Americanah

CHAPTER 16

Kimberly called it a signing bonus. “Ginika told me you’ve had some challenges,” Kimberly said. “Please don’t refuse.”

It would not have occurred to Ifemelu to refuse the check; now she could pay some bills, send something home to her parents. Her mother liked the shoes she sent, tasseled and tapering, the kind she could wear to church. “Thank you,” her mother said, and then sighing heavily over the phone line, she added, “Obinze came to see me.” Ifemelu was silent.

“Whatever problem you have, please discuss it with him,” her mother said.

Ifemelu said, “Okay,” and began to talk about something else. When her mother said there had been no light for two weeks, it seemed suddenly foreign to her, and home itself a distant place. She could no longer remember what it felt like to spend an evening in candlelight. She no longer read the news on Nigeria.com because each headline, even the most unlikely ones, somehow reminded her of Obinze.

At first, she gave herself a month. A month to let her self-loathing seep away, then she would call Obinze. But a month passed and still she kept Obinze sealed in silence, gagged her own mind so that she would think of him as little as possible. She still deleted his e-mails unread. Many times she started to write to him, she crafted e-mails, and then stopped and discarded them. She would have to tell him what happened, and she could not bear the thought of telling him what happened. She felt shamed; she had failed. Ginika kept asking what was wrong, why she had shut out Obinze, and she said it was nothing, she just wanted some space, and Ginika gaped at her in disbelief. You just want some space?

Early in the spring, a letter arrived from Obinze. Deleting his e-mails took a click, and after the first click, the others were easier because she could not imagine reading the second if she had not read the first. But a letter was different. It brought to her the greatest sorrow she had ever felt. She sank to her bed, holding the envelope in her hand; she smelled it, stared at his familiar handwriting. She imagined him at his desk in his boys’ quarters, near his small humming refrigerator, writing in that calm manner of his. She wanted to read the letter, but she could not get herself to open it. She put it on her table. She would read it in a week; she needed a week to gather her strength. She would reply, too, she told herself. She would tell him everything. But a week later, the letter still lay there. She placed a book on top of it, then another book, and one day it was swallowed beneath files and books. She would never read it.

TAYLOR WAS EASY, a childish child, the playful one who was sometimes so naïve that Ifemelu guiltily thought him stupid. But Morgan, only three years older, already wore the mourning demeanor of a teenager. She read many grades above her level, was steeped in enrichment classes, and watched adults with a hooded gaze, as though privy to the darkness that lurked in their lives. At first, Ifemelu disliked Morgan, responding to what she thought was Morgan’s own disturbingly full-grown dislike. She was cool, sometimes even cold, to Morgan during her first weeks with them, determined not to indulge this spoiled silken child with a dusting of burgundy freckles on her nose, but she had come, with the passing months, to care for Morgan, an emotion she was careful not to show to Morgan. Instead she was firm and neutral, staring back when Morgan stared. Perhaps it was why Morgan did what Ifemelu asked. She would do it coldly, indifferently, grudgingly, but she would do it. She routinely ignored her mother. And with her father, her brooding watchfulness sharpened into poison. Don would come home and sweep into the den, expecting that everything would stop because of him. And everything did stop, except for whatever Morgan was doing. Kimberly, fluttery and ardent, would ask how his day was, scrambling to please, as though she could not quite believe that he had again come home to her. Taylor would hurl himself into Don’s arms. And Morgan would look up from the TV or a book or a game to watch him, as though she saw through him, while Don pretended not to squirm under her piercing eyes. Sometimes Ifemelu wondered. Was it Don? Was he cheating and had Morgan found out? Cheating was the first thing anyone would think of with a man like Don, with that lubricious aura of his. But he might be satisfied with suggestiveness alone; he would flirt outrageously but not do more, because an affair would require some effort and he was the kind of man who took but did not give.

Ifemelu thought often of that afternoon early in her babysitting: Kimberly was out, Taylor was playing and Morgan reading in the den. Suddenly, Morgan put down her book, calmly walked upstairs and ripped off the wallpaper in her room, pushed down her dresser, yanked off her bedcovers, tore down the curtains, and was on her knees pulling and pulling and pulling at the strongly glued carpet when Ifemelu ran in and stopped her. Morgan was like a small, steel robot, writhing to be let free, with a strength that frightened Ifemelu. Perhaps the child would end up being a serial murderer, like those women on television crime documentaries, standing half-naked on dark roads to lure truck drivers and then strangle them. When finally Ifemelu let go, slowly loosening her grip on a quieted Morgan, Morgan went back downstairs to her book.

