Americanah

“And who are you to pass judgment? How is it different from you and the rich white guy in America? Would you have your U.S. citizenship today if not for him? How did you get your job in America? You need to stop this nonsense. Stop feeling so superior!”

Ranyinudo hung up on her. For a long time, Ifemelu stared at the silent phone, shaken. Then she took down the post and drove over to Ranyinudo’s place.

“Ranyi, I’m sorry. Please don’t be angry,” she said.

Ranyinudo gave her a long look.

“You’re right,” Ifemelu said. “It’s easy to be judgmental. But it was not personal, and it was not coming from a bad place. Please, biko. I will never invade your privacy like that again.”

Ranyinudo shook her head. “Ifemelunamma, your problem is emotional frustration. Go and find Obinze, please.”

Ifemelu laughed. It was what she least expected to hear.

“I have to lose weight first,” she said.

“You’re just afraid.”

Before Ifemelu left, they sat on the couch and drank malt and watched the latest celebrity news on E!.

DIKE VOLUNTEERED to moderate the blog comments, so that she could take a break.

“Oh my God, Coz, people take this stuff really personal!” he said. Sometimes he laughed aloud on reading a comment. Other times, he asked her what unfamiliar expressions meant. What’s “shine your eye”? The first time the power went off after he arrived, the buzzing, whirring, piping sounds of her UPS startled him. “Oh my God, is that like a fire alarm?” he asked.

“No, that’s just something that makes sure my TV doesn’t get destroyed by crazy power cuts.”

“That’s crazy,” Dike said, but only days later he was going to the back of the flat to turn on the generator himself when the power went off. Ranyinudo brought her cousins to meet him, girls who were close to his age, skinny jeans clinging to their slender hips, their budding breasts outlined in tight T-shirts. “Dike, you must marry one of them o,” Ranyinudo said. “We need fine children in our family.” “Ranyi!” her cousins said, abashed, hiding their shyness. They liked Dike. It was so easy to like him, with his charm and his humor and the vulnerability openly lurking underneath. On Facebook, he posted a picture Ifemelu had taken of him standing on the verandah with Ranyinudo’s cousins, and he captioned it: No lions yet to eat me, folks.

“I wish I spoke Igbo,” he told her after they had spent an evening with her parents.

“But you understand perfectly,” she said.

“I just wish I spoke.”

“You can still learn,” she said, suddenly feeling desperate, unsure how much this mattered to him, thinking again of him lying on the couch in the basement, drenched in sweat. She wondered if she should say more or not.

“Yes, I guess so,” he said, and shrugged, as though to say it was already too late.

Some days before he left, he asked her, “What was my father really like?”

“He loved you.”

“Did you like him?”

She did not want to lie to him. “I don’t know. He was a big man in a military government and that does something to you and the way you relate to people. I was worried for your mom because I thought she deserved better. But she loved him, she really did, and he loved you. He used to carry you with such tenderness.”

“I can’t believe Mom hid from me for so long that she was his mistress.”

“She was protecting you,” Ifemelu said.

“Can we go see the house in Dolphin Estate?”

“Yes.”

She drove him to Dolphin Estate, astounded by how much it had declined. The paint was peeling on buildings, the streets pitted with potholes, and the whole estate resigned to its own shabbiness. “It was so much nicer then,” she told him. He stood looking at the house for a while, until the gateman said, “Yes? Any problem?” and they got back into the car.

“Can I drive, Coz?” he asked.

“Are you sure?”

He nodded. She came out of the driver’s seat and went around to his. He drove them home, hesitating slightly before he merged onto Osborne Road, and then easing into traffic with more confidence. She knew it meant something to him that she could not name. That night, when the power went off, her generator would not come on, and she suspected that her driver, Ayo, had been sold diesel spiked with kerosene. Dike complained about the heat, about mosquitoes biting him. She opened the windows, made him take off his shirt, and they lay side by side in bed talking, desultory talking, and she reached out and touched his forehead and left her hand there until she heard the gentle even breathing of his sleep.

