by Naima Coster
A string of lights hung over the entrance to Sheckley’s. It looked like a barn in the middle of Bed-Stuy, all unpainted pinewood and shutters over the windows. The same shabby sign hung over the door. Penelope pushed her way inside. The bar was dark and warm, the old radiators hissing heat. The red vinyl booths were still there, and through the glass French doors at the rear Penelope could see that the new management had kept the garden, although everything was frozen over.
Ralph was at the bar. His head hung down on the counter, his fingers curled around a half-empty glass. His cane lay on the floor. Penelope ran past the man at the door who asked to see her ID, the young people sharing pitchers of frosty beer in their booths, swirling French fries in ketchup and mayonnaise. They were all out of the storm, keeping each other warm.
Penelope shook Ralph when she reached him.
“Pop, wake up. It’s time to go.”
There was a man behind the bar, drying glasses with a frayed white cloth. “He’s fine, miss,” he said. “Just sleeping it off.”
Penelope ignored him, held her fingers under Ralph’s nose to make sure he was breathing. His lower lip dangled. She shook her father again.
“Seriously, miss, I’m telling you he’s all right.”
Penelope finally looked up across the bar. The man cleaning glasses wore a black T-shirt and horn-rimmed glasses, his curly hair pushed off his forehead. He had brown eyes and skin, a tiny stud in each ear.
“Who are you?” Penelope asked.
“I’m Jon.”
“Fuck you, Jon. You’re a lousy bartender and a shitty human being.”
“Excuse me?”
“You had no right serving liquor to my father. But you don’t care what happens to him as long as he remembers to tip after every drink, right?”
“Look, lady, how could I turn him away? His picture is on the wall. He just seemed like a nice old man—”
“He’s sixty-three,” Penelope spat, and she wasn’t sure whether she had said his age as proof that he wasn’t old, or proof that he was.
She turned back to Ralph and shook him harder now, with her hands on both of his shoulders. Ralph’s head jerked up, and he snorted. He opened one eye, tentatively. He said her name.
“Penny, you’re five. I mean, you turned five here. You remember that?”
Penelope could see the birthday in flashes: her father’s friends raising their glasses of amber and gold ale, Ralph petting her head while everyone sang. Mirella in a bloodred dress, smoking her slender cigarette, nudging a cake toward her.
“That was a nice birthday wasn’t it? Your mother made that cake. That was such a nice cake. With yellow sugar flowers? We had such a nice time.”
Penelope could see the postcard sticking out of Ralph’s pocket. It was a creased and battered card with a white border, but Penelope couldn’t make out much else in the dark. Her father reached to pull out the card and show it to her.
“Not here,” she said and pulled her father’s hand away. She twisted the stool so that he faced her. He began to slump forward, and Penelope separated her legs into a lunge to shoulder his weight. It wasn’t very hard to keep him upright—Ralph was all bone and loose skin. The bartender dashed out from behind the bar.
“I don’t need your help,” Penelope told him, but he stood behind her anyway, his hands raised to catch Ralph if he fell.
Ralph’s head hung to the side, his mouth open, and Penelope patted his cheek.
“Jesus Christ, Pop, will you wake up? I need you to stay awake.”
“I’m sorry, Penny,” he said. “I’m sorry I didn’t give you more birthdays . . . more birthdays when I had the chance.”
Ralph swayed and the stool spun. The bartender was beside her now, and he asked where they lived.
“Let me help you with your father,” he said. “There’s no way you can take him that far yourself.”
Penelope drew her eyebrows together in the Grand look of disgust.
“You don’t know me. You don’t know what I can do. And you’ve done enough.”
“Can I call a car for you at least?”
Penelope turned back to her father. His eyes were closed again; his mouth hung open. If she removed the pressure of her hands from his shoulders, he would fall.
“Fine,” she said. “Hurry.”
