Americanah

“You really shouldn’t trust me to take your car home. What if I don’t come back one day?” Ifemelu said.

Kimberly laughed. “It’s not worth very much.”

“You do have an American license?” Laura asked. “I mean, you can drive legally in this country?”

“Of course she can, Laura,” Kimberly said. “Why would she accept the car if she couldn’t?”

“I’m just checking,” Laura said, as though Kimberly could not be depended upon to ask the necessary tough questions of non-American citizens. Ifemelu watched them, so alike in their looks, and both unhappy people. But Kimberly’s unhappiness was inward, unacknowledged, shielded by her desire for things to be as they should, and also by hope: she believed in other people’s happiness because it meant that she, too, might one day have it. Laura’s unhappiness was different, spiky, she wished that everyone around her were unhappy because she had convinced herself that she would always be.

“Yes, I have an American license,” Ifemelu said, and then she began to talk about the safe driving course she had taken in Brooklyn, before she got her license, and how the instructor, a thin white man with matted hair the color of straw, had cheated. In the dark basement room full of foreigners, the entrance of which was an even darker flight of narrow stairs, the instructor had collected all the cash payments before he showed the safe-driving film on the wall projector. From time to time, he made jokes that nobody understood and chuckled to himself. Ifemelu was a little suspicious of the film: How could a car driving so slowly have caused that amount of damage in an accident, leaving the driver’s neck broken? Afterwards, he gave out the test questions. Ifemelu found them easy, quickly shading in the answers in pencil. A small South Asian man beside her, perhaps fifty years old, kept glancing over at her, his eyes pleading, while she pretended not to understand that he wanted her help. The instructor collected the papers, brought out a clay-colored eraser, and began to wipe out some of the answers and to shade in others. Everybody passed. Many of them shook his hand, said “Thank you, thank you” in a wide range of accents before they shuffled out. Now they could apply for American driver’s licenses. Ifemelu told the story with a false openness, as though it was merely a curiosity for her, and not something she had chosen to goad Laura.

“It was a strange moment for me, because until then I thought nobody in America cheated,” Ifemelu said.

Kimberly said, “Oh my goodness.”

“This happened in Brooklyn?” Laura asked.

“Yes.”

Laura shrugged, as though to say that it would, of course, happen in Brooklyn but not in the America in which she lived.

AT ISSUE WAS an orange. A round, flame-colored orange that Ifemelu had brought with her lunch, peeled and quartered and enclosed in a Ziploc bag. She ate it at the kitchen table, while Taylor sat nearby writing in his homework sheet.

“Would you like some, Taylor?” she asked, and offered him a piece.

“Thanks,” he said. He put it into his mouth. His face crumpled. “It’s bad! It’s got stuff in it!”

“Those are the seeds,” she said, looking at what he had spat into his hand.

“The seeds?”

“Yes, the orange seeds.”

“Oranges don’t have stuff in them.”

“Yes, they do. Throw that in the trash, Taylor. I’m going to put the learning video in for you.”

“Oranges don’t have stuff in them,” he repeated.

All his life, he had eaten oranges without seeds, oranges grown to look perfectly orange and to have faultless skin and no seeds, so at eight years old he did not know that there was such a thing as an orange with seeds. He ran into the den to tell Morgan about it. She looked up from her book, raised a slow, bored hand, and tucked her red hair behind her ear.

“Of course oranges have seeds. Mom just buys the seedless variety. Ifemelu didn’t get the right kind.” She gave Ifemelu one of her accusatory glares.

“The orange is the right one for me, Morgan. I grew up eating oranges with seeds,” Ifemelu said, turning on the video.

“Okay.” Morgan shrugged. With Kimberly she would have said nothing, only glowered.

The doorbell rang. It had to be the carpet cleaner. Kimberly and Don were hosting a cocktail party fundraiser the next day, for a friend of theirs about whom Don had said, “It’s just an ego trip for him running for Congress, he won’t even come close,” and Ifemelu was surprised that he seemed to recognize the ego of others, while blinded in the fog of his own. She went to the door. A burly, red-faced man stood there, carrying cleaning equipment, something slung over his shoulder, something else that looked like a lawn mower propped at his feet.

