Dike had once told her, wistfully, about his friend who had gone to Coney Island and come back with a picture taken on a steep, sliding ride, and so she surprised him on the weekend before she left, saying “We’re going to Coney Island!” Jane had told her what train to take, what to do, how much it would cost. Aunty Uju said it was a good idea, but gave her no money to add to what she had. As she watched Dike on the rides, screaming, terrified and thrilled, a little boy entirely open to the world, she did not mind what she had spent. They ate hot dogs and milkshakes and cotton candy. “I can’t wait until I don’t have to come with you to the girls’ bathroom,” he told her, and she laughed and laughed. On the train back, he was tired and sleepy. “Coz, this was the bestest day ever with you,” he said, resting against her.
The bittersweet glow of an ending limbo overcame her days later when she kissed Dike goodbye—once then twice and three times, while he cried, a child so unused to crying, and she bit back her own tears and Aunty Uju said over and over that Philadelphia was not very far away. Ifemelu rolled her suitcase to the subway, took it to the Forty-second Street terminal, and got on a bus to Philadelphia. She sat by the window—somebody had stuck a blob of chewed gum on the pane—and spent long minutes looking again at the Social Security card and driver’s license that belonged to Ngozi Okonkwo. Ngozi Okonkwo was at least ten years older than she was, with a narrow face, eyebrows that started as little balls before loping into arcs, and a jaw shaped like the letter V.
“I don’t even look like her at all,” Ifemelu had said when Aunty Uju gave her the card.
“All of us look alike to white people,” Aunty Uju said.
“Ahn-ahn, Aunty!”
“I’m not joking. Amara’s cousin came last year and she doesn’t have her papers yet so she has been working with Amara’s ID. You remember Amara? Her cousin is very fair and slim. They do not look alike at all. Nobody noticed. She works as a home health aide in Virginia. Just make sure you always remember your new name. I have a friend who forgot and one of her co-workers called her and called her and she was blank. Then they became suspicious and reported her to immigration.”
CHAPTER 12
There was Ginika, standing in the small, crowded bus terminal, wearing a miniskirt and a tube top that covered her chest but not her midriff, and waiting to scoop Ifemelu up and into the real America. Ginika was much thinner, half her old size, and her head looked bigger, balanced on a long neck that brought to mind a vague, exotic animal. She extended her arms, as though urging a child into an embrace, laughing, calling out, “Ifemsco! Ifemsco!” and Ifemelu was taken back, for a moment, to secondary school: an image of gossiping girls in their blue-and-white uniforms, felt berets perched on their heads, crowded in the school corridor. She hugged Ginika. The theatrics of their holding each other close, disengaging and then holding each other close again, made her eyes fill, to her mild surprise, with tears.
“Look at you!” Ginika said, gesturing, jangling the many silver bangles around her wrist. “Is it really you?”
“When did you stop eating and start looking like a dried stockfish?” Ifemelu asked.
Ginika laughed, took the suitcase and turned to the door. “Come on, let’s go. I’m parked illegally.”
The green Volvo was at the corner of a narrow street. An unsmiling woman in uniform, ticket booklet in hand, was stumping towards them when Ginika jumped in and started the car. “Close!” she said, laughing. A homeless man in a grubby T-shirt, pushing a trolley filled with bundles, had stopped just by the car, as though to rest briefly, staring ahead at nothing, and Ginika glanced at him as she eased the car into the street. They drove with the windows down. Philadelphia was the smell of the summer sun, of burnt asphalt, of sizzling meat from food carts tucked into street corners, foreign brown men and women hunched inside. Ifemelu would come to like the gyros from those carts, flatbread and lamb and dripping sauces, as she would come to love Philadelphia itself. It did not raise the specter of intimidation as Manhattan did; it was intimate but not provincial, a city that might yet be kind to you. Ifemelu saw women on the sidewalks going to lunch from work, wearing sneakers, proof of their American preference for comfort over elegance, and she saw young couples clutching each other, kissing from time to time as if they feared that, if they unclasped their hands, their love would dissolve, melt into nothingness.
