Americanah

Priye had not changed so much as hardened, her personality coated in chrome. She arrived at Ranyinudo’s flat with a pile of newspapers, full of photographs of the big wedding she had just planned. Ifemelu imagined how people would talk about Priye. She is doing well, they would say, she is really doing well.

“My phone has not stopped ringing since last week!” Priye said triumphantly, pushing back the auburn straight weave that fell across one eye; each time she raised a hand to push back the hair, which invariably fell back again across her eye since it had been sewn in to do so, Ifemelu was distracted by the brittle pink color of her nails. Priye had the sure, slightly sinister manner of someone who could get other people to do what she wanted. And she glittered—her yellow-gold earrings, the metal studs on her designer bag, the sparkly bronze lipstick.

“It was a very successful wedding: we had seven governors in attendance, seven!” she said.

“And none of them knew the couple, I’m sure,” Ifemelu said drily.

Priye gestured, a shrug, an upward flick of her palm, to show how irrelevant that was.

“Since when has the success of weddings been measured by how many governors attend?” Ifemelu asked.

“It shows you’re connected. It shows prestige. Do you know how powerful governors in this country are? Executive power is not a small thing,” Priye said.

“Me, I want as many governors as possible to come to my own wedding o. It shows levels, serious levels,” Ranyinudo said. She was studying the photographs, turning the newspaper pages slowly. “Priye, you heard Mosope is getting married in two weeks?”

“Yes. She approached me, but their budget was too small for me. That girl never understood the first rule of life in this Lagos. You do not marry the man you love. You marry the man who can best maintain you.”

“Amen!” Ranyinudo said, laughing. “But sometimes one man can be both o. This is the season of weddings. When will it be my turn, Father Lord?” She glanced upwards, raised her hands as though in prayer.

“I’ve told Ranyinudo that I’ll do her wedding at no commission,” Priye said to Ifemelu. “And I’ll do yours too, Ifem.”

“Thank you, but I think Blaine will prefer a governor-free event,” Ifemelu said, and they all laughed. “We’ll probably do something small on a beach.”

Sometimes she believed her own lies. She could see it now, she and Blaine wearing white on a beach in the Caribbean, surrounded by a few friends, running to a makeshift altar of sand and flowers, and Shan watching and hoping one of them would trip and fall.

CHAPTER 47

Onikan was the old Lagos, a slice of the past, a temple to the faded splendor of the colonial years; Ifemelu remembered how houses here had sagged, unpainted and untended, and mold crept up the walls, and gate hinges rusted and atrophied. But developers were renovating and dismantling now, and on the ground floor of a newly refurbished three-story building, heavy glass doors opened into a reception area painted a terra-cotta orange, where a pleasant-faced receptionist, Esther, sat, and behind her loomed giant words in silver: ZOE MAGAZINE. Esther was full of small ambitions. Ifemelu imagined her combing through the piles of secondhand shoes and clothes in the side stalls of Tejuosho market, finding the best pieces and then haggling tirelessly with the trader. She wore neatly pressed clothes and scuffed but carefully polished high heels, read books like Praying Your Way to Prosperity, and was superior with the drivers and ingratiating with the editors. “This your earring is very fine, ma,” she said to Ifemelu. “If you ever want to throw it away, please give it to me to help you throw it away.” And she ceaselessly invited Ifemelu to her church.

“Will you come this Sunday, ma? My pastor is a powerful man of God. So many people have testimonies of miracles that have happened in their lives because of him.”

“Why do you think I need to come to your church, Esther?”

“You will like it, ma. It is a spirit-filled church.”

At first, the “ma” had made Ifemelu uncomfortable, Esther was at least five years older than she was, but status, of course, surpassed age: she was the features editor, with a car and a driver and the spirit of America hanging over her head, and even Esther expected her to play the madam. And so she did, complimenting Esther and joking with Esther, but always in that manner that was both playful and patronizing, and sometimes giving Esther things, an old handbag, an old watch. Just as she did with her driver, Ayo. She complained about his speeding, threatened to fire him for being late again, asked him to repeat her instructions to make sure he had understood. Yet she always heard the unnatural high pitch of her voice when she said these things, unable fully to convince even herself of her own madamness.

