Halsey Street

by Naima Coster

  Ralph drew the photograph closer to him, bowing his head to examine the younger men. He tapped their faces through the glass of the frame.

  “This is from another life.”

  Watching her father smile, Penelope softened. “Would you believe it’s been hanging in the back of Sheckley’s all this time?”

  “Look at Lionel! That suit is really something. And Freddie—goddamn, he looks the same.”

  Ralph didn’t say anything about himself in the photograph. His black loafers, his pants hitched up to show off just a bit of his argyle socks. His feet pointed straight ahead.

  “Put it up on the mantel for me, will you?”

  Penelope obeyed and placed the frame on the center of the mantelpiece. When she sat down again, Ralph hugged her, the wiry hair on his cheek scraping her skin. She felt lifted for a moment by the sense she had done something right. Ralph’s grief had a density and a taste; like a gas, it could fill a room. Penelope hoped that every time her father looked at the picture, it would open a window and let in some light.

  Ralph kissed Penelope on the cheek, and she almost forgave him for the frame.

  “Do you think it will snow this year? For Christmas?” Ralph said. “Your mother always loved the snow.”

  Penelope wondered whether Ralph was teetering on the edge of some reminiscence about Mirella. She tried to steer him away.

  “It’s probably better if it doesn’t—if it snows, the ceiling on the fourth floor will leak.”

  “I can fix that.”

  “Don’t you go climbing up no ladder by yourself.”

  “You know, it snowed the Christmas your mother was pregnant with you. It was probably the busiest December we’d ever had at the store. It was really something, Penny.”

  “I bet,” Penelope said, and she stirred to leave, but Ralph stopped her, locking his fingers around her wrist.

  “We had so many orders I had to bring some of them home with me after the store closed. Me and your mother gift wrapped everything in this shiny blue paper—we must have wrapped a record for every living person in Bed-Stuy that year. We killed a lot of trees.

  “And when I couldn’t come home, your mother, she’d bring me dinner—a pastrami sandwich and a pickle every night. She’d walk over, and it would take her almost half an hour, through all that snow, and I’d take a break so we could eat together in the stockroom. It was never more than a few minutes, but it was the best part of every day.

  “She couldn’t stay, because I’d be at the shop until two most nights. I had to record every sale in my book and clean up for the next day. It took a while. The streets would be empty on my walk back, except for teenagers, jitterbugging up and down the block. And I’d see a few ladies, too, sitting on the stoops, mad as hell, waiting for their men to come home.

  “But on Christmas Eve, everybody was out. Heading home from parties, heading out to parties, drinking, carrying on, carrying big bags of presents, sliding on the ice. I said hello to everyone I passed, even if I didn’t know their names, and most of them, they knew me. ‘Happy, happy, Mr. Grand,’ they said, and ‘What’s happening, Mr. Grand? Merry Christmas!’

  “You know, no one ever believes old men when we say how good our lives were then. But they believe us when we say how bad our lives are now.”

  Things were better before you fell down the stairs. Things were better before you drank rum like water.

  “Anyway, so it’s Christmas Eve, and when I got home to Marcy that night, Mirella was waiting up for me. She was in the kitchen with her big belly in a red dress and heels. She was eating rice pudding right out of the pot with a spoon. Arroz con leche with raisins and a whole lot of cinnamon. That was all she wanted in those last few months.

  “We sat at the table and we talked and we ate that pudding, and even if we’d been married for a while, it felt like a date. We were still getting to know each other. All we really knew then was that we liked each other and our life and that we wanted you.

  “We stayed up all night, listening to music and talking, then we went out for a walk before sunrise. Your mother—she was still in love with this city, everything in it was new to her, even the snow—I think it was her second winter. She kept kicking up snow and touching her stomach, and she was happy. She knew we’d have the whole day to ourselves ’cause the shop was closed. A rare thing. I don’t even know what we did after that walk. But it doesn’t matter, because it was perfect. Yes, Penelope, it was perfect.”

