Halsey Street

by Naima Coster

Se parece igualita a mí, Mirella thought, staring at the tiny double of herself. Penelope had the same squinty, light-filled eyes and slim hands, the bump in her nose, inherited from Ramona. She was browner than Mirella, a little wheat-colored girl who darkened to bronze in the sun. Ralph was the reason she was so dark, the reason her cheeks rounded when she smiled.

She had nowhere that justified her wearing such a dress, and so she gave it away. They went to Sheckley’s for their wedding anniversary every year, and they hadn’t so much as cut a cake for Penelope since her fifth birthday. Ralph never had the time.

Sometimes it irritated her, the way Penelope saw nothing: how selfish her father was, how much she needed to be left alone. The girl sulked about, carrying a stack of her latest drawings, waiting to be noticed, or marching into the bedroom and interrupting Mirella when she wanted to rest. But other times, the girl looked at her with a shine on her face, the way she sometimes looked at her father, and Mirella wanted to gather her into her arms and squeeze her, to breathe her in. She tapped Penelope on the forehead. “All right, hija,” she said. “For you, it’s blue.”

“I’ve always got time for my Penny.” Ralph winked and pinched his daughter’s cheek. Penelope blushed reverently. Mirella rolled her eyes and squeezed her daughter’s shoulder. “Aren’t you hungry, Penélope? Why don’t you go fix yourself a plate? I made pastelitos.” “I want to stay here with you all.”

He was so content Mirella couldn’t bear to look at him. She turned away. She tuned out the men and Miss Beckett, let their voices fade into the cacophony of hard English sounds storming around the room. She watched Penelope. All the food Mirella had cooked that morning was cold on the table.

I’ve seen people walk in that shop and leave different, even if they only had enough for one record, even if they didn’t even have enough to buy any records. It’s enough to just walk through the aisles. To see what’s there, to see what our people created. I’ve seen young people go into that store and they can’t even believe how much good music was made here in Brooklyn, here, by their own people. They walk into Ralph’s store and they see that black people can do things. They can create.”

He found Mirella’s hand and squeezed it. She wanted to wrench her hand away from his, but she let him hold her hand, swallowing her fingers into his palm. He wanted to share the moment with her, she knew, wanted to say with his hand over her hand, This is our life. Mirella waited for the applause to die down, for their guests to turn back to each other and their drinks and the music, the Mingus still playing, too many horns bleating and competing. When they did, she squeezed Ralph’s hand so he would release her.

Mirella shook her head because she couldn’t give Penelope that same assurance. She did not have a good life. She did not want such smallness and emptiness for her daughter. “Drawing isn’t a job. Penelope can be anything she wants to be. A lawyer, a doctor, an entrepreneur—” Mirella fumbled over the word. “If I had been born here, I would have been something, too.”

She’s prob feeling alone , displaced or unwanted. Her own husband doesn’t even like her food

then place her hand on Penelope’s cheek and stoop down to whisper something in the girl’s ear that made her shine all over. Penelope never looked at Mirella with that kind of pleasure. Even though her daughter was gone, Mrs. Jones still had that instinct about her. Mirella hadn’t felt any maternal aptitude in years—that ability to soothe and protect.

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...

She was spending more and more time in this bed, staring at things, letting her mind empty out until she couldn’t remember where she was. She wasn’t on Halsey, in Brooklyn, or in this country at all. She wasn’t back in Aguas Frescas with Ramona either. She wasn’t anywhere.

He didn’t talk much about his life in Harlem, but Mirella knew Ralph’s childhood had been as mean and lonesome as hers. They both knew what it was to go from no one to one another. Together, she thought, they had a chance to build something of their own: a business, a family, a life.

I’d have been better off trying to make her happy.” “You can’t make anyone else happy, Pop.” Ralph stood tall and still, squinted at Penelope, as if he were suddenly sober. “Of course you can. Please tell me I at least taught you that.” He waited for her answer, as if any moment she might come to her senses and say, Yes, yes, that’s what you taught me.

“My professor called it overdetermined. She said it was cold. Too precise. ‘Where’s the feeling? Where’s the feeling?’ she said. It’s as if she wanted me to confess I’d survived a car crash, and then paint that. Maybe slash open an old scar, and smear some real blood on there. She told me the same thing over and over again, but I could never please her.” 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?

“It must come from your mother,” he said. “Daughters get either their courage or their fear from their mothers.”

