by Naima Coster
“Nah, but I did make snow angels with my mom, and me and my brother went sliding down a hill with the blow-up raft we take to the pool in the summer, and he fell off and busted his nose.”
“Why didn’t you draw any of that?”
“’Cause I’m bored, Miss Grand. This class is boring.”
Penelope felt her eyes water, and she was surprised. She was not a crier, and a snotty eight-year-old was not going to bring her to tears.
“Boring or not, you’re here, so you better fix it.”
Camille looked at her aghast.
“Do you get to skip out on your other classes? No—so, stop trying to take the easy way out.”
“Maybe you should make some smoke come out of his pipe,” said a boy named Benny. “And fix his hat. It looks like it’s about to fall off.”
Benny was a pale Dominican kid with hazel eyes and protruding ears, a diligent though unskilled artist. He was one of those kids who volunteered to hand out supplies and stay behind to wash the board. He usually hugged Penelope when he came in, although he was on the verge of being too old for such displays.
“How’s a snowman gonna smoke a pipe, Benny? He’s not real.” Camille sucked her teeth.
“It’s art, Camille. It doesn’t have to be real.”
Penelope shushed them both, and Benny turned back sullenly to his drawing. Penelope pretended to survey the work of the other kids at the table, circled the room once, and then went back to her desk. She would stay here and drink her coffee until the end of the period, forget that she was at school at all. She heard a few students call for her, but she pretended not to hear. It wasn’t long before she noticed someone standing at her desk.
“I’m hungry, Miss Grand.”
It was Natalie again. The girl’s face looked pinched, the skin around her eyes ashen. She looked slimmer, too, as if her pants would slide right off if she moved too quickly. Was it possible for a child to lose weight over just a single snow day? Penelope asked whether the girl’s mother had brought her in for free breakfast this morning.
“We got here too late, Miss Grand. Mommy overslept.”
Penelope wanted to bang her fist on the table. She had forgotten to pack her own lunch, between Marcus and the tree, and she had nothing to give the girl. She scratched out a hall pass and told the girl to go to the nurse’s office and stay there until lunch.
“She’ll have something for you,” Penelope said, although it was likely the nurse wouldn’t have much more than peppermints.
Natalie took the note, lifted up the backpack larger than her whole torso, and shuffled out of the room.
“Fucking hell,” Penelope said to herself, and she slurped her coffee. Who were these mothers who didn’t rise early enough to feed their girls? Who left their children alone during snowstorms, then returned and assumed their place?
She hadn’t met Natalie’s mother, but Penelope was sure she would hate her. She’d meet her soon enough at the next parent-teacher conference, if she was one of the few parents who bothered making time to talk to the art substitute. If she came, Penelope would tell her exactly what she thought of her. And who could blame her, if she was speaking the truth? Why did women have children they would someday hate?
Penelope ran harder than usual after school that evening. The streets were clear again—no more fallen tree, and the snow had been pushed into hills at every curb. It was easy to find paths to run. Still, she found herself cursing as she recounted the day. They were children, and she shouldn’t begrudge them, but she did. The students had been distracted all day, and it seemed to be proof of her incompetence. She had been meticulous over the years about sticking only to what she had mastered—drinks, sex, runs, object studies—so that she wouldn’t have to face her own inadequacy. But her students had managed to make those dreaded feelings return. She had failed. She was nothing.
Penelope thought of the postcard from her mother, still in her jeans, on the floor, next to the pipe that heated the attic. She didn’t want to throw it away, and she didn’t want to know what it said either. She fantasized about checking her pockets and finding it gone.
She pushed herself to go faster, and sweat exploded over her body, even in the cold. She felt a click in her knees, and she turned in her thighs to stabilize her joints. She looked down at her feet to check her alignment, her lime green sneakers a blur. She focused on the pain.
The light was on in the vestibule of the yellow house when Penelope was done, and she ran up the stairs. She wanted to see Marcus. He would be a bright spot in her day.
