Americanah

“It look dirty. You don’t want color one?”

“Color one is too black, it looks fake,” Ifemelu said, loosening her headwrap. “Sometimes I use color two but color four is closest to my natural color.”

Aisha shrugged, a haughty shrug, as though it was not her problem if her customer did not have good taste. She reached into a cupboard, brought out two packets of attachments, checked to make sure they were both the same color.

She touched Ifemelu’s hair. “Why you don’t have relaxer?”

“I like my hair the way God made it.”

“But how you comb it? Hard to comb,” Aisha said.

Ifemelu had brought her own comb. She gently combed her hair, dense, soft, and tightly coiled, until it framed her head like a halo. “It’s not hard to comb if you moisturize it properly,” she said, slipping into the coaxing tone of the proselytizer that she used whenever she was trying to convince other black women about the merits of wearing their hair natural. Aisha snorted; she clearly could not understand why anybody would choose to suffer through combing natural hair, instead of simply relaxing it. She sectioned out Ifemelu’s hair, plucked a little attachment from the pile on the table, and began deftly to twist.

“It’s too tight,” Ifemelu said. “Don’t make it tight.” Because Aisha kept twisting to the end, Ifemelu thought that perhaps she had not understood, and so Ifemelu touched the offending braid and said, “Tight, tight.”

Aisha pushed her hand away. “No. No. Leave it. It good.”

“It’s tight!” Ifemelu said. “Please loosen it.”

Mariama was watching them. A flow of French came from her. Aisha loosened the braid.

“Sorry,” Mariama said. “She doesn’t understand very well.”

But Ifemelu could see, from Aisha’s face, that she understood very well. Aisha was simply a true market woman, immune to the cosmetic niceties of American customer service. Ifemelu imagined her working in a market in Dakar, like the braiders in Lagos who would blow their noses and wipe their hands on their wrappers, roughly jerk their customers’ heads to position them better, complain about how full or ho

w hard or how short the hair was, shout out to passing women, while all the time conversing too loudly and braiding too tightly.

“You know her?” Aisha asked, glancing at the television screen.

“What?”

Aisha repeated herself, and pointed at the actress on the screen.

“No,” Ifemelu said.

“But you Nigerian.”

“Yes, but I don’t know her.”

Aisha gestured to the pile of DVDs on the table. “Before, too much voodoo. Very bad. Now Nigeria film is very good. Big nice house!”

Ifemelu thought little of Nollywood films, with their exaggerated histrionics and their improbable plots, but she nodded in agreement because to hear “Nigeria” and “good” in the same sentence was a luxury, even coming from this strange Senegalese woman, and she chose to see in this an augury of her return home.

Everyone she had told she was moving back seemed surprised, expecting an explanation, and when she said she was doing it because she wanted to, puzzled lines would appear on foreheads.

“You are closing your blog and selling your condo to go back to Lagos and work for a magazine that doesn’t pay that well,” Aunty Uju had said and then repeated herself, as though to make Ifemelu see the gravity of her own foolishness. Only her old friend in Lagos, Ranyinudo, had made her return seem normal. “Lagos is now full of American returnees, so you better come back and join them. Every day you see them carrying a bottle of water as if they will die of heat if they are not drinking water every minute,” Ranyinudo said. They had kept in touch, she and Ranyinudo, throughout the years. At first, they wrote infrequent letters, but as cybercafés opened, cell phones spread, and Facebook flourished, they communicated more often. It was Ranyinudo who had told her, some years ago, that Obinze was getting married. “Meanwhile o, he has serious money now. See what you missed!” Ranyinudo had said. Ifemelu feigned indifference to this news. She had cut off contact with Obinze, after all, and so much time had passed, and she was newly in a relationship with Blaine, and happily easing herself into a shared life. But after she hung up, she thought endlessly of Obinze. Imagining him at his wedding left her with a feeling like sorrow, a faded sorrow. But she was pleased for him, she told herself, and to prove to herself that she was pleased for him, she decided to write him. She was not sure if he still used his old address and she sent the e-mail half expecting that he would not reply, but he did. She did not write again, because she by then had acknowledged her own small, still-burning light. It was best to leave things alone. Last December, when Ranyinudo told her she had run into him at the Palms mall, with his baby daughter (and Ifemelu still could not picture this new sprawling, modern mall in Lagos; all that came to mind when she tried to was the cramped Mega Plaza she remembered)—“He was looking so clean, and his daughter is so fine,” Ranyinudo said—Ifemelu felt a pang at all the changes that had happened in his life.

“Nigeria film very good now,” Aisha said again.

“Yes,” Ifemelu said enthusiastically. This was what she had become, a seeker of signs. Nigerian films were good, therefore her move back home would be good.

“You from Yoruba in Nigeria,” Aisha said.

“No. I am Igbo.”

“You Igbo?” For the first time, a smile appeared on Aisha’s face, a smile that showed as much of her small teeth as her dark gums. “I think you Yoruba because you dark and Igbo fair. I have two Igbo men. Very good. Igbo men take care of women real good.”

Aisha was almost whispering, a sexual suggestion in her tone, and in the mirror, the discoloration on her arms and neck became ghastly sores. Ifemelu imagined some bursting and oozing, others flaking. She looked away.