“It’s Christmas Eve, Walter!” Beverly said, her eyes welling up. “Come on, Dad,” Daniel protested, faintly. But Fatma could
see that this house was no different from Auntie’s, and that like
Uncle Oliver, Daniel’s father had the last word. Suddenly Walter was handing Daniel and Fatma their coats and ushering them out the door, leaving Beverly to sulk at the table.
They drove a short distance and pulled into a parking lot beside a smoky, nearly empty bar where, to Fatma’s horror, topless girls were dancing on a stage. Asked for identification, Daniel showed her passport, which said she was twenty-one. He had had to lie about her age to take her out of the countr y. When one of the dancing girls approached their table, Walter stuffed a ten-dollar bill into the girl’s g-string. Daniel shook his head; Fatma lowered hers. The room with its decadent behavior was spinning around her.
“I want to go home,” she told Daniel.
“This is not customary, Fatma, believe me,” Daniel said. “Just a little while longer, please. I haven’t seen him in four years.”
“America is evil!” Fatma cried to Auntie on the phone later that night. “The women are more naked than the foreign women on the beaches at home!” She told Auntie where they had gone, how she had looked in every direction, trying to avoid seeing the scantily dressed ladies and the groping men. Horrified, Auntie persuaded Uncle Oliver to wire money. Three days later, Fatma was back in Mombasa.
*
This time her brother Hamal did not have to travel to Mombasa. The fighting in Ogaden had sent millions of refugees into Somalia; the homeless were everywhere. Besides, opposition to Uncle Ahmad’s rule was coalescing; Fatma’s family wasn’t safe. A military man like all her brothers, Hamal had taken care of himself by finding a diplomatic position across the border in Kenya. Unlike the sisters who had already moved to Europe with their husbands, or her spinster sister Kamilah in Saudi Arabia, the others – the unlucky ones like Ayasha – stayed on in Mogadishu, ready to defend their mother’s estate.
“He is not rich!” Fatma cried to Uncle Oliver. “You said his family was rich!”
“He is rich compared to most Kenyans. And he is my friend. He saved my life.”
“I know all about the war and the American who saved your life.” She couldn’t imagine Walter Kornmeyer saving his own life. “And if you send me back to America, there will be a third war.”
“Fatma, you will adjust to the Kornmeyers. You will adjust to America. It’s for your own good. There is no life for you here. There is too much instability. Business is bad.”
Her other brothers were called to Mombasa. For two weeks they ate a lot and from time to time discussed her predicament until they reached a decision: she was Daniel’s wife, and she belonged with him.
“One has to fit in wherever one is,” Hamal quoted a Somali saying.
“You will learn to like living there,” Uncle Oliver said.
“Just as you will learn to love your husband,” was all Auntie said, drawing from experience and offering one of her own proverbs: “Patience is the key to tranquility.”
*
Daniel met Fatma at the airport in Boston. It snowed all winter; she didn’t leave the house until spring. She was not made for life in the bleak city of Carlington. She was an island girl.
Mombasa Eye
Walter Kornmeyer preached the golden rule. “It means be a good Christian,” he said in a loud voice, as though volume would aid Fatma’s English comprehension. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Someday you’ll understand this. Someday I hope you’ll be one of us.” Daniel didn’t translate when she said that she already was one of them since she had one head, two arms, and two legs. Fatma had begun to think that Walter Kornmeyer’s last good deed had been his heroic rescue of Uncle Oliver, because she observed that Walter said one thing but did another.
She couldn’t understand his fascination with the strip club. Unlike Daniel, he didn’t seem much interested in sex – not with his wife, at least, who watched talk shows until well after midnight, long after Walter had happily gone to bed without her. And while he preached his Golden Rule and gave in to tenants, neighbors, and others outside the family, from time to time Fatma could see frustration building within him. That’s when he turned nasty to his wife and son – in a nice way. Looking back on it, Fatma would see that the times he claimed to be protecting his family from danger were the times he was trying hardest to gain respect, because his family were the only people he could control. He gave Beverly less money for groceries, saying the economy was headed downward. He wouldn’t let Daniel use the car. Although Daniel thought it was fine, Walter was sure there was something wrong with it. Walter managed the produce section of Fine Foods Supermarket. It soon became apparent to Fatma that all he knew was fruits and vegetables.
