“I don’t like cold,” Ifemelu said. “I think I would freeze if the AC was turned on to the lowest.”
Doris blinked. She looked not merely betrayed but surprised that she had been betrayed. “Well, okay, we can turn it off and on throughout the day? I have a hard time breathing without the AC and the windows are so damn small?”
“Okay,” Ifemelu said.
Zemaye said nothing; she had turned to her computer, as though indifferent to this small victory and Ifemelu felt unaccountably disappointed. She had taken sides, after all, boldly standing with Zemaye, and yet Zemaye remained expressionless, hard to read. Ifemelu wondered what her story was. Zemaye intrigued her.
Later, Doris and Zemaye were looking over photographs spread out on Doris’s table, of a portly woman wearing tight ruffled clothes, when Zemaye said, “Excuse me, I’m pressed,” and hurried to the door, her supple movements making Ifemelu want to lose weight. Doris’s eyes followed her too.
“Don’t you just hate it how people say ‘I’m pressed’ or ‘I want to ease myself’ when they want to go to the bathroom?” Doris asked.
Ifemelu laughed. “I know!”
“I guess ‘bathroom’ is very American. But there’s ‘toilet,’ ‘restroom,’ ‘the ladies.’ ”
“I never liked ‘the ladies.’ I like ‘toilet.’ ”
“Me too!” Doris said. “And don’t you just hate it when people here use ‘on’ as a verb? On the light!”
“You know what I can’t stand? When people say ‘take’ instead of ‘drink.’ I will take wine. I don’t take beer.”
“Oh God, I know!”
They were laughing when Zemaye came back in, and she looked at Ifemelu with her eerily neutral expression and said, “You people must be discussing the next Been-To meeting.”
“What’s that?” Ifemelu asked.
“Doris talks about them all the time, but she can’t invite me because it is only for people who have come from abroad.” If there was mockery in Zemaye’s tone, and there had to be, she kept it under her flat delivery.
“Oh, please. ‘Been-To’ is like so outdated? This is not 1960,” Doris said. Then to Ifemelu, she said, “I was actually going to tell you about it. It’s called the Nigerpolitan Club and it’s just a bunch of people who have recently moved back, some from England, but mostly from the U.S.? Really low-key, just like sharing experiences and networking? I bet you’ll know some of the people. You should totally come?”
“Yes, I’d like to.”
Doris got up and took her handbag. “I have to go to Aunty Onenu’s house.”
After she left, the room was silent, Zemaye typing at her computer, Ifemelu browsing the Internet, and wondering what Zemaye was thinking.
Finally, Zemaye said, “So you were a famous race blogger in America. When Aunty Onenu told us, I didn’t understand.”
“What do you mean?”
“Why race?”
“I discovered race in America and it fascinated me.”
“Hmm,” Zemaye murmured, as though she thought this, discovering race, an exotic and self-indulgent phenomenon. “Aunty Onenu said your boyfriend is a black American and he is coming soon?”
Ifemelu was surprised. Aunty Onenu had asked about her personal life, with a casualness that was also insistent, and she had told her the false story of Blaine, thinking that her boss had no business with her personal life anyway, and now it seemed that personal life had been shared with other staff. Perhaps she was being too American about it, fixating on privacy for its own sake. What did it really matter if Zemaye knew of Blaine?
“Yes. He should be here by next month,” she said.
“Why is it only black people that are criminals over there?”
Ifemelu opened her mouth and closed it. Here she was, famous race blogger, and she was lost for words.
“I love Cops. It is because of that show that I have DSTV,” Zemaye said. “And all the criminals are black people.”
“It’s like saying every Nigerian is a 419,” Ifemelu said finally. She sounded too limp, too insufficient.