Sometimes It Snows In America

by Marisa Labozzetta

  *

  She skipped lunch that day; the smell of the burgers she put together made her nauseous. The courthouse had frightened her more than she realized. Recalling Elsa with her hands cuffed behind her back and being led away like a captured animal made Fatma’s throat dry and her head pound. After all, Elsa had been her guide to freedom in America.

  To make sure no one was watching her, Fatma now asked the taxi driver who picked her up for her New York trips to follow her for five blocks before she got in. Isaac was sending her more often now, sometimes three times a week. She routinely checked the locks on Isaac’s flat several times before she began to cook. She closed the blinds. She turned on the radio to drown out any sound she might make. Isaac had told her not to deposit large amounts of cash, because this was a giveaway. She hadn’t deposited any. She bought nails and a hammer, and nailed shut the drawers of the built-in china cabinet in her flat where she kept her money.

  Trouble was brewing like a monsoon over the calm seas as it always does. It had all been too simple. People got arrested every day: she had seen it with her own eyes. It had been as common as someone carrying a cup of coffee out of Dunkin Donuts.

  She met Isaac at Steigers’ Department Store later that day, and they exchanged shopping bags – one that had her cooking beneath clothing wrapped in tissue paper, and the other with her salary in cash similarly hidden. From the moment their eyes met, Isaac sensed trouble. “Come visit us tonight, Fatma,” he said. “India misses you.” In the warmth of their kitchen, over steaming coffee and fresh-baked rum-and-walnut buns, Fatma told Isaac and India what had happened to Elsa and admitted that she was worried about getting caught, and that she had probably made a mistake by showing her

  face in the courthouse. Her friends’ expressions never changed. “But you are not Elsa,” Isaac said. “That is why I asked you to

  work for me. That is why she doesn’t anymore.” “Just remember that it’s not forever,” India said.

  “You’re not Elsa. You are Fatma.” Isaac said it like a mantra, as though waiting for Fatma to deny it. “You are not Elsa. You are Fatma, aren’t you?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Liar!” Isaac screamed, his face contorted. “I don’t mind that you started your own business. I understand that. I even understand that you’ve stolen some of my clients. But I don’t understand your using my flat, and without the decency to tell me. And jeopardizing my clients and all that my wife and I have risked by going to a courthouse to protect scum like Elsa. We are finished. Give me the key and go.” With steady hands that surprised even Fatma, she boldly removed the key from her key ring and threw it on the table. Yes, she still had the cursed pride of Iblis. “And don’t tr y to use my suppliers in New York.” His voice resumed its calm. “They know you are untrustworthy. You are dead to them.”

  But Isaac was wrong. In the cocaine jungle, money speaks louder than loyalty. While her trips to New York became much less frequent, a few suppliers were quite willing to continue selling her the cocaine she was now audacious enough to cook in her own apartment. She found it exciting this new challenge of keeping her business a secret from Mrs. Lucchese. What did distress Fatma was losing India, who had shaken her head in disapproval at Fatma’s behavior. Fatma loved Pia, but she adored India – her beauty, her determination, their shared culture. She was Auntie and Ayasha and Fatma’s mother all rolled into one. Fatma would find a way to make big money, to hire the best in order to confront Grandfather. But she would never find another India.

  Then Nick Benson called to tell Fatma he thought she might like to know that Elsa would be spending six to eight months in jail. It had been nice of him, Fatma supposed, and something that considerate lawyers did. She had thought of him a lot after their meeting at the courthouse. He was the kind of man whose face and smell you carr y to bed with you at night, whose image tugs at your vagina and makes your heart race. The corners of your mouth curl upward as you remember the sound of his voice. The second time he called, he asked her out. He called at least once a week for the next month. He called on the morning of the feast. Wouldn’t she just have a cup of coffee with him? Despite the attraction, she refused. Isaac had been right about Elsa leading Fatma into trouble; she had stupidly tried to help Elsa, and now Elsa’s lawyer was after Fatma.