“I borrowed my landlord’s car. I didn’t want to come get you in my shit-ass car. I can’t believe it, Ifemsco. You’re in America!” Ginika said. There was a metallic, unfamiliar glamour in her gauntness, her olive skin, her short skirt that had risen up, barely covering her crotch, her straight-straight hair that she kept tucking behind her ears, blond streaks shiny in the sunlight.
“We’re entering University City, and that’s where Wellson campus is, shay you know? We can go for you to see the school first and then we can go to my place, out in the suburbs, and after we can go to my friend’s place in the evening. She’s doing a get-together.” Ginika had lapsed into Nigerian English, a dated, overcooked version, eager to prove how unchanged she was. She had, with a strenuous loyalty, kept in touch through the years: calling and writing letters and sending books and shapeless trousers she called slacks. And now she was saying “shay you know” and Ifemelu did not have the heart to tell her that nobody said “shay” anymore.
Ginika recounted anecdotes about her own early experiences in America, as though they were all filled with subtle wisdom that Ifemelu would need.
“If you see how they laughed at me in high school when I said that somebody was boning for me. Because boning here means to have sex! So I had to keep explaining that in Nigeria it means carrying face. And can you imagine ‘half-caste’ is a bad word here? In freshman year, I was telling a bunch of my friends about how I was voted prettiest girl in school back home. Remember? I should never have won. Zainab should have won. It was just because I was a half-caste. There’s even more of that here. There’s some shit you’ll get from white people in this country that I won’t get. But anyway, I was telling them about back home and how all the boys were chasing me because I was a half-caste, and they said I was dissing myself. So now I say biracial, and I’m supposed to be offended when somebody says half-caste. I’ve met a lot of people here with white mothers and they are so full of issues, eh. I didn’t know I was even supposed to have issues until I came to America. Honestly, if anybody wants to raise biracial kids, do it in Nigeria.”
“Of course. Where all the boys chase the half-caste girls.”
“Not all the boys, by the way.” Ginika made a face. “Obinze had better hurry up and come to the U.S., before somebody will carry you away. You know you have the kind of body they like here.”
“What?”
“You’re thin with big breasts.”
“Please, I’m not thin. I’m slim.”
“Americans say ‘thin.’ Here ‘thin’ is a good word.”
“Is that why you stopped eating? All your bum has gone. I always wished I had a bum like yours,” Ifemelu said.
“Do you know I started losing weight almost as soon as I came? I was even close to anorexia. The kids at my high school called me Pork. You know at home when somebody tells you that you lost weight, it means something bad. But here somebody tells you that you lost weight and you say thank you. It’s just different here,” Ginika said, a little wistfully, as though she, too, were new to America.
Later, Ifemelu watched Ginika at her friend Stephanie’s apartment, a bottle of beer poised at her lips, her American-accented words sailing out of her mouth, and was struck by how like her American friends Ginika had become. Jessica, the Japanese American, beautiful and animated, playing with the emblemed key of her Mercedes. Pale-skinned Teresa, who had a loud laugh and wore diamond studs and shabby, worn-out shoes. Stephanie, the Chinese American, her hair a perfect swingy bob that curved inwards at her chin, who from time to time she reached into her monogrammed bag to get her cigarettes and step out for a smoke. Hari, coffee-skin
ned and black-haired and wearing a tight T-shirt, who said, “I am Indian, not Indian American,” when Ginika introduced Ifemelu. They all laughed at the same things and said “Gross!” about the same things; they were well choreographed. Stephanie announced that she had homemade beer in her fridge and everyone chanted “Cool!” Then Teresa said, “Can I have the regular beer, Steph?” in the small voice of a person afraid to offend. Ifemelu sat on a lone armchair at the end of the room, drinking orange juice, listening to them talk. That company is so evil. Oh my God, I can’t believe there’s so much sugar in this stuff. The Internet is totally going to change the world. She heard Ginika ask, “Did you know they use something from animal bones to make that breath mint?” and the others groaned. There were codes Ginika knew, ways of being that she had mastered. Unlike Aunty Uju, Ginika had come to America with the flexibility and fluidness of youth, the cultural cues had seeped into her skin, and now she went bowling, and knew what Tobey Maguire was about, and found double-dipping gross. Bottles and cans of beer were piling up. They all lounged in glamorous lassitude on the sofa, and on the rug, while heavy rock, which Ifemelu thought was unharmonious noise, played on the CD player. Teresa drank the fastest, rolling each empty can of beer on the wood floor, while the others laughed with an enthusiasm that puzzled Ifemelu because it really was not that funny. How did they know when to laugh, what to laugh about?
