Halsey Street

by Naima Coster

  “A drink can help take the edge off the world, that’s why I opened my bar. But it’s nothing compared to what Ralph does. I’m telling you, Muh-ray-uh, music—”

  “It’s all we’ve got. Yes, Lionel. I see what you’re saying.”

  The guests were listening now, nodding along to what he said. Lionel took note of his audience, and went on, addressing the crowd now as much as he had her.

  “Do you see how happy everyone is here at this party in your house? It’s not the free beer, I’ll tell you that. It’s because we’re all glad to be here celebrating Ralph and you and Penny. We all see what Grand Records has done for this neighborhood. I’ve seen people walk in that shop and leave different, even if they only had enough for one record, even if they didn’t even have enough to buy any records. It’s enough to just walk through the aisles. To see what’s there, to see what our people created. I’ve seen young people go into that store and they can’t even believe how much good music was made here in Brooklyn, here, by their own people. They walk into Ralph’s store and they see that black people can do things. They can create.”

  Ralph was quiet, leaning against the wall and listening to his friend’s speech. Mirella saw Penelope perk up in her chair, straining to hear.

  “Our music reminds us we’re all connected. Ella, Billie, Jimi—those are the kind of artists who can change your life. They can save it. I’m forty-three years old, and I’ve been a bachelor all my life, and if I couldn’t go home to some Teena Marie or Jean Carne, I don’t know how I’d make it through the days.”

  “Teena Marie is white,” Mirella said, but no one seemed to hear.

  “Ralph knows what music does—he knows it. He’s known since he was a kid working in the record store in Harlem across the street from that last boys’ home he lived in. And he’s dedicated his life to making sure we all know it, too. I’m lucky to call him friend. You’re lucky to be his wife, and we’re all lucky just to know him.”

  Lionel thrust his empty beer bottle into the air.

  “A toast to Ralph Grand!” he said, and the crowd followed suit, raising their bottles.

  “To Grand Records and to Ralph Grand—father, husband, entrepreneur, and friend to the neighborhood.”

  “Hear, hear,” the guests cheered and the parlor rang with the collisions of glass on glass, fevered applause. Foamy beer sloshed out of the bottles and onto the floor. Miss Beckett clapped slowly, letting her palms slide against each other, her eyes fixed on Ralph. Ralph nodded at the cluster of guests, and he smiled, his eyes half closed, almost bashful, as he steeped in the attention.

  “Thank you, thank you,” he said, nodding in time to his own words. He found Mirella’s hand and squeezed it. She wanted to wrench her hand away from his, but she let him hold her hand, swallowing her fingers into his palm. He wanted to share the moment with her, she knew, wanted to say with his hand over her hand, This is our life. Mirella waited for the applause to die down, for their guests to turn back to each other and their drinks and the music, the Mingus still playing, too many horns bleating and competing. When they did, she squeezed Ralph’s hand so he would release her.

  “Excuse me,” Mirella murmured as she slipped out of the circle. “I’m going to check on the food,” she said, and no one questioned her. Lionel and Ralph were already talking again about summer business, Miss Beckett and Dr. Elias listening in.

  She found Mrs. Jones in the same spot she had been at the beginning of the party, staring at Penelope’s drawings, three of them in a row, above the fireplace. They looked like a series of squiggly lines to Mirella, the kind of multicolor messes that toddlers make when they first learn how to color. Penelope had explained to Mirella that she was “playing with colors,” which Mirella had thought was obvious.

  Mrs. Jones looked frail in her black cocktail dress, just brown skin and bones under the lacy sleeves and tulle skirt. She kissed Mirella on the cheek and wrapped her arm around her shoulder. Her face was perfectly dusted with powder, her eyelashes curled, and her lips a deep rose. She could have been a doll, she was so tiny and delicately made-up. She seemed to be shrinking every time she turned up for a visit on the pretense of selling Mirella mascara. Her hands were cold.

  “Busy night for your family, hmm?”

  “For Ralph.”

  “You’ll have a lot to clean up.” Mrs. Jones pointed at the bottles someone had lined up on the mantel.