Aunty Onenu liked to say, “Most of my staff are foreign graduates while that woman at Glass hires riffraff who cannot punctuate sentences!” Ifemelu imagined her saying this at a dinner party, “most of my staff” making the magazine sound like a large, busy operation, although it was an editorial staff of three, an administrative staff of four, and only Ifemelu and Doris, the editor, had foreign degrees. Doris, thin and hollow-eyed, a vegetarian who announced that she was a vegetarian as soon as she possibly could, spoke with a teenage American accent that made her sentences sound like questions, except for when she was speaking to her mother on the phone; then her English took on a flat, stolid Nigerianness. Her long sisterlocks were sun-bleached a coppery tone, and she dressed unusually—white socks and brogues, men’s shirts tucked into pedal pushers—which she considered original, and which everyone in the office forgave her for because she had come back from abroad. She wore no makeup except for bright-red lipstick, and it gave her face a certain shock value, that slash of crimson, which was probably her intent, but her unadorned skin tended towards ashy gray and Ifemelu’s first urge, when they met, was to suggest a good moisturizer.

“You went to Wellson in Philly? I went to Temple?” Doris said, as though to establish right away that they were members of the same superior club. “You’re going to be sharing this office with me and Zemaye. She’s the assistant editor, and she’s out on assignment until this afternoon, or maybe longer? She always stays as long as she wants.”

Ifemelu caught the malice. It was not subtle; Doris had meant for it to be caught.

“I thought you could, like, just spend this week getting used to things? See what we do? And then next week you can start some assignments?” Doris said.

“Okay,” Ifemelu said.

The office itself, a large room with four desks, on each of which sat a computer, looked bare and untested, as though it was everybody’s first day at work. Ifemelu was not sure what would make it look otherwise, perhaps pictures of family on the desks, or just more things, more files and papers and staplers, proof of its being inhabited.

“I had a great job in New York, but I decided to move back and settle down here?” Doris said. “Like, family pressure to settle down and stuff, you know? Like I’m the only daughter? When I first got back one of my aunts looked at me and said, ‘I can get you a job at a good bank, but you have to cut off that dada hair.’ ” She shook her head from side to side in mockery as she mimicked a Nigerian accent. “I swear to God this city is full of banks that just want you to be reasonably attractive in a kind of predictable way and you have a job in customer service? Anyway, I took this job because I’m interested in the magazine business? And this is like a good place to meet people, because of all the events we get to go to, you know?” Doris sounded as if she and Ifemelu somehow shared the same plot, the same view of the world. Ifemelu felt a small resentment at this, the arrogance of Doris’s certainty that she, too, would of course feel the same way as Doris.

Just before lunchtime, into the office walked a woman in a tight pencil skirt and patent shoes high as stilts, her straightened hair sleekly pulled back. She was not pretty, her facial features created no harmony, but she carried herself as though she was. Nubile. She made Ifemelu think of that word, with her shapely slenderness, her tiny waist and the unexpected high curves of her breasts.

“Hi. You’re Ifemelu, right? Welcome to Zoe. I’m Zemaye.” She shook Ifemelu’s hand, her face carefully neutral.

“Hi, Zemaye. It’s nice to meet you. You have a lovely name,” Ifemelu said.

“Thank you.” She was used to hearing it. “I hope you don’t like cold rooms.”

“Cold rooms?”

“Yes. Doris likes to put the AC on too high and I have to wear a sweater in the office, but now that you are here sharing the office, maybe we can vote,” Zemaye said, settling down at her desk.

“What are you talking about? Since when do you have to wear a sweater in the office?” Doris asked.

Zemaye raised her eyebrows and pulled out a thick shawl from her drawer.

“It’s the humidity that’s just so crazy?” Doris said, turning to Ifemelu, expecting agreement. “I felt like I couldn’t breathe when I first came back?”

Zemaye, too, turned to Ifemelu. “I am a Delta girl, homemade, born and bred. So I did not grow up with air conditioners and I can breathe without a room being cold.” She spoke in an impassive tone, and everything she said was delivered evenly, never rising or falling.