When Penelope reached the fourth-floor landing, Grace dashed out of her father’s study and into the hall. She flung herself into Penelope’s arms. The child had never hugged her before. Penelope squeezed her back. Her face was open and radiant.
“Daddy and I are reading the same book you were reading to me last night,” she said. “Anne of Green Gables.”
On cue, Marcus emerged from the office, scooping up the book from the floor. Grace had let it drop when she ran out of the room. He smiled at Penelope in his usual reckless way, and she beamed back at him. It was the exact face she had hoped to see.
“Hi, there,” she said, and he leaned against the doorway and nodded at her, a hand on his hip. It was as seductive a posture as he could muster in front of his daughter. He didn’t look the same to her, not now that she had seen him with his clothes off. She knew the other side of him, behind this meekness, his deference.
“Come in and read with us,” Grace said.
Marcus slipped his hand under the hair at the nape of his daughter’s neck, while Penelope still had her hand on the girl’s shoulder. They were both touching her.
“Where’s your mother? Is she around?”
Penelope wanted to see inside Marcus’s study. She imagined a desk and a straight-backed chair, an antique typewriter that he kept just for show. She could picture the three of them on the floor, paging through the book.
Marcus stepped out of the doorway into the hall, and Penelope saw him in fuller light. The skin under his eyes was a faint blue from staying up those nights with her. He held the paperback loosely in his hand.
“Gracie, would you give me a minute to talk to Penelope?”
Grace nodded and stood on her tiptoes to kiss Penelope on the cheek before turning on her heels and slipping back into the office. How quickly children give up their allegiance. Marcus shut the door once Grace was inside.
“I’ve been wanting to see you all day,” Penelope said.
Marcus nodded, and Penelope went to kiss him. He held up a hand to stop her.
“Penelope, these last two nights—”
And suddenly Penelope felt edgeless because she knew what would follow. He was going to erase her with his words. She cut him off.
“They were nice,” Penelope said.
“More than nice. You were amazing, and it was everything I’ve been wanting—” He stopped himself, a high red flush around his ears.
Penelope switched her feet to feel her joints click again, to bring herself back into the hallway, into this moment with Marcus.
“Samantha came home and admitted she spent those nights away because she was avoiding me. We’ve been avoiding each other. But we talked and we decided that we’re going to try and get back on track.”
We, we, we. Penelope waited and shifted her feet again.
“But that doesn’t change that our time together was very special. To me. Suffice it to say that you mean a great deal to me. And it was the best time I’ve had in what feels like forever. I just wanted you to know.”
“Is that all?”
“I’d better get back to Grace. I promised her we’d finish the chapter before bedtime.”
“Don’t let me stand in your way—I know you’re a man of such solid commitments.”
“Penelope, I lost my head.”
“You came up to see me.”
“Please try to understand—”
“You know it’s not e
asy for me to be here. I have no one.”
“You didn’t have anyone in Pittsburgh either.”
Marcus’s words startled her. She felt as if she had been holding some shroud around herself and Marcus snatched it away. He must have seen on her face that he had hurt her.
“I know you’re lonely,” he said, mildly, but it was too late. She could see that he was through playing sweet and smitten with her. She had hoped they would have more time to test out what was between them—it wouldn’t have been hard with him working from home and Samantha so often in the city. She had only wanted to have him close, to be close to him. But he was already turning away from her, back to his real family, and Penelope wasn’t one to be left behind.
She stepped around him and knocked on the office door, just once, before she pushed it open. Grace sat on a plush leather loveseat with her hands folded on her lap. She was sifting through a pile of old New Yorkers Marcus had stacked on a side table beneath a brass lamp with a green shade. As Penelope had guessed, there was a desk of dark wood and a matching straight-backed chair.
“Come in, Penelope. I found a funny cartoon.”
Penelope crossed into the office, kneeled beside the loveseat, and put her arms around Grace. The child let the magazines slip from her lap. The weight of her arms was a brief comfort; Penelope felt tangible again, flesh and bone, here.