  “Please, I don’t want to think about it.”

  “Well, if you have a parlor this beautiful, you should certainly use it for parties.”

  “I’d hardly call this a party,” Mirella said. “Everyone’s just standing and talking, getting drunk. At a party, you laugh and you dance. But you can’t move to this music.”

  “Don’t let Lionel hear you. He’ll have a heart attack if he hears you say the music is just nice.” Mrs. Jones laughed. “He’s a nut, isn’t he? All that our music business. You’d think he was Ralph’s wife.”

  Mirella nodded, but she didn’t want to talk about Ralph. She was thankful for this moment away from him and his horde of admirers.

  “You haven’t eaten anything,” she said.

  Mrs. Jones smiled sadly. “I don’t have much of an appetite these days. Winter is always the hardest for me—but you already knew that.”

  “Yes, I understand.”

  Mrs. Jones turned back to the drawings over the fireplace. “Penny’s such a talented girl,” she said. “These are so beautiful. I can’t say why, but there’s something more to them than is obvious.”

  Mirella shrugged. “I don’t understand it. I don’t mind if she draws, I just wish she’d focus more on school. I tell her that’s the only chance she has.”

  “I used to tell Lily the same thing—to work hard in school so she wouldn’t end up selling Mary Kay.” Mrs. Jones looked down at her empty hands and then back at Mirella, as if she’d found something there that filled her with regret. “I don’t know why I said those things to her. She was just a girl, and I shouldn’t have worried her with such grown-up things. Sean and I live a good life.”

  Mirella shook her head because she couldn’t give Penelope that same assurance. She did not have a good life. She did not want such smallness and emptiness for her daughter.

  “Drawing isn’t a job. Penelope can be anything she wants to be. A lawyer, a doctor, an entrepreneur—” Mirella fumbled over the word. “If I had been born here, I would have been something, too.”

  “You still can. I’m sure Ralph would support you if you decided to go back to school.”

  “What would I even go back for?”

  “Just for a change.”

  “I’d never get in anywhere with my English.”

  “Your English is fine—better than a lot of people’s English, I promise you,” Mrs. Jones said.

  “I don’t think Ralph would like it.” Mirella felt disgusted with herself as soon as she had said it. “Where’s Mr. Jones?”

  “Oh, you know how he is. He can’t handle crowds anymore, so I left him at home. I should be getting back to him soon. He’s probably hungry by now.”

  Mirella took Mrs. Jones’s hands in hers.

  “Please take some of the food with you. We’ll be eating it for days, and Ralph doesn’t even like Dominican food.”

  “He has no idea what he’s missing,” Mrs. Jones said, and she winked.

  The women hugged, and Mrs. Jones took up as many empty beer bottles as she could in her arms to deposit them in the garbage can by the door. She turned to go and then paused, circling back around to face Mirella.

  “Frame those pictures,” she said. “Go down to the ninety-nine-cents store and frame those pictures. Put them up like you’re proud of her. Make sure she knows.”

  She nodded at Mirella, once, and then left to throw away the bottles and fix a plate for Mr. Jones. Mirella watched her go, her little body and the load of bottles. She saw Mrs. Jones dump the bottles into the garbage, then place her hand on Penelope’s cheek
and stoop down to whisper something in the girl’s ear that made her shine all over.

  Penelope never looked at Mirella with that kind of pleasure. Even though her daughter was gone, Mrs. Jones still had that instinct about her. Mirella hadn’t felt any maternal aptitude in years—that ability to soothe and protect. When Penelope was a baby, mothering had been easy. Penelope bit at her breasts, and her arms ached and her back bent from nights spent rocking her, and she panicked whenever she ran a fever or fell, but the girl had been so small, so indisputably hers.

