At Southport, Cesar was allowed only three hours of exercise a week. For this, he would be led, shackled, to a cage in a cube of walled-in yard, where he could do sit-ups, push-ups, squat thrusts, and jumping jacks. Showers were timed and also limited to three a week. Like Jessica, Cesar was obsessive about cleanliness and he found this especially difficult. He had no books. He had no photographs to look at. Radios were forbidden. He reflected upon his life. It surprised him that he didn’t miss the girls and parties as much as being able to open the door of a refrigerator, or play peekaboo with Mercedes on the floor. He said, “The street is like a scapegoat. You get in a fight with your mother and you go out and you get blasted and you have a beef with someone on the street—but two minutes later you don’t even remember what’s the beef about.” He did, however, remember a time he and Rocco broke into an apartment to steal drugs and discovered the dealer, and his baby son, at home. The dealer cried, “Hold up, not my kid!” and Cesar took the boy and moved him. Even though they only beat the guy and tied him up, Cesar started thinking about how horrible it must have been for the boy to see his father so scared.
The isolation of the box made him feel, at turns, morose and hyperactive. He’d started suffering anxiety attacks. In his letter to Coco, he’d sounded desperate. “I’m in a real state of depression,” he’d written. Coco fretted because Cesar—for all he’d been through—had never expressed himself in this way in letters before.
The bus dispatcher greeted the passengers warmly. “Welcome, everybody,” he said. “There are some rules for you to follow. We don’t allow drugs on the bus. Please don’t be getting drunk. Be considerate to others, have a good visit tomorrow. Take the same seat when you come out of the facility, and come back next week and bring a friend.”
Coco gave Mercedes some candy and spread out Mercedes’s old black shearling along the backseat to make a bed. She held Nautica until she dozed off, then gently placed her beside Mercedes, who had quickly fallen asleep. Veteran visitors had equipped themselves with rolls of quarters and crisp dollars for the vending machines, clear plastic bags for locker keys and change. Some brought along pretty outfits whose perfection they preserved in dry-cleaning bags. The cost of the trip used up most of Coco’s money. Lourdes’s boyfriend, Domingo, had given Coco $20 to deposit in Cesar’s commissary, and Coco had budgeted an additional $20 for the vending machines, so Cesar and the girls could eat. She opened a sandwich she’d made for the ride and offered half to the woman seated next to her.
The woman declined, but offered Coco some of her springwater. As Coco sipped, the woman said, “This is such a good bus, quiet, the people nice, you just don’t know.” She recounted less savory trips—loud music, dueling girlfriends, wailing children, drunks. She showed Coco a picture of her son. The boy had just received a scholarship to private school from a local youth group.
“God bless him, he’s beautiful,” Coco murmured. She appreciated anybody’s good news. Mercedes curled close to her baby sister, and Coco covered them both with the coat she’d borrowed from Foxy. The bright city disappeared and the bus drove on in the companionable dark. Some of the riders spaced out, their Walkmans singing in their ears. The women chattered; two girls played clapping games. An old woman made her way slowly down the aisle, balancing on her cane. Her lopsided belly dragged beneath drooping breasts, but her spirits were high. “I had me a stroke right there at Rikers, right there in the visiting room,” she said. The man she’d been visiting had become her husband. Tomorrow, she bragged, he’d sign their first joint tax forms.
The night stretched on. Conversation quieted. Legs and arms dusted the aisle floor, children coughed, braids came undone. Coco looked out the window. She couldn’t imagine moving upstate, as Milagros planned to do, living out in the country, away from her family. The old bus creaked and rolled.
Nautica woke first; she spit up and cried at dawn. Coco covered her hairy head with a cotton cap. “You going to see your daddy. I’m getting butterflies just thinking about seeing your daddy,” Coco said. She raised Nautica up each time the bus bounced from a bump and smiled.
About a half hour from the prison, the bus pulled into a truck stop. The women gathered themselves and their dry cleaning and crowded into the cramped bathroom of the restaurant. There they tucked and scrutinized and tightened, sharing compliments and lipstick and complaints in the toasty bathroom air. They didn’t want to dress in the bathroom at the prison, where they would lose precious minutes of their visits.