The bartender ducked behind the bar and dialed. Penelope leaned against her father to wait, one shoulder against his, the toes of his oxfords scraping the pinewood floor. A few of the customers in their booths had stopped to watch. They stared at Ralph, drunk, his peacoat still on, his eyes shut. They stared at Penelope, too, jacketless, windblown hair, holding him up with gloved hands. She stared back at them, unable to read concern or amusement in their faces. They seemed to just be looking. Penelope wished, precipitously, violently, that she was one of them, drinking in a booth with people who knew her name, the drunk man at the bar an interruption to her night and not the center of it.
Ralph opened one eye.
“You can’t keep anything in this life, Penny. Not a thing.” He started to fumble around for the postcard again, as if he had forgotten where he had put it.
“You want some water, Pop? That will help.”
“Not if I pee myself, Penny. What if I pee myself?”
Penelope put her hand in his fro, speckled with drops of melting snow. “Has that happened before, Pop? Have you peed yourself before?”
Ralph started to cry.
“I didn’t want you to know.”
The bartender announced the taxi was on its way. Penelope told her father, asked him to stand up for her. She promised she would help, make sure he didn’t fall.
Ralph placed his feet on the floor and sank into his legs when he slid off the stool. Penelope wrapped his arm around her neck. She gripped him around the waist, and they moved toward the door, Ralph throwing his feet out in front of him. He didn’t walk all that differently drunk than he did sober. Penelope had to steer him, and he leaned hard on her, his palm weighing heavy on her shoulder. The bartender picked up Ralph’s cane and followed them. He held the door open for them as they left.
Penelope eased Ralph down the steps. It took all of her focus to guide Ralph through the drifts. The sidewalk was all soft snow, powder that unfolded into a path as they inched toward the corner.
“It’s cold out here,” Ralph said.
“That’s ’cause you’re not wearing your boots.”
“You two, you could never stop fighting. Like you didn’t understand what family was for. But I knew. Me and your mother, we had our way. Before I messed it all up over that goddamned store—”
“The store was important, Pop. It brought the people together.”
“What neighborhood? What people? All those years . . . I’d have been better off trying to make her happy.”
“You can’t make anyone else happy, Pop.”
Ralph stood tall and still, squinted at Penelope, as if he were suddenly sober.
“Of course you can. Please tell me I at least taught you that.”
He waited for her answer, as if any moment she might come to her senses and say, Yes, yes, that’s what you taught me.
Ralph shook his head. “Here,” he said, reaching into his pocket. “It wasn’t for me.”
He held the postcard faceup, her mother’s handwriting visible under the streetlights. Penelope took the card from him, stuffed it into the pocket of her jeans.
The livery car turned the corner, its high beams shining parallel paths into the snow. Penelope helped her father into the car, and then ran over to the other side to let herself in.
“Where to?” the driver asked.
“Halsey Street,” she said, and they took off in silence, breaking new ground in the snow.
Penelope didn’t finish with her father until after two. She brewed coffee and soaked his feet in hot water, held a bucket for him to vomit, threw away the empty bottles of beer, the handle of rum. When she left, the city trucks hadn’t arrived yet t
o plow, and there was no salt on the sidewalks. The snow was up past her ankles, and it took effort to trudge back to Greene. More than once, she thought about stopping under one of the streetlamps to read the postcard, but the idea made her shake. The postcard felt volatile somehow, as if she could set it off if she weren’t careful. If she paused to look, it might explode in her hands. She kept walking east, avoiding the patches of ice, a reel of her father sick and moaning, his ankles swollen, replaying in her head.
At the corner of her new block, Penelope passed two lovers wrestling in the snow. The street was otherwise empty, and they took up the whole sidewalk, pummeling each other with fistfuls of powder. They tugged at each other, pushed each other away, their back-and-forth so quick it seemed synchronized. They were panting through the violence of it, giggling and grunting whenever they got ahold of each other. She didn’t see they were white until she had stepped off the curb to avoid their public play. She saw their flushed faces in the light from the streetlamp, the hunger in their eyes as they swung at each other, cold smiles stretching across the width of their faces. Penelope guessed they were a few years younger than she was, recent college grads, fresh to the neighborhood, and far away from their families. They had probably found each other at a house party, or maybe in a café. She wanted their night to be her night, and their life hers.
