Halsey Street

by Naima Coster

Porque la piedra en esta mano pesa más que lo que aguanta tu corazón. —Li Yun Alvarado, “Adiós”

After a month of sleeping on a bundle of sweaters and a rug, the bed had been proof that leaving New York was worth all this solitude, this space. She missed her father, but life with him would have made her feeble, plastic; here she had her bones.

Penelope sipped her drink and wondered whether to ask him to leave. She figured it was too late, they had already slept together, and she could let him sober up for a few hours. He was right when he said her drawings were all object studies. He hadn’t lied to win her over, which she appreciated. What he hadn’t understood was that she didn’t have to do more. She wasn’t working toward a class or a show. The drawing was an exercise, as much a part of her routine as evening tea, morning runs, these sips of gin. The sketches kept her muscles working; they tempered her moods. She had no fellowship to Berlin, but these object studies, they were hers.

“You know, this is the kind of thing that family usually does.” “I’m grateful, Una. Just let me know, will you, if he needs anything else?” “You know what he needs.” “I have my life here.” “Everybody’s got a life someplace else! You’ve got yours there, your mother has hers wherever she is. Everybody’s got a life, it seems, except your daddy!”

She had told herself that if her mother weren’t there, she would have flown to see Ralph, but then Mirella left for good, and still Penelope couldn’t bring herself to fly back. Instead she called every day and sent flowers and chocolates. When Ralph was out of his temporary wheelchair, she flew him out to Pittsburgh and saw with her own two eyes that he had survived one disaster and then another. The sight of him sealed up some of the guilt inside her. She kept flying him out, whenever she could afford a ticket, and Ralph looked a little feebler every time but never as awful as that first time, when his back was hunched and his fingers gnarled, and he was quieter, as if the fall had cleared away a part of his brain, too.

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.

must have been a magical place to grow up.” Penelope nodded at her, certain there had been no magic in her growing up.

five years’ worth of losses.

Was she in Pitt for 5 yrs? Check in Ch 1 if she mentioned time.

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

It’s often mentioned her neg history with her past specifically living with her parents

Penelope touched her father’s cheek. Ralph pushed her hand away. “Pfsh!” he exhaled. “It looks worse than it feels. Don’t you worry, Penny. Everything is gonna be all right now that you’re back. Una thinks you’re going to get that job at the elementary school. It’s a sign—everything falling into place so quick! It was time for you to come back. Now, I had always imagined your mother would be here, too, when you came home.”

The shed, where Mirella had kept her gardening tools, was boarded up. She knew her mother must have taken her old seeds and supplies with her. It was unlike Mirella to leave anything of hers behind. It surprised Penelope that the flowerpots were still there.

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.

She had double wrapped everything in Bubble Wrap and cardboard, all her paintings from art school. She had kept the paintings because they were proof that she had once thought art would be her whole life, and not one habit of many.

she could run off the dull feeling she had caught from being back in the old house, seeing her father, and, somehow, her mother, too.

She could have made her money another way, but she owed it to her father, now that she was back in Brooklyn, to live somewhat more respectably. He had never put her through the kind of speech he would have been justified to give: two parents, art school, city college, a big house, and she had never done anything besides mix drinks, wait tables, and shelve books at the library.

“It’s going to be good for the children to have you in the classroom,” Principal Pine said. “You’re young, you look like them, you were born here. They need visions of success they can relate to.

She would run until the interview was far away from her, and she forgot her distaste for Mrs. Pine, her nerve. She had assumed Penelope needed to meet the kids to see how they hurt, as if she hadn’t learned all that when she was a girl.

“Technically, they’re still married, they just don’t live together,” Penelope said. “How can they be married and not live together?” She just left, Penelope thought to say, but she saw the worry in Grace’s face, as if a great myth she had believed about mothers and fathers had been cracked open by the facts of Penelope’s life.

“Yeah, I learned how to run real quick,” Penelope said, and they both laughed. She wondered right away what the joke meant to him, whether he thought she was admitting how dangerous the neighborhood used to be, or whether he was impressed by her, the idea that it didn’t used to be as easy to get by in Brooklyn as it was now.

Mirella refused to sleep in someone else’s house now that she finally had one of her own.

After she found a house near the beach at Cabarete, she rented a truck, packed it with her belongings, and drove it across the island. She didn’t leave anything for the women who had housed her; they didn’t need her US dollars. She didn’t say good-bye.

She didn’t buy too many things because she wanted the house to feel as airy and as large as it truly was. When she and Marcello spoke in the evenings, their voices reverberated, their echoes unintelligible and hollow. And when she was alone in the house, which was often, it felt like just enough space.

All her appliances—the pots, the bamboo cutting board, the plastic Mr. Coffee machine—had been wedding gifts from Ralph’s friends. It was as if they had expected her to spend her married life cooking in a stuffy Brooklyn kitchen. They hadn’t given her anything else.

She laughed to herself during these dinners and thought that if her mother, Ramona, were alive, she would be horrified at how little she was eating. No chicharrones de pollo, no arroz con gandules, no steaming pot of sancocho—just a little piece of chocolate, like a beggar, and a glass of liquor, like a puta.

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.

Penelope obeyed her father, and soon Spanish was reserved for birthday cards and Mother’s Day letters. When Penelope was a teenager, they fought in English, and Mirella always said the wrong thing. She felt Penelope had the upper hand, so she yelled and threw things—the phone, a comb, a plate—to keep up. Maybe that had been their problem. English was for Ralph and Brooklyn and the overly perfumed rich ladies whose houses she had cleaned; she was never meant to raise a daughter in some other tongue.