“I ain’t never been to see my husband in nothing but a dress,” said a young woman in a lime green sheath that showed her figure. An older woman gruffly forked her permed hair.
“Albany gave you the date?” one woman asked another. She was referring to the official approval to marry an inmate; the headquarters of the Department of Corrections was in Albany.
“My friend is going to make my wedding dress. I already have it all designed,” answered the bride-to-be.
Coco leaned against the wall and listened and waited for the one bathroom stall to clear; she felt too self-conscious to undress in front of the others. She snuck a look in the mirror: to save money, she’d trimmed her own bangs. She’d slicked them down with Vaseline, which emphasized the jaggedness. A fresh spray of red spots flecked her cheeks.
“Here, I’ll hold her,” a lady offered, reaching for Nautica. Coco slipped into the stall and stepped into a conservative outfit Elaine had loaned her—a beige turtleneck and matching skirt, topped by an embroidered vest. She wore sheer stockings beneath the slitted skirt, so she could show Cesar her tattoo. Her own style was more sporty, but she wanted Cesar to see that she had matured.
In the prison processing area, Mercedes sat beside Coco, legs swinging, humming to herself. “You been here before?” a woman asked, sounding concerned. Her eye makeup was a rainbow. The woman positioned herself over Mercedes’s head and mouthed, so Mercedes couldn’t hear, “Expect bars—you can only touch his hands.” Coco’s eyes filled with tears.
All the visitors were allowed to the next stage of processing except Coco. Coco waited. Nautica dozed. Mercedes doodled. Coco showed her how to draw ♥ U. “Your Títi Jessica taught me that,” Coco said.
After fifteen minutes, Coco hesitantly approached the guard at the desk. She hadn’t filled out the forms correctly, and he hadn’t bothered to tell her. Already, she’d lost an hour. Mercedes rested her nose on the counter. “What’s in your lunch box?” she asked the guard as Coco struggled to hold Nautica and to write at the same time.
The guard pointed to a kitchenette. “That’s where I heat up my food,” he said. A woman emerged from the ladies’ room, transformed. The guard bent forward and whispered, “Who is the painted lady?”
“What’s in your lunch box? Tell me!” Mercedes said.
“You sure talk a lot. I bet you are a little flirt.”
The guard stamped Coco’s hand with invisible ink, then stamped Mercedes’s, and finally directed them to a door.
The doors led out to a short walkway that led into another building, where Coco and her daughters waited twelve minutes for two guards to finish a conversation, after which one yelled at Coco for setting off the metal detector because she’d forgotten to remove her watch. When she cleared the detector, they were allowed into the visiting room. Carrying Nautica, Coco slowly wound her way to her seat assignment at the end of the S-shaped rows. Mercedes paraded through, initially oblivious to the shackled men behind the wire mesh.
She caused a little stir; her blond curls bounced as she searched eagerly for her father. Coco slid onto a chair, which was bound to three others by chains. She pretended to be absorbed by Nautica, who wobbled on her thighs. Cesar stood in the interior cage, waiting for a guard to spring the gate. At last, Mercedes spotted him. He shuffled toward them, barely able to move. He was shackled with leg irons, and in handcuffs, both of which were attached to a chain around his waist. Mercedes looked terrified. “Come out! Over here,” she said desperately.
“I can’t,” Cesar mumbled.
“Teasing ain’t nice, come out!” Mercedes said.
“Can’t you see I’m chained up? I can’t move, Mercy,” he said, lifting his wrists slightly.
“Take them off. Take them off,” she demanded. “Take them off!”
“I can’t.”
“Play patty-cake!”
“Mercedes,” Coco chided.
“I can’t take them off, Mercedes,” Cesar said.
Mercedes determinedly outlined the invisible ink the guard had stamped on her hand. Soon her gesture became vague. “Daddy, you have money at your house?” she asked quietly.
“No, Mercedes,” he said sadly.
