Halsey Street

by Naima Coster

  They found a table by the window in a café on Nostrand Avenue. It was a new restaurant with yellow curtains and tiny whitewood tables all cramped together. There was hardly enough room on the table for two cloth napkins, a short vase filled with irises, the ceramic salt and pepper shakers.

  “Is this supposed to be a soul food place?”

  “Yeah, Pop. I thought it would remind you of that place we used to go to on Utica?”

  Ralph lifted the menu to his face with a frown. “That place didn’t have flowers on the table. You think they’re charging us for the flowers here?”

  He was joking, but Penelope couldn’t laugh along. She wanted to do something nice for Ralph, to bring him out of the house to someplace new where he didn’t have any memories but where he wouldn’t stand out. It was even harder for him to blend in now because of the way he walked. He had made a big clatter entering the restaurant; he caught his foot on the doormat, he had dropped himself too hard into his seat.

  Ralph squinted his eyes as he read the menu. Before long, a woman arrived to take their order. She had shiny shoulder-length locks and a lace apron tied over her skirt. Her silver bangles rang when she reached for the pen behind her ear. She must have been about forty, but she was trim and strong. She wore brick-red lipstick and smelled of rosewater.

  “Would you like to hear about our specials?”

  “That won’t be necessary,” Ralph said softly. “I already know what I want.” He smiled up at the waitress until she smiled back, and Penelope rolled her eyes. He might have resented the restaurant but he would still flirt. The woman scribbled down their orders.

  “And have you got any rum?” Ralph flipped over the hot-pink cocktail menu, trying to find something he recognized. “How about rum and Coke? Do you have that?”

  “I can mix you one myself.”

  Ralph thanked her with a wink, and the woman took their menus and sauntered away. Ralph followed her with his eyes.

  “She seems nice,” he said. “I hope for her sake this restaurant finds a way to make it. Otherwise, she’ll be out of a job.” Ralph shook his head. “That was one of the worst parts of closing down the store—I had to let everyone go. I used to worry about whether their kids would eat or if they’d get kicked out of their apartments. It was a heavy load over my head.”

  Ralph swept back the yellow curtain to look out on the street. The leaves were turning red, the whole block ablaze. Across the street stood a barbershop that shared a storefront with a black bookstore. Next door, the hair salon spewed steam onto the street, the fried chicken spot, a jewelry shop with crucifixes and chains glittering on display, and the beauty supply store that blasted soca and flashed neon lights onto the sidewalk. This particular corner didn’t have a view of any of the coffee shops that had opened farther east. Those had plush furniture and abstract art on the walls, stainless-steel espresso pumps. They were always crowded with young people in jeans and plaid, typing away on their laptops. There were the bars, too, with a dozen local beers on tap, and short menus that consisted mostly of nuts, pickles, cheese. Penelope could see the changes, of course, but she still recognized the neighborhood—it wasn’t like Fort Greene or Williamsburg, which were no longer themselves. Strangers still said hello to her as they lounged on their stoops at sundown. She still had to ignore the whistles from the young men who stood in front of the bodega for so long each day it was clear they were dealing. Church bells rang on the hour and floors thumped with praise for Jesus in the Baptist churches, the one-room Pentecostal churches, the regal AME tabernacles, worship never ceasing in Bed-Stuy. The horizon on Bedford Avenue was just as long, the sirens of the police cars as persistent, the wheeze of the B26 loud enough to wake her up at night.

  Ralph let the curtain fall over the window again and shook his head.

  “Revitalization. They’re revitalizing the neighborhood.” He made big swoops with his fingers, quotation marks around the word revitalize.

  “It’s still Brooklyn, Pop.”

  “Maybe on the surface. But what about inside, hmm?” Ralph gestured over his shoulder at the rest of the restaurant. Most of the other customers were talking over their lunches, nearly all of them white. They weren’t the majority outside on Nostrand but they were in here, congregated around the little tables. They were Penelope’s age or younger, brightly colored peacoats draped over the backs of their chairs, pashmina scarves wound around their necks. A few of them had babies in strollers who pulled at their socked feet or napped; they didn’t fuss, completely at ease in the busy restaurant. An older black couple sat near the back, sharing a slice of pie. The old woman wore a stiff box hat, and the man sat in his frayed wool coat. They ate without speaking, holding hands under the table. Besides the couple, and the servers, she and Ralph were the only brown people in the café.