  “Sounds like a fairy tale,” Penelope said and dropped her head in her hands.

  “What’s the matter with you? You drunk?”

  “I don’t want to talk about Mirella. You think she’s in DR reminiscing about us?”

  “I don’t know what she’s doing. She didn’t write to me—”

  “Jesus,” Penelope said, and she stood, irritated, although she knew Ralph was bound to ask sooner or later.

  “Did you ever write back to her?”

  “Pop, it’s Christmas.”

  “She’s our family.”

  “I don’t know that woman from your story, Pop. My mother wasn’t some big-bellied saint. My mother never even wanted me.”

  Penelope had never said it aloud before, so plainly, but the truth of it struck her, palpably, like a palm to the chest.

  “Now that’s a lie, Penny. All we ever wanted was to give you a family.”

  “And we have one,” Penelope said, and she took her father’s hand and laid it against her neck, as if he could feel her pulse and remember that she, too, was a person. That she was here beside him. “We don’t need her,” she said.

  “You don’t see, Penelope. Nobody wants to see. My life is the way it is because she’s gone. You think I care that I can’t walk? Sure, but not nearly as much as I care that she’s gone. It’s not my legs that are killing me, Penelope. It’s not my spine. It’s her.”

  “But what about me, Pop? What about me?”

  “What about you?” Ralph said, and he flung her hand away.

  Penelope couldn’t help but remember Marcus and how he had spoken to her in the room just behind the parlor, while Marty drank his beer on the other side—And what do you think you are to me? She had been as foolish to run to her father as she had been to turn to Marcus.

  Her mother was right—she had never been more to Ralph than a thing, like the house, the store, some proof he’d made a good life and left the orphanage for good. And still she had devoted herself to him because he was willing to offer her something, no matter how partial, how meager. Penelope stood and started to assemble her things.

  “What are you doing?”

  She was already back in her coat, and she lifted on her gloves, her hat, the scarf, revolving around her neck.

  “Why am I here? If you don’t want me here, then why am I here?”

  “Penny, calm down. Take off your jacket and calm down.”

  “I’ve tried with you, Pop,” she said. “I’ve really tried. But you don’t see me. I’m not even here.”

  Ralph called after her, but she ran down the stairs away from him. If she didn’t move fast enough, she was afraid she would change her mind, so she charged out of the house, heavy-footed in her boots.

  She ran in the gray and snowless dark, unthinking, quick. Her throat was closed with thirst, her eyes blending together the trees, the stone fronts of the unlit houses. But she went on, Halsey Street sliding off her soles. She didn’t have to stay if she didn’t want to; there was another place for her to go, another way to be.

  She reached the avenue and came out from under the cover of trees onto the curb where the sky shone an imperial blue. She looked up into the night and saw nothing but color. No clouds, no stars, without rupture—clear.

  13

  DESPEGANDO

  It was the last day that Mirella would ever have to clean a white woman’s house. Mrs. Spillers needed her just for a few hours, to dust, to clean the floors, the bathroom. The stooping and scrubbing in the bathroom hurt her b
ack, so she worked quickly. She would miss cleaning—the exertion of it, the smell of hot soap and bleach, the feeling she could transform a ruined thing. But it was time. She was forty-four, the age her father had been when he died, and who knew how much time she had left? When she was done, she let Mrs. Spillers know. She was reading a magazine on the velvet couch, the tiny dog with his head on her feet. She rose and shook Mirella’s hand, thanked her for all the years, wondered how she’d ever find someone as good. She handed her the last fat white envelope, and Mirella pulled on her jacket and rang for the elevator. It was then that Mrs. Spillers asked her what she would do now. She could have asked at any point that morning instead of flipping through one magazine after another, waiting for the hours to pass. Now she expected Mirella to fit her whole life into the moments it would take for the elevator to reach the apartment door. She said something about spending more time in her own house, with her husband and her daughter, although it wasn’t true—she hadn’t quit her jobs for that.

