Her father had, finally, found a job, as the deputy director of human resources in one of the new banks. He bought a mobile phone. He bought new tires for her mother’s car. Slowly, he was easing back into his monologues about Nigeria.
“One could not describe Obasanjo as a good man, but it must be conceded that he has done some good things in the country; there is a flourishing spirit of entrepreneurship,” he said.
It felt strange to call them directly, to hear her father’s “Hello?” after the second ring, and when he heard her voice, he raised his, almost shouting, as he always did with international calls. Her mother liked to take the phone out to the verandah, to make sure the neighbors overheard: “Ifem, how is the weather in America?”
Her mother asked breezy questions and accepted breezy replies. “Everything is going well?” and Ifemelu had no choice but to say yes. Her father remembered classes she’d mentioned, and asked about specifics. She chose her words, careful not to say anything about Curt. It was easier not to tell them about Curt.
“What are your employment prospects?” her father asked. Her graduation was approaching, her student visa expiring.
“I have been assigned to a career counselor, and I’m meeting her next week,” she said.
“All graduating students have a counselor assigned to them?”
“Yes.”
Her father made a sound, of admiring respect. “America is an organized place, and job opportunities are rife there.”
“Yes. They have placed many students in good jobs,” Ifemelu said. It was untrue, but it was what her father expected to hear. The career services office, an airless space, piles of files sitting forlornly on desks, was known to be full of counselors who reviewed résumés and asked you to change the font or format and gave you outdated contact information for people who never called you back. The first time Ifemelu went there, her counselor, Ruth, a caramel-skinned African-American woman, asked, “What do you really want to do?”
“I want a job.”
“Yes, but what kind?” Ruth asked, slightly incredulous.
Ifemelu looked at her résumé on the table. “I’m a communications major, so anything in communications, the media.”
“Do you have a passion, a dream job?”
Ifemelu shook her head. She felt weak, for not having a passion, not being sure what she wanted to do. Her interests were vague and varied, magazine publishing, fashion, politics, television; none of them had a firm shape. She attended the school career fair, where students wore awkward suits and serious expressions, and tried to look like adults worthy of real jobs. The recruiters, themselves not long out of college, the young who had been sent out to catch the young, told her about “opportunity for growth” and “good fit” and “benefits,” but they all became noncommittal when they realized she was not an American citizen, that they would, if they hired her, have to descend into the dark tunnel of immigration paperwork. “I should have majored in engineering or something,” she told Curt. “Communications majors are a dime a dozen.”
“I know some people my dad did business with, they might be able to help,” Curt said. And, not long afterwards, he told her she had an interview at an office in downtown Baltimore, for a position in public relations. “All you need to do is ace the interview and it’s yours,” he said. “So I know folks in this other bigger place, but the good thing about this one is they’ll get you a work visa and start your green card process.”
“What? How did you do it?”
He shrugged. “Made some calls.”
“Curt. Really. I don’t know how to thank you.”
“I have some ideas,” he said, boyishly pleased.
It was good news, and yet a soberness wrapped itself around her. Wambui was working three jobs under the table to raise the five thousand dollars she would need to pay an African-American man for a green-card marriage, Mwombeki was desperately trying to find a company that would hire him on his temporary visa, and here she was, a pink balloon, weightless, floating to the top, propelled by things outside of herself. She felt, in the midst of her gratitude, a small resentment: that Curt could, with a few calls, rearrange the world, have things slide into the spaces that he wanted them to.
When she told Ruth about the interview in Baltimore, Ruth said, “My only advice? Lose the braids and straighten your hair. Nobody says this kind of stuff but it matters. We want you to get that job.”
Aunty Uju had said something similar in the past, and she had laughed then. Now, she knew enough not to laugh. “Thank you,” she said to Ruth.
Since she came to America, she had always braided her hair with long extensions, always alarmed at how much it cost. She wore each style for three months, even four months, until her scalp itched unbearably and the braids sprouted fuzzily from a bed of new growth. And so it was a new adventure, relaxing her hair. She removed her braids, careful to leave her scalp unscratched, to leave undisturbed the dirt that would protect it. Relaxers had grown in their range, boxes and boxes in the “ethnic hair” section of the drugstore, faces of smiling black women with impossibly straight and shiny hair, beside words like “botanical” and “aloe” that promised gentleness. She bought one in a green carton. In her bathroom, she carefully smeared the protective gel around her hairline before she began to slather the creamy relaxer on her hair, section by section, her fingers in plastic gloves. The smell reminded her of chemistry lab in secondary school, and so she forced open the bathroom window, which was often jammed. She timed the process carefully, washing off the relaxer in exactly twenty minutes, but her hair remained kinky, its denseness unchanged. The relaxer did not take. That was the word—“take”—that the hairdresser in West Philadelphia used. “Girl, you need a professional,” the hairdresser said as she reapplied another relaxer. “People think they’re saving money by doing it at home but they’re really not.”
Ifemelu felt only a slight burning, at first, but as the hairdresser rinsed out the relaxer, Ifemelu’s head bent backwards against a plastic sink, needles of stinging pain shot up from different parts of her scalp, down to different parts of her body, back up to her head.
“Just a little burn,” the hairdresser said. “But look how pretty it is. Wow, girl, you’ve got the white-girl swing!”
Her hair was hanging down rather than standing up, straight and sleek, parted at the side and curving to a slight bob at her chin. The verve was gone. She did not recognize herself. She left the salon almost mournfully; while the hairdresser had flat-ironed the ends, the smell of burning, of something organic dying which should not have died, had made her feel a sense of loss. Curt looked uncertain when he saw her.
“Do you like it, babe?” he asked.
“I can see you don’t,” she said.
He said nothing. He reached out to stroke her hair, as though doing so might make him like it.