  “It’s a shame that making room for white folks mean the rest of us have to go. But it’s always been that way, hasn’t it?”

  She had no reason to disagree with him—the closing of the shop had devastated her, too. The end of Grand Records had been the end of Ralph Grand, and not only because the accident was shortly after. If the store hadn’t closed, he would have taken the bus there, he would have used a cane to hobble down the aisles, he would have more to do than play his records and smoke his pipe, drink, and sit around and wait to die.

  Ralph had always expected her to listen to him and agree, to let him again be Mr. Grand, expert and legend. He seemed to need it now more than ever. And although Penelope wanted to please her father, she couldn’t go back to the girlhood habit of putting away her self. She resolved to push.

  “You’re not from here, either, Pop.”

  “I’ve been here forty-six years.”

  “You were new to Brooklyn once, too.”

  “If I’m not from here then I’m not from anywhere. Where should I claim? That boys’ home in Harlem? Wherever I lived before then?”

  “I didn’t mean to mention—”

  “I wasn’t anybody till I came to Brooklyn.”

  The waitress returned, carrying their lunches, but Ralph was too upset to manage a smile for her. He started slurping at his rum and soda in the fountain glass even before she had set down their plates. He had decided to ignore her, and so Penelope busied herself with her food. She cherished these big meals, which she only ate when she was with Ralph. If she was on her own, she ate just a little of what she wanted whenever she wanted—a peach, a few pieces of shrimp, a slice of garlic bread, a square or two of dark chocolate. If she wasn’t hungry, she ate just to have the energy to run. She had no rituals with food, and it had been her way since she was a girl and neither parent surfaced for dinner, not Mirella from her bedroom, or Ralph from the store. Penelope could have made herself rice, fixed a sandwich from the cold cuts in the fridge, but there was no point in preparing an entire meal to eat alone. She often put herself to bed with her stomach churning, and she had learned to like the feeling of an empty belly, her taut skin. It was a habit she had kept.

  When Ralph was done with his food, he looked at Penelope, and pointed his finger up at the ceiling, as if he remembered that she was there.

  “What we ought to do is put the house in your name.”

  “You’re going to be fine, Pop. You’ve just got to do those exercises that Dr. Elias gave you.”

  “Pfsh!” Ralph waved his hand. “Freddie’s always thought he knows everything. I’m trying to tell you about the house. Do you remember Mrs. Jones? Your mother’s friend?”

  “I don’t remember Mami having any friends.”

  “She sold Mary Kay? And when her husband died we all went to the wake out in New Jersey? Well, she got dementia about a year ago. Real young. Didn’t have anybody to look after her. Some big realtor came by the house and convinced her to sell it to him for peanuts. When her niece and nephew came up from Charlotte, it was too late. They had no legal authority, no money for a lawyer, and all they could do was help pack her up. You know where she is now?”
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  Ralph didn’t wait for Penelope to guess.

  “A nursing home in the Bronx. They say she’s got a tiny room with a view of the highway, and she’s only gotten worse since she’s been there.”

  “I didn’t know you were such a gossip, Pop.”

  “It ain’t gossip. It’s the truth.”

  Ralph sucked up the last of his Coke and shook his head back and forth.

  “These people are cold, Penelope. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. They think a neighborhood is only about what you can buy—fancy coffee, flowers on the table, a big old house. It’s all just stuff to them, stuff they want, stuff they think they deserve because they can afford it. A neighborhood means more than that. It’s about the people.”

  Penelope said she wanted to focus on Ralph getting better and not worse. They didn’t need to worry about the house. She didn’t say she had no desire to inherit the house on Halsey Street. To live there would be to go backward, into a life she hadn’t chosen. Without Ralph, she had no reason for Brooklyn; she would rather be off in some other place.