“Good night, Gracie,” she said. “Only sweet dreams tonight, okay?”
“You aren’t going to read with us?”
Penelope left without a word to Marcus, and he didn’t stop her. She climbed the last flight of stairs up to the attic, her calves in knots, her knees pulsing, and there was another disconnected pressure in her chest, as if someone had crushed all the air out of her.
Penelope retrieved one of the bottles of gin from the floor, where it had grown cold over the course of the day. She lay down on her bed and rolled up her leggings to her thighs. She held the bottle of gin to her left knee, then her right. She rested the bottle on her chest and let the cold seep into her.
The house was quiet again, and Penelope felt her body begin to shake. She didn’t recognize, at first, that she was crying, but there was no other way to explain the tremors in her limbs, the compression in her chest, her wet face. She twisted off the cap and let just a little drop into her throat: the sweet taste of juniper, the clean burn. She tipped the bottle back and drank more. It eased the aching in her knees. She drank until the room went black.
Penelope dreamed of Coney Island. She was riding the Gravitron alone, feeling the whoosh of air as she spun. Ralph started climbing into the ride while it was in motion, and Penelope screamed for him to stop. She woke with a sense of inward velocity, her head awhirl. She felt a familiar slosh in her stomach, and she catapulted down the stairs. I’m going to fall, she thought. I’m going to die in the Harpers’ house, and they will find me in the morning.
She made it to the fourth floor, burst into the bathroom, and gagged quietly into the bowl. She hadn’t eaten dinner, hadn’t done anything but drink and weep after Marcus had told her he didn’t want her, so it was all bile. The hot and bitter liquid scorched her throat as she heaved. When she was done, she flushed the toilet and rested her head on the cool, clean seat. There was thunder, a brief illumination of lightning through the window. It was fitting, she thought. Another storm, but this time without any magic, no lavender light, no dancing snow. She found her way back to the attic.
Penelope went straight for the little pile of clothes she had left on the floor by the pipe. The postcard was dry and cold. On its face, a sun set over a honey-colored beach. An empty rope hammock hung low between two trees. Penelope flipped the card over. It was postmarked several days ago, from a post office in a province where Penelope had never been. The mail between countries could take so long. She stared at the inky postal signature—La República Dominicana.
The card was gray from too many erasures, as if her mother had spent several minutes trying to find the words, writing things down, and striking them out. Perhaps she had even spent hours. The message was just a few lines, in pale pencil lead, her mother’s slender, slanting hand. Penelope decided to read. What more did she have to lose? What else could be taken away? Nothing, she reminded herself. Nothing.
It was only a few lines.
Hija—
No, she would not break. She braced herself and started again.
Hija—
I am here. I have another life. I bought a house. I am not the same. Come see me. Write to me. Call me. Knock on my door. I am ready now for you. We could try again.
—Mami
10
THE MOUNTAIN
The red clay from the road caked under Mirella’s nails; it settled in a powdery film on the lenses of her sunglasses. The red earth was the consistency of mud more than dust, and yet it rose and covered the back of the truck where Mirella sat in the midst of all her luggage. She had packed enough clothing and soap to last two months in the mountains. Penelope sat on her knees, clutching the edge of the truck and peering down into the valley, where they had started their journey nearly two hours before. She stared at the green plain, probably searching for burning weeds on the face of the cliff. Every summer, Penelope behaved as if it were her first and last time in Aguas Frescas, as if she had to ingest the mountains and the sunlight right away, or it would all vanish.
The truck lurched and Mirella groaned. “Fernando, por favor, despacito,” she called.
She lowered the brim of her straw hat, already feeling her skin begin to crisp. There was no shelter from the sun while they were on the road, nothing Mirella could do but squirm and burn. The truck skipped and sank on the rocky path; the incline nauseated her. When she was a girl, she had watched a dairy truck fall off this road. The tanks of milk had burst open on the rocks, and the truck had teetered for what seemed like whole minutes before it rolled onto its side and skidded down the slope of the mountain. The driver and his two sons went over with the truck; they must have screamed, but all Mirella heard was the screech of metal against earth.
