Sometimes It Snows In America

by Marisa Labozzetta

  Isaac and India’s apartment was on Trumble Street, a few blocks off Gaylord and not too far from the Royal Lion. Elsa took Fatma there, thinking she might be able to work her way back into Isaac’s good graces, yet she did so reluctantly. Fatma could tell when Elsa introduced her to India, that she was jealous of India, afraid that Fatma might prefer the beautiful Jamaican to her. Although Isaac told Elsa he didn’t want to work with anyone anymore, he must have sized Fatma up that first night as someone special, because the next morning he came to the pizzeria. Yes, he could use her help, and yes, there was much money to be made running errands for him that he no longer used Elsa for, because Elsa had stolen from him; users could not be trusted. And if he was pleased with Fatma’s courier services, there was even more money to be made in cooking.

  “I can’t cook,” she told him.

  He smiled. “Oh, I think you can learn.”

  Isaac had a flat on the other side of town. It was a laboratory of sorts, an empty apartment in a decent building that he also rented by the hour to other dealers who wanted to keep their business a secret. It was a place where Fatma could learn to make money, a place where he wanted to spend less time, because Isaac was very cautious and didn’t like having attention drawn to himself.

  And that was how she began to work one more job in America. While Mrs. Lucchese was cooking up a storm at the deli, Fatma, whose only miracle in the kitchen had been putting together a deluxe burger, would develop a most lucrative skill of her own over on Broad Street. After working her shift at Juicy Burger, she headed for what she called the double-barrel building: two semicircles of brick and windows running up four stories on either side of the entrance. It was across from the Baptist church and one block from the mosque, just a few streets down from the courthouse and the towers filled with attorneys’ offices. It was in a nice section of town, a place unlikely to draw suspicion.

  When she passed the mosque those mornings, she closed her eyes in the hope that the imam, who sometimes appeared in the door way and studied her as she walked past, would not be there. She was aware that he knew, without seeing the black buibui or hearing the sound of her voice, that she was no ordinar y woman on her way to work. He knew what her mother would never let her forget: he knew she was a Muslim woman. Once in the double-barrel apartment, however, and out of his sight, she closed the door on all that had been bad as well as good and decent about her childhood.

  *

  “You ever did anything bad?” she asked Pia one morning as they walked.

  “I let Johnny Premiano feel me up in an alley after school when

  I was in fifth grade. Wasn’t much to feel.” They both laughed. “I mean really bad.”

  “I used to steal from Stop & Shop in high school. It started with snatching a cookie from an open package. Then I started being the one to open the package and take a cookie. I progressed to taking entire packages that I slipped into my backpack. It became an obsession. Crazy. I just liked getting away with something. One day I put in an Eskimo pie, and the store detective saw me, and I knew it. He followed me around while I did more shopping, but I just wouldn’t put back this damn melting ice cream bar. It was like a game I was playing. I even went through the checkout and paid for everything else but the Eskimo pie! He nabbed me the minute I walked out of the store.”

  “He arrest you?”

  “He took me down to this disgusting cellar filled with crates of what smelled like rotting fruits and vegetables, and he put the fear of God in me, as my mother would say. He told me I could go to jail for what I’d done. That I would disgrace my family. After the lecture he said that I was ‘too pretty to go to jail’ and that he’d give me a second chance. I didn’t know what I was more afraid of: him, jail, or my mother finding out. Anyway, it cured me.”

  Fatma knew the thrill of getting away with something. She had felt it when she ran away on her wedding night, when she stole from the convenience store and Miss Greene. And she felt it now. Every other Tuesday, Isaac arranged a connection in New York City: maybe in Harlem, maybe lower Manhattan, maybe even midtown; it was all the same to Fatma. Her job was to meet Isaac’s friend, who was usually a nurse’s aide, in the lobby of some hospital, where they made the transaction right out in public. She gave him an envelope with money; he gave her a bag of powder. Then back she went to the flat in Rockfield, where she began to cook the way Isaac had taught her.

