CHAPTER 37
It seemed to Ifemelu as though she had glanced away for a moment, and looked back to find Dike transformed; her little cousin was gone, and in his place a boy who did not look like a boy, six feet tall with lean muscles, playing basketball for Willow High School, and dating the nimble blond girl Page, who wore tiny skirts and Converse sneakers. Once, when Ifemelu asked, “So how are things going with Page?” Dike replied, “We’re not yet having sex, if that’s what you want to know.”
In the evenings, six or seven friends converged in his room, all of them white except for Min, the tall Chinese boy whose parents taught at the university. They played computer games and watched videos on YouTube, needling and jousting, all of them enclosed in a sparkling arc of careless youth, and at their center was Dike. They all laughed at Dike’s jokes, and looked to him for agreement, and in a delicate, unspoken way, they let him make their collective decisions: ordering pizza, going down to the community center to play Ping-Pong. With them, Dike changed; he took on a swagger in his voice and in his gait, his shoulders squared, as though in a high-gear performance, and sprinkled his speech with “ain’t” and “y’all.”
“Why do you talk like that with your friends, Dike?” Ifemelu asked.
“Yo, Coz, how you gonna treat me like that?” he said, with an exaggerated funny face that made her laugh.
Ifemelu imagined him in college; he would be a perfect student guide, leading a pack of would-be students and their parents, showing them the wonderful things about the campus and making sure to add one thing he personally disliked, all the time being relentlessly funny and bright and bouncy, and the girls would have instant crushes on him, the boys would be envious of his panache, and the parents would wish their kids were like him.
SHAN WORE a sparkly gold top, her breasts unbound, swinging as she moved. She flirted with everyone, touching an arm, hugging too closely, lingering over a cheek kiss. Her compliments were clotted with an extravagance that made them seem insincere, yet her friends smiled and bloomed under them. It did not matter what was said; it mattered that it was Shan who said it. Her first time at Shan’s salon, and Ifemelu was nervous. There was no need to be, it was a mere gathering of friends, but still she was nervous. She had agonized about what to wear, tried on and discarded nine outfits before she decided on a teal dress that made her waist look small.
“Hey!” Shan said, when Blaine and Ifemelu arrived, exchanging hugs.
“Is Grace coming?” she asked Blaine.
“Yes. She’s taking the later train.”
“Great. I haven’t seen her in ages.” Shan lowered her voice and said to Ifemelu, “I heard Grace steals her students’ research.”
“What?”
“Grace. I heard she steals her students’ research. Did you know that?”
“No,” Ifemelu said. She found it strange, Shan telling her this about Blaine’s friend, and yet it made her feel special, admitted into Shan’s intimate cave of gossip. Then, suddenly ashamed that she had not been strong enough in her defense of Grace, whom she liked, she said, “I don’t think that’s true at all.”
But Shan’s attention was already elsewhere.
“I want you to meet the sexiest man in New York, Omar,” Shan said, introducing Ifemelu to a man as tall as a basketball player, whose hairline was too perfectly shaped, a sharp curve sweeping his forehead, sharp angles dipping near his ears. When Ifemelu reached out to shake his hand, he bowed slightly, hand on his chest, and smiled.
“Omar doesn’t touch women to whom he is not related,” Shan said. “Which is very sexy, no?” And she tilted her head to look up suggestively at Omar.
“This is the beautiful and utterly original Maribelle, and her girlfriend Joan, who is just as beautiful. They make me feel bad!” Shan said, while Maribelle and Joan giggled, smallish white women in dark-framed oversize glasses. They both wore short dresses, one in red polka-dot, the other lace-fringed, with the slightly faded, slightly ill-fitting look of vintage shop finds. It was, in some ways, costume. They ticked the boxes of a certain kind of enlightened, educated middle-classness, the love of dresses that were more interesting than pretty, the love of the eclectic, the love of what they were supposed to love. Ifemelu imagined them when they traveled: they would collect unusual things and fill their homes with them, unpolished evidence of their polish.
