by Naima Coster
After she put together her four-post bed, Penelope was drenched in sweat and smoke. She sat on the bed to tack photographs of Pittsburgh overhead. The black-and-white squares covered the sloped ceiling as high up as she could reach. She hoped they would offer her some kind of comfort, a reminder that she had left, she had been away for five years. Her life in Brooklyn hadn’t been her only life.
She unpacked her easel last, opening it before the porthole window. She looked down on the street and saw how similar the block looked to the one she had grown up on, although it was quieter than Penelope remembered. There were about as many trees, tall London planes, with brown bark peeling off in strips. The branches spread over the block, forming a canopy of shade. A few old folks sat on their stoops. Children in stiff church clothes skipped down the block. It was afternoon now, and a few white women worked in the little gardens in front of their houses. Their children rode bicycles to the corner and back.
Penelope gathered her new set of keys from the floor and left to see her father. The house was just a few blocks over, and Penelope wanted to see if the other streets were as quaint as Greene and Bedford. Ralph had narrated the changes in the neighborhood to her over the phone, five years’ worth of losses. His store wasn’t the only one that had closed. Lionel Sheckley wasn’t the only friend who had died. Almost everyone was gone, he said. He hardly recognized Bed-Stuy.
Penelope didn’t run into anyone she knew on the street, but the crowds on Nostrand Avenue seemed the same. She had to weave through the packs of people, talking and laughing, fanning themselves in the heat. Soca blared out of a beauty supply shop; the glare off the glass storefronts was blinding. The avenue was the Brooklyn she remembered; the side streets were stranger, quieter, emptier.
She found the old mud-colored house easily and climbed up the stoop to ring the doorbell like a guest. It would be a few minutes before Ralph made it down the stairs. Penelope took in the rusting iron of the rail on the stoop, the peeling paint above the threshold. The pavement in front of the house, down at the garden level, was cracked. Somehow the hydrangea bush seemed to be thriving: dusty blue, it grew in a plot of dirt, just inside the iron fence that separated the house from the street and the two brownstones on either side. The fence was rusted, too.
Penelope heard Ralph before she saw him. A heavy step, the scrape of one leg behind him. Another step. He swept aside the lace curtains on the door and peered onto the stoop. He fumbled for the doorknob and spoke to her through the glass.
“There’s my Penny,” he said. He jerked the door open and threw out his arms. “There’s my girl.”
Ralph crushed Penelope to his chest, and he felt so light against her, his arms bony and limp. Penelope let her face sink into the collar of his shirt. His back was stooped, and they were the same height now. He smelled like soap and tobacco, his mineral hair tonic. He wore his hair in a soft gray fro on most days; the tonic was for special occasions, to comb his hair over, wet and flat, with a part on the side. Penelope felt the creased skin of his cheek, velvety against hers.
Ralph stepped back into the doorway, and she could finally see his face. The cut curved from his temple to the inner corner of his eye. He wasn’t squinting, but the skin beneath his eye was puffed up and purple. The gash gleamed yellow-red under the bacitracin he must have slathered on that morning.
Penelope refused to stare.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” he said and clamped his hand on her shoulder. He gave it a squeeze and then turned back inside.
Penelope entered the house and felt her former life heaped upon her. The doors to the parlor were pushed open, and she saw the dirt coagulated on the mantels and the mirror, the fireplace clogged with bricks. She had sat beside Ralph on the day he filled up the fireplace with bricks; Mirella had gone out to the stoop in protest. She had left the door open so she could turn around once in a while and yell that Ralph was ruining the house, that all she had wanted was a room where she could light fires in the wintertime. Ralph had explained to Penelope that a fireplace was a disaster waiting to happen, too big of a risk given their investment in the house. He ignored Mirella and laid the bricks down in a row. He showed Penelope how to use the trowel. She had spread the mortar.
Ralph rested one hand on the open parlor door, the other on her shoulder. He leaned on her hard.
