Americanah (12 page)

“It is a wise book. The human stories that matter are those that endure. The American books you read are lightweights.” She turned to Ifemelu. “This boy is too besotted with America.”

“I read American books because America is the future, Mummy. And remember that your husband was educated there.”

“That was when only dullards went to school in America. American universities were considered to be at the same level as British secondary schools then. I did a lot of brushing-up on that man after I married him.”

“Even though you left your things in his flat so that his other girlfriends would stay away?”

“I’ve told you not to pay any attention to your uncle’s false stories.”

Ifemelu stood there mesmerized. Obinze’s mother, her beautiful face, her air of sophistication, her wearing a white apron in the kitchen, was not like any other mother Ifemelu knew. Here, her father would seem crass, with his unnecessary big words, and her mother provincial and small.

“You can wash your hands at the sink,” Obinze’s mother told her. “I think the water is still running.”

They sat at the dining table, eating garri and soup, Ifemelu trying hard to be, as Aunty Uju had said, “herself,” although she was no longer sure what “herself” was. She felt undeserving, unable to sink with Obinze and his mother into their atmosphere. “The soup is very sweet, ma,” she said politely. “Oh, Obinze cooked it,” his mother said. “Didn’t he tell you that he cooks?”

“Yes, but I didn’t think he could make soup, ma,” Ifemelu said. Obinze was smirking.

“Do you cook at home?” his mother asked.

Ifemelu wanted to lie, to say that she cooked and loved cooking, but she remembered Aunty Uju’s words. “No, ma,” she said. “I don’t like cooking. I can eat Indomie noodles day and night.”

His mother laughed, as though charmed by the honesty, and when she laughed, she looked like a softer-faced Obinze. Ifemelu ate her food slowly, thinking how much she wanted to remain there with them, in their rapture, forever.

THEIR FLAT SMELLED
of vanilla on weekends, when Obinze’s mother baked. Slices of mango glistening on a pie, small brown cakes swelling with raisins. Ifemelu stirred the batter and peeled the fruit; her own mother did not bake, their oven housed cockroaches.

“Obinze just said ‘trunk,’ ma. He said it’s in the trunk of your car,” she said. In their America-Britain jousting, she always sided with his mother.

“Trunk is a part of a tree and not a part of a car, my dear son,” his mother said. When Obinze pronounced “schedule” with the
k
sound, his mother said, “Ifemelunamma, please tell my son I don’t speak American. Could he say that in English?”

On weekends, they watched films on video. They sat in the living room, eyes on the screen, and Obinze said, “Mummy,
chelu
, let’s hear,” when his mother, from time to time, gave her commentary on the plausibility of a scene, or the foreshadowing, or whether an actor was wearing a wig. One Sunday, midway into a film, his mother left for the pharmacy, to buy her allergy medicine. “I’d forgotten they close early today,” she said. As soon as her car engine started, a dull revving, Ifemelu and Obinze hurried to his bedroom and sank onto his bed, kissing and touching, their clothing rolled up, shifted aside, pulled halfway. Their skin warm against each other. They left the door and the window louvers open, both of them alert to the sound of his mother’s car. In a sluice of seconds, they were dressed, back in the living room, Play pressed on the video recorder.

Obinze’s mother walked in and glanced at the TV. “You were watching this scene when I left,” she said quietly. A frozen silence fell,
even from the film. Then the singsong cries of a beans hawker floated in through the window.

“Ifemelunamma, please come,” his mother said, turning to go inside.

Obinze got up, but Ifemelu stopped him. “No, she called me.”

His mother asked her to come inside her bedroom, asked her to sit on the bed.

“If anything happens between you and Obinze, you are both responsible. But Nature is unfair to women. An act is done by two people, but if there are any consequences, one person carries it alone. Do you understand me?”

“Yes.” Ifemelu kept her eyes averted from Obinze’s mother, firmly fixed on the black-and-white linoleum on the floor.

“Have you done anything serious with Obinze?”

“No.”

“I was once young. I know what it is like to love while young. I want to advise you. I am aware that, in the end, you will do what you want. My advice is that you wait. You can love without making love. It is a beautiful way of showing your feelings but it brings responsibility, great responsibility, and there is no rush. I will advise you to wait until you are at least in the university, wait until you own yourself a little more. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” Ifemelu said. She did not know what “own yourself a little more” meant.

“I know you are a clever girl. Women are more sensible than men, and you will have to be the sensible one. Convince him. Both of you should agree to wait so that there is no pressure.”

Obinze’s mother paused and Ifemelu wondered if she had finished. The silence rang in her head.

“Thank you, ma,” Ifemelu said.

“And when you want to start, I want you to come and see me. I want to know that you are being responsible.”

