IT WAS MONDAY MORNING. Ifemelu was reading Postbourgie, her favorite American blog. Zemaye was looking through a stash of glossy photographs. Doris was staring at her computer screen, cradling in her palms a mug that said I ♥ FLORIDA. On her desk, next to her computer, was a tin of loose-leaf tea.
“Ifemelu, I think this feature is too snarky?”
“Your editorial feedback is priceless,” Ifemelu said.
“What does ‘snarky’ mean? Please explain to some of us who did not go to school in America,” Zemaye said.
Doris ignored her completely.
“I just don’t think Aunty Onenu will want us to run this?”
“Convince her, you’re her editor,” Ifemelu said. “We need to get this magazine going.”
Doris shrugged and got up. “We’ll talk about it at the meeting?”
“I am so sleepy,” Zemaye said. “I’m going to send Esther to make Nescafé before I fall asleep in the meeting.”
“Instant coffee is just awful?” Doris said. “I’m so glad I’m not much of a coffee drinker or I would just die.”
“What is wrong with Nescafé?” Zemaye said.
“It shouldn’t even be called coffee?” Doris said. “It’s like beyond bad.”
Zemaye yawned and stretched. “Me, I like it. Coffee is coffee.”
Later, as they walked into Aunty Onenu’s office, Doris ahead, wearing a loose-fitting blue pinafore and black square-heeled mary janes, Zemaye asked Ifemelu, “Why does Doris wear rubbish to work? She looks like she is cracking a joke with her clothes.”
They sat around the oval conference table in Aunty Onenu’s large office. Aunty Onenu’s weave was longer and more incongruous than the last, high and coiffed in front, with waves of hair floating to her back. She sipped from a bottle of diet Sprite and said she liked Doris’s piece “Marrying Your Best Friend.”
“Very good and inspirational,” she said.
“Ah, but Aunty Onenu, women should not marry their best friend because there is no sexual chemistry,” Zemaye said.
Aunty Onenu gave Zemaye the look given to the crazy student whom one could not take seriously, then she shuffled her papers and said she did not like Ifemelu’s profile of Mrs. Funmi King.
“Why did you say ‘she never looks at her steward when she speaks to him’?” Aunty Onenu asked.
“Because she didn’t,” Ifemelu said.
“But it makes her sound wicked,” Aunty Onenu said.
“I think it’s an interesting detail,” Ifemelu said.
“I agree with Aunty Onenu,” Doris said. “Interesting or not, it is judgmental?”
“The idea of interviewing someone and writing a profile is judgmental,” Ifemelu said. “It’s not about the subject. It’s about what the interviewer makes of the subject.”
Aunty Onenu shook her head. Doris shook her head.
“Why do we have to play it so safe?” Ifemelu asked.
Doris said, with false humor, “This isn’t your American race blog where you provoked everybody, Ifemelu. This is like a wholesome women’s magazine?”
“Yes, it is!” Aunty Onenu said.
“But Aunty Onenu, we will never beat Glass if we continue like this,” Ifemelu said.
Aunty Onenu’s eyes widened.
“Glass is doing exactly what we are doing,” Doris said quickly.
Esther came in to tell Aunty Onenu that her daughter had arrived.
Esther’s black high heels were shaky, and as she walked past, Ifemelu worried that the shoes would collapse and sprain Esther’s ankles. Earlier in the morning, Esther had told Ifemelu, “Aunty, your hair is jaga-jaga,” with a kind of sad honesty, about what Ifemelu considered an attractive twist-out style.
“Ehn, she is already here?” Aunty Onenu said. “Girls, please finish the meeting. I am taking my daughter to shop for a dress and I have an afternoon meeting with our distributors.”
Ifemelu was tired, bored. She thought, again, of starting a blog. Her phone was vibrating, Ranyinudo calling, and ordinarily she would have waited until the meeting was over to call her back. But she said, “Sorry, I have to take this, international call,” and hurried out. Ranyinudo was complaining about Don. “He said I am not the sweet girl I used to be. That I’ve changed. Meanwhile, I know he has bought the jeep for me and has even cleared it at the port, but now he doesn’t want to give it to me.”