In the morning, the sky was overcast with slate-gray clouds, the air thick with rains foreboding. From nearby a clutch of birds screeched and flew away. The rain would come down, a sea unleashed from the sky, and DSTV images would get grainy, phone networks would clog, the roads would flood and traffic would gnarl. She stood with Dike on the verandah as the early droplets came down.

“I kind of like it here,” he told her.

She wanted to say, “You can live with me. There are good private schools here that you could go to,” but she did not.

She took him to the airport, and stayed watching until he went past security, waved, and turned the corner. Back home, she heard the hollowness in her steps as she walked from bedroom to living room to verandah and then back again. Later, Ranyinudo told her, “I don’t understand how a fine boy like Dike would want to kill himself. A boy living in America with everything. How can? That is very foreign behavior.”

“Foreign behavior? What the fuck are you talking about? Foreign behavior? Have you read Things Fall Apart?” Ifemelu asked, wishing she had not told Ranyinudo about Dike. She was angrier with Ranyinudo than she had ever been, yet she knew that Ranyinudo meant well, and had said what many other Nigerians would say, which was why she had not told anyone else about Dike’s suicide attempt since she came back.

CHAPTER 51

It had terrified her, the first time she came to the bank, to walk past the armed security guard, and into the beeping door, where she stood in the enclosure, sealed and airless like a standing coffin, until the light changed to green. Had banks always had this ostentatious security? Before she left America, she had wired some money to Nigeria, and Bank of America had made her speak to three different people, each one telling her that Nigeria was a high-risk country; if anything happened to her money, they would not be responsible. Did she understand? The last woman she spoke to made her repeat herself. Ma’am, I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you. I need to know that you understand that Nigeria is a high-risk country. “I understand!” she said. They read her caveat after caveat, and she began to fear for her money, snaking its way through the air to Nigeria, and she worried even more when she came to the bank and saw the gaudy garlands of security at the entrance. But the money was safely in her account. And now, as she walked into the bank, she saw Obinze at the customer service section. He was standing with his back to her and she knew, from the height and the shape of the head, that it was him. She stopped, sick with apprehension, hoping he would not turn just yet until she had gathered her nerves. Then he turned and it was not Obinze. Her throat felt tight. Her head was filled with ghosts. Back in her car, she turned on the air conditioner and decided to call him, to free herself of the ghosts. His phone rang and rang. He was a big man now; he would not, of course, pick up a call from an unknown number. She sent a text: Ceiling, it’s me. Her phone rang almost immediately.

“Hello? Ifem?” That voice she had not heard in so long, and it sounded both changed and unchanged.

“Ceiling! How are you?”

“You’re back.”

“Yes.” Her hands were trembling. She should have sent an e-mail first. She should be chatty, ask about his wife and child, tell him that she had in fact been back for a while.

“So,” Obinze said, dragging the word. “How are you? Where are you? When can I see you?”

“What about now?” The recklessness that often emerged when she felt nervous had pushed out those words, but perhaps it was best to see him right away and get it over with. She wished she had dressed up a bit more, maybe worn her favorite wrap dress, with its slimming cut, but her knee-length skirt was not too bad, and her high heels always made her feel confident, and her Afro was, thankfully, not yet too shrunken from the humidity.

There was a pause on Obinze’s end—something hesitant?—which made her regret her rashness.

“I’m actually running a bit late for a meeting,” she added quickly. “But I just wanted to say hi and we can meet up soon …”

“Ifem, where are you?”

She told him she was on her way to Jazzhole to buy a book, and would be there in a few minutes. Half an hour later, she was standing in front of the bookshop when a black Range Rover pulled in and Obinze got out from the back.

THERE WAS a moment, a caving of the blue sky, an inertia of stillness, when neither of them knew what to do, he walking towards her, she standing there squinting, and then he was upon her and they hugged. She thumped him on the back, once, twice, to make it a chummy-chummy hug, a platonic and safe chummy-chummy hug, but he pulled her ever so slightly close to him, and held her for a moment too long, as though to say he was not being chummy-chummy.