Americanah

“I do not rent to Igbo people,” he said softly, startling her. Were such things now said so easily? Had they been said so easily and had she merely forgotten? “That is my policy since one Igbo man destroyed my house at Yaba. But you look like a responsible somebody.”

“Yes, I am responsible,” she said, and feigned a simpering smile. The other flats she liked were too expensive. Even though pipes poked out under the kitchen sink and the toilet was lopsided and the bathroom tiles shoddily laid, this was the best she could afford. She liked the airiness of the living room, with its large windows, and the narrow flight of stairs that led to a tiny verandah charmed her, but, most of all, it was in Ikoyi. And she wanted to live in Ikoyi. Growing up, Ikoyi had reeked of gentility, a faraway gentility that she could not touch: the people who lived in Ikoyi had faces free of pimples and drivers designated “the children’s driver.” The first day she saw the flat, she stood on the verandah and looked across at the compound next door, a grand colonial house, now yellowed from decay, the grounds swallowed in foliage, grass and shrubs climbing atop one another. On the roof of the house, a part of which had collapsed and sunk in, she saw a movement, a turquoise splash of feathers. It was a peacock. The estate agent told her that an army officer had lived there during General Abacha’s regime; now the house was tied up in court. And she imagined the people who had lived there fifteen years ago while she, in a little flat on the crowded mainland, longed for their spacious, serene lives.

She wrote the check for two years’ rent. This was why people took bribes and asked for bribes; how else could anyone honestly pay two years’ rent in advance? She planned to fill her verandah with white lilies in clay pots, and decorate her living room in pastels, but first, she had to find an electrician to install air conditioners, a painter to redo the oily walls, and somebody to lay new tiles in the kitchen and bathroom. The estate agent brought a man who did tiles. It took him a week and, when the estate agent called her to say that the work was done, she went eagerly to the flat. In the bathroom, she stared in disbelief. The tile edges were rough, tiny spaces gaping at the corners. One tile had an ugly crack across the middle. It looked like something done by an impatient child.

“What is this nonsense? Look at how rough this is! One tile is broken! This is even worse than the old tiles! How can you be happy with this useless work?” she asked the man.

He shrugged; he clearly thought she was making unnecessary trouble. “I am happy with the work, aunty.”

“You want me to pay you?”

A small smile. “Ah, aunty, but I have finish the work.”

The estate agent intervened. “Don’t worry, ma, he will repair the broken one.”

The tile man looked reluctant. “But I have finish the work. The problem is the tile is breaking very easily. It is the quality of tile.”

“You have finished? You do this rubbish job and say you have finished?” Her anger was growing, her voice rising and hardening. “I will not pay you what we agreed, no way, because you have not done what we agreed.”

The tile man was staring at her, eyes narrowed.

“And if you want trouble, trust me, you will get it,” Ifemelu said. “The first thing I will do is call the commissioner of police and they will lock you up in Alagbon Close!” She was screaming now. “Do you know who I am? You don’t know who I am, that is why you can do this kind of rubbish work for me!”

The man looked cowed. She had surprised herself. Where had that come from, the false bravado, the easy resort to threats? A memory came to her, undiminished after so many years, of the day Aunty Uju’s General died, how Aunty Uju had threatened his relatives. “No, don’t go, just stay there,” she had said to them. “Stay there while I go and call my boys from the army barracks.”

The estate agent said, “Aunty, don’t worry, he will do the work again.”

Later, Ranyinudo told her, “You are no longer behaving like an Americanah!” and despite herself, Ifemelu felt pleased to hear this.

“The problem is that we no longer have artisans in this country,” Ranyinudo said. “Ghanaians are better. My boss is building a house and he is using only Ghanaians to do his finishing. Nigerians will do rubbish for you. They do not take their time to finish things properly. It’s terrible. But Ifem, you should have called Obinze. He would have sorted everything out for you. This is what he does, after all. He must have all kinds of contacts. You should have called him before you even started looking for a flat. He could have given you reduced rent in one of his properties, even a free flat sef. I don’t know what you are waiting for before you call him.”