Beverly provoked her husband’s tyrannical side. She often gave him a choice for dinner: steak or chicken, broiled or fried. If he requested steak, she made chicken. If he said broiled, she fried it. Fatma came to anticipate the dinner scenes that followed – the tightening of Walter’s jaw as he gazed down at his plate, the deep breath, the murmuring. The next day, or even that night, a new restriction was announced, which made Beverly get all huffy or teary. Their marriage was a dance for which they set up their own obstacle course. Daniel seemed reluctant to translate at these times, perhaps hoping Fatma would remain oblivious to goings-on that he had grown accustomed to. But she must have understood enough for their behavior to rub off on her, because one day he would find herself caught up in a similar but far more dangerous marriage waltz of her own.
Walter made fun of Daniel’s desire to help others – or at least Daniel’s way of going about it – which seemed yet another contradiction of his Golden Rule. He discouraged Daniel from becoming a social worker and pushed him toward business, boasting that he would become an international entrepreneur. That’s when Fatma learned that she wasn’t the only prize Uncle Oliver had handed over to the Kornmeyers. He had offered to back the young couple in a venture, one he also stood to gain from. They would establish an artifacts shop. Uncle Oliver would provide the capital investment and inventory; Daniel and Fatma would run it.
Soon after Fatma and Daniel arrived in the United States, Uncle Oliver had sent Fatma a cashier’s check for ten thousand dollars that was to provide the first year’s rent for the artifacts shop, Kilimanjaro, to be located in the mall beneath the downtown Rockfield commercial towers. Jeannine Fournier, fresh out of law school and the daughter of Walter’s boss, set about drawing up the contract for the business and arranging for the lease. The entire process would advance the careers of the younger generation and bolster the egos of the older. Uncle Oliver sent a list of instructions and provisions concerning the business. After a year, most of the profits would finance a second store in one of the wealthier Rockfield suburbs. If that one was successful, they would open another shop in Worcester, and yet another in Boston, until a chain of African-artifacts stores dotted Massachusetts and eventually the entire United States. Although Fatma would be the legal proprietor when she turned twenty-one, Uncle Oliver had made provisions for an increase in the cost of inventory that limited her profits. She couldn’t help but feel that she had been sent to America to salvage his enterprise.
*
She began to understand bits of the conversations that went on around her but, in an attempt to remain outside of her in-laws’ control, she refused to let on, finding it easy to dance Kornmeyer-style. While they waited for the first shipment of inventory, Daniel took a job delivering furniture in Rockfield and she spent her days with her mother-in-law.
“Do you want to mop the floor or dust?” Beverly would say, carefully pronouncing each syllable, her large mouth opening and closing so slowly Fatma had time to examine Beverly’s silver fillings. Beverly held out a mop in one hand and a piece of Walter’s old white boxer shorts in the other. She knew Fatma understood the exaggerated gestures she made when she s
poke; she simply didn’t understand that Fatma didn’t do housework, that she was a princess. She encouraged Fatma to cook with her but, even when Fatma didn’t resist, she did nothing to Beverly’s satisfaction: Daniel’s mother recut the kielbasa Fatma had sliced too thick or rescrambled the eggs she had not beaten enough. Fatma continued to work lackadaisically and used ignorance as an excuse to be rude to her mother-in-law because Beverly Kornmeyer’s whiny nature irritated her no end.
“You don’t like me, do you?” Beverly said one day as Fatma let the beef broth Beverly had just made vanish down the drain. A colander of neck bones and fat sat in the sink beside the bowl the soup was to have been filtered into. Fatma hadn’t intended to do it; she had simply thought about doing it to annoy Beverly, and before she knew it she was doing it – and enjoying it.