  *

  “The feast – it’s not what it used to be,” Mrs. Lucchese, in her long white apron that barely covered her large breasts, said, heaving a sigh and filling rolls with tomatoes, fresh mozzarella, and basil on a hot August day. Despite the vendors in their trailers selling pepper and sausage grinders, pizza, and fried dough stuffed with anchovies or dusted with powdered sugar, the crowds gathered for the Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel would be in for her panini. “Used to be such a special day. What a party! Everything’s changed.” Mrs. Lucchese looked at the crowds of Puerto Ricans wandering the streets. “What do they celebrate? You tell me.”

  “What does it matter who’s celebrating, Ma?” Pia said. “As long as they celebrate. Today we’re all Italians.”

  “Are you Irish on Saint Patrick’s Day?” “Come on, Ma.”

  “Beh!” Signora Lucchese uttered, thrusting her palms up in the air as if to say, “So there you have it.”

  “Shh!” Pia whispered, indicating that her mother had offended

  Fatma.

  “Why? She’s Irish?”

  Pia rolled her eyes, mortified by her mother’s tactlessness. Mrs. Lucchese handed Fatma one of her panini. “Mine is

  better than what they got out there. And don’t forget. They gonna carry the Madonna at two. That’s when you make a wish. The

  Madonna can make your dreams come true!”

  Fatma thanked her for the roll and went out into the muggy crowded street. She liked the feast: the colored lights strung from lampposts that were draped with red, white, and green flags; the rock and roll music from the stage set up at the end of the street; the little man with an accordion trying to compete with them as he strolled through the crowds singing “Mala Femmina.” Except for a few of the older Italian women who, enraptured, nodded their heads to the beat, nobody paid any attention to him.

  The giant Madonna was being paraded down the street now on a float, bouquets of flowers all around her. Daniel’s mother had a statue like that on a pedestal in the foyer, and she used to explain all about the Virgin to Fatma in the hope that, one Sunday, she might want to accompany her to church. “Just to see what it’s like,” she would say. Beverly’s Madonna wore blue and white; this giant one had on an elegant brown-and-gold velvet dress with a heavy gold crown and a string of pearls. But just like Beverly’s Madonna, this one had long blond hair, which made Fatma laugh: didn’t they know what women looked like in Fatma’s mother’s part of the world? Fatma’s ex-mother-in-law’s Madonna had stood alone with her arms stretched out, beckoning to the world, while this bigger-than-life-size image held her son, the Baby Jesus, dressed in a matching outfit down to the pearls and blond hair. This Madonna wore a long white satin cape trimmed with gold and a rosar y of white roses around her neck. As six men in dark suits slowly carried the float that supported her, parishioners, mostly women, flocked to her and pinned dollar bills onto her gown in a show of devotion or perhaps in hopes of having their prayers answered, of a miracle happening. Maybe Elsa’s lawyer had pinned one on her himself that day, because Fatma had just turned off Main Street and was strolling on Gaylord toward the Royal Lion when he pulled up to the curb in a convertible filled with so many flowers it looked like one of the floats.

  “I’ve been looking for you,” he said.

  People stared at him as though he was crazy, sitting in a car filled with floral arrangements. Fatma was embarrassed. A cruiser pulled up alongside the convertible.

  “What’s up?” the policeman asked the lawyer.

  “Nothing, officer. My fiancée and I were just having a little spat.” “Your what?” Fatma said.

  “Either get in,” the policeman ord
ered Fatma, “or you get outa here,” he said to the beautiful man in the car. “Just stop blockin’ traffic. Can’t you see there’s a feast goin’ on?”

  “Give the guy a break!” a man in the crowd shouted.

  “My boyfriend don’t give me no flowers, bitch,” a girl yelled. “Let me at least drive you home,” Nick Benson said.

  Then Fatma did what she did best: she ran – away from this lawyer who had not only drawn the attention of a crowd but of a police officer to boot. They were all laughing – the crowd behind her, the children she passed on the street – as she ran up Gaylord toward the safety and obscurity of the Royal Lion. She ran until one of her high heels got caught in a crack in the pavement and her ankles, which were always weak, gave in.

