Still, Lourdes had to hustle to get by. She reapplied for SSI and was rejected. She applied for emergency food stamps and got lucky—$50 worth came through. Her ex-boyfriend Domingo occasionally gave her an extra $20 or $40 when he brought a crate or two of vegetables up to her apartment, his truck double-parked. One time, when Serena visited, they bused to Tremont to hit up Felix, the old family friend who’d offered his Mount Hope apartment to Lourdes, years before. Felix gave Serena money, just as he had her mother, when she was Serena’s age. In the long run, though, Lourdes, like Cesar, was banking on Jessica.
Lourdes no longer partied much; she no longer broke night. Darkness no longer haunted her; her prescription medication, Ambien, knocked her out completely, preventing the anxiety attacks that had for years kept her awake. She saw a psychiatrist, who had diagnosed her with depression, a condition that intrigued her. No one had ever attached professional words to her anguish: they had said she was “having problems” or was “all into her business” or “doing wrong” or “messing up.”
The relative serenity of Lourdes’s new life made the ravages of her old one more apparent: her face had taken on a ruined and vacant air. “She looks that way because she is not avoiding her pain,” Cesar said. Like the onset of diabetes that followed years of obesity, or the rotten teeth that came from candy and poor diet, Lourdes was showing the disappointments and disasters she’d weathered to reach middle age. But Lourdes’s ailments would recede some in her cozy kitchen, when she stood among Domingo’s donated produce. Sacks of onions and garlic slumped against crates of avocados and lemons and tomatoes, and starched ruffled curtains blew in the alleyway breeze.
Domingo attended school at night in pursuit of a trucking license. Sometimes he would stop by after work and practice vocabulary words with Lourdes while she cooked. Emilio spent most of the time quietly watching television in the bedroom. He only became animated when Justine made screwball faces up close to his unhappy one. Her giggles were infectious, and if he tickled her, she tickled him back.
One morning six weeks before Jessica’s release, Lourdes changed into a T-shirt and leggings; she already had a tea towel over her shoulder, the way she used to wear her braid. She scrubbed the kitchen sink, filled it with hot water, chopped the tips off the green bananas, slit them, dropped them in the sink, and added in a handful of salt. She peeled the white yuca. She skinned the pumpkin and scooped out the seeds. All the while she tended to the codfish she was boiling for the bacalao for lunch. She railed against her latest favorite culprit—Elaine—who was snootier than ever since getting promoted at her job. How miraculous it was, mused Lourdes, that her daughter’s back wasn’t broken for all the sex she was having. If Elaine’s working ass was so superior, why didn’t she help out her mother? Why wouldn’t she take Lourdes to see Cesar in her new used van? Elaine would only drive Cesar’s wife. But the ranting no longer revived Lourdes; the complaints seemed a habit, drained of expectation.
By dusk, Lourdes’s pasteles covered the counters and table. She counted them aloud like a child newly confident with numbers—sixty-seven altogether—and said contentedly, “I’m gonna smoke me a cigarette.” Her fingers were stained from the achiote. One of her favorite songs, “Suave,” came on the radio. She took two pasteles and held them elegantly in her swollen hands, as though she were releasing little birds. “When I danced, there was always a circle around me,” she recalled wistfully. Now she lacked the optimism for dancing: “Why did God take away from me the one thing that I loved the most?”
A male voice beckoned to her from outside. Lourdes popped her head between the curtains. A workingman stood beneath her window, wearing coveralls. “Esa comida que huele tan rica, es para vender?” he asked politely. Was the good food he was smelling for sale? She answered, “The food is for my childrens.” His wife had no talent for pasteles, he explained—she was Panamanian—would Lourdes teach his wife some afternoon? After he left, Lourdes smiled pityingly. Her food was unique, her creation, like a baby—specifically hers to give. “That’s what I’m proud of,” Lourdes said. “Whoever tasted my food always come back for more. What you have made, not what anybody else have made.”
Another Christmas was approaching. Cesar had been transferred to a facility only ninety miles away. She sensed the potential of the move, even if Cesar hadn’t yet; he was closer to home, one step nearer family. “God does the right thing, in his own time,” Lourdes said. Giselle had promised to bring him some of Lourdes’s pasteles on their next trailer. And Jessica would be home in time for the holidays.
It would be hard to keep the pasteles safe once the word got out. Lourdes neatly stacked them in the freezer. Her delicacies filled it up.
Following her evacuation from the flea-infested house on the hill, Coco reapplied for Section 8 certification and also for public housing. (Part of the application asked her to write an essay, “Why I Want to Live in Public Housing.” “Because I’m homeless,” Coco wrote.) She and the girls shuttled between Hector’s and Iris’s to give each host a break.
