Mariama opened the door, propped it with a chair. “This heat is really bad.”
EACH HEAT WAVE REMINDED Ifemelu of her first, the summer she arrived. It was summer in America, she knew this, but all her life she had thought of “overseas” as a cold place of wool coats and snow, and because America was “overseas,” and her illusions so strong they could not be fended off by reason, she bought the thickest sweater she could find in Tejuosho market for her trip. She wore it for the journey, zipping it all the way up in the humming interior of the airplane and then unzipping it as she left the airport building with Aunty Uju. The sweltering heat alarmed her, as did Aunty Uju’s old Toyota hatchback, with a patch of rust on its side and peeling fabric on the seats. She stared at buildings and cars and signboards, all of them matte, disappointingly matte; in the landscape of her imagination, the mundane things in America were covered in a high-shine gloss. She was startled, most of all, by the teenage boy in a baseball cap standing near a brick wall, face down, body leaning forward, hands between his legs. She turned to look again.
“See that boy!” she said. “I didn’t know people do things like this in America.”
“You didn’t know people pee in America?” Aunty Uju asked, barely glancing at the boy before turning back to a traffic light.
“Ahn-ahn, Aunty! I mean that they do it outside. Like that.”
“They don’t. It’s not like back home where everybody does it. He can get arrested for that, but this is not a good neighborhood anyway,” Aunty Uju said shortly. There was something different about her. Ifemelu had noticed it right away at the airport, her roughly braided hair, her ears bereft of earrings, her quick casual hug, as if it had been weeks rather than years since they had last seen each other.
“I’m supposed to be with my books now,” Aunty Uju said, eyes focused on the road. “You know my exam is coming.”
Ifemelu had not known that there was yet another exam; she had thought Aunty Uju was waiting for a result. But she said, “Yes, I know.”
Their silence was full of stones. Ifemelu felt like apologizing, although she was not quite sure what she would be apologizing for. Perhaps Aunty Uju regretted her presence, now that she was here, in Aunty Uju’s wheezing car.
Aunty Uju’s cell phone rang. “Yes, this is Uju.” She pronounced it you-joo instead of oo-joo.
“Is that how you pronounce your name now?” Ifemelu asked afterwards.
“It’s what they call me.”
Ifemelu swallowed the words “Well, that isn’t your name.” Instead she said in Igbo, “I did not know it would be so hot here.”
“We have a heat wave, the first one this summer,” Aunty Uju said, as thou
gh heat wave was something Ifemelu was supposed to understand. She had never felt a heat quite so hot. An enveloping, uncompassionate heat. Aunty Uju’s door handle, when they arrived at her one-bedroom apartment, was warm to the touch. Dike sprang up from the carpeted floor of the living room, scattered with toy cars and action figures, and hugged her as though he remembered her. “Alma, this is my cousin!” he said to his babysitter, a pale-skinned, tired-faced woman with black hair held in a greasy ponytail. If Ifemelu had met Alma in Lagos, she would have thought of her as white, but she would learn that Alma was Hispanic, an American category that was, confusingly, both an ethnicity and a race, and she would remember Alma when, years later, she wrote a blog post titled “Understanding America for the Non-American Black: What Hispanic Means.”
Hispanic means the frequent companions of American blacks in poverty rankings, Hispanic means a slight step above American blacks in the American race ladder, Hispanic means the chocolate-skinned woman from Peru, Hispanic means the indigenous people of Mexico. Hispanic means the biracial-looking folks from the Dominican Republic. Hispanic means the paler folks from Puerto Rico. Hispanic also means the blond, blue-eyed guy from Argentina. All you need to be is Spanish-speaking but not from Spain and voilà, you’re a race called Hispanic.
But that afternoon, she hardly noticed Alma, or the living room furnished only with a couch and a TV, or the bicycle lodged in a corner, because she was absorbed by Dike. The last time she saw him, on the day of Aunty Uju’s hasty departure from Lagos, he had been a one-year-old, crying unendingly at the airport as though he understood the upheaval his life had just undergone, and now here he was, a first grader with a seamless American accent and a hyper-happiness about him; the kind of child who could never stay still and who never seemed sad.
