by Naima Coster
It was a spare room, dozens of metal folding chairs, gold vessels for swinging incense, and stacks of battered Nueva Reina Valera Bibles. All the Aguas Frescas services were held in this single room: prayers, baptisms, funerals, and weddings. It was where Mirella first received the Eucharist; it was where Ramona’s body would rest before she was buried. It was impeccably kempt, white shiny tile, large potted palm fronds, and a large baptismal font in the center of the room. The font was more of a pit, a cavity three feet deep, in the shape of a boxy cross. Mirella had seen many baptisms here, on Sundays when a priest came up to Aguas Frescas for mass and confession. The townspeople would line up to be immersed in the pit, the red earth drifting off their skin and settling on the white tile while they were blessed. The font was dry now, and sitting inside the pit were Penelope and Ramona, their bodies tucked into the broad, hollow head of the cross.
They spoke in low voices, and Mirella strained to listen. She pressed her ear to the crack in the door.
“I can see him in the way you smile,” Ramona said. “In your cheeks, and the way you like to listen to the radio with me in the morning. In your pelo crespo. I know you don’t get those things from your mami. I know they must come from him.”
“Maybe next year he’ll come and you can meet him. It’s the store, Abuela. He can’t leave it. It’s the reason we have our house. And it has to stay open for the neighborhood—the neighborhood needs its music.”
Mirella rolled her eyes as Penelope quoted Ralph. The People need their music, Mirella. It’s not just me—it’s all for The People. Ralph and Lionel’s speeches about blackness and Brooklyn, entrepreneurship, all centered on The People, the community that needed their businesses. The People thrived when they thrived. After all her years in Brooklyn, Mirella had come to know buildings and strangers, her daughter, the neighbors, the men who worked at the drugstore, Ralph and his friends. She had yet to meet The People.
“My father gave me a camera so I could take pictures of the mountain and of you. He wants to come here, but I don’t think Mami wants him to. She likes to get away.”
“Your mother has hot feet. She can’t stay in one place for too long.”
“She doesn’t like Brooklyn.”
“She doesn’t like it here either.”
“We come back for you, Abuela.”
Ramona laughed. “No, niña. Your mami doesn’t make the trip for me.”
“I wish I lived here.”
Mirella cursed the girl’s stupidity silently and waited for Ramona to correct her. The old woman raked her nails over Penelope’s scalp.
“You’d get bored here, mamita. You’re like your mother that way. This town wouldn’t be enough for you.”
“Abuela, will you ever come to New York?”
“Maybe one day. But you know, Penelope, no one lives forever.”
Penelope was quiet.
“You know, this pueblo will always be here for you, mi reina, even when I’m gone. My house, and the mountain—they’re for you.”
“I know, Abuela.”
Penelope tucked herself in closer to her grandmother. They sat in the font in the silence.
Mirella pushed the door loudly, it squeaked as it scraped across the floor. She stepped into the sanctuary.
“Waiting on the presence of the Lord?” she said.
Ramona and Penelope squinted at the doorway but neither of them stirred. They stayed put, wrapped up in each other, low in the pit.
“Yes, hija,” Ramona finally called. “We are waiting. Waiting, always waiting.” She gestured to the other end of the font. “Te quieres meter?”
Mirella ignored her mother’s question and stared at Penelope. She leaned her head to the side and put one hand on her hip, and Penelope revealed her first signs of guilt. She looked down at her hands and clicked on a flashlight she had in her lap. She pointed the beam up at the ceiling.
“I came all the way here with nothing but a candle,” Mirella said.
“You were asleep, Mami. We didn’t think you’d notice we were gone. I didn’t mean to worry you.”
“I wasn’t worried.”
Penelope stood and climbed out of the cross. She helped Ramona up, both of them leaving red footprints on the tile. Mirella stared at the girl’s bare feet and shook her head.
“Súper,” she said. “Súper Ma, qué bien. You take her out of the house in the middle of the night and you don’t even put on her chancletas. Next time, take her out naked, eh?”