  She was on all fours when Benson pulled up alongside her again and got out of his car to help her up.

  “Now will you let me drive you home?” he asked. “No.”

  “Please,” he begged, looking like a puppy dog. “No! Thank you,” she added, softening. “Your knees are bleeding.” “It’s nothing,” she said.

  “I’ll call you – again,” he said.

  He went back to his car, while she, scraped knees and palms stinging, continued to walk toward the Royal Lion, unable to stop thinking about this sexy man who, unlike Daniel, knew how to fight for what he wanted. But what exactly did he want? To learn more about her business? To get her locked up? Or was it possible that he was truly enamored with her? It would be easy to fit a man like this into her life, and where Hussein was concerned, so very useful. It occurred to her that, despite the humiliation and pain, maybe it was a special day after all, just like Mrs. Lucchese had said, a day meant to end happily – a new beginning. Maybe someone – maybe the Mother Madonna or maybe her good jinn – was looking over her shoulder after all.

  At the Top of the Hub

  At seven p.m., Fatma was sure she had been stood up. At five past, Nick appeared at her door carrying a dozen long-stemmed red roses. He wore a black silk sports jacket, a sky blue shirt, and a yellow-and-blue-striped tie. He seemed nervous. How could someone as handsome and successful as he ever be nervous? she wondered. All men wobble on stilts from time to time, Auntie would have answered. “Can I come in?”

  She was embarrassed by her sparsely furnished room. She’d become so obsessed with accumulating money that, unlike the house on Poplar Street, she hadn’t spent any of it on fixing up the apartment. Taking in the few dated remnants of Mrs. Lucchese’s early life with her husband, Nick complimented the place all the same.

  “It’s cozy,” he said. “Do you have a vase for these?” She didn’t.

  “A jar will do.” He smiled, and she was glad he did because he had looked so serious standing in the doorway.

  She went into the kitchen and took a quart of sour milk from the refrigerator, emptied the milk into the sink, and refilled the container with water.

  “Kind of art deco,” Nick said. “I like it.” “Good thing you don’t give me all those flowers in your car from feast,” she said.

  “I have a confession to make. A guy I know is a funeral director. Sometimes there are too many flowers for the gravesite. The mourners don’t want them, and he doesn’t know what to do with them. I did him a favor.”

  “What you did with them?”

  “I put them on the Madonna’s float and said a prayer.” He brought the palms of his hands together. “But I bought these. That’s why I’m a little late.” He placed the flowers on the table by the window overlooking the tree.

  “My country place,” she said. They both laughed at the notion.

  “I’d like to have a place in the country someday,” he said, “away from the rat race.”

  “This one is easy to get to. It remind me a little of home.” “Where’s that?”

  “Mombasa. And Somalia. And my mother is – was – Arabian. Is long story.”

  “Well, come on, Scheherazade,” he said, taking her arm. “We have all night. And hopefully another thousand.”

  They drove to Boston, and then Nick took her higher – to the top of the Prudential Center. She was at the top of the world, all right, drinking martinis, eating Oysters Rockefeller, and staring down on the city lit up like a Christmas tree. Nick had asked for a booth so they could sit side by side, and when his leg brushed hers, she cemented her leg to the warmth and pressure of his.

  Attempting to win over Nick wasn’t hard. She had never been excited like this about anyone else – not Daniel, certainly not Elsa, and not the few men she’d kissed in a dark corner at the Royal Lion, where she had let their liquor-and-tobacco-laced tongues linger for a while. But she never went home with them and she never invited them to her place. And if she found out later that they were married, she admonished them out loud, for everyone to hear, with the saying: A rooster doesn’t sing on two roofs.

  “Your eyes are so exotic,” Nick said.

  No one had ever called her exotic before. She wasn’t exotic in Africa. There was a club in downtown Rockfield with exotic dancers, but she didn’t think he meant that she was one of them. Her stepsister Jamila, the tall and willowy daughter of her father’s youngest wife, was exotic, with a neck so long it could accommodate twenty gold bands when most people could wear only seven or eight. She had been discovered in Somalia by a news photographer at the age of thirteen and sneaked out to England. Now she was a famous actress – “the exotic Jamila,” people in Europe and America called her. But Fatma was short and busty, with a round face and freckles across what she considered a too-small and uninteresting nose.

