Halsey Street

by Naima Coster

  Marcus was in his pajamas: a flannel robe to match the flannel pants she remembered pulling off him that first time up in the attic, a white T-shirt, and a pair of silver-rimmed glasses. They made his green eyes swim in front of his face. Penelope hadn’t known he wore glasses.

  “Can I help you at all?” he said.

  “I’ll be all right.”

  “I could walk you to the train if you want. It’s still dark out. I just need to change my shoes.”

  “I have a ride.”

  “Of course.” Marcus pushed up his glasses with his index finger. The red wave of his hair was undisturbed by sleep, tucked neatly behind his ears.

  “I thought of bringing down Grace to say good-bye, but she’s still in bed.”

  Penelope didn’t look at him. She wound the laces of her boots around her ankles.

  “She’s scared, you know. She thinks she’ll never see you again.”

  “We’ll say our good-byes when I get back. All my stuff is still upstairs. Thanks again for the extra time.”

  Marcus muttered something about the circumstances, and no trouble at all. He sat down beside Penelope, and when she looked at him, he frowned, as if he were in some kind of mild pain, like from being stuck with needles, or a cramp. As if he were the one to whom comfort was owed.

  “How did this all happen, Penelope? Between the two of us, and your father—I can only imagine how hard this time back in Brooklyn has been for you. I feel terrible for my part in everything. I’m deeply sorry.”

  “I know you are. You’re always sorry.”

  Penelope stood and Marcus stayed seated, beneath her. He pressed his lips together.

  “I can understand your hatred of me. You told me you could use a friend, and I—I deserve your hate.”

  “Jesus Christ, Marcus. I don’t hate you.”

  He stood up suddenly, and Penelope worried he might kiss her.

  “Of all the things I’ve been feeling these last few days, hate for you hasn’t quite registered,” she said.

  Marcus nodded and laid his hand on her shoulder. Even now, it was easy to let him touch her. His fingers cupped the nape of her neck. He smiled. “At least, we’ll still be neighbors.”

  The doorbell rang, and Penelope stepped away to unlock the door. Jon strode into the house, blowing on his gloveless hands, his black sweatshirt dusted with snow.

  “It’s cold as shit out there,” he said and kissed Penelope on the cheek. “How you doing?” He turned to Marcus, and Penelope watched the two men shake hands, Jon in his black skullcap, curls fanning around his pierced ears, and Marcus, dazed in his robe, his bare feet.

  “Nice to meet you, M,” Jon said, and he took up Penelope’s suitcase.

  “Let’s go,” she said.

  Jon hooked his arm with hers as they made their way down the stoop, already covered in an inch of snow. She didn’t need his help, but she let him hold on to her. He opened the car door for her and loaded her suitcase into the trunk. Penelope watched him in the rearview mirror. She didn’t have to look back to the mustard-yellow house to know Marcus was out on the stoop, watching him, too.

  The morning Penelope was scheduled to arrive, Mirella woke next to Marcello. His skin was its usual tomato red, and he didn’t seem to be breathing, facedown on her pillow, his hands pinned to the back of his head. A snore erupted from him every few minutes, a sign he was alive and still drunk from the night before. They had finished two bottles of wine, Mirella too nervous to eat any of the risotto Marcello had made. When he was done eating, he had crawled into her lap and started to apply his tongue to her neck, the underside of her chin. The weight of him crushed her legs. She had stood and led him by the hand upstairs, where she put him to bed and shut off the light. When he was unconscious, she slid beside him and slept.

  The night had passed too slowly, and now Mirella rose and sat at her vanity table, unpinned her hair from the tubi she wrapped it into each night before bed, and brushed it carefully to the ends. She put on a white dress that reached her ankles. It was backless and fell straight over the planes of her body. She chose turquoise earrings from her jewelry box, spread her day cream under her eyes, colored her lips a deep rose, and penciled the usual mole onto her chin. She inspected herself in the mirror, and when she was finished, she shook Marcello awake.

  “You have to go,” she said. “My daughter’s coming. I don’t want you here.”

  Marcello flipped over and opened his eyes, rubbed the dark hair on his belly.

