by Naima Coster
Mirella rolled the stiff fabric between her fingers. The dress gave off a stale smell, like dried flowers in a windowless room.
“Let’s get this over with,” she said and nudged Penelope toward the door.
Mirella had worn the emerald dress on the night she first met Ralph. An electric sign hung over the door to the nightclub, its red light kissing the curb. Mirella had overheard one of the ladies she worked for talking about the club. She had said the men went there in suits, the women in long hair and long earrings; there were black people, and white people, a few Puerto Ricans. She had called Luisel, from the factory, to go with her because it was safer to ride the train with another woman, and because if she went alone, someone might mistake her for a prostitute. Inside, the people were beautiful, as Mirella had expected. It was the New York she liked to remind herself she lived in. The men wore hats, and the women sparkled in their glittery blouses and melting makeup. They danced by touching themselves: their shoulders, their hair, their hips. They dipped and swung from side to side. The DJ played disco, which Mirella loved. She and Luisel found a table where they drank and shook their shoulders, waiting for someone to ask them to dance. It didn’t take long before they were taking turns on the floor, or back at the table, watching their purses and drinks. They sweat until their hair was heavy; they drank until they felt glamorous and as if they belonged; they whispered to each other in Spanish and felt far from the campo, their half of an island. Ralph found her, fanning herself at the table. He sat down beside her and asked, “Where’d you get all that red hair?”
He was older than her, probably the same age as her terrible aunt, but he was handsome in his unbuttoned shirt and white pants. He had an afro, a big one, and a little mustache. He asked where she was from and where she worked, and he told her about the store. They had to shout over the music, and there were pauses in her speech as she read his lips to understand. Ralph didn’t seem to mind. He teased her for saying she was drinking Esprite, but he pronounced it that way when the waiter came over, which made her laugh. He bought her one rum and soda, and then another, and another, until they were both out, dancing under the lights. Ralph pointed his index fingers at her while he rocked side to side in a funny American sway. She had imitated him—that she could remember—the rest was blurry and beautiful. When the club closed, Ralph put Luisel in a car—she was angry Mirella had ignored her all night—and then the two of them walked on together, peacefully, toward the train.
He didn’t seem frightened at all by where Mirella lived in Brownsville, and he took her right up to the door of her aunt’s apartment. She explained that soon she would leave her tía Mercedes and find a place of her own. The old woman had only brought her to this country so that Mirella could cook for her and wash for her and kill the mice in exchange for a corner to sleep and keep her things. Ralph didn’t kiss her good night, and when he left, Mirella ran to the kitchen. From the window, she watched him saunter down the block, his hands in his pockets, his head up, until he disappeared around the corner.
The Grand guests swarmed around the parlor, shouting over the Charles Mingus record. They sat in rented folding chairs and on the olive green sofa Ralph and Mirella usually kept upstairs. Ralph must have asked one of his friends to help him carry it downstairs to cover the fireplace, the white marble mouth filled with dusty bricks. A woman rushed across the room to say hello to someone she recognized and knocked over a half-dozen beer bottles. The guests were lining up the empty green and brown bottles in a corner of the parlor, underneath the window.
“I thought there were only nine people here.” Mirella pinched Penelope’s shoulder. The girl squirmed but didn’t cry out.
“There were nine. Dr. Elias and Mrs. Jones weren’t here before. I counted.”
“You counted wrong.”
There were at least twenty guests, most of them other business owners in the neighborhood. A few were old neighbors from the apartment building on Marcy, or new friends from this block. Mirella scanned the room for the Joneses, her favorite neighbors on Halsey Street. Mr. Jones was a bus driver, and Mrs. Jones sold Mary Kay. They lived a few brownstones over and were simple people who never treated Mirella like she didn’t belong. They had moved up from one of the Carolinas, and Mirella had been in Brooklyn as long as they had. Mrs. Jones dropped by the house a few times a month just to talk to Mirella. Sometimes, Mirella couldn’t get out of bed, so she sent Penelope to the door to say she wasn’t feeling well. Other times, she and Mrs. Jones had coffee standing up in the kitchen, as if both of them could spare only a few minutes. They would talk for hours about their gardens or their daughters, nursing small cups of café con leche. Mrs. Jones’s daughter was Penelope’s age when she died. She got sick with a fever they couldn’t lower; her heart gave out at Beth Israel Hospital in Manhattan before the Grands bought the house on Halsey. Mrs. Jones was just as hungry for company as Mirella, and she used her briefcase filled with too-pink blush and gummy lipstick as pretext for visits.