“Why do you have a sweater? It’s too hot for a sweater!” he said, chortling, still holding on to her in a drawn-out hug. She laughed. He was so small, so innocent, and yet there was a precociousness about him, but it was a sunny one; he did not nurse dark intentions about the adults in his world. That night, after he and Aunty Uju got into bed and Ifemelu settled on a blanket on the floor, he said, “How come she has to sleep on the floor, Mom? We can all fit in,” as though he could sense how Ifemelu felt. There was nothing wrong with the arrangement—she had, after all, slept on mats when she visited her grandmother in the village—but this was America at last, glorious America at last, and she had not expected to bed on the floor.
“I’m fine, Dike,” she said.
He got up and brought her his pillow. “Here. It’s soft and comfy.”
Aunty Uju said, “Dike, come and lie down. Let your aunty sleep.”
Ifemelu could not sleep, her mind too alert to the newness of things, and she waited to hear Aunty Uju’s snoring before she slipped out of the room and turned on the kitchen light. A fat cockroach was perched on the wall near the cabinets, moving slightly up and down as though breathing heavily. If she had been in their Lagos kitchen, she would have found a broom and killed it, but she left the American cockroach alone and went and stood by the living room window. Flatlands, Aunty Uju said this section of Brooklyn was called. The street below was poorly lit, bordered not by leafy trees but by closely parked cars, nothing like the pretty street on The Cosby Show. Ifemelu stood there for a long time, her body unsure of itself, overwhelmed by a sense of newness. But she felt, also, a frisson of expectation, an eagerness to discover America.
“I THINK it’s better if you take care of Dike for the summer and save me babysitting money and then start looking for a job when you get to Philadelphia,” Aunty Uju said the next morning. She had woken Ifemelu up, giving brisk instructions about Dike, saying she would go to the library to study after work. Her words tumbled out. Ifemelu wished she would slow down a little.
“You can’t work with your student visa, and work-study is rubbish, it pays nothing, and you have to be able to cover your rent and the balance of your tuition. Me, you can see I am working three jobs and yet it’s not easy. I talked to one of my friends, I don’t know if you remember Ngozi Okonkwo? She’s now an American citizen and she has gone back to Nigeria for a while, to start a business. I begged her and she agreed to let you work with her Social Security card.”
“How? I’ll use her name?” Ifemelu asked.
“Of course you’ll use her name,” Aunty Uju said, eyebrows raised, as though she had barely stopped herself from asking if Ifemelu was stupid. There was a small white blob of face cream on her hair, caught at the root of a braid, and Ifemelu was going to tell her to wipe it off but she changed her mind, saying nothing, and watched Aunty Uju hurry to the door. She felt singed by Aunty Uju’s reproach. It was as if, between them, an old intimacy had quite suddenly lapsed. Aunty Uju’s impatience, that new prickliness in her, made Ifemelu feel that there were things she should already know but, through some personal failing of hers, did not know. “There’s corned beef so you can make sandwiches for lunch,” Aunty Uju had said, as though those words were perfectly normal and did not require a humorous preamble about how Americans ate bread for lunch. But Dike didn’t want a sandwich. After he had shown her all his toys, and they had watched some episodes of Tom and Jerry, with him laughing, thrilled, because she had watched them all before in Nigeria and so told him what would happen before it did, he opened the refrigerator and pointed at what he wanted her to make him. “Hot dogs.” Ifemelu examined the curiously long sausages and then began to open cupboards to look for some oil.
“Mummy says I have to call you Aunty Ifem. But you’re not my aunt. You’re my cousin.”
“So call me Cousin.”
“Okay, Coz,” Dike said, and laughed. His laughter was so warm, so open. She had found the vegetable oil.
“You don’t need oil,” Dike said. “You just cook the hot dog in water.”