by Naima Coster
14
THE BRIDGE
The Harpers returned a week into the new year. They arrived without much commotion, like a machine quietly whirring back to life. They didn’t come knocking to wish Penelope Happy New Year or to invite her to dinner, but still she witnessed every bit of their first evening back—the doorbell ringing when the pizza arrived, the smell of the mozzarella and olive oil as they opened up the box, the scrape of chairs on the floor, the rush for napkins when one of them knocked over a can of soda. Samantha might have wanted her to stay, but no one came to say hello.
I just live here, Penelope reminded herself. There was no reason for them to say anything to her. She lay down and took a few swigs from a bottle of good bourbon Jon had given her during her last visit to Sheckley’s. Along with the bottle, he had also given her a tiny card that said Don’t go breaking this over someone’s head. —Jon.
She had been to the bar nearly every day since her fight with Ralph. It was the only place left for her to go. If she spent too long in the empty yellow house, she began to feel unreal, as if she were haunting the Harpers in their absence. Jon always made her something good, and they talked about how different Brooklyn seemed with all the transplants gone home for the holidays. Jon said these nights were better for him and his friends to go out and tag deserted buildings in the dark. He had invited Penelope to join them, but she had never agreed to go. He had touched her once, a bar napkin between his fingers and her cheek, where snow had stuck to her skin. It seemed that he was after camaraderie more than anything else because he seemed content to talk and listen to her, and nothing else. She liked the look of him: the strange elastic band he used to keep his hair off his forehead, the perfect minuscule circles gouged out of his earlobes by the gauge piercings he had gotten when he was sixteen and had to live with now. If she were still a painter, she would have painted him, mixing a half-dozen shades of brown to capture the light in his hair, the color in his cheeks, the scruff on his chin.
She thought of Jon to help her sleep, to knock out the sounds of the Harpers back down below. She had lost her own family and now had the theater of another instead. She couldn’t bring herself to make up with Ralph, to go seeking the love of yet another parent who didn’t want her. She and Miss Beckett, they were the same to Ralph. He was no different than Mirella, only willing to make as much room for her as he wanted, when and if he wanted.
On her first day back at PS 23, the students were bursting with stories from the holidays. Penelope passed out paintbrushes and markers, and listened to the children recount long drives south, flights home to Grenada or PR or Barbados for the holidays. They told her about the new video games and other electronic gadgets they had found underneath their polyvinyl trees, and Penelope felt old. Some of them received sneakers, but they were all for show: the kids wouldn’t be able to run more than a few blocks in their clunky, name-brand, candy-colored kicks. Penelope indulged the ones she could tell were lying when they said they’d received everything they wanted on Christmas. She was no better. At lunch, she lied in the same way when the other young teachers cornered her in the faculty lounge while she heated up her soup. They told stories of snorkeling with their fiancés, skiing with their fit and able parents. So, Penelope said something about eggnog and jazz, wishing for snow. Wasn’t that what they wanted to hear—that her life was sunny and beautiful, too?
She felt drained and remote by the time she returned to Greene in the afternoon, the sky already dark. In the attic, she brewed tea and counted out her aspirin, ordered her usual from the Emerald. The food arrived quickly, and Penelope felt her way down the stairs in the dark. The light in the vestibule was off, and she didn’t bother to turn it on when she opened the door to pay the delivery boy. He handed her the food, grease and soy sauce seeping through the brown paper bag.
“Shit,” she said, trying to catch the liquid in her hands. “Shit, shit.”
“Hello, Penelope.”
Penelope switched on the light and found Grace in the parlor, curled into one of the linen armchairs by the fireplace. Her slippered feet dangled over the floor, and her hair fell pin-straight around her, scorched a rusty blond by the sun.
“What are you doing sitting alone in the dark?”
“It wasn’t dark in here a few minutes ago. I was reading and then the sun went down.”
Penelope sat on the ottoman across from Grace. She popped open the can of soda that had been free with her order. The girl was still in her school uniform: a green plaid jumper, a white blouse with a scalloped collar, a navy sweater buttoned over her shoulders. She glanced at the bag of Chinese food at Penelope’s feet.