  She put some of the powder and water into an empty baby-food jar, added a pinch of baking powder to harden it, and simmered it over a low flame on the stove. Once it solidified, she cut some of it up into very small wedges the size of a fingernail, putting two or three of these into plastic bags. She packaged some of the loose powder for clients who sucked it up their nostrils in restrooms during their workdays as easily as they popped sticks of chewing gum into their mouths. And she added a pinch of tranquilizer or anything else addictive that Isaac gave her and cooked it into the crack she gave cabdrivers for her rides to New York.

  Isaac said his customers were upscale, with discriminating taste. They were safe clients with too much to lose from exposure, professionals like doctors and lawyers and even judges, who knew enough to eat before they got high so they would come down fast. They were rich junkies who could afford to eat. He said it was just a matter of time before drugs like this would become legal anyway, but in the meantime they needed to take advantage of the demand. It was like getting into the stock market at the right time, he said. They were foreigners but they were as smart as anyone else; why shouldn’t they make their fortunes while they could? She didn’t know anything about the stock market, but she knew some things about business. Uncle Oliver had been wrong about the market for African artifacts in Rockfield; Fatma had come to that conclusion early on. But from what Isaac said, there was clearly a demand for the goods he was selling. At times even Daniel and his friends had taken powder into their nostrils in Katundu. And if she was as cautious as Isaac, there would be nothing to worry about.

  “Think of it as an adventure, Fatma. You are like Christopher Columbus. You are discovering a new America,” Isaac said. “And watch the drinking, my friend. Stay alert.”

  “Pay attention!” Mrs. Lucchese had said. Keep alert, Fatma. Keep alert.

  “And watch out for Elsa,” Isaac added.

  Elsa had been right: besides the promise of being able to make money, what had attracted her to the business was India, and Fatma tried hard to make India like her. Fatma visited her from time to time and took her gifts, the way Auntie had taught Fatma to give to hostesses. Sometimes she went with flowers for the kitchen table or chocolates. In a way, Fatma courted India. And there were times when Fatma thought she had won her over when she was as warm as melted butter on a slice of toast as she knelt on her bony knees to scrub a molding or scrape up something that had spilled onto the red-brick-patterned linoleum floor. Unlike Isaac’s laboratory, this apartment was in a deteriorating section of the city. And while India kept it clean, it was sparsely furnished and its walls, the color of dead skin, needed painting. This surprised Fatma, until she realized that Isaac and India not only frugal saved every penny they possibly could, but that nice furnishings would only have raised suspicions about illicit income. Isaac also worked off the books, just as Fatma had, as a cook in a Greek take-out restaurant, and even that was a step up from the situations of other tenants in the building, who were on welfare and most of whom were addicts.

  What the apartment lacked in style it made up for with the rhythm of their orderly life, like the smell of spices India used that seduced Fatma as they talked over coffee. India couldn’t wait until she and Isaac had made enough money to quit the drug business, get out of Rockfield, and begin a family like normal Americans. They had tried when they first arrived in the States, but it had been too difficult for them to find any substantial work from prominent black employers, even though Isaac had worked in a bank in Jamaica. “We’re different,” she told Fatma, including Fatma in that we. “And we’
re ambitious. The others resent us for it.” It soon became apparent that it would have taken them a lifetime to achieve the comforts they sought. One thing had led to another, and Isaac had become a dealer. “A person has to do what a person has to do. If they don’t get it from you, they are going to get it from somebody else,” she said. “It’s just a business, Fatma. A means to an end.”

  Fatma’s longing for India must have been all too obvious and was probably distasteful to India, because there were times when India withdrew from Fatma and seemed as preoccupied as everyone else and as cold and remote as Fatma’s mother.

  Perhaps those days in Rockfield marked the emergence of the other Fatma. The notion was not so extraordinary. Her life was unfolding like a song in double time: two mothers, two countries of origin, two children in one birth, two jinns – and, eventually, two husbands.

