Because of Daniel’s status, Daniel paid women to bring water from the village, carrying it for hours in fifty-pound orange or yellow plastic jugs strapped to their backs with ropes that cut into their bony shoulders. Sometimes the women were very pregnant. Transferring it into buckets and standing on a ladder outside a three-sided wooden enclosure next to the smelly outhouse, the women poured the water over Fatma for her shower. “What are you looking at?” Fatma asked when they stared at her naked body. The women just smiled, having no idea what she’d said and making no attempt to understand her.
It was Daniel who taught Fatma how to wash clothes with this water and who tried to teach her how to cook. He liked to prepare a goulash that made her sick to look at.
“What is that?” she asked the first time he made it. “You should try it before you pass judgment.”
She had clearly offended him, so she tried it. She hated it. She had grown up with the rich, Italian-influenced food of Somalia, with Auntie’s succulent roasts. But she ate it rather than learning how to cook: she was spoiled, having grown up with Lisha and Kiah as maids. The only thing she knew how to make was pumpkin dessert, because she had liked it and watched Lisha steam the pumpkin and scoop out the flesh hundreds of times. Lisha would let her stir the pumpkin and coconut milk and spices until it all became pudding. “Never stop stirring,” Lisha would say. “Never let it burn.” And while Fatma stirred, Lisha talked – about Lamu, the religious Muslim community north of Mombasa where she was from, and about jinns.
According to Lisha, the people of Lamu had always believed in the existence of jinns. Created by God out of fire, they were spirits who lived in trees, toilets, and other dark hiding places. Jinns could live in your mind, which could be helpful or damaging, depending on the jinn. They were ghosts. They could be guardian angels. They could be the devil. They could be healing or a death sentence, protectors or nuisances. To lose a good jinn was to lose a part of you. Auntie laughed at Lisha’s belief in jinns and the stories she told Fatma. Auntie said the people of Lamu overused them because of their ignorance about disease and modern medicine. Jinns – good or bad – caused anything unexplainable. But Lisha held her ground. “You were born with a full head of hair and consequently an evil spirit, a bad jinn,” she said repeatedly. “Your mother should have taken you to a healer right away to discover what the jinn desired, to make it go away. A goat would have been sacrificed and coriander burned. The sweet smell is pleasing to jinns. Now your evil jinn will plague you. But respect your good jinn. It will be your salvation one day.”
*
In Katundu, Fatma and Daniel walked ten miles down a dusty dirt road into town to buy food and pick up mail. If they were lucky, they caught a matatu, a minivan that served as a bus, but these didn’t run on any particular schedule, and at times it was faster to walk than wait for one. It wasn’t the walking that bothered Fatma so much. Daniel always carried the groceries in his backpack, and besides it gave her something to do. It was the snakes that sometimes appeared out of nowhere and slithered onto the road that made her uneasy. Since coffee and tea plants attract them, snakes were plentiful in Katundu. Yet she couldn’t help but feel that it was she who attracted the snakes, that having married a white Christian must have angered her good jinn and would always cause her to attract them.
*
Three weeks passed after their wedding before she let Daniel touch her again – really touch her. Their first night as man and wife in Mombasa had been something to get through. Daniel was clumsy about doing what a man does to a woman. She had lain rigid with her eyes closed throughout the ordeal, which was every bit as horrible as she had anticipated. The chattering and snoring of the old women who kept vigil outside the door had probably made Daniel nervous and led him to perform mechanically rather than make love. At the time she didn’t understand the difference between these things. In Katundu, however, he began by stroking her hair with a smooth, gentle touch. When she turned away, he gently rubbed her back. Sometimes he passed his index finger over the tattoos on the insides of her forearms (which tickled her) and asked what each image stood for. They had been put there when she was a very small child. All her brothers and sisters had them. There was the flower, which was the family’s symbol; then the hearts – one on each arm – that represented the love of both parents. And there was her name, crudely printed. Maybe having the names on his children’s arms helped her father to tell one from the other, there were so many.
