Sometimes It Snows In America

by Marisa Labozzetta

  Fatma pulled off the rack the first three things she saw. “Which one’s for every day and which one makes you feel

  special?” Miss Wilma asked, eyeing the flannel work shirt, the sweatshirt, and a pair of jeans at least three sizes too large for Fatma. “Life’s about making choices, good ones, and here’s where you start. Try again.”

  Fatma found a pair of jeans in her size. She kept the sweatshirt, which was just like the one Pia used to wear. She then selected a yellow cotton nightshirt, a pair of black velvet pants, and a cream-colored lace blouse that was missing a few buttons. She was already wearing black heels.

  “You’ll need a comfortable pair of shoes to work in.” Miss Wilma pointed to a shelf lined with everything from slippers to knee-high suede boots. Fatma grabbed a pair of worn sneakers. She took three pairs of panties out of a cardboard box that had “Medium” written on it, and fished for a size 34 bra out of another box marked A. All the underwear was ridiculously sexy for a bunch of women living together.

  “I’ll give you a needle and thread and some buttons. The most important thing you’ll learn here is to care,” she said. “About yourself.”

  “No maid service?” Fama said as she had to Daniel on her first day in Katundu.

  Miss Wilma didn’t think this was funny. She raised her eyebrows. Another privileged one, she thought. Just like the congressman’s daughter who was there, because Fatma was also paying for her stay at Haven House, unlike many of the women sent by the courts. That had been part of the deal. The money came from the same place it had when she was in Shelby: the sale of the house on Poplar Street. “You come first,” Miss Sarah had insisted. “Worry about your family later, because without Haven House, there won’t be any visits back home.”

  Haven House was a two-story white clapboard tucked away in a wooded area a few miles from the center of Willowsville. There was no fancy trim or shutters on the building. It had a kitchen and a living room, two bathrooms, three bedrooms, and a year-round porch that Miss Wilma used for her office. Although the furniture was clearly secondhand (like the lavender leather couch with duct tape covering a few tears), every inch of Haven House was immaculate. Four other women were there during Fatma’s stay. She shared a room with Justine – the youngest, the congressman’s daughter. She was only nineteen, the victim of one bad mistake. She was shy, naïve, and malleable, which made her an excellent target for harassment.

  Laurel had just finished doing ten years at the state prison in Framingham for killing the husband who had beat on her for twelve years. Haven House cut down on her prison time. Sweet spirituals flowed through the space left by her missing front teeth like a breeze through a window on a hot summer day as she cleaned or did other chores. Mary Ellen was a born liar who sweet-talked you this way and that, twisting the truth and making no sense at all. Teresa was the bully, no bigger than Fatma but with a mouth as wide as the Grand Canyon and a tongue to match.

  “So much pink,” Fatma said to Miss Wilma when she showed

  Fatma to her room.

  “My, ain’t we fussy. When your creative juices start flowing, you can redecorate.”

  *

  Living in Haven House was different than being locked up in jail, where the outside was restricted to glimpses of trees and the parking lot through a six-inch-wide window or the sole open wall of the recreation deck. At Haven House Fatma felt the nip of frost on her neck when she rose at sunrise to perform her community service. She would sweep the downtown streets or rake newly fallen leaves from the lawn of the town common, where a local band played in the gazebo in the evenings. She sat next to a child who tried to trap tropical fish on the side of a glass tank in the dentist’s waiting office. When she stepped out of AA meetings at the Unitarian church or sessions with her counselor, she met mothers guiding baby carriages, shoppers carrying bags of freshly baked bread, and young people with green hair sitting at tables on the sidewalk, laughing and sipping coffee through pierced lips. At Haven House, waking up at dawn really did mean seeing the light of day.

  Yet even in little Willowsville – with its pizzeria, microbrewery, and café with exposed brick walls on the inside – scum floated. Pushers looked for the weak link, the chink in the armor. They showed up in the courthouse lobby and waited for the parole or probation officer to disappear into the restroom just long enough for the probationer to step outside for a fix. They hid in the shadows, waiting to give the vulnerable the swift kick that would smash the fragile shells they had constructed.

