Americanah: Chapters 3–10

Ifemelu felt sorry for him, hungry-looking in his worn dashiki, and wondered how much he could possibly make from his sales.

Then, on Easter Saturday, a dour day, the first quiet Easter Saturday in Ifemelu’s life, her mother ran out of the kitchen and said, “I saw an angel!”

“What happened?” he asked, in the placating tone used for a child, as if humoring his wife’s madness would make it go away quickly.

The warmth in her mother’s eyes was back, and there was a new joy in her bearing, and she once again lingered at the dining table with her father after meals, and sang loudly while taking a bath.

“Twelve years of dedicated labor. It is unconscionable,” he said.

Even his handwriting was mannered, all curves and flourishes, with a uniform elegance that looked like something printed.

He had scolded Ifemelu as a child for being recalcitrant, mutinous, intransigent, words that made her little actions seem epic and almost prideworthy.

He had scolded Ifemelu as a child for being recalcitrant, mutinous, intransigent, words that made her little actions seem epic and almost prideworthy.

He no longer muttered “nation of intractable sycophancy” when the nightly news started on NTA, no longer held long monologues about how Babangida’s government had reduced Nigerians to imprudent idiots, no longer teased her mother.

She could prevent pastoral approval of a marriage, if she wanted to.

Each year, she was voted Prettiest Girl in their form, and she would wryly say, “Its just because I’m a half-caste. How can I be finer than Zainab?”

She had always liked this image of herself as too much trouble, as different, and she sometimes thought of it as a carapace that kept her safe.

His kiss was enjoyable, almost heady; it was nothing like her ex-boyfriend Mofe, whose kisses she had thought too salivary.

After Kayode’s party, Ginika was stilted; an alien awkwardness grew between them.

It seemed wrong, that her close friend Ginika, pretty, pleasant, popular Ginika with whom she had never quarreled, was reduced to pretending that she did not care, even though a wistfulness underlined her tone whenever she talked about Obinze.

He was a small, dark man, smaller-looking and darker-looking beside Ginika’s large, ash-haired mother, with an undecided air about him, as though he was always dithering between choices.

They roared with laughter, at that word “Americanah,” wreathed in glee, the fourth syllable extended, and at the thought of Bisi, a girl in the form below them, who had come back from a short trip to America with odd affectations, pretending she no longer understood Yoruba, adding a slurred r to every English word she spoke.

In a sluice of seconds, they were dressed, back in the living room, Play pressed on the video recorder.

Sometimes, as she gave instructions to her driver, Sola, or her gardener, Baba Flower, or her two house helps, Inyang who cleaned and Chikodili who cooked, Ifemelu would remember Aunty Uju, the village girl brought to Lagos so many years ago, who Ifemelu's mother mildly complained was so parochial she kept touching the walls, and what was it with all those village people who could not stand on their feet without reaching out to smear their palm on a wall?

After he left, Ifemelu’s father said, “What ignominy. To ask us for two years’ rent. We have been paying one year.”

As Ifemelu mimicked the landlord, a wan sadness crossed Aunty Uju’s face.

She looked suddenly small and bewildered among the detritus of her new life, the fawn-colored jewel case on the dressing table, the silk robe thrown across the bed, and Ifemelu felt frightened for her.

With Aunty Uju, they hovered and groveled, curtseying deeply as they greeted her, overpraising her handbag and shoes.

He arrived in the evenings, in his green uniform, holding a gossip magazine or two, while his ADC, at an obsequious pace behind him, brought his briefcase and put it on the dining table.

He rarely left with the gossip magazines; copies of Vintage People and Prime People and Lagos Life littered Aunty Uju’s house, with their blurry photos and garish headlines.

She held Ifemelu's wrist, then ran her hand, almost meditatively, over the embossed title of Ifemelu's Sidney Sheldon novel.

Her mother, when Aunty Uju came back, stayed in Dolphin Estate for a while, bathing and feeding the gurgling, smooth-skinned baby, but she faced The General with a cold officiousness.

She answered him in monosyllables, as though he had betrayed her by breaking the rules of her pretense.

They set up in the front garden, near the generator house, and stayed until the last guests left, all of them slow and sated, taking food wrapped in foil.

She marched towards the phone, as though to challenge it, too, and then she slid to the floor, a boneless, bereft sliding, and began to weep.

She put up bright blue wallpaper in her corner and because she had heard stories of roommate squabbles—one final-year student, it was said, had poured kerosene into the drawer of the first-year student for being what was called “saucy”—she felt fortunate about her roommates.

His activism surprised Ifemelu—he seemed a little too urbane, a little too cool, to be in the students' union government—but also impressed her.

Life had become a turgid and suspended film.

In Lagos, the harmattan was a mere veil of haze, but in Nsukka, it was a raging, mercurial presence; the mornings were crisp, the afternoons ashen with heat, and the nights unknown.

The church bazaars would leave the air redolent, smoky from mass cooking.

They had met, as usual, in front of the Ekpo refectory after their morning lecture.

Now, she was watching them, smirking and humming insouciantly.

Dr. Achufusi, an avuncular and pleasant man, pressed at Ifemelu’s side and announced, “It’s your appendix, very inflamed. We should get it out quickly.”

In the face of the enthusiasm of others, she suddenly felt flaccid and afraid.

The new film began with trailers, jaggedly cut scenes interspersed with flashes of light.

They would laugh with derision, but only a mild derision, because she was still their African sister, even if she had briefly lost her way.

He was so small, so innocent, and yet there was a precociousness about him, but it was a sunny one; he did not nurse dark intentions about the adults in his world.

Even the days, sliding one into the other, languorous and limpid, the sun lingering until very late, seemed to be waiting.

She enjoyed the unfamiliar—the McDonald’s hamburgers with the brief tart crunch of pickles, a new taste that she liked on one day and disliked on the next, the wraps Aunty Uju brought home, wet with piquant dressing, and the bologna and pepperoni that left a film of salt in her mouth.

At first, the evening news puzzled her, a litany of fires and shootings, because she was used to NTA news, where self-important army officers cut ribbons or gave speeches.