  “Buenos días,” he yawned.

  “Make the bed,” Mirella said and left to call the taxista Emanuel. Marcello had offered to take her to the airport in his black SUV to pick up Penelope, but Mirella didn’t want him there when she met her daughter. She would introduce him later, as a neighbor from the residence.

  After he was gone, Mirella sat in the garden to wait. The sun was warming the cement and stone; the morning baked her skin. She sank her feet into the pool and thought about her daughter.

  Penelope had called Ralph every day after the accident. The phone in the living room rang and rang. Mirella knew not to answer the phone, but sometimes she carried it into the bedroom where Ralph was laid up, all bandages and bruises, dozing off while his records scratched.

  “How’s my Penny?” he would say, waking and lifting the receiver to his ear, and Mirella would leave the room. There was plenty for her to do while Ralph and Penelope talked. She dusted and swept and washed the dishes, deep in old labors and new ones. She counted out pain pills for Ralph, changed the gauze around his hand, and mopped the bathroom floor after he sloshed water from the sink or missed the toilet when he urinated. They were routines she had never expected.

  Ralph laughed when Penelope called, asked her about Pittsburgh, and promised her he was “fine, just fine.” For all her concern, she hadn’t visited, and Ralph still indulged her, holding up the phone to the speakers in the bedroom so Penelope could hear whatever record he was playing.

  Even though they didn’t speak, Mirella knew Penelope blamed her for Ralph’s accident, the way he spent whole days in bed now, and needed to be pushed around in a wheelchair if he chose to go outside. He would need the wheelchair for only a few weeks, while he healed, but Mirella knew that even once he could walk again, Penelope would never forgive her. Any chance she and Penelope might have had at becoming mother and daughter again was obliterated the day Ralph fell.

  But now she was coming. She might have torn up the postcard, but it had worked, her words had reached her daughter and had some influence on her for the first time. With her postcard, she had stirred up her old affections, her purest, oldest instincts as a daughter. Because of her words, Penelope was finding her way back.

  The airport was already filled with other people, carrying cheap balloons and handmade signs, whole families sweating in ironed jeans and pastel polo shirts. Many of the women hadn’t unwound their hair from their morning tubis; a few still wore a hairnet and rollers. Infants cried from the heat, unappreciative of the slow breeze that filtered through the plaza every few minutes, rustling the palm trees and carrying the scent of everyone. Pigeons swooped overhead, releasing shit all over the airport. Emanuel gave Mirella his baseball cap to wear, and she took it. She bought pan tostado for the both of them and two cafés con leche. They sat in the waiting area to eat and watch the birds, watching for Penelope’s flight number to appear above the gate.

  “When was the last time your daughter came to visit you? I don’t think I’ve ever met her.”

  Emanuel squinted at Mirella, rearranging his hair to cover the bald spots in his scalp, exposed without the baseball cap. He was a sweet man, nearly seventy, soft-spoken, but strong. When he didn’t drive his taxi, he worked in the gardens of other houses in the residence. He sat with her on the breezeway during his breaks, and they ate lunch together, complaining about the mosquitoes, the government, the Englishmen in the residence.

  “I haven’t seen her in five years.”

  Eman
uel whistled. “Horible, no? Este mundo? What kind of world is this that parents can’t see their children?” He shook his head, as if God might be watching, take note of his disapproval, and be moved. He patted Mirella’s shoulder. “I know what it’s like, Doña. I haven’t seen my Lourdes in ten.”

  He unearthed his wallet from the pocket of his jeans and handed two photographs to Mirella. The first was of a woman who shared his freckled complexion and light eyes, the other of two toothless children, smiling in navy school uniforms, their arms wrapped around each other. “Mis nietos,” he explained. “And my Lourdes. She fell in love with a gringo. That’s why the children are so blond. They live in Florida.”

  “They’re beautiful. Is she ever going to bring them to see you?”

  “No papers,” he said, slipping the photographs back into the slim and battered brown leather. “Their father won’t bring them. He owns an auto shop in Orlando that he can’t ever leave.”