Ifemelu nodded. She was sitting on Obinze’s mother’s bed, in the woman’s bedroom, nodding and agreeing to tell her when she started having sex with her son. Yet she felt the absence of shame. Perhaps it was Obinze’s mother’s tone, the evenness of it, the normalness of it.

“Thank you, ma,” Ifemelu said again, now looking at Obinze’s
mother’s face, which was open, no different from what it usually was. “I will.”

She went back to the living room. Obinze seemed nervous, perched on the edge of the center table. “I’m so sorry. I’m going to talk to her about this when you leave. If she wants to talk to anybody, it should be me.”

“She said I should never come here again. That I am misleading her son.”

Obinze blinked. “What?”

Ifemelu laughed. Later, when she told him what his mother had said, he shook his head. “We have to tell her when we start? What kind of rubbish is that? Does she want to buy condoms for us? What is wrong with that woman?”

“But who told you we are ever going to start anything?”

During the week, Aunty Uju hurried home to shower and wait for The General and, on weekends, she lounged in her nightdress, reading or cooking or watching television, because The General was in Abuja with his wife and children. She avoided the sun and used creams in elegant bottles, so that her complexion, already naturally light, became lighter, brighter, and took on a sheen. Sometimes, as she gave instructions to her driver, Sola, or her gardener, Baba Flower, or her two house helps, Inyang who cleaned and Chikodili who cooked, Ifemelu would remember Aunty Uju, the village girl brought to Lagos so many years ago, who Ifemelu’s mother mildly complained was so parochial she kept touching the walls, and what was it with all those village people who could not stand on their feet without reaching out to smear their palm on a wall? Ifemelu wondered if Aunty Uju ever looked at herself with the eyes of the girl she used to be. Perhaps not. Aunty Uju had steadied herself into her new life with a lightness of touch, more consumed by The General himself than by her new wealth.

The first time Ifemelu saw Aunty Uju’s house in Dolphin Estate, she did not want to leave. The bathroom fascinated her, with its hot water tap, its gushing shower, its pink tiles. The bedroom curtains were made of raw silk, and she told Aunty Uju, “Ahn-ahn, it’s a waste to use this material as a curtain! Let’s sew a dress with it.” The living room had glass doors that slid noiselessly open and noiselessly shut. Even the kitchen was air-conditioned. She wanted to live there. It would impress her friends; she imagined them sitting in the small room just off the living room, which Aunty Uju called the TV room, watching programs on satellite. And so she asked her parents if she could stay
with Aunty Uju during the week. “It’s closer to school, I won’t need to take two buses. I can go on Mondays and come home on Fridays,” Ifemelu said. “I can also help Aunty Uju in the house.”

“My understanding is that Uju has sufficient help,” her father said.

“It is a good idea,” her mother said to her father. “She can study well there, at least there will be light every day. No need for her to study with kerosene lamps.”

“She can visit Uju after school and on weekends. But she is not going to live there,” her father said.

Her mother paused, taken aback by his firmness. “Okay,” she said, with a helpless glance at Ifemelu.

For days, Ifemelu sulked. Her father often indulged her, giving in to what she wanted, but this time he ignored her pouts, her deliberate silences at the dinner table. He pretended not to notice when Aunty Uju brought them a new television. He settled back in his well-worn sofa, reading his well-worn book, while Aunty Uju’s driver put down the brown Sony carton. Ifemelu’s mother began to sing a church song—“the Lord has given me victory, I will lift him higher”—which was often sung at collection time.

“The General bought more than I needed in the house. There was nowhere to put this one,” Aunty Uju said, a general statement made to nobody in particular, a way of shrugging off thanks. Ifemelu’s mother opened the carton, gently stripped away the Styrofoam packaging.

“Our old one doesn’t even show anything anymore,” she said, although they all knew that it still did.

“Look at how slim it is!” she added. “Look!”

Her father raised his eyes from the book. “Yes, it is,” he said, and then lowered his gaze.

THE LANDLORD CAME AGAIN
. He barged past Ifemelu into the flat, into the kitchen, and reached up to the electric meter, yanking off the fuse, cutting off what little electricity they had.

After he left, Ifemelu’s father said, “What ignominy. To ask us for two years’ rent. We have been paying one year.”

“But even that one year, we have not paid,” her mother said, and in her tone was the slightest of accusations.

“I’ve spoken to Akunne about a loan,” her father said. He disliked Akunne, his almost-cousin, the prosperous man from their hometown to whom everyone took their problems. He called Akunne a lurid illiterate, a money-miss-road.

“What did he say?”

“He said I should come and see him next Friday.” His fingers were unsteady; he was struggling, it seemed, to suppress emotions. Ifemelu hastily looked away, hoping he had not seen her watching him, and asked him if he could explain a difficult question in her homework. To distract him, to make it seem that life could happen again.