by Naima Coster
“You’ve never mentioned that.”
“I don’t have many stories like that.”
Jon opened his mouth to speak, and Penelope cut him off.
“Don’t start with any of that ‘love’ shit. My mother wasn’t Birdie Wright.”
“It’s obvious, Penelope, that she—”
Penelope plugged her ears and started to chant: I do not want to hear it, I do not want to hear it, I do not want to hear it. It was childish, she knew, and she would have felt embarrassed if she didn’t care more about sparing herself. She would rather Jon find her ridiculous than listen to him say again and again that her mother had loved her, that she had lived with the knowledge of it.
Jon quieted, and Penelope uncovered her ears. “Let’s just go to sleep,” she said and turned off the light.
“Jon.”
“Miss Grand?”
“Do you still miss her? Your mother?”
He didn’t answer right away, and Penelope felt scared, the darkness of the room coming down around her.
“Most days, it’s not so bad. I even forget sometimes and go about my day for a while as if nothing is missing. But eventually I remember she’s dead, and then it’s bad, but not as bad as it was that first year without her.”
“And your father? Is he all right?”
“He doesn’t drink anymore, so it seems like he’s better than he’s ever been. It’s hard to tell. He still talks to her. Out loud, like she’s in another room and he just can’t see her. He says he can still hear her voice when he needs to.”
Penelope could hear Mirella shouting, as clearly as the rain, the creak of the old house.
“I don’t want to keep my mother’s voice with me.”
“Then keep something else.”
It wasn’t long before he was asleep, and Penelope slipped her hand into the waistband of his jeans. She felt his skin thrum against her fingers: his heart. She slid one leg on top of his, her left calf over his right shin. Their linked ankles were an anchor, rigging them to the room and one another. It seemed to help, to touch him, but she still couldn’t sleep. Her head was too filled with Mirella. Mami, she wanted to say. Mami, stop.
Penelope climbed out of bed and sat on her trunk. Her easel was still open, the clean cotton paper clipped to the top of it. There was a jar of drinking water on the floor, and all her supplies in a neat pile: the tubes of paint, her brushes, a palette knife, a rag to wipe everything off.
Penelope took up a filbert brush, her fingers curling to pinch the handle. She began by building stone. She left the edges of the paper blank and started near the center. She scumbled together white and blue, gray and pink. The wall began to form: grainy, dappled in light. The exterior of a house would never be this colorful, no matter how creamy the paint, or how bright the day, but Penelope kept going. She swept on the paint with thick, free strokes, as if the color were blowing out of her center, into her arms, her fingertips. She was emboldened and brought in yellow, switched to a fan brush to tap in even greater light.
She couldn’t remember the color of the shutters or whether there had been shutters at all. She used the mop brush to swipe on white and gray to make the sill, and then two slender strips of indigo for curtains. Had there been curtains? If there had, they should have been indigo: dark and mesmeric. The curtains were cast open, but she did not want to paint inside yet. She moved to the garden.
She hadn’t listened when her mother named the flowers; she hadn’t taken them in with her eyes either. She had been elsewhere, wondering what would become of the two of them and trying to appear unmoved. She worked without any real memory, feeling her way through color: violet, blue, pink. She pressed her round brush down to make the petals, twisted her wrist around for the bud. The flowers swelled larger than scale, but what did it matter? A swipe of black for a stem, folds of yellow and green to make each leaf. She worked until she had filled the paper, the garden inching into the edges of the painting, rising up the wall, and onto the sill. The only empty space was where the windows should be. Penelope blew on the paper and considered the center.
She took up the mop again and brought together red and yellow and blue, then more yellow, and white. Where the windows should be, she painted only light: gold and orange and yellow, then rivulets of pure white. It took a few minutes to get the color right, and she inspected the painting when she was done. It was beautiful—hurried and loose and aglow. She could have kept it to remember the house in the residence in the north of the island, to remind herself of where she and her mother had once stood together, but she decided to give it away. She would take this to her mother, whether Mirella would have wanted it or not. She would take down one of those awful still lifes, and hang it in her house. She had never been one for words, and she considered it her best reply to her mother’s last letter and question—Have you found your life?
The answer was obvious—No—and also, Ya casi.
20
SALIDA
They arranged for a flight in the late afternoon so that they would have enough time to get Ralph ready for the airport. When Penelope arrived at Willow Lake, he was already packed and in his wheelchair. His shirt was a serious plaid, his leather oxfords recently shined, his gray hair slicked back with tonic and parted on the side. He had a little suitcase filled with clothes, and a larger duffel bag with medical supplies, the wooden transfer board, washcloths, protein shakes, pain pills, a bedpan and a basin in case it became too difficult to get him to the tub or the toilet in Mirella’s house. He’d taken the poppies out of the vase on the windowsill and wrapped them with a navy handkerchief into a bouquet. He held them in his hand.