  “It’s better to have it all written down,” Ralph said. “What if I fall again and they find a way to steal the house right out from under us? I already had a man come by the house once. I caught him poking around in the front. When I came out, he said he wanted to take over my mortgage for me so I wouldn’t have to worry about debts in my old age, said he was prepared to write me a check right there. And I told him my mortgage had been all paid up for thirteen years and that he had better get the hell off my property.”

  “You never told me that.”

  “I never told you a lot of things.”

  The waitress came back and took away their plates, and Penelope turned to look out the window. A young mother hurried down the block, pulling at the hand of her reluctant daughter, a girl with skin the color of milky tea. Her hair was twisted into thin braids, fastened with a rainbow of plastic barrettes. She was probably no more than three years old; she stamped her way slowly through a mound of leaves. The young mother yanked the little girl’s hand, trying to hurry her along, and the child dallied behind, oblivious. She kicked up the leaves in a yellow cloud. Penelope watched as the mother reeled around and smacked the child hard across the face. The girl began to cry, and her mother stooped down to yell into her ear. Penelope turned back to her father.

  “Me and your mother, we never had no place,” Ralph said. “We don’t want that for you.”

  Penelope knew very well that she would never move back into the house on Halsey Street. She would just as soon go back to having Mirella as her mother, but she didn’t want to trouble her father anymore, not when she still had to convince him to get down on the floor at home and try some stretches, not order another rum and Coke.

  “I’ll think about it, Pop.”

  The waitress brought them two cups of coffee and a slice of pie to share on the house. It was the sort of gesture businesses made when they were first getting off the ground, when they were courting customers. Eventually, they would stop giving away the free dessert. But for now Penelope and Ralph scraped their spoons along the hand-painted china. The cherry filling was an artificial red; it was gooey and false and delicious.

  “This is real nice,” Ralph said, and he poured cream into his coffee. “I can’t remember the last time I went out—besides that night at Sheckley’s. I think it must have been when I went to see you in Pittsburgh for Easter.”

  Penelope quickly did the math. Her father had stayed inside the house on Halsey Street for over four months.

  “Jesus, Pop,” she said before she could stop herself. “You didn’t leave once?”

  Ralph held up a finger and shushed her. “Wait, wait, wait, Penny—do you hear that?” He pointed up at the ceiling. Penelope listened. Coltrane was playing over the speakers.

  “‘My Favorite Things,’” she said.

  “That’s right, Penny. First session he recorded for Atlantic with his quartet.”

  Ralph closed his eyes and began to sway his head to the shifting swells of the piano. The saxophone offered a reply to the bright melody. They listened to it tremble and moan, and Ralph’s fingers played on the air.

  “Dah duh dah, dah duh dah . . .”

  “Pop, what did you do? What did you do with all that time?”

  Ralph shushed her and sang; he swung his head from side to side to the music, as if he hadn’t just told her that he went from April to August without leaving the house. She knew he rarely left, but he used to take his cane and go to the bodega at the corner for coffee and bread, at least. She imagined he went a few houses over to visit Una; she imagined he sometimes sat out on the stoop. How did he get his food? How did he buy his liquor? How had he managed for so long without seeing the street or the sun head-on? How hadn’t she known? A few times she had called and he wasn’t home, and she’d imagined he had run out to the liquor store, or over to see Una, or out to the stoop.

  Penelope opened her mouth to speak, but Ralph shushed her again. He listened with his eyes closed, and his mouth twisted into a grimace, as if the music were what had cracked him open.

  Back on Greene, the parlor doors were pushed open, the light on in the vestibule. Marcus sat on the polished floor, sifting through the cardboard boxes. She had taken her time along the avenues, after she dropped off Ralph at the house. It had started to rain, and Penelope was wet, everything inside of her sunken. She crossed into the parlor, without an invitation. Marcus and his fistfuls of hair, his bow of a smile, might lift her. She wanted to draw near to the sweetness of his life.

