by Naima Coster
The days passed and no one called besides Penelope. Lionel was dead, and Ralph had stopped talking to Freddie when he left Bed-Stuy for a tiny condo at the edge of the borough, down between the two bridges. Freddie had never boasted as much about the neighborhood as Lionel and Ralph. He thought it wasn’t safe enough or beautiful enough to go on living there, so he and Kim left for somewhere with a view. It wasn’t Freddie’s fault Ralph felt so alone, but Freddie was the only one he could blame—Freddie wasn’t his daughter, and he wasn’t dead.
After a week, Ralph finally left the house. He went to Sheckley’s and got drunk. Mirella didn’t begrudge him drinking. He was mourning, and sometimes you needed to drink until the world blurred, and your eyes slipped shut, and you had succeeded, in a way, in obliterating everything that hurt. But the world was stubborn and kept coming back—you could count on its return. So Mirella let him drink.
She joined him one night, and they sat in a booth. Mirella wore heels. She admired the new menu and ordered a martini—her first. Ralph plowed through his beers sullenly. They paid the bill without leaving a tip and walked home, crushing the leaves underfoot. In the bedroom, he kissed her and thanked her. He didn’t say for what.
As they were undressing for bed, Mirella felt an unexpected exhilaration, her heart beating in her ears. She could feel her blood warming her face. It wasn’t the anticipation of making love. Ralph was too depressed, and it had been so long, she no longer relied on him to satisfy her. But she could feel a shift between them. With the shop gone, all they did was in sync. Rise, eat, sleep, rise again. They could do this for the rest of their lives; they had the time, and nothing to worry about, now, besides each other. With the shop gone, they could do anything. They could take a trip to California, or rent a car and drive south. Mirella had never been to Washington, DC. They could visit all fifty states. She could take him to DR. Ralph could apply for his passport and take her to Spain. They could sell the house and move to Manhattan. They could start over.
When they got down under the covers, Mirella’s heart was still knocking sweetly in her chest, and Ralph asked her if she was all right, did she drink too much? Did she need some water from the tap? Ralph got up and brought her a glass of water, put his hand on her thigh and said, “There now. Drink up, you’ll be fine.” He clicked off the light.
Mirella reached for Ralph in her sleep, but she didn’t find him. She woke up, her throat dry and vision bleary. He was gone. The bedroom door was shut; the house was quiet. No cars on Halsey Street; it was too late even for the neighborhood goons to be roaming outside. It was the hour that hangs between the end of one day and the beginning of the next. The sun wouldn’t rise for a while; it smelled like empty street corners, burning paper and herb, Brooklyn slumber.
“Ralph,” Mirella whispered, although she knew he wasn’t near enough to hear her. She said his name again and smiled, thinking, wherever he was, he was in this house, and he would return to bed, and they would sleep, and then wake again to another day. And they’d live day after day like that, for a long time.
She rose from the bed, found her chancletas, her robe. She slipped into the dark hallway, running her hand along the flat banister, following the light into the kitchen. She heard the familiar whistle of the cafetera. Ralph was boiling water. Coffee at four a.m.? For their hangovers, she thought.
Ralph stood at the stove in a white undershirt and the long pants he wore to sleep. In silhouette, he didn’t look too different than he had when they had first met. There was the pouch of his belly, and the circumference of his fro shrunken, but he was still Ralph, his pelvis pushed up against the stove, his muscles still detectable under the loosened skin on his arms.
He was yawning into his hand, his face dark, as the gas burned violet-blue under the aluminum kettle. The cafetera was dented, but they still used it; it made the best coffee, the darkest and sweetest taste.
Mirella smiled at him, chin resting in his cupped hand as he groggily made their coffee for the day. She stepped over the threshold into the kitchen, and he looked up at her, startled. His eyes glittered in the dark, wet streaks on his cheeks, the catch of a breath in his throat.
“Ralph, what’s wrong?” she said and put her arms on his shoulders. “Are you crying?” she asked, although she could see he was. “Why are you crying?” She was no good at this.
