by Naima Coster
“How could you tell?”
“He was looking at you as if it physically hurt him to see you go.”
Jon turned on the windshield wipers, and they cleared away the snow.
“What did you like about him anyway? He seems like a square.”
Penelope shrugged. “He liked me.”
“There must have been something more. For both of you to risk what you did.”
He was kind to me. I was lonely. He’s a good father. It was something to do. She could have said any of these things, but she didn’t want Jon to know them yet.
“I should have never been there in the first place. My father needed me in his house—”
“And you needed to be elsewhere. So it goes with parents and their children.”
The windshield wipers squeaked in time to a jingle for laundry detergent.
“Well, whatever you and Marcus had, I don’t care, as long as it’s over. I’m jealous, yeah, but he has nothing to do with you and me. You’re moving out when you get back, and we have our own thing.”
Our own thing, Penelope thought, and for a moment, all the sorrow she’d been carrying around thinned. Jon’s jealousy had shrunken it down.
“Will you be all right driving back from the airport? Over all this ice?”
“Chicago boy, remember?”
He smiled at her, and it seemed like the opposite of a smile from Marcus: uncoded, clean.
A synthesizer hummed on the radio, the muted pulse of a bass. Jon beat out the percussion on the steering wheel. At the next light, he opened the glove compartment, fished out a white envelope, and handed it to her.
Penelope felt along the sealed edge of the envelope. He’d scribbled her name across the front of it, the letters pressed together, angled forward, as if they might tip over.
“What is it?”
“Pictures,” he said. “So you remember to come back.”
The house was more elegant than Penelope expected. It was white and cavernous, so much space between the ceiling and the floor, between the walls. Mirella’s footsteps echoed as she gave her the tour, pointed out the skylight, the wood and wicker furniture she had ordered from the capital.
Her mother’s house didn’t have the of-the-moment sophistication of the Harpers’ home, nor was it as old-fashioned as the house on Halsey Street. It was clean, and bright, and empty, a marble kitchen counter, a glass wall, the white columns on the breezeway. It was someone else’s vision of a good life. Even the oil paintings Mirella had framed in the living room were forgettable still lifes of flowers in vases, fruits spilling onto a sunlit table.
Mirella lingered in front of the paintings to give Penelope enough time to inspect them. Penelope’s eyes flashed over them, disinterestedly, and she said, “You started collecting, I see,” and Mirella wasn’t sure whether she was making fun of her. She had wanted the paintings to touch Penelope, to show her she could appreciate art. Maybe the garden would impress her. Mirella led the way.
Penelope had to be careful not to give away how beautiful it was. Here was her mother, this green overgrowth, surging with flowers and trees. Short papaya trees and birds of paradise and bushes of hot peppers and tomatoes filled the first quarter acre; small palms lined the perimeter, and rosebushes close to the edges of the house, alongside white eruptions of velo de novia, the flowers as delicate as tissue paper. Farther back in the garden the banana trees grew, and more plants, so thick and green and near to each other Penelope couldn’t see where the property ended, how far back the garden reached.
Mirella waited for Penelope to say something, to notice the rosemary plants, like she’d grown back in Brooklyn, or the care she’d taken in circling her herb garden with blue-gray pebbles she’d collected from along the side of the road. The sun bored through the clouds, and Penelope squinted toward the back of the garden.
“How much land do you have?”
“Two acres. Not counting the house.”
Penelope said nothing.
“Do you want to go swimming?”
“I’d like to run.”
Penelope asked to see where she’d be staying so she could change, and Mirella led her back into the house. She felt as though her tour had been interrupted, but there wasn’t anything more to show Penelope, unless she wanted to go upstairs to see her master bedroom, her walk-in tub, the cedar wood closet she’d had built to keep mosquitoes away from her clothes.
The guest room was at the front of the house. Mirella had washed a set of sheets for the bed, opened the window to let in the perfume of the rosebush planted nearby. It was furnished only with a dresser and a ceiling fan, a four-post bed of pure caoba. Now that Penelope was here it would finally contain more—clothes and books, shoes, her daughter.