*
While Daniel fell farther and farther away from Muslim culture, Fatma did her best to stay on the Islamic path around which her life had centered, though she did so more out of obligation to her parents and Auntie than from devotion. She knelt facing east five times a day on the woolen prayer rug with brightly colored swirls and geometric patterns that she kept rolled up beside the bed. Prayer before sunrise was the only time she felt comfortable, because at all other times Beverly was there in the apartment either watching or listening – eyebrows knitted up, lips puckered, trying to figure Fatma out. Beverly told Daniel she thought Fatma might have some personality disorder, since she spent so much time each day scrubbing her hands and forearms and feet and dribbling water on her crown like John the Baptist. “It’s Muslim ritual,” Daniel told her. “They – we – have to clean ourselves if we’ve touched anything dirty or another person before we pray.” He had spoken in the first person, but Beverly knew her son better than anyone else and, aware that religion had never been a priority in his life, she guessed he believed no differently where Islam was concerned.
“Even if the person is clean?” Beverly was the only person Fatma touched during the day, and only if they handed the other something or accidentally brushed in passing.
“No person is clean,” Daniel said.
The morning after the soup incident, the prayer rug was nowhere to be found. By noon prayer time, Fatma still hadn’t located the rug. At three o’clock she washed herself as usual and found Beverly in the mustard yellow housedress she wore every day, hanging the wash out on the clothesline that stretched from a post on the back porch to a telephone pole across the alley. She almost never used a dryer unless the temperature dropped below freezing. She liked the freshness of outdoors, she said, although she rarely ventured into it.
“Msala?” Fatma demanded to know where her rug was. Beverly’s puzzled expression meant she didn’t understand. Daniel came home and found Fatma in tears. Beverly said she
had just wanted to clean the rug: it was so old and dirty, and she knew how important cleanliness was to Fatma. In a fit of insomnia she had put it into the washer during the night and then, because it was so heavy and would have taken so long to dry on the line, put it into the dryer and forgotten about it. “She’s lying!” Fatma told Daniel (they still spoke only Swahili to each other) when he explained Beverly’s motives. The episode had nearly destroyed the treasured carpet that had been with Fatma for as long as she could remember and that was now frayed, faded, and shrunken. “You know she prays throughout the day,” Daniel said to his mother.
“I only meant to help. I can’t seem to do anything right around her. Please tell her I’m sorry.”
“Tell her yourself,” Daniel said. “I’m sorry, Fatma. Really, dear.”
Fatma thought Beverly might really be sorry, and that she probably had forgotten about the rug, but only because she had wanted to. Fatma’s customs were as irritating to Beverly as Beverly’s were to Fatma.
Daniel assured Fatma that, as soon as the store got under way and they had saved enough money, they would move into their own apartment. But Daniel seemed to be settling back a little too comfortably into the surroundings he had not so long ago cast aside for the unknown, and she feared it wouldn’t be long before he forgot the urgency about a new apartment, or that when the time came he wouldn’t have the nerve to leave if his parents didn’t want the couple to go.
*
Fatma needed to get away from Beverly. As the sun grew stronger and birds began chirping, she took to walking into town. Downtown Carlington was small, several blocks at best – a dreary sort of place, especially in winter, with drab buildings and small unattractive shops so unlike the pastel hues of Old Town Mombasa. Each day she made a circle. She went down Centre Street, passing a few clapboard houses on her right, the shops on her left. City Hall was like her, out of place, an imposing brick structure with a large round stained-glass window and a rectangular clock tower topped with a weather vane. She crossed Butler Street with its Rivoli movie theater where Daniel always wanted to see complicated love stories with lots of dialogue she couldn’t understand. She hated those movies that got Daniel excited and eager to make love. From there the street sloped downward to Front Street and the old redbrick mill buildings that were now an industrial park. Then came the river. It was the river that sustained Fatma in Carlington. In the heat of summer, which finally arrived like a miracle, she watched the dirty water and pretended it was the sea, and that she saw her family and all the fancy tourists of home in it. She pretended briefly that she was home, before she looped around and went up Ridge Street and back over to Union and the apartment. In the evenings when he wasn’t working, Daniel joined her on a walk. He would put his arm around her, draw her close to him and kiss her on the cheek or forehead. But she always wriggled out of his grasp.
