Americanah

He was looking at her, his eyes fearful. “No,” he said coldly. “I don’t.”

“Be honest.”

“I am being honest. The problem is you think everyone is like you.

You think you’re the norm but you’re not.”

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing. Just forget it.”

He did not want to talk about it any further, but the air between them was marred, and remained disturbed for days, even after he went back home, so that when the strike ended (“The lecturers have called it off! Praise God!” Chetachi shouted from their flat one morning) and Ifemelu returned to Nsukka, they were tentative with each other for the first few days, their conversations on tiptoe, their hugs abridged.

It surprised Ifemelu, how much she had missed Nsukka itself, the routines of unhurried pace, friends gathered in her room until past midnight, the inconsequential gossip told and retold, the stairs climbed slowly up and down as though in a gradual awakening, and each morning whitened by the harmattan. In Lagos, the harmattan was a mere veil of haze, but in Nsukka, it was a raging, mercurial presence; the mornings were crisp, the afternoons ashen with heat, and the nights unknown. Dust whirls would start in the far distance, very pretty to look at as long as they were far away, and swirl until they coated everything brown. Even eyelashes. Everywhere, moisture would be greedily sucked up; the wood laminate on tables would peel off and curl, pages of exercise books would crackle, clothes would dry minutes after being hung out, lips would crack and bleed, and Robb and Mentholatum kept within reach, in pockets and handbags. Skin would be shined with Vaseline, while the forgotten bits—between the fingers or at the elbows—turned a dull ash. The tree branches would be stark and, with their leaves fallen, wear a kind of proud desolation. The church bazaars would leave the air redolent, smoky from mass cooking. Some nights, the heat lay thick like a towel. Other nights, a sharp cold wind would descend, and Ifemelu would abandon her hostel room and, snuggled next to Obinze on his mattress, listen to the whistling pines howling outside, in a world suddenly fragile and breakable.

OBINZE’S MUSCLES WERE ACHING. He lay on his belly, and Ifemelu straddled him, massaging his back and neck and thighs with her fingers, her knuckles, her elbows. He was painfully taut. She stood on him, placed one foot gingerly on the back of a thigh, and then the other. “Does it feel okay?”

“Yes.” He groaned in pleasure-pain. She pressed down slowly, his skin warm under the soles of her feet, his tense muscles unknotting. She steadied herself with a hand on the wall, and dug her heels deeper, moving inch by inch while he grunted, “Ah! Ifem, yes, just there. Ah!”

“You should stretch after playing ball, mister man,” she said, and then she was lying on his back, tickling his underarms and kissing his neck.

“I have a suggestion for a better kind of massage,” he said. When he undressed her, he did not stop, as usual, at her underwear. He pulled it down and she raised her legs to aid him.

“Ceiling,” she said, half-certain. She did not want him to stop, but she had imagined this differently, assumed they would make a carefully planned ceremony of it.

“I’ll come out,” he said.

“You know it doesn’t always work.”

“If it doesn’t work, then we’ll welcome Junior.”

“Stop it.”

He looked up. “But, Ifem, we’re going to get married anyway.”

“Look at you. I might meet a rich handsome man and leave you.”

“Impossible. We’ll go to America when we graduate and raise our fine children.”

“You’ll say anything now because your brain is between your legs.”

“But my brain is always there!”

They were both laughing, and then the laughter stilled, gave way to a new, strange graveness, a slippery joining. It felt, to Ifemelu, like a weak copy, a floundering imitation of what she had imagined it would be. After he pulled away, jerking and gasping and holding himself, a discomfort nagged at her. She had been tense through it all, unable to relax. She had imagined his mother watching them; the image had forced itself onto her mind, and it had, even more oddly, been a double image, of his mother and Onyeka Onwenu, both watching them with unblinking eyes. She knew she could not possibly tell Obinze’s mother what had happened, even though she had promised to, and had believed then that she would. But now she could not see how. What would she say? What words would she use? Would Obinze’s mother expect details? She and Obinze should have planned it better; that way, she would know how to tell his mother. The unplannedness of it all had left her a little shaken, and also a little disappointed. It seemed somehow as though it had not been worth it after all.