“Ya no aguantas el paseo,” Fernando observed, calling to Mirella from the cab of the truck. “Lavaste la tierra de tus manos!” he laughed and stuck a thumbs-up out the window to show he was just teasing. Every year he mocked Mirella, kindly, for how much of a newyorkina she had become. She and Penelope had spent the night before in a hotel near the airport, and she had passed easily as a woman who had lived in cities her whole life. Her gargantuan leather purse, her slick unparted hair, the exacting stare she directed at almost everyone, concealed that she had only ever lived in one city—Brooklyn—and her DR, like Fernando’s, was the red-earth campo, a village with one colmado, one chapel, one school, and many rivers.
The truck slowed down.
“En Nueva York no se ve ni una montaña,” Penelope called above the racket of the truck. Her accent was flawless, the cadences perfectly Dominican. Mirella was impressed by how well Penelope had learned to imitate the lurching up-and-down lilt of her own speech. She could be mistaken for a girl born on this mountain.
Mirella’s head throbbed from the dust and their shouting. She buried her face in her hands. When Fernando asked Penelope whether the only mountains in New York were piles of trash and shit, Penelope giggled and agreed, “Ay sí, pura basura y mierda.”
Mirella turned her head sharply in Penelope’s direction. She didn’t scold her aloud, but Penelope stopped laughing at once and turned back to the valley. Fernando kept driving. After a while, she spoke again, tentatively, as if to make amends.
“Mami, is it all right with you if I draw?”
She had been doing this—asking for permission—since they left for JFK the day before.
Mami, can I call Pop from the pay phone to say good-bye? Mami, can I buy some gum to chew on the plane? Mami, can I lift the window shade to see the clouds?
She was thirteen and acting as if she were helpless. Maybe it was Penelope’s way of showing she was still a go
od and obedient daughter. Maybe she wanted to have something to say, just so that the two of them were talking. Either way, it irritated Mirella how the girl suddenly needed her, now that they had left Ralph and Brooklyn.
Ralph hadn’t accompanied them to the airport this year because the flight was in the evening when he had to close the shop, and he refused to leave the front girls to lock up. Sure, they could work the register and sort the records, but could they run a business? Ralph had explained it all to Mirella the morning he kissed her good-bye. She hadn’t said a word to him, not as he dressed or waved to her from the door. She didn’t get up until it was time to leave for the airport. She was exhausted and sore from spending the day in bed, sweating and doing nothing as the sun emptied itself on Halsey. In the living room, Ralph had left a wad of twenty-dollar bills and a scrap of legal paper on which he had written TAXI. Not Ralph, not Be safe, not Te amo, which they still said to each other the times they made love, and Ralph stroked the backs of her legs and played the keys of her spine, and she would kiss his ears and fleetingly think that at fifty, he was still a handsome man, and it may not have all been perfect, but it was theirs, this home, and this life.
Ralph had left Penelope twenty dollars of her own for the trip and a hot-pink Polaroid camera. He wanted her to take pictures of the mountains that he had never seen. He’d written her note on a scrap of paper from the same yellow legal pad: Penny, Pop loves you. Come home safe.
Penelope asked again whether she could draw.
“If you open that bag, the dust will cover everything in it. Is that what you want? Dust on your sketchbook? Dust on the new camera?”
Mirella sucked her teeth, and Penelope set down the book bag, looking stunned and deflated. Her hair crinkled in the humidity. The blowout, which Mirella had paid for at a Bedford Avenue salon, was already being overtaken by a ripple that started at her crown and wound into a full curl at her waist. Her kinks had grown more persistent, but after a good wash and rolos, her hair still resembled Mirella’s, long and thick, but coarser and without any hint of auburn at all.