“Mommy left me soup upstairs. I’m supposed to warm it up at six.”
“Where’s your father?”
“He’s covering a story.”
“Want some company?”
They went upstairs to the kitchen, which Penelope had never seen. Samantha had left the door unlocked. The room was shabbier than the rest of the house. Penelope had expected espresso-stained cabinets, a sparkling glass table, stainless steel appliances, and maybe a bad, photorealist painting on the wall. Instead the refrigerator was short and white with a large dent in the door; the cabinets were made of the same splintering wood as the cabinets in the house on Halsey. The acrylic countertop was black and gray, patterned in a way meant to evoke marble, and it was coming loose at the edges. Only the floor had been replaced—it was the same reclaimed pine that was in the parlor: unscratched, lustrous, the color of sand. A felt magnet from Sprout hung on the fridge.
They sat at the small kitchen table, Grace with her carrot soup, Penelope her noodles. Grace swung her feet below the table absentmindedly, and Penelope asked about her days in California.
“It was cold. Too cold to swim. But we went for walks on the shore every day. And at night we made fires and had popcorn and took out my grandpa’s dogs. He has two of them. Hermes and Venus. They’re old dogs now, but they used to be guard dogs. They still bark whenever someone comes to the door, even the mailman. We played fetch on the beach.
“And on Christmas, we made fried chicken and watched an old video of Mommy dancing in The Nutcracker. She was Clara.”
The ballet explained Samantha’s frailty, the thin limbs, her constant chignon.
Grace pushed aside her soup and poured a whole packet of soy sauce on a single dumpling Penelope had offered. She chewed with her mouth open.
“Mommy and Daddy were happy, too. They gave each other the same book on Christmas. Isn’t that funny? And I got all the books I asked for. And these.” Grace lifted her hair off her shoulders, and Penelope saw the pearl studs in her ears. They were nested in gold petals. Lucky girl.
“I’m sorry I didn’t get you anything.” Grace looked at her seriously, her lips pursed, and Penelope assured her it was fine.
“It just doesn’t feel right not to get you something—you live with us.”
“Well, I didn’t get you anything either. So we’re even.”
Grace gave a magnanimous nod of her head and looked relieved.
They each took a dumpling onto their plate, the last of the food, besides the soup Grace had abandoned. They finished eating and licked the soy sauce and scallions off the ends of their chopsticks.
“Best Chinese in Brooklyn,” Penelope said, and she reminded herself of Ralph.
Grace took up the plastic bag and stared at the logo, the name of the restaurant in boldface, a glittering green gem in the place of the A.
“Have you ever been there? To the Emerald?”
“Of course. I pick up food there all the time on my way to Halsey Street.”
“Is that a long walk?”
“You don’t know where Halsey Street is?”
“I’ve probably seen it, but I don’t know which one it is. You can’t see the street signs in a car. You’re going too fast.”
Penelope looked over Grace’s head at the old-fashioned clock hanging above the stove. It was hardly past five.
“Would you like to go? To the Emerald? I’ll buy you dessert.”
“What about my mother? She’ll be expecting me here. She’s coming home at nine.”
Penelope tried hard not to frown. Samantha balked at an unlocked door, but she was willing to leave her child alone. She condescended to Penelope but expected her to look after the child.
“We’ll be back long before she is,” Penelope said, and she ordered Grace to go put on her snow boots. She used the same voice she used to tell kids to rinse out their brushes at the sink, to start clearing up their tables and lining up for their next class. Grace looked skeptical, but after a nod from Penelope, she ran out of the room, her slippers thwacking as she raced up the stairs. It would do them good to get out, Penelope thought. The last thing either of them needed was another night alone in the yellow house.
Grace held on to Penelope by the crook of her arm as they made their way along Nostrand Avenue over the ice. The girl’s face was waxy from the Vaseline Penelope had spread beneath her eyes and around her ears like a shield. “So you don’t become a popsicle,” she had said.