  *

  Miraa comes from the leaves and bark of a tree that grows in the muddy state of Meru, in Kenya. Somali travelers used to chew its woody stems to stay awake and feel confident while going long distances. It made them feel good. Fatma’s old maid Lisha had a cousin in Lamu named Kalil, who chewed miraa much of the time. Kalil, however, had a good jinn who monitored his behavior. When Kalil chewed miraa, or drank alcohol, or neglected to pray five times a day, the jinn would possess him, and Kalil would cut himself with sharp objects, scratching the skin all over his body, or slam himself against walls. People in town would watch him and think he was going mad, Lisha said. And he was, but at the hands of his good jinn, who sought to have the craziness take a toll on Kalil, so that Kalil would come to understand that if he behaved he acted sanely, but if he sinned he was possessed.

  While Fatma’s evil jinn might have gotten her into trouble in America, it was her good jinn that now tortured her. There was nowhere to hide at Haven House. Not even sleep protected her. In her dreams Nick found her; they all found her. Some nights she ran up Gaylord Street naked, shackles weighing her down, but Nick always managed to run over her with his convertible filled with flowers, crushing her lungs beneath the tires. Other nights he shot at her with her grandfather’s gun. Sometimes he got out of the car and strangled Fatma. If it wasn’t Nick, it was Elsa. She’d pry open the door to Fatma’s old apartment on Main Street with a knife and then chip away at Fatma as though she were a block of ice, taking shallow stabs all over, until Fatma was bleeding like a fountain with a hundred spouts. Miss Wilma would find Fatma in the morning, sitting on the edge of the pink bed, watching out for the sleep that always came to destroy her. She would find her with her skin all scratched, nails bloody, a sheet wrapped tightly around her neck, face and knuckles bruised, the wall stained.

  “You’re safe,” Miss Wilma would say, wiping her sweaty body with a cool washcloth. “You’re safe.” She was safe, and she hated it. Because the more she got herself straight, the more her jinns battled for attention and the worse her nights became, the more she wanted a drink and a fix, the more she needed to ease the pain.

  “To stay sober and straight, you have to believe in a higher power,” Miss Wilma said. “Because we can’t do it alone; we can’t do it our way. Our way is negative. But spirituality is positive. If you’re doing something that’s wrong, you know it can’t be related to anything spiritual, because spirituality is a good thing. That and service to community.”

  But belief in a higher power had been the source of Fatma’s trouble in the first place. Her mother’s hatred of Christians and her sense of superiority even over Somalis had led her to manipulate Fatma with promises. And so while Fatma was sweeping Main Street and her overseer stepped into Dunkin’ Donuts for a cup of coffee, Fatma walked off down an alley and several blocks over to the bus station, where she took out the hundred-dollar bill she had slipped in her vagina the day she left the Sunny Glow Motel and later tucked into the lacy black bra that Sundry Undies had donated. Like a love note she had kept the piece of green paper each day between the folds of her breasts, and on that warm late summer morning, she bought a ticket for the 6:20, all the while listening to the voice within that promised that if she rode the bus long enough, it would take her all the way to Saudi Arabia, it would take her to Hussein. But she never made it to Saudi Arabia; the last stop was Rockfield.

  The Closet

  She didn’t notice the students boarding the bus to New Yo
rk or the old women holding shopping bags from Toys R Us to take to their grandchildren. She smelled the piss of a man urinating on the side of the building while a pimp cursed a teenage hooker wearing hot pants so short the bottoms of her buttocks were exposed. A young Hispanic junkie carrying her infant begged for bus fare at the station entrance. These were the citizens of Rockfield with whom she identified; these were the people in the stratum of the city to which she’d belonged.