“She took all the furniture from down here when she left.”
The empty parlor smelled of mildew, and the sour scent went to Penelope’s head. She had forgotten her morning eye-opener, and she needed to sit down.
“Let’s go upstairs, Pop,” she said, and Ralph led the way.
He dragged his left leg behind him as they climbed the stairs. Penelope paused on each step, waiting until Ralph made his way up to the next. He heaved his body up, gripping the banister with one hand, pressing against the wall with the other. Penelope hadn’t seen the stairs since she left for Pittsburgh, and she felt a yoke close around her neck as she counted the steps between the first floor and the second. Had he hit each one? Or had he plummeted down, no impact until he reached the bottom? Penelope shook her head and coughed to clear her lungs. There was no reason to worry; it was over now. She was here, and they were fine.
Ralph was panting when they reached the second floor. He shuffled into the living room and fell back onto the beaten-up olive sofa. Penelope softly set herself down next to him. The arms of the sofa were stained with ink from when Penelope used to leave her drawing pens uncapped, and they would bleed onto the cushions.
Flowerpots stood on every flat surface in the room: the windowsill, the top of the television set, above the fireplace, the coffee table, and the lamp stands. Mirella’s plants had once made a green perimeter around the room, but the pots were all empty now, filled with chalky dirt. The room stank of stale coffee and ash. Penelope was glad she had gone to her attic first instead of here.
Ralph reached for her hand across the sofa and looked at her as if he wanted something.
“I made up your old room.”
Penelope started to speak, but he raised his voice over hers. “I know you’re a woman and all that and you need your space, but there’s plenty of space here.”
Penelope pictured Ralph tripping around her old bedroom, trying to fix the sheets and dust, as if a clean room could convince her to live again the way she had as a girl.
“I’ll think about it, Pop.”
Ralph nodded and crossed one leg over the other, using his hands to lift his left leg at the ankle and lay it over his right. He was handsome in his blue pinstripe shirt, his white chest hairs sprouting over the collar.
“You’re skinnier than you were at Easter,” he said. “Don’t they have rice and beans in Pittsburgh?”
Penelope explained that she had been running a lot, more, actually, ever since he fell outside Sheckley’s, but she didn’t say that.
“Careful now,” Ralph said, his gray eyes watery and sincere. “You wouldn’t want to hurt yourself and wind up like me.”
Penelope slid across the sofa to examine the cut. He had been lucky, she thought, that the glass didn’t enter his pupil or slice open more of his face. It was healing slowly. In two weeks, Penelope had uprooted her life in Pittsburgh and returned to Brooklyn, and Ralph’s skin hadn’t managed to close around the wound. Penelope touched her father’s cheek.
Ralph pushed her hand away.
“Pfsh!” he exhaled. “It looks worse than it feels. Don’t you worry, Penny. Everything is gonna be all right now that you’re back. Una thinks you’re going to get that job at the elementary school. It’s a sign—everything falling into place so quick! It was time for you to come back. Now, I had always imagined your mother would be here, too, when you came home.”
Ralph lifted his pipe out of the ashtray on the table, struck a match and held it in the chamber until the tobacco lit up. He puffed smoke into the space between them, and the room seemed to shrink.
Penelope got up and hauled open the window, but the a
ir that flooded in was warm and damp. She stuck her head out. The backyard below was overgrown with weeds. Three lawn chairs, streaked by rain, pointed in different directions. Someone else’s orange cat sat on one of them sunning itself. The old lanterns strung from the back of the house to the far end of the wooden fence bobbed uselessly in the breeze. The shed, where Mirella had kept her gardening tools, was boarded up.
She knew her mother must have taken her old seeds and supplies with her. It was unlike Mirella to leave anything of hers behind. It surprised Penelope that the flowerpots were still there.
“What’s in the shed?” she asked, without turning back toward the room.
“Old things from the shop. Signs, the cash register, the records we still had on the day we closed. The ones we couldn’t sell even after we put them on clearance. Your mother thought it would be better to keep it all out there.”
