“Yes, we’re really about excess in this country,” Kimberly said. “I’m sure back home you ate a lot of wonderful organic food and vegetables, but you’re going to see it’s different here.”
“Kim, if she was eating all of this wonderful organic food in Nigeria, why would she come to the U.S.?” Laura asked. As children, Laura must have played the role of the big sister who exposed the stupidity of the little sister, always with kindness and good cheer, and preferably in the company of adult relatives.
“Well, even if they had very little food, I’m just saying it was probably all organic vegetables, none of the Frankenfood we have here,” Kimberly said. Ifemelu sensed, between them, the presence of spiky thorns floating in the air.
“You haven’t told her about television,” Laura said. She turned to Ifemelu. “Kim’s kids do supervised TV, only PBS. So if she hired you, you would need to be completely present and monitor what goes on, especially with Morgan.”
“Okay.”
“I don’t have a babysitter,” Laura said, her “I” glowing with righteous emphasis. “I’m a full-time, hands-on mom. I thought I would return to work when Athena turned two, but I just couldn’t bear to let her go. Kim is really hands-on, too, but she’s busy sometimes, she does wonderful work with her charity, and so I’m always worried about the babysitters. The last one, Martha, was wonderful, but we did wonder whether the one before her, what was her name again, let Morgan watch inappropriate shows. I don’t do any television at all with my daughter. I think there’s too much violence. I might let her do a few cartoons when she’s a little older.”
“But there’s violence in cartoons, too,” Ifemelu said.
Laura looked annoyed. “It’s cartoon. Kids are traumatized by the real thing.”
Ginika glanced at Ifemelu, a knitted-brow look that said: Just leave it alone. In primary school, Ifemelu had watched the firing squad that killed Lawrence Anini, fascinated by the mythologies around his armed robberies, how he wrote warning letters to newspapers, fed the poor with what he stole, turned himself into air when the police came. Her mother had said, “Go inside, this is not for children,” but halfheartedly, after Ifemelu had already seen most of the shooting anyway, Anini’s body roughly tied to a pole, jerking as the bullets hit him, before slumping against the criss-cross of rope. She thought about this now, how haunting and yet how ordinary it had seemed.
“Let me show you the house, Ifemelu,” Kimberly said. “Did I say it right?”
They walked from room to room—the daughter’s room with pink walls and a frilly bedcover, the son’s room with a set of drums, the den with a piano, its polished wooden top crowded with family photographs.
“We took that in India,” Kimberly said. They were standing by an empty rickshaw, wearing T-shirts, Kimberly with her golden hair tied back, her tall and lean husband, her small blond son and older red-haired daughter, all holding water bottles and smiling. They were always smiling in the photos they took, while sailing and hiking and visiting tourist spots, holding each other, all easy limbs and white teeth. They reminded Ifemelu of television commercials, of people whose lives were lived always in flattering light, whose messes were still aesthetically pleasing.
“Some of the people we met had nothing, absolutely nothing, but they were so happy,” Kimberly said. She extracted a photograph from the crowded back of the piano, of her daughter with two Indian women, their skin dark and weathered, their smiles showing missing teeth. “These women were so wonderful,” she said.
Ifemelu would also come to learn that, for Kimberly, the poor were blameless. Poverty was a gleaming thing; she could not conceive of poor people being vicious or nasty because their poverty had canonized them, and the greatest saints were the foreign poor.
“Morgan loves that, it’s Native American. But Taylor says it’s scary!” Kimberly pointed to a small piece of sculpture amid the photographs.
“Oh.” Ifemelu suddenly did not remember which was the boy and which the girl; both names, Morgan and Taylor, sounded to her like surnames.
Kimberly’s husband came home just before Ifemelu left.
“Hello! Hello!” he said, gliding into the kitchen, tall and tanned and tactical. Ifemelu could tell, from the longish length, the near-perfect waves that grazed his collar, that he took fastidious care of his hair.
“You must be Ginika’s friend from Nigeria,” he said, smiling, brimming with his awareness of his own charm. He looked people in the eye not because he was interested in them but because he knew it made them feel that he was interested in them.
With his appearance, Kimberly became slightly breathless. Her voice changed; she spoke now in the high-pitched voice of the self-consciously female. “Don, honey, you’re early,” she said as they kissed.
Don looked into Ifemelu’s eyes and told her how he had nearly visited Nigeria, just after Shagari was elected, when he worked as a consultant to an international development agency, but the trip fell through at the last minute and he had felt bad because he had been hoping to go to the shrine and see Fela perform. He mentioned Fela casually, intimately, as though it was something they had in common, a secret they shared. There was, in his storytelling, an expectation of successful seduction. Ifemelu stared at him, saying little, refusing to be ensnared, and feeling strangely sorry for Kimberly. To be saddled with a sister like Laura and a husband like this.
“Don and I are involved with a really good charity in Malawi, actually Don is much more involved than I am.” Kimberly looked at Don, who made a wry face and said, “Well, we do our best but we know very well that we’re not messiahs.”
“We really should plan a trip to visit. It’s an orphanage. We’ve never been to Africa. I would love to do something with my charity in Africa.”
Kimberly’s face had softened, her eyes misted over, and for a moment Ifemelu was sorry to have come from Africa, to be the reason that this beautiful woman, with her bleached teeth and bounteous hair, would have to dig deep to feel such pity, such hopelessness. She smiled brightly, hoping to make Kimberly feel better.
“I’m interviewing one more person and then I’ll let you know, but I really think you’re a great fit for us,” Kimberly said, leading Ifemelu and Ginika to the front door.
“Thank you,” Ifemelu said. “I would love to work for you.”
The next day, Ginika called and left a message, her tone low. “Ifem, I’m so sorry. Kimberly hired somebody else but she
said she’ll keep you in mind. Something will work out soon, don’t worry too much. I’ll call later.”
Ifemelu wanted to fling the phone away. Keep her in mind. Why would Ginika even repeat such an empty expression, “keep her in mind”?
IT WAS late autumn, the trees had grown antlers, dried leaves were sometimes trailed into the apartment, and the rent was due. Her roommates’ checks were on the kitchen table, one on top of the other, all of them pink and bordered by flowers. She thought it unnecessarily decorative, to have flowered checks in America; it almost took away from the seriousness of a check. Beside the checks was a note, in Jackie’s childish writing: Ifemelu, we’re almost a week late for rent. Writing a check would leave her account empty. Her mother had given her a small jar of Mentholatum the day before she left Lagos, saying, “Put this in your bag, for when you will be cold.” She rummaged now in her suitcase for it, opened and sniffed it, rubbing some under her nose. The scent made her want to weep. The answering machine was blinking but she did not check it because it would be yet another variation of Aunty Uju’s message. “Has anyone called you back? Have you tried the nearby McDonald’s and Burger King? They don’t always advertise but they might be hiring. I can’t send you anything until next month. My own account is empty, honestly to be a resident doctor is slave labor.”