“Mirella, go back to bed,” Ralph babbled. “I’m fine, everything is fine. I just couldn’t sleep.”
“Ralph, talk to me. I’m your wife, talk to me.”
Ralph shook his head, rubbing his eyes with one hand. The whistling grew louder, and he turned off the flame. Steam rushed out of the mouth of the cafetera. Mirella felt it heat the kitchen, all the windows closed.
“Ralph, what’s wrong?”
He kept shaking his head, his fingers covering his eyes. He was crying without caution now, heaving and sighing like a child, and Mirella wrapped an arm around his shoulder. He took her hand and gently unwound himself from her.
“You shouldn’t have to see me like this. It’s not right.”
“It’s fine,” Mirella said. Were there other words she could say? Would another word have been better? It’s “normal”? It’s “natural”? It’s “fine with me”?
“It’s fine,” she repeated.
“Jesus,” Ralph gasped, and his shoulders shook. He loped out of the kitchen, his hands still over his eyes.
“Ralph! Stop right there,” Mirella called after him.
“I don’t want the coffee anymore, Mirella. And I don’t want to talk.”
“Is it Penélope?” Mirella said. “I miss her, too.”
She wanted to walk out to the hallway, to hold him where he’d stalled by the stairs, but she didn’t want him to move her hands again, to step away from her and say he didn’t want her to see him like this. This is what she had wanted—for Ralph to falter and lean on her, to need something from her again. Here was the opening, and she stood alone in it, waiting.
“Ralph, you can tell me. She’s our daughter.”
“God, it’s not Penelope,” Ralph said. “If I let myself feel this way every time I missed Penelope, I wouldn’t have made it past the first month she was gone.”
“Is it us?” She had never asked before, but now she could. Their marriage had devastated her, too. She had wanted more, too. Now they could speak about all that was wrong, without it crushing them.
“We’re getting better, Ralph,” she said. “I can feel it. You too, yes? You can feel it?”
Ralph’s face broke again, his lips skewing to one side. His eyes sealed, his body trembled. He put a hand on the banister to steady himself.
“Ralph, I’m here. Look at me, Ralph, I’m here.”
Ralph muttered into his hand, but Mirella couldn’t hear what he said. He moaned, “God, oh God, oh God.”
“Ralph!” she screamed.
“My store! It’s gone—my store.”
Ralph’s voice rose to the pitch he used only when he was laughing—not his perfunctory laugh for when someone gave him a compliment, or amused him or he was biding his time thinking about how to pick apart an argument he disagreed with. It was the pitch of the high throaty laugh he used for Penelope when she was a girl and had gotten paint on her face, or had accidentally said something ruder than she realized, or when Mirella mixed up her words in English and invented new ones like watching-machine. But he was weeping now in that high terrible pitch.
“My store, my store,” he said. He hiccupped between sobs.
“Is that what you’re crying about?”
Ralph uncovered his face and opened his eyes, sheepishly, but he didn’t say anything.
“Ralph, come here. Let’s talk about this.” Mirella tried to make her voice easy and light. He needed comfort; she would comfort him, although she felt that she was losing herself. She could no longer see in colors, and her mind turned toward instinct: a set of impulses she couldn’t explain, none of them mercy, patience.
“E
verything is going to be fine,” she said.
“Mirella, can’t you see? I have nothing left. It’s all gone.”
“I’m here, Ralph. Look at me.”
He began to shake his head.
“Ralph, look at me.”
He blubbered and lowered his face. He was only a few yards away, but he seemed much farther, just the outline of a man.
“Coño, Ralph! Look at me!”
She banged her hand on the kitchen counter. The cafetera rattled on the stove.
Ralph didn’t turn to her. “Nothing, nothing. I have nothing.”
“Look at me!”