Ifemelu thought about the expression “sweet girl.” Sweet girl meant that, for a long time, Don had molded Ranyinudo into a malleable shape, or that she had allowed him to think he had.
“What about Ndudi?”
Ranyinudo sighed loudly. “We haven’t talked since Sunday. Today he will forget to call me. Tomorrow he will be too busy. And so I told him that it’s not acceptable. Why should I be making all the effort? Now he is sulking. He can never initiate a conversation like an adult, or agree that he did something wrong.”
Later, back in the office, Esther came in to say that a Mr. Tolu wanted to see Zemaye.
“Is that the photographer you did the tailors article with?” Doris asked.
“Yes. He’s late. He has been dodging my calls for days,” Zemaye said.
Doris said, “You need to handle that and make sure I have the images by tomorrow afternoon? I need everything to get to the printer before three? I don’t want a repeat of the printer’s delay, especially now that Glass is printing in South Africa?”
“Okay.” Zemaye shook her mouse. “The server is so slow today. I just need to send this thing. Esther, tell him to wait.”
“Yes, ma.”
“You are feeling better, Esther?” Doris asked.
“Yes, ma, Thank you, ma.” Esther curtsied, Yoruba-style. She had been standing by the door as though waiting to be dismissed, listening in on the conversation. “I am taking the medicine for typhoid.”
“You have typhoid?” Ifemelu asked.
“Didn’t you notice how she looked on Monday? I gave her some money and told her to go to the hospital, not to a chemist?” Doris said. Ifemelu wished that she had noticed that Esther was unwell.
“Sorry, Esther,” Ifemelu said.
“Thank you, ma.”
“Esther, sorry o,” Zemaye said. “I saw her dull face, but I thought she was just fasting. You know she’s always fasting. She will fast and fast until God gives her a husband.”
Esther giggled.
“I remember I had this really bad case of typhoid when I was in secondary school,” Ifemelu said. “It was terrible, and it turned out I was taking an antibiotic that wasn’t strong enough. What are you taking, Esther?”
“Medicine, ma.”
“What antibiotic did they give you?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know the name?”
“Let me bring them, ma.”
Esther came back with transparent packets of pills, on which instructions, but no names, were written in a crabbed handwriting in blue ink. Two to be taken morning and night. One to be taken three times daily.
“We should write about this, Doris. We should have a health column with useful practical information. Somebody should let the health minister know that ordinary Nigerians go to see a doctor and the doctor gives them unnamed medicines. This can kill you. How will anybody know what you have already taken, or what you shouldn’t take if you’re already taking something else?”
“Ahn-ahn, but that one is a small problem: they do it so that you don’t buy the medicine from someone else,” Zemaye said. “But what about fake drugs? Go to the market and see what they are selling.”
“Okay, let’s all calm down? No need to get all activist? We’re not doing investigative journalism here?” Doris said.
Ifemelu began then to visualize her new blog, a blue-and-white design, and, on the masthead, an aerial shot of a Lagos scene. Nothing familiar, not a traffic clog of yellow rusted buses or a water-logged slum of zinc shacks. Perhaps the abandoned house next to her flat would do. She would take the photo herself, in the haunted light of early evening, and hope to catch the male peacock in flight. The blog posts would be in a stark, readable font. An article about health care, using Esther’s story, with pictures of the packets of nameless medicine. A piece about the Nigerpolitan Club. A fashion article about clothes that women could actually afford. Posts about people helping others, but nothing like the Zoe stories that always featured a wealthy person, hugging children at a motherless babies’ home, with bags of rice and tins of powdered milk propped in the background.
“But, Esther, you have to stop all that fasting o,” Zemaye said. “You know, some months Esther will give her whole salary to her church, they call it ‘sowing a seed,’ then she will come and ask me to give her three hundred naira for transport.”
“But, ma, it is just small help. You are equal to the task,” Esther said, smiling.
“Last week she was fasting with a handkerchief,” Zemaye continued. “She kept it on her desk all day. She said somebody in her church got promoted after fasting with the handkerchief.”
“Is that what that handkerchief on her table was about?” Ifemelu asked.