  The Feast

  She should have listened to Isaac; she should have watched Elsa more closely. She should have remembered that whoever walks with unworthy people becomes unworthy. Elsa should have remembered that also. Bad always finds bad, Lisha used to tell Fatma. Bad Fatma. Bad Elsa.

  It didn’t take long for the entrepreneurial blood that flowed through Fatma’s veins to help her make money out of money. She used her new income to purchase more cocaine than Isaac had ordered on her trips to New York, and she established her own clientele in the bathroom of the Royal Lion and the alleyway behind it. Some of Isaac’s classy customers became her customers, because she undercut Isaac’s price. Two or three wedges of pure cocaine brought her between twenty and fifty dollars, depending on the going market price for a hit. A large cut – one chunk that kept someone high for hours – sold for eight hundred.

  Elsa and Fatma were drifting apart. Fatma was caught up with her jobs: one that kept her honest, one that made her rich. And Elsa was caught up in hers. When they did meet, it was at the Royal Lion, where they sat at the bar, drawing on cigarettes with one hand, cradling drinks with the other, while their feet played on the rungs of their wooden stools. “Why we come here?” Fatma asked her one night after she had drunk a good number of vodkas the way she liked her liquor – straight up.

  Elsa swung her long shiny mop of black curls now streaked with blond toward Fatma and looked at her as if to say You know damn well why you come here.

  “I tell you why we come, Elsa. To hide.” The Royal Lion had not only become a place for Fatma to do business but a place where she was known and even respected. The clientele masqueraded as a circle of friends who left whatever lives they led away from the place outside of the bar. The Royal Lion became their own secret world of camaraderie and depravity.

  “What’s the matter? Isaac finally get you in trouble, chica?” Elsa said with a certain amount of satisfaction. She hadn’t been jealous only of India; Isaac had never given her more work.

  “We come to hide from us, Elsa.” Fatma tapped her breast. “From ourselves. When your neighbor’s wrong, you point a finger. But when you wrong, you hide.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  Fatma didn’t answer. In Kenya they say Who does not even understand a look, does not understand long explanations. And so Fatma ended the conversation because Elsa was always ready for a good fight.

  “Maybe you helping yourself to a little of Isaac’s inventory. Better yet, maybe you helping yourself to his wife, funny girl.” Then she gave that loud cackling laugh of hers that made even the semiconscious look their way. “So tell me, what are you doing with all your money?”

  “You know I save it for my family.”

  “Oh, right. You’re going back to Africa or wherever you came from. Like I buy that.” “What you doing these days, Elsa?”

  Since Fatma had known her, she claimed she’d worked as a hairdresser, in a mini-mart, as an aide in a nursing home, and more recently as a model for a wholesale lingerie company. But she never had any money.

  “I’m a secretary for a plumbing supply store,” she said. “For a big boss with a big pinga.” She held her hands a foot apart.

  “Maybe we drink too much, Elsa.”

  “Maybe you’re no fun no more, chica. And maybe you can pay for my drinks. I got to meet my boss right now. He’s taking me to dinner.”

  “It’s midnight.”

  “Maybe he said breakfast.” She laughed again and slung her large gold lamé purse over her shoulder.

  “Why don’t you put some air-conditioning in this shithole,” she told the bartender. With her tiny skirt riding up toward her waist, she gave him a flash of her furry patch as she maneuvered off the stool, and he smiled. “Fuck you,” she said, tottering away on her stiletto heels.

  Fatma assumed Elsa meant the bartender, but she couldn’t be sure.

  *

  She had gotten so plastered that a few hours later, the ringing of the phone almost didn’t wake Fatma up. It was a sweet, sober Elsa, asking if Fatma would please come down to district court at 8 a.m. “Bring lots of cash,” she said. “I’ll pay you back.” Fatma tried to ask what had happened, but someone grabbed the phone out of Elsa’s hands, saying that her time was up.