GINIKA WAS BUYING a dress for a dinner party, hosted by the lawyers she was interning with.
“You should get some things, Ifem.”
“I’m not spending ten kobo of my money unless I have to.”
“Ten cents.”
“Ten cents.”
“I’ll give you a jacket and bedding stuff, but at least you need tights. The cold is coming.”
“I’ll manage,” Ifemelu said. And she would. If she needed to, she would wear all her clothes at the same time, in layers, until she found a job. She was terrified to spend money.
“Ifem, I’ll pay for you.”
“It’s not as if you are earning much.”
“At least I am earning some,” Ginika quipped.
“I really hope I find a job soon.”
“You will, don’t worry.”
“I don’t understand how anybody will believe I’m Ngozi Okonkwo.”
“Don’t show them the license when you go to an interview. Just show the Social Security card. Maybe they won’t even ask. Sometimes they don’t for small jobs like that.”
Ginika led the way into a clothing store, which Ifemelu thought too fevered; it reminded her of a nightclub, disco music playing loudly, the interior shadowy, and the salespeople, two thin-armed young women in all black, moving up and down too swiftly. One was chocolate-skinned, her long black weave highlighted with auburn, the other was white, inky hair floating behind her as she came up to them.
“Hi, ladies, how are you? Is there anything I can help you with?” she asked in a tinkly, singsong voice. She pulled clothes off hangers and unfurled them from shelves to show Ginika. Ifemelu was looking at the price tags, converting them to naira, exclaiming, “Ahn-ahn! How can this thing cost this much?” She picked up and carefully examined some of the clothes, to find out what each was, whether underwear or blouse, whether shirt or dress, and sometimes she was still not certain.
“This literally just came in,” the salesperson said of a sparkly dress, as though divulging a big secret, and Ginika said, “Oh my God, really?” with a great excitement. Under the too-bright lighting of the fitting room, Ginika tried on the dress, walking on tiptoe. “I love it.”
“But it’s shapeless,” Ifemelu said. It looked, to her, like a boxy sack on which a bored person had haphazardly stuck sequins.
“It’s postmodern,” Ginika said.
Watching Ginika preen in front of the mirror, Ifemelu wondered whether she, too, would come to share Ginika’s taste for shapeless dresses, whether this was what America did to you.
At the checkout, the blond cashier asked, “Did anybody help you?”
“Yes,” Ginika said.
“Chelcy or Jennifer?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t remember her name.” Ginika looked around, to point at her helper, but both young women had disappeared into the fitting rooms at the back.
“Was it the one with long hair?” the cashier asked.
“Well, both of them had long hair.”
“The one with dark hair?”
Both of them had dark hair.
Ginika smiled and looked at the cashier and the cashier smiled and looked at her computer screen, and two damp seconds crawled past before she cheerfully said, “It’s okay, I’ll figure it out later and make sure she gets her commission.”
As they walked out of the store, Ifemelu said, “I was waiting for her to ask ‘Was it the one with two eyes or the one with two legs?’ Why didn’t she just ask ‘Was it the black girl or the white girl?’ ”
Ginika laughed. “Because this is America. You’re supposed to pretend that you don’t notice certain things.”
GINIKA ASKED Ifemelu to stay with her, to save on rent, but her apartment was too far away, at the end of the Main Line, and the commuter train, taken every day into Philadelphia, would cost too much. They looked at apartments together in West Philadelphia, Ifemelu surprised by the rotting cabinets in the kitchen, the mouse that dashed past an empty bedroom.
