She was watching him, waiting for his explanation. It began to bother her, thinking of how much she had paid for the suburban train ticket.
“Look, you’re not a kid,” he said. “I work so hard I can’t sleep. I can’t relax. I don’t do drugs so I figured I need help to relax. You can give me a massage, help me relax, you know. I had somebody doing it before, but she’s just moved to Pittsburgh. It’s a great gig, at least she thought so. Helped her with a lot of her college debt.” He had said this to many other women, she could tell, from the measured pace with which the words came out. He was not a kind man. She did not know exactly what he meant, but whatever it was, she regretted that she had come.
She stood up. “Can I think about this and give you a call?”
“Of course.” He shrugged, shoulders thick with sudden irritability, as though he could not believe she did not recognize her good fortune. As he let her out, he shut the door quickly, not responding to her final “Thank you.” She walked back to the station, mourning the train fare. The trees were awash with color, red and yellow leaves tinted the air golden, and she thought of the words she had recently read somewhere: Nature’s first green is gold. The crisp air, fragrant and dry, reminded her of Nsukka during the harmattan season, and brought with it a sudden stab of homesickness, so sharp and so abrupt that it filled her eyes with tears.
EACH TIME she went to a job interview, or made a phone call about a job, she told herself that this would, finally, be her day; this time, the waitress, hostess, babysitter position would be hers, but even as she wished herself well, there was already a gathering gloom in a far corner of her mind. “What am I doing wrong?” she asked Ginika, and Ginika told her to be patient, to have hope. She typed and retyped her résumé, invented past waitressing experience in Lagos, wrote Ginika’s name as an employer whose children she had babysat, gave the name of Wambui’s landlady as a reference, and, at each interview, she smiled warmly and shook hands firmly, all the things that were suggested in a book she had read about interviewing for American jobs. Yet there was no job. Was it her foreign accent? Her lack of experience? But her African friends all had jobs, and college students got jobs all the time with no experience. Once, she went to a gas station near Chestnut Street and a large Mexican man said, with his eyes on her chest, “You’re here for the attendant position? You can work for me in another way.” Then, with a smile, the leer never leaving his eyes, he told her the job was taken. She began to think more about her mother’s devil, to imagine how the devil might have a hand here. She added and subtracted endlessly, determining what she would need and not need, cooking rice and beans each week, and heating up small portions in the microwave for lunch and dinner. Obinze offered to send her some money. His cousin had visited from London and given him some pounds. He would change it to dollars in Enugu.
“How can you be sending me money from Nigeria? It should be the other way around,” she said. But he sent it to her anyway, a little over a hundred dollars carefully sealed in a card.
GINIKA WAS BUSY, working long hours at her internship and studying for her law school exams, but she called often to check up on Ifemelu’s job searching, and always with that upbeat voice, as though to urge Ifemelu towards hope. “This woman I did an internship with her charity, Kimberly, called me to say her babysitter is leaving and she’s looking. I told her about you and she’d like to meet you. If she hires you, she’ll pay cash under the table so you won’t have to use that fake name. When do you finish tomorrow? I can come and take you to her for an interview.”
“If I get this job, I will give you my first month’s salary,” Ifemelu said, and Ginika laughed.
Ginika parked in the circular driveway of a house that announced its wealth, the stone exterior solid and overbearing, four white pillars rising portentously at the entrance. Kimberly opened the front door. She was slim and straight, and raised both hands to push her thick golden hair away from her face, as though one hand could not possibly tame all that hair.
“How nice to meet you,” she said to Ifemelu, smiling, as they shook hands, her hand small, bony-fingered, fragile. In her gold sweater belted at an impossibly tiny waist, with her gold hair, in gold flats, she looked improbable, like sunlight.
“This is my sister Laura, who’s visiting. Well, we visit each other almost every day! Laura practically lives next door. The kids are in the Poconos until tomorrow, with my mother
. I thought it would be best to do this when they’re not here anyway.”
“Hi,” Laura said. She was as thin and straight and blond as Kimberly. Ifemelu, describing them to Obinze, would say that Kimberly gave the impression of a tiny bird with fine bones, easily crushed, while Laura brought to mind a hawk, sharp-beaked and dark-minded.
“Hello, I’m Ifemelu.”
“What a beautiful name,” Kimberly said. “Does it mean anything? I love multicultural names because they have such wonderful meanings, from wonderful rich cultures.” Kimberly was smiling the kindly smile of people who thought “culture” the unfamiliar colorful reserve of colorful people, a word that always had to be qualified with “rich.” She would not think Norway had a “rich culture.”
“I don’t know what it means,” Ifemelu said, and sensed rather than saw a small amusement on Ginika’s face.
“Would you like some tea?” Kimberly asked, leading the way into a kitchen of shiny chrome and granite and affluent empty space. “We’re tea drinkers, but of course there are other choices.”
“Tea is great,” Ginika said.
“And you, Ifemelu?” Kimberly asked. “I know I’m mauling your name but it really is such a beautiful name. Really beautiful.”
“No, you said it properly. I’d like some water or orange juice, please.” Ifemelu would come to realize later that Kimberly used “beautiful” in a peculiar way. “I’m meeting my beautiful friend from graduate school,” Kimberly would say, or “We’re working with this beautiful woman on the inner-city project,” and always, the women she referred to would turn out to be quite ordinary-looking, but always black. One day, late that winter, when she was with Kimberly at the huge kitchen table, drinking tea and waiting for the children to be brought back from an outing with their grandmother, Kimberly said, “Oh, look at this beautiful woman,” and pointed at a plain model in a magazine whose only distinguishing feature was her very dark skin. “Isn’t she just stunning?”
“No, she isn’t.” Ifemelu paused. “You know, you can just say ‘black.’ Not every black person is beautiful.”
Kimberly was taken aback, something wordless spread on her face and then she smiled, and Ifemelu would think of it as the moment they became, truly, friends. But on that first day, she liked Kimberly, her breakable beauty, her purplish eyes full of the expression Obinze often used to describe the people he liked: obi ocha. A clean heart. Kimberly asked Ifemelu questions about her experience with children, listening carefully as though what she wanted to hear was what might be left unsaid.
“She doesn’t have CPR certification, Kim,” Laura said. She turned to Ifemelu. “Are you willing to take the course? It’s very important if you are going to have children in your care.”
“I’m willing to.”
“Ginika said you left Nigeria because college professors are always on strike there?” Kimberly asked.
“Yes.”
Laura nodded knowingly. “Horrible, what’s going on in African countries.”
“How are you finding the U.S. so far?” Kimberly asked.
Ifemelu told her about the vertigo she had felt the first time she went to the supermarket; in the cereal aisle, she had wanted to get corn flakes, which she was used to eating back home, but suddenly confronted by a hundred different cereal boxes, in a swirl of colors and images, she had fought dizziness. She told this story because she thought it was funny; it appealed harmlessly to the American ego.
Laura laughed. “I can see how you’d be dizzy!”