“She didn’t want to wear them.”
“Oh, and at thirteen Penélope’s already la que manda? She can do whatever she wants?”
“Calm down, Mirella. La tierra no mata. She’s fine.”
“She’s not like you, Ma. She’s not used to walking barefoot.”
“Mami, I’m fine.”
“Ni pensaste Ma, eh? Ni pensaste!”
“Calm down, Mirella,” Ramona repeated.
Mirella glared at the two of them, standing in the dark chapel, only Penelope penitent, but it still wasn’t enough. She stomped out of the chapel, slammed the door behind her, walked quickly along the black road. Penelope caught up to her quickly, her flashlight shining in the dark. She ran in front of Mirella and lit the way.
Ramona caught up, too, and tried to get Mirella to calm down, but Mirella couldn’t hear her. She saw her mother, folding her arms across herself in the cold, the wind sifting through the hairs that had sprung free of her moño. She tried to take the candle from Mirella to relight it with a book of matches she kept in the pocket of her housedress, but Mirella shook her head and snatched the candle away.
“Cálmate, hija,” Ramona whispered, reminding Mirella that everyone in the pueblo was sleeping. They hadn’t meant to upset her, it was just a night walk, no harm had been done, la niña was fine.
“It’s not about la niña!” Mirella screamed. “Ni pensaste en mi, Ma,” she said. “Ni pensaste en mi. If I hadn’t come looking for you, you would have left me there alone.”
11
PARLOR GAMES
December fell on Brooklyn as rain, and the water swept the old dirty-white islands of snow into the gutters. The days were wet, but Penelope ran every day for longer than she was used to. She didn’t want to be in the house on Greene. When she ran into Marcus on the stairs, he was cordial and shamefaced, but it sickened her to think of how much of her she had let him see. She had learned to time her arrivals and departures to avoid the landlady. Halsey Street was no better. Ralph was still smoking his pipe and playing records, waxing on about the state of the neighborhood instead of his own. She was growing sick of moving between the two houses. She needed some other place.
Sheckley’s was mostly empty when Penelope pushed open the door one blue and frozen afternoon. Punk music grumbled softly over the sound system. A pair of young women sat in the booth by the window, draining pints of lager and laughing, peering out at the cold street. One of the girls wore a floral patterned scarf wound haphazardly around her neck; the other wore brown plastic spectacles so large they seemed to swallow her face. Penelope recognized those glasses as the sort of hideous frames the poorest kids at PS 23 were forced to wear; they were now the vogue among Bed-Stuy hipsters, it seemed. Would this really become her bar? Penelope passed the girls, and they carried on talking in hushed voices, gripping the large pints with their skinny, manicured hands.
A man in his thirties sat alone watching a rerun of The Wonder Years and finishing off a basket of fries. Sometimes he glanced at the girls by the window and rubbed his blond beard with interest. The only other customer was a woman in an argyle sweater, sitting at the bar with her legs crossed. A leather bag hung from one of her knees, and she stirred the clear liquid in her martini glass with a toothpick, stripped of olives. Penelope had served many women like her at the bar in Squirrel Hill. They would come in with their hair in perfect waves or a neat chignon, wearing tailored pants, and a skimpy, silky shirt under a conservative blazer. They drank martinis or top-shelf whisk
ey in silence, surveying the bar in between sips. When they finished one, they ordered another, and then pulled out a hardcover or their phone. They tapped away at their screens or idly flipped the pages of their books, smiled at Penelope whenever she caught them staring at her. She felt that she was one of them: less elegant but still a woman who drank alone at bars around town. They fascinated her and filled her with an unexpected sadness—their quiet drinking and pretty hair. They rarely offered their names, but she felt kindred to them, and they seemed to watch her back, as she wiped glasses or cleaned the ice bin, dropped a new pellet of soap in the sanitizing solution and scrubbed down the bar. They were often good tippers, as if they were also paying for Penelope’s company, her work as a guardian of their solitude.
