by Naima Coster
She sat at her vanity to read the deed, but the words were too technical for her to understand. It would be easier if someone could speak it aloud to her. She gave up after the third page and flipped to the end, where she found Ralph’s signature—the careful, small letters, the ink smudged from where he pressed too hard on the pen. Beneath, Penelope’s—three big loops for her first name, then a G and a flourish for Grand. Her name looked like a drawing, some beautiful code.
Mirella tiptoed down to the guest room, the deed in hand. Penelope was asleep on her side, her curls gathered like a spray of flowers on the top of her head. In the starlight, Mirella thought she saw streaks on Penelope’s face. Had she been crying about the house? Leaving DR? Her? Mirella moved closer and realized it had been a trick of the light. Penelope hadn’t been crying and wouldn’t. Neither of them would. It wasn’t a part of their Santos blood.
Mirella sat on the edge of the bed and looked around at the things her daughter had scattered on the floor: neon sneakers and mesh shorts, the still-wet yellow bikini she’d worn at the beach, a fine-tipped black pen with a point so sharp it looked as if it would cut right through paper. Mirella scooped the pen from the ground, twirled it between her fingers. She unfolded the square of papers in her lap, signed along the two blank lines Penelope had marked with Xs. She initialed next to another X, folded up the deed, and tucked it next to Penelope’s head.
Penelope went on sleeping, unaware of what Mirella had done. She would find out soon enough, in the morning, before the airport. If she could have written more things she would have: how we do things we do not mean; we do evil things; if we see an open door, we will dart through it, before we lose our guts, no matter who is left behind, we will move at the chance to be free.
Mirella could hear the crickets outside, the sound of a lone motorcycle chugging down the road. She thought of going out to her garden, but she didn’t want to leave the girl yet. The cool night breeze poured into the room the scent of grapefruit-tree leaves, her roses, and gasoline. Mirella considered placing her hand on Penelope’s cheek to feel the globe of her round face, or wrapping her finger around a strand of her coiled hair to give it a new shape, but she did neither. It was not their way. Mirella drew the sheets up around her daughter’s shoulders. They still had, at least, tomorrow.
17
SEAMS
“Poor Penelope Grand.”
Jon stood at the corner, far off enough that Penelope could hardly see him through the dark. The street didn’t have many lampposts, and the only light came from windows high in the apartment buildings. She was doubled over the gutter, waiting to vomit, and she hadn’t wanted Jon to see her in pain. He was making jokes from the end of the block, but she couldn’t answer him. She waited, felt her gut shrink and knot. The sour vapor taste filled her mouth.
Jon came back to her, leaned against a puny city tree, and helped her straighten up.
“You should just go on without me,” she said and drew out the bottle of pills from her bag. “Fucking antibiotics. They should have worked by now.”
“Takes a while to kill a parasite,” Jon said. He watched her swallow down a pale green pill.
“My mother would laugh if she could see me now. She told me not to drink out of the tap.”
Penelope knew instantly that she had blundered. If she brought up her mother, she gave Jon a window to ask whether she had heard from Mirella yet, whether Penelope had decided she would be the first one to call. But Jon didn’t say anything and offered her his arm. He seemed to be learning when to keep himself away, when to circle her perimeter until there was a sign to come back in.
He was the one who had met her at the airport. She had called him after she left the little plane bathroom foul with the smell of her own bile. She had vomited up all that water her mother had warned her not to drink. Jon took her back to Greene and, over the next few days, helped her move her few belongings to Halsey Street. She decided she would live on the first floor, going up the stairs only for the kitchen. He had helped her repaint the walls of the little room she had made her bedroom, a tiny room that was meant to be a large pantry, with a window that faced the backyard. He had gone with her to the thrift store to buy a loveseat for the barren living room, helped her carry it back on the bus. She went to see him at the bar, and sometimes he came by before his shift, and they would eat and talk until they were through talking, then they would wrap themselves in each other and kiss until Penelope decided it was time for him to leave. She liked his unselfconscious humming and the sight of him walking barefoot through the rooms of the house. She liked to watch him rearrange the few inches of his hair. They had found their own rhythm, and he made her feel that the house was somewhat hers. The only nuisance was when he brought up Mirella and asked about the trip, and what Penelope planned to do now that her mother was in her life. He had stopped prodding after Penelope told him, without blinking, “Why don’t you ask me about my father? He’s the one in a fucking nursing home, you know.” She didn’t know how long he would remain patient with her, or how long she had before he realized her bad moods were her.
