Americanah

There was more laughter, Mwombeki himself laughing loudly, as though he had not heard his own jokes before.

Later, as Ifemelu left the meeting, she thought of Dike, wondered which he would go to in college, whether ASA or BSU, and what he would be considered, whether American African or African American. He would have to choose what he was, or rather, what he was would be chosen for him.

IFEMELU THOUGHT the interview at the restaurant where Dorothy worked had gone well. It was for a hostess position, and she wore her nice shirt, smiled warmly, shook hands firmly. The manager, a chortling woman full of a seemingly uncontrollable happiness, told her, “Great! Wonderful to talk to you! You’ll hear from me soon!” And so when, that evening, her phone rang, she snatched it up, hoping it was a job offer.

“Ifem, kedu?” Aunty Uju said.

Aunty Uju called too often to ask if she had found a job. “Aunty, you will be the first person I will call when I do,” Ifemelu had said during the last call, only yesterday, and now Aunty Uju was calling again.

“Fine,” Ifemelu said, and was about to add, “I have not found anything yet,” when Aunty Uju said, “Something happened with Dike.”

“What?” Ifemelu asked.

“Miss Brown told me that she saw him in a closet with a girl. The girl is in third grade. Apparently they were showing each other their private parts.”

There was a pause.

“Is that all?” Ifemelu asked.

“What do you mean, is that all? He is not yet seven years old! What type of thing is this? Is this what I came to America for?”

“We actually read something about this in one of my classes the other day. It’s normal. Children are curious about things like that at an early age, but they don’t really understand it.”

“Normal kwa? It’s not normal at all.”

“Aunty, we were all curious as children.”

“Not at seven years old! Tufiakwa! Where did he learn that from? It is that day care he goes to. Since Alma left and he started going to Miss Brown, he has changed. All those wild children with no home training, he is learning rubbish from them. I’ve decided to move to Massachusetts at the end of this term.”

“Ahn-ahn!”

“I’ll finish my residency there and Dike will go to a better school and better day care. Bartholomew is moving from Boston to a small town, Warrington, to start his business, so it will be a new beginning for both of us. The elementary school there is very good. And the local doctor is looking for a partner because his practice is growing. I’ve spoken to him and he is interested in my joining him when I finish.”

“You’re leaving New York to go to a village in Massachusetts? Can you just leave residency like that?”

“Of course. My friend Olga, the one from Russia? She is leaving, too, but she will have to repeat a year in her new program. She wants to practice dermatology and most of our patients here are black and she said skin diseases look different on black skin and she knows she will not end up practicing in a black area so she wants to go where the patients will be white. I don’t blame her. It’s true my program is higher ranked, but sometimes job opportunities are better in smaller places. Besides, I don’t want Bartholomew to think I am not serious. I’m not getting any younger. I want to start trying.”

“You’re really going to marry him.”

Aunty Uju said with mock exasperation, “Ifem, I thought we had passed that stage. Once I move, we’ll go to court and get married, so that he can act as Dike’s legal parent.”

Ifemelu heard the beep-beep of an incoming call. “Aunty, let me call you back,” she said, and switched over without waiting for Aunty Uju’s response. It was the restaurant manager.

“I’m sorry, Ngozi,” she said, “But we decided to hire a more qualified person. Good luck!”

Ifemelu put the phone down and thought of her mother, how she often blamed the devil. The devil is a liar. The devil wants to block us. She stared at the phone, and then at the bills on her table, a tight, suffocating pressure rising inside her chest.

CHAPTER 15

The man was short, his body a glut of muscles, his hair thinning and sun-bleached. When he opened the door, he looked her over, mercilessly sizing her up, and then he smiled and said, “Come on in. My office is in the basement.” Her skin prickled, an unease settling over her. There was something venal about his thin-lipped face; he had the air of a man to whom corruption was familiar.

“I’m a pretty busy guy,” he said, gesturing to a chair in his cramped home office that smelled slightly of damp.