  Mrs. Spillers said, “Your daughter still lives at home?” and when Mirella nodded, the white lady deemed it lovely. Then she wished Mirella well and the elevator arrived. On the train back to Brooklyn, Mirella fretted over Mrs. Spiller’s question, her surprised expression. She had pointed out with her question how little Penelope had progressed since she was a girl. Mrs. Spillers’s children had framed diplomas on her wall, photographs of them in faraway places, safaris, bridges in cities that looked like Europe. She had nothing to show for her daughter, and her daughter nothing to show for herself. Penelope was stuck, and Mirella had known it for a long time—apparently, so did Mrs. Spillers.

  When she got off the A, Mirella went to the new drugstore on Fulton Street. It was one of the nicer pharmacy chains, but there had never been one in the neighborhood before. She found a thirty-dollar face cream, pale green in a little apothecary jar. It was her reward for her retirement, a reward for her new life. She thought of buying something for Penelope—one of those purple lipsticks that she liked, a lotion to calm that hair—but the girl didn’t deserve it. She had earned nothing, returned nothing, after all that Mirella had given, so she walked on in the midday cool, feeling free. No more white women’s houses.

  At her vanity, Mirella traced the planes of her face. Her fingers slipped into the shallow cavity beneath her eyes, glided across the steep angle of her cheekbones. She rubbed the cream along her jaw, her hairline. So far, her only wrinkles were the fan of lines at the corners of her eyes, the faint parentheses that enclosed her lips even when she wasn’t smiling. She would have to be careful. Her mother dead, she wasn’t sure exactly how she would age.

  Mirella dabbed on more of the cream. This would be one of her routines, part of her retirement. She didn’t know what to do next, but she imagined finally living a life somewhat more akin to the lives of the women she had admired when she was a girl living near La Plaza Valerio. These women never worked; they oversaw their households and raised children, bought fabric for new curtains, sat in rocking chairs on the patios with their husbands to listen to the evening radio. They were in the business of being beautiful, and although Mirella wouldn’t be busy with friends, her daughter, her husband, or the household, she remembered these women when she sat at her vanity, rubbing the cream into her neck. They had been married to her father’s friends and would visit on the nights Eleazar hosted parties. They would crowd into Ramona’s room, standing around the vanity table Eleazar had bought for her and which she never used. They gossiped about their husbands, the stench of their cigars, the bellies they were growing from sitting around and drinking rum while they argued about politics as if talk were all it would take to arreglar el país. The women weren’t bitter; they seemed to love their husbands, or, at the very least, find them amusing. They laughed as they sprayed their hair and dusted their noses. They ground the points of their dark pencils into their cheeks and shoulders to create false beauty marks that would make other men wonder where else they had marks hidden on their bodies. They addressed Ramona while they groomed themselves, asking about La Billonera and the maids and whether Ramona was going to put any makeup on, but Ramona wasn’t made for their dizzying, chaotic talk. She was Mirella’s quiet, dark mother, and after a while, she would leave to help the workers in the kitchen although she wasn’t needed there. Mirella would stay behind, perched on the mahogany bed her parents shared, trying to discern the meaning behind their female chatter, their ideas about Balaguer and boleros, their figures and each other’s, the best scrub to use on hot days to smell like flowers and not sweat down there, the news they had heard about the men they had loved before their husbands, who fled to San Juan during the Trujillato, married Puerto Rican girls, and never returned. Mirella basked in the mystery of their gossip and perfume, until one of the women called her over and began sweeping powder on her freckled nose. The makeup smelled of chalk dust and hibiscus, and it seemed to hold the power to make Mirella one of them.