For now, they carried on toward the avenue, their arms linked. Penelope felt her nausea begin to pass. There was no one else on the street. They had turned the corner of winter into March, but there was no one else on the street, the night too cold. Chunks of ice dissolved in the gutter, and the city trees were still without their buds. Jon had dressed up for the show in a leather jacket and striped T-shirt, too-short jeans, his skinny ankles exposed to the cold. He had pulled back his hair into a small nub on the top of his head, which Penelope loved because she could admire his face more easily: his protruding brow, the large almonds of his eyes, the gaping holes in his ears, the crow’s feet he was too young to have. She didn’t want to go to the gallery, but if it meant something to Jon, she had to at least make an appearance. He clasped their hands together as they strode down the block.
“I’m glad you’re feeling better,” he said, and she realized he meant her nausea. “I don’t think I could get in without you—Darnell put your name on the list. I’m just ‘Guest.’”
He winked at her and kissed her knuckles, and Penelope felt both bewildered and charmed. How did Jon survive this way, with so much ease and brightness? Had he always counted on smiles and his good humor to get him through?
She steered him toward the side of a building, leaned him back against the cold wall. She kissed him, slow and diligent in the use of her tongue. He slipped his hands under her shirt and around her waist; she sunk her fingers into the waistband of his jeans. Neither of them moved any further: this was their dance. Penelope usually cut them off before it got too far, but Jon hadn’t pressed either. They kissed for a long time until Jon pulled away and started laughing.
“Hot damn, Miss Grand,” he said. “You’re going to make me miss my friend’s show.” He kissed her cheek and pulled her in the direction of the avenue, toward its foot traffic and lampposts, away from the shadows and quiet of the block.
The gallery was no more than a storefront, the brick inside painted white. The paintings were displayed inside large glass boxes mounted on the wall, as if they were images on a television screen. Penelope saw all the manicured women with multicolor tattoos, the men with waxed mustaches sipping from cheap green cans of beer.
“I can’t,” she said and pretended to feel sick again. “Give me your key.” She volunteered to wait for him in his studio, which was less than a mile away.
He told her to give the pill some time to kick in. She’d feel better after some water and if she found a place to sit.
“Don’t you want to see Darnell’s show? He told me he can’t wait to hear what you think.”
Penelope didn’t say anything to Jon but pushed past him into the gallery, the room too bright and loud. She went straight for the bar and asked for a double with diet tonic. By the time Jon reached her, she had already made eyes at the bartender. Jon put his arm on her shoulder and she shook him off. He
had been her ally on the street, and he was an irritant now. He left her there at the bar, and she stood, drinking, trying to coax herself to return to him, to make nice. After a few minutes, she found him looking at the sequence of Darnell’s works, near the back of the show. He tried to put his arm around her again, and, this time, she let him. They didn’t speak but waited for the rift between them to close.
