“It will get better,” Ifemelu said, helplessly. She knew how hollow she sounded. Nothing was familiar. She was unable to comfort Aunty Uju because she did not know how. When Aunty Uju spoke about her friends who had come to America earlier and passed their exams—Nkechi in Maryland had sent her the dining set, Kemi in Indiana bought her the bed, Ozavisa had sent crockery and clothes from Hartford—Ifemelu said, “God bless them,” and the words felt bulky and useless in her mouth.
She had assumed, from Aunty Uju’s calls home, that things were not too bad, although she realized now that Aunty Uju had always been vague, mentioning “work” and “exam” without details. Or perhaps it was because she had not asked for details, had not expected to understand details. And she thought, watching her, how the old Aunty Uju would never have worn her hair in such scruffy braids. She would never have tolerated the ingrown hair that grew like raisins on her chin, or worn trousers that gathered bulkily between her legs. America had subdued her.
CHAPTER 10
That first summer was Ifemelu’s summer of waiting; the real America, she felt, was just around the next corner she would turn. Even the days, sliding one into the other, languorous and limpid, the sun lingering until very late, seemed to be waiting. There was a stripped-down quality to her life, a kindling starkness, without parents and friends and home, the familiar landmarks that made her who she was. And so she waited, writing Obinze long, detailed letters, calling him once in a while—calls kept brief because Aunty Uju said she could not waste the phone card—and spending time with Dike. He was a mere child, but she felt, with him, a kinship close to friendship; they watched his favorite cartoon shows together, Rugrats and Franklin, and they read books together, and she took him out to play with Jane’s children. Jane lived in the next apartment. She and her husband, Marlon, were from Grenada and spoke in a lyrical accent as though just about to break into song. “They are like us; he has a good job and he has ambition and they spank their children,” Aunty Uju had said approvingly.
Ifemelu and Jane laughed when they discovered how similar their childhoods in Grenada and Nigeria had been, with Enid Blyton books and Anglophile teachers and fathers who worshipped the BBC World Service. She was only a few years older than Ifemelu. “I married very young. Everybody wanted Marlon so how could I say no?” she said, half teasing. They would sit together on the front steps of the building and watch Dike and Jane’s children, Elizabeth and Junior, ride their bicycles to the end of the street and then back, Ifemelu often calling out to Dike not to go any farther, the children shouting, the concrete sidewalks gleaming in the hot sun, and the summer lull disrupted by the occasional rise and fall of loud music from passing cars.
“Things must still be very strange for you,” Jane said.
Ifemelu nodded. “Yes.”
An ice cream van drove into the street, and with it a tinkling melody.
“You know, this is my tenth year here and I feel as if I’m still settling in,” Jane said. “The hardest thing is raising my kids. Look at Elizabeth, I have to be very careful with her. If you are not careful in this country, your children become what you don’t know. It’s different back home because you can control them. Here, no.” Jane wore an air of harmlessness, with her plain face and jiggly arms, but there was, beneath her ready smile, an icy watchfulness.
“How old is she? Ten?” Ifemelu asked.
“Nine and already trying to be a drama queen. We pay good money for her to go to private school because the public schools here are useless. Marlon says we’ll move to the suburbs soon so they can go to better schools. Otherwise she will start behaving like these black Americans.”
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t worry, you will understand with time,” Jane said, and got up to get some money for the children’s ice cream.
Ifemelu looked forward to sitting outside with Jane, until the evening Marlon came back from work and told Ifemelu in a hasty whisper, after Jane went in to get some lemonade for the children, “I’ve been thinking about you. I want to talk to you.” She did not tell Jane. Jane would never hold Marlon responsible for anything, her light-skinned, hazel-eyed Marlon whom everyone wanted, and so Ifemelu began to avoid both of them, to design elaborate board games that she and Dike could play indoors.
Once, she asked Dike what he had done in school before summer, and he said, “Circles.” They would sit on the floor in a circle and share their favorite things.
She was appalled. “Can you do division?”
He looked at her strangely. “I’m only in first grade, Coz.”
“When I was your age I could do simple division.”