Penelope swung her suitcase onto the bed and began rummaging through, without taking in the sheer white curtains, the pale blue of the walls.
“I can make us some lunch,” Mirella said.
“If you want.”
Penelope kicked off her boots and began to unbutton her shirt.
“I think it’s going to rain,” Mirella said, and when Penelope didn’t turn to look at her, she backed out of the room and left her daughter undressing.
From the kitchen, Mirella saw her run out of the residence, past the watching-man and Ariane, who was mopping the steps in front of Marcello’s house, her long hair pulled back, her shirt already damp with sweat although she was just starting the day’s work. She and Penelope couldn’t look more different, although they were nearly the same age. Ariane was dark from the sun with slender limbs but a soft stomach, the layers of flesh a woman gains after childbirth. Her clothes would have been in style in the US a decade ago, but they were in as good condition as she could manage to keep them in, the collars ironed, the buttons secured with extra thread. Her shoes were made of plastic. And there was Penelope in lime green running sneakers, smeared in dirt but surely no more than a year old, skimpy shorts, a faded T-shirt. Her hair flopped loose behind her, pushed off her brow with a black elastic band that fit around her ears. Her body was the kind that you shape for yourself, not the kind that is the sum of all your accidents, labor, appetites, and genes.
Ariane saw Mirella standing in the kitchen and waved to her. Mirella waved back and then returned to the guest room, where Penelope had left her suitcase open on the bed. Mirella was careful not to unfold anything as she sifted through, wiping the sweat from her hands on her dress. She found the same lacy panties Penelope had always worn, the matching brassieres, and fluffy athletic socks. She had packed enough clothes for a few days—she hadn’t told Mirella yet when she planned on flying back. Inside the sleeve of one of Ralph’s shirts, Mirella found a flask. It was cool steel with a black cap; full. Penelope had packed one book, a slim hardcover without the jacket. Between the pages, there was an envelope with her daughter’s name across the front. Inside were Polaroids, one of a brick wall covered in green and orange circles of spray paint, another of two glasses of beer on a wooden counter, several of sunny, cold Brooklyn streets. She found a Polaroid of a man sitting on the front steps to a brick building. He held a cigarette in his hand, his whole body caving in on itself as he laughed. Mirella could tell he was young, despite the smile lines, the creases in his forehead and around his eyes. He wore his dark hair long, and he almost looked like Penelope, his curls swept off his face with a band like the one she had put on before her run. He was darker than Penelope, but not as dark as Ralph. There was snow on the stoop, and he wore a sweatshirt instead of a coat, but nothing about him seemed cold. Mirella examined his face, then put everything back in the suitcase, and returned to the kitchen to wait.
She filled two plates with the food Marcello had made the night before: pork shoulder and risotto with herbs from her garden. She sat at the kitchen counter and fumbled in the cupboard below, searching for the broken cup, like the one Ramona had kept at her shrine in her bedroom in Aguas Frescas. With the postcard gone, all that was left in Mirella’s cup was
the butterfly clip Penelope had worn as a girl.
She had left the clip behind when she moved to Pittsburgh. While she was gone, Mirella and Ralph had kept the door to her bedroom closed, but Ralph went inside sometimes. Mirella heard Penelope’s bed creak under his weight; she heard him pick things off her desk and then set them back down, open her drawers and close them. Mirella entered the bedroom when she was finally packing up to leave herself. Penelope had abandoned her collection of mood rings and charm bracelets, tiny gold hoop earrings and glow-in-the-dark wristbands, an array of purple and pink lipsticks she hadn’t worn after high school. The clip reminded Mirella the most of when Penelope had been a girl, still unable to handle her hair by herself. She had resorted to bobby pins and the butterfly clip to bite into her curls, keep them fast to her crown.
Mirella felt the sharp, fragmented edges of the cup, the crease in the postcard, the fake jewels adorning the butterfly wings.
“Nice road.”
