Halsey Street Page 5

  “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.

  While he laughed, his eyes swooped over Penelope, from her fluffy ankle socks and lime green sneakers to the black nylon shorts that covered just a third of her thighs. She knew exactly how she must look—her skin orange under the warm overhead lighting, her long legs, dense and bare. Her muscles seemed carved with a blade, her calves smooth, her flesh sharp and lifted away from the bone at her joints. From what she remembered of Samantha, the landlady was more slender and delicate. Penelope wondered what Marcus preferred.

  “Daddy, we were playing a game. You interrupted us.” Grace yanked her father’s shirt hem to get his attention.

  “Sorry about that, sweetheart.” Marcus kissed the top of her head. “I was just coming up to work.” He pointed to a closed door behind Penelope. It must have been his study.

  Penelope didn’t know any lawyers personally, but once in a while, a group of attorneys would tumble into the bar in Squirrel Hill, all loosened ties and Jack-and-gingers. They would complain about their bosses and their salaries, how low their pay would be if it were calculated by the hour. They were all first-year lawyers at big firms; Penelope had no idea what it was like to be an attorney when you were older, a father, living in Bed-Stuy.

  “Preparing for trial?” she asked.

  “Not today.”

  Penelope nodded and uncrossed her arms to show she was interested. He didn’t go on, so she searched for something more to say to keep him in the hall. She asked if he ever thought of moving back to California.

  “Daddy, I don’t want to move again.” Grace broke into the conversation they were constructing over her head.

  Penelope squatted on her knees until she was eye level with the child.

  “I wouldn’t want you to move either. We just met.”

  “I’m glad you’re not a ghost,” Grace said.

  “Ghosts don’t sweat,” Penelope said and gestured at her arms: hard, actual, and still slick from the run. She picked up her towel from where she had draped it over the banister. “I should leave you two and finally take that shower. I’m disgusting.”

  “You’re fine,” Marcus said. He smiled at her.

  Penelope waved good-bye to Grace and slipped into the bathroom, closing the door behind her. Grace and Marcus talked on the other side of the door, but Penelope couldn’t make out their words. She saw in the mirror that her curls were smashed to one side of her head. She sighed and ran her fingers through the strands, pulling the curls into their rightful halo shape around her head. She peeled off her running shorts and T-shirt and took a good long look at herself. She was pleased at her body and that Marcus had seen her in her ratty little running clothes.

  It took a while for the water to heat up, and Penelope let the bathroom fill with steam. Grace was back downstairs, and Marcus must have already settled into his study. She imagined him there now, although she had never seen the room. She could see him hunched over a desk, beginning to type, maybe licking his finger before sifting through the pages of a big law reference book, bound in leather. She saw the nascent lines in his forehead, the slender swimmer’s body, his waves and waves of hair. She soaped her body slowly, rinsed with hot water, then cold, then hot again, kneading her muscles. She showered for a long time before enveloping herself in the towel and creeping onto the fourth floor and then up to the attic. She locked her door behind her and wrapped the towel around her head to dry her curls. The house was quiet. Maybe the Harpers were having dinner. She wondered if Samantha cooked for them, or Marcus, or if they made meals together, or ordered in. She had no idea what kind of family they were. All she knew was that the girl seemed lonely, although her father obviously loved her. His love seemed to revolve around her instead of the other way around.

  Penelope lay down on her bed and looked up at the canopy of photographs from Pittsburgh: the railroad tracks at Station Square, the lit-up exterior of her bar in Squirrel Hill, the quaint shops along Walnut Street, the truss bridge on Herrs Island where she had gone running past new townhouses that had been built over sawmills and stockyards. She didn’t have photographs of any of the other bartenders or the people who worked in the kitchen. None of the men she knew through work and the other bars. She hadn’t left anyone behind.

  Ralph was expecting her, she knew. He would want to hear about the interview at the school, and order Chinese food from the Emerald, maybe listen to records until it was time for Penelope to walk back to the attic. She had spent every night since her return back on Halsey Street, and she sensed now, for the first time, how much she didn’t want to see her father. She would rather stay here, at least for a while, and loom above the Harpers. She could consider their routines, their happiness.