  When a dealer Fatma recognized from Gaylord Street approached her, she could feel that first hit, she could taste that first drink. She conjured up an image of Nick at the Royal Lion, sitting at the bar, using his finger to stir ice cubes around in a glass of scotch, and she would surprise him, and they would return to life the way it had been in the beginning, before they lost control, before it all went wrong. As she took a wad of twenties out of her bra, she felt two arms encircle her. She heard the familiar snap of an illusory undercover cop’s silver bracelets. And she saw Rockfield in its finest state of decay for the first time. Panicking, she bought a ticket for the next bus back to Willowsville. That was the same morning Miss Sarah confided in Fatma and their true friendship began. She was leaving Shelby. She had been made a deputy sheriff, and she was going to work with women on the outside. She planned to follow them after prison, teaching them how to shop and save money and get a job, deal with people. She was tired of just helping them get out; she wanted to help them stay out.

  “Now we’re both onto something new,” she told Fatma. “I’m scared.”

  “Like standing at the edge of a cliff?” “With devil pushing me.”

  “No, he’s pulling you back. Jump, Fatma.”

  They were putting in a vegetable garden on the grounds of Haven House. The nursing students from the university brought over donated plants. On days they didn’t lead classes on hygiene, sexually transmitted diseases, and nutrition, they taught the women to hoe and plant. Fatma liked the garden just as she had liked the greenhouse. With her hair tucked into a bandana she had found in the basement “department store,” she spent hours in the sunshine, preparing herself for the luminosity of Mombasa, thinking how much better off she was here, working in the dirt, than back in the city living in it. She kept to herself, concentrating on taking that leap Miss Sarah had talked about. But her stamina was low. Thanks to the sessions with English tutors so she could begin to prepare for a GED diploma, the medical appointments for her back, the nurses’ survival meetings, sessions with her social worker, and AA meetings, she barely had the energy left to deal with Miss Sarah, who came every Monday.

  “You don’t pull a knife on the clerk at the checkout counter because she says your lane is closed,” she lectured at one of her skills session. “You don’t cuss them out either, sugars.” The women had learned a certain set of rules in the streets and in jail; now they had to find a way to stand up for themselves without taking another person down. After class, Miss Sarah took Fatma out for coffee or to a discount store to pick up nail polish or a hair clip – things that she thought would perk her up. Fatma could barely stay awake, so little had she slept.

  During the day she longed for the old Nick she thought she knew, but at night she ran from the real one, trying to stay awake by concentrating on Justine’s even breathing and observing how the night air dried out her lips. After a while Fatma’s body would give in, and in the morning she would wake up on the floor, her face black and blue, her knuckles red and swollen, with Justine standing over her, frantically screaming for Miss Wilma. Now Justine became afraid to sleep.

  “No use us both losing sleep,” Fatma told Justine one night as they lay in their beds staring up at the ceiling. Fatma could see Justine’s eyelids lowering every now and then, but the girl would catch herself and her eyelids would fly back up like a windowshade with a broken spring. Fatma was touched that Justine watched over her, even though she was far too petite to be able to restrain her. Or perhaps Justine was simply afraid that Fatma would attack her.

  *

  Linda Stern, Fatma’s counselor at the Department of Social Services, thought that when the serial murderer was caught, her nightmares and violent behavior would stop. Fatma didn’t say much to her, since she found therapy a waste of time. What made Fatma tick? The counselors and psychiatrists had no idea.

  “You anorexic?” Fatma asked Stern, breaking her silence. She was tall and as thin as kindling. Fatma could snap her in half. Listening to the annoying questions emerging from her long flat face, Fatma wanted to do just that.

  “No, I’ve always been like this,” she said, shocked and at the same time angry, as though she was tired of being taken for some kind of freak. That day Fatma saw a weakness in Stern: years of being made fun of, adults staring in disbelief, rejection by boyfriends who demanded breasts to suck on, children pointing at her. She saw a heart that beat and blood that flowed through that deformed body. She had found the chink in Linda Stern’s armor.

  “I’m not disrespecting. I just never see someone so skinny— except my sister who’s actress.” This wasn’t really accurate. Jamila wasn’t emaciated like Linda Stern.

  “Does it bother you that I’m so thin?” Stern asked.

  “You mean I’m jealous?” Fatma was glad to be putting on weight. She’d already gone up two sizes and bra cups since she arrived at Haven House. Miss Wilma said the additional pounds were a sign of her beginning to reach wellness. “All monkeys cannot hang on same branch.”

