Americans believed that jinns were beautiful harem girls or superstrong men who lived in lamps and who, when the lamps were rubbed, emerged to magically grant wishes. The truth was that jinns were spirits: good ones behaved like guardian angels; bad ones – the fallen ones – followed Iblis. Though Auntie always scolded Lisha when she heard her filling Fatma with preposterous notions about jinns, it was becoming increasingly apparent to Fatma that jinns did indeed inhabit her. Whether this had occurred at birth or as she lay unclean beneath the baobab tree, somewhere on life’s path she had come to a fork and chosen the wrong way. Iblis was closing in on her. She was bad right out of the womb, which was why her mother had given her away. Bad for having married a Christian. And now she was bad for wanting to deceive that Christian and for refusing his love. Bad for having doubted her destiny. She was no less greedy for power, really, than her Uncle Ahmad Siad Adan. “Bad always finds bad,” her evil jinn whispered in her ear as she tossed and turned each night. “Bad Fatma. Bad, bad girl.”
*
Elsa Martinez lived with her three children and her mother in a rundown rent-subsidized apartment. She was dark complexioned like Fatma, but stockier – denser – with long curly black hair and clothes so tight Fatma could see through the seams. Fatma missed her time with Miss Greene, whom she had never gone back to see. Perhaps Fatma knew that her friend would have tried to dissuade her from the thoughts she entertained. Perhaps her thoughts would have disappointed Miss Greene or perhaps Fatma had no interest in the advice Miss Greene might have offered, since she had made up her mind to taste life on her own. But she hobbled on one foot in America, while the other remained implanted in rich African soil soaked with tradition and human blood. Across the continents her legs stretched. Her African foot never caught up with the American one: it merely kept her displaced and off balance. “Africa is here,” one foot beckoned her. “You are an American now. Be glad. Africa is not safe,” the other whispered. She told Elsa about her mother and father, her country, even about Hussein. Elsa would nod and let out moans of sympathy, understanding every word of Fatma’s halting English. Elsa even cried; she was a good actress. And while Fatma would quickly have been able to size up an individual in Kenya or Somalia, she faced new rules in America: a different set of codes, signals, and humor that Daniel tried to warn her about. Her judgment played tricks on her. Who was good and who was bad, who was genuine and who was false, who was funny and who was not, were perceived according to her needs at a given time.
Elsa brought over rice and pork that Fatma now ate, though with reservations. How could Elsa afford to take food from her children? Fatma asked, when Elsa revealed that she had been laid off at Gemtek. Elsa vowed that she never stole from her children, that she would never let them go hungry, that she would do whatever it took to see that they didn’t. She began to cook at Fatma’s house, which bothered Daniel no end. Not that he complained; Daniel was a patient man – too patient. But Fatma could see the disappointment in his face when he returned from work to find Elsa occupying his kitchen. Sometimes he made excuses for not eating with them and left. Sometimes he sat down to dinner, but with a jaw almost too tight to chew food. Good. Maybe you’ll starve to death, Fatma thought. Maybe that will be the way to get free of you.
Together Elsa and Fatma shopped for groceries that Fatma always paid for, including the bag Elsa took home to her children. It was worth it to be able to move around comfortably with another woman, with no man’s demanding penis dangling between them. Yes, Elsa and Fatma became good friends, equals in age and as immigrants. She was Fatma’s first girlfriend in America. They went to Steigers department store and shared a dressing room. Their elbows banged into one another’s soft tummies and behinds and breasts as they tore outfits on and off. Elsa’s breasts were big and round, with large dark nipples. One day she caught Fatma staring at them. At first she was mad. “What you gawkin’ at, chica?” she said. “You funny or somethin’?” Then she laughed and said she was only kidding. She took Fatma’s hand and put it over one of her breasts. “Nice, eh?” she said. “Even after three niños. These titties are real. Not that jelly some ladies inject into themselves.” They were nice, hard and smooth. Fatma saw the black fur between Elsa’s legs when she tugged her jeans off and her panties came partway with them. Elsa saw Fatma’s too. One day Elsa stuffed a blouse into her panties. She said the plastic security tab was missing, and that it was only fair: it was meant for her. She took nail polish from the drugstore. She took doughnuts from the bins in the supermarket and dropped them into her large purse, just the way Fatma had stolen in Carlington. Elsa said that was what you did in America. You had to live by your wits when the chips were down. “What chips?” Fatma asked. “Your luck,” she answered.