  Greene Avenue was dark, and Penelope drifted off without meaning to. The first September drafts blew in through the open window, and she felt the warm air on her skin. She dreamed of black-sand beaches and her mother, sitting on a stone in a sea. The water was a turbulent green, but her mother remained motionless, her back to the shore. Her hair streamed behind her, a flame rippling in the wind.

  4

  LA COPA ROTA

  Mirella could not rest. It was too quiet in the residence, too far from the road. She heard only the humming of the generator on the first floor of the house, the crickets tuning up their legs. Her lover breathed hard beside her, his hands on the back of his head as he slept facedown. He slept this way every night, and every night Mirella thought he looked ridiculous. Was he under arrest? Was he blocking out the sound of nothing? Of their seclusion here in the residence, where there was no one but other expats, and the watching-man at the gate?

  She slid from the bed; Marcello didn’t stir. They had been to the beach that day, running through the surf as if they were half their age. They drank limoncello from the porcelain cups Mirella used for coffee, and then stretched out on their stomachs to eat cold pasta. They had made the pasta together that morning, Mirella picking the oregano and basil from her garden in short shorts and her bathing suit top, Marcello complaining in her kitchen that Dominican beef was too tough, and the ragù would never taste the way it was meant to.

  He was badly sunburned now, his skin bright red even in the dark. Tomorrow it would be peeling off, and Mirella would cut a spear of aloe from the yard and rub it over his back. They had been lovers for months, and this was their routine: trips to the beach, quiet dinners with cold wine, sex, sunburns, and sleeping in Mirella’s bed. Marcello’s house was one of the seven in the gated residence, but Mirella refused to sleep in someone else’s house now that she finally had one of her own. Even the bed was hers, a four-post frame made of pure caoba, ordered from the best mueblería in the capital.

  When she first returned to DR a year ago, Mirella rotated through the apartments of her old schoolmates still living in El Cibao. They had grown up to be teachers and doctors, a few architects, and one wife of a mayor. They seemed to take her in mostly out of curiosity, to discover what sort of life she had lived all those years in New York. They invited her to dinners and encouraged her to look for an apartment there in Santiago, but Mirella declined. She preferred to eat alone, at small restaurants with outdoor tables, and she was sure she didn’t want to live in the city. 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.

  Mirella walked down the stairs, the tiles cold under her feet. The house was just two floors, but its high ceilings made it seem palatial to Mirella. There were skylights in the foyer, living room, and master bedroom. The eastern wall on the ground floor was all glass. On nights alone
, Mirella could watch the moon rise over her garden; during the months that were winter in New York, she watched her skylights smear with rain.

  She reached the living room and paused to run her hand over the armoire to check for dust. There was none. She had collected her furniture slowly over the months, just a few big pieces handmade from wood, and the couch. 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.

  The wall above the armoire was still blank, but it wouldn’t be for long. After Mirella and Marcello had returned from the beach that afternoon, a package had arrived. Three paintings packed in a box with foam peanuts and Bubble Wrap. She had chosen the pictures and their frames out of a catalogue. There were two paintings of flowers, tied with ribbon and arranged in vases, on tables in windowless, dark rooms. The last painting was of fruit, the kind Mirella never ate anymore—apples and pears and grapes—also in a bowl in a room with hardly any light. She hadn’t known which pictures were the best ones, but these had seemed the most foolproof. They would look fine, maybe even elegant, in their bronze frames. They were the final touches to the house, the last things Mirella needed for the place to be complete. Everything else that she wanted for the house, she already had.

  Mirella wandered into the kitchen and poured herself a glass of mabi. She didn’t like the fizzy drink, but she had cases of it stored in the pantry. She sat at the counter, underneath her rack of copper pots and pans. 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 had spent so many years in the United States cooking for other people that when she found herself back in DR, forty-seven, and cooking for just one, she wasn’t sure what she liked to make just for herself. She had discovered she liked frying fish and baking bread, assembling salads, and not much else. Dominican food took too long to make, and she only knew how to cook in bulk, a stew big enough to last for days. If Marcello wasn’t there, she just had wine and good dark chocolate from the German bakery down the road. 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.

