Halsey Street

by Naima Coster

  “Why hello, Penelope,” she said, the surprise in her voice obvious as she set the heavy bags down. She unwound the scarf from her neck and hung it on a hook. She entered the parlor, untying the belt of her coat to reveal a red silk pantsuit. The scent of lavender trailed after her. Penelope could tell she was the kind of woman who could work a full day, buy groceries, come home in the rain, and still look and smell exactly as she had in the morning before she left the house.

  Marcus stood and kissed his wife swiftly on the lips. “You’re home early.”

  “I could hear the paralegals gossiping all the way in my office. It was amusing, but I couldn’t get any work done. I said to myself, Why didn’t they all just go home at five? And then I realized they had nowhere better to be. But I did. So I called a car and I left.”

  Marcus kissed Samantha again.

  “Grace will be thrilled,” he said. “Are you making dinner?” He gestured to her brown bags.

  “Yes, but I’ll need your help. I’m roasting a chicken.”

  Marcus nodded dutifully. He hoisted the paper bags onto his hip. Penelope saw the bright green logo stamped on the grocery bags, the tiny seedling curling out of the ground.

  Samantha ran a hand through her hair and turned to Penelope, who was still sitting in the parlor, her hands burning, her hair dripping on the ottoman.

  “Do you want to join us, Penelope?”

  “I have dinner plans with my father,” she lied.

  “Maybe another time.”

  Samantha started up the stairs, and Marcus followed with the bags. Penelope trailed behind them.

  “What were you doing downstairs?”

  “I was looking for my Stanford pennant. I thought it would look nice in Gracie’s bedroom. But I couldn’t remember which box we put it in.”

  Samantha laughed. “I told you to label them.”

  Penelope shrank as she listened to them. It was far better to overhear them from the attic, where their voices were melded and indistinct, no more than murmurs through the floorboards.

  “You know, Marcus, when I came in this evening the front door was unlocked.”

  “That’s strange. It locks whenever you close it.”

  “I mean the deadbolt, love. It wasn’t turned. I told you about that burglary over on Gates. One open window was all it took, and the thief left with everything, a trumpet, a keyboard, some speakers. They robbed a pair of musicians.”

  “I was the last to come in,” Penelope said. “I must have forgotten to turn the deadbolt.”

  Samantha stopped climbing the stairs and turned around to look down at Penelope.

  “Could you try to remember next time? I don’t mean to be so particular, but I want us all to be careful—for Grace.”

  “Of course. Sorry.”

  Penelope instantly wished she hadn’t apologized at all. She’d heard about the burglary, too—it wasn’t on Gates, but on Stuyvesant Ave, in a building in the projects. No one was going to break into Samantha’s renovated brownstone, every door and window locked, a panic button probably nestled behind some bookshelf in her bedroom. Penelope had met white women like her at RISD—women who were certain they were the center of everyone’s world. If someone wanted to steal a handbag, it would be her handbag. If someone wanted to pick a lock, it would be her lock. She was no better than the Manhattan friends Marcus complained about. She felt for a moment how much she hated that she was living with them at all, writing them rent checks, promising to deadbolt their front door. But where else could she have gone? Not back to Halsey Street, and their listing had been perfect. An attic was removed enough from the street that she could feel afloat over the block, as if she were at sea, and not tethered once again to the old neighborhood.

  They reached the second-floor landing, and Samantha stopped in front of a shut door. Penelope guessed the door led to the pantry and then the kitchen. She had seen a few houses with this design. Samantha put the key in the lock then turned to stare at Penelope.

  “Good night,” she said, and Penelope realized she had been dismissed. Samantha disappeared through the door.

  Marcus stalled and glanced at Penelope penitently, then held up a hand to say good-bye and followed his wife. He closed the door behind him.

  Penelope crossed the next flight of stairs, wondering whether Marcus would continue to think of her. Would he feel bad for holding her hand? Would he wish they had been able to hold on for longer? She couldn’t predict. But she had wanted more time with him—just to see. She cursed Samantha for interrupting them and felt no guilt. The landlady was a brat, as self-contented and oblivious as the girls at RISD, only she was all grown up, a lawyer, a mother, beyond any kind of reprove.

