Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bro

by LeBlanc, Adrian Nicole

  Coco still felt high from Wishman’s attentions, but she tried to temper her excitement. She felt pretty sure Wishman had other girls on the side. Cesar always had. Nikki’s father, Kodak, too. “All my girls’ fathers is like that. They all be with a lotta girls, and the girls they like is young,” she said.

  As she got older, though, it seemed to Coco that the girls her old boyfriends liked were getting younger. During the recent spate of visits to New York, Wishman and his friends had commented more than once to Coco about how fly Mercedes looked. Ordinarily, Coco relished compliments about her daughters. But these felt different. Mercedes was seven. “Too fly,” Coco said. “The way they say it—‘Coco, yo, that girl is fly, your daughter is fly.’ These are boys I grew up with, I have a history with. It ain’t right.” Even Kodak, during a trip from Baltimore, singled out Mercedes. Coco wanted to say, “Pay attention to your own daughter,” but she didn’t say a word.

  That night in front of Foxy’s building, Coco let the children play outside for hours; before going back upstairs, they even took a walk around the block by Wishman’s building, but they never caught sight of him. A few days later, the car broke down yet again and Coco and her kids took the bus home. They were stuck in Troy for the rest of the summer, where Coco became increasingly irritable.

  Coco knew that her fling with Wishman would have been almost impossible if Mercedes had been with her. If new boys came around to visit Frankie, Mercedes’s body tensed. She seemed to understand that something in the combination of attentive boys and Coco’s sexual interest posed a threat to Coco and Mercedes both. When Coco wanted to be what she called strong, her watchdog daughter made it easier to “do right,” but if Coco wanted to be what she called bad, she resented her daughter’s checks. Coco was honest with her daughters about her relationship with Frankie, but her resolutions changed with her mood; for Mercedes, who took her mother very seriously, Coco’s vacillations were bewildering. Coco would yell at Frankie, “I ain’t having nobody in my house who don’t do for me!” Then she’d yell at Mercedes if Mercedes supported the idea of kicking Frankie out: “I won’t let you tell me who I can have in my house!” Even though Mercedes had told Frankie straight-up that she hated him, Coco believed that Mercedes would still have alerted him to her mother’s indiscretion, if she’d known about it. Mercedes regarded Frankie as family, compared to Wishman.

  Lately, everything Mercedes did seemed to bother Coco: Coco relied on her as a helpmate and confidante, then yelled at Mercedes for acting grown. She chided Mercedes for forgetting to change Pearl’s Pampers or for scolding Nikki, but neither was Mercedes free to be a child. When she tried to be affectionate with her mother, even her hugs seemed to weigh too heavily around Coco’s neck. “You ain’t a baby, Mercedes!” she would threaten, or, “Mercedes, you too big!” Mercedes had always been tall for her age, but her obvious neediness made her seem more cumbersome; her unhappiness demanded attention, which was in short supply. As a child, Mercedes had only pouted at Coco’s inconsistencies, but now she got angry. When she couldn’t get Coco’s attention, she would hit one of her sisters or pick a fight with a neighbor’s child. By late summer, Mercedes was getting into fights almost every day.

  One August afternoon, Coco answered her door to find a police officer staring down at her. She assumed he wanted Frankie. Instead, he asked, “Do you have a daughter by the name of Mercedes?”

  Mercedes was at church. A local church occasionally lured Corliss Park’s children to a youth group with promises of pizza and a ride in a van. Coco wasn’t particularly religious, but she was glad the children had something constructive to do. The pizza also relieved Coco of the worry of one more meal.

  The police officer said Mercedes was potentially guilty of harassment—she’d allegedly called a neighborhood woman fat and threatened to send her cousin after her.

  “Do you know how old my daughter is?” asked Coco. The officer expressed surprise that Mercedes was seven. He suggested Coco have a talk with her, before she ended up in juvenile hall. He said he heard Mercedes’s name a lot.

  Mercedes admitted to harassing the woman. Coco approached the woman, who was new to Corliss Park and white. The woman told Coco she didn’t want problems from a little girl. “Exactly,” Coco agreed, “a little girl. But why you calling the cops? You want my daughter to get arrested? I know you ain’t the type to cause trouble. If you have a problem with my kids, knock on my fucking door.”