One night she lay there crying, because of Katundu, because of the Kikuyu, and because she was lonely, so she let him console her. While his hands moved in circles on her back, she turned to him. For the first time, he kissed her. It was a short kiss. Then came a longer one. Then a very long one. His hand moved down the back of her leg, then under her nightgown and up the front of her thigh to her breasts, large for such a young girl, where it roamed, like a hunter in new territory. Her nipples hardened and her breasts felt full. Her hips moved toward him, and, unlike their first night together, she actually saw him grow stiff and so big that she pulled back for a moment in shock. How could such a skinny man have such a giant uume? she wondered. As usual, Daniel understood. “Si jambo la mara moja,” he whispered – it takes time – and his hand played with her for a long time until she was wet and her private place beat like a heart. Then he turned her onto her back and got on top of her, careful not to rest his weight on her. Even then, she knew that Daniel’s light body could never crush her. He reached under the bed and pulled out a small red packet that he ripped open with his teeth. He removed a round object and unrolled it down his uume like a stocking up a woman’s leg. Her expression must have turned from bewilderment to hurt, because he sensed she thought he didn’t want his uume to touch her. “Hakuna mtoto. Mapema mno,” he said. It was too early for children. It was all easier than the first night, easier than she could have imagined. He guided his uume into her slowly, awkwardly, but with little pain this time. Though he never admitted it, he wasn’t very experienced himself. In the months that followed he tried to learn his way around her body, to discover how to make her desire him, how to satisfy her. They say that Somali women are circumcised to force a man to work hard to bring pleasure. But while Daniel may have worked hard, she had yet to really learn the meaning of pleasure.
*
She returned to Mombasa every chance she got. Most times Daniel stayed behind, even if he wasn’t teaching, because she never hid her desire to go alone. She did not know how to spare the feelings of others, nor did she care to. No one had ever spared hers.
During the years she lived in Katundu, the summer reunions in Mombasa were the best times for her. All of her sisters and brothers – Auntie’s nieces and nephews – came, including Rihanna, who had married an Italian and lived in Milan, and Kamilah, who lived with their grandfather in Saudi Arabia. They came from everywhere to Auntie’s summer feast, where they laughed and ate and the small children ran around singing and playing games until they fell from exhaustion into their mothers’ arms.
That first summer she returned, Fatma’s sister Ayasha had given birth to a ten-pound boy named Kareem on whom she doted endlessly. “And this is your Auntie Fatma,” she said, allowing Fatma to hold him. He was heavy and strong, and after a year or two was running wild like a captured deer set free. Ayasha spoiled him, everyone said. How could she not? He was her first and only child, born out of her forbidden union with a Bantu. Yet their mother’s alienation had not left Ayasha starving, as it had Fatma. Ayasha beamed with joy in the presence of her gentle husband and strong little son, knowing full well that her mother’s rejection had been the result of prejudice, that her husband had done nothing wrong.
Fatma cringed at the thought of having a big baby who seemed to grow like a jungle vine, and she tried to imagine how he could possibly have come out of the tiny hole that was big enough for an uume but never a baby.
“Do you miss me, Mama?” Fatma asked Auntie as she left Mombasa that first summer. To please
Auntie, she had worn her Somali gown throughout her stay, not the jeans she had grown accustomed to wearing in Katundu. Uncle Oliver was loading Fatma’s bags into the pickup; he turned and stared at Auntie, daring her to respond. Auntie’s lips remained sealed. Then it was time to leave, to board the train back to Katundu and to face the little adjustments Daniel and Fatma would make whenever she returned, that would lull them back into the monotonous rhythm of Katundu and of being man and wife.