  The room was identical to the parlor on Halsey Street but a blinding white. An ivory rug covered most of the floor, creamy linen armchairs faced the fireplace. A map of nineteenth-century Brooklyn hung in a frame above the mantel; a bubble-glass chandelier cast a pure light. Penelope had never seen the room before; usually, the doors were shut.

  “Why don’t you ever use this room? It’s beautiful.”

  “Samantha is waiting, I think. For our big chance to entertain. None of our friends want to make the trip out to Brooklyn, at least not this far out.”

  “This isn’t very far.”

  “It is when you live uptown and hardly ever go below Fourteenth Street.”

  “Yikes,” Penelope said, certain that as much as she liked Marcus, she would hate all his friends. He motioned for her to sit down, and she sank onto a fat ottoman. He sat across from her in one of the linen chairs. She could smell Marcus’s cologne, something made of citrus fruit and spice. She already felt far from the hospital, the café on Nostrand, her day.

  “Were you writing today?” she asked.

  “I wish. I’ve been distracted, fiddling around with these old boxes.”

  Penelope spotted the rubber nipples of baby bottles, a can of powdered formula, an unopened package of tiny socks. She asked whether he was going through Grace’s old things.

  “Some of it was hers, yes.”

  He fidgeted and closed the flaps of a box. “I don’t know why I feel the need to keep it a big secret—I don’t think it does us any good.”

  Penelope slid closer to him, across the ottoman. She remembered how he had touched her knee that time on the stoop.

  “We were going to have a little boy. That’s part of why we bought the house. Samantha didn’t want her children to grow up in an apartment. She’s still a California girl at heart.”

  Marcus smiled and sighed. “Needless to say, we lost the baby. But we got the house, and—here we are.”

  Penelope felt too inept to comfort Marcus. Dead babies and houses and deeds were far from what she knew. So she squeezed his knee, once, the way you should when someone confides in you, she told herself.

  “I think it’s easier for Sam to be at the office these days than to be here. And I’m hardly helping with the mortgage anymore—God, I shouldn’t even be telling you this. I’m sure this is more than you want to know about your old and boring landlords—”

  �
��You’re not so old,” Penelope said, and this time she kept her hand on his knee.

  Marcus laughed, so Penelope went on.

  “Maybe you should throw a party in this parlor, so the house doesn’t feel so empty anymore. I can already imagine the room filled with guests. It will be the party of the year.”

  “That’s true—none of my Manhattan friends have this much space.”

  “Or a backyard. Don’t forget the backyard.”

  They laughed together in the living room, and Marcus looked up at her.

  “You’re a champ for listening, Penelope.”

  “Of course.”

  “I don’t have many people to talk to these days. Samantha is fantastic, but a wife is too close to be a friend.”

  What he said seemed true to her. Ralph and Mirella had never appeared to be friends.

  “Then that’s what we’ll be,” Penelope said. “Friends.”

  She took his palm in hers, and Marcus let her. She didn’t knit their fingers—that would be too much. She saw a flush rise over Marcus, from beneath the collar of his shirt, up to his temples. The shock of color on his skin made her blush, too.

  He didn’t speak, but he didn’t pull his hand away either, so she traced the lines in his palm, her pressure slight. She ran her finger along each of his fingers. He was motionless, but she felt as if he were touching her, too, a warmth spreading over every inch of her skin.

  “Samantha,” he said, and Penelope heard the jangle of keys in the door. In unison they sprang apart, and Marcus dropped her hand.

  Samantha swept into the foyer, carrying two heavy brown paper bags, her purse dangling from her wrist. Penelope had almost forgotten what she looked like, and although she looked more tired and formal than she had when they met over the summer, Penelope was struck all over again by how lovely she was. She was slender under her trench coat, so short and petite she hardly seemed old enough to be anyone’s mother. Her blond hair was wound into a chignon at the nape of her neck, fastened with bronze pins. Gray shadows under her eyes peeked through her yellow concealer, but it didn’t diminish any of her prettiness. She had a round face, like her daughter, and the lunar shape of it made you want to look at her again and again.