Chimamanda Adichie - Americanah

Ifemelu thought often of that afternoon early in her babysitting: Kimberly was out, Taylor was playing and Morgan reading in the den. Suddenly, Morgan put down her book, calmly walked upstairs and ripped off the wallpaper in her room, pushed down her dresser, yanked off her bedcovers, tore down the curtains, and was on her knees pulling and pulling and pulling at the strongly glued carpet when Ifemelu ran in and stopped her. Morgan was like a small, steel robot, writhing to be let free, with a strength that frightened Ifemelu. Perhaps the child would end up being a serial murderer, like those women on television crime documentaries, standing half-naked on dark roads to lure truck drivers and then strangle them. When finally Ifemelu let go, slowly loosening her grip on a quieted Morgan, Morgan went back downstairs to her book.

Later, Kimberly, in tears, asked her, “Honey, please tell me what’s wrong.”

And Morgan said, “I’m too old for all that pink stuff in my room.”

Now, Kimberly took Morgan twice a week to a therapist in Bala Cynwyd. Both she and Don were more tentative towards her, more cowering under her denouncing stare.

When Morgan won an essay contest at school, Don came home with a present for her. Kimberly anxiously stood at the bottom of the stairs while Don went up to present the gift, wrapped in sparkly paper. He came down moments later.

“She wouldn’t even look at it. She just got up and went into the bathroom and stayed there,” he said. “I left it on the bed.”

“It’s okay, honey, she’ll come around,” Kimberly said, hugging him, rubbing his back.

Later, Kimberly, sotto voce, told Ifemelu, “Morgan’s really hard on him. He tries so hard and she won’t let him in. She just won’t.”

“Morgan doesn’t let anyone in,” Ifemelu said. Don needed to remember that Morgan, and not he, was the child.

“She listens to you,” Kimberly said, a little sadly.

Ifemelu wanted to say, “I don’t give her too many choices,” because she wished Kimberly would not be so sheer in her yieldingness; perhaps Morgan just needed to feel that her mother could push back. Instead she said, “That’s because I’m not her family. She doesn’t love me and so she doesn’t feel all these complicated things for me. I’m just a nuisance at best.”

“I don’t know what I’m doing wrong,” Kimberly said.

“It’s a phase. It will pass, you’ll see.” She felt protective of Kimberly, she wanted to shield Kimberly.

“The only person she really cares about is my cousin Curt. She adores him. If we have family gatherings she’ll brood unless Curt is there. I’ll see if he can come visit and talk to her.”

LAURA HAD BROUGHT a magazine.

“Look at this, Ifemelu,” she said. “It isn’t Nigeria, but it’s close. I know celebrities can be flighty but she seems to be doing good work.”

Ifemelu and Kimberly looked at the page together: a thin white woman, smiling at the camera, holding a dark-skinned African baby in her arms, and all around her, little dark-skinned African children were spread out like a rug. Kimberly made a sound, a hmmm, as though she was unsure how to feel.

“She’s stunning too,” Laura said.

“Yes, she is,” Ifemelu said. “And she’s just as skinny as the kids, only that her skinniness is by choice and theirs is not by choice.”

A pop of loud laughter burst out from Laura. “You are funny! I love how sassy you are!”

Kimberly did not laugh. Later, alone with Ifemelu, she said, “I’m sorry Laura said that. I’ve never liked that word ‘sassy.’ It’s the kind of word that’s used for certain people and not for others.” Ifemelu shrugged and smiled and changed the subject. She did not understand why Laura looked up so much information about Nigeria, asking her about 419 scams, telling her how much money Nigerians in America sent back home every year. It was an aggressive, unaffectionate interest; strange indeed, to pay so much attention to something you did not like. Perhaps it was really about Kimberly, and Laura was in some distorted way aiming at her sister by saying things that would make Kimberly launch into apologies. It seemed too much work for too little gain, though. At first, Ifemelu thought Kimberly’s apologizing sweet, even if unnecessary, but she had begun to feel a flash of impatience, because Kimberly’s repeated apologies were tinged with self-indulgence, as though she believed that she could, with apologies, smooth all the scalloped surfaces of the world.

A FEW MONTHS INTO her babysitting, Kimberly asked her, “Would you consider living in? The basement is really a one-bedroom apartment with a private entrance. It would be rent-free, of course.”

Ifemelu was already looking for a studio apartment, eager to leave her roommates now that she could afford to, and she did not want to be further enmeshed in the lives of the Turners, yet she considered saying yes, because she heard a plea in Kimberly’s voice. In the end, she decided she could not live with them. When she said no, Kimberly offered her the use of their spare car. “It’ll make it much easier for you to get here after your classes. It’s an old thing. We were going to give it away. I hope it doesn’t stop you on the road,” she said, as if the Honda, only a few years old, its body unmarked, could possibly stop on the road.

“You really shouldn’t trust me to take your car home. What if I don’t come back one day?” Ifemelu said.

Kimberly laughed. “It’s not worth very much.”

“You do have an American license?” Laura asked. “I mean, you can drive legally in this country?”

“Of course she can, Laura,” Kimberly said. “Why would she accept the car if she couldn’t?”

“I’m just checking,” Laura said, as though Kimberly could not be depended upon to ask the necessary tough questions of non-American citizens. Ifemelu watched them, so alike in their looks, and both unhappy people. But Kimberly’s unhappiness was inward, unacknowledged, shielded by her desire for things to be as they should, and also by hope: she believed in other people’s happiness because it meant that she, too, might one day have it. Laura’s unhappiness was different, spiky, she wished that everyone around her were unhappy because she had convinced herself that she would always be.

“Yes, I have an American license,” Ifemelu said, and then she began to talk about the safe driving course she had taken in Brooklyn, before she got her license, and how the instructor, a thin white man with matted hair the color of straw, had cheated. In the dark basement room full of foreigners, the entrance of which was an even darker flight of narrow stairs, the instructor had collected all the cash payments before he showed the safe-driving film on the wall projector. From time to time, he made jokes that nobody understood and chuckled to himself. Ifemelu was a little suspicious of the film: How could a car driving so slowly have caused that amount of damage in an accident, leaving the driver’s neck broken? Afterwards, he gave out the test questions. Ifemelu found them easy, quickly shading in the answers in pencil. A small South Asian man beside her, perhaps fifty years old, kept glancing over at her, his eyes pleading, while she pretended not to understand that he wanted her help. The instructor collected the papers, brought out a clay-colored eraser, and began to wipe out some of the answers and to shade in others. Everybody passed. Many of them shook his hand, said “Thank you, thank you” in a wide range of accents before they shuffled out. Now they could apply for American driver’s licenses. Ifemelu told the story with a false openness, as though it was merely a curiosity for her, and not something she had chosen to goad Laura.