The lights were off in the yellow house, and Penelope rounded the landings slowly, climbing the four flights of stairs with leaden legs. When she reached the fourth floor, she stepped into a pool of light, shining down from the attic. She remembered that she hadn’t closed the door behind her when she went running out to save Ralph. She reached her room and saw Marcus sitting on the floor.
“Penelope,” he said and set one of her acrylic-on-wood paintings back in the open trunk. “I came up to say hello, and I saw your door was open.”
Penelope took off her boots at the door, her eyes scanning the room, as if she were trying to recognize the place in which she had found herself. Marcus began to stammer.
“I promise I’ve only been here a few minutes. I wanted to make sure the heat was on up here, given this is the first snow of the year, and I saw the trunk was open, and I couldn’t help myself. I didn’t mean to snoop, but you said once you’d like for me to take a look—”
It took her a few moments to make sense of all that Marcus had said. He asked if she was all right.
“It’s been a bad day,” she said. “I’m not all here.”
Marcus asked whether he should leave, but he didn’t move toward the door.
“Your work is spectacular,” he said.
“It’s all old.”
“I’m no art critic, but really—wow. These paintings are terrific.”
Terrific and spectacular, Penelope repeated the words to herself. They were large and vacuous, but she gathered them to her anyway.
“Where’s Samantha?”
“Stuck in the city.”
“I saw people coming out of the station on Nostrand. The trains are still running.”
“Ah, yes, well, Samantha doesn’t even like taking the subway during the daytime, and it’s impossible to get a cab in Manhattan right now.”
“I see.”
“She’ll be very comfortable in her office. She’s spent nights there before, if she’s preparing something for a client.”
Penelope said nothing. The wind outside was shrill. It shook the branches of the trees, the current of air ripped over their heads.
“Are you all right?” Marcus said. “I’ve never seen you so distracted.”
“You hardly know me.”
“I thought our plan was to become friends.”
He grinned at her, his face plaintive and sweet, and Penelope wondered if this was how he had learned to get his way with women—his propitiating tone, his earnest smile. He was on board already, Penelope could tell, especially since his wife had left him alone in the storm. He wouldn’t require very much convincing.
Penelope peeled off her sweater, unraveled the scarf from her neck. She tossed the postcard out of her pants pocket onto the heap of wool and she stepped away. She was back in the tank top she had been wearing before Miss Beckett called, when she was conjuring up the mountain. She wasn’t wearing a bra, and she turned to face Marcus, as if she were looking for something in the room. He looked away, back to the trunk, but Penelope knew he had already seen the shape of her breasts under the thin cotton. She was cool and distracted as she pulled an RISD sweatshirt from the top of the hamper. He had already seen what she wanted him to see, and now she could cover herself with this ratty old thing, its sleeves shorn short, the collar ripped out. A large bleach stain covered its left side.
“I’m going to have a drink. Would you like one?”
“Oh God, yes,” Marcus said. He was sitting on the bed now, cradling a wood panel on his lap.
Penelope began to cut open a grapefruit. The ceramic bowl on the table was piled with a motley assortment of fruits—grapes, dates, oranges, yellow apples, plums. The ruby pulp spilled onto the tabletop as Penelope quartered the fruit. She squeezed the segments, seed side up, over two glasses. She filled them with as much juice as the fruit would yield. She finished each glass off with several ounces of gin and a few sloshes of bright red bitters. She stirred with her finger, then washed her hands in the china sink and carried the drinks back to the bed.
Marcus accepted his glass and thanked her. He took a large swallow, without wincing, and ran his tongue around the rim to catch the pulp.