  On the street, Coco usually defended Mercedes, so as not to shame her. But at home, she reprimanded her daughter for instigating fights. Sometimes she grounded Mercedes—“Go to your room. You’re not seeing no street,” she’d say—but Coco found it difficult to stick to the punishment. Although she didn’t approve of Mercedes’s combativeness, she understood; she, too, took her frustrations out on her kids.

  One hot sticky evening, Coco’s rage exploded over everyone: Coco chased Mercedes, yelled at Nikki, and warned Nautica, “You’re next!” Smacks punctuated every syllable—“You [smack] been [smack] ask [smack] ing [smack] for [smack] it [smack] all day!” Mercedes screamed, “I want my daddy!” Her sisters watched her blankly. Nikki looked dazed.

  Coco checked her answering machine, cranking the volume to drown the girls’ crying. The first message was from her caseworker, who was trying to process her Section 8 application, so Coco could leave Corliss Park: Coco wanted to move to a place where Frankie wouldn’t have to hide like a fugitive. Frankie’s voice followed: “Yo, Ma, yo, I been calling you all day, yo, but you ain’t there, I’ll see you.” She rewound the tape to hear his voice again, then dragged herself into the kitchen, where the girls had gone in search of food.

  Mercedes scanned the refrigerator. Besides a dozen eggs, it was nearly empty. She held a bottle of sour milk at arm’s length. It had spoiled while they were in the Bronx. Mercedes clipped her nose. “Mommy! It stinks!”

  “Toss it, Mercedes,” Coco said wearily.

  “Mami!” Mercedes said helplessly. Coco snatched it and flung the full container into a corner generally designated for trash. She sent Mercedes to the store for milk. Nikki wanted cereal; Pearl wanted instant potatoes; Mercedes wanted Spam and scrambled eggs; Nautica needed to know the whereabouts of Baby Matthew, her pet rock. Nikki requested the plastic bowl with the straw attached. Coco opened and shut a cabinet, and a Barbie leg caught Nautica’s eye. Mercedes rescued Barbie. Nautica had by then spotted Nikki’s miniature box of Froot Loops. Coco offered cornflakes. Nautica slumped inconsolably to the floor. Nikki tiptoed by, carefully balancing the cereal bowl she’d topped to the rim with milk. Coco propped Pearl against a wall and placed a bowl of instant potatoes between her feet.

  “I want potatoes,” Nautica said. Coco cooked a second batch. She cracked open the last of Mercedes’s eggs. Mercedes changed her order to tuna fish.

  “Eggs and Spam ham, Mercedes!”

  Mercedes flung herself onto the couch.

  “I want Spam ham!” Nautica started.

  “Naughty,” Coco sighed. She wiped the knife on her leg and sliced her a hunk, and gave Pearl another dollop of potatoes, since most of the previous serving now frosted the floor.

  Nikki pointed to the smear. “Mommy, look!”

  “You don’t think I see?” Coco replied.

  “I need a spoon!” Nikki added.

  “Go find one, then!” Coco said.

  Nikki found a dirty spoon. She found Baby Matthew, too. “Nautica, look!” Nikki declared.

  “Gimme that!” Coco said, grabbing the spoon from her daughter to rinse.

  “I don’t need a spoon, Mommy,” Nikki said reassuringly, slurping the milk from her bowl to demonstrate. Nautica dropped the hunk of Spam to pick up Baby Matthew and happily sauntered off.

  Coco scooped up the potatoes and Spam and dumped them in the garbage. She stepped onto the reeking bag to stuff in the overflow and dragged it outside. The girls dropped the dirty dishes in the sink. Coco arranged the comforters on the floor and told the
girls to lie down.

  “I can sleep here?” Mercedes asked, full of hope.

  “What I say, Mercedes?” Coco said. Pearl scooted to the edge of the blanket and rested her cheek on the floor. The linoleum was pleasingly cool. Nautica escorted her rock through the forest of sisters, balancing Baby Matthew precariously above Pearl’s head.

  “Naughty,” Coco warned as she rewound the answering machine. She listened again to Frankie with a grim face, her hand on her hip, and rewound it once more. She searched for the cartoon channel. Nikki snored—her sinus trouble.

  Mercedes propped herself against the couch. As the night wore on, she struggled to stay awake. She would doze and slip to the side, then jerk back up. Coco, gazing glassy-eyed at the familiar cartoon stories, eventually fell asleep. Only then did Mercedes allow herself to drift off.