Elsa taught Fatma the satisfying tastes of nicotine and coffee, nicotine and sugar, and especially nicotine and alcohol. She kept a tin of small hard raspberry candies she sucked on while she smoked. That’s what really hooked Fatma on cigarettes: the raspberry candies, and feeling independent and sophisticated. Every day they swore they would look for new jobs, but then they went out to lunch or shopped instead. It was like being back at International Airways, except that Elsa was much friendlier than the other hostesses had been. Fatma wanted to be like Elsa, to maneuver with the assertiveness and confidence she exhibited, to have men look at her and to look right back. She wanted to wear clothes like Elsa – clothes she never imagined she could wear – a size smaller than her own so that her breasts peeked out of low-cut knit tops. What she didn’t want was to be alone.
Elsa listened to Fatma when she described her family and her unhappiness with Daniel. While she listened, she took in the leather sofa, the new TV, and the rugs and curtains Daniel and Fatma had worked for. Fatma interpreted Elsa’s ravenous scrutiny as a compliment; she was proud of what she owned.
*
“If there’s something you like, maybe I can make it,” Elsa offered Daniel over dinner one evening.
“What’s your children’s favorite dish?” Daniel responded. Elsa put down her fork and stared straight into Daniel’s eyes.
In a soft sweet voice she responded, “Plátanos – los maduros.” “Maybe you should be home making it for them.”
“I’ll teach Fatma how to prepare it.”
“Maybe Fatma can go to your house and make it for your children,” Daniel said.
Daniel and Fatma had a fight that night. She had never seen him so angry. “Why you don’t like her?” she demanded to know.
“Because I don’t trust her. She’s using you.”
“For what?”
“For your nice house. For your food. And who knows for what the hell else.”
“Like your father use me for liquor?”
“At least he paid you for it.”
“She’s my friend.”
“She ruined your eye. She’s no friend. Why isn’t she home with her kids?”
“Her mother watch them.” “She should be watching them.”
“So now you perfect father. Too late.”
“This has nothing to do with our son. Is this what it’s all about? Are you trying to get back at me for Hussein? I’ve told you a million times I did not intend to get you pregnant. You’re the one who went back to Saudi Arabia. You played right into your crazy family’s hands.” “Now they crazy. You like them when you come to Kenya, though. You like them when you marry someone too young to know better. You never understand Muslim family. You think you do, but you don’t. You never understand me. You never understand my loneliness here. When I tell you about Hussein, you never even try to get him back.”
“Why did you wait until you’d already come back home to tell me?” he asked. They ’d been over this dozens of times; he looked as though he was about to cr y. Daniel had always been weak.
“You could do something after. You never fight, Daniel. You never try.”
“We can have more children, Fatma. The promise is over.” “No! No more loss.”
&
nbsp; “We can try to go and talk to your grandfather.”
She didn’t believe a word he said. She no longer trusted him. “I’m tired of listening to everyone. No more. And now you don’t even like I have friend. Too bad.”
“That’s not true!” His look said he longed to touch her in some way, to feel the warmth of her arm, the softness of her face, but she stood still and impenetrable as steel. “There’s something about Elsa that’s all wrong. You can’t see it, Fatma, but I can. She’s not like you. You’re a princess.”
She looked around at the walls of the small house and laughed. “Some princess,” she said. “Maybe you don’t know this princess.” “Come on, Fatma. She’s this close to a hooker.” He drew his thumb and forefinger together. “Maybe she is a hooker. You’ve been here long enough you see them in the center of Rockfield. You know who I mean.” He made a fist and knocked it on the table as though he didn’t know what else to do with it.
“She’s my friend! She make me happy.” She lit a cigarette. Daniel grabbed it out of her mouth. For the first time he frightened her.
“Look what the smoke’s doing to your eye.”
Her and Elsa’s smoking made the Mombasa eye smart and tear up all the time. And because she didn’t care if Daniel was right about the smoking and about everything else, she knew they had come to the end of their journey together.
“I hate you,” she said.
