Americanah

At the checkout, the blond cashier asked, “Did anybody help you?”

“Yes,” Ginika said.

“Chelcy or Jennifer?”

“I’m sorry, I don’t remember her name.” Ginika looked around, to point at her helper, but both young women had disappeared into the fitting rooms at the back.

“Was it the one with long hair?” the cashier asked.

“Well, both of them had long hair.”

“The one with dark hair?”

Both of them had dark hair.

Ginika smiled and looked at the cashier and the cashier smiled and looked at her computer screen, and two damp seconds crawled past before she cheerfully said, “It’s okay, I’ll figure it out later and make sure she gets her commission.”

As they walked out of the store, Ifemelu said, “I was waiting for her to ask ‘Was it the one with two eyes or the one with two legs?’ Why didn’t she just ask ‘Was it the black girl or the white girl?’ ”

Ginika laughed. “Because this is America. You’re supposed to pretend that you don’t notice certain things.”

GINIKA ASKED Ifemelu to stay with her, to save on rent, but her apartment was too far away, at the end of the Main Line, and the commuter train, taken every day into Philadelphia, would cost too much. They looked at apartments together in West Philadelphia, Ifemelu surprised by the rotting cabinets in the kitchen, the mouse that dashed past an empty bedroom.

“My hostel in Nsukka was dirty but there were no rats o.”

“It’s a mouse,” Ginika said.

Ifemelu was about to sign a lease—if saving money meant living with mice, then so be it—when Ginika’s friend told them of a room for rent, a great deal, as college life went. It was in a four-bedroom apartment with moldy carpeting, above a pizza store on Powelton Avenue, on the corner where drug addicts sometimes dropped crack pipes, miserable pieces of twisted metal that glinted in the sun. Ifemelu’s room was the cheapest, the smallest, facing the scuffed brick walls of the next building. Dog hair floated around. Her roommates, Jackie, Elena, and Allison, looked almost interchangeable, all small-boned and slim-hipped, their chestnut hair ironed straight, their lacrosse sticks piled in the narrow hallway. Elena’s dog ambled about, large and black, like a shaggy donkey; once in a while, a mound of dog shit appeared at the bottom of the stairs and Elena would scream “You’re in big trouble now, buddy!” as though performing for the roommates, playing a role whose lines everyone knew. Ifemelu wished the dog were kept outside, which was where dogs belonged. When Elena asked why Ifemelu had not petted her dog, or scratched his head in the week since she moved in, she said, “I don’t like dogs.”

“Is that like a cultural thing?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean like I know in China they eat cat meat and dog meat.”

“My boyfriend back home loves dogs. I just don’t.”

“Oh,” Elena said, and looked at her, brows furrowed, as Jackie and Allison had earlier looked at her when she said she had never gone bowling, as though wondering how she could have turned out a normal human being without ever having gone bowling. She was standing at the periphery of her own life, sharing a fridge and a toilet, a shallow intimacy, with people she did not know at all. People who lived in exclamation points. “Great!” they said often. “That’s great!” People who did not scrub in the shower; their shampoos and conditioners and gels were cluttered in the bathroom, but there was not a single sponge, and this, the absence of a sponge, made them seem unreachably alien to her. (One of her earliest memories was of her mother, a bucket of water between them in the bathroom, saying to her, “Ngwa, scrub between your legs very well, very well …,” and Ifemelu had applied a little too much vigor with the loofah, to show her mother just how clean she could get herself, and for a few days afterwards had hobbled around with her legs spread wide.) There was something unquestioning about her roommates’ lives, an assumption of certainty that fascinated her, so that they often said, “Let’s go get some,” about whatever it was they needed—more beer, pizza, buffalo wings, liquor—as though this getting was not an act that required money. She was used, at home, to people first asking “Do you have money?” before they made such plans. They left pizza boxes on the kitchen table, and the kitchen itself in casual disarray for days, and on weekends their friends gathered in the living room, with packs of beer stacked in the refrigerator and streaks of dried urine on the toilet seat.