  Fatma tried to deepen her voice and make it sultry. She visualized the verb conjugations that Mrs. Dolan had used, searching for the correct tense endings that were still hard for her to keep straight. He was a lawyer, educated. But nothing she said seemed to bother Nick, who made her feel like an ebony sculpture that should be polished until it shone.

  “You know, that day in the courthouse wasn’t the first time I’d ever seen you. I recognized you from Little Venezia last Columbus Day. You were sitting next to a bunch of old ladies, but I don’t think you were with them. You looked a little tired.”

  She was ashamed to think that he had seen her so hung over. Of course she hadn’t appeared much better the morning she’d met him at the courthouse, when she sensed something familiar about him but couldn’t put her finger on it. “I was with my father-in-law, Vito Rossi,” he said, “when I saw you at Little Venezia.” Her smile vanished, and he quickly added that it was his ex-father-in-law. “I’m divorced now,” he said.

  “Me too. You still friends?” She had meant he and his wife, but he continued to talk about his father-in-law.

  “I like Vito. But my ex-wife’s a bitch, to put it bluntly – a pathological liar. She told brutal stories about me, so Vito cut me off. In fact the last time I saw him was that morning I saw you at Little Venezia. I guess there’s always a silver lining, as they say. And your in-laws?”

  “I could never be friends with them,” she said.

  “Anyway, I was kind of sorry I hadn’t spoken to you in Little Venezia. Then, at the courthouse, it hit me after a while that you were that girl. Can’t get much luckier than a second chance.”

  “You have children?”

  “Three. Of course they’re pretty much grown up now. And you?” What would he think of a woman whose own family had taken her child away from her?

  “A boy. He’s far away right now.”

  He didn’t pursue it. When he asked her what she did, she timidly told him about the pizzeria and Juicy Burger. To compensate for her lack of status, she let him in on a little secret she didn’t like to talk about in Rockfield. “In Somalia, I’m princess. Royalty.”

  “So you really are my Scheherazade!” He beamed.

  Nick excused himself several times that evening, and she suspected that he was attempting to escape a disappointing evening, a date that had been an error in judgment. Each time he returned, however, he was happier and more eager th
an before.

  “The bladder gets lazy at my age,” he offered.

  *

  On their next date, Nick took her to his office suite. It was the first time she’d been inside the towers. It was plush – just like Nick. Browns and rusts and forest greens with leather couches and dark wood furniture that, he made sure to inform her, was tropical mahogany. He proudly walked her through the suite, pointing out his secretary’s desk, his office, and the library with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves lined with fat legal volumes. Then came the coffee room and Tom O’Brien’s office.

  “Your partner?” she asked.

  “Oh no. I’ve never had a partner. Being married to one person at a time was all I could handle. On the other hand, I guess I didn’t handle that too well, either. I admit it: I like to be the boss. Much less complicated. That way, anything goes wrong, I have no one to blame but myself. Tom’s just out of law school – Western New England. I get most of my associates from there. They stay a few years, pick up a little experience, and then go off on their own or join some bigger practice. It works. I prefer a change in secretaries from time to time too, before they start thinking they’re the office manager. I’ve seen what happens when lawyers get too dependent on secretaries.”

  “How Elsa can afford you?”

  “She didn’t have to pay me. I’m part of the bar advocate program. The court picked me from a list of its lawyers. We represent clients who don’t have enough money to hire an attorney. In our legal system everyone’s entitled to a trial by jury with representation. That’s the great thing about it. However, I have to say I’m glad enough people can afford to pay us esquires.” Nick used a lot of words she’d never heard. He was the kind of man she had expected to find when she came to America. Someone of her family’s status. A man with connections. This was what her uncle had promised.

  He took her hand and led her back into his office. Encircling her with his arms he told her he’d always wanted to make love on the couch.