“I never believed any of that stuff—the primal bond, mothers and daughters. It sounds like a convenient excuse, a way for a mother to always defend herself—But I gave you life. As if that matters. As if I care.”

They didn’t shut the door and they weren’t quiet, as if the whole house was theirs.

Why did women have children they would someday hate?

The students had been distracted all day, and it seemed to be proof of her incompetence. She had been meticulous over the years about sticking only to what she had mastered—drinks, sex, runs, object studies—so that she wouldn’t have to face her own inadequacy. But her students had managed to make those dreaded feelings return. She had failed. She was nothing.

“Penelope, these last two nights—” And suddenly Penelope felt edgeless because she knew what would follow. He was going to erase her with his words. She cut him off.

What more did she have to lose? What else could be taken away? Nothing, she reminded herself. Nothing. It was only a few lines. Hija— No, she would not break. She braced herself and started again. Hija— I am here. I have another life. I bought a house. I am not the same. Come see me. Write to me. Call me. Knock on my door. I am ready now for you. We could try again. —Mami

Every summer, Penelope behaved as if it were her first and last time in Aguas Frescas, as if she had to ingest the mountains and the sunlight right away, or it would all vanish.

Every year he mocked Mirella, kindly, for how much of a newyorkina she had become.

“En Nueva York no se ve ni una montaña,” Penelope called above the racket of the truck. Her accent was flawless, the cadences perfectly Dominican. Mirella was impressed by how well Penelope had learned to imitate the lurching up-and-down lilt of her own speech. She could be mistaken for a girl born on this mountain.

She was thirteen and acting as if she were helpless. Maybe it was Penelope’s way of showing she was still a good and obedient daughter. Maybe she wanted to have something to say, just so that the two of them were talking. Either way, it irritated Mirella how the girl suddenly needed her, now that they had left Ralph and Brooklyn.

it may not have all been perfect, but it was theirs, this home, and this life.

Mirella was the one who had grieved for Eleazar and their old life; Ramona was happier as a widow, young and untethered, with a house of her own.

They had stopped eating meals together in New York, and Mirella wondered how they would learn to be together here, over the next two months in this house. Penelope hadn’t grown any quieter in the past year, but she seemed to love her solitude now, rather than fight against it. She still asked for permission to go to school dances and art shows, but when Mirella forbade her, she hardly flinched, and returned, unperturbed, to her room to draw. She didn’t come into Mirella’s bedroom anymore to say good night, which must have been normal for a girl of thirteen, but she didn’t hug her anymore either, didn’t rise onto her tiptoes to kiss the air next to her cheek.

“Her grades are nothing special,” Mirella said. “She’s lucky she got into this middle school—there was a lottery. She needs to work harder if she wants to go to a good college one day. They won’t care if she has As in art.” “Maybe that’s all she needs. Maybe she’ll be an artist one day.”

“You shouldn’t encourage her,” Mirella said. “Filling her head with tonterías. I’m the one who has to make sure she is prepared for life.” “Being an artist doesn’t seem to be the problem in Penelope’s life.” “Y eso?” Mirella leaned across the table and pointed her finger in Ramona’s face. “What are you trying to say?” “Nothing, except I know how you all live over there. Without neighbors, without friends. At least, Penelope has something she loves.” “It’s not the campo, Ma. You can’t leave your door open at night and yell at anyone who passes, ‘Oigan! Que vengan para ’ca. Hice un sancocho y me quedó bien rico!’” Ramona ignored Mirella’s parody of her.

“Penelope’s my granddaughter. If she wants to draw, I want to see her drawings. If she decides to be a fisherman, I want to see her fish.” “Don’t try to teach me how to raise a child. I raised myself, didn’t I?” “I was young. I didn’t know how to be a mother. We lived in the same house, and I thought that was the same thing as raising you. Now, I’m old, and I see things.” “I was thinking of Penélope before she was even born. I left this little campo because I knew I’d never raise a child here.” “I thought you left because you were ashamed to be a campesina like me.” Mirella watched her mother pick up a grain of rice from the edge of her plate and lick her finger. “It doesn’t matter,” Ramona said. “We all make choices to chase our own happiness. You made yours.” “And I am happy.” “Good.” Mirella looked around the little shack, its mint green walls. “But listen to me—you better make things right with that girl. She won’t keep waiting for you.”