Mirella’s fingers found the handle of the cafetera, and she hurled it at Ralph, where he stood at the top of the stairs, just beyond the border of the tiled kitchen. The lid of the cafetera stuttered open, and hot coffee flew onto the wall, Mirella’s hands, Ralph’s undershirt. Ralph lifted his hands to cover his face; he twisted his body away from the spray of the kettle. He stepped back onto the top step, and his ankle turned. He pitched sideways down the stairs. Mirella ran after him, but he was already off the landing, tumbling down to the first floor, and he wasn’t Ralph anymore, but a blur in the dark, a tall thing doubled in on itself, thumping out a terrible rhythm, as if his body hit each step, as if he didn’t miss a single one.
In the morning, Mirella knocked on her daughter’s door. The girl was already awake, sitting on the floor in shorts the length of panties and a T-shirt, a book open on her lap, a cup of coffee on the floor. She might have been awake for hours.
“I’m going to the bakery,” Mirella said. “You can come with me if you want.” She thought she’d start small—Hija, will you cross the road with me? If you want the deed, you will.
Penelope yawned, looked down at her book, then slapped it shut.
“Fine. I’ll put on my sneakers,” she said, and Mirella went to wait for her in the hall.
When they were out of the house, walking along the paved sidewalks of the residence, Mirella couldn’t tell if Penelope was any angrier than usual—had she expected her to just sign over the house right away? To break the silence, she asked her when she planned to return to Brooklyn.
“Tomorrow,” Penelope said. “I have to get back to work.”
Mirella shouldn’t have been surprised Penelope had a job—of course she did, she was a woman now, but she hadn’t mentioned anything about it. Was she still at the library? Had she found a job to do with her art? What if Penelope had become famous, and Mirella never knew? She wondered, but didn’t ask. She said she would call Emanuel so he could drive her to the airport, and she decided silently that she’d ride along to say good-bye.
At the gates to the residence, a Dominican watching-man sat with a rifle in his lap. He wore a khaki cap, and he tipped it to them as they climbed out to the road.
The cars sped by in two main thoroughfares, one running east and the other west. There were no marked lanes, but the cars clung to either side of the road. A few drivers lurched across the road into oncoming traffic, to pursue a gap and pick up speed. Cars often came within a few yards of colliding, until one swerved away, back to its proper side of the road.
Penelope watched the dizzying pattern of the cars, the density of bodies and machines on the road. The concho vans were stuffed with people, men and women stood on the backs of pickup trucks, their hair and T-shirts flapping in the wind. Even the motoconchos were crammed, three, four, five riders on a single motorcycle seat. Penelope had run along this road, but she hadn’t tried to cross it. She realized she didn’t know how.
Mirella took her daughter’s hand. “Come on,” she said, and she led her daughter through an opening in the cars. On the other side, they let go of each other, and Mirella proceeded to the bakery, which was down a grassy slope, through a grove of tamarind trees. They left the whir of the traffic behind them.
The German bakery was a squat stucco building with a black clay roof. When they entered, the baker greeted Mirella and guessed immediately that Penelope was her daughter.
“Yes, yes,” Mirella said in English. “She is my daughter.”
Penelope noticed how genuinely Mirella smiled, as if she were truly thrilled the baker could tell they were related. Her lips spread apart, wide and crooked—her unaffected smile—and her whole face shone from beneath her sun hat, even with her bug-eye sunglasses low on her nose. Looking at her, Penelope couldn’t believe this was the woman who had ruined her father, who had thrown a coffeepot at him, who had made him tumble down the stairs, and then left him. She looked so harmless, beautiful, while she talked to the baker and squeezed the loaves with a leaf of parchment paper. She asked which rounds were which: she wanted one with cinnamon, clove.
Back in the house, Mirella made breakfast. It must have been fifteen years, no, longer, since Mirella had last cooked for her—Penelope was determined not to count. They each had a single scrambled egg, a salad made from lettuce, lemon, and herbs from the garden, a whole avocado, sweet bread from the bakery, and cold glasses of white wine. They were halfway through the bottle by the time they switched to coffee, Mirella offering her fragments of dark chocolate.
Penelope watched her mother drink. She would pick up a finger of chocolate, bite off the end, then take a sip of coffee, and return the chocolate to the cup, so it would continue to melt. How long had her mother been doing this? When did she discover it? Penelope did the same with her coffee, imitating her mother. Mirella gave her a spoon for the dregs and chocolate that stuck to the bottom.
