“Sister, you know her problem is that she doesn’t always know when to keep her mouth shut. Don’t worry, I will talk to her,” Aunty Uju said, playing her role of pacifier, soothing her cousin’s wife. She had always got along with Ifemelu’s mother, the easy relationship between two people who carefully avoided conversations of any depth. Perhaps Aunty Uju felt gratitude to Ifemelu’s mother for embracing her, accepting her status as the special resident relative. Growing up, Ifemelu did not feel like an only child because of the cousins, aunts, and uncles who lived with them. There were always suitcases and bags in the flat; sometimes a relative or two would sleep on the floor of the living room for weeks. Most were her father’s family, brought to Lagos to learn a trade or go to school or look for a job, so that the people back in the village would not mutter about their brother with only one child who did not want to help raise others. Her father felt an obligation to them, he insisted that everyone be home before eight p.m., made sure there was enough food to go around, and locked his bedroom door even when he went to the bathroom, because any of them could wander in and steal something. But Aunty Uju was different. Too clever to waste away in that backwater, he said. He called her his youngest sister although she was the child of his father’s brother, and he had been more protective, less distant, with her. Whenever he came across Ifemelu and Aunty Uju curled up in bed talking, he would fondly say “You two.” After Aunty Uju left to go to university in Ibadan, he told Ifemelu, almost wistfully, “Uju exerted a calming influence on you.” He seemed to see, in their closeness, proof of his own good choice, as though he had knowingly brought a gift to his family, a buffer between his wife and daughter.
And so, in the bedroom, Aunty Uju told Ifemelu, “You should have just made the garland. I’ve told you that you don’t have to say everything. You have to learn that. You don’t have to say everything.”
“Why can’t Mummy like the things you get from The General without pretending they are from God?”
“Who says they are not from God?” Aunty Uju asked, and made a face, pulling her lips down at the sides. Ifemelu laughed.
According to the family legend, Ifemelu had been a surly three-year-old who screamed if a stranger came close, but the first time she saw Aunty Uju, thirteen and pimply faced, Ifemelu walked over and climbed into her lap and stayed there. She did not know if this had happened, or had merely become true from being told over and over again, a charmed tale of the beginning of their closeness. It was Aunty Uju who sewed Ifemelu’s little-girl dresses and, as Ifemelu got older, they would pore over fashion magazines, choosing styles together. Aunty Uju taught her to mash an avocado and spread it on her face, to dissolve Robb in hot water and place her face over the steam, to dry a pimple with toothpaste. Aunty Uju brought her James Hadley Chase novels wrapped in newspaper to hide the near-naked women on the cover, hot-stretched her hair when she got lice from the neighbors, talked her through her first menstrual period, supplementing her mother’s lecture that was full of biblical quotes about virtue but lacked useful details about cramps and pads. When Ifemelu met Obinze, she told Aunty Uju that
she had met the love of her life, and Aunty Uju told her to let him kiss and touch but not to let him put it inside.
CHAPTER 4
The gods, the hovering deities who gave and took teenage loves, had decided that Obinze would go out with Ginika. Obinze was the new boy, a fine boy even if he was short. He had transferred from the university secondary school in Nsukka, and only days after, everyone knew of the swirling rumors about his mother. She had fought with a man, another professor at Nsukka, a real fight, punching and hitting, and she had won, too, even tearing his clothes, and so she was suspended for two years and had moved to Lagos until she could go back. It was an unusual story; market women fought, mad women fought, but not women who were professors. Obinze, with his air of calm and inwardness, made it even more intriguing. He was quickly admitted into the clan of swaggering, carelessly cool males, the Big Guys; he lounged in the corridors with them, stood with them at the back of the hall during assembly. None of them tucked in their shirts, and for this they always got into trouble, glamorous trouble, with the teachers, but Obinze came to school every day with his shirt neatly tucked in and soon all the Big Guys tucked in, too, even Kayode DaSilva, the coolest of them all.