Penelope startled Mirella, loping into the kitchen from behind her. Mirella shut the cupboard.
“If this were Aguas Frescas, I’d be up to my knees in dirt. But the road here is nice.”
“It’s paved. It makes a difference. You know how Dominicans drive—” Mirella held up her hand and made it lurch from side to side, as if she were slicing up a road of air.
“I can see why you decided to live here.”
Mirella kept her eyebrows from going up in shock. It was the closest thing to a compliment she’d heard from Penelope in years. She seemed to be in a good mood, red-faced, nearly all of her skin blushing and exposed. Maybe someone had said something to her while she was on the road, leaned out of a pickup truck to call her beautiful, honked at her to say she shouldn’t go so fast, slow down, they wanted to watch. Whatever had happened, Mirella hoped the mood would last.
“I made some food,” Mirella said, pulling a plate from the microwave. “And there’s mabi in the refrigerator.” She didn’t mention the cases and cases she had saved in the pantry for the day her daughter finally came to visit.
“I’ll take water,” Penelope said, and she sprang onto a stool and yanked the elastic from her hair. With her curls around her ears, she looked, for a moment, like a girl again.
Mirella filled a glass for her from a bottle and explained to her the tap water wasn’t filtered, and she shouldn’t drink from the tap anywhere in the house.
Penelope gulped down the water quickly. “I never worried about the water here. I left that to you.”
“I had to worry. You were my child.”
“That I was,” Penelope said and raised her glass. She looked Mirella squarely in the eyes for what felt like the first time since she had arrived that morning. “Salud.” She drained the glass.
They sat and didn’t speak, Penelope chuckling darkly to herself and shaking her head while she pushed the food around her plate. Mirella watched, waiting for her to blast. She poured her first glass of wine for the day, without offering any to Penelope, and abandoned the food for her drink. She no longer had an appetite either.
“Are you even going to ask about him?”
Penelope glared at Mirella, fork and knife in her hands, her eyes filled with fire.
There.
“I was waiting for you,” Mirella said.
Penelope laughed and shook her head. “No, you weren’t.”
“How is he?”
“He’s alive,” Penelope placed both her hands flat on the counter. “He’s the only man under sixty-five in the home we found for him, which is depressing, but a lot of people there are still in their right mind, so at least he has regular company now. And he has a room of his own, and an aide to take him out on walks in the evenings. Well, the aide walks, and Pop—”
Penelope swallowed hard.
“I’m negotiating with the management to get a rack put in the wall, so he can keep more of his records with him. We’re waiting for their approval, but it doesn’t matter what they say—I’ll go in there with a drill and put in the rack myself if I have to.”
“Yes, you’re right. The records will make him happy.”
“The home isn’t far,” Penelope went on, as if she had been waiting all morning to tell Mirella precisely this, and now that she was finally telling her, she could relent and be calm. She didn’t grip the counter quite as hard, her voice was even and low. “It’s just over the BQE. You can see the Clock Tower from his window. I go see him a few times a week, and so does Miss Beckett.”
Mirella cringed. “Una? She’s still alive?”
“She’s the one who found him. She saved his life.”
Mirella didn’t say anything. They sat across the counter from each other, and Mirella could see Penelope was already starting to brown. She was the color of dark honey.
“So who else lives here? Or do you live alone?”
“It’s just me.”
“Big house for one person.”
“It’s not a problem for me.”
“Of course not. You’re not the one who fell down the stairs—”
“I’m not sorry I left.”
“You think I came all the way here for an apology?”
“I don’t know why you’re here.”
“This is where I’m from,” Penelope said. “It’s a part of me, too.”
Penelope stood and carried her plate to the garbage. She scraped the untouched risotto and pork into the can, refilled her glass at the tap.
“Besides, it’s been a long time.”
I wanted to see you, too, hija.
“I thought about calling him,” Mirella said. “After I got your letter.”
“What would you have said?” Penelope stood with one hand on her hip.
“I would have said, ‘Hi, Ralph, how are you?’”