Mrs. Jones stood in front of the sofa, holding a bottle of beer she wasn’t drinking. She stared at the drawings Penelope had taped over the fireplace, tilting her head as if she were waiting for the turbulent spirals to announce something to her. Mirella wanted to go speak to her, but she knew Ralph would want her to join him in his circle. Mirella didn’t have to call out to her friend; Mrs. Jones looked up from one of Penelope’s colored pencil creations and saw her by the stairs. Mrs. Jones smiled weakly and waved before turning back to the drawings.
“Let’s go say hello,” Mirella said softly, nudging Penelope toward where Ralph stood. She kept her hand on Penelope’s back and felt as if she were really pushing herself, and not the girl, into the center of the room.
Ralph was smoking cigars with Dr. Elias and Lionel Sheckley. The men puffed smoke up into the room, and Mirella cringed. The smell would stick to the curtains, which she had just washed that week with bleach. Una Beckett stood among the men, picking at a large plate of potato salad, and listening to Ralph as he spoke. Her plastic fork was stained with lipstick and mayonnaise. Her eyelids were the same garish pink as her dress, cinched at her fat waist with a belt. Miss Beckett and Ralph were the same age, but she already looked much older. Mirella smiled as she approached them, satisfied that even in her dress she looked young enough to be Una’s daughter. She undid just the top button of her dress.
“Mirella, aren’t you stunning!”
Dr. Elias stepped aside to make room for Mirella in the circle. She smiled at him.
“Hi, Freddie.”
She embraced him and then turned to Lionel. Lionel was already drunk, and sweating in a green blazer that didn’t quite fit him. He squinted at Mirella through his Coke-bottle glasses, then agreed vigorously with Dr. Elias.
“Lovely as ever, Muh-ray-uh! You’re a dream in blue!”
Mirella nodded in thanks. Lionel and Freddie were Ralph’s friends, not hers, but she liked them both. Freddie was levelheaded and honest, and Lionel told a lot of corny jokes just to make everyone laugh. They were part of the reason she had fallen for Ralph—they hushed whenever he spoke and listened to him as if he knew more than they ever could. They had all experienced a good amount of success, but Ralph was the only one with no reason to thrive. He had started out not only black and poor, but without even parents or a surname he could be sure was his. They revered him, and Mirella had once, too.
Ralph slipped his arm around her waist.
“Yes, love, you look nice,” he said, without looking up from the glowing tip of his cigar. “So these are Cuban, you say?” Ralph held his cigar out to Lionel.
“One hundred percent. I personally know the guy in the Village who sold me these.”
“How do we know he didn’t just slip these little rings that say ‘Havana’ on any old cigars?” Dr. Elias inspected the gold band around his cigar.
“He wouldn’t do that,” Lionel said. “He doesn’t have to. These are the real thing.”
“Isn’t that ris
ky?” Miss Beckett asked in a shaky voice. She looked over her shoulder as if she expected the police to bust into the house at any second, confiscate the cigars, and arrest Ralph.
“Pfsh,” Ralph said. “Why would it be risky? No one’s ever going to check and see if a shop in the Village is selling Cuban cigars. What does anyone care? Now if that tobacco shop were here on Bedford Avenue—forget about it.”
Ralph shook his head, his disapproval enough to complete the thought. The men sucked on their cigars.
Dr. Elias put his hand on Penelope’s head, acknowledging the child and flattening her curls.
“Smile for me, Penny,” he said.
Penelope beamed at him obediently, revealing her small ivory teeth. She had a gap between her two front teeth, and the bottom two were so crooked they almost faced each other.
“Those aren’t straightening out, are they?” Miss Beckett said. She lowered her glasses and leaned in to have a closer look at the girl’s teeth.