She mourned that he’d stayed behind, although she’d never fantasized about him coming to New York with her. This is what it meant to be Dominican—to be bound for life one moment, and the next, left for dead on the road.

“Your mother has hot feet. She can’t stay in one place for too long.”

“Ni pensaste en mi, Ma,” she said. “Ni pensaste en mi. If I hadn’t come looking for you, you would have left me there alone.”

And if she moved, where would she go? If she left again, she might only find herself back in a few years, Ralph even worse off than he was now. Besides, where would she go? Here, she had at least her father, a job. There was nothing and no one else to follow. The thought uncorked a sadness in her, and she rose to leave.

people have all kinds of romantic attachments to where they grew up, but that’s life in this city. You lose everything you love here.”

she felt an unexpected pity for the woman. They were just alike, pining for Ralph’s affections, hunting for family.

“Least I could do.” “You never do the least, young lady. I see that about you now. I never understood why you left—and why you stayed away even after your father was alone, and, you know, disabled. I used to say to him, Why hasn’t she come back! And your father, he’d say, Penny has to find her own way. And I had my doubts about you, Penelope—the kind of woman you’d become, whether you could see how lucky you were to have a father like Ralph.”

He wasn’t any better than when she had arrived in the fall, and it was plain that her life wasn’t any better either—she’d wasted months looking after the Harpers and wanting their life. When the dishes were clean, she decided to go home. She went back into the living room, and Ralph was shaking the tambourine.

Ralph’s grief had a density and a taste; like a gas, it could fill a room. Penelope hoped that every time her father looked at the picture, it would open a window and let in some light.

“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.” Things were better before you fell down the stairs. Things were better before you drank rum like water.

“I don’t know that woman from your story, Pop. My mother wasn’t some big-bellied saint. My mother never even wanted me.”

She had nothing to show for her daughter, and her daughter nothing to show for herself. Penelope was stuck, and Mirella had known it for a long time—apparently, so did Mrs. Spillers.

Mirella wanted to travel. She could start in Latin America, visit cities where she spoke the language. Sit in cafés, drink wine, be anonymous. See things. She had considered Europe, too, maybe Canada, or Florida, there were beaches in this country, too. She would go anywhere just to let in a bit more life. Her entire world had been Aguas Frescas and then Halsey Street. It was too grim to think about—but she had her savings, and now she had her time. All she had to do was work on Ralph, manage to lure him away from the store so that he could go with her. And she had to fix Penelope, too, before she went away.

She had never been attached to Ramona, and she wouldn’t miss her. She felt sad not that she had lost something but rather that her mother had—Ramona had loved her life, her pipe and her blue casita and her mountain. Mirella was sorry the old woman wouldn’t live any more of the days she had loved so much. She was sorry for Penelope, too, afraid she would be unable to stop crying, the way Mirella had been after her father died. 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.

“Nobody took care of me! Who are you to talk! I was more of a woman at ten years old than you’ll ever be! You’ve never had to take care of another person. Your father gives you everything. You can’t even take care of yourself! You’re a spoiled, sad little girl,” Mirella said. “Imprudente. Comparona. Consentida! You can’t see how much you have, how much you’ve thrown away. Is this what artists do? Live in their parents’ house? Make eight dollars an hour? Is this what you went to art school for? I made more money cleaning!”

“Oh, please, Mami,” Penelope said. “You and I both know you didn’t pay ni un centavo for this house.” “Was I supposed to pay? What else am I supposed to give? You took my whole life.” “I didn’t take anything from you.” “Everything you have you took from me.” “Pop gave me things. Pop and Abuela Ramona.” Mirella smacked the stove with her open hand, and the pot of boiling water shifted on the burner. “I gave birth to you. I fed you. I washed your clothes. I took you to the Dominican Republic to see your grandmother. What did ‘Pop’ do, eh? Play you a few records and call you ‘Penny’? Por favor, Penélope, that’s not love. That’s your father doing his best not to feel like an orphan anymore. No seas tan boba.” “How many names are you going to call me tonight, Ma?” “You think your father loves you more than I do? He just wants to keep you here! That’s not love!”

Mirella felt so exposed and misunderstood that she wanted to yell at Penelope again, but she watched her pile socks into the suitcase and then zip it shut. These might be her final moments with her daughter. Like her, Penelope knew how to hold a grudge.

“Make sure they keep their Spanish. It’s the sort of thing you lose in that country.” Emanuel laughed. “Qué no se pierde para allá?”