Pedestrians broke out from underground and onto the avenue. They clogged the sidewalk as they rushed more slowly than usual, through slush and puddles, careful not to slip. Nearly everyone was brown—pale as wheat, deep as coffee grounds, the endless palette of shades in between. These neighbors wore bubble coats and steel-toe Timberlands, toothpaste-white sneakers and hooded peacoats. The white people making their way home from the train were all young. They wore bright scarves and jackets that seemed too thin to be warm. They carried grocery bags from supermarkets in the city; they flicked their unfinished cigarettes into the dirty piles of snow; they laughed into their cell phones.
Grace seemed more interested in the stores than the people, perhaps because she passed the same ones every day without ever looking inside. She peered into the one-room Pentecostal church next door to the beauty salon, the steam from the hair dryers blowing onto the street. The quivering old voices in the church swelled up in a Spanish hymn. She brushed past a quartet of children, probably siblings, stalled on the street and fighting over a white paper bag. They dug their hands inside to rip out pillowy hot chunks of coco bread. She poked into the bodegas, sized up their identical yellow interiors, the way their racks overflowed with bags of chips and corn nuts and expired rainbow candies.
At the corner, they passed the old woman who danced nightly on that curb to the music playing inside the beauty supply store. She boogied by herself there, for hours, under the flash of the mirror ball revolving inside the beauty shop. Each time Penelope saw her, she wore a knee-length coat, unbuttoned over a wrinkled black housedress, white tights drooping at her ankles. She didn’t seem high, or insane, not even when her moves slipped from the steady and old school to the vulgar and newly invented. She was a neighborhood fixture now, it was clear, but Penelope wasn’t sure how long she had been. Had she been dancing on this corner only since the summer when Penelope returned and first saw her? Or had this corner been hers for years? Did she ever go on hiatus?
Grace watched the old woman spin around twice on the balls of her feet, stomp in place to the soca like a soldier, swing her hips, and sink down to the pavement, her bottom nearly touching the street, before she wound back up, twisting her fists, as if they were attached by a hinge at her wrists. The old woman caught Grace staring at her, and she winked and wriggled her fingers at her: Come over here.
Grace paused, as if considering it. Penelope tugged her along, and they kept winding through the banks of people.
She wondered what the two of them looked like together, there in the cold. If Samantha, Grace, and Marcus ever walked the avenue together, it would be clear to anyone they were a family. When Penelope was a girl, and Mirella and Ralph took her out, it was clear she belonged to each of them. Could anyone mistake her and Grace for family? Who did they think Penelope might be?
At the Emerald, the smell of French fries and noodles met them at the door. Penelope joined the line while Grace took a seat in one of the stiff white booths.
“Let me get two red bean rolls. And two teas. To go.”
The red-faced woman behind the counter jammed the rolls into a Styrofoam tray, stapled shut the top, and slid two hot teas across the counter, the amber liquid sloshing out.
Penelope joined Grace in the booth, where it was still cold from the door opening and closing as customers entered the Emerald. A few potted bamboo plants flanked the door, a green neon light shone from the ceiling. Penelope put sugar in her tea, and Grace sipped at hers without any, grimacing a little before she said, “This is very good. Thank you.”
The red bean rolls were flaky, and bits of pastry stuck to their coats. The sweet bean paste reminded Penelope of habichuelas con dulce, which Ramona had made for her whenever she asked, with evaporated milk and cinnamon, whole cloves and a cut-up sweet potato.
“That’s a funny calendar,” Grace said, pointing at the wall.
It was the Emerald yearly calendar: a glossy stock photograph of a New York City landmark featured for each month. The Statue of Liberty, Times Square, the arch in Washington Square Park, Bethesda Fountain in Central Park, Canal Street in Chinatown. The calendar hung year-round in the kitchen on Halsey Street. It had for as long as Penelope could remember. She wondered whether Ralph already had this new calendar, just a few days into the year. January was the Brooklyn Bridge.