  “What?”

  “Everybody’s different.”

  The therapist smiled, amused.

  “Was your body type a problem with your husband? A source of his anger and violence?” Stern asked, eager to reestablish their roles.

  “Fat me or skinny me?” “Either.”

  “Everything about me made him angry,” Fatma said. “What things?”

  “Everything.” She had said all she had to say for that session and for many more sessions to come, because she couldn’t talk to this woman. There were things she couldn’t say to anybody, not even Miss Sarah.

  *

  Some Mondays, Fatma wasn’t able to get out of bed, she was so exhausted from her battles of the night before. But Miss Sarah came nevertheless and, sitting opposite her on Justine’s bed, talked and listened.

  “It might help you to write your thoughts down on paper,” she said one afternoon.

  “Why?”

  “It’s a form of release, of ridding yourself of ghosts that haunt you.”

  “And then?”

  “You can lock them away, or rip them up, or burn them.”

  “I can’t write good.” Fatma had done little writing since school, and now found it nearly impossible; her English lessons were primarily conversational. Thoughts often whizzed by like shooting stars that she grasped for with fists that came back empty. Too many drugs and too many beatings had dulled her, incapacitated her. At times her memory was lucid, as vivid as a Mombasa sunset; then it faded, and she had trouble recalling her brothers’ and sisters’ names. Of course, taking into account all her father’s wives, there were thirty-one of them.

  “I have a better idea.” Miss Sarah reached into her bag and fished out a tape recorder smaller than her hand. She popped out a tiny cassette and put in a different one. “I use this all the time to dictate my notes at the end of the day while I’m driving home. Then I type it onto my computer. Keep it. I have another one.” She showed Fatma how to use it. The recorder sat on her dresser for a month before she picked it up one night when she thought Justine was sleeping and began to whisper into the little black box.

  “Are you talking to me?” Justine asked. “No.” Fatma got out of bed, opened the window, and threw the tape recorder as far out into the snow as she could.

  *

  Mary Ellen usually prepared dinner: corned beef and cabbage or chicken fingers or spaghetti were common fare. Meals were important at Haven House: most of the women had survived for too long on cigarettes and coffee. None of them had given up eit
her of them. In fact, Fatma was smoking more now than ever before. But cigarettes were allowed at Haven House. Getting rid of one vice at a time was more than enough for anybody to handle. Mary Ellen was good about providing protein, vegetables, and salad when she cooked, and the regimen was obviously working for Fatma.

  One evening when Mary Ellen had the flu, Justine volunteered to make supper. She topped frozen chicken wings with barbecue sauce, surrounded them with peeled sliced potatoes, and put them directly into the oven – which wouldn’t have turned out too terribly, except that she had no concept of how much time it would need to cook. At six o’clock Justine called the women to the table. She had taken extra pains to make the occasion festive, bringing down from her room a potted ivy for a centerpiece and placing the white paper napkins in the shape of crowns in the center of the plates.

  Teresa the bully took her place at the table, eager to find fault. She didn’t have to look far. Justine nervously set the cookie sheet of pale chicken wings and semi-boiled potatoes swimming in steamy orange liquid before them. Indifferent to Miss Wilma’s presence in the next room, Teresa blasted Justine’s meal nonstop until a distraught Justine threw the pan into the garbage pail and, sobbing, ran up to her room. That’s when Fatma lunged at Teresa, wrapping her hands so tightly around her neck that Miss Wilma and Laurel were unable to pry them off as Fatma elbowed them away. Miss Wilma picked up the Rubbermaid pitcher from the table and poured ice water over Fatma’s head. Fatma released her grip, and Teresa’s head dropped onto her plate as she sucked in air like a vacuum cleaner.

  Justine thought the entire incident, including the restrictions placed on all the women, had been her fault. Fatma begrudgingly apologized to Teresa, who in turn apologized to Justine. But in her heart Fatma wasn’t at all sorry, and in fact found the fracas had been worthwhile, because she and Justine grew closer once their caretaking had become mutual, and no one took advantage of Justine again.