“Doesn’t that shed still leak?”
“As bad as the ceiling on the fourth floor.”
“Mami never understood the shop.”
“Not like we did.”
Penelope turned to face her father. The dust motes floated between them, and Penelope wanted to ask him to come and stand beside her at the window. Sitting down, he looked fine, as if he could have hoisted himself up and strode over to put his arm around her and look out on the yard. Penelope might not have ever left if she knew she would miss the final years of seeing her father strong. She could have found other ways to avoid her mother. She could have lived in another neighborhood. She could have met him sometimes at the shop. She could have left the house, this life, without leaving him.
“Maybe I’ll buy you some curtains,” she said. “It’s too bright up here.”
“All right.”
“And maybe I can help you move a few things down to the first floor. That way you don’t have to worry about climbing down those stairs, as well as the stoop, if you want to go outside.”
Ralph held his pipe in his hand and looked at Penelope as if she had suggested something obscene. “Go outside to where? Sheckley’s was a onetime thing. It was my birthday.”
“Maybe now that I’m here, you can get out more—”
“We’ve always lived on the second floor.”
“Pop, you’re living in a museum, everything arranged just like it used to be. Why don’t you move downstairs?”
Ralph bit down on his pipe and crossed his arms. He made a grunt she was meant to understand as his answer. He was as defiant as a little boy, and Penelope knew she would get nowhere by pleading. She spoke as sternly as she could.
“You can’t keep waiting for her, Pop. Mami isn’t coming back.”
“Pfsh! You think I don’t know that?” Ralph began to shake his head as if he couldn’t believe Penelope wasn’t smarter. “I’m the one who married her—I know how stubborn she is. I’ll never see her again. Not in this lifetime. But that doesn’t change a thing.”
Penelope crossed the room to sit beside him and make peace, but Ralph didn’t acknowledge her. He tilted his head back and stared up at the ceiling. Ralph didn’t like to argue, and he would stop a disagreement dead as soon as he could. When he could still walk, and Penelope and Mirella would start to fight, he would tear out of the room, huffing loudly but not speaking. He didn’t want to hear. Looking up was his new way of leaving a room.
“Come on, Pop.”
He kept puffing on the pipe, holding it upright between his teeth. She put her head on his shoulder, and he didn’t move, just kept exhaling smoke into the room. She waited.
“Forget I said anything at all.”
Ralph lowered his chin onto her forehead, and she knew it meant he had forgiven her, that he would, in fact, forget. She wrapped his hand in hers, and they stayed like that for a long time, the traffic growing louder outside on Halsey Street, the day passing away from them. The light retracted slowly over the floorboards, as if it were trying to escape through the window.
When Penelope returned to Greene, the activity on the block had died down. Most people were inside their homes for the evening, and the ones who were outside were on their stoops, watching the sun go down. Inside the yellow house the lights were off. The landlady and her family were still in the city, and the house felt as vacant as her father’s in the darkness. Penelope felt her way up four flights of stairs in the dark, crossing the landings quickly, to the top of the house.
She turned on the light and took in the smallness of the attic, the way her entire life had fit into this single room. She had everything with her now, except her art, which she had shipped off just yesterday, when she was still in Pittsburgh. She had double wrapped everything in Bubble Wrap and cardboard, all her paintings from art school. She had kept the paintings because they were proof that she had once thought art would be her whole life, and not one habit of many.
Penelope started the pot for tea and wondered what to do with her night. As a girl, she’d had no places of her own in Bed-Stuy; she had followed her father around to his haunts, and when she was old enough she set out for the city to drink and meet men. She could try to find a bar, but there would be no point in drinking if she had to sit in sick awareness of herself, surrounded by well-off white people, new to the neighborhood, blind to her, or worse. She drank her tea and started to feel restless, an itching in her soles. She decided to run.