The bartender spotted Penelope before she reached him, and he raised his eyebrows high and comically at her approach. It was the same man she had cursed at the night she rescued Ralph. She would have to make amends with him if this was to be her bar. She forced a smile and waved, and he lifted his hands in a mock surrender.
“Don’t shoot,” he said.
“I’m unarmed.” Penelope lifted up her hands. “See?”
The bartender spread his legs in a wide and confident stride, his arms crossed.
“You strike me as the sort of woman who’s always carrying something.”
Penelope sat at the bar, and he slid the happy hour menu across the counter. Penelope flipped over the single glossy sheet, a list of cocktails on one side, standard bar fare on the other. There were asterisked notes about where the ingredients and the spirits had been sourced. When she was a girl, the only things she ever ate at Sheckley’s were onion soup and fried pickles. Lionel had been raised in the Carolinas and he had served Southern fare. He told Penelope stories about riding in the back of a truck, filled with cotton he had picked to make pocket money. Penelope thought of Grace and her fear of ghosts. If there were such things, then Sheckley’s was certainly haunted—dead Lionel, her father’s friends who had moved away and lost touch, a fitter, younger version of Ralph.
Penelope pushed the menu back across the counter. “I came to apologize,” she said.
The woman in the argyle sweater looked up from her martini, suddenly intrigued. She closed her book. She wanted to watch.
“The other night.”
“Go on. I’d like to hear this.”
“You had no right to serve my father the way you did. It was shitty and irresponsible, and you endangered his life, but you didn’t know that.”
The bartender whistled, a shrill, sinking sound. “Some apology,” he said and started to walk away from her.
“Look, I know what it’s like to have to deal with other people’s shit when you’re on the job. And for that I am sorry.”
“For the record, I didn’t even serve your father. He came in drunk. I just let him sit here and talk.”
Penelope apologized again. The bartender leaned against the mirror behind the counter and unfolded his arms, as if he were considering what she had said. Penelope could see now that he was boyishly slender in his black T-shirt and black jeans. His long curls were pushed off his face with a thin black band, the diamond studs in his ears glinted in the light of the bar. He looked amused, and Penelope wondered if this was his only expression. He offered his hand over the bar.
“We’re good,” he said.
His palms were damp from the soapy water, sticky and puckering. His skin was the color of walnuts, or strong tea with a dash of milk. Or her own hand after a summer in Aguas Frescas.
The woman in argyle was staring at them plainly now, her chin cupped in her hand.
“I owe you thanks, too. For helping me get my father out of here and for calling the cab for us. That was decent.”
“I am a decent man when I’m not being shitty and—what was it you said? Inconsiderate?”
“I’m Penelope by the way.”
“Jon.”
They shook hands again.
The music in the bar switched to a mellower tune, the kind of melodic and melancholy rock that had played at the bar in Squirrel Hill. The CMU kids loved that soft, strange music; they sang along as they flashed Penelope their IDs, and ordered whiskey sours with an extra cherry. She had liked the music herself, and the weird, beautiful band names—Smashing Pumpkins, Soundgarden, Radiohead. She had grown up with jazz but was nothing like it; this music sounded like she felt—slow, dark, solemn—much more than her father’s jazz, which was chaotic, complex, emphatic.
The woman in argyle swayed to the music. She closed her eyes and combed her hands through the airy layers of her butter-yellow hair. Penelope marveled at the woman and at how they were both enjoying the same song. They were patrons at the same bar, and for all Penelope knew, this stranger could have lived on Greene.
“Do you have time for a drink?” Jon said. “Or are you making the rounds and apologizing to all the bartenders you’ve insulted lately?”
“I’ll stay,” Penelope said. She ordered a gin and tonic with double the gin. She recited the three brands of gin she would drink and in what order. Jon laughed.
“Where do you think you are, girl? Manhattan? Let me make you something.”
Penelope agreed, and the woman in argyle dropped a few dollars on the counter, then picked up her purse and her book and went over to one of the booths by the window.
