Americanah

He had not been back to Nigeria in years and perhaps he needed the consolation of those online groups, where small observations flared and blazed into attacks, personal insults flung back and forth. Ifemelu imagined the writers, Nigerians in bleak houses in America, their lives deadened by work, nursing their careful savings throughout the year so that they could visit home in December for a week, when they would arrive bearing suitcases of shoes and clothes and cheap watches, and see, in the eyes of their relatives, brightly burnished images of themselves. Afterwards they would return to America to fight on the Internet over their mythologies of home, because home was now a blurred place between here and there, and at least online they could ignore the awareness of how inconsequential they had become.

Nigerian women came to America and became wild, Igbo Massachusetts Accountant wrote in one post; it was an unpleasant truth but one that had to be said. What else accounted for the high divorce rates among Nigerians in America and the low rates among Nigerians in Nigeria? Delta Mermaid replied that women simply had laws protecting them in America and the divorce rates would be just as high if those laws were in Nigeria. Igbo Massachusetts Accountant’s rejoinder: “You have been brainwashed by the West. You should be ashamed to call yourself a Nigerian.” In response to Eze Houston, who wrote that Nigerian men were cynical when they went back to Nigeria looking for nurses and doctors to marry, only so that the new wives would earn money for them back in America, Igbo Massachusetts Accountant wrote, “What is wrong with a man wanting financial security from his wife? Don’t women want the same thing?”

After he left that Saturday, Aunty Uju asked Ifemelu, “What did you think?”

“He uses bleaching creams.”

“What?”

“Couldn’t you see? His face is a funny color. He must be using the cheap ones with no sunscreen. What kind of man bleaches his skin, biko?”

Aunty Uju shrugged, as though she had not noticed the greenish-yellow tone of the man’s face, worse at his temples.

“He’s not bad. He has a good job.” She paused. “I’m not getting any younger. I want Dike to have a brother or a sister.”

“In Nigeria, a man like him would not even have the courage to talk to you.”

“We are not in Nigeria, Ifem.”

Before Aunty Uju went into the bedroom, tottering under her many anxieties, she said, “Please just pray that it will work.”

Ifemelu did not pray, but even if she did, she could not bear praying for Aunty Uju to be with Bartholomew. It saddened her that Aunty Uju had settled merely for what was familiar.

BECAUSE OF OBINZE, Manhattan intimidated Ifemelu. The first time she took the subway from Brooklyn to Manhattan, her palms sweaty, she walked the streets, watching, absorbing. A sylphlike woman running in high heels, her short dress floating behind her, until she tripped and almost fell, a pudgy man coughing and spitting on the curb, a girl dressed all in black raising a hand for the taxis that sliced past. The endless skyscrapers taunted the sky, but there was dirt on the building windows. The dazzling imperfection of it all calmed her. “It’s wonderful but it’s not heaven,” she told Obinze. She could not wait until he, too, saw Manhattan. She imagined them both walking hand in hand, like the American couples she saw, lingering at a shop window, pausing to read menus taped on restaurant doors, stopping at a food cart to buy cold bottles of iced tea. “Soon,” he said in his letter. They said “soon” to each other often, and “soon” gave their plan the weight of something real.

FINALLY, Aunty Uju’s result came. Ifemelu brought in the envelope from the mailbox, so slight, so ordinary, United States Medical Licensing Examination printed on it in even script, and held it in her hand for a long time, willing it to be good news. She raised it up as soon as Aunty Uju walked indoors. Aunty Uju gasped. “Is it thick? Is it thick?” she asked.

“What? Gini?” Ifemelu asked.

“Is it thick?” Aunty Uju asked again, letting her handbag slip to the floor and moving forward, her hand outstretched, her face savage with hope. She took the envelope and shouted, “I made it!” and then opened it to make sure, peering at the thin sheet of paper. “If you fail, they send you a thick envelope so that you can reregister.”

“Aunty! I knew it! Congratulations!” Ifemelu said.

Aunty Uju hugged her, both of them leaning into each other, hearing each other’s breathing, and it brought to Ifemelu a warm memory of Lagos.