“My father has to fracture his spine and nearly die to get you to call him? When is the next time you’ll call? The funeral?”
“We’re separated.”
“So he’s nothing to you? Is that how you treat someone you spent half of your life with? Do you even know what it means to be part of a family?”
“Watch yourself,” Mirella said. “You left Brooklyn before I did.”
Mirella didn’t want to explode now. It wasn’t like before, when they lived just a few rooms away from each other. She wanted clarity and slowness, this control over her words. Penelope was finally in her house. Her daughter was here.
Penelope smiled and sipped from her glass, the tap water clear and cold.
“Ah, you see, Mami, there’s a big difference,” she said. “You’re nothing to me. As far as I’m concerned, you’re already dead.”
It grew dark while Penelope lay on the bed in the guest room. She put the Polaroid of Jon on her chest and gulped from the flask. She hadn’t brought any cigarettes with her, but she imagined the smoke curling out of her hand, floating to the teal ceiling. After all these years, she still couldn’t control her tongue around her mother. It was Mirella who had first taught her to say whatever would wound most after she herself had been wounded. After she left Brooklyn, she never had someone draw close enough to trade cuts, but it was an instinct she hadn’t lost. This was all her mother had given her—sharpened edges.
Penelope wasn’t surprised that her mother was living among expats; she had never wanted to belong to the mountains. The house was beautiful, and the garden more so, Mirella still elegant. It was obvious that her new life suited her. Penelope had sent a photograph with her letter to make it plain that she was no longer a girl, to say somehow, Take this so that you will recognize me—it’s been five years, and I am not the same. But Penelope was, and it was her mother who had become different. She felt envious and, also, devastated that her mother’s life had bloomed only after she disentangled herself from the trouble of loving Ralph, of being a mother.
Penelope thought of her grandmother and drank again from the flask. She closed her eyes and conjured up the old woman, held her close. She was dead and yet she was nearer t
o Penelope than Mirella had ever been. She couldn’t say whether she had once loved her mother, only that she had once pined for her mother’s love. She reminded herself that she had not come to pine again—she would get what she came for and then leave. It was simple. It was easy. She braced herself with a few long swills.
She could hear Mirella out in the garden with her shears, clipping the plants, turning the hose on and off. They would be old women, she and Mirella, carrying on in just this way—they would bicker, and leave each other, then come back together again. Penelope closed her eyes and listened to her mother, watering things, snipping them apart.
After the garden, Mirella went upstairs to be alone. She didn’t want to be on the same floor as her daughter, so she chain-smoked in bed and watched novelas, catching the ash in a marble ashtray, some of it still finding its way onto the sheets. She turned over Penelope’s words in her mind, and wanted to stomp down to the guest room and throw her out of the house. Send her out onto the road in the dark, let her walk—or better, run—to the airport. Go back to her precious Ralph, who was still alive. Mirella was more alive than any of them. She had left so that she could live.
It was night when Marcello rang the doorbell, and to Mirella’s surprise, when she went downstairs, Penelope had already let him in. He had brought a fig tart and a bottle of perfectly chilled pinot grigio. He and Penelope were chatting easily, moving between Spanish and English, according to the words and phrases that Marcello knew in each language. Penelope was elegant in a strappy navy dress and a small moño held up by gold bobby pins, revealing the rippled undersides of her hair. Mirella noticed a sway in Penelope’s walk as they made their way to the living room. She caught a whiff of the alcohol and discerned instantly how her daughter had spent the afternoon.
The three of them sat on Mirella’s beige couch, leaving the tart untouched between them. They were all on their second glasses before long, and Marcello prattled on and on about the residence and how life in DR wasn’t as cheap as he had hoped. There was the gardener to pay, and Ariane, the watching-man, and the teenage boy who cleaned the pool. Dog food was more expensive here, imported from the US, and he had three dogs to feed. He sighed and huffed and poured them all more wine, and declared, in his strange Dominicanized Spanish, La vida no es fácil, and Penelope swirled the wine in her glass and agreed, No, no, la vida es dura.