“Here’s Bill!” Shan said, hugging the muscular dark man in a fedora. “Bill is a writer but unlike the rest of us, he has oodles of money.” Shan was almost cooing. “Bill has this great idea for a travel book called Traveling While Black.”
“I’d love to hear about it,” Ashanti said.
“By the way, Ashanti, girl, I adore your hair,” Shan said.
“Thank you!” Ashanti said. She was a vision in cowries: they rattled from her wrists, were strung through her curled dreadlocks, and looped around her neck. She said “motherland” and “Yoruba religion” often, glancing at Ifemelu as though for confirmation, and it was a parody of Africa that Ifemelu felt uncomfortable about and then felt bad for feeling so uncomfortable.
“You finally have a book cover you like?” Ashanti asked Shan.
“ ‘Like’ is a strong word,” Shan said. “So, everyone, this book is a memoir, right? It’s about tons of stuff, growing up in this all-white town, being the only black kid in my prep school, my mom’s passing, all that stuff. My editor reads the manuscript and says, ‘I understand that race is important here but we have to make sure the book transcends race, so that it’s not just about race. And I’m thinking, But why do I have to transcend race? You know, like race is a brew best served mild, tempered with other liquids, otherwise white folk can’t swallow it.”
“That’s funny,” Blaine said.
“He kept flagging the dialogue in the manuscript and writing on the margins: ‘Do people actually say this?’ And I’m thinking, Hey, how many black people do you know? I mean know as equals, as friends. I don’t mean the receptionist in the office and maybe the one black couple whose kid goes to your kid’s school and you say hi to. I mean really know know. None. So how are you telling me how black people talk?”
“Not his fault. There aren’t enough middle-class black folks to go around,” Bill said. “Lots of liberal white folks are looking for black friends. It’s almost as hard as finding an egg donor who is a tall blond eighteen-year-old at Harvard.”
They all laughed.
“I wrote this scene about something that happened in grad school, about a Gambian woman I knew. She loved to eat baking chocolate. She always had a pack of baking chocolate in her bag. Anyway, she lived in London and she was in love with this white English guy and he was leaving his wife for her. So we were at a bar and she was telling a few of us about it, me and this other girl, and this guy Peter. Short guy from Wisconsin. And you know what Peter said to her? He said, ‘His wife must feel worse knowing you’re black.’ He said it like it was pretty obvious. Not that the wife would feel bad about another woman, period, but that she would feel bad because the woman was black. So I put it in the book and my editor wants to change it because he says it’s not subtle. Like life is always fucking subtle. And then I write about my mom being bitter at work, because she felt she’d hit a ceiling and they wouldn’t let her get further because she was black, and my editor says, ‘Can we have more nuance?’ Did your mom have a bad rapport with someone at work, maybe? Or had she already been diagnosed with cancer? He thinks we should complicate it, so it’s not race alone. And I say, But it was race. She was bitter because she thought if everything was the same, except for her race, she would have been made vice president. And she talked about it a lot until she died. But somehow my mom’s experience is suddenly unnuanced. ‘Nuance’ means keep people comfortable so everyone is free to think of themselves as individuals and everyone got where they are because of their achievement.”
“Maybe you should turn it into a novel,” Maribelle said.
“Are you kidding me?” Shan asked, slightly drunk, slightly dramatic, and now sitting yoga-style on the floor. “You can’t write an honest novel about race in this country. If you write about how people are really affected by race, it’ll be too obvious. Black writers who do literary fiction in this country, all three of them, not the ten thousand who write those bullshit ghetto books with the bright covers, have two choices: they can do precious or they can do pretentious. When you do neither, nobody knows what to do with you. So if you’re going to write about race, you have to make sure it’s so lyrical and subtle that the reader who doesn’t read between the lines won’t even know it’s about race. You know, a Proustian meditation, all watery and fuzzy, that at the end just leaves you feeling watery and fuzzy.”
“Or just find a white writer. White writers can be blunt about race and get all activist because their anger isn’t threatening,” Grace said.
“What about this recent book Monk Memoirs?” Mirabelle said.
“It’s a cowardly, dishonest book. Have you read it?” Shan asked.