Later, Kimberly, in tears, asked her, “Honey, please tell me what’s wrong.”

And Morgan said, “I’m too old for all that pink stuff in my room.”

Now, Kimberly took Morgan twice a week to a therapist in Bala Cynwyd. Both she and Don were more tentative towards her, more cowering under her denouncing stare.

When Morgan won an essay contest at school, Don came home with a present for her. Kimberly anxiously stood at the bottom of the stairs while Don went up to present the gift, wrapped in sparkly paper. He came down moments later.

“She wouldn’t even look at it. She just got up and went into the bathroom and stayed there,” he said. “I left it on the bed.”

“It’s okay, honey, she’ll come around,” Kimberly said, hugging him, rubbing his back.

Later, Kimberly, sotto voce, told Ifemelu, “Morgan’s really hard on him. He tries so hard and she won’t let him in. She just won’t.”

“Morgan doesn’t let anyone in,” Ifemelu said. Don needed to remember that Morgan, and not he, was the child.

“She listens to you,” Kimberly said, a little sadly.

Ifemelu wanted to say, “I don’t give her too many choices,” because she wished Kimberly would not be so sheer in her yieldingness; perhaps Morgan just needed to feel that her mother could push back. Instead she said, “That’s because I’m not her family. She doesn’t love me and so she doesn’t feel all these complicated things for me. I’m just a nuisance at best.”

“I don’t know what I’m doing wrong,” Kimberly said.

“It’s a phase. It will pass, you’ll see.” She felt protective of Kimberly, she wanted to shield Kimberly.

“The only person she really cares about is my cousin Curt. She adores him. If we have family gatherings she’ll brood unless Curt is there. I’ll see if he can come visit and talk to her.”

LAURA HAD BROUGHT a magazine.

“Look at this, Ifemelu,” she said. “It isn’t Nigeria, but it’s close. I know celebrities can be flighty but she seems to be doing good work.”

Ifemelu and Kimberly looked at the page together: a thin white woman, smiling at the camera, holding a dark-skinned African baby in her arms, and all around her, little dark-skinned African children were spread out like a rug. Kimberly made a sound, a hmmm, as though she was unsure how to feel.

“She’s stunning too,” Laura said.

“Yes, she is,” Ifemelu said. “And she’s just as skinny as the kids, only that her skinniness is by choice and theirs is not by choice.”

A pop of loud laughter burst out from Laura. “You are funny! I love how sassy you are!”

Kimberly did not laugh. Later, alone with Ifemelu, she said, “I’m sorry Laura said that. I’ve never liked that word ‘sassy.’ It’s the kind of word that’s used for certain people and not for others.” Ifemelu shrugged and smiled and changed the subject. She did not understand why Laura looked up so much information about Nigeria, asking her about 419 scams, telling her how much money Nigerians in America sent back home every year. It was an aggressive, unaffectionate interest; strange indeed, to pay so much attention to something you did not like. Perhaps it was really about Kimberly, and Laura was in some distorted way aiming at her sister by saying things that would make Kimberly launch into apologies. It seemed too much work for too little gain, though. At first, Ifemelu thought Kimberly’s apologizing sweet, even if unnecessary, but she had begun to feel a flash of impatience, because Kimberly’s repeated apologies were tinged with self-indulgence, as though she believed that she could, with apologies, smooth all the scalloped surfaces of the world.

A FEW MONTHS INTO her babysitting, Kimberly asked her, “Would you consider living in? The basement is really a one-bedroom apartment with a private entrance. It would be rent-free, of course.”

Ifemelu was already looking for a studio apartment, eager to leave her roommates now that she could afford to, and she did not want to be further enmeshed in the lives of the Turners, yet she considered saying yes, because she heard a plea in Kimberly’s voice. In the end, she decided she could not live with them. When she said no, Kimberly offered her the use of their spare car. “It’ll make it much easier for you to get here after your classes. It’s an old thing. We were going to give it away. I hope it doesn’t stop you on the road,” she said, as if the Honda, only a few years old, its body unmarked, could possibly stop on the road.