The conviction lodged in her head, that American children learned nothing in elementary school, and it hardened when he told her that his teacher sometimes gave out homework coupons; if you got a homework coupon, then you could skip one day of homework. Circles, homework coupons, what foolishness would she next hear? And so she began to teach him mathematics—she called it “maths” and he called it “math” and so they agreed not to shorten the word. She could not think, now, of that summer without thinking of long division, of Dike’s brows furrowed in confusion as they sat side by side at the dining table, of her swings from bribing him to shouting at him. Okay, try it one more time and you can have ice cream. You’re not going to play unless you get them all right. Later, when he was older, he would say that he found mathematics easy because of her summer of torturing him. “You must mean summer of tutoring,” she would say in what became a familiar joke that, like comfort food, they would reach for from time to time.
It was, also, her summer of eating. She enjoyed the unfamiliar—the McDonald’s hamburgers with the brief tart crunch of pickles, a new taste that she liked on one day and disliked on the next, the wraps Aunty Uju brought home, wet with piquant dressing, and the bologna and pepperoni that left a film of salt in her mouth. She was disoriented by the blandness of fruits, as though Nature had forgotten to sprinkle some seasoning on the oranges and the bananas, but she liked to look at them, and to touch them; because bananas were so big, so evenly yellow, she forgave them their tastelessness. Once, Dike said, “Why are you doing that? Eating a banana with peanuts?”
“That’s what we do in Nigeria. Do you want to try?”
“No,” he said firmly. “I don’t think I like Nigeria, Coz.”
Ice cream was, fortunately, a taste unchanged. She scooped straight from the buy-one-get-one-free giant tubs in the freezer, globs of vanilla and chocolate, while staring at the television. She followed shows she had watched in Nigeria—The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, A Different World—and discovered new shows she had not known—Friends, The Simpsons—but it was the commercials that captivated her. She ached for the lives they showed, lives full of bliss, where all problems had sparkling solutions in shampoos and cars and packaged foods, and in her mind they became the real America, the America she would only see when she moved to school in the autumn. At first, the evening news puzzled her, a litany of fires and shootings, because she was used to NTA news, where self-important army officers cut ribbons or gave speeches. But as she watched day after day, images of men being hauled off in handcuffs, distraught families in front of charred, smoldering houses, the wreckage of cars crashed in police chases, blurred videos of armed robberies in shops, her puzzlement ripened to worry. She panicked when there was a sound by the window, when Dike went too far down the street on his bicycle. She stopped taking out the trash after dark, because a man with a gun might be lurking outside. Aunty Uju said, laughing shortly, “If you keep watching television, you will think these things happen all the time. Do you know how much crime happens in Nigeria? Is it because we don’t report it like they do here?”
CHAPTER 11
Aunty Uju came home dry-faced and tense, the streets dark and Dike already in bed, to ask “Do I have mail? Do I have mail?” the question always repeated, her entire being at a perilous edge, about to tip over. Some nights, she would talk on the phone for
a long time, her voice hushed, as though she were protecting something from the world’s prying gaze. Finally, she told Ifemelu about Bartholomew. “He is an accountant, divorced, and he is looking to settle down. He is from Eziowelle, very near us.”
Ifemelu, floored by Aunty Uju’s words, could only say, “Oh, okay,” and nothing else. “What does he do?” and “Where is he from?” were the questions her own mother would ask, but when had it started to matter to Aunty Uju that a man was from a hometown close to theirs?
One Saturday, Bartholomew visited from Massachusetts. Aunty Uju cooked peppered gizzards, powdered her face, and stood by the living room window, waiting to see his car pull in. Dike watched her, playing halfheartedly with his action figures, confused but also excited because he could sense her expectation. When the doorbell rang, she told Dike, urgently, “Behave well!”
Bartholomew wore khaki trousers pulled up high on his belly, and spoke with an American accent filled with holes, mangling words until they were impossible to understand. Ifemelu sensed, from his demeanor, a deprived rural upbringing that he tried to compensate for with his American affectation, his gonnas and wannas.
He glanced at Dike, and said, almost indifferently, “Oh, yes, your boy. How are you doing?”