Despite Akin’s insistence that Christmas traditions were capitalist conjectures to fleece the populace, he took us shopping the following day, laughing at my mother’s excitement as she grabbed a giant turkey and purchased more lights that could cover the circumference of their home. He climbed ladders and cut through paper ornaments, sharing in my mother’s joy as the lights came on, his eyes not on the decorations but her face. He would do anything for her, I realised with a dull ache in my chest.
In America, my mother listened to classical music, the symphonies floating through the walls. She’d only just concluded her PhD programme at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where Akin taught and had taken up a postgraduate position on the department faculty. Occupying a prominent position on their living room wall was a framed photo of my mother in her graduation gown, cheesing at the camera. She’d refused to let us come for her graduation – ‘Don’t waste your money. Do you know how old I am?’ – but from the way her smile lit up the frame, the prominence of the print of her name at the bottom – Obianuju Nwaike, her father’s name – I knew it meant more than I could know. Life was beginning for her at last.
‘American media is too focused on America,’ I observed one day as I watched the evening news with Akin. ‘You would think the rest of the world doesn’t exist.’
A fledgling bond had begun to form between us. Akin possessed a genuine curiosity, an eagerness to learn, but it was the sensitivity with which he seemed to move through life that was most endearing. He was an encyclopaedia of experience and knowledge and yet he was in no way boastful or arrogant, and I found myself willing to talk, to share my thoughts.
‘American racism is more overt than British racism,’ he’d said to me during a conversation about my Twitter; he did not understand Twitter, but he understood race as a foreigner. ‘And the British are less willing to discuss it because class disparities take prominence over everything else there.’
‘Yes,’ I concurred. ‘Class issues are ingrained. But they would die before they admit something is racist.’ I mimicked a British accent. ‘It’s rude, not racist. It’s also part of the stiff-upper-lip culture of not talking about your problems. Personally, I think it’s how the establishment has been able to keep the masses from revolting. If you don’t speak about your problems, how do you get angry enough to protest?’
‘Now,’ he said, ‘It’s American exceptionalism at play. America is in love with America, it’s high on its own Kool-Aid. I moved here before the internet became a thing, and let me tell you, it was so hard to find news about any other country. I felt like the country was suffocating me. I wrote letters back home to assure myself that another world existed.’
I thought to myself that it was why he’d never developed an American accent, despite having lived there since the ’80s – a refusal to be subsumed by America.
‘You know we had a running joke in class during my postgraduate programme,’ I said, ‘that anyone speaking about a country outside of America should put up a map and flag so the Americans could know where they’re talking about.’
Akin laughed long and loud until I wondered if he only found the joke funny because I’d told it.
It was at a large store that our bond was truly solidified. We were getting groceries when I went searching and came face to face with a wall of guns. In a fit of panic, I bolted down the aisle and through the nearest exit I could find. Later, I would think of it as an embarrassing overreaction.
Bent forward, on the verge of hyperventilating, a hand soothingly rubbed my back until I’d gathered myself. I looked up to find Akin, his face a mask of concern. It was more care than my father had ever shown me.
A store attendant passed by. ‘Is everything alright?’
Akin looked to me for a response. I nodded slowly.
‘Is she your daughter?’
‘Yes,’ I said with assurance.
Akin lamented the big corporates that held the country in its grasp. ‘There’s no reason for guns to be sold in a grocery store. Year after year we lament school shootings and we let it continue in the name of freedom? Freedom birthed in fear!’
It brought a change in our relationship, a gradual eradication of its limitations.
My mother wanted to go shopping, just me and her.
‘You don’t spend any time with me,’ she said. ‘You’re always talking to Akin.’
‘You should be happy I love him as much as you do,’ I teased.
Understanding her need for time alone with me, Akin dropped us off at the mall with stern instructions to call him when we were done.
‘Ahn-ahn, you’re talking like we’ll get lost. I know Boston o,’ she said.
We moved between clothing stores, pop music playing from the speakers, lanky salespeople observing our movements.
‘You should buy that,’ I said to my mother when she tried on a cocktail dress that hugged her hips and accentuated her cleavage.
‘You don’t think I’m too old for something like this?’
‘Nobody is ever too old to look fine. You don’t even look your age.’
‘You should try on something. Maybe somebody will see how fine you are in America and keep you here,’ she joked.
I smiled. ‘I don’t want anybody to keep me here. I’m not ready to write exams to become a lawyer in America too.’
She faced the mirror, rubbing her hands against the dress. ‘Akin told me what happened the other day,’ she said suddenly. ‘Why didn’t you tell me about it?’ I sensed in her tone a creeping angst that I’d begun to keep things from her.
‘It was nothing,’ I assured her. ‘I’ve just never seen guns in a store before.’
‘It’s not nothing. You should tell me; I want to know.’
I nodded.
She turned away from the mirror to look at me. ‘I’ve never understood the gun laws here. They say it’s to protect against bad people but isn’t it easier to make sure nobody has guns at all? But that’s America for you, they do everything upside down. Even their measurement system is different.’
I laughed. ‘I know. Who else uses Fahrenheit in the name of God?’
‘During the riots, I was so worried. There are deep racial tensions and grievances unaddressed in this country. What if it breaks out into a full-on war?’
‘I guess they compensate for that with heavy investment in law enforcement,’ I said.
She decided against getting the dress, so we went into another store, shuffling through the racks. An auburn-haired teenager brushed roughly against my shoulder, not bothering to apologise.
‘Some of them don’t have manners here. They don’t teach them respect,’ my mother said with annoyance. ‘You should hear the things they say to me on campus. When the Ebola pandemic started this year, someone asked me the last time I visited home, as if that would determine how closely they could approach me. Can you imagine the rubbish?’
‘It was the same in England, even some of my colleagues started acting funny, educated people o.’