  “Are they married?”

  Emanuel shook his head. “But he loves the kids. They’re crazy about him. Call him Papi and everything. He doesn’t speak a word of Spanish, but they do. They call me every Sunday. On my neighbor’s phone. To ask for my blessing, tell me about school. The girl—she’s bright. Una lámpara.”

  “Make sure they keep their Spanish. It’s the sort of thing you lose in that country.”

  Emanuel laughed. “Qué no se pierde para allá?”

  And Mirella laughed, too, although it was hard to make the sound.

  They announced the flight around ten, after Emanuel and Mirella had been waiting for two hours. Mirella bought Emanuel a magazine he couldn’t read, but he flipped through the pictures of Punta Cana and Samaná, the famed white-sand beaches on the other coast of the island that all the tourists came to visit but that he had never seen. Mirella had another café and soon she could feel her heart thumping in her ears. She smoked a cigarette, collecting the ash in her empty cup, but she only felt sicker, sweating through the thin linen of her white dress.

  The passengers poured out of the gate, lugging overstuffed suitcases sealed shut with silver duct tape and plastic wrap. During the holidays and the summer, the tourists flocked to this airport, pasty and carting designer luggage. They usually went straight from the gate onto charter buses that shuttled them to the resorts along the shore. But it was a Friday in February, and everyone on this flight from JFK was Dominican. They were absolute New Yorkers in fitted caps and tailored jeans; the men in blindingly white T-shirts, and the women raking their hands through immaculately straightened silky hair.

  Mirella and Emanuel pressed through the crowd forming at the gate. They were surrounded by cheering and sobbing, mothers dropping their carry-ons to lift gangly children into their arms, lovers kissing mouths and cheeks and hands, men slapping each other on the back and jeering, Qué lo qué cabrón?

  Mirella wiped the sweat from her upper lip and forehead, felt her hair beginning to inflate just a bit at the roots. It was humid in the airport, and Mirella hoped for rain. The day would cool off after the shower, and her roses needed the water. If it rained, they would stay inside; Penelope would admire the house and talk to her.

  She began to fan herself and pant, rising onto her tiptoes. She searched for a blurry woman in a navy dress, but she found herself distracted by a teenage girl with toffee skin and small eyes. She carried a sketchbook, a graphite pencil tucked behind one ear. Her hair was only kinky at her roots, the rest of it waving cleanly to her waist. She was slight in Spandex jeans and an “I Heart NY” T-shirt she had sliced open at the neckline and sleeves.

  Sometimes, Mirella believed in race—that there were things in her DNA that bound her to other Dominicans. She felt it when she was in the airport, at the beach on a Sunday, in the market in Puerto Plata, when Ariane told a joke she had heard herself twenty years before on the other side of the island. She would remember, for a moment, that her little gated residence wasn’t all of the island, and she was in a place where there were thousands of people who looked as if they could be related to her—a long-lost tía, a neighbor who had left Aguas Frescas for the north, her American daughter.

  An old man and woman, both weeping, swallowed the teenage girl in their arms. She wrapped one arm around each of them and they rocked together. Mirella watched as the old couple stole the girl away through the crowd.

  Mirella turned back to the gate and discovered Penelope a few yards away from her. Her hair was tied in a knot on top of her head, the curls pushing their way out of the elastic, falling around her face. She was as thin and as muscular as Mirella expected from the photograph, but up close there was nothing of girlhood left in her face. She looked her age, almost thirty, and although her skin was still taut and fresh, she was no longer young. She wore gray pants and an oversized collared shirt with the sleeves rolled up—Ralph’s, but not one of the ones Mirella used to wear to work in the backyard.

  Mirella waved, although Penelope had already seen her. Penelope nodded back at her and cut through the crowd confidently, carrying only her black leather suitcase, the one she had taken with her first when she went to RISD, and then when she finally left Halsey Street for good.

  Mirella felt herself shaking, her fingertips and her wrists, then her cheeks and the corners of her lips. Her teeth knocked against each other. Her sweat turned cold.

  “Tranquila,” Emanuel whispered, placing his hand on her shoulder. “Ya casi.”