  By the end of the summer, Coco began to accept that there was nothing for her in the Bronx. She couldn’t stop her mother from running around; Wishman was committed to his girl; her own girls had to return to school. Coco resolved to tackle her small-city life. She appreciated Frankie more than she had in a while. “Frankie isn’t the best man in the world. He gives me headaches, but he’s been there for me. He helps me with the girls,” she said. He promised to pay for their school supplies.

  In the meantime, national changes in welfare policy had finally caught up with her, and Coco either had to return to school or go to work. Pearl’s medical disabilities had bought her a little time, but now she had to report to a “transition agency.” Coco supported the welfare-to-work policy, but she was afraid to place Pearl in day care until she was old enough to speak; how could Coco know if anything went wrong? Coco had come to blame her failure to protect Mercedes from the alleged sexual abuse on the two weeks she’d worked at Youngland, the clothing store in the Bronx; during that time, she’d left Mercedes at Lourdes’s, and Mercedes couldn’t yet talk. But Coco had no choice with Pearl: Milagros was enrolled in a GED course and going back to work herself, and Coco didn’t entirely trust Frankie to pay close attention to Pearl’s medical needs.

  Luckily, Pearl thrived in day care; then, better still, she got accepted for Head Start. Coco called Pearl “Little Teacher” because she wore tiny pink glasses. Her enthusiasm for school reminded Coco of her own, when she was younger. Coco remembered Foxy taking them to the dollar store for school supplies, and how she had sharpened her pencil so many times in anticipation that she had ended up with nubs. Pearl went nearly crazy with excitement as she waited by the picture window each morning for the Head Start bus.

  Coco decided to return to school and pursue her high school equivalency diploma. She believed a GED would help her find a better-paying job and set the best example for her girls. With the exception of the brief stint at Youngland, and baby-sitting, Coco, at twenty-three, had never held a job. On her academic assessment test, she scored at a fifth-grade level in reading, and sixth-grade in math.

  After the first week of classes, Coco proclaimed herself transformed. “Welfare, just the word makes me sick. Before it used to be, ‘Oh, I’m just getting my check, whatever.’ ” Now she was headed to a career. She would work in medical records until she could learn photography. Serena quizzed her from a list of vocabulary words: Compassion. Humble. Jeer. Brutality. Coco scored a perfect grade on the second test. Cesar’s letters would no longer intimidate her with big words she could not pronounce. She denounced his requirement that the photographs she send exclude Pearl and Nikki. His children were his children, but they had sisters, and she was proud of all of her daughters. “I’m tired of having to hide what’s me,” she wrote.

  To Coco’s surprise, Cesar didn’t lecture her about mentioning her other children. His time in the box was prompting him to reconsider things. “You go girl,” he wrote. “Get that education together. You could do anything you put your mind to. Don’t let anyone tell you different.” In her next letter, she signed off, “From the love of your life Coco.”

  Frankie, however, got anxious about the implications of the new Coco in his midst: he predicted that she would abandon him. Coco agreed. “He can’t afford me,” she said pertly. But Frankie surprised her, too, and found an off-the-books job laying cement slabs for a sidewalk construction crew. It was the first almost-legal job he’d ever held.

  Coco cranked up the volume on the radio when she heard Frankie’s news, then grabbed him and danced. Frankie rarely danced; he felt self-conscious, and Coco sometimes made fun of him. But now he held Coco’s hands and the girls piled in: Mercedes hulked over Nikki, who shimmied her skinny hips and coyly flicked her wrists; Pearl bounced slightly off-beat to the music; and Nautica, with perfect timing, did her crowd-pleasing butterfly. The moment later reminded Coco of happy times when she was growing up, when her stepfather, Richie, would dance Spanish with her mother in the middle of the afternoon. Said Coco, “It was music everywhere. Music all around.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Prisoners while away hours imagining what they would do if they were released. Cesar wanted to take a plane ride and travel. Boy George wanted to take the subway to Harlem, get off at 125th Street, and walk home to the South Bronx over the Willis Avenue Bridge. Jessica wanted to open Club Fed, her own nightspot, where she would dress up and hostess. She envisioned palm trees, a waterfall, decorated drinks. Federal IDs would let ex-felons in for free.