“It is really okay here. How many times do I have to tell you that?”
But it was so hard getting used to displaying affection in public, and the way women walked around with skin showing everywhere: bare arms and legs sticking out from shorts and skirts that just covered their behinds, necklines revealing half their breasts.
“I am who I am,” she reminded him.
“I’m not asking you to change, Fatma. Just try to adjust.”
“Daniel, I can’t be new,” she said.
*
The first shipment of artifacts arrived in midsummer, and Daniel quit his job at the furniture store. In the beginning Fatma went with Daniel each day to the shop, where she was to remain silent when customers entered, for fear they would think Daniel and she were plotting in Swahili to fleece them. As Daniel suggested, she wore colorfully festive outfits and headwraps not worn by Muslim women, and sat in a corner like a mannequin transported in a crate along with the other knickknacks. Before long he told her not to bother to come down at all, because the presence of a black woman in foreign dress must have been frightening the professional white clientele from the wealthy suburb. His decision suited Fatma just fine, since Beverly had begun to go to the shop every day to help out and she had even asked for a small salary. Time alone in the apartment would be like smearing cool salve on a burning wound.
What to do with Fatma, however, became the new Kornmeyer preoccupation. After dinner one evening Beverly sat munching on the raisins she had plucked from a pound cake, while Walter gobbled up the remaining loaf, which now resembled a block of Swiss cheese. (Sometimes Beverly picked blueberries out of a muffin, which Walter then finished off, or she spooned the filling out of a slice of pie, leaving him to devour the crust. It embarrassed Fatma when they did this, because it seemed such an intimate affair, a mutually satisfying act like making love. Maybe this was the closest they ever got to it.) It was time, they all agreed, for Fatma to learn English. Why she had resisted seemed of no interest to anyone, not even Daniel, who was growing impatient with her. She was going to apply for naturalization after she’d been in the States for three years, and she would have to be somewhat proficient in English. But her mother’s hatred of Anglo-Christians had nearly severed her English vocal cords long ago and left them badly damaged.
Fatm
a agreed to go to school two nights a week. The classes were held at the high school. The teacher, Mrs. Dolan, was a stocky woman with red-framed glasses and short black-and-gray hair that stuck out like wet feathers from every part of her head. At the beginning of class, she made the students recite pronunciation drills out loud and in unison. She gave them a sound, and they made the changes she pointed to. Luck, muck, tuck, buck, duck, suck, puck they recited one evening. Fatma had never heard this kind of chanting coming from Daniel’s schoolroom. When she had peeked into the room, Daniel was usually bent over a student’s bench, whispering the correct pronunciation as the student read, trying not to embarrass the child. Fatma stayed silent as usual, until one day Mrs. Dolan pointed to f by mistake. “Fuck!” Fatma yelled, as loud as she could, along with the others. Most of them didn’t understand what they were saying, but Fatma knew, because Daniel said that all the time when he was angry. Mrs. Dolan’s face became as red as her glasses. It was the only time Fatma laughed in class.
The Cambodians, the Colombians, and especially the Russians made a lot of progress in Mrs. Dolan’s class, while Fatma sat like a tiger trapped in a sandpit. This was not the kind of school she had attended in Mombasa, and these people were not her friends, who knew what countr y they belonged in. With each day away from home, Mombasa overran its boundaries until it spilled over the entire continent of Africa and was fast encompassing Fatma’s world. She missed Auntie more than ever. She missed Mogadishu and her father and brothers and sisters. She even missed her mother.
Sometimes It Snows In America Page 4