  He took a step behind her, leaving room for Penelope. Mirella saw the pigeons nesting in the corners of the airport ceiling. There were small ledges where they had piled sticks to make their homes.

  Penelope stood taller than Mirella in her leather boots splattered with paint. The stale scent of the airplane cabin had stuck to her skin; beneath that, she was Vaseline and coconut oil, and something bitter.

  “It was snowing in New York,” she said. “That’s why the flight was late.”

  “We weren’t waiting long.”

  Mirella shook and stood silently, waiting.

  “I told you not to come,” Penelope said. “This suitcase is the only luggage I brought. I’d have been fine on my own.”

  “It’s no trouble,” Mirella said. “I wanted to come.”

  Penelope sighed and let the bag drop. It clattered softly to the ground. She stretched, her hands reaching for the ceiling. There was silver in her daughter’s hair, just a strand or two, spun into her moño.

  Mirella stepped forward, wondering whether to touch her.

  “Here,” she said, lifting the suitcase from the ground. “I’ll take this.”

  Mirella raised her free hand and placed it on Penelope’s shoulder. They didn’t have to draw near to one another, they could preserve the space between them, but Mirella was still touching her. She closed her cold fingers around her daughter’s shoulder.

  Penelope slid out from underneath her mother’s grasp and walked past her to Emanuel.

  “Hola, Señor, mucho gusto. Yo soy Penélope Grand.”

  Penelope clapped both her hands around Emanuel’s, then kissed him on the cheek. Her face swiping against his, her arm patting him on the back. She asked him where he had parked and set off, ahead of them, walking in the direction of the car. She left Mirella with the suitcase.

  On the ride to the airport, Penelope and Jon had inched along Atlantic Avenue, over the ice, listening to some early-eighties radio show. The station played rock ballads that all seemed to revolve around the word heaven.

  Penelope stared out the window at the undersides of the Long Island Rail Road tracks. The early risers were out in their oversized coats. The older folks trotted slowly enough to seem still, and packs of kids dashed and slid across the ice, leaving their parents at the other end of the block. Not one of them seemed to be in any danger, despite the ice, the wind, the blur of snow. They were fine, cold but fine, and it seemed terrible to Penelope that a day like this could seem so pretty and benign as to trick you into believing this was a good place to live,
that every instant, someone in this city wasn’t losing something, that bad news couldn’t come anytime anywhere, that every day might be the worst day.

  They stopped at a red light, and Penelope turned up the radio.

  “Either you’re really into the music or not in the mood to talk.”

  “I’m just thinking.”

  “How are you feeling?”

  “I said I was thinking, not feeling.”

  Jon stared at her sideways across the front seat, and Penelope reached for her coffee so that she could look away. He seemed to accept her silence, and kept driving, the tiny paperboard scented tree swinging above the dashboard. The car belonged to a friend, one of the guys they had gone spray-painting with that night under the JMZ.

  “It’s beginning to irritate me,” Penelope said, “the way you’re always so optimistic. And calm. You do realize why I’m going to the airport right now? You do understand what’s happened in my life these past few weeks?”

  “I’m fully aware,” Jon said. “I’m also aware that what’s happened in your life the past few weeks isn’t my fault. So, I’m not sure why you’re turning on me.”

  He indicted her so plainly it was worse than if he’d used melodrama, yelled, or thrown a plate or a brush. He had simply pointed out how badly she was behaving, and now she had to sit beside him in the car, unmasked and with nowhere to escape.

  Penelope looked out the window at the slush and ice. “Why are you so nice to me?” she said.

  “You’ll get used to it.”

  “I should be terrified, but I just feel like I’m going to see my mother. It seems normal. Like something I could have been doing all along.”

  “You’ve been holding up real good, Penny. You’re gonna do just fine.”

  Penelope looked back out the window, a butter roll untouched in her lap. When they stopped at the next red light, she handed him his cup, and he sipped his coffee with one hand on the wheel. The car vibrated beneath them.

  “So, I can’t help but ask,” he said. “Is Marcus the real reason the landlady asked you to move out?”