“How about we go to Miami?” he said, half joking, but she took him to Miami and they spent two days in a hotel, ordering burgers at the thatch-covered bar by the pool, talking about everything but the suicide attempt.
“This is the life,” he said, lying with his face to the sun. “That blog of yours was a great thing, had you swimming in the dough and all. Now you’ve closed it, we won’t be able to do more of this stuff!”
“I wasn’t swimming, kind of just splattering,” she said, looking at him, her handsome cousin, and the curl of wet hair on his chest made her sad, because it implied his new, tender adulthood, and she wished he would remain a child; if he remained a child then he would not have taken pills and lain on the basement couch with the certainty that he would never wake up again.
“I love you, Dike. We love you, you know that?”
“I know,” he said. “Coz, you should go.”
“Go where?”
“Back to Nigeria, like you were planning to. I’m going to be okay, I promise.”
“Maybe you could come and visit me,” she said.
After a pause, he said, “Yeah.”
Part 7
CHAPTER 44
At first, Lagos assaulted her; the sun-dazed haste, the yellow buses full of squashed limbs, the sweating hawkers racing after cars, the advertisements on hulking billboards (others scrawled on walls—PLUMBER CALL 080177777) and the heaps of rubbish that rose on the roadsides like a taunt. Commerce thrummed too defiantly. And the air was dense with exaggeration, conversations full of overprotestations. One morning, a man’s body lay on Awolowo Road. Another morning, The Island flooded and cars became gasping boats. Here, she felt, anything could happen, a ripe tomato could burst out of solid stone. And so she had the dizzying sensation of falling, falling into the new person she had become, falling into the strange familiar. Had it always been like this or had it changed so much in her absence? When she left home, only the wealthy had cell phones, all the numbers started with 090, and girls wanted to date 090 men. Now, her hair braider had a cell phone, the plantain seller tending a blackened grill had a cell phone. She had grown up knowing all the bus stops and the side streets, understanding the cryptic codes of conductors and the body language of street hawkers. Now, she struggled to grasp the unspoken. When had shopkeepers become so rude? Had buildings in Lagos always had this patina of decay? And when did it become a city of people quick to beg and too enamored of free things?
“Americanah!” Ranyinudo teased her often. “You are looking at things with American eyes. But the problem is that you are not even a real Americanah. At least if you had an American accent we would tolerate your complaining!”
Ranyinudo picked her up from the airport, standing by the Arrivals exit in a billowy bridesmaid’s dress, her blusher too red on her cheeks like bruises, the green satin flowers in her hair now askew. Ifemelu was struck by how arresting, how attractive, she was. No longer a ropy mass of gangly arms and gangly legs, but now a big, firm, curvy woman, exulting in her weight and height, and it made her imposing, a presence that drew the eyes.
“Ranyi!” Ifemelu said. “I know my coming back is a big deal but I didn’t know it was big enough for a ball gown.”
“Idiot. I came straight from the wedding. I didn’t want to risk the traffic of going home first to change.”
They hugged, holding each other close. Ranyinudo smelled of a floral perfume and exhaust fumes and sweat; she smelled of Nigeria.
“You look amazing, Ranyi,” Ifemelu said. “I mean, underneath all that war paint. Your pictures didn’t even show you well.”
“Ifemsco, see you, beautiful babe, even after a long flight,” she said, laughing, dismissing the compliment, playing at her old role of the girl who was not the pretty one. Her looks had changed but the excitable, slightly reckless air about her had not. Unchanged, too, was the eternal gurgle in her voice, laughter just beneath the surface, ready to break free, to erupt. She drove fast, braking sharply and glancing often at the BlackBerry on her lap; whenever the traffic stilled, she picked it up and typed swiftly.
“Ranyi, you should text and drive only when you are alone so that you kill only yourself,” Ifemelu said.
“Haba! I don’t text and drive o. I text when I’m not driving,” she said. “This wedding was something else, the best wedding I’ve been to. I wonder if you’ll remember the bride. She was Funke’s very good friend in secondary school. Ijeoma, very yellow girl. She went to Holy Child but she used to come to our WAEC lesson with Funke. We became friends in university. If you see her now, eh, she’s a serious babe. Her husband has major money. Her engagement ring is bigger than Zuma Rock.”