He stiffened when he saw her. First surprise flitted over his features, then it ossified to hostility.

“You need a carpet cleaned?” he asked, as if he did not care, as if she could change her mind, as if he wanted her to change her mind. She looked at him, a taunt in her eyes, prolonging a moment loaded with assumptions: he thought she was a homeowner, and she was not what he had expected to see in this grand stone house with the white pillars.

“Yes,” she said finally, suddenly tired. “Mrs. Turner told me you were coming.”

It was like a conjurer’s trick, the swift disappearance of his hostility. His face sank into a grin. She, too, was the help. The universe was once again arranged as it should be.

“How are you doing? Know where she wants me to start?” he asked.

“Upstairs,” she said, letting him in, wondering how all that cheeriness could have existed earlier in his body. She would never forget him, bits of dried skin stuck to his chapped, peeling lips, and she would begin the blog post “Sometimes in America, Race Is Class” with the story of his dramatic change, and end with: It didn’t matter to him how much money I had. As far as he was concerned I did not fit as the owner of that stately house because of the way I looked. In America’s public discourse, “Blacks” as a whole are often lumped with “Poor Whites.” Not Poor Blacks and Poor Whites. But Blacks and Poor Whites. A curious thing indeed.

Taylor was excited. “Can I help? Can I help?” he asked the carpet cleaner.

“No thanks, buddy,” the man said. “I got it.”

“I hope he doesn’t start in my room,” Morgan said.

“Why?” Ifemelu asked.

“I just don’t want him to.”

IFEMELU WANTED to tell Kimberly about the carpet cleaner, but Kimberly might become flustered and apologize for what was not her fault as she often, too often, apologized for Laura.

It was discomfiting to observe how Kimberly lurched, keen to do the right thing and not knowing what the right thing was. If she told Kimberly about the carpet cleaner, there was no telling how she would respond—laugh, apologize, snatch up the phone to call the company and complain.

And so, instead, she told Kimberly about Taylor and the orange.

“He really thought seeds meant it was bad? How funny.”

“Morgan of course promptly set him right,” Ifemelu said.

“Oh, she would.”

“When I was a little girl my mother used to tell me that an orange would grow on my head if I swallowed a seed. I had many anxious mornings of going to look in the mirror. At least Taylor won’t have that childhood trauma.”

Kimberly laughed.

“Hello!” It was Laura, coming in through the back door with Athena, a tiny wisp of a child with hair so thin that her pale scalp gaped through. A waif. Perhaps Laura’s blended vegetables and strict diet rules had left the child malnourished.

Laura put a vase on the table. “This will look terrific tomorrow.”

“It’s lovely,” Kimberly said, bending to kiss Athena’s head. “That’s the caterer’s menu. Don thinks the hors d’oeuvre selection is too simple. I’m not sure.”

“He wants you to add more?” Laura said, scanning the menu.

“He just thought it was a little simple, he was very sweet about it.”

In the den, Athena began to cry. Laura went to her and, soon enough, a string of negotiations followed: “Do you want this one, sweetheart? The yellow or the blue or the red? Which do you want?”

Just give her one, Ifemelu thought. To overwhelm a child of four with choices, to lay on her the burden of making a decision, was to deprive her of the bliss of childhood. Adulthood, after all, already loomed, where she would have to make grimmer and grimmer decisions.

“She’s been grumpy today,” Laura said, coming back into the kitchen, Athena’s crying quelled. “I took her to her follow-up from the ear infection and she’s been an absolute bear all day. Oh and I met the most charming Nigerian man today. We get there and it turns out a new doctor has just joined the practice and he’s Nigerian and he came by and said hello to us. He reminded me of you, Ifemelu. I read on the Internet that Nigerians are the most educated immigrant group in this country. Of course, it says nothing about the millions who live on less than a dollar a day back in your country, but when I met the doctor I thought of that article and of you and other privileged Africans who are here in this country.” Laura paused and Ifemelu, as she often did, felt that Laura had more to say but was holding back. It felt strange, to be called privileged. Privileged was people like Kayode DaSilva, whose passport sagged with the weight of visa stamps, who went to London for summer and to Ikoyi Club to swim, who could casually get up and say “We’re going to Frenchies for ice cream.”