  On the third floor, all the doors were closed and there was no sign of Grace. She heard no games or songs; there was not even a light visible from beneath the doors.

  Up in the attic, Penelope sat at her kitchen table. The room was dark and empty, so she wrapped herself in a blanket and lit a cigarette. She smoked it down to an ace, and then snuffed it out in the ashtray to finish later. She felt calmer with the scent of the smoke in her wet hair and lungs, on her fingertips. She pushed open the window to let in the night.

  After she quit RISD, Penelope used to wonder whether she should have stayed around for her BFA. She had been miserable in school but wound up stuck in Brooklyn—it was less miserable only because it was familiar, routine. Pittsburgh had been like another attempt at college, only without the degree, the critiques, the terrible classmates. She had found her morning runs in Frick Park, her nightcaps at the Anchor, how satisfied and unwound she felt when she could bring a man home to fuck in the quiet and privacy of her own home.

  The Harpers seemed to have a good life. Dead baby and all, they still had their beautiful house, their weekends in the city. Grace and boxes full of old things, roast chicken dinners. Samantha was a pain, but at least she wasn’t alone. Maybe Penelope could have found her life here, too—

  But it was late now. The dark lay heavy over the street below. There was no difference between the houses, the remodeled ones and the ones in decay, under the hush of night. Penelope couldn’t remember Brooklyn ever being this serene. And yet it was. The percussive fall of rain, the whoosh of rare cars, the blue of the air. She lit another cigarette.

  7

  THE GRANDS

  The guests had started to arrive, but Mirella was still in her bedroom on the second floor. She heard them talking and clinking bottles over a jazz record Ralph had put on. Her hair dripped on the floor from where she sat on the edge of the bed, staring at the wall, bare except for a watercolor painting of the garden that Penelope had tacked up herself. Mirella had returned from work one day and found the painting posted with a yellow tack. The painting was all green and pink and violet swirls, the paper crinkling in the spots where water had pooled. She had known instantly that it was her garden. Penelope had captured the way everything in the backyard was a part of something else—there were no rows or little wooden signs separating the herbs from the vegetables and flowers. The entire yard was a colorful, orderly overgrowth, where Mirella didn’t even have to try to lose herself. When she worked on the yard, the traffic on Halsey—the chime of a bicycle bell or the groan of a public bus—was the only proof that she was still in Brooklyn. Mirella had liked the painting so much that she hadn’t called Penelope in to yell at her for tacking a painting up in her bedroom without permission and piercing a hole in the wall. It was easy to yell at Penelope for her eight-year-old misadventures: leaving paintbrushes on the floor, forgetting to comb her hair, pressing her ear to Mirella’s bedroom door when she had made it clear that she wanted to be left alone.

  Ralph’s laughter boomed in the parlor, and Mirella drew the thin robe more tightly around herself. This second winter in the house had been especially hard; cold drafts cut through the house on windy days, and even when Mirella sat next to the pipes that heated the house, she couldn’t get warm enough. The snow had covered and killed
everything she had sown in the past year, and it would be weeks before she could sit out in the yard again. Without her garden to distract her, the days bled into one another. She made oatmeal for Ralph, detangled Penelope’s hair, and rode the A train into the city to clean houses for Mrs. Schubert, Mrs. Baxter, Mrs. Engle, Mrs. Farley, whoever had scheduled her for the day.

  The work gave her a routine and purpose; she liked the exertion of it, the feel of hot water on her hands, the herbal smell of the purple liquid she used to scrub the floors. She felt alive, deep in her body, when she cleaned. Ralph had wanted her to quit cleaning houses so that she could watch Penelope and give the girl what neither of them had known: a parent alive and devoted to them. But Penelope was old enough to watch herself; she went to school; she was fed; she was clean; she needed nothing else. Mirella was the one who needed things. At least, she didn’t have to ask Ralph for an allowance, like a child, and she could see what she had accomplished at work each day, each year, as her little stockpile of savings grew steadily in the bank.