As Penelope wheeled him out of his suite and down the hallway, the nurses called after him to have a safe trip. They waved as he passed, and Ralph gave each of them a wink. He’d charmed them all. She helped Ralph into the passenger seat of the taxi, and she sat in the back while he made small talk with the driver. It amazed her he wasn’t more sullen, more silent. She let him have his normalcy. For a while, he was just a man in a car riding to the airport.
When Ralph told the driver the terminal number, he asked, “Flying international today?”
“First time,” Ralph said.
“Where you going?”
“The Caribbean.”
“Wow! That will be like paradise,” the driver said, and Ralph didn’t contradict him.
The driver brought out the luggage, while Penelope helped her father into the chair and onto the curb. The driver told Ralph to have a blast in DR, and Ralph nodded, arranged a blanket around himself in the cold.
They got through security fine, although Penelope was sweating the whole time, worried they would ask Ralph to get out of the chair, and that she wouldn’t know how to help him. Once they were inside, he asked her to go buy him a cup of coffee, and she didn’t want to leave him alone. He was reading the paper peacefully when she got back, and he drank his coffee, then said he had to use the bathroom. They found an accessible bathroom, and Ralph went in by himself. She stood outside the door, wondering if she was strong enough to kick in the lock if something went wrong. Soon she heard the flush, then water running in the sink. Ralph knocked on the door, and she opened it to let him out. He was shaking his wet hands.
“All that money for a ticket and they can’t put a roll of paper towel in the bathroom. Pfsh.”
They had some time to kill before their departure. At the gate, they were surrounded by Dominicans on their way home, tourists readying themselves for vacation, and they were somewhere in between. The sun was setting, and Ralph closed the newspaper, pulled a cell phone from his pocket.
“Where’d you get that?”
“Faye helped me order one online. It’s in case we need anything. We can call Una from down there. It was Freddie’s idea.”
“You called Dr. Elias?”
“He had a right to know. He knew your mother. And it’s smart, I think—to keep connected.”
Penelope raised an eyeb
row at her father and smiled. “We’ll be fine,” she said.
Ralph squinted down at his phone, tapping and trying to understand. Eventually, he gave up and put it back in his pocket.
“So that man you mentioned—her friend. The one who called. He won’t be down there, will he?”
“Mami’s neighbor? No. He’s gone.”
Ralph looked relieved. He went back to people watching, observing the new parents with their wailing infants, grandparents with children who kept wandering off, the childless middle-aged folks who had the space to read and eat, talk on the phone, while they waited to board.
“I wish I was going to see her, and not just her house,” he said. “But it’s something. How’s her garden? You know, your mother, she had art in her bones, same as you. That’s where you get it from. Her garden—that was how she drew. Do you remember what the yard was like when we first moved in? Just dirt and a square of cement? But she made it beautiful. Did she plant roses?”
“I can’t remember.”
“She always said she planted those for you. We thought for a while about naming you that, Rose, but your mother said it was too common. She liked Penelope.”
“I didn’t know.”
Ralph gestured at the chipboard case Penelope had with her. He asked what was inside.
“I made a painting for Mami. I thought I’d leave it there for her.”
“Is that right?” Ralph smiled. “Good girl now, Penny. Good girl.”
Ralph said he was starting to get hungry, so Penelope unpacked some of the food Una had dropped off for them the day before. She had made macaroni and cheese, and green beans, roast beef, and her infamous potato salad. Penelope had foisted most of it off on Jon, but she had brought along the black cake, full of stone fruit and rum.
“I should go find us a knife.”
“No, no, no,” Ralph said, and he reached out his hands. He unwrapped the cake and tore off a hunk for Penelope, another for himself.
“We’ll eat it just like this.”
They sat quietly, as passengers at other gates began to line up to board. When he was done with his piece, his expression went sour.
“I can’t believe she’s dead.”
Penelope didn’t know what to say. She believed that her mother was dead, but she still couldn’t fathom what it meant. The only way she had ever known her mother was through her body: the scrape of her fingers in Penelope’s scalp the few times she had helped her wash her hair in the sink when she was a girl, the pudding scent of her cold face cream. The ringing of her gold bangles, the residue left by an eye pencil ground into her chin to create an artificial beauty mark. The crust of mud on her cutoff jeans. The flap of her red hair in the wind on the beach, her downturned mouth on the ride up the rocky side of the mountain. The impact of her fingers on Penelope’s sternum that time in the kitchen. Penelope had long tolerated the idea of Mirella no longer being her mother, but she couldn’t comprehend Mirella no longer being Mirella. She had always been herself, her own woman in her bedroom, in her yard, on her island. Her body had always been somewhere.