“We’re going to a party. Come with us, it’ll be fun!” Jackie said, and Ifemelu pulled on her slim-fitting trousers and a halter-neck blouse borrowed from Ginika.

“Won’t you get dressed?” she asked her roommates before they left, all of them wearing slouchy jeans, and Jackie said, “We are dressed. What are you talking about?” with a laugh that suggested yet another foreign pathology had emerged. They went to a fraternity house on Chestnut Street, where everyone stood around drinking vodka-rich punch from plastic cups, until Ifemelu accepted that there would be no dancing; to party here was to stand around and drink. They were all a jumble of frayed fabric and slack collars, the students at the party, all their clothes looked determinedly worn. (Years later, a blog post would read: When it comes to dressing well, American culture is so self-fulfilled that it has not only disregarded this courtesy of self-presentation, but has turned that disregard into a virtue. “We are too superior/busy/cool/not-uptight to bother about how we look to other people, and so we can wear pajamas to school and underwear to the mall.”) As they got drunker and drunker, some lay limp on the floor and others took felt-tipped pens and began to write on the exposed skin of the fallen. Suck me off. Go Sixers.

“Jackie said you’re from Africa?” a boy in a baseball cap asked her.

“Yes.”

“That’s really cool!” he said, and Ifemelu imagined telling Obinze about this, the way she would mimic the boy. Obinze pulled every strand of story from her, going over details, asking questions, and sometimes he would laugh, the sound echoing down the line. She had told him how Allison had said, “Hey, we’re getting a bite to eat. Come with us!” and she thought it was an invitation and that, as with invitations back home, Allison or one of the others would buy her meal. But when the waitress brought the bill, Allison carefully began to untangle how many drinks each person had ordered and who had the calamari appetizer, to make sure nobody paid for anybody else. Obinze had found this very funny, finally saying, “That’s America for you!”

It was, to her, funny only in retrospect. She had struggled to hide her bafflement at the boundaries of hospitality, and also at this business of tipping—paying an extra fifteen or twenty percent of your bill to the waitress—which was suspiciously like bribing, a forced and efficient bribing system.

CHAPTER 13

At first, Ifemelu forgot that she was someone else. In an apartment in South Philadelphia, a tired-faced woman opened the door and led her into a strong stench of urine. The living room was dark, unaired, and she imagined the whole building steeped in months, even years, of accumulated urine, and herself working every day in this urine cloud. From inside the apartment, a man was groaning, deep and eerie sounds; they were the groans of a person for whom groaning was the only choice left, and they frightened her.

“That’s my dad,” the woman said, looking at her with keen assessing eyes. “Are you strong?”

The advertisement in the City Paper had stressed strong. Strong Home Health Aide. Pays cash.

“I’m strong enough to do the job,” Ifemelu said, and fought the urge to back out of the apartment and run and run.

“That’s a pretty accent. Where are you from?”

“Nigeria.”

“Nigeria. Isn’t there a war going on there?”

“No.”

“Can I see your ID?” the woman asked, and then, glancing at the license, added, “How do you pronounce your name again?”

“Ifemelu.”

“What?”

Ifemelu almost choked. “Ngozi. You hum the N.”

“Really.” The woman, with her air of unending exhaustion, seemed too tired to question the two different pronunciations. “Can you live in?”

“Live in?”

“Yes. Live here with my dad. There’s a spare bedroom. You would do three nights a week. You’d need to clean him up in the morning.” The woman paused. “You are pretty slight. Look, I’ve two more people to interview and I’ll get back to you.”

“Okay. Thank you.” Ifemelu knew she would not get the job and for this she was grateful.

She repeated “I’m Ngozi Okonkwo” in front of the mirror before her next interview, at the Seaview restaurant. “Can I call you Goz?” the manager asked after they shook hands, and she said yes, but before she said yes, she paused, the slightest and shortest of pauses, but still a pause. And she wondered if that was why she did not get the job.

Later Ginika said, “You could have just said Ngozi is your tribal name and Ifemelu is your jungle name and throw in one more as your spiritual name. They’ll believe all kinds of shit about Africa.”