Then Mercedes brightened. It was as though she’d grasped that her father couldn’t tolerate the view of himself that her panic reflected. “We are going to get bunk beds and Nikki is going to be on the bottom, and I am going to be on the top!” she chattered. “You can come over and sleep with me on the top, and we can take a bubble bath.”
Cesar squinted, as though he had suddenly recognized her voice from far away.
“Wanna hear a song?” Mercedes asked. Then she sang. Her father was smitten by her performance until she said, “That’s Nikki’s daddy’s song,” puncturing the moment. He glanced over his shoulder stonily. “Look at Mommy’s face,” Mercedes urged. “Mommy been messing with her face.”
Cesar hadn’t teased Coco or complimented her dressy outfit. He’d said nothing about the tattoo, or the special Weeboks Nautica wore. When he had been in Harlem Valley and Mercedes had worn the cheaper, no-name-brand sneakers called skippies, he’d removed them and tossed them across the visiting room. Since then, Coco had made sure Mercedes wore name-brand sneakers for visits, but it didn’t seem to matter—all because of her face. “I’m sick of it; if that’s the way you want it, fine,” Cesar said to Coco. For the next three hours, they did not speak.
Coco busied herself with Nautica. Nautica grabbed on to the mesh cage, which was covered in lipstick. Mercedes explored the visiting room and collected compliments.
“Oh, that girl, she yours?” Cesar’s neighbor asked, watching Mercedes pass.
“That’s her,” said Cesar.
“She look like Shirley Temple.”
“These are my two girls. I got two other kids with other wives, four kids altogether. I’m nineteen. I got started young, right?”
Again, Mercedes asked Cesar, “Daddy, you wanna hear a song?” She performed “Kind Kind Mother” and got stuck on a verse. She kept repeating the start of the verse until she reached her aborted end, then began from the beginning again. “I had a kind kind mother . . .” Cesar teased her, “What about your father, too?”
Around noon, Cesar finally spoke to Coco: “Get me something to eat.” She bought three packages of chicken wings from the vending machine and waited beside the microwave. She tore open the packets of sauce and silently passed them beneath the slot. Cesar hunched over the styrofoam tray. He pushed the wings into his mouth. The handcuffs dug into his wrists.
After he’d finished, Coco cleared the trays. Cesar carefully wiped his hands. He looked to the side and reached through the slot and held what he could of Coco. Touch did what only touch could do.
Coco’s words poured out. She told him about a new girl at Thorpe who knew all about the trailer visits. The girl had had a prison wedding. She had told Coco about all the right things to bring—satin sheets, and cream and strawberries. Coco had been learning new things, too, from watching pornography.
Cesar watched Coco soberly. He waited for her to finish, then said tenderly, “Sex ain’t everything.” The box had forced him to do some thinking. If they were going to marry, they needed to communicate. Coco bit her lip. His hope came across as a reprimand. “I want it to be you love me and I love you. Where happiness comes in is when I’m making you happy and you do things to make me happy,” Cesar said.
Meanwhile, Mercedes stared at the couple beside them, a young, skinny black man with a full set of gold teeth, and a large, middle-aged white woman in a modest silk dress. He was angry; she looked tired. He beckoned her closer, and she pressed her substantial bosom against the mesh. She bowed her head to listen. He cursed. Then, methodically, he smashed his handcuffed hands into her chest. He continued speaking in low tones as he punched her, and she held her body taut to receive him. Only her head jerked back. Coco furtively watched.
“They been having trailers for years,” Cesar said, without irony.
A guard climbed to the top of what looked like a lifeguard chair, a signal to Cesar that they had less than an hour of visiting left.
“I’m starting to think about going back to that cell, and it’s got me real depressed,” Cesar said. Besides letters, chess was the only activity that helped him pass the time in solitary. He’d made a chessboard out of paper, and his opponent shouted out his plays from down the hall. The pending good-bye wedged between them. “You better come next week or I’ll punch you in the face, you got my hopes up,” he said miserably.