  Mirella still marveled at Penelope, sometimes—the way she now expertly shook cereal into her blue breakfast bowl, the adult stance she assumed, hands on her hips, when she gargled in the bathroom, her head tipped back and the water running, how she swirled her fingertips in paint and then tapped at her rice paper in patterns Mirella couldn’t discern. The ordinariness of life with Penelope could still astound her; she was Mirella’s greatest anchor in this city. But every day, Penelope became less hers. Mirella saw it in the way Penelope sat with one ankle resting on her knee, her leg bent at a ninety-degree angle, a masculine way for a little girl to sit. She had all of Ralph’s American habits—feet up on the table, shoes on the couch; she preferred her potato salad white, without capers and without the beets that stained it pink. Even her Spanish—one of the last things just the two of them shared—seemed like a trick she was constantly practicing. She savored her consonants for too long, rounded her vowels, as if she were giving a speech instead of speaking.

  Ralph and Penelope were building a language of their own now, too. She had started staying up late to listen to records with him when he came home from the store. For hours, the two of them sat curled up on the olive sofa, singing along to Ralph’s favorite albums, until Mirella barged into the living room and lifted the needle off the track, and sent them both to bed.

  Mirella could always sense the edges of the girl’s cheerfulness, the careful plotting behind everything she ever said: her invitations for Mirella to join her in a game of checkers, her wondering aloud in the hallway where she had left her colored pencils, her traipsing into the bedroom because there was a knot in her hair she couldn’t unravel on her own. Mirella knew that she was never the one Penelope was truly seeking; she wanted her father, and Mirella was the one who happened to be around.

  With Mrs. Jones gone, Penelope remained where she was, swinging her head in time to the music. The girl was humming to herself, her eyes shut, her shoulders twisting to the music, and Ralph was enclosed behind a wall of guests. Mirella knew no one would miss her, so she weaved through the crowd back to the stairs and walked up to the second floor where she could be alone.

  The belching bass notes followed her into the bedroom. She kicked off her heels and lay on the bed in the dark, staring up at the ceiling. She was spending more and more time in this bed, staring at things, letting her mind empty out until she couldn’t remember where she was. She wasn’t on Halsey, in Brooklyn, or in this country at all. She wasn’t back in Aguas Frescas with Ramona either. She wasn’t anywhere.

  Her wedding dress still hung in the closet; she had seen Penelope’s hands pass over it. It was a simple white dress she had bought at A&S the morning they went to city hall. Ralph ordered a Dominican cake with guava filling, and they had fed oversized slices to each other, in one of the booths at Sheckley’s, Lionel bringing over rounds and rounds of beer on the house. She had liked that party. Later on, Ralph carried her up the stairs of his building on Marcy Avenue, and they made love in front of an open window, the curtains dancing in the night breeze. It was different than the boy-and-girl love she’d known in the mountains; Ralph was strong, and he could lift her up and move her around beneath him with the simple hook of his arm. They didn’t have to hide and sneak behind the schoolhouse or by the river. They were home. Mirella wrapped her legs around Ralph’s waist, and she shouted and moaned. Ralph squeezed her close and kissed her ear, a loud smacking sound.

  After, he lit his pipe, and put on a song. Mirella listened from where she lay, hot, under the covers, and thought that she wanted a lush life, too, just like the man in the song—more beer and more bars, more of Ralph swinging her around the dance floor, his hands on her waist, and then bringing her back to their little place.

  She imagined her father must have been a man like Ralph—of great designs and striving. She hadn’t met anyone, in Aguas Frescas or the United States, who was so full of dreams. He had no reason for his boldness, and yet he walked as if he were the tallest man in every room. He didn’t talk much about his life in Harlem, but Mirella knew Ralph’s childhood had been as mean and lonesome as hers. They both knew what it was to go from no one to one another. Together, she thought, they had a chance to build something of their own: a business, a family, a life.

  While Ralph padded around the apartment naked to fix them two glasses of ice water, Mirella called out to him. “I have to call my mother! I have to call her and say, ‘Mami! Me casé con un morenito.’” She translated for Ralph and he laughed and said she shouldn’t forget to mention she was Mrs. Grand now—the first and only. After he left the boys’ home, Ralph had picked his own last name; there had been no Grands before them.

  “Mami?”

  Penelope was at the door again.

  “Qué quieres niña?” Mirella asked. She was exasperated with talking, with English.

  “Why did you leave the party, Mami?”

  “Porque me quería ir.”

  “What?”