*
That night she dreamt there was a porch roof beneath the window in the bedroom, just as there had been outside her window in Mombasa. She jumped onto the roof and slid down the pillars into a dhow, for Poplar Street had turned into a canal of sorts where her old friend Halima and Halima’s father waited for Fatma with a basketful of Auntie’s roast pig. Even the vegetables appealed to Fatma.
“How did you get here?” she asked Halima. “It was easy.”
“Where are we going?”
“To Saudi Arabia. We have come to take you to Hussein.” “But how did you know about him?”
“This is a dream, Fatma.”
Fatma wept with joy. She was about to tell Halima how her brother Hamal had beaten her when she ran away from Daniel the first time, but the boat began to rock so forcefully that she spilled out of it into the hard sea and hit her head.
“Open your eyes and save yourself, Fatma!” Halima cried from the boat.
But her eyes would not open. “Open your eyes!”
The voice grew louder, and Fatma realized she had fallen out of bed. She was glad her eyes were too swollen from crying to see Daniel kneeling above her, pleading with her to open them. There was numbness where her aching heart used to be; she was deaf to the wailing of the child inside her empty womb.
*
Daniel was afraid to let her go, afraid that she would make mistakes, afraid she could not survive alone. He had seen her into womanhood, but even mother birds push their babies out of the nest.
“It’s never only been about Hussein,” he said. “No.”
“Still, I was always hoping.”
“I try, Daniel. I try for long time.”
“I’m not abandoning you,” he assured her. “We’ve come to a decision.”
“I know.”
“I hope to God you do.”
“He look like you, Daniel. Hussein look like you.”
Daniel left without any fuss: he was a peaceful man, always a gentleman – the only man Fatma would eventually realize ever really loved her. They closed the artifacts shop. He went back to school to study social work. She would one day come to think of herself as his first case gone wrong.
Lady Liberty
Daniel gave her the house on Poplar Street, along with some cash. He said the house had been her idea anyway, but she thought it made it easier for him to leave her. Occasionally Elsa spent the night, and it reminded Fatma of being with her sisters when she visited the ranch in Mogadishu. That house had so many rooms she had always slept alone, but the one on Poplar Street had only two bedrooms: hers and Daniel’s, and the small nursery. Fatma liked sharing her bed with Elsa, laughing about men they had run into that day while they drank vodka and smoked cigarettes with nobody’s disapproving eye on them.
One night while Elsa was sleeping, Fatma cupped the soft breast that had fallen out of her camisole like a melon ripe for the picking. Elsa’s skin was silky smooth, and Fatma kissed her all over her plump face. Elsa continued to sleep undisturbed – that is until she opened her eyes and Fatma realized she had been awake for quite some time. Fearful of Elsa’s reaction, Fatma backed off. But Elsa smiled and guided Fatma’s hand under the sheet and inside her panties. She moved it around her moist secret spot until she pressed Fatma’s hand so hard it hurt and Fatma felt the spot pulsate as Elsa moaned with delight. Now both of them were breathing heavily, but only Elsa had been satisfied. Unconcerned about Fatma’s gratification, Elsa turned her back and said, “Ay, look what you made me do, puta.”
Surprised by what she’d just done and confused by Elsa’s reaction, Fatma lay watching Elsa sleep for hours, until she too drifted off. When she woke in the morning, Elsa was gone. Weeks passed without a word from her. Fatma hated living alone on Poplar Street, in such a remote part of the city, in a house filled with nothing but sadness. Daniel would have helped her plan her next step, and she missed having him to manage the little messy details of living in America and to blame for ever ything that went wrong.
When Fatma told Auntie about the divorce, Auntie was beside herself. What was a young woman to do in such a big country without a man to protect her? Uncle Oliver said he was disgusted with the whole bloody bunch of the Kornmeyers, including Fatma, for having made such a disaster of Kilimanjaro.
“Come home, binti,” Auntie begged.
“Pay your own way,” Uncle Oliver added.