“My teeth were crooked, too, at that age,” Mirella said.
“And they sure straightened out—didn’t they?” said Lionel.
“It’s nothing braces won’t fix,” Dr. Elias said. He patted Penelope’s head again, and she smiled at him, this time genuinely. “We’ll get you some in a pretty color, like pink or blue, if your pop ever finds the time to take you to that dentist.”
“I’ve always got time for my Penny.” Ralph winked and pinched his daughter’s cheek. Penelope blushed reverently.
Mirella rolled her eyes and squeezed her daughter’s shoulder.
“Aren’t you hungry, Penélope? Why don’t you go fix yourself a plate? I made pastelitos.”
“I want to stay here with you all.”
“Go and get them while they’re still hot.”
“Sí, Señora,” Penelope said, knowing when she had been ordered away. She wandered over to the table piled high with food, and the conversation returned to cigars.
“Mirella, is it true that you can get Cuban cigars in the Dominican Republic?”
Lionel touched Mirella’s arm as he spoke, his voice low as if they shouldn’t be overheard.
“Of course, you can,” she said. “Cuba is right next door to us, but there’s no reason to buy Cuban cigars when you can buy Dominican cigars for much cheaper. Our cigars are just as good, and you don’t have any trouble bringing them into the US.”
“Now, I disagree there—” Ralph took the cigar out of his mouth and pointed it at the center of the circle. “You can’t really compare Dominican and Cuban cigars. The quality of the tobacco is just not the same. Cubans make the best cigars in the world.”
Lionel nudged Ralph hard in the arm with a slanted, drunken grin on his face. “Maybe the next time you go to the Dominican Republic, you can smuggle us back some Cubans, eh, Ralph?”
“What next time?” Dr. Elias scoffed. “He’s never been.”
“Don’t tell me that!” Lionel shouted. “Is that true, Ralph Grand? You’ve never been to the Dominican Republic?”
Ralph puffed a perfect O. The smoke ring drifted above the circle before it broke apart.
“No time, old man. You know how things get at the store over the summer.”
“I can’t believe I forgot you’d never been—” Lionel rubbed the creases in his forehead.
“If you ask me, you’re a fool, Ralph,” Dr. Elias said. “It’s a beautiful country. Kim and I are planning a trip as soon as I can get some days off from the hospital.”
“Be careful,” Mirella said. “If you go, you’ll never want to come back.”
“Ralph, if you’ve never been, who goes with Mirella and Penny every summer?” Lionel asked.
“What do you mean who goes with them? They go with each other,” Miss Beckett snapped.
“Penny’s always begging me to go,” Ralph said, picking at his fro with his fingers. “I’m planning on it—maybe next year if business slows down, but we don’t want that to happen, do we?” He held out his fist to Lionel, who tapped it with his own, and the two men chuckled.
Lionel had been Ralph’s first friend in the neighborhood. They met doing construction, right out of high school. They took pride now in how much they had done and how busy they were—the long nights spent balancing the books, the hours they put in every day to keep their businesses open. Sheckley’s was the most popular and respectable bar on this side of the neighborhood, and Grand Records had become a Bed-Stuy landmark. Ralph was always saying that if Bed-Stuy were included in the guidebooks, Grand Records would be on the first page. He had only recently started selling tapes, too, instead of just vinyl, but the records still sold best. Church ladies came in regularly for gospel albums, but the top sellers were always hip-hop—Run DMC, Eric B. and Rakim, Fat Boys. Ralph sold Motown, too, and a few rock albums that young people in the neighborhood requested: the Grateful Dead and Pink Floyd. Hipsters from Manhattan took the A train into Brooklyn just to pick up some jazz and blues from a real jazz and blues shop. They always asked for Ralph’s opinion, and he’d handle their questions as if the answers were obvious and recommend Monk and Miles and Bobby Hutcherson before ringing them up himself.
Ralph still had all that coolness from when he and Mirella first started to see each other. He was starting to gray, but he looked rugged in his brown pants and matching blazer, the neat, shrinking globe of his fro. He laughed now with Lionel, the cigar tucked and motionless in the corner of his mouth, as if he were waiting to be photographed. He was so content Mirella couldn’t bear to look at him. She turned away.