The tea was too hot for either of them to drink very much, but they warmed their hands over the coverless cups. They finished the rolls, wiping the sticky near-black paste from the corners of their lips. A customer near them spoke loudly on his phone while eating fried chicken wings from a wax paper bag; a couple divided an order of beef with broccoli between three Styrofoam plates that three small children kept trading between them. For all Samantha’s sheltering, Grace didn’t seem wary of anything. She didn’t even panic when a man came into the restaurant, waving around his bag of takeout and shouting that he had asked for no eggs in his moo shu pork, and there were eggs in his moo shu pork, and he was allergic, and were they trying to kill him?
Grace giggled a bit when the man left with a fresh order, and Penelope felt guilt for the first time that she had fucked this girl’s father. The freckles on her nose were the same as his; he twisted his lips when he smiled, too.
“I’m sorry, Grace.”
“For what?” She collected fallen sesame seeds on a plastic spoon and licked them off.
“For not taking you out sooner. I should’ve shown you around the neighborhood before.”
“You’re so nice to me, Penelope.”
“There’s still a lot for you to see. The library on Franklin. The little garden behind PS 23.”
Grace offered her a spoonful of sesame seeds, and Penelope shook her head.
“What I’m trying to say is, even after I don’t live in the house anymore, I’ll still be around. If it’s all right with your parents.”
“But it’s only January. Aren’t most leases for a year?”
“I’m not going to live with your family forever, Grace.”
“But you’ll stay close by, won’t you? ’Cause of your dad?”
Penelope said nothing, and Grace looked devastated, the black sesame seeds stuck to her upper lip. She offered Penelope the rest of her tea, and although she didn’t want it, Penelope accepted the cup and drank.
“At least you’re not leaving today.”
Penelope looked back at the calendar on the wall, the bridge silhouetted in the dark. Fireworks burst in the sky above.
“Come on,” she said. “We still have a few hours before your mother gets home.”
The girls emerged from the A train at High Street, just at the mouth of the bridge. Here, in downtown Brooklyn, the sidewalk wasn’t as icy. It already felt more like Manhattan, the high-rises in Brooklyn Heights and the new condominiums in Fort Greene harpooning the sky.
Grace kept a good pace, matching each of Pen
elope’s strides with one of her own. Her arms swung at her sides while she walked, the way Marcus’s did, and she angled her chin upwards to take in the city as it came into view. The Manhattan skyline was already lit orange and white, the needle of the Empire State Building blazed violet. The sky was a steady cobalt, cool despite all the electricity. They eased their way up the incline of the bridge.
Winter never seemed to relieve the bridge adequately of crowds, but tonight the pathways were more serene than Penelope had expected. Pedestrians crossed the bridge in both directions, neglecting the bike lane as they wandered from one side of the bridge to the other to snap photographs. The bikers, only one every few minutes now, skirted the absentminded tourists easily. They didn’t even bother slapping their bells; they simply sped by, shaking their helmeted heads and muttering.
The cement underfoot gave way to the bridge’s wooden planks; beneath the bridge, the paved streets gave way to dark water.
“Is that where the World Trade Center used to be?”
Grace pointed down by the seaport, at the pier empty in the dark.
“Close to there.”
She didn’t have to do the math to realize Grace hadn’t been in New York City when the towers fell. She had been an infant, if she was even born yet. Penelope had been in Brooklyn the day of the attacks. She was waiting for class to start in a grubby classroom at her new college, but she left and went straight to the store. Ralph hadn’t closed the shop, but people weren’t buying anything. Penelope sat in the back room among the boxes of unsorted records and watched the news on an old antenna television set. The same video of smoke and debris blasting through downtown looped onscreen. A middle-aged anchorman gave a disarmingly calm narration of the disaster. Penelope didn’t look away from the screen until the shop was closed, and Ralph came in the back to get her.
“Do you think anything like that could ever happen again?”
“I hope not,” Penelope said. “I think we’ll all be fine.”
The Q train rose across the Manhattan Bridge to the east, and they passed through the high stone arches, nearly halfway across now.