*
Fatma did not go home. Nor did she continue living in the house on Poplar Street. She phoned Jeannine Fournier, who had set up their business contract and had taken care of their divorce. Jeannine convinced her not to sell the house until she had a good job and some plans for the future. “After you pay off the mortgage, you’ll have nothing left. You could become homeless, you know. That’s how it happens in America,” she warned Fatma, who understood that she would one day need a home to which she could bring Hussein. “Besides, it’s not worth much right now in this market,” the lawyer added. Fournier agreed to list the house as a furnished rental and be the escrow agent of an account into which went the rent and out of which came the mortgage payment and her fee. Fatma put down a deposit on a one-bedroom apartment above an Italian deli on Main Street in the south end of downtown Rockfield. It was tiny but clean, with crisp floral bed linens and sheer white curtains over mini-blinds. There was a worn but clean cut-velvet sofa, a matching gold recliner, a coffee table on beige wall-to-wall carpeting, and a kitchenette with a built-in china closet. The bedroom could barely hold a bed with a blond wooden headboard and matching dresser. The bathroom was tiled – gray on the walls, white mosaic on the floor. A pink shower curtain showed two large swans facing each other as though engrossed in conversation.
Mrs. Lucchese, a widow, owned the flat and ran the deli along with her son, Sal, and younger daughter, Pia. Mrs. Lucchese, who had immigrated to America with her parents when she was a little girl after the Second World War, was probably a lot younger than she looked, with salt-and-pepper hair cut in a style that resembled an artichoke. She never wore makeup, and her black-rimmed glasses matched her hair and hid her eyebrows. The Luccheses told Fatma that there used to be a big Italian population in the south end of town. To Fatma, it sounded like Italian Somaliland, in the southern regions of that country. But just as the community of Italian Somaliland had been altered when her uncle Ahmad had deported the Italians, so too had the south end of Rockfield begun to change by the time she moved there. Puerto Ricans from the north end of town were moving in and inserting, themselves among the Italians: Iglesia Cristiana Pentecostal sat sandwiched between An
gelo’s Barber Shop and Danza’s Bakery; Diaz’s Pawn Shop – WE BUY AND SELL IT ALL – appeared between Casa Lisa and Little Venezia Café. The Hispanic storefronts looked like afterthoughts, with their carelessly hand-painted signs taped onto the windows; the Italian ones were filled with family photos of christenings and weddings and graduations for all to see. We are established and fortified, and we were here first, the Italian stores proclaimed. A few travel and insurance agencies, with their fancy wooden signs engraved in gold, expressed the hope that Rockfield might be headed for yet another resurgence even as scruffy men in castoff parkas, shaking and smoking cigarettes, peered out from dark alleys.
Nothing happened in Rockfield after five, when the lawyers and insurance agents went back to their sleepy suburbs. Except for the occasional night when teenagers piled into the Civic Center for a rock concert, then ran back home as fast as possible when it was over, the town was dead. But for others, Fatma would soon learn, nighttime was when Rockfield came alive: with junkies and prostitutes, drive-by shootings and gambling rings. Iblis slithered through the alleyways and vacant tenements.
*
The Luccheses had a cousin who owned a pizzeria up the street and was caring for his sick wife. Getting her up in the mornings and ready for bed at night consumed a lot of time; he needed someone to come in first thing to mop the floor, clean the glass cases, turn on the ovens, and take the dough and cheeses and other ingredients from the refrigerator so that everything was at room temperature when he came in to begin cooking. Was Fatma interested, they wondered?
It wasn’t as glamorous as working for the airlines, but it was less boring and confining than putting circuit boards together, and she had to start somewhere if she was going to establish herself in
America and make a home for Hussein.
She awoke to the early morning perfume of garlic and basil and thyme, of sausage and eggplant fr ying, of simmering red tomato sauce that rose up from Mrs. Lucchese’s salumeria and entered her bedroom without knocking, just as Auntie’s cooking had in Mombasa. Sitting at a little round kitchen table beneath the window that faced the alley, she drank her coffee. She called this her countr y home, because a tree branch brushed against the windowsill and she breakfasted with the birds. The front windows, in contrast, looked out onto Main Street, but she liked that view too: the bustling traffic in the early morning; the sound of vendors rolling out their awnings and sweeping their sidewalks the way Mrs. Lucchese’s shy son, Sal, did – the way Fatma did too, as soon as she picked up the key from the Luccheses and walked up to the pizzeria. It was a welcome contrast to the isolation of Poplar Street.
Sometimes It Snows In America Page 8