Americanah

“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.”

“Water? How can a sausage be cooked in water?”

“It’s a hot dog, not a sausage.”

Of course it was a sausage, whether or not they called it the ludicrous name of “hot dog,” and so she fried two in a little oil as she was used to doing with Satis sausages. Dike looked on in horror. She turned the stove off. He backed away and said “Ugh.” They stood looking at each other, between them a plate with a bun and two shriveled hot dogs. She knew then that she should have listened to him.

“Can I have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich instead?” Dike asked. She followed his instructions for the sandwich, cutting off the bread crusts, layering on the peanut butter first, stifling her laughter at how closely he watched her, as though she just might decide to fry the sandwich.

When, that evening, Ifemelu told Aunty Uju about the hot dog incident, Aunty Uju said with none of the amusement Ifemelu had expected, “They are not sausages, they are hot dogs.”

“It’s like saying that a bikini is not the same thing as underwear. Would a visitor from space know the difference?”

Aunty Uju shrugged; she was sitting at the dining table, a medical textbook open in front of her, eating a hamburger from a rumpled paper bag. Her skin dry, her eyes shadowed, her spirit bleached of color. She seemed to be staring at, rather than reading, the book.

AT THE GROCERY STORE, Aunty Uju never bought what she needed; instead she bought what was on sale and made herself need it. She would take the colorful flyer at the entrance of Key Food, and go looking for the sale items, aisle after aisle, while Ifemelu wheeled the cart and Dike walked along.

“Mummy, I don’t like that. Get the blue one,” Dike said, as Aunty Uju put cartons of cereal in the cart.

“It’s buy one, get one free,” Aunty Uju said.

“It doesn’t taste good.”

“It tastes just like your regular cereal, Dike.”

“No.” Dike took a blue carton from the shelf and hurried ahead to the checkout counter.

“Hi, little guy!” The cashier was large and cheerful, her cheeks reddened and peeling from sunburn. “Helping Mummy out?”

“Dike, put it back,” Aunty Uju said, with the nasal, sliding accent she put on when she spoke to white Americans, in the presence of white Americans, in the hearing of white Americans. Pooh-reet-back. And with the accent emerged a new persona, apologetic and self-abasing. She was overeager with the cashier. “Sorry, sorry,” she said as she fumbled to get her debit card from her wallet. Because the cashier was watching, Aunty Uju let Dike keep the cereal, but in the car she grabbed his left ear and twisted it, yanked it.

“I have told you, do not ever take anything in the grocery! Do you hear me? Or do you want me to slap you before you hear?”

Dike pressed his palm to his ear.

Aunty Uju turned to Ifemelu. “This is how children like to misbehave in this country. Jane was even telling me that her daughter threatens to call the police when she beats her. Imagine. I don’t blame the girl, she has come to America and learned about calling the police.”

Ifemelu rubbed Dike’s knee. He did not look at her. Aunty Uju was driving a little too fast.

DIKE CALLED OUT from the bathroom, where he had been sent to brush his teeth before bed.

“Dike, I mechago?” Ifemelu asked.

“Please don’t speak Igbo to him,” Aunty Uju said. “Two languages will confuse him.”

“What are you talking about, Aunty? We spoke two languages growing up.”

“This is America. It’s different.”

Ifemelu held her tongue. Aunty Uju closed her medical book and stared ahead at nothing. The television was off and the sound of water running came from the bathroom.

“Aunty, what is it?” Ifemelu asked. “What is wrong?”

“What do you mean? Nothing is wrong.” Aunty Uju sighed. “I failed my last exam. I got the result just before you came.”

“Oh.” Ifemelu was watching her.

“I’ve never failed an exam in my life. But they weren’t testing actual knowledge, they were testing our ability to answer tricky multiple-choice questions that have nothing to do with real medical knowledge.” She stood up and went to the kitchen. “I’m tired. I am so tired. I thought by now things would be better for me and Dike. It’s not as if anybody was helping me and I just could not believe how quickly money went. I was studying and working three jobs. I was doing retail at the mall, and a research assistantship, and I even did some hours at Burger King.”

“It will get better,” Ifemelu said, helplessly. She knew how hollow she sounded. Nothing was familiar. She was unable to comfort Aunty Uju because she did not know how. When Aunty Uju spoke about her friends who had come to America earlier and passed their exams—Nkechi in Maryland had sent her the dining set, Kemi in Indiana bought her the bed, Ozavisa had sent crockery and clothes from Hartford—Ifemelu said, “God bless them,” and the words felt bulky and useless in her mouth.

She had assumed, from Aunty Uju’s calls home, that things were not too bad, although she realized now that Aunty Uju had always been vague, mentioning “work” and “exam” without details. Or perhaps it was because she had not asked for details, had not expected to understand details. And she thought, watching her, how the old Aunty Uju would never have worn her hair in such scruffy braids. She would never have tolerated the ingrown hair that grew like raisins on her chin, or worn trousers that gathered bulkily between her legs. America had subdued her.

CHAPTER 10

That first summer was Ifemelu’s summer of waiting; the real America, she felt, was just around the next corner she would turn. Even the days, sliding one into the other, languorous and limpid, the sun lingering until very late, seemed to be waiting. There was a stripped-down quality to her life, a kindling starkness, without parents and friends and home, the familiar landmarks that made her who she was. And so she waited, writing Obinze long, detailed letters, calling him once in a while—calls kept brief because Aunty Uju said she could not waste the phone card—and spending time with Dike. He was a mere child, but she felt, with him, a kinship close to friendship; they watched his favorite cartoon shows together, Rugrats and Franklin, and they read books together, and she took him out to play with Jane’s children. Jane lived in the next apartment. She and her husband, Marlon, were from Grenada and spoke in a lyrical accent as though just about to break into song. “They are like us; he has a good job and he has ambition and they spank their children,” Aunty Uju had said approvingly.

Ifemelu and Jane laughed when they discovered how similar their childhoods in Grenada and Nigeria had been, with Enid Blyton books and Anglophile teachers and fathers who worshipped the BBC World Service. She was only a few years older than Ifemelu. “I married very young. Everybody wanted Marlon so how could I say no?” she said, half teasing. They would sit together on the front steps of the building and watch Dike and Jane’s children, Elizabeth and Junior, ride their bicycles to the end of the street and then back, Ifemelu often calling out to Dike not to go any farther, the children shouting, the concrete sidewalks gleaming in the hot sun, and the summer lull disrupted by the occasional rise and fall of loud music from passing cars.