Americanah

CHAPTER 9

Mariama returned carrying oil-stained brown paper bags from the Chinese restaurant, trailing the smells of grease and spice into the stuffy salon.

“The film finished?” She glanced at the blank TV screen, and then flipped through the pile of DVDs to select another.

“Excuse me, please, to eat,” Aisha said to Ifemelu. She perched on a chair at the back and ate fried chicken wings with her fingers, her eyes on the TV screen. The new film began with trailers, jaggedly cut scenes interspersed with flashes of light. Each ended with a male Nigerian voice, theatrical and loud, saying “Grab your copy now!” Mariama ate standing up. She said something to Halima.

“I finish first and eat,” Halima replied in English.

“You can go ahead and eat if you want to,” Halima’s customer said, a young woman with a high voice and a pleasant manner.

“No, I finish. Just small more,” Halima said. Her customer’s head had only a tuft of hair left in front, sticking up like animal fur, while the rest was done in neat micro braids that fell to her neck.

“I have a hour before I have to go pick up my daughters,” the customer said.

“How many you have?” Halima asked.

“Two,” the customer said. She looked about seventeen. “Two beautiful girls.”

The new film had started. The grinning face of a middle-aged actress filled the screen.

“Oh-oh, yes! I like her!” Halima said. “Patience! She don’t take any nonsense!”

“You know her?” Mariama asked Ifemelu, pointing at the TV screen.

“No,” Ifemelu said. Why did they insist on asking if she knew Nollywood actors? The entire room smelled too strongly of food. It made the stuffy air rank with oiliness, and yet it also made her slightly hungry. She ate some of her carrots. Halima’s customer tilted her head this way and that in front of the mirror and said, “Thank you so much, it’s gorgeous!”

After she left, Mariama said, “Very small girl and already she has two children.”

“Oh oh oh, these people,” Halima said. “When a girl is thirteen already she knows all the positions. Never in Afrique!”

“Never!” Mariama agreed.

They looked at Ifemelu for her agreement, her approval. They expected it, in this shared space of their Africanness, but Ifemelu said nothing and turned a page of her novel. They would, she was sure, talk about her after she left. That Nigerian girl, she feels very important because of Princeton. Look at her food bar, she does not eat real food anymore. They would laugh with derision, but only a mild derision, because she was still their African sister, even if she had briefly lost her way. A new smell of oiliness flooded the room when Halima opened her plastic container of food. She was eating and talking to the television screen. “Oh, stupid man! She will take your money!”

Ifemelu brushed away at some sticky hair on her neck. The room was seething with heat. “Can we leave the door open?” she asked.

Mariama opened the door, propped it with a chair. “This heat is really bad.”

EACH HEAT WAVE REMINDED Ifemelu of her first, the summer she arrived. It was summer in America, she knew this, but all her life she had thought of “overseas” as a cold place of wool coats and snow, and because America was “overseas,” and her illusions so strong they could not be fended off by reason, she bought the thickest sweater she could find in Tejuosho market for her trip. She wore it for the journey, zipping it all the way up in the humming interior of the airplane and then unzipping it as she left the airport building with Aunty Uju. The sweltering heat alarmed her, as did Aunty Uju’s old Toyota hatchback, with a patch of rust on its side and peeling fabric on the seats. She stared at buildings and cars and signboards, all of them matte, disappointingly matte; in the landscape of her imagination, the mundane things in America were covered in a high-shine gloss. She was startled, most of all, by the teenage boy in a baseball cap standing near a brick wall, face down, body leaning forward, hands between his legs. She turned to look again.

“See that boy!” she said. “I didn’t know people do things like this in America.”

“You didn’t know people pee in America?” Aunty Uju asked, barely glancing at the boy before turning back to a traffic light.

“Ahn-ahn, Aunty! I mean that they do it outside. Like that.”

“They don’t. It’s not like back home where everybody does it. He can get arrested for that, but this is not a good neighborhood anyway,” Aunty Uju said shortly. There was something different about her. Ifemelu had noticed it right away at the airport, her roughly braided hair, her ears bereft of earrings, her quick casual hug, as if it had been weeks rather than years since they had last seen each other.