Ifemelu stared out of the window, half listening, thinking how unpretty Lagos was, roads infested with potholes, houses springing up unplanned like weeds. Of her jumble of feelings, she recognized only confusion.
“Lime and peach,” Ranyinudo said.
“What?”
“The wedding colors. Lime and peach. The hall decoration was so nice and the cake was just beautiful. Look, I took some pictures. I’m going to put this one up on Facebook.” Ranyinudo gave Ifemelu her BlackBerry. Ifemelu held on to it so that Ranyinudo would focus on her driving.
“And I met someone o. He saw me when I was waiting outside for the mass to end. It was so hot, my foundation was melting on my face and I know I looked like a zombie, but he still came to talk to me! That’s a good sign. I think this one is serious husband material. Did I tell you my mother was seriously saying novenas to end my relationship when I was dating Ibrahim? At least she will not have a heart attack with this one. His name is Ndudi. Cool name, abi? You can’t get more Igbo than that. And you should have seen his watch! He’s into oil. His business card has Nigerian and international offices.”
“Why were you waiting outside during mass?”
“All the bridesmaids had to wait outside because our dresses were indecent.” Ranyinudo rolled “indecent” around her tongue and chuckled. “It happens all the time, especially in Catholic churches. We even had cover-ups but the priest said they were too lacy, so we just waited outside until the mass ended. But thank God for that or I would not have met this guy!”
Ifemelu looked at Ranyinudo’s dress, its thin straps, its pleated neckline that showed no cleavage. Before she left, were bridesmaids banished from church services because their dresses had spaghetti straps? She did not think so, but she was no longer sure. She was no longer sure what was new in Lagos and what was new in herself. Ranyinudo parked on a street in Lekki, which was bare reclaimed land when Ifemelu left, but now a cavalcade of large houses encircled by high walls.
“My flat is the smallest, so I don’t have parking space inside,” Ranyinudo said. “The other tenants park inside, but you should see all the shouting that happens in the morning when somebody does not move their car out of the way, and somebody else is late for work!”
Ifemelu climbed out of the car and into the loud, discordant drone of generators, too many generators; the sound pierced the soft middle of her ears and throbbed in her head.
“No light for the past week,” Ranyinudo said, shouting to be heard above the generators.
The gateman had hurried over to help with the suitcases.
“Welcome back, aunty,” he said to Ifemelu.
He had not merely said “welcome” but “welcome back,” as though he somehow knew that she was truly back. She thanked him, and in the gray of the evening darkness, the air burdened with smells, she ached with an almost unbearable emotion that she could not name. It was nostalgic and melancholy, a beautiful sadness for the things she had missed and the things she would never know. Later, sitting on the couch in Ranyinudo’s small stylish living room, her feet sunk into the too-soft carpet, the flat-screen TV perched on the opposite wall, Ifemelu looked unbelievingly at herself. She had done it. She had come back. She turned the TV on and searched for the Nigerian channels. On NTA, the first lady, blue scarf wrapped around her face, was addressing a rally of women, and crawling across the screen were the words “The First Lady is Empowering Women with Mosquito Nets.”
“I can’t remember the last time I watched that stupid station,” Ranyinudo said. “They lie for the government but they can’t even lie well.”
“So which Nigerian channel do you watch?”
“I don’t even really watch any o. I watch Style and E! Sometimes CNN and BBC.” Ranyinudo had changed into shorts and a T-shirt. “I have a girl who comes and cooks and cleans for me, but I made this stew myself because you were coming, so you must eat it o. What will you drink? I have malt and orange juice.”
“Malt! I’m going to drink all the malt in Nigeria. I used to buy it from a Hispanic supermarket in Baltimore, but it was not the same thing.”
“I ate really nice ofada rice at the wedding, I’m not hungry,” Ranyinudo said. But, after she served Ifemelu’s food on a dinner plate, she ate some rice and chicken stew from a plastic bowl, perched on the arm of the couch, while they gossiped about old friends: Priye was an event planner and had recently gone big time after being introduced to the governor’s wife. Tochi had lost her job at a bank after the last bank crisis, but she had married a wealthy lawyer and had a baby.