Dike had tried to kill himself. It was impossible to comprehend. His memory of Dike was of a toddler, a white puff of Pampers at his waist, running around in the house in Dolphin Estate. Now he was a teenager who had tried to kill himself. Obinze’s first thought was that he wanted to go to Ifemelu, right away. He wanted to buy a ticket and get on a plane to America and be with her, console her, help Dike, make everything right. Then he laughed at his own absurdity.
“Darling, you’re not paying attention,” Kosi said to him.
“Sorry, omalicha,” he said.
“No work thoughts for now.”
“Okay, sorry. What were you saying?”
They were in the car, on their way to a nursery-primary school in Ikoyi, visiting during the open day as guests of Jonathan and Isioma, Kosi’s friends from church, whose son went there. Kosi had arranged it all, their second school visit, to help them decide where Buchi would go.
Obinze had spent time with them only once, when Kosi invited them to dinner. He thought Isioma interesting; the few things she allowed herself to say were thoughtful, but she often remained silent, shrinking herself, pretending not to be as intelligent as she was, to salve Jonathan’s ego, while Jonathan, a bank CEO whose photos were always in the newspapers, dominated the evening with long-winded stories about his dealings with estate agents in Switzerland, the Nigerian governors he had advised, and the various companies he had saved from collapse.
He introduced Obinze and Kosi to the school headmistress, a small round Englishwoman, saying, “Obinze and Kosi are our very close friends. I think their daughter might be joining us next year.”
“Many high-level expatriates bring their children here,” the headmistress said, her tone pride-tinged, and Obinze wondered if this was something she said routinely. She had probably said it often enough to know how well it worked, how much it impressed Nigerians.
Isioma was asking why their son was not yet doing much of mathematics and English.
“Our approach is more conceptual. We like the children to explore their environment during the first year,” the headmistress said.
“But it should not be mutually exclusive. They can also start to learn some maths and English,” Isioma said. Then, with an amusement that did not try to shield its underlying seriousness, she added, “My niece goes to a school on the mainland and at age six she could spell ‘onomatopoeia’!”
The headmistress smiled tightly; she did not, her smile said, think it worthwhile to address the processes of lesser schools. Later, they sat in a large hall and watched the children’s production of a Christmas play, about a Nigerian family who find an orphan on their doorstep on Christmas Day. Halfway through the play, a teacher turned on a fan that blew small bits of white cotton wool around the stage. Snow. It was snowing in the play.
“Why do they have snow falling? Are they teaching children that a Christmas is not a real Christmas unless snow falls like it does abroad?” Isioma said.
Jonathan said, “Ahn-ahn, what is wrong with that? It’s just a play!”
“It’s just a play, but I also see what Isioma is saying,” Kosi said, and then turned to Obinze. “Darling?”
Obinze said, “The little girl that played the angel was very good.”
In the car, Kosi said, “Your mind is not here.”
HE READ all the archives of Raceteenth or Various Observations About American Blacks (Those Formerly Known as Negroes) by a Non-American Black. The blog posts astonished him, they seemed so American and so alien, the irreverent voice with its slanginess, its mix of high and low language, and he could not imagine her writing them. He cringed reading her references to her boyfriends—The Hot White Ex, Professor Hunk. He read “Just This Evening” a few times, because it was the most personal post she had written about the black American, and he searched for clues and subtleties, about what kind of man he was, what kind of relationship they had.
So in NYC, Professor Hunk was stopped by the police. They thought he had drugs. American Blacks and American Whites use drugs at the same rate (look this up), but say the word “drugs” and see what image comes to everyone’s mind. Professor Hunk is upset. He says he’s an Ivy League professor and he knows the deal, and he wonders what it would feel like if he were some poor kid from the inner city. I feel bad for my baby. When we first met, he told me how he wanted to get straight As in high school because of a white teacher who told him to “focus on getting a basketball scholarship, black people are physically inclined and white people are intellectually inclined, it’s not good or bad, just different” (and this teacher went to Columbia, just sayin’). So he spent four years proving her wrong. I couldn’t identify with this: wanting to do well to prove a point. But I felt bad then too. So off to make him some tea. And administer some TLC.
