Sometimes It Snows In America

by Marisa Labozzetta

  The night he told her to go out to the car for a carton of cigarettes because he was already undressed, he locked her out of the house. After banging on the windows and doors and screaming for an hour, she lay on the carseat until morning, grateful for unseasonably warm weather. When he opened the car door, she punched him in the arm.

  “Why the hell you do that?” she shouted.

  He looked at her as though she was a raving lunatic. “Did you. Did you do that. And it was a joke, Princess. Just a joke.”

  She got out of the car. He got in and took off, and didn’t come back until the following morning.

  His solo outings were becoming common. He would return with a dozen roses or fancily wrapped pieces of lingerie. When she accused him of fooling around, he sulked, and she felt a need to make up to him for her accusation.

  One night she walked into the great room wearing a new teddy he had recently given her. She put on sexy music and stripped for him, trying to pretend she was enjoying it, still uncomfortable with no curtains on the windows and the moon – like a spotlight – shining down on her for all to see. Only, just as Nick had planned, there was never anyone to see or hear her in the house he had bought her. No one but Nick. “Come here,” he said when she was naked. He told her to kneel on the floor in front of him.

  She waited for him to put his penis between her breasts the way he liked. Instead, he got off the couch and turned her over. He pinned her arms to the floor and forced himself into her from behind over and over again.

  “Don’t make me go out on you, Princess,” he begged, as though it was she who controlled his behavior.

  *

  There were times on their trips to Rockfield when Nick started in on her before they even reached the car. A certain look came over his face – a slight smile, as though he had just remembered where he had stashed a thousand-dollar bill. The kind of look a lion has when it sniffs the air and senses fair game – a satisfied look, pleased with what it sees through its cold stare. Thus Nick looked at her on those nights with keen interest while she talked like a child without a thought in her carefree head, always thinking this was the night that would change everything. And he listened and nodded at her babbling like a lion with many thoughts in its head, smacking its tail on the ground as though drumming in the jungle, waiting to make his move.

  “You know, you walk funny,” he’d say. “Must be because your feet are so small.” So she’d try to walk straight, one foot carefully placed in front of the other, because she figured that she must walk funny. Otherwise why would Nick say she did? She’d get into the car and sit there, waiting for him to quiet down. If he didn’t, she began throwing punches, hitting him anywhere she could, knowing well what he’d do in retaliation, because no pain from his fists hurt as much as his words. One night he pulled her by the arm across the driver’s seat, back out of the car, and into the house, her legs scraping along the gravel and then the brick walk and steps. She screamed, but soon she made no sound at all. He slapped her face. He punched her in the mouth. Her head hit the floor as she gagged on her own warm blood. He went into the bathroom; she could hear the water running. He’s going to drown me, she thought. He came back, his hands smelling of soap. He had put on a clean shirt and pants.

  He kissed her head and kept telling her how sorry he was. He took her to Hamilton County General and, as they wheeled her to the x-ray department, told them she had been mugged on the street, to spare no expense. In the waiting room he looked worried about her while he watched TV, drank coffee from a machine, and stepped outside to smoke cigarettes.

  “Where were you mugged?” A young doctor asked her as he stitched up her lip.

  “Rockfield.”

  “Then why didn’t you go Commonwealth or Saint Joe’s? What are you doing all the way out here?”

  She shrugged her shoulders.

  “Do you want to report the – mugging – to the police?” She didn’t answer.

  “Look. You don’t have to go back with him. We can find you a place to stay. We can call the police. We can help you.”