  Mirella sighed. “I was tired, hija.”

  Penelope crept into the dark room. She lay next to her mother on the bed, the sheets rustling as she crossed her legs at the ankle and tucked her hands behind her head.

  “Mami, will you tell me a story about when you were a girl in Aguas Frescas?”

  “I told you I was tired.”

  “Will you tell me about Abuela Ramona?”

  Mirella put her fingers to her temples.

  “Mami?”

  “Shhh.”

  “I miss her.”

  “Cállate niña.”

  Mirella stared at the ceiling, sank into the white plaster, let it fill her eyes, her ears, her nose. She could hardly hear the Mingus, or Ralph, or Penelope fidgeting on the bed beside her. She allowed herself to drift.

  “Mami?”

  8

  ADRIFT

  Penelope was working in colors when the snow arrived. It was only November, but the branches drooped under the weight of the clean, glimmering stuff. She had brought out her pastels in an effort to combat the white. Her mind turned toward the mountains, the red dirt of Aguas Frescas, the summers with her grandmother. She clipped a square of cotton paper to the easel. Sweeps of vermilion, brown, and fresh green became the mountains, patches of orange for where the sun warmed the earth. It was not painting, but it was the closest she had come in years. She had needed the color, a smudge of every pink and blue and yellow in her evening sky.

  When the phone rang, she lifted it to her ear, one hand still drawing. It was late for Pop to be calling. She said hello.

  “Penny girl, have you heard from your father?”

  It was Miss Beckett again. Penelope sighed and let the old woman know she had seen her father earlier in the evening and that she was interrupting.

  “He won’t answer the phone, and I’ve called at least a dozen times.”

  “He’s probably just asleep.”

  “Oh God,” Miss Beckett said, the God was muffled as if the phone had slipped from her mouth and the receiver was pressed against skin.

  “I put him to bed before I left, Una. Relax. You’re making something out of nothing.”

  Penelope and Ralph had eaten spaghetti and meatballs from two cans, shared a bottle of root beer. They watched Men of Boys Town, and Ralph paused the film over and over to tell her stories about his years in the boys’ home in Harlem. He told her about how eagerly he awaited the weekly macaroni night, and the time he had been forced to kneel on rice because th
e nuns found dirty pictures carved into the pew where he sat every Sunday although he’d had nothing to do with the crude etchings. He seemed worn out from all his remembering by the end of the night, and Penelope had left him in his bed, only his chin visible above the beige sheets.

  “Well, he was awake when I went to see him.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “We had plans . . . to play checkers.”

  Miss Beckett spoke meekly as if she didn’t actually want anyone to hear. Penelope asked what had happened.

  “I have a key, so I let myself in and I brought up the mail like I always do. You know he can’t get down to the box—and when I gave it all to him, he froze up, like a corpse. He got a postcard, you see. From her.”

  “What did it say?”

  “I don’t know. But as soon as he was through with it, he asked me to leave.”

  Miss Beckett began to sob, and Penelope ignored her sniveling.

  “I’ll find him.”

  “Will you wait for me? I want to come along.”

  “Stay where you are,” Penelope snapped, and Miss Beckett gasped as if she had been shoved. She resisted the urge to tell the old woman she had done enough harm for one night—why would she ever give Ralph the postcard?

  “I’ll call you once I’ve found him.”

  Penelope felt the panic as soon as she hung up the phone. Her pulse rose loudly into her ears as if her heart were suddenly playing an internal, frantic music. Was this her fault? Had she summoned her mother somehow? She looked at her drawing of the mountains, their mocking swipes of red. She ran out of the attic in a sweater and boots and a pair of gloves, and she didn’t bother to close the door behind her.

  Out on the street, the cold seeped through the wool of her sweater, the coils of her hair. Penelope ran toward Bedford, her feet landing hard, crushing prints into the snow. He’s fine, she thought as she sped up the dark street. He’s fine, he’s fine. This time I am here. He’s fine. She didn’t see anyone else, any signs of life, until she reached Franklin Avenue, all lit up and noisy, weary-looking people surfacing from the subway and slogging through the snow. It was after ten.