Because he had last known her when she knew little of the things she blogged about, he felt a sense of loss, as though she had become a person he would no longer recognize.
Part 6
CHAPTER 43
For the first few days, Ifemelu slept on the floor in Dike’s room. It did not happen. It did not happen. She told herself this often, and yet endless, elliptical thoughts of what could have happened churned in her head. His bed, this room, would have been empty forever. Somewhere inside her, a gash would have ruptured that would never seal itself back. She imagined him taking the pills. Tylenol, mere Tylenol; he had read on the Internet that an overdose could kill you. What was he thinking? Did he think of her? After he came home from the hospital, his stomach pumped, his liver monitored, she searched his face, his gestures, his words, for a sign, for proof that it had really almost happened. He looked no different from before; there were no shadows under his eyes, no funereal air about him. She made him the kind of jollof rice he liked, flecked with bits of red and green peppers, and as he ate, fork moving from the plate to his mouth, saying, “This is pretty good,” as he always had in the past, she felt her tears and her questions gathering. Why? Why had he done it? What was on his mind? She did not ask him because the therapist had said that it was best not to ask him anything yet. The days passed. She clung to him, wary of letting go and wary, also, of suffocating him. She was sleepless at first, refusing the small blue pill Aunty Uju offered her, and she would lie awake at night, thinking and turning, her mind held hostage by thoughts of what could have been, until she fell, finally, into a drained sleep. On some days, she woke up scarred with blame for Aunty Uju.
“Do you remember when Dike was telling you something and he said ‘we black folk’ and you told him ‘you are not black’?” she asked Aunty Uju, her voice low because Dike was still asleep upstairs. They were in the kitchen of the condo, in the soft flare of morning light, and Aunty Uju, dressed for work, was standing by the sink and eating yogurt, scooping from a plastic cup.
“Yes, I remember.”
“You should not have done that.”
“You know what I meant. I didn’t want him to start behaving like these people and thinking that everything that happens to him is because he’s black.”
“You told him what he wasn’t but you didn’t tell him what he was.”
“What are you saying?” Aunty Uju pressed the lever with her foot, the trash can slid out, and she threw in the empty yogurt cup. She had switched to part-time work so that she could spend some time with Dike, and drive him to his therapist appointments herself.
“You never reassured him.”
“Ifemelu, his suicide attempt was from depression,” Aunty Uju said gently, quietly. “It is a clinical disease. Many teenagers suffer from it.”
“Do people just wake up and become depressed?”
“Yes, they do.”
“Not in Dike’s case.”
“Three of my patients have attempted suicide, all of them white teenagers. One succeeded,” Aunty Uju said, her tone pacifying and sad, as it had been since Dike came home from the hospital.
“His depression is because of his experience, Aunty!” Ifemelu said, her voice rising, and then she was sobbing, apologizing to Aunty Uju, her own guilt spreading and sullying her. Dike would not have swallowed those pills if she had been more diligent, more awake. She had crouched too easily behind laughter, she had failed to till the emotional soil of Dike’s jokes. It was true that he laughed, and that his laughter convinced with its sound and its light, but it might have been a shield, and underneath, there might have been a growing pea plant of trauma.
Now, in the shrill, silent aftermath of his suicide attempt, she wondered how much they had masked with all that laughter. She should have worried more. She watched him carefully. She guarded him. She did not want his friends to visit, although the therapist said it was fine if he wanted them to. Even Page, who had burst out crying a few days ago when she was alone with Ifemelu, saying, “I just can’t believe he didn’t reach out to me.” She was a child, well-meaning and simple, and yet Ifemelu felt a wave of resentment towards her, for thinking that Dike should have reached out to her. Kweku came back from his medical mission in Nigeria, and he spent time with Dike, watching television with him, bringing calm and normalcy back.
The weeks passed. Ifemelu stopped panicking when Dike stayed a little too long in the bathroom. His birthday was days away and she asked what he would like, her tears again gathering, because she imagined his birthday passing not as the day he turned seventeen but as the day he would have turned seventeen.