  On her way out, he handed her some brochures from the Everywoman’s Center: Warning signs for perpetrator and What you should know about your abusive partner. In the years that followed the hospitals and doctors would change, but the scenes would remain the same. The pamphlets sometimes varied. Cycle of violence was a popular one; so was Is he really going to change? Whatever the pamphlet, a hotline number appeared in large bold letters at the bottom. She would become used to them, and to the small white cards with a list of emergency numbers they sometimes gave her. She threw them into the trash before she reached the waiting room. The doctors never understood why she wanted to go home with Nick. It wasn’t because she was afraid of him. It was because she loved him, and she was sure that, if she could figure out how his mind worked, she would know how to act. She could make the relationship work again, too. She could make it be like before. It was up to her, because deep down, Nick was right: she had turned into a skinny, ugly junkie. She was everything Nick said she was. In a way, she was grateful that Nick could hurt her, could make her feel again, though it seemed that he could never beat that evil jinn out of her.

  Only the jinn had five heads now: Walter Kornmeyer’s, Daniel’s, Uncle Oliver’s, Isaac’s – and Nick’s. She kept looking at the five-headed monster as it led her into the bedroom and picked up the pipe and passed it from one head to the other. How could one hit last that long? she wondered. Then the monster passed the pipe to her.

  “This’ll make you feel better,” he said. “I’ll never hurt you again.”

  She climbed into bed; she took the peace offering from the monster, and she forgot that she was losing control over everything. She lay back down on the pillow; she closed her eyes. When she opened them again, it was morning and the monster was gone. Nick was carrying a tray of orange juice, toast, scrambled eggs, and cocaine to her. Breakfast in bed.

  They ventured into Rockfield that day. Pure goods from his discreet former dealers had long ago become far too expensive, so Nick dropped her off on a corner of Gaylord Street where he would have stuck out like a white giraffe. She could scurry in and out of those alleys and deteriorating Victorian crack houses with boarded-up windows, caving-in porches, and trash piled high. She could prowl the tenements (their palatial stone-column entrances marred by ugly gray steel doors signifying what Gaylord Street had become) unnoticed, just another black junkie crawling up the anthill, looking for a dealer. Just like Nick had always known she could, from the moment he had seen her in Café Venezia, because he too had always had a plan.

  That particular afternoon she turned onto Trumble Street instead and rang India’s bell. It had been so many months – or years, she couldn’t remember – since Fatma had seen her. She had no right to go there after she’d betrayed them, but India buzzed her in all the same. Nothing had ever ruffled India’s calm demeanor. It was like the flat line on some hospital ICU machine and steady as the basket Lisha balanced on her head in the marketplace in Mombasa.

  India recoiled on seeing her – more from pity than from anger, yet she let Fatma in.

  “What you see?” Fatma asked India, who, her hair elegantly swept up into a tight knot, her nails clean and shiny and long, set two cups of coffee on a blue checkered tablecloth.

  “You want to know what I see?”

  “What he does when he come to Rockfield?”

  India put both palms on the table and leaned her weight onto them.

  “He’s stinkin’ like a dead dog. Pickin’ up women. That’s what I see. But it’s not about what I see.” She took Fatma’s arm and pulled her out of the chair and over to a mirror. Fatma saw the drug-glazed eyes, the face bruised like a piece of tarnished silver in Auntie’s china closet. “It’s about what you see.”

  *

  Nick had borrowed money anywhere he could. He sold his coin collection for eighty thousand dollars. When pieces of the jewelry he had bought Fatma disappeared, he tried t
o convince her that she had lost or misplaced or had never been given them. She was afraid her diamond ring would be next, and she wanted to protect it, not because it was so valuable but because it symbolized their marriage. If it disappeared, so might they. She phoned India, intending to arrange a time when she could give her the ring to hold. Fatma knew it was a stupid thing to do; Nick didn’t like her to make phone calls.

  She was using the kitchen phone and had barely said hello when

  Nick told her to come to the sofa and watch a show with him. “In a minute,” she said.

  “Now, Princess,” he called out. “I need you to come here now.” “One minute.”

  “Fatma, who are you talking to?” “Nobody.”

  “Good, because I can’t hear the TV with you talking.”

  Fatma hung up just as India answered. She buried the ring in a can of coffee; Nick never made coffee. She went over to him.