  She wouldn’t spend all her money on creams and makeup, no—not her twenty years’ worth of fat white envelopes. And she wouldn’t spend it on the house either, which had started to decay, although neither Ralph nor Penelope seemed to notice. The paint on the front of the house was peeling, the rich chocolate of the stones giving way to patches the color of mud. The ceiling on the fourth floor swelled with craters of water damage, and still Ralph refused to call the repairman. He would climb onto the roof with his toolbox, and experiment with duct tape and plaster and spackling and boards of wood, while the rain blew bubbles into the fourth-floor ceiling. Mirella had tried to reason with him—if the leak were in the shop he would just give in and call a professional—but Ralph didn’t concede, coming down from the roof every time, shivering and smiling, certain that this time he had finally done it. To spend her savings on the house would be a waste.

  Mirella wanted to travel. She could start in Latin America, visit cities where she spoke the language. Sit in cafés, drink wine, be anonymous. See things. She had considered Europe, too, maybe Canada, or Florida, there were beaches in this country, too. She would go anywhere just to let in a bit more life. Her entire world had been Aguas Frescas and then Halsey Street. It was too grim to think about—but she had her savings, and now she had her time. All she had to do was work on Ralph, manage to lure him away from the store so that he could go with her. And she had to fix Penelope, too, before she went away.

  Mirella knew that Penelope would never listen to her advice. She had lost that power over the girl a long time ago. She had seen the uselessness of intervening when Penelope dropped out of RISD and moved home. She had said nothing when Penelope finished at the public college and took her job shelving books at the library. It was different for Mirella—she was old and married, had never been to college, faltered in English. She knew nothing. But Penelope—she didn’t have to live her whole life out in Brooklyn, drawing, running, wasting years. She could do anything.

  It’s only been a few months, Ralph said when Mirella asked if he intended on having Penelope live with them forever. She’s my daughter, he added, as if she didn’t know. I’m not in any rush for her to leave.

  Penelope’s days were predictable. She arrived late from her nights in the city, where Mirella had gathered she must have had a boyfriend. She took the steps three at a time, quick and quiet in the running shoes she wore with everything—her leather jacket and pleated skirts, the dark blue jeans so tight they seemed to be spray-painted on. She went straight to the kitchen to wash the dishes Ralph had left in the sink, then she poured herself a glass of water, then another, and another, before returning to her room. In the mornings, she would come out to start the coffee in the kettle, so Ralph could have a cup before he left for the store. She would pour herself a mug then go back into her room to sleep until it was time for her shift at the library. She came home, she ran, she went out again. Was this all that women with degrees in art history could do? Couldn’t they work in museums? Teach in schools? Go back to school and get a degree
at a higher level?

  Mirella stood from the vanity, her skin saturated and new, and herself more disheartened than she thought she would be on her last day of work. She considered lying down. My garden, she thought, and it was the only thing that kept her from turning in to the bed and drawing the blinds.

  The sun was still bright, the branches of a large maple tree bending in the wind. She put on her work boots, sun hat, and gloves, and left for the garden, counting the hours until sunset, until Ralph and Penelope returned.

  Everything in the yard was familiar: the water hose, the bags of mulch, the fertilizer and packets of seeds, the trowel and scoop and shovel and rake, the watering can, and her knife. She took up the tools in her hand. They had waited for her in the shed, faithfully. This work would fill her days now.

  Mirella pruned her rosebush first, watered the flowers, and pinched the vegetables to see if they were ripe. It was fall, and in a few weeks she could pick the squash and the lettuces. Mirella sweat in her jeans and paisley blouse; she swatted away the bugs drawn by the scent of her new face cream. She smoked a cigarette while the sun set, catching the crumbling ash of her Parliament in an ashtray. She sat underneath the dirty neon umbrella at the round glass table they had set outside for entertaining but hardly ever used. They had gotten life all wrong, she and Ralph.

  Mirella could point to the moment she had lost what little claim she had on her daughter. It was during her first winter home from RISD. Penelope was the one who answered the phone, then she fell onto her knees and screamed, Abuela’s dead. She was doubled over and crying, Por qué pero por qué que pasó, so Mirella took the phone and handled the rest of the news. Ramona had been sick for three weeks, vomiting and headaches. The neighbors had brought her soup. That morning they went to check on her and she was dead, across her bed, Lulú’s head on her lap.