  It had been Mrs. Schubert today, her parquet floors and clogged closets, the squadron of little dogs nipping at Mirella’s ankles while she tried to sweep. It was a longer day than usual because Mirella had risen early to cook. Ralph had refused to pay for a caterer—he wanted the food to come right from home. So before she left for the city that morning, Mirella had folded dozens of pastelitos, stewed chicken thighs with capers and olives, and filled her largest pot with rice and beans. It was nearly dark when she returned to Brooklyn, and she had no will to help Ralph set up the parlor. She spent longer than she intended in the shower, leaning against the tiles, under the spray of hot water, just standing. It was as if she were asleep with her eyes open. She didn’t think anything, and she couldn’t hear the party starting up, Ralph moving around furniture and opening the front door when the bell rang. It wasn’t until she had finally washed up, shampooed her hair, and returned to the bedroom that she remembered she was supposed to help.

  This would be their first party in their new house. They had entertained guests before, always visitors for Ralph. Mirella set out cookies and coffee, sat with them in the living room until she could invent a reason to leave. The women were no better than the men. They hardly looked at her, and Ralph addressed her only to add emphasis to whatever he was saying—“Isn’t that right, Mirella?” and “Wouldn’t you say, Mirella love?”

  She knew his friends didn’t take her seriously—they were always commenting on how young she was, asking her questions about Puerto Rico, although she had told them that wasn’t the island she was from. They thought she was a beautiful, skinny idiot who cleaned houses and flubbed some of her words in English—bark for buck, When-es-day for Wednesday, minds instead of mine. She didn’t admire Ralph’s friends any longer for owning businesses or having office jobs in downtown Brooklyn or Manhattan. The bottles of wine they brought over didn’t impress her anymore, or the new records they had purchased at Ralph’s store. Mirella knew now this was the extent of their lives—stopping into each other’s brownstones to drink and play music and talk indifferently about the neighborhood, as if it were some other place, instead of the brutal swatch of the city where they’d chosen to make their homes.

  Ever since Ralph and Mirella left their apartment on Marcy Avenue, their house had become a popular stop on the block’s gossip circuit. Neighbors stopped in to trade rumors about what had caused that big shoot-out on Myrtle; they complained about the rotting meat left out in the aisle of the A&P, and how long it had taken the police to find the man who had raped two elderly women on their walks home from the train. They shook their heads and remembered the little boy whose face had been cut open in the schoolyard one afternoon while he waited for his father to pick him up. They smoked cigars and listened to the radio, and never tired of the same conversations, the same disasters.

  In Aguas Frescas, the neighbors would have formed a search party to find the man who had cut the face of the little boy, a classmate of Penelope’s. They would find him and the rapist, beat them both with bats and bars, call them sinvergüenzas, and reprimand them for bringing shame to the barrio. They would reprimand the parents, too, for not keeping their children under better control. The people in her village were poor, but they knew how to defend their homes. Mirella didn’t say any of these things aloud; their guests would look at her as if she were an alien, and Ralph’s eyes would bulge as if she had gravely betrayed him in front of a crowd he wanted to impress. She kept busy by refilling the coffee and cookies, fluttering back and forth to the kitchen, wondering why no one in this country could be content with just one cookie, just one cup of coffee.

  Ralph had risen that morning, humming over the party. Mirella had watched him dress, comb his beard, and put on his tie. “Today’s our day, Mirella,” he had said. “Fifteen years, can you believe it?” And she had nodded from beneath the covers, shivering. “Big night,” was all she said, and Ralph kissed her neck before he left to run errands. He had ordered a banner for the party—“GRAND RECORDS, EST. 1976” printed in black ink on tan fabric. He wanted to hang it in the parlor for the night then string it up in the window at the store to announce their fifteenth anniversary sale. Mirella heard Ralph lock the front door behind him when he left to pick up the banner. She stayed in bed until the alarm rang again and she knew she had to get up or she wouldn’t have time to cook before she left for work.