*
Ever y few months Daniel threw his own party. That’s what he called it, but it was nothing like her family reunions. His school courses would end, and he would make a giant pot of goulash and buy lots of sweets. Three or four Americans – in appearance much like Daniel with their long hair and baggy western clothing – would show up at the door, other Peace Corps volunteers who taught in neighboring villages. One had a guitar, and they would all sing in English when she played and smoke marijuana, and eat. Sometimes they created small lines of white powder and sucked it up their nostrils with a tightly rolled American dollar bill – it had to be American money, they insisted. Fatma could not comprehend the nostalgia for their homeland and believed the magic powder would lose its potency if it passed through a five-shilling note. She would sit in a corner and watch them laughing, singing, and eating until their eyes became glassy and heavy and they fell asleep against the sleeping bags they didn’t bother to unroll. One couple usually found their way into the schoolhouse and the rest could hear them rolling around on the floor, moaning and panting. Daniel never forced Fatma to take part in anything frowned on by Muslim culture, although her father had had a liquor cabinet that could have rivaled any Christian man’s and that horrified Fatma’s mother. Fatma often got light-headed just breathing the smoke that filled their tiny cabin in Katundu, and it frightened her. She did like the music, even though she couldn’t understand a word. And she especially liked the fact that on these occasions Daniel had others to play with and left her alone.
*
She got used to Daniel. He was kind and she trusted him, but she never grew to love him. And she would never get used to life in Katundu, nor did she try. She was stubborn that way. She could have sat in on Daniel’s classes, but she refused to learn English, feeling her mother’s fingers digging deep into her shoulders, shaking them until her head nearly toppled, warning her to keep away. Perhaps that’s why she continued to wear a veil, even though she wore western clothes in Katundu, where the days were long and boring, and where she spent most of her time planning her escape.
She missed her family. She missed friends like Halima and the fun they had had on the forbidden shore, where they used to jump from one dhow to another, playing hide and seek or screaming secrets that the deaf fishermen couldn’t hear because their eardrums had burst from diving too deep for lobsters. Fatma missed Lisha and the stories Lisha would tell her in her bedroom or the kitchen or laundry room when she thought Auntie wasn’t listening. Yet, when Daniel’s commitment to the Peace Corps ended and he told her they would be going to the United States, she cried. She ran out of the house and was gone for hours. Daniel found her hiding under a baobab. “Never walk under that type of tree when you are unclean,” Lisha had always said. “Evil jinns know when a woman is unclean and will enter her, possess her.” She had her period that night, yet she lay beneath the baobab, sobbing. Nothing worse could happen to her than what was about to. An evil spirit had entered her body at birth, according to Lisha. That must have been the jinn that controlled her destiny. What else could it have been? she thought. It wasn’t necessary to go to America, she told Daniel. It was Katundu she had to leave, not Africa. But Daniel had renewed his two-year-commitment once already. Eyes filled with compassion, he cupped her wet face in his hands.
“You will like it,” he said. “I promise.”
The notion that she might like America was inconceivable. She was fifteen and terrified that in America she would be lost.
II
Carlington
The plane landed at Boston’s Logan Airport on Christmas Eve. No one was waiting for Fatma and Daniel. They took a bus to the city of Rockfield, on the other side of Massachusetts, where Daniel’s father met them and drove them to the small town of Carlington. It was like stepping into Auntie’s icebox when it needed a good defrosting: Fatma’s hands were numb, her toes throbbed with pain, the air smacked her face and left it stinging. Where had Daniel brought her? To the hell Uncle Oliver, on occasion, wished someone that had done him wrong would burn in. Only this hell didn’t torture with heat, just the opposite. She had never seen anything like this before, except in a picture of the Arctic: white mountains three times her height were everywhere, a wall of snow so high in the middle of town, she couldn’t see across the street. They walked on paths carved out of drifts several feet deep. Frozen snow glazed the rooftops, like the icing on sponge cakes she’d seen in fancy bakeries in Mombasa. Icicles like spears hung down to second-story windows. Vapor came out of their mouths when they spoke, and she feared her evil jinn was emerging, or her insides were rotting. Maybe she was dying. Daniel held her hand as she walked up the path to the front porch of his parents’ house. “You just missed the storm. Biggest one in twenty-five years.” Daniel translated what his father had said. “Snowed all day and night; then warmed up a bit and things started to melt, then the temperature dropped and we got another foot. I’m telling you, it was something.”
His father was tall like Daniel. When he removed his puffy down jacket, Fatma would see that he was thin like Daniel too, except for a belly that made him look as though he might be carrying a beach ball inside his clothing.
