“But it is true, all of us have small 419 in our blood!” Zemaye smiled with what seemed to be, for the first time, a real amusement in her eyes. Then she added, “Sorry o. I did not mean that your boyfriend is a criminal. I was just asking.”
CHAPTER 48
Ifemelu asked Ranyinudo to come with her and Doris to the Nigerpolitan meeting.
“I don’t have energy for you returnees, please,” Ranyinudo said. “Besides, Ndudi is finally back from all his traveling up and down and we’re going out.”
“Good luck choosing a man over your friend, you witch.”
“Yes o. Are you the person that will marry me? Meanwhile I told Don I am going out with you, so make sure you don’t go anywhere that he might go.” Ranyinudo was laughing. She was still seeing Don, waiting to make sure that Ndudi was “serious” before she stopped, and she hoped, too, that Don would get her the ne
w car before then.
The Nigerpolitan Club meeting: a small cluster of people drinking champagne in paper cups, at the poolside of a home in Osborne Estate, chic people, all dripping with savoir faire, each nursing a self-styled quirkiness—a ginger-colored Afro, a T-shirt with a graphic of Thomas Sankara, oversize handmade earrings that hung like pieces of modern art. Their voices burred with foreign accents. You can’t find a decent smoothie in this city! Oh my God, were you at that conference? What this country needs is an active civil society. Ifemelu knew some of them. She chatted with Bisola and Yagazie, both of whom had natural hair, worn in a twist-out, a halo of spirals framing their faces. They talked about hair salons here, where the hairdressers struggled and fumbled to comb natural hair, as though it were an alien eruption, as though their own hair was not the same way before it was defeated by chemicals.
“The salon girls are always like, ‘Aunty, you don’t want to relax your hair?’ It’s ridiculous that Africans don’t value our natural hair in Africa,” Yagazie said.
“I know,” Ifemelu said, and she caught the righteousness in her voice, in all their voices. They were the sanctified, the returnees, back home with an extra gleaming layer. Ikenna joined them, a lawyer who had lived outside Philadelphia and whom she had met at a Blogging While Brown convention. And Fred joined them too. He had introduced himself to Ifemelu earlier, a pudgy, well-groomed man. “I lived in Boston until last year,” he said, in a falsely low-key way, because “Boston” was code for Harvard (otherwise he would say MIT or Tufts or anywhere else), just as another woman said, “I was in New Haven,” in that coy manner that pretended not to be coy, which meant that she had been at Yale. Other people joined them, all encircled by a familiarity, because they could reach so easily for the same references. Soon they were laughing and listing the things they missed about America.
“Low-fat soy milk, NPR, fast Internet,” Ifemelu said.
“Good customer service, good customer service, good customer service,” Bisola said. “Folks here behave as if they are doing you a favor by serving you. The high-end places are okay, not great, but the regular restaurants? Forget it. The other day I asked a waiter if I could get boiled yam with a different sauce than was on the menu and he just looked at me and said no. Hilarious.”
“But the American customer service can be so annoying. Someone hovering around and bothering you all the time. Are you still working on that? Since when did eating become work?” Yagazie said.
“I miss a decent vegetarian place?” Doris said, and then talked about her new house help who could not make a simple sandwich, about how she had ordered a vegetarian spring roll at a restaurant in Victoria Island, bit in and tasted chicken, and the waiter, when summoned, just smiled and said, “Maybe they put chicken today.” There was laughter. Fred said a good vegetarian place would open soon, now that there was so much new investment in the country; somebody would figure out that there was a vegetarian market to cater to.
“A vegetarian restaurant? Impossible. There are only four vegetarians in this country, including Doris,” Bisola said.
“You’re not vegetarian, are you?” Fred asked Ifemelu. He just wanted to talk to her. She had looked up from time to time to find his eyes on her.
“No,” she said.
“Oh, there’s this new place that opened on Akin Adesola,” Bisola said. “The brunch is really good. They have the kinds of things we can eat. We should go next Sunday.”
They have the kinds of things we can eat. An unease crept up on Ifemelu. She was comfortable here, and she wished she were not. She wished, too, that she was not so interested in this new restaurant, did not perk up, imagining fresh green salads and steamed still-firm vegetables. She loved eating all the things she had missed while away, jollof rice cooked with a lot of oil, fried plantains, boiled yams, but she longed, also, for the other things she had become used to in America, even quinoa, Blaine’s specialty, made with feta and tomatoes. This was what she hoped she had not become but feared that she had: a “they have the kinds of things we can eat” kind of person.
Fred was talking about Nollywood, speaking a little too loudly. “Nollywood is really public theater, and if you understand it like that, then it is more tolerable. It’s for public consumption, even mass participation, not the kind of individual experience that film is.” He was looking at her, soliciting her agreement with his eyes: they were not supposed to watch Nollywood, people like them, and if they did, then only as amusing anthropology.
“I like Nollywood,” Ifemelu said, even though she, too, thought Nollywood was more theater than film. The urge to be contrarian was strong. If she set herself apart, perhaps she would be less of the person she feared she had become. “Nollywood may be melodramatic, but life in Nigeria is very melodramatic.”
“Really?” the New Haven woman said, squeezing her paper cup in her hand, as though she thought it a great oddity, that a person at this gathering would like Nollywood. “It is so offensive to my intelligence. I mean, the products are just bad. What does it say about us?”
“But Hollywood makes equally bad movies. They just make them with better lighting,” Ifemelu said.
Fred laughed, too heartily, to let her know he was on her side.
“It’s not just about the technical stuff,” the New Haven woman said. “The industry is regressive. I mean, the portrayal of women? The films are more misogynistic than the society.”
Ifemelu saw a man across the pool whose wide shoulders reminded her of Obinze. But he was too tall to be Obinze. She wondered what Obinze would make of a gathering like this. Would he even come? He had been deported from England, after all, so perhaps he would not consider himself a returnee like them.
“Hey, come back,” Fred said, moving closer to her, claiming personal space. “Your mind isn’t here.”
She smiled thinly. “It is now.”
Fred knew things. He had the confidence of a person who knew practical things. He probably had a Harvard MBA and used words like “capacity” and “value” in conversation. He would not dream in imagery, but in facts and figures.
“There’s a concert tomorrow at MUSON. Do you like classical music?” he asked.