Darnell had three paintings in the show, all of them glossy and erupting with color. They weren’t bad at all, considering he had a day job in graphic design and no formal training as a painter. The first piece was a deconstructed face in pinks and blues. Only the mouth, agape, was in place; the eyes and nose and coils of hair were disarrayed on the rest of the canvas. The subject’s organs were rendered in miniature, little anatomical drawings in ink, stark lines underneath big washes of color. When they went out tagging, Darnell sprayed big streaks of color onto the walls, then hand-painted lines from philosophy and rap, all mixed up together, to make new aphorisms he wanted people in the neighborhood to see. Penelope had found it calculated and strange; he had carried a little notebook with him, the lines he wanted to stitch together already written inside. The other two paintings were also acrylic, ink, and enamel. They were violent, bright, and precise, overloaded with detail. Penelope read the little plaque underneath the last piece. It had Darnell’s full name and his place of birth (Fayetteville, North Carolina), and it listed his preoccupations (mythology, cosmology, the body, the street) and his influences (Basquiat, Ernst, Lawrence, and Watts)—no surprises there.
Jon leaned in to whisper in her ear.
“I’m out of my league,” he said.
She didn’t agree with him aloud. The show was familiar to her, even if she’d only tasted the game at RISD. She could have written the copy for Darnell’s paintings; she could have helped someone else understand it; what she couldn’t do was create any of it—not anymore. Maybe if she’d spent the last ten years differently, but she hadn’t.
When Darnell came over, she didn’t want to hug him. She didn’t feel any happiness for him. He wore a T-shirt with suspenders, a pair of red-rimmed spectacles she was certain he didn’t need. He had cut his hair into a fade, his twists long on top. He wore shell sneakers and wool slacks, his outfit a mash-up of things his crowd would either recognize or wonder at.
“It’s a costume, Penny,” he said, when he noticed her staring. “It’s surreal, man. All these white people with nice things to say.”
Jon wrapped an arm around Darnell and squeezed him close.
“I’m proud of you,” he said, and the two men started talking about the pieces. Penelope had a few moments to step out of the gallery and into herself. She wondered what it would be like to be Darnell, to hang her worth on the wall and put names on the list, to drink white wine and have an entire night devoted, at least in part, to her.
It wasn’t long before a little convoy of Darnell’s colleagues from the graphic design firm came over. They all congratulated Darnell and chugged from their free beers. They were all formally trained—painters—but they had all landed in the same place as Darnell in their careers. Some were a bit ahead, a few behind, but Penelope could see the jealousy in their teeth when they complimented him on the show. She didn’t want to be like them. She had started to drift away when Darnell reached for her hand and pulled her into the circle. She hoped he wouldn’t mention RISD or that she was from Brooklyn or that she was Jon’s girlfriend—it all made her sound like she was more than she was. She was grateful that Darnell introduced her only by saying that Penelope was a part of their tagging crew now.
A woman named Margot with fuchsia-painted lips nodded at Penelope. “How nice,” she said, before turning back to Darnell. She asked whether he planned on finally finding an agent.
“I might,” he said. “It’s hard without the art school cred. I’m not like you all.” Darnell pointed at his colleagues and then Penelope, and, within an instant, she had been found out. The convoy turned their eyes on her.
“I draw a little,” Penelope said.
“So you’re an illustrator?”
Penelope said no, and Margot shook her head and said, “Thank God. I’ve got a friend who’s an illustrator, and you wouldn’t believe the kinds of kitsch she churns out—tote bags and little coasters with dogs on them, and wedding invitations, even a few book covers. She gets paid more than any of us could ever hope to make.”
Another woman chimed in. “Thanks for nothing, SVA.”
They all laughed and started to circulate the names of the schools where they had earned their degrees: Pratt, Cooper Union, Parsons, MIT. They went on about debt but good times, and soon they had forgotten that Penelope and Jon were there. Somehow they had even forgotten Darnell, too, who sipped from his beer, and adjusted his glasses and tried to laugh along as they commiserated. Penelope was the first to leave, while Jon and Darnell held out, their faces dazed and grave as if they were at a funeral and not an art show.
There was a woman who had art up in the show. Her works were on slender, long cuts of handmade paper, all of them watercolor and ink. The watercolor figures were edgeless, the ink all edges and knots. The one she liked best was all orange and gold, except for the black ink; like a knife, it slashed through the layers of color. Here is something I would like to create, Penelope thought.