When, a week or so later, she woke up in pain, a sharp stinging on her side and a great, sickening nausea pervading her body, she panicked. Then she vomited and her panic grew.

“It’s happened,” she told Obinze. “I’m pregnant.” They had met, as usual, in front of the Ekpo refectory after their morning lecture. Students milled around. A group of boys were smoking and laughing close by and for a moment, their laughter seemed directed at her.

Obinze’s brows wrinkled. He did not seem to understand what she was saying. “But, Ifem, it can’t be. It’s too early. Besides, I came out.”

“I told you it doesn’t work!” she said. He suddenly seemed young, a confused small boy looking helplessly at her. Her panic grew. On an impulse, she hailed a passing okada and jumped on the back and told the motorcyclist that she was going to town.

“Ifem, what are you doing?” Obinze asked. “Where are you going?”

“To call Aunty Uju,” she said.

Obinze got on the next okada and was soon speeding behind her, past the university gates and to the NITEL office, where Ifemelu gave the man behind the peeling counter a piece of paper with Aunty Uju’s American number. On the phone, she spoke in code, making it up as she went along, because of the people standing there, some waiting to make their own calls, others merely loitering, but all listening, with unabashed and open interest, to the conversations of others.

“Aunty, I think what happened to you before Dike came has happened to me,” Ifemelu said. “We ate the food a week ago.”

“Just last week? How many times?”

“Once.”

“Ifem, calm down. I don’t think you’re pregnant. But you need to do a test. Don’t go to the campus medical center. Go to town, where nobody will know you. But calm down first. It will be okay, inugo?”

Later, Ifemelu sat on a rickety chair in the waiting room of the lab, stony and silent, ignoring Obinze. She was angry with him. It was unfair, she knew, but she was angry with him. As she went into the dirty toilet with a small container the lab girl had given her, he had asked, already getting up, “Should I come with you?” and she snapped, “Come with me for what?” And she wanted to slap the lab girl. A yellow-faced beanpole of a girl who sneered and shook her head when Ifemelu first said, “Pregnancy test,” as though she could not believe she was encountering one more case of immorality. Now, she was watching them, smirking and humming insouciantly.

“I have the result,” she said after a while, holding the unsealed paper, her expression disappointed because it was negative. Ifemelu was too stunned, at first, to be relieved, and then she needed to urinate again.

“People should respect themselves and live like Christians to avoid trouble,” the lab girl said as they left.

That evening, Ifemelu vomited again. She was in Obinze’s room, lying down and reading, still frosty towards him, when a rush of salty saliva filled her mouth and she leaped up and ran to the toilet.

“It must be something I ate,” she said. “That yam pottage I bought from Mama Owerre.”

Obinze went inside the main house and came back to say his mother was taking her to the doctor’s. It was late evening, his mother did not like the young doctor who was on call at the medical center in the evenings, and so she drove to Dr. Achufusi’s house. As they passed the primary school with its trimmed hedges of whistling pine, Ifemelu suddenly imagined that she was indeed pregnant, and the girl had used expired test chemicals in that dingy lab. She blurted out, “We had sex, Aunty. Once.” She felt Obinze tense. His mother looked at her in the rearview mirror. “Let us see the doctor first,” she said. Dr. Achufusi, an avuncular and pleasant man, pressed at Ifemelu’s side and announced, “It’s your appendix, very inflamed. We should get it out quickly.” He turned to Obinze’s mother. “I can schedule her for tomorrow afternoon.”

“Thank you so much, Doctor,” Obinze’s mother said.

In the car, Ifemelu said, “I’ve never had surgery, Aunty.”

“It’s nothing,” Obinze’s mother said briskly. “Our doctors here are very good. Get in touch with your parents and tell them not to worry. We will take care of you. After they discharge you, you can stay in the house until you feel strong.”

Ifemelu called her mother’s colleague, Aunty Bunmi, and gave her a message, as well as Obinze’s home phone number, to pass on to her mother. That evening, her mother called; she sounded short of breath.