  Mirella’s skin prickled into gooseflesh, and she wondered how long she could sit upstairs before someone asked where she was.

  “Mami,” a small voice called from the hall. Penelope poked her head into the bedroom. “Ya empezaron a llegar.”

  She spoke cautiously, her hands gripping the door for a moment before she finally stepped in the room. Her navy party dress was wrinkled, and her hair was still twisted into that morning’s pigtails. She had fastened a jeweled butterfly clip above her ear to flatten the hairs that had come loose at the crown. Mirella had straightened Penelope’s hair just a few days ago, but it was already coiling, returning to its unruly shape. The curls were Ralph’s fault, the clip the girl’s attempt at looking presentable.

  “We’re all waiting for you, Mami.”

  Penelope edged closer to her mother, put her hand on her knee.

  “How many people are downstairs?”

  “Not a lot—maybe nine.”

  “I hear more than nine voices.”

  “I counted before I came up.”

  Mirella crossed her legs and sighed.

  “Do you want me to pick out a dress for you, Mami?”

  Penelope smiled at her, her back straight and her hands dangling at her side, as if the longer she stood there beaming, the more likely Mirella would be to move.

  Se parece igualita a mí, Mirella thought, staring at the tiny double of herself. Penelope had the same squinty, light-filled eyes and slim hands, the bump in her nose, inherited from Ramona. She was browner than Mirella, a little wheat-colored girl who darkened to bronze in the sun. Ralph was the reason she was so dark, the reason her cheeks rounded when she smiled.

  “Fine,” she said. “Pick something out for me.”

  Penelope turned triumphantly toward the closet. She sifted through the dresses on their hangers, the dozen silk frocks Mirella hadn’t worn in years. She had cleared away the rest, including her favorite: slinky, bright, and emerald green. It had wrapped around her waist, long-sleeved, the neckline low. She had nowhere that justified her wearing such a dress, and so she gave it away. They went to Sheckley’s for their wedding anniversary every year, and they hadn’t so much as cut a cake for Penelope since her fifth birthday. Ralph never had the time.

  Penelope pulled a cobalt dress off the hanger.

  “How about this one, Mami? You look so pretty in blue.”

  Penelope held the dress against her body, the hem brushing the floor. Her eyebrows arched hopefully, as she waited for Mirella to respond. Mirella forced herself to smile at the girl, her frown breaking and dissol
ving over her face. It was a dress for an old woman, with a collar and fake pearl buttons along the front.

  Sometimes it irritated her, the way Penelope saw nothing: how selfish her father was, how much she needed to be left alone. The girl sulked about, carrying a stack of her latest drawings, waiting to be noticed, or marching into the bedroom and interrupting Mirella when she wanted to rest. But other times, the girl looked at her with a shine on her face, the way she sometimes looked at her father, and Mirella wanted to gather her into her arms and squeeze her, to breathe her in. She tapped Penelope on the forehead.

  “All right, hija,” she said. “For you, it’s blue.”

  Mirella took off the robe and slipped into the dress. The silk clung to her wet skin. Penelope sat cross-legged on the bed and watched her as Mirella dotted on perfume and put on her earrings. She shook her waves of hair behind her. Her hair was no longer burnt red by the mountain sun; it was a dull brown after all her years in Brooklyn, only hints of auburn or gold in certain angles under certain light.

  “Se te ves hermosa!” Penelope said.

  “Te ves hermosa.”

  Mirella corrected the child, and Penelope repeated after her and went to the closet to bring out a pair of black pumps. She held them steady while Mirella stepped into them.

  She looked at herself in the mirror, the veins in her bare calves, the new freckles on her arms. She had the beginning of a line in her forehead. She might not have been nearly as old as Ralph and his friends, but she wasn’t a girl anymore either. A woman on the subway had once mistaken her for Penelope’s sister, and a part of her had thought it seemed right; she hadn’t lived nearly enough to be someone’s mother.

  “There’s a big sign downstairs,” Penelope said. “Everyone is so proud of Pop.”