by Naima Coster
Mirella retrieved a pencil from a jar she kept on the counter. She turned the postcard back to the cloudy blank side and began to write quickly, her words spanning the creases. She could only fit a few lines, but it would be enough, she hoped, for her daughter to detect all that she had left unsaid. When she was finished, she printed the address to her house in DR, no zip code, no apartment number, just the name of the residence, the town, the road, and the number of kilometers to the nearest gas station. It was the best way for her daughter to reach her, if she decided to write back.
Mirella put the clip and the porcelain pieces back inside the cup, put the cup in the cabinet. She left the postcard out on the counter; she would send it in the morning. Mirella finished her glass of mabi, walked back to the living room, and unlatched the gate leading onto the patio.
It was warm in the garden. Mirella felt as if someone had thrown a shawl over her in the dark. The air was damp and clean. She stepped off the breezeway, and the earth gave under her feet. She inhaled the dew on grass. The crickets were louder outside.
The acres behind the house were perfectly pruned and watered. The bean-shaped pool was immaculate, except for two frogs. One squatted on the edge of the pool while the other hopped lazily around the perimeter. She loved her days here in the garden, tending to the banana trees, the herb and vegetable patches, picking the avocado and papaya and lemons that fell in the breeze, uprooting weeds and killing snakes that had slipped through the barbed wire around her land. She loved her birds of paradise: the magenta beak of the buds, the yellow and blue petals like a crown of feathers, the slender green stalks. She could have never grown flowers that bright and intricate in Brooklyn.
You would like it here, hija, she thought. Penélope.
5
INTRICATE AND FRAGILE THINGS
Penelope entered the classroom a full hour before her students were set to arrive. The fluorescent lights gave the room a green tint, and Penelope lifted the blinds and cranked open the windows to let in the morning light. The garden outside was full of blooming sunflowers, a slowly withering vegetable patch. Over the garden, someone had painted a mural of smiling brown and white children holding hands atop a smudgy blue-green globe. It was embarrassingly bland but better than the old view of the broken-down playground, where a girl had been raped when Penelope was a child, and a boy from her class slashed with a razor by his older brother’s friends.
Principal Pine had told her to make the room hers, and so Penelope did. She hung paper lanterns from the ceiling, although she couldn’t light them because of the building codes. She liked the shapes of them, white spheres floating over the room. The room was well stocked, even better than the schools in Pittsburgh. A half-dozen tiny easels leaned against the southern windows—the children would have to share—and the back shelves burst with odds and ends: spools of wire, yarn, bundles of shoelaces, old brooches and buttons, tubs of clay. The long tables where the children would sit looked exactly as they had two decades ago: cheap yellow wood, low to the ground, engraved with initials and curse words, bubble-letter dollar signs and BKs, chubby hearts pierced by two-dimensional arrows. Even the windowsills overflowed with stuff: metal cans filled with paintbrushes, stacks of colored paper, bins of old shirts and aprons for the children to use as smocks. Penelope didn’t mind the mess—it was the way a proper studio should look. She washed the board, and when it dried she wrote her name, Ms. Grand, in lavender chalk, then she sat with her coffee to wait for the bell to ring.
She wondered whether she should tell the children she had gone to this school; her art had hung from the cork bulletin boards in this room. There would have been no question if her return were a triumphant one, the kind that would have been written up in the black nationalist paper Ralph used to read. She could imagine the headline: Bed-Stuy Sister Comes Home to Teach Our Youth! But she’d had no noble reason to return to Brooklyn besides that she didn’t want her father to die. In her time away she had conquered nothing. She had merely found a way to be.
When she was a girl, Mirella used to tell her about success stories she had seen on the news—a girl from the Bronx won a citywide science fair, got recruited to MIT, and planned on becoming a chemist; a boy in Queens who finished high school while living in a homeless shelter had returned to his neighborhood to open a clinic and buy his mother a house. Even then, Penelope knew there would be no news story about a girl who decided to paint, who was intent on making even less money than her parents, the orphan and the immigrant who together had built her a good life. Even when the letter arrived from RISD, Mirella had been unimpressed. “Where is that?” she had said. “Massachusetts? Maybe you can transfer.”
