Part 2
CHAPTER 3
Mariama finished her customer’s hair, sprayed it with sheen, and, after the customer left, she said, “I’m going to get Chinese.”
Aisha and Halima told her what they wanted—General Tso’s Chicken Very Spicy, Chicken Wings, Orange Chicken—with the quick ease of people saying what they said every day.
“You want anything?” Mariama asked Ifemelu.
“No, thanks,” Ifemelu said.
“Your hair take long. You need food,” Aisha said.
“I’m fine. I have a granola bar,” Ifemelu said. She had some baby carrots in a Ziploc, too, although all she had snacked on so far was her melted chocolate.
“What bar?” Aisha asked.
Ifemelu showed her the bar, organic, one hundred percent whole grain with real fruit.
“That not food!” Halima scoffed, looking away from the television.
“She here fifteen years, Halima,” Aisha said, as if the length of years in America explained Ifemelu’s eating of a granola bar.
“Fifteen? Long time,” Halima said.
Aisha waited until Mariama left before pulling out her cell phone from her pocket. “Sorry, I make quick call,” she said, and stepped outside. Her face had brightened when she came back; there was a smiling, even-featured prettiness, drawn out by that phone call, that Ifemelu had not earlier seen.
“Emeka work late today. So only Chijioke come to see you, before we finish,” she said, as if she and Ifemelu had planned it all together.
“Look, you don’t have to ask them to come. I won’t even know what to tell them,” Ifemelu said.
“Tell Chijioke Igbo can marry not Igbo.”
“Aisha, I can’t tell him to marry you. He will marry you if he wants to.”
“They want marry me. But I am not Igbo!” Aisha’s eyes glittered; the woman had to be a little mentally unstable.
“Is that what they told you?” Ifemelu asked.
“Emeka say his mother tell him if he marry American, she kill herself,” Aisha said.
“That’s not good.”
“But me, I am African.”
“So maybe she won’t kill herself if he marries you.”
Aisha looked blankly at her. “Your boyfriend mother want him to marry you?”
Ifemelu thought first of Blaine, then she realized that Aisha, of course, meant her make-believe boyfriend.
“Yes. She keeps asking us when we will get married.” She was amazed by her own fluidness, it was as if she had convinced even herself that she was not living on memories mildewed by thirteen years. But it could have been true; Obinze’s mother had liked her, after all.
“Ah!” Aisha said, in well-meaning envy.
A man with dry, graying skin and a mop of white hair came in with a plastic tray of herbal potions for sale.
“No, no, no,” Aisha said to him, palm raised as though to ward him off. The man retreated. Ifemelu felt sorry for him, hungry-looking in his worn dashiki, and wondered how much he could possibly make from his sales. She should have bought something.