Kayode spent every vacation in his parents’ house in England, which looked large and forbidding in the photos Ifemelu had seen. His girlfriend, Yinka, was like him—she, too, went to England often and lived in Ikoyi and spoke with a British accent. She was the most popular girl in their form, her school bag made of thick monogrammed leather, her sandals always different from what anybody else had. The second most popular girl was Ginika, Ifemelu’s close friend. Ginika did not go abroad often, and so did not have the air of away as Yinka did, but she had caramel skin and wavy hair that, when unbraided, fell down to her neck instead of standing Afro-like. Each year, she was voted Prettiest Girl in their form, and she would wryly say, “It’s just because I’m a half-caste. How can I be finer than Zainab?”
And so it was the natural order of things, that the gods should match Obinze and Ginika. Kayode was throwing a hasty party in their guest quarters while his parents were away in London. He told Ginika, “I’m going to introduce you to my guy Zed at the party.”
“He’s not bad,” Ginika said, smiling.
“I hope he did not get his mother’s fighting genes o,” Ifemelu teased. It was nice to see Ginika interested in a boy; almost all the Big Guys in school had tried with her and none had lasted long; Obinze seemed quiet, a good match.
Ifemelu and Ginika arrived together, the party still at its dawn, the dance floor bare, boys running around with cassette tapes, shyness and awkwardness still undissolved. Each time Ifemelu came to Kayode’s house, she imagined what it was like to live here, in Ikoyi, in a gracious and graveled compound, with servants who wore white.
“See Kayode with the new guy,” Ifemelu said.
“I don’t want to look,” Ginika said. “Are they coming?”
“Yes.”
“My shoes are so tight.”
“You can dance in tight shoes,” Ifemelu said.
The boys were before them. Obinze looked overdressed, in a thick corduroy jacket, while Kayode wore a T-shirt and jeans.
“Hey, babes!” Kayode said. He was tall and rangy, with the easy manner of the entitled. “Ginika, meet my friend Obinze. Zed, this is Ginika, the queen God made for you if you are ready to work for it!” He was smirking, already a little drunk, the golden boy making a golden match.
“Hi,” Obinze said to Ginika.
“This is Ifemelu,” Kayode said. “Otherwise known as Ifemsco. She’s Ginika’s right-hand man. If you misbehave, she will flog you.”
They all laughed on cue.
“Hi,” Obinze said. His eyes met Ifemelu’s and held, and lingered.
Kayode was making small talk, telling Obinze that Ginika’s parents were also university professors. “So both of you are book people,” Kayode said. Obinze should have taken over and begun talking to Ginika, and Kayode would have left, and Ifemelu would have followed, and the will of the gods would have been fulfilled. But Obinze said little, and Kayode was left to carry the conversation, his voice getting boisterous, and from time to time he glanced at Obinze, as though to urge him on. Ifemelu was not sure when something happened, but in those moments, as Kayode talked, something strange happened. A quickening inside her, a dawning. She realized, quite suddenly, that she wanted to breathe the same air as Obinze. She became, also, acutely aware of the present, the now, Toni Braxton’s voice from the cassette player, be it fast or slow, it doesn’t let go, or shake me, the smell of Kayode’s father’s brandy, which had been sneaked out of the main house, and the tight white shirt that chafed at her armpits. Aunty Uju had made her tie it, in a loose bow, at her navel and she wondered now if it was truly stylish or if she looked silly.
The music stopped abruptly. Kayode said, “I’m coming,” and left to find out what was wrong, and in the new silence, Ginika fiddled with the metal bangle that encircled her wrist.
Obinze’s eyes met Ifemelu’s again.
“Aren’t you hot in that jacket?” Ifemelu asked. The question came out before she could restrain herself, so used was she to sharpening her words, to watching for terror in the eyes of boys. But he was smiling. He looked amused. He was not afraid of her.
“Very hot,” he said. “But I’m a country bumpkin and this is my first city party so you have to forgive me.” Slowly, he took his jacket off, green and padded at the elbows, under which he wore a long-sleeved shirt. “Now I’ll have to carry a jacket around with me.”
“I can hold it for you,” Ginika offered. “And don’t mind Ifem, the jacket is fine.”