She was the one who didn’t miss him now. She had stopped longing for him, slowly, over the years he left her alone in that dilapidated house in Brooklyn. Penelope was different. You couldn’t leave a daughter behind; she was yours no matter where you were. And although she didn’t know what they would do if they were ever together again—they weren’t the kind to talk or laugh, or even sit beside each other for long—she still craved her girl, as unthinkingly as a seabird longs for the sea. The house hadn’t been ready before. But with the new paintings hung, the custom furniture in place, the curtains clean and fitted to the windows, she finally had something of her own

After the store closed, and the accident, Ralph needed her again—to pick up his prescriptions, to wash his back with a sponge, to push him down the street in his wheelchair. He could see her again, recognize her presence, but only because he had nothing left. Mirella finally learned to speak the thoughts that had been circling her mind for decades: This is not why I got married, and This is not why I came here. It took a few weeks for her to pack her things, and all along, Ralph thought that she was bluffing. When she started shipping the boxes, he asked her if she was really willing to abandon him and their life together. Mirella said yes.

She had thought of Penelope as she rode away from the neighborhood she had moved to as a girl, eighteen and fresh from the red-earth campo, looking for life. How will my daughter find me? she had thought as the taxi plunged farther into Brooklyn, although it had been years since Penelope had stopped looking.

She could have never grown flowers that bright and intricate in Brooklyn. You would like it here, hija, she thought. Penélope.

But she’d had no noble reason to return to Brooklyn besides that she didn’t want her father to die. In her time away she had conquered nothing. She had merely found a way to be.

Her father knew RISD was a good school only from the gloss of the brochures, the faces his Manhattan customers made when he mentioned where Penelope was going to school. Penelope set off, with her paints and her portfolio, ecstatic to finally leave Halsey Street to find her own life.

life in Brooklyn had consisted only of home, school, the store—the neighborhood wasn’t safe, and she had no places in it, nowhere to go when she was in high school. And she’d thought herself fortunate, compared to her classmates in Bed-Stuy; for the first time, at RISD, Penelope wondered whether she had been poor. She quickly realized she hadn’t been, although her mother had, and her father, when they were children.

She slept with a few of them, just to prove that she could, and even after she knew having sex with white boys wasn’t the victory she had expected it to be, she kept finding them, fucking them, and turning them away. It felt good, and it was a thing she could control: she could choose someone and have someone and then return to herself, safe.

Penelope’s scale was smaller, her technique immaculate, and her works soon done. She couldn’t make anything as large or as bold as they did. No one had ever shown her how.

They went on talking about whether Penelope considered herself more of an artist or a teacher, what she had been working on lately. She explained that she was neither, really; she hadn’t painted for more than a decade, not since art school, but lately she had been drawing things she could see from her window. Art could never be her career, but drawing was an impulse, as recurrent, old, and automatic as breathing, except she had chosen to need it.

10 or 5 years? How much time has passed?

The neighborhood had never been anything more to Penelope than where she was from. She’d had no choice in the matter; it was her home.

Am I the only one feeling lack of authenticity in her narrative perspective of Bedstuy ? Did this “connection” between her and Marcus just happen all of sudden? Too soon? Forced?

If they were to go on in this way, she’d have to be able to say what she thought. If she wanted to appease a man, she had her father for that.

“You be careful walking over.” “Pop, I’ll be fine. I’m not thirteen anymore.” “You just be careful, okay? Some things, they haven’t changed.”

Her dad is really trying. Was she drawing the wedge between her parents all along?

“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?” She had no reason to disagree with him—the closing of the shop had devastated her, too. The end of Grand Records had been the end of Ralph Grand, and not only because the accident was shortly after. If the store hadn’t closed, he would have taken the bus there, he would have used a cane to hobble down the aisles, he would have more to do than play his records and smoke his pipe, drink, and sit around and wait to die. Ralph had always expected her to listen to him and agree, to let him again be Mr. Grand, expert and legend. He seemed to need it now more than ever. And although Penelope wanted to please her father, she couldn’t go back to the girlhood habit of putting away her self. She resolved to push.

He has Past trauma too that may be causing him to pass on to his current family

She had no rituals with food, and it had been her way since she was a girl and neither parent surfaced for dinner, not Mirella from her bedroom, or Ralph from the store. Penelope could have made herself rice, fixed a sandwich from the cold cuts in the fridge, but there was no point in preparing an entire meal to eat alone.

like her mother in the beginning, she has an aversion to meals because her family never connected with her over meals

“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.” Penelope said she wanted to focus on Ralph getting better and not worse. They didn’t need to worry about the house. She didn’t say she had no desire to inherit the house on Halsey Street. To live there would be to go backward, into a life she hadn’t chosen. Without Ralph, she had no reason for Brooklyn; she would rather be off in some other place.

“Me and your mother, we never had no place,” Ralph said. “We don’t want that for you.” Penelope knew very well that she would never move back into the house on Halsey Street. She would just as soon go back to having Mirella as her mother, but she didn’t want to trouble her father anymore, not when she still had to convince him to get down on the floor at home and try some stretches, not order another rum and Coke.

Ralph’s condition worse than shown

Random love interest?!?!

“I don’t have many people to talk to these days. Samantha is fantastic, but a wife is too close to be a friend.” What he said seemed true to her. Ralph and Mirella had never appeared to be friends. “Then that’s what we’ll be,” Penelope said. “Friends.”

Without her garden to distract her, the days bled into one another.

Circle back to the garden

Ralph had wanted her to quit cleaning houses so that she could watch Penelope and give the girl what neither of them had known: a parent alive and devoted to them. But Penelope was old enough to watch herself; she went to school; she was fed; she was clean; she needed nothing else. Mirella was the one who needed things. At least, she didn’t have to ask Ralph for an allowance, like a child, and she could see what she had accomplished at work each day, each year, as her little stockpile of savings grew steadily in the bank.

Lack of examples of love & no past families for mírela and Ralph