Her father knew RISD was a good school only from the gloss of the brochures, the faces his Manhattan customers made when he mentioned where Penelope was going to school. Penelope set off, with her paints and her portfolio, ecstatic to finally leave Halsey Street to find her own life.
Not all the students were white, but they all came from places like Santa Barbara, Olympia, and Austin, or the suburbs that surrounded them. Their lives were foreign to Penelope: they talked about nightly dinners with their parents and summers on various shores; they already knew the names of the artists they studied in their foundations class; they’d had such wide lives in their small towns—sports and parties and social clubs and leagues. They spoke French and Japanese; they wore boots made of real leather, tiny nose rings encrusted with gems. Penelope’s life in Brooklyn had consisted only of home, school, the store—the neighborhood wasn’t safe, and she had no places in it, nowhere to go when she was in high school. And she’d thought herself fortunate, compared to her classmates in Bed-Stuy; for the first time, at RISD, Penelope wondered whether she had been poor. She quickly realized she hadn’t been, although her mother had, and her father, when they were children.
The other students dressed the way artists should dress—the girls wore black lacy dresses to galleries on the weekend, the same dresses with cable-knit sweaters over them to work in the studio. They smoked and drank as if they were already defeated, hardened, and long out of art school. Penelope joined them, and these were the best times: when she could sip at cigarettes for the calm, when the taste of gin was enough to dissolve the blocks between her and the rest of them. Once, they all shared a spliff on an empty street corner, and a girl had asked Penelope if she had grown up in the ghetto, if she already knew how to roll a blunt. There was another time, she told someone her neighborhood was called Bed-Stuy, and a boy chimed in, rapping Notorious B.I.G., and Penelope had asked what the fuck was wrong with him and everyone had stared at her until he told her it was a joke and she should chill. It wasn’t long before the girls started to keep their distance, and the boys, too, except for a few, who watched her with interest from afar, as if her hoop earrings, thighs, and mass of curls were a statement rather than simply who she was. She slept with a few of them, just to prove that she could, and even after she knew having sex with white boys wasn’t the victory she had expected it to be, she kept finding them, fucking them, and turning them away. It felt good, and it was a thing she could control: she could choose someone and have someone and then return to herself, safe.
The only first-year she liked somewhat was her roommate, a nice-enough plump girl named Meg. Meg didn’t like to work on large canvases either, and her pieces were tiny—intricate and fragile things on wood, small enough to fit in your palm, made with acrylic and twine and bits of dried flowers she had shipped to her off the Internet. Penelope would often return to the dorm to find Meg’s little pieces drying all around their room—on the coffee table, the windowsill, the foot of her bed, beside the radiator. She would stoop down to inspect them and admire how painstakingly Meg had made them with fine-tipped brushes and tweezers and glue. Meg was from Westchester, and they had bonded over New York and the subway, the relative sleepiness of Providence. At first, they went to dinner together every night; then Meg found friends of her own, but she still looked after Pe
nelope when she drank too much. Meg brought her Dixie cups full of water, taught her how to stick two fingers down her throat when she’d had too much.
Penelope hadn’t expected to be popular at art school—she never had been—but she had expected her crits to go well. It wasn’t long before more than one teacher had told Penelope that she was trying to draw with paint. Her work was clean and literal, too spare. The other painters in her cohort all worked on large canvases, bigger than anything Penelope had ever cared to make. They piled the paint on in big irreverent swaths of color; they used bits of metal and wire, they worked from dozens of photographs, even if they were just painting grass, or a woman. Penelope’s scale was smaller, her technique immaculate, and her works soon done. She couldn’t make anything as large or as bold as they did. No one had ever shown her how.
