Halsey Street

by Naima Coster

They had spoken English all those years in the house in Brooklyn, so that Mirella couldn’t remember the sound of Spanish in her daughter’s mouth. When she was a child, Ralph would complain he didn’t understand what the two of them were always chattering about. He told Penelope to speak English at home, although she was already speaking it at school. Ralph couldn’t tolerate feeling left out, even for a few minutes, although Mirella felt that way every day—when someone on the subway asked her for directions and she fumbled her vowels, when the black women at the supermarket stared at her and her light skin as she wandered the aisles, when the white ladies she worked for didn’t look up from their hefty magazines to say thank you and good night, when the teachers at Penelope’s school referred to her as “Ralph Grand’s wife.”

“These people are cold, Penelope. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. They think a neighborhood is only about what you can buy—fancy coffee, flowers on the table, a big old house. It’s all just stuff to them, stuff they want, stuff they think they deserve because they can afford it. A neighborhood means more than that. It’s about the people.”

They thought she was a beautiful, skinny idiot who cleaned houses and flubbed some of her words in English—bark for buck, When-es-day for Wednesday, minds instead of mine. She didn’t admire Ralph’s friends any longer for owning businesses or having office jobs in downtown Brooklyn or Manhattan. The bottles of wine they brought over didn’t impress her anymore, or the new records they had purchased at Ralph’s store. Mirella knew now this was the extent of their lives—stopping into each other’s brownstones to drink and play music and talk indifferently about the neighborhood, as if it were some other place, instead of the brutal swatch of the city where they’d chosen to make their homes.

The words stuck to the roof of Penelope’s mouth—I could never please her—and it seemed obvious to her she had been right to leave RISD. If she couldn’t give her teachers what they wanted, if they would never accept her, there was no point to sticking around. Why steep in someone else’s disappointment? Why linger where you aren’t wanted?

Penelope couldn’t believe she was living this moment: Ralph mourned a dead Mirella instead of a living one, and she was finally motherless, after all her years of claiming motherlessness.