Halsey Street

by Naima Coster

She missed her father, but life with him would have made her feeble, plastic; here she had her bones.

There was really something to be said for studying art, but he didn’t say what.

She ignored him and flashed around the apartment. She closed her easel, carried the empty jam jars to the sink, lifted out a mass of dried gym clothes from the machine. These were the many things that had kept her away from Ralph, these petty, little loads.

Penelope entered the house and felt her former life heaped upon her.

Penelope might not have ever left if she knew she would miss the final years of seeing her father strong. She could have found other ways to avoid her mother. She could have lived in another neighborhood. She could have met him sometimes at the shop. She could have left the house, this life, without leaving him.

His love seemed to revolve around her instead of the other way around.

But in English, Mirella was formal and uneasy. There were gaps in her meaning.

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.”

Her talent, or the idea of it, was her only permission to be there.

“It’s a shame that making room for white folks mean the rest of us have to go. But it’s always been that way, hasn’t it?”

“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.”

Ralph’s grief had a density and a taste; like a gas, it could fill a room.

“You know, no one ever believes old men when we say how good our lives were then. But they believe us when we say how bad our lives are now.”

Now she expected Mirella to fit her whole life into the moments it would take for the elevator to reach the apartment door.

She had cried every day for a year, and then only once in a while, abruptly and for no reason at all, at times that seemed to have nothing to do with her father. And then Mirella learned to put away her sadness, to store it in her body, somewhere out of the way, higher than her stomach, below her throat.

The sight of him was a memory and a premonition.

Losing a mother is like losing the most primal part of yourself—the most fixed thing you know about life on this planet.”