By the end of the hour, the couple beside them had reconciled. The young man pressed one ear to the counter, penitent, as the woman braided his hair. The guard called time. Chairs scraped the linoleum. The men tried to stretch. Children’s hands clasped the grating like small claws. One mother yelled to her husband, who was talking to the other men, “Look at your boy! Look at your boy!” The man to whom she called hopped, as if shaking off the visit. She shoved her son closer to the cage her man was in. “Say good-bye to your daddy. Look at your boy! Look at your boy!” She pressed the boy against what divided them. “Get your father! Get your father!” The boy’s thin fingers gripped the wire. His father swatted a good-bye and turned back to the protection of his friends.
“Mom, he said good-bye! Dad said bye!” the boy exclaimed.
Coco noticed Cesar eyeing a teenage girl who’d joined the line. Nautica slept, heavy in Coco’s arms.
Coco was relieved to breathe the fresh, cold air outside. She paused, watching Mercedes energetically climb the stairs into the bus. The idea of staying with Cesar and the reality of it were different; he was more demanding in person than he was in her fantasies. She couldn’t possibly afford to visit again any time soon—the girls’ birthdays were coming. Yet she couldn’t tell him no. Coco was glad to be heading home, even though home was Thorpe.
Shortly afterward, Cesar wrote and told her to limit the girls’ visits to Southport; he didn’t want them to see him caged in any more than necessary.
Coco’s trips to her mother’s and Lourdes’s were searching expeditions—she needed guidance, but Foxy and Lourdes were in no position to help; similar conflicts ruled their own lives. Still, Coco kept returning to the same places for answers again and again. Mercedes, who was almost four, was more direct; sometimes it was as though she voiced her mother’s unspoken worries and doubts.
One day early that winter, Coco took the girls by Lourdes’s. Lourdes was still denying that Domingo had anything to do with why her arm was in a cast. Lourdes was holding court in bed, her long hair loose, a blanket wrapped around her waist like the base of a Christmas tree. Two women sat on the bed beside her, while another scrubbed a blackened pot. Domingo sat at a half-open table, chopping cilantro. He placed fistfuls of the cut greens beside an impressive pile of garlic. A man stood beside him, sipping a beer. When Coco entered, all conversation stopped.
Lourdes beckoned her over. The ladies left. With her good arm, Lourdes whisked Nautica up. She held the whole of Nautica’s head in her palm, infant face to Grandma. “Look at this fucking baby!” she shouted gleefully. “Mercy, give me her bottle.” Mercedes removed the bottle from the side pocket of the brand-new baby bag and watched her grandmother nestle Nautica on her lap.
“Mami, braid my hair?” Lourdes asked Coco. Coco inched around the bed and began to separate Lourdes’s hair into small clumps with her fingernails.
Mercedes stroked her grandmother’s cast. “Who did that?”
“A boy,” Lourdes said mischievously.
“Domingo did that,” stated Mercedes.
“No, Mercy,” said Lourdes, glancing at Domingo significantly. Only his eyes and eyebrows were visible through the bookshelf that divided the studio into a bedroom and kitchen. “Domingo did not do this,” said Lourdes with emphasis. “He wouldn’t do this to Abuela. Two morenos did this to me.”
Domingo peeked around the shelving. “Do you like me?” he asked Mercedes playfully.
“He didn’t do this to me,” Lourdes repeated, trying to keep her audience. Mercedes appealed to her mother, but Coco concentrated on Lourdes’s braid. Domingo was making a commotion rummaging in his pocket like a magician looking for his rabbit. Then he pulled out a dollar. Mercedes scrambled to the end of the bed to grab it. He pulled it away and laughed.
“What do you say, Mercedes?” Coco prompted.
“Thank you,” Mercedes said. Domingo passed her the money. But Lourdes, to goad her boyfriend, returned to Mercedes’s silenced questions about her injury at every opportunity: when Coco told her about the wedding rings she’d bought to marry Cesar, Lourdes said, “Abuela wouldn’t lie to you, Mercy”; when Coco told her the latest news of Cesar, “Domingo wouldn’t do this to Abuela,” Lourdes replied. Finally, Coco brushed the tail of Lourdes’s long braid and then changed Nautica’s diaper for the road.
Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bro Page 25