Halsey Street

by Naima Coster

Mirella still marveled at Penelope, sometimes—the way she now expertly shook cereal into her blue breakfast bowl, the adult stance she assumed, hands on her hips, when she gargled in the bathroom, her head tipped back and the water running, how she swirled her fingertips in paint and then tapped at her rice paper in patterns Mirella couldn’t discern. The ordinariness of life with Penelope could still astound her; she was Mirella’s greatest anchor in this city. But every day, Penelope became less hers. Mirella saw it in the way Penelope sat with one ankle resting on her knee, her leg bent at a ninety-degree angle, a masculine way for a little girl to sit. She had all of Ralph’s American habits—feet up on the table, shoes on the couch; she preferred her potato salad white, without capers and without the beets that stained it pink. Even her Spanish—one of the last things just the two of them shared—seemed like a trick she was constantly practicing. She savored her consonants for too long, rounded her vowels, as if she were giving a speech instead of speaking. Ralph and Penelope were building a language of their own now, too. She had started staying up late to listen to records with him when he came home from the store. For hours, the two of them sat curled up on the olive sofa, singing along to Ralph’s favorite albums, until Mirella barged into the living room and lifted the needle off the track, and sent them both to bed. Mirella could always sense the edges of the girl’s ch...