Her feet had wanted to slide out from under her in the airport parking lot, which had seemed as slick as oil. But here in Carlington the air was dr y, and white flakes flew around like bits of sawdust that disappeared when she caught them. The ground squeaked beneath her feet which were encased in a pair of patent-leather high heels in which she had been unsteady even in Kenya.
The house was large – three stories of avocado green shingles – but not nearly as large as Auntie’s. On either side of the entrance were three levels of bay windows. At the third landing a woman waited by an open door with a pine wreath and a red bow on it. Daniel’s mother was plain, not pretty and pale like the English or striking like the Saudis or the Italians. She seemed as bland as a boiled potato.
“Welcome,” she said, her eyes avoiding Fatma’s as she hugged her against a bosom as flat as Auntie’s ironing board. Then she abruptly let go and took a step back so that she could study her new daughter-in-law’s face. Her hands hovered above Fatma’s shoulders as if she were deciding whether or not to touch her again.
“She’s very pretty,” Daniel translated.
Fatma tried to smile. She wanted to cry. Beverly Kornmeyer proceeded to fuss over her son, insisting that he had grown (which he hadn’t) and that he must visit the barber the first chance he got because long hair on men, something she had never liked, was going out of style.
Daniel led Fatma to his old bedroom, which would be theirs now. The Kornmeyers had replaced Daniel’s twin bed with a double mattress and box spring that left almost no space for a dresser and a nightstand. The white walls smelled of new paint. The two windows had narrow white blinds with a beige ruffled curtain across the top, just like the other windows in the house. Everything in America seemed to lack color. Fatma asked Daniel if all kitchens in the United States were upstairs. He laughed. “This is an apartment,” he said. “We only live on the third floor.” She assumed that Uncle Oliver had wanted her to marry Daniel because his parents were rich and thought it odd for a wealthy man to live in such tiny quarters.
“Then what is downstairs?”
“Tenants,” he said. Then, to re-assure her: “Don’t worry. This is temporary.”
At dinner Daniel tried to translate everything he and his parents said, but Fatma was too tired and uninterested to keep up, and after a while told Daniel not to bother.
“You know that I’m Muslim now,” Daniel told his mother when she set the pink pork, topped with pineapple rings and cherries and dotted with cloves, on the table.
“I know you converted to marry Fatma, but I didn’t take it seriously.”
Daniel took in a deep breath. Islam had seemed such an easy and logical fit when they were in Kenya, even though he had never been completely sold on the religion.
“What didn’t you take seriously?” he asked. “The conversion or the marriage?”
Beverly apologized for having made ham. Daniel eventually ate it with relish; it had been his favorite. Fatma played with the food on her plate, sinking the peas and slippery pearl onions into the mashed potatoes just as Auntie had done when she made her patties. Surrounded by incomprehensible chatter, Fatma felt as small as those vegetables and, like them, longed to be buried. After the main course plates were cleared, Beverly placed a piece of pumpkin pie in front of her, and Daniel proceeded to tell Fatma that it was one of America’s oldest traditional dishes, really the same as Mombasa pumpkin dessert.
“The only difference, Fatma, is that it’s in a pastry shell, and the pumpkin comes from a can, and there’s no coconut milk. Oh, and the spices are different.”
“Then it’s not Mombasa pumpkin dessert,” she told him. Nothing in America, as far as she could tell, was like Mombasa.
Suddenly, Daniel’s mother screamed and threw her paper napkin onto her plate. Fatma watched for Daniel and his father to do the same. Perhaps this was how one ended a meal in America. Fatma clutched the napkin on her lap, waiting for a sign to toss it onto her dish. Maybe the meal, praise Allah, was finally over.
“No!” Beverly cried out again, looking at Daniel for support. Daniel merely shrugged his shoulders, and Fatma saw a weakness in him she’d never noticed before. Daniel, who had cursed American imperialism and who had taught her how to make goulash and love, step by step, suddenly had no influence in this apparent crisis. Walter, with his balding gray head, blotchy skin, and pregnant-looking belly, was no different from Uncle Oliver, and enjoyed wielding power over Daniel and his wife. Only, unlike Auntie, Beverly dared to speak out.
Sometimes It Snows In America Page 3