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would tell you “Wait, my sister is coming to help.” The phone rang again and Mariama spoke in French, her voice rising, and she stopped braiding to gesture with her hand as she shouted into the phone. Then she unfolded a yellow Western Union form from her pocket and began reading out the numbers. “Trois! Cinq! Non, non, cinq!”
    The woman whose hair she was braiding in tiny, painful-looking cornrows said sharply, “Come on! I’m not spending the whole day here!”
    “Sorry, sorry,” Mariama said. Still, she finished repeating the Western Union numbers before she continued braiding, the phone lodged between her shoulder and ear.
    Ifemelu opened her novel, Jean Toomer’s
Cane
, and skimmed a few pages. She had been meaning to read it for a while now, and imagined she would like it since Blaine did not. A precious performance, Blaine had called it, in that gently forbearing tone he used when they talked about novels, as though he was sure that she, with a little more timeand a little more wisdom, would come to accept that the novels he liked were superior, novels written by young and youngish men and packed with
things
, a fascinating, confounding accumulation of brands and music and comic books and icons, with emotions skimmed over, and each sentence stylishly aware of its own stylishness. She had read many of them, because he recommended them, but they were like cotton candy that so easily evaporated from her tongue’s memory.
    She closed the novel; it was too hot to concentrate. She ate some melted chocolate, sent Dike a text to call her when he was finished with basketball practice, and fanned herself. She read the signs on the opposite wall— NO ADJUSTMENTS TO BRAIDS AFTER ONE WEEK. NO PERSONAL CHECKS. NO REFUNDS —but she carefully avoided looking at the corners of the room because she knew that clumps of moldy newspapers would be stuffed beneath pipes and grime and things long rotten.
    Finally, Aisha finished with her customer and asked what color Ifemelu wanted for her hair attachments.
    “Color four.”
    “Not good color,” Aisha said promptly.
    “That’s what I use.”
    “It look dirty. You don’t want color one?”
    “Color one is too black, it looks fake,” Ifemelu said, loosening her headwrap. “Sometimes I use color two but color four is closest to my natural color.”
    Aisha shrugged, a haughty shrug, as though it was not her problem if her customer did not have good taste. She reached into a cupboard, brought out two packets of attachments, checked to make sure they were both the same color.
    She touched Ifemelu’s hair. “Why you don’t have relaxer?”
    “I like my hair the way God made it.”
    “But how you comb it? Hard to comb,” Aisha said.
    Ifemelu had brought her own comb. She gently combed her hair, dense, soft, and tightly coiled, until it framed her head like a halo. “It’s not hard to comb if you moisturize it properly,” she said, slipping into the coaxing tone of the proselytizer that she used whenever she was trying to convince other black women about the merits of wearing their hair natural. Aisha snorted; she clearly could not understand whyanybody would choose to suffer through combing natural hair, instead of simply relaxing it. She sectioned out Ifemelu’s hair, plucked a little attachment from the pile on the table, and began deftly to twist.
    “It’s too tight,” Ifemelu said. “Don’t make it tight.” Because Aisha kept twisting to the end, Ifemelu thought that perhaps she had not understood, and so Ifemelu touched the offending braid and said, “Tight, tight.”
    Aisha pushed her hand away. “No. No. Leave it. It good.”
    “It’s tight!” Ifemelu said. “Please loosen it.”
    Mariama was watching them. A flow of French came from her. Aisha loosened the braid.
    “Sorry,” Mariama said. “She doesn’t understand very well.”
    But Ifemelu could see, from Aisha’s face, that she understood very well. Aisha was simply a true market woman,