Penelope was nearly done with her coffee when Mirella announced, “I’m going to the beach.” Penelope licked her spoon clean and said nothing. If she didn’t move quickly, her daughter might disappear into her room and stay there until her flight the next day.
“Get your things. I’ll call a car,” she said, and Penelope laughed.
“Sí, Señora,” she said, saluted her, and then left to change.
Mirella tried not to let Penelope’s smugness needle at her. Wasn’t it natural for a mother to give orders? To tell a daughter what she should and shouldn’t do? Ramona hadn’t done that much for her—she’d had no words about whether Mirella should move to New York, or marry so young, no instructions for how to get ahead in school, how to hang clothes on a line. Penelope couldn’t see that through all her meddling, Mirella had never left her alone.
The beach was empty when they arrived, the afternoon sunless and warm. A skinny man ran out from one of the shacks set back from the shore to bring them two vinyl lawn chairs and ask if they wanted drinks. The women agreed piña coladas served in hollowed-out pineapple halves would be too sweet, and they weren’t tourists after all. They ordered Presidentes, a bucket full of them.
They drank in silence, dropping their empty bottles in the sand when they were through. Neither of them wanted to leave the purses unattended on the shore, so they took turns swimming. When they weren’t in the water, they slept to the sound of waves and wind, the rare bird.
Mirella couldn’t believe that time was passing and they weren’t arguing. Penelope was controlling herself, and so was she. Maybe they were both playing nice, trying to each get what they wanted with the deed. They chewed on chips of ice and gulped their beers. By the end of the day, they were both sunburned and drunk, and they decided their purses would be fine hidden underneath the chairs. They went into the water together.
Mirella paddled around, unable to swim very far on her own, and Penelope swam away from the land, although the waves were growing choppier and taller in the dusk. She swam out to a bench of coral, where she hauled herself up and sat, although the surface was rough and caught on the fabric of her bathing suit. She watched her mother, swimming in little circles on her own, pausing sometimes to gather her hair in her hands to wring out the seawater. Then she would twist it back up into a moño that unwound as soon as she dove back into the water.
The beach was beautiful. Short coconut trees stood guard along the sand, and farther uphill, framboyan trees grew,
scattering their feathery red fronds along the cobbled paths. It wasn’t the mountain, but it was DR, and Penelope was with her mother again. They didn’t turn to look at each other, but Penelope felt they must have been thinking the same thing.
Penelope watched her mother climb out of the water and onto the dunes. She lifted up the lawn chair to be sure their leather purses were still there. She dried herself with a towel and began collecting the bottles they had buried. She stamped her feet on a rock to shake off the sand, her body bony and smooth, her hair swinging behind her like she was still the twenty-year-old she had been when Penelope was a girl. The wind and tide swelled, and soon they would have to return to Mirella’s house.
Her mother had no reason not to sign the deed—she was fine here in DR, perhaps better than she had ever been. Life was so unequal, Penelope thought. She had ruined Ralph’s happiness and found her own. To keep the house would be spiteful, unless she wanted to hold on to some scrap of her life before, the last evidence that she’d ever been a Grand. The thought that her mother would want to keep some final stake in Brooklyn, their family, shook Penelope. The force of the idea—She wants us—made her tremble. Penelope stood on the coral bench and dove headfirst into the silver bay, and let the water enclose her. She swam for as long as she could without coming up for air.
Back in the residence, Mirella and Penelope showered and ordered pizza again, then went into their separate rooms for the night. Penelope left her room only once to fetch a glass of water from the bathroom sink. She found Mirella on the sofa, watching a soap opera with the volume turned low, clipping the split ends of her red hair with a pair of nail scissors.
Mirella watched novela after novela, the hours draining away from her. She didn’t want the night to end. My daughter is here; my daughter is asleep—she thought of Penelope through the theme song, commercials, the credits. It was dark but nearly morning when she turned off the television and went up to her room.