“My hostel in Nsukka was dirty but there were no rats o.”
“It’s a mouse,” Ginika said.
Ifemelu was about to sign a lease—if saving money meant living with mice, then so be it—when Ginika’s friend told them of a room for rent, a great deal, as college life went. It was in a four-bedroom apartment with moldy carpeting, above a pizza store on Powelton Avenue, on the corner where drug addicts sometimes dropped crack pipes, miserable pieces of twisted metal that glinted in the sun. Ifemelu’s room was the cheapest, the smallest, facing the scuffed brick walls of the next building. Dog hair floated around. Her roommates, Jackie, Elena, and Allison, looked almost interchangeable, all small-boned and slim-hipped, their chestnut hair ironed straight, their lacrosse sticks piled in the narrow hallway. Elena’s dog ambled about, large and black, like a shaggy donkey; once in a while, a mound of dog shit appeared at the bottom of the stairs and Elena would scream “You’re in big trouble now, buddy!” as though performing for the roommates, playing a role whose lines everyone knew. Ifemelu wished the dog were kept outside, which was where dogs belonged. When Elena asked why Ifemelu had not petted her dog, or scratched his head in the week since she moved in, she said, “I don’t like dogs.”
“Is that like a cultural thing?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean like I know in China they eat cat meat and dog meat.”
“My boyfriend back home loves dogs. I just don’t.”
“Oh,” Elena said, and looked at her, brows furrowed, as Jackie and Allison had earlier looked at her when she said she had never gone bowling, as though wondering how she could have turned out a normal human being without ever having gone bowling. She was standing at the periphery of her own life, sharing a fridge and a toilet, a shallow intimacy, with people she did not know at all. People who lived in exclamation points. “Great!” they said often. “That’s great!” People who did not scrub in the shower; their shampoos and conditioners and gels were cluttered in the bathroom, but there was not a single sponge, and this, the absence of a sponge, made them seem unreachably alien to her. (One of her earliest memories was of her mother, a bucket of water between them in the bathroom, saying to her, “Ngwa, scrub between your legs very well, very well …,” and Ifemelu had applied a little too much vigor with the loofah, to show her mother just how clean she could get herself, and for a few days afterwards had hobbled around with her legs spread wide.) There was something unquestioning about her roommates’ lives, an assumption of certainty that fascinated her, so that they often said, “Let’s go get some,” about whatever it was they needed—more beer, pizza,
buffalo wings, liquor—as though this getting was not an act that required money. She was used, at home, to people first asking “Do you have money?” before they made such plans. They left pizza boxes on the kitchen table, and the kitchen itself in casual disarray for days, and on weekends their friends gathered in the living room, with packs of beer stacked in the refrigerator and streaks of dried urine on the toilet seat.
“We’re going to a party. Come with us, it’ll be fun!” Jackie said, and Ifemelu pulled on her slim-fitting trousers and a halter-neck blouse borrowed from Ginika.
“Won’t you get dressed?” she asked her roommates before they left, all of them wearing slouchy jeans, and Jackie said, “We are dressed. What are you talking about?” with a laugh that suggested yet another foreign pathology had emerged. They went to a fraternity house on Chestnut Street, where everyone stood around drinking vodka-rich punch from plastic cups, until Ifemelu accepted that there would be no dancing; to party here was to stand around and drink. They were all a jumble of frayed fabric and slack collars, the students at the party, all their clothes looked determinedly worn. (Years later, a blog post would read: When it comes to dressing well, American culture is so self-fulfilled that it has not only disregarded this courtesy of self-presentation, but has turned that disregard into a virtue. “We are too superior/busy/cool/not-uptight to bother about how we look to other people, and so we can wear pajamas to school and underwear to the mall.”) As they got drunker and drunker, some lay limp on the floor and others took felt-tipped pens and began to write on the exposed skin of the fallen. Suck me off. Go Sixers.
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