“Where’s Dike?” Aunty Uju asked, as though he was not already in bed when she came home from her second job. She went into the kitchen, stood under the bright ceiling light and looked, again, at the result, her eyes wet. “So I will be a family physician in this America,” she said, almost in a whisper. She opened a can of Coke and left it undrunk.

Later, she said, “I have to take my braids out for my interviews and relax my hair. Kemi told me that I shouldn’t wear braids to the interview. If you have braids, they will think you are unprofessional.”

“So there are no doctors with braided hair in America?” Ifemelu asked.

“I have told you what they told me. You are in a country that is not your own. You do what you have to do if you want to succeed.”

There it was again, the strange naïveté with which Aunty Uju had covered herself like a blanket. Sometimes, while having a conversation, it would occur to Ifemelu that Aunty Uju had deliberately left behind something of herself, something essential, in a distant and forgotten place. Obinze said it was the exaggerated gratitude that came with immigrant insecurity. Obinze, so like him to have an explanation. Obinze, who anchored her through that summer of waiting—his steady voice over the phone, his long letters in blue airmail envelopes—and who understood, as summer was ending, the new gnawing in her stomach. She wanted to start school, to find the real America, and yet there was that gnawing in her stomach, an anxiety, and a new, aching nostalgia for the Brooklyn summer that had become familiar: children on bicycles, sinewy black men in tight white tank tops, ice cream vans tinkling, loud music from roofless cars, sun shining into night, and things rotting and smelling in the humid heat. She did not want to leave Dike—the mere thought brought a sense of treasure already lost—and yet she wanted to leave Aunty Uju’s apartment, and begin a life in which she alone determined the margins.

Dike had once told her, wistfully, about his friend who had gone to Coney Island and come back with a picture taken on a steep, sliding ride, and so she surprised him on the weekend before she left, saying “We’re going to Coney Island!” Jane had told her what train to take, what to do, how much it would cost. Aunty Uju said it was a good idea, but gave her no money to add to what she had. As she watched Dike on the rides, screaming, terrified and thrilled, a little boy entirely open to the world, she did not mind what she had spent. They ate hot dogs and milkshakes and cotton candy. “I can’t wait until I don’t have to come with you to the girls’ bathroom,” he told her, and she laughed and laughed. On the train back, he was tired and sleepy. “Coz, this was the bestest day ever with you,” he said, resting against her.

The bittersweet glow of an ending limbo overcame her days later when she kissed Dike goodbye—once then twice and three times, while he cried, a child so unused to crying, and she bit back her own tears and Aunty Uju said over and over that Philadelphia was not very far away. Ifemelu rolled her suitcase to the subway, took it to the Forty-second Street terminal, and got on a bus to Philadelphia. She sat by the window—somebody had stuck a blob of chewed gum on the pane—and spent long minutes looking again at the Social Security card and driver’s license that belonged to Ngozi Okonkwo. Ngozi Okonkwo was at least ten years older than she was, with a narrow face, eyebrows that started as little balls before loping into arcs, and a jaw shaped like the letter V.

“I don’t even look like her at all,” Ifemelu had said when Aunty Uju gave her the card.

“All of us look alike to white people,” Aunty Uju said.

“Ahn-ahn, Aunty!”

“I’m not joking. Amara’s cousin came last year and she doesn’t have her papers yet so she has been working with Amara’s ID. You remember Amara? Her cousin is very fair and slim. They do not look alike at all. Nobody noticed. She works as a home health aide in Virginia. Just make sure you always remember your new name. I have a friend who forgot and one of her co-workers called her and called her and she was blank. Then they became suspicious and reported her to immigration.”

CHAPTER 12

There was Ginika, standing in the small, crowded bus terminal, wearing a miniskirt and a tube top that covered her chest but not her midriff, and waiting to scoop Ifemelu up and into the real America. Ginika was much thinner, half her old size, and her head looked bigger, balanced on a long neck that brought to mind a vague, exotic animal. She extended her arms, as though urging a child into an embrace, laughing, calling out, “Ifemsco! Ifemsco!” and Ifemelu was taken back, for a moment, to secondary school: an image of gossiping girls in their blue-and-white uniforms, felt berets perched on their heads, crowded in the school corridor. She hugged Ginika. The theatrics of their holding each other close, disengaging and then holding each other close again, made her eyes fill, to her mild surprise, with tears.