It had been nearly a month since she returned from DR, and she had started to feel the impulse to paint. It might have been the nights spent tagging with Jon, the feel of a paint can in her hand had activated her muscle memory. Or maybe it was being on Halsey Street, a desire to put things on the wall to make the house hers. Or it might have been her mother. She had seen Mirella, talked with her, swam with her, and convinced her to sign the deed—maybe the things she thought were impossible were no longer so. Maybe her mother would call her. Maybe she would visit her in the summer. Maybe they would see each other again. Maybe she would paint. Maybe. It was a game Jon liked to play, but she could only wonder about her mother by herself. To nurse these possibilities on her own was terrifying enough.
Penelope closed her eyes. Although the gallery was clogged with people and bottles and light, she managed to conjure up her mother. She remembered her at the airport gate, how cold her mother’s skin had felt in the open-air heat, as if every pore had been closed by a cream or a serum, a dab of scented oil. It was then, as they were saying good-bye, that Penelope felt that she wanted to paint her—not to capture the slope of her nose or the shape of her eyes, or even the anomaly of her red hair. She wanted to capture this sensation of skinny arms and chilled skin, the collusion of herbal lotion and floral perfume, coffee, morning wine, and how close the two of them could be—at least, their bodies—her mother tipping onto her toes to align her hips with Penelope’s, to press their cheeks together, as if they could cradle something between the two of them if they stood near enough.
How could she paint such a thing? She imagined it might be orange and gold, open, blurred, but with edges, pointed and clean.
Jon handed her a glass of water. She didn’t know how long he had been standing next to her. She didn’t take the water from him, in case it was his way of suggesting she was drunk. She wasn’t, and he ought to be able to tell. He put an arm around her and spoke into her ear.
“I should have known this would be hard for you. But I wasn’t sure—you haven’t told me much about RISD, and I can only assume.”
“Is that a habit of yours? Assuming? Maybe you’re no better than they are.”
“Easy,” Jon said. “We’re in public.”
It was his first indication to Penelope that he cared what other people thought. He didn’t want her to raise her voice; he didn’t want a scene. Penelope wanted more than ever to give him one. She wanted to scream and yank the beautiful scrolls off the wall; she wanted to smash a bottle. She could imagine the shards of glass, ramming one into her cheek.
“I hate these people,” she said.
“I don’t think you do,” Jon
said, without even waiting for her to clarify whether she meant artists or smug artists or rich people or rich white people.
“Excuse me?”
“I don’t think it’s them you hate.”
Penelope took a step away from him and raised her voice. “Are you an expert now in Penelope Grand?”
“Maybe I am. I’m as close as anyone has ever been. I’ve been watching you for a while now, Penelope. You don’t make things; you don’t talk to your mother. Just work, run, see your pop. Work, run, see me. And gin. So much gin. You go on like the world is happening to you, like you’re not here. But you’re here, girl. You’re here.”
Another woman might have taken his hand; another woman might have said she needed to step outside and would he come along? Another woman might have told him what he got right and what he got wrong; she might have been surprised by Jon, by how much he could already see her. This other woman was long-haired and pretty; she had different parents, a different life. Penelope could see this other woman, but she wasn’t her.
“You cocky motherfucker,” she said. “If I wanted a shrink, I would see one.”
“Maybe you should.”
“I’m going home.”
She tried to slide past him, but he put his hands on her shoulders.
“I’m serious, Penelope. How long had it been since you’d seen your mother? Five years? It’s like you two came back from the dead to each other. And your father—”
He was closing in on her, and Penelope felt in herself the urge to cry. She couldn’t dispute the physicality of it, the need as sharp and particular as the need to vomit or to drink a glass of water or lie down. It was a stinging in her eyes, and heat in her face, but it was also a line she could feel running along the front of her, from between her toes, up to her forehead: a seam that if pressed against would force her to come apart.