“I’m supposed to be with my books now,” Aunty Uju said, eyes focused on the road. “You know my exam is coming.”

Ifemelu had not known that there was yet another exam; she had thought Aunty Uju was waiting for a result. But she said, “Yes, I know.”

Their silence was full of stones. Ifemelu felt like apologizing, although she was not quite sure what she would be apologizing for. Perhaps Aunty Uju regretted her presence, now that she was here, in Aunty Uju’s wheezing car.

Aunty Uju’s cell phone rang. “Yes, this is Uju.” She pronounced it you-joo instead of oo-joo.

“Is that how you pronounce your name now?” Ifemelu asked afterwards.

“It’s what they call me.”

Ifemelu swallowed the words “Well, that isn’t your name.” Instead she said in Igbo, “I did not know it would be so hot here.”

“We have a heat wave, the first one this summer,” Aunty Uju said, as though heat wave was something Ifemelu was supposed to understand. She had never felt a heat quite so hot. An enveloping, uncompassionate heat. Aunty Uju’s door handle, when they arrived at her one-bedroom apartment, was warm to the touch. Dike sprang up from the carpeted floor of the living room, scattered with toy cars and action figures, and hugged her as though he remembered her. “Alma, this is my cousin!” he said to his babysitter, a pale-skinned, tired-faced woman with black hair held in a greasy ponytail. If Ifemelu had met Alma in Lagos, she would have thought of her as white, but she would learn that Alma was Hispanic, an American category that was, confusingly, both an ethnicity and a race, and she would remember Alma when, years later, she wrote a blog post titled “Understanding America for the Non-American Black: What Hispanic Means.”

Hispanic means the frequent companions of American blacks in poverty rankings, Hispanic means a slight step above American blacks in the American race ladder, Hispanic means the chocolate-skinned woman from Peru, Hispanic means the indigenous people of Mexico. Hispanic means the biracial-looking folks from the Dominican Republic. Hispanic means the paler folks from Puerto Rico. Hispanic also means the blond, blue-eyed guy from Argentina. All you need to be is Spanish-speaking but not from Spain and voilà, you’re a race called Hispanic.

But that afternoon, she hardly noticed Alma, or the living room furnished only with a couch and a TV, or the bicycle lodged in a corner, because she was absorbed by Dike. The last time she saw him, on the day of Aunty Uju’s hasty departure from Lagos, he had been a one-year-old, crying unendingly at the airport as though he understood the upheaval his life had just undergone, and now here he was, a first grader with a seamless American accent and a hyper-happiness about him; the kind of child who could never stay still and who never seemed sad.

“Why do you have a sweater? It’s too hot for a sweater!” he said, chortling, still holding on to her in a drawn-out hug. She laughed. He was so small, so innocent, and yet there was a precociousness about him, but it was a sunny one; he did not nurse dark intentions about the adults in his world. That night, after he and Aunty Uju got into bed and Ifemelu settled on a blanket on the floor, he said, “How come she has to sleep on the floor, Mom? We can all fit in,” as though he could sense how Ifemelu felt. There was nothing wrong with the arrangement—she had, after all, slept on mats when she visited her grandmother in the village—but this was America at last, glorious America at last, and she had not expected to bed on the floor.

“I’m fine, Dike,” she said.

He got up and brought her his pillow. “Here. It’s soft and comfy.”

Aunty Uju said, “Dike, come and lie down. Let your aunty sleep.”

Ifemelu could not sleep, her mind too alert to the newness of things, and she waited to hear Aunty Uju’s snoring before she slipped out of the room and turned on the kitchen light. A fat cockroach was perched on the wall near the cabinets, moving slightly up and down as though breathing heavily. If she had been in their Lagos kitchen, she would have found a broom and killed it, but she left the American cockroach alone and went and stood by the living room window. Flatlands, Aunty Uju said this section of Brooklyn was called. The street below was poorly lit, bordered not by leafy trees but by closely parked cars, nothing like the pretty street on The Cosby Show. Ifemelu stood there for a long time, her body unsure of itself, overwhelmed by a sense of newness. But she felt, also, a frisson of expectation, an eagerness to discover America.