She tuned out the men and Miss Beckett, let their voices fade into the cacophony of hard English sounds storming around the room. She watched Penelope. All the food Mirella had cooked that morning was cold on the table.
Penelope peered into every dish before daintily spooning a little bit of rice onto a plate. No one else had touched Mirella’s food. The guests were eating the hors d’oeuvres Miss Beckett had brought over instead: soda crackers, pigs in a blanket, milky-white potato salad.
Mirella felt Miss Beckett lean into her. She had stopped listening to the men to watch Penelope, too. The girl had taken a seat by the record player, cradling the plate in her lap, tilting her head to read the label on the album spinning inside.
“I hope she likes the potato salad,” Miss Beckett said.
“I think you used too much mayonnaise,” Mirella replied dryly.
“I didn’t even realize she was standing here with us before. That child is so quiet sometimes I’d swear she was a ghost. I see her in the halls at school in between classes, and I walk right by her half the time before I even notice she’s there.”
“Well, she is there—every single day. And she’s not so quiet.”
“I’m not saying I worry about her. She isn’t one of those students who sits by herself at lunch. She plays with the other girls during recess. She gets picked for teams because she’s so fast. She doesn’t ever have problems with anyone—not the teachers, not the kids, but she doesn’t really seem to have friends either.”
“What are you trying to say, Una?”
“I’ve told Ralph that it’s no good for her to be so solitary. It’s obvious that the two of you love her, but that’s not enough. She should have friends her own age.”
“Penelope is a private girl.”
“Wouldn’t it be nice if she had been able to invite a friend or two from school to this party? Then she could have someone to talk to while she sat over there. She wouldn’t have to pretend to like the music so much, or to be so interested in her food.”
“I don’t think my daughter’s pretending.” Mirella raised her voice. “And not everyone needs someone to talk to.”
“Now, I disagree with that—” Miss Beckett began, but Lionel interrupted her. He planted a hand on Mirella’s shoulder, his meaty fingers on the cap sleeve of her dress.
“Muh-ray-uh, don’t be too mad at Ralph for not going with you all to DR.”
His breath stank of beer.
“He’ll go soon enough to spend time with you and Penny and to meet your mother and all that. I tell you, running a shop is no easy thing. The bar gets the same way every summer, and I’m sure if I were married, my wife would hate me from May to September.”
“I know what it takes to run the shop. That’s why I used to ask Ralph to let me help.”
Miss Beckett’s eyebrows went up in horror, as if she could tell Mirella were about to speak ill of Ralph. Lionel didn’t seem to notice, he was babbling on about warm weather, how it made people feel like spending all they’ve got. Ralph wasn’t listening either. She went on.
“I wanted to work in the store, to help Ralph, but he never let me do anything but wash the windows and dust.”
“That’s just how he is,” Miss Beckett said, leaning into the little huddle of Lionel and Mirella. Lionel still had his arm around her. “I’ve offered to help, too, over the years.”
“I’m his wife,” Mirella said. “You live down the street.”
Lionel interrupted the women.
“It’s hard work, Muh-ray-uh,” he said, almost spitting in her face. “Running a business isn’t easy for any of us, but we do it, ’cause it’s worth doing. It’s worth the headaches to be able to call something your own. Like that shop and this house—they’re your little piece of this city, Muh-ray-uh. They belong to Ralph on paper, but they belong to you and Penny as well. They’re your pieces of this life.”
“Yes, Lionel. I’m very fortunate.”
“I just sell beers, but what Ralph does—that’s for real. That’s important. You hear this music that’s playing? This is Charles Mingus. Mingus.”
Mirella hoped he was done.
“That’s all we’ve got, you know—our music. Most people in this neighborhood don’t have a single thing of their own. Hell, when Ralph and I came here, we didn’t even have families. Me without a father, Ralph without either of his parents.”
Some of the other guests in the room had gathered around to listen to Lionel’s speech. He didn’t seem to notice them. He gripped Mirella’s shoulder and leaned closer to her. She felt the heat rising from his pink cheeks and heavy hand.