Fatimatou and Folasade
Mar. 28th, 2026 09:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_camera
Day off.
At some point, I am going to trek across the bridge to grab my tomato cages from the Hyde Park Community Garden & deliver them to the New Paltz Community Garden.
###
I'd had some vague thought of joining one of the numerous No Kings Marches today, but I'm not feeling it.
Besides! I gave at the office yesterday with my last two clients of the day, Fatimatou and Folasade (not their real names), who turned out to be from Guinea, which fact I extracted when I realized the impenetrable language they were trading with one another was actually a strangely accented French.
"Tu parle français?" I asked in my own execrable French.
"Ah, toi aussi, tu parles français?" asked Fatimatou, the more fluent of the two young women in English.
"Un peu," I said. "Un petit peu. Très mal. Tu viens du Sénégal?"
"On vient de Guinée," Fatimatou said.
Guinea!
I had no idea where Guinea actually was, except that most of France's former African colonies are on the west coast.
###
Fatimatou had come to this country as a child with her parents. Product of the Brooklyn public school system, she was bright and enterprising, and had earned a bachelor's degree in the rapidly obsolescing field of data management. This degree qualified her for a string of jobs at places like Sephora and Tori Burch. I had no idea why Fatimatou decided to move to Middletown, where there are far fewer Sephoras and Tori Burches.
When she'd worked at the Sephora in Brooklyn, Fatimatou had been vested in the company's 401(k), so when she left the company, they'd presented her with a check for several thousand dollars. Unfortunately, they'd neglected to instruct her about rollovers, so she'd spent the money and was now facing a tax penalty. Fortunately, she'd been conscientious filling out those W4s, so the tax penalty wasn't huge—
"Three hundred and seventy-three dollars," I said, switching back to English.
Fatimatou said something to Folasade in that weird French, and they both squealed with joy.
"I did it myself, and it showed I owed $10,000," she explained.
This, in fact, is why most first-time users come to Schlock: They fuck up their Turbotax return somehow.
###
Folasade was a more recent immigrant.
She had a green card, but I could feel the tension in the two women around that.
She was also in the unenviable position of understanding a lot more English than she could actually speak. But not quite enough English to understand what I was saying without Fatimatou's interpretation.
She'd had exactly one job in 2025—as a holiday worker at Tori Burch, where she'd made exactly $266. And they'd taken out nothing in federal taxes.
I grimaced when I saw that.
"I don't know what to tell you about this," I said. "We're going to charge you $164 for this return. It hardly seems worth it. On the other hand, with the situation here being what it is right now, it seems wise to make some sort of paper trail, establishing you as a law-abiding wannabe citizen."
The situation got even more complicated when it turned out that even the minute amount of money Folasade earned qualified her for a minute amount ($28!) of earned income credit. EIC kicks up the Schlock pricing structure by a hundred bucks.
I sat there for a couple of seconds and then shot an email to the district head of Schlock's mid-Hudson Valley operations: If I can get her a deal this year, we'll have a customer for life, blah, blah, blah—because that's the kind of logic that works on corporate asswipes.
And lo and behold! They called me back and gave me a coupon to take $100 off her fee.
I still feel like she was exploited, but you can only do what you can do.
###
I'm halfway through The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny. It should be a page turner—the story is very interesting, India is very interesting—and yet it is not a page-turner because each and every sentence has exactly the same metric beat, so the prose, even with the razzledazzle of unusual metaphors and similes, is actually pretty boring.
One of the novel's focuses is the plight of upper-caste Indian women, sent abroad to be overeducated in foreign schools but unable to catch a husband, and so, who end up living lives of genteel poverty.
That is not so very different from my own plight, no? I'm nothing if not overeducated! And I married twice, but neither marriage stuck.
In the end, there is no such thing as exceptionalism—national or not.
###
"Comment tu vas, uh, passer reste de la journée?" I asked Folasade in my terrible French.
"We are going to look for jobs," Fatimatou said in English. "But it is hard because she cannot speak..." Fatimatou shrugged.
"You might try looking for housecleaning jobs," I said. "Because then English wouldn't matter. I know it's a bit demeaning, rabaissant, but it pays okay—"
The ghost of Barbara Ehrenreich groaned at me from Heaven.
no subject
Date: 2026-03-28 05:37 pm (UTC)Also, a book recommendation for you! Cheap Land Colorado: Off-Gridders at America’s Edge
https://tedconover.com/book/cheap-land-colorado/
Like Barbara Ehrenreich, the writer went out to document and explore people’s experiences, essentially, how do they get by? I just re-read it after driving through southern Colorado this past week.
no subject
Date: 2026-03-28 08:53 pm (UTC)--Bless you, P. Seriously, you should be finding diamonds and emeralds in your footsteps.