  Fatma wasn’t sure what prompted her to help Elsa and expose herself to Rockfield’s legal system. Maybe Walter Kornmeyer’s Golden Rule had actually had an impact on her or maybe the side of her that liked to live on the edge prevailed, because she went to the pizzeria earlier than usual to get her work done, then took a taxi down to a place she had worked meticulously to avoid – the courthouse. She was directed to a courtroom where she found Elsa sitting in the front row with a bunch of hookers. From where Fatma sat, she could see one side of Elsa’s face: her smudged eye makeup made her look like a raccoon, her lipstick and rouge were worn off, her hair was all tangled. She appeared exhausted, all the bravado sucked out of her, and Fatma wondered what her night in an American jail had been like.

  “Case of Commonwealth versus Elsa Martinez,” a clerk sitting at a desk in front of the judge called after a while. A man in a tan suit got up and stated that he’d interviewed Elsa and that she was entitled to appointed counsel. Then the judge said something about a public defender, bail, and another hearing, and a court officer led Elsa out.

  Fatma didn’t know what to do, so she sat in the back watching the other women in skimpy shorts and skin-tight skirts and low-cut tops like Elsa to be called. Some got to walk out. Some, like Elsa, got led away again. A man slid into the seat alongside Fatma.

  “Are you Fatma Kornmeyer?” he asked. “Yes.”

  “Nick Benson.” He extended his hand. “The court’s appointed me to represent Elsa Martinez. She told me you might be here with her bail.”

  “I have money.”

  “Did you understand what just happened?” “Not really.”

  “Your friend was picked up for common nightwalking.”

  He looked surprised that Fatma wasn’t familiar with the term. “Tricking. Prostitution,” he explained. “She also violated her probation, so her probation officer has requested a preliminary hearing. Can you stick around for another hour?”

  Fatma nodded. Benson flashed a half smile and left. She wasn’t really surprised, but she was irritated that Daniel had had Elsa pegged from the moment he met her. She could leave now and be done with her once and for all, but she wanted to stay, and not solely for Elsa. There was something familiar about her attorney, and something ver y attractive. And how dangerous was it, really? She had plenty of lawyers who were clients. A lawyer wasn’t a cop. She found a pay phone and called Juicy Burger to say she’d be late.

  At about eleven, Elsa was brought back in. Her tired eyes swept the courtroom and, meeting Fatma’s, she smiled with relief. The man in the tan suit who identified himself as her probation officer handed her a sheet of paper. When her name was called this time, Benson stood in front of her and Elsa sat down. A lawyer in a gray suit asked for bail of two thousand dollars. Fatma had brought only one thousand. She wondered if she should take the money up to them anyway, but t
hen the lawyer in the gray suit said something about bail for an old case being revoked.

  “This case is continued to July twentieth for pretrial conference and hearing on violation of probation,” the judge said.

  Fatma kept waiting for someone to ask her to step up with the money, but they led Elsa away. She never turned around to look for her friend again.

  Fatma sat there for a while thinking they might bring Elsa back into the courtroom. When it finally emptied out, she left. It occurred to her to tell Elsa’s mother what had happened, but she had never met Elsa’s mother, or her children. She wasn’t even sure where to find them, because according to Elsa they moved around a lot. They didn’t have a phone; Elsa had always used a pay phone. Then she scolded herself, the way Mrs. Lucchese might have done, for giving a rat’s ass about Elsa.

  She was standing in front of the elevator when the man who had introduced himself as Elsa’s lawyer approached her again.

  “You still here?” he asked.

  A little laughter in his voice gave it a sexy, youthful quality that attracted her. She tried not to stare into his eyes, but she was trying to determine if they were gray or green. She said she felt foolish for having hung around so long.

  “I’m sorry, but with two prior offenses, probation violations, and dirty urine, bail was more than a long shot,” he said. “But thanks for waiting just the same.” He took a few steps away; then turned back around to face her. “Can I ask you something? What’s a nice girl like you doing hanging around someone like her?”

  Now she wanted to run as fast and as far away from the building as possible, before they locked her up too. But the attorney’s smile indicated he was concerned about someone who had been pulled into something she knew nothing about. Little did he know.

  “I’ll do what I can for your friend. But don’t make lunch reservations too soon.”