“I guess we bored her,” Penelope said.
“Day drinkers,” Jon agreed, and they shared a knowing look. No one who drank this early in the afternoon was ever really fine. All you could do, as the bartender, was sling their drinks and then tell them to go home when they had had enough.
Jon set to work making Penelope a drink. He was fast and clean, wasting nothing, shaking up bourbon, apricot liqueur, fresh lime juice, and muddled blueberries that he sank to the bottom of the glass with a straw. Penelope leaned in to smell.
“Mmm,” she hummed. She let the bourbon wash over her teeth, her tongue, to the back of her throat.
“It’s perfect,” she said. “Why aren’t you working at some place in the West Village that charges fifteen bucks a cocktail?”
“The owner lets me keep my bike in the back,” Jon said, and he left to tend a couple that had appeared at the other end of the bar. Penelope laughed at his answer and shook off her coat.
Jon sent the couple away with two mugs of beer, came back and noticed the paint on Penelope’s shirt. A portly first grader named Rodney had planted his hand firmly on her arm to get her attention during third period. She had been wearing a smock, but he managed to find the fabric of her shirt anyway, his fingers covered in bright white. She’d wanted to yell at the child, for his clumsiness, for his need, for the way he grabbed at her, but she sent him to the sink to wash his hands in as even a tone as she could manage. She had been on the verge of erupting ever since Marcus, her mother’s scheming request—We could try again.
She told Jon about her job, and that, no, teaching art at PS 23 did not feel like coming full circle, at least not in a good way. He was from the South Side of Chicago but had arrived in Brooklyn just after Penelope left. He had been living off Broadway and Myrtle for five years. He called Pittsburgh a grim town, and Penelope thought, They’re all grim towns, but she didn’t say so.
They traded bartending stories. Once, a drunk accountant gave Penelope a forty-dollar tip for being “ridiculously fucking beautiful.” Another time, she’d made a gang of bitchy bridesmaids appletinis without any vodka, and they hadn’t noticed. Jon had served two famous comedians at Sheckley’s who came in one afternoon, ordered wine, and talked shit about the director of the hit TV show they were both on. Another time, a customer complained the glasses weren’t sufficiently chilled, so Jon shoveled a scoopful of ice into his pint of beer and said he was a bartender not a magician. They had a lot of stories in common, but Jon had a few that were distinctly new Brooklyn: he’d seen women breast-feed their babies in the front booths while their boyfriends or husbands downed pints; he’d
seen more than one overintellectualized breakup occur, one lover insisting on the transience of everything, how natural it was for love to reach an end, while the other lover ordered rounds of beer that couldn’t come fast enough. Penelope liked the way Jon scissored his hands when he talked. She couldn’t quite keep up with him, never speaking more than a few sentences a time, but she still felt caught up in an exchange. It took her a while to finish her drink.
“God, I needed that,” Penelope said. She pointed to her empty glass, but she meant all of it—his stories, the mod music, the familiar interior of Sheckley’s. “I’ve needed to get away.”
“From your old man?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Looking after him must be exhausting.”
Penelope felt a line being drawn between herself and the bartender.
“I don’t mean to offend, seriously, I don’t. I just relate. My father has the same problem.”
“Your father’s disabled?”
“Alcoholic.”
“My father isn’t—he’s had a hard three years.”
“I used to have to do the same thing with my old man. Chase him down in bars when he didn’t show up for dinner, or my mom’s birthday, or when my grandparents were in town. Christmas. Every time, I’d give him a big talk and throw out his bottles, hide his keys. Once, I even let the air out of his tires, and he just called a friend to come get him. I got older, and I didn’t want to help him anymore. I wanted to smash his face in. So I moved here, and he joined AA ’cause there wasn’t anyone left to pick up the pieces for him anymore. He needed me to leave.”
“Pop and I aren’t like that.”
“You’re lucky then.”
The word hardly seemed right, but Penelope didn’t object.