One teacher tried to help by telling her that art didn’t have to represent; it simply had to be. Another said that if she wanted to be an illustrator, she’d picked the wrong program. Penelope stayed at the studio late, often working on the weekends, in her party dress, or early in the morning while the other kids slept off their hangovers, but, still, she couldn’t stop drawing with paint. She got by in all her classes, but she didn’t create anything really beautiful or terrifying. The bad crits, when they came, unmoored her, and Penelope drank and chased boys to regain her ground. Her talent, or the idea of it, was her only permission to be there.
In the spring, when Penelope stopped going to class to draw and drink in their dorm room, Meg was the one who told the dean. The dean didn’t issue any threats when she met with Penelope; she was nice-white-lady concerned and offered Penelope mints while she asked about her critiques, whether anything was wrong at home. Penelope said she was fine; she couldn’t stop drawing with paint, but, otherwise, everything else was fine. She had already decided privately not to return in the fall.
At the end of the year, she left Meg her fanciest set of oil paints, and when she conferred the tubes, the girl started crying, pressing one of those flimsy dead flowers into Penelope’s hand. She gave her a pink Post-it note, too, with her phone number and address in Rye. If you ever want to talk, she had said, which had made Penelope want to laugh.
The morning in the classroom went smoothly, even with all of the miniature fiascos Penelope had anticipated. No one flung a box of crayons across the room, and no one slapped anyone else across the face with a ruler. The worst they did was shout and rush to the front of the room to show off their work to their new teacher until Penelope made a rule they had to stay in their seats, and she would come around to see what they were creating. Principal Pine poked in her head at the right time, a few hours into the day, after Penelope had already instituted the rule. The kids were rowdy but working, each of them in a seat. As the day went on, Penelope had to break up a few disputes about which color was whose, and whose turn it was to use the paste. There were two emergency trips to the sink—first, with Jewel, who got glue in her eye, and next with Khalil, who insisted he cut his fingers using the safety scissors. Penelope humored him by holding his hand under the tap in the big aluminum sink at the back of the room.
During the calmer moments, Penelope couldn’t help but categorize the motley group of students in her mind: poor, wealthy, new, not sure. A quarter of them were white, and they seemed more at ease than poor Genevieve, her old classmate, had ever been. They all seemed to have lived in the neighborhood for a while, and they even talked with half the lilt of their classmates, a little Brooklyn peeking through their speech. The biggest difference she could see between them was that the white children nearly all knew how to use the paints. They squeezed colors into the tiny wells of the plastic palettes, dipped their brushes into water between strokes. Hardly any of the white kids wore the uniform, while the brown children were a mix of cheap bow ties and pleated skirts, sagging play clothes, neutral-colored corduroys and fashionable plaid. She wondered who their parents were, especially for the children who were mixed.
Just before lunch, Penelope called one of the third graders up to her desk. Natalie kept putting her head down on the table even though Penelope had told her four times that she wasn’t allowed to sleep in class.
“I can’t help it, Miss Grand. My head hurts.”
The child wore a hot-pink turtleneck with sleeves that hardly covered her forearms. Her acid-washed jeans had an elastic waistband, like the kind of pants Penelope had worn as a child in the eighties. She held a hand flat against her belly.
“Are you sure it’s not your stomach?”
“Yeah, Miss Grand. It’s my stomach.”
“Are you hungry?”
The girl nodded.
Penelope reached into her purse where she had half a bar of dark chocolate. “Don’t let the other kids see,” she said, slipping the candy to the girl. “Eat this here, then go take your seat. It’s almost lunchtime. You’ll be all right.”
Natalie popped the chocolate squares into her mouth. She chewed slowly, pensively.
“It tastes funny,” she said, but she ate it all. She licked her fingertips, and without thanking Penelope, went back to her seat. Principal Pine had warned her there would be parents who didn’t know their kids were eligible for free breakfast, or who didn’t wake up in time to bring them in, or who were already at work by the time the kids woke themselves up. She didn’t know what category Natalie’s mother fell in, but she made a note to herself to tell Mrs. Pine to call.