“I assumed so from the advertisement,” Ifemelu said. Female personal assistant for busy sports coach in Ardmore, communication and interpersonal skills required. She sat on the chair, perched really, suddenly thinking that, from reading a City Paper ad, she was now alone with a strange man in the basement of a strange house in America. Hands thrust deep in his jeans pockets, he walked back and forth with short quick steps, talking about how much in demand he was as a tennis coach, and Ifemelu thought he might trip on the stacks of sports magazines on the floor. She felt dizzy just watching him. He spoke as quickly as he moved, his expression uncannily alert; his eyes stayed wide and unblinking for too long.

“So here’s the deal. There are two positions, one for office work and the other for help relaxing. The office position has already been filled. She started yesterday, she goes to Bryn Mawr, and she’ll spend the whole week just clearing up my backlog of stuff. I bet I have some unopened checks in there somewhere.” He withdrew a hand to gesture towards his messy desk. “Now what I need is help to relax. If you want the job you have it. I’d pay you a hundred dollars, with the possibility of a raise, and you’d work as needed, no set schedule.”

A hundred dollars a day, almost enough for her monthly rent. She shifted on the chair. “What exactly do you mean by ‘help to relax’?”

She was watching him, waiting for his explanation. It began to bother her, thinking of how much she had paid for the suburban train ticket.

“Look, you’re not a kid,” he said. “I work so hard I can’t sleep. I can’t relax. I don’t do drugs so I figured I need help to relax. You can give me a massage, help me relax, you know. I had somebody doing it before, but she’s just moved to Pittsburgh. It’s a great gig, at least she thought so. Helped her with a lot of her college debt.” He had said this to many other women, she could tell, from the measured pace with which the words came out. He was not a kind man. She did not know exactly what he meant, but whatever it was, she regretted that she had come.

She stood up. “Can I think about this and give you a call?”

“Of course.” He shrugged, shoulders thick with sudden irritability, as though he could not believe she did not recognize her good fortune. As he let her out, he shut the door quickly, not responding to her final “Thank you.” She walked back to the station, mourning the train fare. The trees were awash with color, red and yellow leaves tinted the air golden, and she thought of the words she had recently read somewhere: Nature’s first green is gold. The crisp air, fragrant and dry, reminded her of Nsukka during the harmattan season, and brought with it a sudden stab of homesickness, so sharp and so abrupt that it filled her eyes with tears.

EACH TIME she went to a job interview, or made a phone call about a job, she told herself that this would, finally, be her day; this time, the waitress, hostess, babysitter position would be hers, but even as she wished herself well, there was already a gathering gloom in a far corner of her mind. “What am I doing wrong?” she asked Ginika, and Ginika told her to be patient, to have hope. She typed and retyped her résumé, invented past waitressing experience in Lagos, wrote Ginika’s name as an employer whose children she had babysat, gave the name of Wambui’s landlady as a reference, and, at each interview, she smiled warmly and shook hands firmly, all the things that were suggested in a book she had read about interviewing for American jobs. Yet there was no job. Was it her foreign accent? Her lack of experience? But her African friends all had jobs, and college students got jobs all the time with no experience. Once, she went to a gas station near Chestnut Street and a large Mexican man said, with his eyes on her chest, “You’re here for the attendant position? You can work for me in another way.” Then, with a smile, the leer never leaving his eyes, he told her the job was taken. She began to think more about her mother’s devil, to imagine how the devil might have a hand here. She added and subtracted endlessly, determining what she would need and not need, cooking rice and beans each week, and heating up small portions in the microwave for lunch and dinner. Obinze offered to send her some money. His cousin had visited from London and given him some pounds. He would change it to dollars in Enugu.

“How can you be sending me money from Nigeria? It should be the other way around,” she said. But he sent it to her anyway, a little over a hundred dollars carefully sealed in a card.

GINIKA WAS BUSY, working long hours at her internship and studying for her law school exams, but she called often to check up on Ifemelu’s job searching, and always with that upbeat voice, as though to urge Ifemelu towards hope. “This woman I did an internship with her charity, Kimberly, called me to say her babysitter is leaving and she’s looking. I told her about you and she’d like to meet you. If she hires you, she’ll pay cash under the table so you won’t have to use that fake name. When do you finish tomorrow? I can come and take you to her for an interview.”