  “Why you need me?”

  “You know I don’t like watching TV by myself.” “I talk low. It don’t bother you, Nick.”

  “Now you’re complaining because I want you to be with me?” His voice had climbed an octave without getting louder, as though he was trying to keep it in check. The little red veins on his temples popped out.

  “I just say I can’t even talk on phone.”

  “‘Talk on phone?’ You can’t even talk!” he said, laughing. “Stop!”

  He kept laughing. She slapped him.

  Her face was raw and wet and burning when he finished with her that night. He poured whiskey into her mouth to kill the pain, he said. It dribbled out and set her face on fire. Then he helped her to the bed.

  “Jesus, I’m so sorry, Fatma. But you shouldn’t have done that. You shouldn’t have pushed me. I hope I didn’t ruin your beautiful face. Here, Princess. Have some water.”

  She couldn’t move her mouth to swallow anything. Every breath hit her torso like he was kicking her all over again.

  She closed her eyes that night. She stopped thinking and feeling. She nearly stopped breathing. The next morning her lawyer phoned out of the blue and told Fatma she had a buyer for the house on Poplar Street – Daniel. Was she interested in selling? Fatma hadn’t talked to Jeannine Fournier in years but she had taken her advice. She had held onto the house, never telling Nick. And lately – like so many other things – she’d even forgotten about it.

  “Who called?” Nick asked. “Wrong number.”

  Then she told him she was pregnant, more to test his response than as an excuse to go to Rockfield. He had never mentioned children again after that one time, never seemed upset that she hadn’t conceived.

  “What makes you think that?” he asked. “Same way all women know. I miss periods.” “You’ve missed them before.”

  “Never this many.”

  “It seems like you just had it.” “You confused.”

  He furrowed his brow as if straining to remember, but she knew he’d never figure it out. He couldn’t remember where the bathroom was these days.

  Had he been happy about her news, she might have told him about the house – the house he never knew she owned. And she would have tried hard to get pregnant. Instead, she said she was going to Rockfield to arrange for an abortion. Nick said he would have taken her, but he was feeling sick.

  *

  She was afraid to see Daniel, who would instantly realize that she had turned into something far worse than the contrary child he had brought out of Katundu. She didn’t want him to see her broken, with her cheeks bruised and her Mombasa eye swollen. But Daniel wasn’t there.

  “It’s fallen apart,” Jeannine Fournier told Fatma. “I tried to reach you. Daniel got cold feet about moving back into the house. Said he had personal reasons for changing his mind.”

  “You said who you was when you called me?”

  “Almost. But I decided not to. Let’s say your husband sounded a bit out of it. Don’t worry – there’ll be another buyer along soon. The neighborhood is changing for the better.” Then she said icily on her way out: “And get yourself some help before it’s too late.”

  A deep sadness began growing inside Fatma that day. It moved from between her ovaries into her uterus and stomach, and up into her heart. On the way home she carried that sadness until her body could no longer contain it, until she thought it might sink down to her vagina and, right there in the taxi, exit in painful convulsions, the way Hussein had.

  *

  When she returned she found the front door of the house slightly open. On her way into the bedroom to check on Nick, she heard rustling and groaning. Loan sharks must have finally worked him over, or worse, maybe they were still there. She first went into the kitchen and dug her hands into the coffee can, relieved to find the ring still there. She slipped it back on and grabbed her grandfather’s pistol, which she kept in the breadbox they never used for bread, and walked into the bedroom. Nick was on his back, naked, oblivious to Fatma, a woman between his legs, her face in his groin. Then Fatma could see nothing. She could only feel – feel blood rising up, her heart pounding, her stomach muscles tightening, her body hot. The Kikuyu say that if a person is roasting two potatoes at one time, one potato is bound to get charred. She fired twice.