Ralph put his hand on Penelope’s shoulder. “When she was alive, at least there was a chance,” he said. “Even if most of the time we don’t really know how to change. We can’t hardly figure out how to love right. But there was hope. Now . . . Nothing is as final as death.”
“Maybe not,” Penelope said. “Look at Coltrane. Isn’t he with us all the time?”
Ralph smiled as if it pained him. “And McCoy. Don’t you forget McCoy.”
Penelope pulled a pair of headphones from her backpack and reached into Ralph’s pocket for his cell phone. She began to tap on the screen.
“What are you doing?”
She handed him an earbud, and he recognized the song immediately.
“Run it back, run it back,” he said. “I want to hear it from the start.”
They sat, awash in the turbulence of the piano, the way it rang in many directions. The saxophone sailed in, and they could hear the chant even before it was uttered. A love supreme. A love supreme.
They gave themselves over to the music. Ralph rapped on his chest, the additional percussion of his fist. The cymbals switched, the piano faded, until there was only the bass, deep, spare, the sound of sorrow. Penelope took her father’s hand. She wanted to tell him who he was to her.
“Wait, wait, wait,” Ralph said, holding up a finger to shush her. “Listen to this part, Penny. Listen.” He shook his head from side to side, as if the music were too much, as if he could hardly bear it.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My first thanks are dedicated wholeheartedly to my agent, Kristyn Keene. Thank you for your unwavering belief in my work, your editorial vision, and your commitment to getting this book into the world. I am also so grateful to my fabulous editor, Morgan Parker, who understood this project, and whose love for Brooklyn, black women, and our stories helped push Halsey Street further and deeper. Thank you also to Vivian Lee and Alexandra Woodworth, who saw this book through until the very end.
I’d have been lost without the generosity of dear friends and fellow writers who were willing to read Halsey Street and offer notes. Thank you to Elizabeth St. Victor, Bin Jung, Emily Helck, Meghan Flaherty, and Thomas Sun. I am deeply indebted to you all for your encouragement, friendship, and advice.
I started Halsey Street at Fordham University, where early versions of these pages passed through the skilled and generous hands of many writers: Kim Dana Kupperman, Meera Nair, and John Reed. I am also beholden to Christina Baker Kline, who taught me how to write a decent short story and told me it was time to start writing a book. I am also grateful to the many writers at the Columbia MFA program who gave me direction and support as I wrote this book: Sam Lipsyte, Matthew Sharpe, Stacey D’Erasmo, Victor LaValle, Rebecca Godfrey, Ben Marcus, and Johanna Lane. I am thankful to my many colleagues at Columbia, as well, especially Michael Hafford.
I offer a special thanks to John Crowley, my first writing professor and mentor at Yale. John has believed in my writing for as long as I’ve known him.
I am grateful to my family for their love and support over the years: thank you to my mother, my father, and my brother, Luciano. I found the drive and audacity to write in part because of how committed you’ve been to providing me with both education and opportunities. Thank you also to my uncle, Adlai, who bought me at least two laptops and loaned me another—your generosity and kindness have been enormous gifts to me in my life. I also thank my aunt and uncle, Mayra and Edwin, and their children, for being devoted, consistent, loving family to me.
And my highest thanks I offer to my husband, Jonathan Jiménez Pérez, whose faith in me and in this book has never wavered. You have supported me and loved me in more ways than I can count. Thank you, Jonathan. This book is for us, for our freedom.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo © 2016 Jonathan Jiménez
Naima Coster is a native of Fort Greene, Brooklyn. She holds an MFA in fiction from Columbia University, an MA in English and creative writing from Fordham University, and a BA in English and African American studies from Yale. Her stories and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Guernica, Arts & Letters, Kweli, and the Rumpus. Coster is the recipient of numerous awards and a Pushcart Prize nomination. A former editor of CURA and a former mentor of Girls Write Now, Coster is also a proud alumna of Prep for Prep, the leadership development program in New York City aiding high-potential minority students in public, charter, and parochial schools. She currently teaches writing in North Carolina, where she lives with her family. Halsey Street is her first novel.
s-filter: grayscale(100%); filter: grayscale(100%); " class="sharethis-inline-share-buttons">share