  Marcello assumed she had grown up in the city like the schoolmates she had mentioned who owned apartments on La Calle del Sol in Santiago. He didn’t question why she had chosen to live in the residence instead, where all the other owners were European expats: a few Germans, an Englishman, and another Italian like himself. They had all come to DR for the same reason. Here, they could live like the people they had envied in their own countries. A few of them were retired. Most went home for a few months every year to work, but they always came back. No matter how expensive gasoline or rice became, or how long the electricity was out, in this country, their pounds and euros and dollars stretched far. They had pools and Jeeps, servants, time.

  Mirella was the only resident in the estate without a staff. She worked all day in the garden, checked the fuses in the generator, and climbed onto the roof if one of the skylights was leaking. “Why don’t you hire someone to clean for you?” Marcello often asked her. Her house was the largest in the residence.

  Mirella hadn’t told him she spent years cleaning houses in New York: stately brick townhouses, Park Avenue apartments with butter-colored carpets, lower Manhattan lofts with what felt like miles of windows. Marcello knew only that Mirella had been in a bad marriage in New York, and when they finally gave up their business, she left. She told him she knew how to handle the house herself, and he believed her. He left her alone.

  The Dominican woman who cleaned for Marcello was a slender Santiaguera named Ariane. Mirella invited her for coffee, but she never accepted. They spoke over the gate around Mirella’s house when Ariane passed on her way from Marcello’s to the front gate. Mirella cherished their short conversations, the relief of Ariane’s husky, melodic voice, from Marcello’s flippant Italianate Spanish. Although she had four children, Ariane was not yet thirty; she was Penelope’s age.

  Mirella took a sip of the mabi, already flat, and thought of her daughter. When she was a girl, Penelope would beg Mirella to buy her the brown soda, and although she didn’t approve of sugary drinks, Mirella usually consented. Penelope loved the taste of tree bark and sugar and would be nearly finished with a bottle before Mirella had paid for it.

  Mirella reached into one of the cabinets underneath the counter. She felt the rim of an old, chipped cup, and set it on the counter. Inside the cup were a jeweled butterfly hair clip, the broken pieces of the porcelain cup, and a folded-up card.

  Mirella held the fragments of the cup in her hand like heavy, cool puzzle pieces. She fingered the fake gems on the wings and thorax of the butterfly. She unfolded the postcard and saw the smudges from all the erasing she had done, her handwriting in the faint gray of pencil lead.

  She had bought this postcard on the beach. She went on a walk one morning to explore the town that was now her home. She drank coffee in a Styrofoam cup, cycled through displays of cheap glass jewelry and clay charms, before she found the rack of postcards and thought of writing to her daughter. It was her first time back on the island without Penelope, and she wanted to tell her about the new house.

  Mirella had inscribed the card in Spanish first, then erased everything and wrote to her daughter again in English. She worried Penelope wouldn’t remember her Spanish. But in English, Mirella was formal and uneasy. There were gaps in her meaning.

  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.”

  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.

  Mirella raised the postcard to her face and tried to discern the last words she had written before erasing it all and stowing the card away in the cup. Hija, she had written, then a few lines, and her signature. Mirella had thought, briefly, that if she wrote to her, maybe her daughter would come, maybe things would be better in this big house in the north than they ever were in Brooklyn or in the mountains where they spent summers when Ramona was still alive, and Ralph was too consumed with the store to miss them.

  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 l
augh, 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 to show her daughter. Penelope probably knew she was here—Ralph would have told her.

  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.

  While Ralph was asleep one night, she put on a scarf and gloves and her wool coat, and slipped out of the house on Halsey with her suitcase. She knew she could not say good-bye; if she saw Ralph’s face, she might lose her nerve. It was better if he were a figment, an idea: the life she had wanted to leave. She walked to Bedford Avenue and hailed a cab to the airport. She left behind her misery and her husband, and all the potted plants there had been no way to ship.

  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.

  Mirella flattened the postcard on the counter and flipped it over. The photograph on the front of the card seemed unchanged by the years: a rope hammock hung between two coconut trees, their leaves and trunks silhouetted against an orange sky. The ocean was bronze and shimmering, a slim beam of light cutting across the water to the shore.