At the end of the period, the children sprang from their seats and stampeded for the door. She had watched the students do this all morning, rowdy under her watch, and then falling into crooked lines as soon as their teachers arrived to collect them. Penelope had met a few classroom teachers this morning, a few black women who had welcomed her to school and said they remembered her father and the store. There had also been a pair of young white teachers who invited her to lunch. Every day they went out for pizza or Chinese that they ate together in the faculty lounge. “There’s a group of us,” they said, though they didn’t say whom they meant by us.
The man who came for the third graders was Mr. Rodemeyer. He was ruddy faced and wore a pink shirt and chinos. He introduced himself as a former North Carolinian and aspiring New Yorker. He welcomed Penelope to the school.
“They driving you nuts yet?” he said, jerking a thumb toward the kids. He had a brazen smile that made Penelope wonder whether he had been a frat boy in college. “Rumor has it you’re a real artist—you studied painting?”
“Hm,” Penelope said noncommittally. The children fidgeted in line.
Mr. Rodemeyer went on about how his fiancée was getting into drawing. She took a nude-figure drawing class in Gowanus and was looking for a buddy to go with her.
“We’ve been up here about a year, and she’s still trying to make friends. You know, other ladies who share her interests.”
“I’ll keep an eye out,” Penelope said, and she strode away from the door, calling good-bye to the kids.
They waved as they passed. “Later, Miss Grand!” and “Bye-bye, Miss Grand!” For all they knew, she wasn’t a substitute. For all they knew, she was a real teacher. Natalie gave her a high five on the way out and smiled brightly at her, a smudge of chocolate under her lip.
Back at her desk, Penelope unpacked her lunch: an egg salad sandwich, a pair of pickles from the bodega, caffeinated soda. It would take only a few minutes to eat, and then she would have the rest of the period to herself. She considered moving to the teachers’ lounge. It was her first day, and if she didn’t mingle with the other teachers now, when would she ever? The young white teachers seemed to think she was one of them, and so did the older black women. She couldn’t imagine camaraderie with either group, so she unwrapped her sandwich and stayed put in the room.
The afternoon light stretched along Greene, the houses on the block shimmering as if they had been dipped in gold. Penelope had worried working the children all day would sap her urge to draw, but she rushed down the block so she
could get up to the attic before the light faded. She saw a dozen potential images on the street, and she memorized them as she went: a broken Hula-Hoop, half of its arc peeking from the top of a dumpster, a cluster of yellow leaves on the pavement, a dozen trinkets set out on the curb—ancient dolls, yellowed paperbacks, an outdated video-game console—in a cardboard box marked FREE.
Marcus Harper sat on the stoop of the mustard-yellow house, his pants rolled up to his knees, his pale legs burning in the sun. When he saw her, he held up a hand to say hello. He commented on the beauty of the afternoon, the breeze, how much he loved fall on the East Coast. When he was through, Penelope wondered whether she should carry on into the house, whether he merely wanted to be a decent landlord and not a friend. But Marcus waved to the empty spot beside him, so Penelope sat down.
“Grace has been asking about you. Ever since that day in the hall.”
“Has she now?”
“You’re quite the mystery to her.”
“There isn’t much to know.”
All down the block, children were arriving home from school, parents hustling to the grocery store or the bodega to pick up something for dinner. A pizza-delivery man pulled up a few houses away and honked his horn. A neighbor from across the street cursed him for his rudeness. Penelope and Marcus watched the activity on the block in silence, steeping in the sun. After a while, Marcus asked her about work, and Penelope said it was fine, all fine.
“The only art project Grace brought home last year was a paper turkey. Do you remember those? The ones where you outline your hand on construction paper and cut it out?”
Penelope shook her head. “I can’t believe they still do that.”