“To your art,” he said, raising his glass. They clinked.
Together they went through Penelope’s work, poring over her sketches, her pen-and-ink drawings. There were fewer paintings, but Marcus claimed to love each that he saw. He commented on her art with the savvy of any humanities major who had sat through one semester’s worth of art history lectures, any man who visited the major museums along Fifth Avenue a few times a year. He vaguely complimented her composition, assigned emotions to her colors, and gazed at her as often as he did the art. He appraised her work with light as striking or haunting, once, delicate. She didn’t mind his imprecision. She thawed under his attention and with each swill of her gin. Fuck Mirella, she thought. Her mother was an ocean away, and yet she was here. Fuck the postcard.
She showed Marcus the portrait she had done of Ralph when she was in high school. It was the sort of painting that made you feel as if you knew someone intimately, even if all you could see was his profile, from the shoulders up. It was the piece she believed had gotten her into RISD.
Marcus held Ralph at arm’s length. “This is your father? I adore this. It’s like the pipe is a part of him.”
“He makes that face all the time,” Penelope said, smiling at the sternness of her father’s expression in the painting. His eyebrows were pushed together and his mouth set in a line as he bit down on the pipe. It was obvious to Penelope that the Ralph in this painting had not yet lived through his accident. His fro was darker and his face rounder, and he seemed freer. His eyes were a clearer gray than the smoke that drifted over the rest of the canvas.
Marcus leaned the painting against the bed and took up another Penelope had pulled from the closet. It was one of the last pieces she had completed at RISD, when she had already made up her mind to leave. She had painted a car crash at the intersection of two Brooklyn thoroughfares. Three lanes of traffic stretched in either direction, and in the foreground stood a gold passenger car, wrecked. It was intact at the ends, but blown open at the center, as if it had been crushed from either side, and then imploded. It was an impossible wreck, the metal warped around a cavity where the passengers should have been. A crowd of people gathered around the accident, the car with the empty center.
“This is so powerful,” Marcus said, his cheeks and ears flushed from the gin.
“My professor called it overdetermined. She said it was cold. Too precise. ‘Where’s the feeling? Where’s the feeling?’ she said. It’s as if she wanted m
e to confess I’d survived a car crash, and then paint that. Maybe slash open an old scar, and smear some real blood on there. She told me the same thing over and over again, but I could never please her.”
The words stuck to the roof of Penelope’s mouth—I could never please her—and it seemed obvious to her she had been right to leave RISD. If she couldn’t give her teachers what they wanted, if they would never accept her, there was no point to sticking around. Why steep in someone else’s disappointment? Why linger where you aren’t wanted?
Penelope carried the painting back to the closet where she kept the canvases too large for the trunk. She returned to the bed, folded her legs underneath her. The snow hadn’t let up since they started looking at her paintings, and Penelope wasn’t sure how much time had passed. The sky was pearly lavender, a trick of the light. A steady stream of white flakes fell across the window.
“You are so brave.”
Penelope laughed. “Me?”
“Yes, you. Absolutely you.”
Penelope took the glass from him and drank.
“You underestimate yourself, Penelope. You go on runs in the rain and you teach children and you paint. You walk around Bed-Stuy at two a. m. during snowstorms like no one could ever touch you! I’ve never met anyone like you. You are exquisite. You are epic.”
“Easy there,” Penelope said, but she hummed inwardly. She could have Marcus; she would have Marcus. He smiled at her and stole back his glass; he swayed across the room and uncapped the stout bottle of gin. He emptied a few more ounces into his glass, the pulp swirling up into the liquor, tinting the gin a cloudy pink. He was close now.
“It must come from your mother,” he said. “Daughters get either their courage or their fear from their mothers.”
Marcus made a face after another swig of gin, as if he were shocked by his harshness. “I know being a mother isn’t easy—believe me. Samantha’s always saying I can’t quite grasp how differently you love a child when you’ve grown one with your own body. The bond—it’s carnal.”