She would do one of her old loops to survey the neighborhood—the concrete and intersections would be the same, and she could run off the dull feeling she had caught from being back in the old house, seeing her father, and, somehow, her mother, too.
Penelope left the house just as the evening heat broke into a soft rain. She chose to run along Bedford because the avenue seemed to stretch indefinitely in both directions, as if she could reach Pittsburgh if she kept running west. She went east instead, and then south, crossing the streets as quickly as she could. There were as many liquor stores as ever, and she picked up her speed every time she passed one so she wouldn’t hear what the men loitering under the awnings muttered at her. She passed the same half-dozen murals—for ODB, for Rosa Parks, for a young father shot and killed before reaching thirty.
The streets were a mix of run-down apartment buildings with eroding fire escapes, and regal brownstones clustered in blocks of colors: a row of tan houses, then red, then chocolate brown, once in a while a house painted bubblegum pink or mint green. Penelope ran past the apartment building on Marcy where they had lived when she was younger, a few games of chess being played in Tompkins Park, and the empty bleachers. She saw an abandoned building on Flushing, most of the windows boarded up with planks of wood, the others gaping like cavities in the gutted house. Bottles and black bags of trash formed hills inside an empty lot, closed off by a chain-link fence. An elderly woman sat on a lawn chair, having a beer in the front yard she had covered in Astroturf. She seemed unbothered by the rain. An American flag hung motionless from a pole behind her chair, the Stars and Stripes collecting water.
Penelope headed back south, intending to return to Greene, since the rain was picking up, but instead her body propelled her to Lewis Avenue, past a gourmet pizzeria, a one-room bookstore, and a wine bar where the Puerto Rican deli used to be. She stopped to stretch on the corner, right across from the health food store. She’d never seen it before, but, of course, she knew how to find it.
The shop glowed behind a hedge of skinny ginkgo trees. The awning was a deep brown, the color of fertile soil, and above the entrance was the shop name: “SPROUT” in block letters, the T curling into the leaves of a green shoot. It was like any small upscale supermarket, with aisles of canned food and broth in boxes. The produce was arranged in crates under soft spotlights at the front of the shop: bunches of purple kale and rhubarb, blood oranges, and swollen avocados. Customers crowded around the produce and stood in lines before the dry-food dispensers, which looked like gumball machines filled with grains and beans and nuts.
They stood in lines with their Tupperware, occasionally sampli
ng what they were buying, stealing a hazelnut or a handful of muesli. The shop was so bright she could see the colors of their painted nails, the patterns of their short-sleeved blouses, the glint of the eyeglasses on the men and women. The crack still parted the sidewalk in front of the store. No one had bothered to fill it in.
They had painted over the exterior so that it was lime green now. Penelope wondered if the new owners had seen her initials there: PSG, Penelope Sofia Grand, carved into the brick, beside the RAG, for Ralph Arnold Grand, and the M that was all Mirella left behind. Had the green paint been enough to cover them?
The rain started to fall more heavily, and Penelope watched the customers open their umbrellas when they left the store, and the people who were already on the street rushed for cover—a mother pushing her toddler in a stroller, a man mean-mugging at the bus stop and hugging his arms to his chest, two older schoolgirls in YMCA camp uniforms, lifting their backpacks over their heads and slurping violent-purple quarter waters as they exited the bodega, their teeth stained.
Penelope could have crossed the street and stood under the awning of Sprout, searching for the letters they had carved and waiting for the shower to pass. She could have seen if the etchings were still there; she could have felt them under her fingers. She decided to run on instead.
3
THE HARPERS
Principal Pine was waiting for Penelope on the front steps of the elementary school. She was a slender black woman with her hair in twists, her face touched by an array of colors: gold, pink, bronze, black. She smelled of immaculate makeup, sweet oil on her scalp. Gold earrings in the shape of Africa dangled from her ears. Penelope was sweating, the blazer she wore too heavy for the warm weather. She extended her hand to Mrs. Pine, who gave her a hug instead.