People were flattered to be asked about themselves and if she said nothing after they spoke, it made them say more. Before, she would have said, 'I know,' that peculiar American expression that professed agreement rather than knowledge, and then she would have started a conversation with him, to see if he would say something she could use in her blog. He had to be an academic, but not in the humanities or he would be more self-conscious. The graying hair on the back of his head was swept forward, a comical arrangement to disguise his bald spot. He turned to her and said, 'About time,' when the train finally creaked in, with the familiarity strangers adopt with each other after sharing in the disappointment of a public service. The man standing closest to her was eating an ice cream cone she had always found it a little irresponsible, the eating of ice cream cones by grown-up American men, especially the eating of ice cream cones by grown-up American men in public. A few other people were waiting on the platform, all of them white and lean, in short, flimsy clothes. The chocolate bar in her handbag had melted. It was unreasonable to expect a braiding salon in Princetonthe few black locals she had seen were so light-skinned and lank-haired she could not imagine them wearing braidsand yet as she waited at Princeton Junction station for the train, on an afternoon ablaze with heat, she wondered why there was no place where she could braid her hair. She liked, most of all, that in this place of affluent ease, she could pretend to be someone else, someone specially admitted into a hallowed American club, someone adorned with certainty.īut she did not like that she had to go to Trenton to braid her hair. She liked the campus, grave with knowledge, the Gothic buildings with their vine-laced walls, and the way everything transformed, in the half-light of night, into a ghostly scene. She liked watching the locals who drove with pointed courtesy and parked their latest model cars outside the organic grocery store on Nassau Street or outside the sushi restaurants or outside the ice cream shop that had fifty different flavors including red pepper or outside the post office where effusive staff bounded out to greet them at the entrance. Baltimore smelled of brine, and Brooklyn of sun-warmed garbage. Philadelphia had the musty scent of history.

Princeton, in the summer, smelled of nothing, and although Ifemelu liked the tranquil greenness of the many trees, the clean streets and stately homes, the delicately overpriced shops, and the quiet, abiding air of earned grace, it was this, the lack of a smell, that most appealed to her, perhaps because the other American cities she knew well had all smelled distinctly.

Americanah ngozi adichie