Ifemelu shook her head. Ranyinudo, for whom men existed only as sources of things. She could not imagine calling Obinze to ask him for reduced rent in one of his properties. Still, she did not know why she had not called him at all. She had thought of it many times, often bringing out her phone to scroll to his number, and yet she had not called. He still sent e-mails, saying he hoped she was fine, or he hoped Dike was doing better, and she replied to a few, always briefly, replies he would assume were sent from America.

CHAPTER 46

She spent weekends with her parents, in the old flat, happy simply to sit and look at the walls that had witnessed her childhood; only when she began to eat her mother’s stew, an oil layer floating on top of the pureed tomatoes, did she realize how much she had missed it. The neighbors stopped by to greet her, the daughter back from America. Many of them were new and unfamiliar, but she felt a sentimental fondness for them, because they reminded her of the others she had known, Mama Bomboy downstairs who had once pulled her ear when she was in primary school and said, “You do not greet your elders,” Oga Tony upstairs who smoked on his verandah, the trader next door who called her, for reasons she never knew, “champion.”

“They are just coming to see if you will give them anything,” her mother said, in a whisper, as if the neighbors who had all left might overhear. “They all expected me to buy something for them when we went to America, so I went to the market and bought small-small bottles of perfume and told them it was from America!”

Her parents liked to talk about their visit to Baltimore, her mother about the sales, her father about how he could not understand the news because Americans now used expressions like “divvy up” and “nuke” in serious news.

“It is the final infantilization and informalization of America! It portends the end of the American empire, and they are killing themselves from within!” he pronounced.

Ifemelu humored them, listening to their observations and memories, and hoped that neither of them would bring up Blaine; she had told them a work issue had delayed his visit.

She did not have to lie to her old friends about Blaine, but she did, telling them she was in a serious relationship and he would join her in Lagos soon. It surprised her how quickly, during reunions with old friends, the subject of marriage came up, a waspish tone in the voices of the unmarried, a smugness in those of the married. Ifemelu wanted to talk about the past, about the teachers they had mocked and the boys they had liked, but marriage was always the preferred topic—whose husband was a dog, who was on a desperate prowl, posting too many dressed-up pictures of herself on Facebook, whose man had disappointed her after four years and left her to marry a small girl he could control. (When Ifemelu told Ranyinudo that she had run into an old classmate, Vivian, at the bank, Ranyinudo’s first question was “Is she married?”) And so she used Blaine as armor. If they knew of Blaine, then the married friends would not tell her “Don’t worry, your own will come, just pray about it,” and the unmarried friends would not assume that she was a member of the self-pity party of the single. There was, also, a strained nostalgia in those reunions, some in Ranyinudo’s flat, some in hers, some in restaurants, because she struggled to find, in these adult women, some remnants from her past that were often no longer there.

Tochi was unrecognizable now, so fat that even her nose had changed shape, her double chin hanging below her face like a bread roll. She came to Ifemelu’s flat with her baby in one hand, her BlackBerry in the other, and a house help trailing behind, holding a canvas bag full of bottles and bibs. “Madam America” was Tochi’s greeting, and then she spoke, for the rest of her visit, in defensive spurts, as though she had come determined to battle Ifemelu’s Americanness.

“I buy only British clothes for my baby because American ones fade after one wash,” she said. “My husband wanted us to move to America but I refused, because the education system is so bad. An international agency rated it the lowest in the developed countries, you know.”

Tochi had always been perceptive and thoughtful; it was Tochi who had intervened with calm reason whenever Ifemelu and Ranyinudo argued in secondary school. In Tochi’s changed persona, in her need to defend against imagined slights, Ifemelu saw a great personal unhappiness. And so she appeased Tochi, putting America down, talking only about the things she, too, disliked about America, exaggerating her non-American accent, until the conversation became an enervating charade. Finally Tochi’s baby vomited, a yellowish liquid that the house help hastily wiped, and Tochi said, “We should go, baby wants to sleep.” Ifemelu, relieved, watched her leave. People changed, sometimes they changed too much.