  The first shot grazed the woman’s butt. Fatma had always been better with a rifle than with a pistol. The woman jerked her head up and screamed. Fatma stared at the blurry image of her face in disbelief. The next shot – aimed at Elsa Martinez’s head – missed its target. Fortunately, or Fatma would have gone to prison for life. She shot Nick’s thigh instead.

  IV

  Daughters of Muhammad

  There were more drugs, of a greater variety and a higher quality, at Shelby County Jail and House of Correction than there were on the streets. Not long after her arrival, Fatma discovered the dealers’ circle. It wasn’t hard. Seated around a table in the common room, just like the women on Oprah’s book club on the TV screen on the wall, and holding playing cards in their hands or setting tiles on a scrabble board, the dealers’ circle also discussed things, but it wasn’t books. Using code, they learned who had what. “My man came by yesterday. Said my baby girl put on at least five ounces” meant that an inmate had more than that amount of heroin hidden in the library. Shelby allowed inmates to greet their visitors face to face, to kiss hello or goodbye, as long as a correction officer was present in the reception room, a CO who didn’t give a damn about an inmate’s rehabilitation and saw her time at Shelby as something that would be repeated over and over again.

  And so the little packet hidden under the visitor’s tongue was easily transferred to the underside of the inmate’s tongue. Some of the inmates had brought in their own plastic-wrapped heroin and coke. Held by tightly contracted muscles between the walls of their vaginas, the drugs had escaped detection during the welcoming strip search in which the women were ordered to bend over and cough. They later carried the booty to their cells. There it went under the mattress until they could get it to the library. There it was placed in a bookcase – for example, 150-199, the second shelf from the top at the beginning of the aisle, sixth book in: Studies in Semantics of Generative Grammar or another obviously donated book that no one had touched since the day it was shelved. Most inmates hadn’t gotten past eighth grade.

  At their meetings women who belonged to the dealers’ circle set prices, elected leaders, and banished women for weakness or resistance. Transactions were carried out even more discreetly: a quick pass in the library, a pretense of making out with another inmate by kissing her or putting a hand up her shirt or down her pants. Women could have expense accounts at Shelby: they could do just about anything except drive a car and sleep with visitors. Money was transferred from inmate to inmate; a little went a long way in jail. Fatma quickly learned that it was no different on the inside than on the outside – those who had ruled. As always, she wanted to be among those who had, but thanks to Nick’s isolating her, she hadn’t established close enough friendships with sup
pliers for them to want to visit her in jail, so she was kept out of the dealers’ circle. She could still be a customer, however, since Jeannine Fournier had been right about the house on Poplar Street: it had recently sold, and Fournier, who continued to manage the proceeds, made a monthly deposit into the Shelby account intended for sundries like cigarettes, magazines, and toiletries.

  Drugs could also be got from COs in exchange for sex, or were administered by the medical staff to prevent the pain of withdrawal or to sedate difficult inmates. Without the drugs the doctors gave Fatma, she would succumb to uncontrollable fits of rage in an effort to rid herself of Iblis, who, like an alien, was painfully working his way through her insides and threatening at any moment to break through her flesh. She swung at nurses and doctors and COs. She flailed her arms and legs. She cursed and kicked and screamed. When they approached her with needles or pills, she knocked the trays out of their hands, until they strapped her down and injected her. After three months in Shelby waiting for her trial, she felt crazier than ever. She should have expected it, she thought. Those who seek revenge should always remember to dig two graves.

  *

  “We’ll ask for a jury trial,” her court-appointed attorney, Bernard Kosakowski, told Fatma as she sat across the table from him in the orange jumpsuit that signified she was a pretrial. “A jury will be sympathetic to you. More women than men serve on juries. A woman would certainly understand the overwhelming urge you had to shoot your husband, having found him and your friend in a tryst.” Tryst. It was a word she had never heard before: probably an old-fashioned one, because Kosakowski’s skin hung from his jawbone like hide from a dead goat’s carcass. His blue eyes swam in pools of yellow and his hand trembled when he scribbled down things Fatma said.