  With less than two years remaining on her sentence, however, Jessica began to think more seriously about the prospect of her release. Her optimism about the future derived in part from the restorative powers of a new love. Jessica had met Nilda, a shy, old-world Puerto Rican girl, in the recreation room. Nilda resembled Milagros—short and stocky, with a pug nose and cagey eyes.

  “Take your hat off,” Jessica had said suggestively. “You got long hair under your hat.” She smiled her fantastic smile. Nilda removed her hat. “You got real pretty hair,” complimented Jessica. She then invited Nilda to give her a birthday kiss—although it wasn’t her birthday. Before the week was out, they had fallen in love.

  But Nilda was scheduled to start DAP, the drug-treatment program Jessica had earlier been kicked out of, and Nilda didn’t want to have a long-distance relationship with a girl on another unit. “If you want to be with me, you have to go,” Nilda said.

  Jessica didn’t want to reapply to DAP. She claimed that she hated the staff, but seemed more worried about the shame of failing a second time. Jessica’s hesitation brought out Nilda’s conviction in her, a dynamic that would come to characterize their relationship.

  Nilda was raised in a family of fourteen. She’d married briefly, in a failed attempt to convince her mother that she wasn’t a lesbian. “I related to Jessica,” she said. “I was raped when I was young, the hitting and the beating. It was like I decided I was going to change Jessica, and I felt if Jessica could change, I could change.” She reminded Jessica that her five children needed a mother, and that DAP meant a time cut: it was Jessica’s responsibility to try. Jessica reapplied, and Nilda relocated to the DAP unit. Jessica joined her there ten days later. Miranda, her old rival who’d managed Boy George’s table, had been transferred to Danbury, and was starting DAP as well. She and Jessica became friends.

  Jessica’s other girlfriends had been possessive, but Nilda didn’t discourage Jessica’s socializing; if Jessica wanted to go to the rec room and Nilda didn’t, Nilda said, “You go.” When Jessica was blue, Nilda would put Spanish music on the radio. “Come on, baby, dance,” she would say. Nilda herself wasn’t much of a dancer, but she would do anything to amuse Jessica; once, she started breakdancing in the dinner line. But when Jessica got belligerent, Nilda knew to let her be; a few times, Jessica provoked Nilda and dared Nilda to hit her; Nilda refused. Once, however, Nilda did shove Jessica—when she caught her making out with Lovely, Cesar’s pen pal. “You set that girl up with your brother!” Nilda charged. Jessica was amused at Nilda’s prudishness. She assured her, “My brother is like, ‘The three of us will go at it,
there’s no problem right there.’ ”

  Always, Jessica missed her children. She traded stamps and manicures for birthday cards made by the more artistic inmates. She sent candy to Kevin and Brittany and Stephanie. She blamed Milagros for their coolness. Once, after Jessica had kissed the twin girls at a visit, they wiped her lipstick off their cheeks. They called Milagros Mommy, which continued to humiliate and enrage Jessica. Nilda said, “Your job is just to love them no matter what they call you.”

  As Jessica progressed through DAP, her abandonment of Serena increasingly haunted her. She worried less about the twin girls—they belonged to Milagros—and she admitted that she felt little connection to the baby boys. But the bond with her eldest daughter stayed strong. She mailed gifts to Serena—crocheted hangers, crocheted slippers, an address book. She consigned a friend to make Serena a T-shirt featuring the Tasmanian Devil with the inscription Mommy’s Little Angel, Serena. At one point, Jessica even forwarded Serena her diary, but Milagros intercepted it, saying that it was too sad for a child to bear. Nilda urged Jessica to keep writing the girls letters whether or not they responded. Years from now, her daughters could look back upon her efforts and understand that, even though she wasn’t with them, they were always in her thoughts.

  As Nilda tutored Jessica about motherhood in prison, Coco and Milagros argued about the best way to raise Jessica’s daughter back in Troy. Serena was twelve, and showing signs of Jessica’s sleepy beauty. Both Coco and Milagros divided her world into two options—a belly, or school and a future—but they disagreed about how to steer her in the right direction. Milagros’s approach was to repress all signs of Serena’s womanhood, whereas Coco thought it wiser to impart life’s truths as she knew them. When Kevin, now fifteen, confided to Coco that he and his girlfriend were having sex, Coco gave him condoms and urged Frankie to speak with him. (Frankie claimed he tried, but Coco thought that Frankie and Kevin just ended up smoking weed.)