Coco felt bad about imposing: the timing seemed especially bad. Hector had just started working. He was also housing Iris’s mother, who had been moving house to house in the years since her release from prison; Iris’s sister and toddler; Platinum and her son; and Hector had the new baby on the way. His two-bedroom apartment didn’t have much furniture yet—only two beds, which people used in shifts. Coco was sensitive to the strained language of worn-out welcomes—exasperation with the naturally unruly ways of children, observations about the shrinking food (“I just bought soda”), the way Hector spoke of his new van as if it were a human being (“It needs a rest”). Luckily, Hector Jr., who was four, qualified for SSI. He was hyperactive, which worried his parents, but the first SSI check—which included retroactive payments for all the months it had taken for processing—had paid for the secondhand van. The van made it possible for Hector to take a job packing fruit at night. Troy’s limited bus service often made evening jobs prohibitive. Soon, Hector got Frankie hired, and the two rode together to work.
Coco’s sister’s apartment was uncomfortable in a different way. Iris had just started college and was struggling to keep up with her course work along with her household obligations; Armando had agreed to let her enroll only as long as their home life remained unaffected. She was dog-tired, Armando could be impatient and humorless, and Coco’s presence meant five more mouths to feed. Iris and Armando’s six-year-old daughter, Brandi, loved Nikki, which made Mercedes jealous. Nautica regularly balked when it was time for the tub, but the battle seemed louder in Iris’s house. There was never music on. The TV was, and Armando wanted the children to hush so he could hear it, and he regularly ordered them upstairs to play. Iris’s children had two sets of identical toys—one for display, one to play with—and Iris noticed if the display set had been touched. Pearl fussed at night and gasped and puked during the daytime; Coco had run out of her medicine. Armando made Coco take every diaper to the trash outdoors because he hated the smell. Coco said nothing, but she felt unwelcome.
Galvanized, Coco applied for several jobs and got hired by the deli at Price Chopper, slicing meat. At times of crisis, there was no denying that her family could not carry her, much as they tried to help. She’d moved to Thorpe House after Cesar’s arrest, while pregnant; she’d relocated to Troy in the middle of the upheaval with Pearl; now, homeless again, she rallied herself to work. Dire need cut through the chaos, much as the anticipation of a lover heightened an otherwise boring afternoon on the street. The greater challenge was surviving the daily grind.
Price Chopper paid $5.14 an hour. Coco spent the evening before her very first shift cradling Pearl in the emergency room. The night cracked open into day. In the mornings, Troy’s streets could seem almost unbearably bleak. It may have been the abandoned tenements, or the forties bottles emptied of beer and filled with pee, or the boarded-up doors, or the cars whirring by. Coco hadn’t slept, and the world filtered in around the
edges of her exhaustion. She quietly dressed her girls in the morning dark of Iris’s house. She walked them around the corner, to River Street, and stood at the bus stop in front of a Laundromat. She was shorter than some of the kids.
Coco had witnessed gunfire on the same block a year earlier. She and Mercedes and Frankie had been waiting for the bus home after Sunday dinner at Iris’s. Two white boys robbed a Spanish man at the River Street Store and were firing as they ran out; Frankie had been in the store when the shooting started, but somehow he was suddenly next to Coco and Mercedes, covering them and flagging down a car and ushering them into the backseat. The driver recognized Frankie from the neighborhood and delivered them to the relative safety of Corliss Park. This morning, though, the block was tranquil, and amid the sounds of the mundane world, the future presented itself through a cloud of bus exhaust. Coco spotted a sign in a broken window of a first-floor tenement across the street—Apartment for Rent.
The intersection of River and 101st Streets was at the heart of Troy’s growing ghetto, the place where the migrants from the big city and the stalwart residents of the now-poor part of the small city mixed. Hip-hop clashed with the heavy metal that wafted from the windows of the cars idling at the traffic light. Row houses that had once belonged to white working-class families had been hacked up into rentals, drywalled, and painted in ugly colors for the working and unemployed poor, who were white, Puerto Rican, and black.
Milagros urged Coco to keep looking in other neighborhoods. River Street was no place for growing girls. It was a known drug spot. “It’s not as if I have a choice,” Coco huffed. What were her options, exactly? Other people’s floors? Homelessness made her private business public; everyone had opinions about how she raised her kids, whether or not they spoke them. And what kind of mother would she be if her girls were homeless for the holidays? Having no apartment made any apartment look good. Coco said, “The store is right across the street. The bus stop is there. The rent is three-fifty, so all I think about is that.”
The glass in the bay window, shattered from another shooting that had driven out the previous tenants, could be replaced—perfect to show off her Christmas tree. Coco already envisioned a backyard with her daughters playing and ignored the actual crumbling square of tar with its mangled shopping cart and trail of gnawed chicken meat. The two empty units above her, one of which had burned and still smelled faintly of smoke, meant no nosy neighbors—no one judging what they couldn’t know, eyeing Frankie’s friends, calling the police. The girls didn’t have to transfer schools. The store had a pay phone she could use when the telephone company cut off her service, and Iris lived around the block. While Coco waited for the Section 8 inspector to approve the apartment, she and Hector snuck back into the condemned house on the hill to retrieve some pots, pans, and clothes.
Coco kept a close eye on Mercedes and looked for any change in Mercedes’s feelings about Frankie, whose return from Hector’s was imminent. Coco didn’t want her daughters to put up with what she had from men, but the best example she offered was her willingness to point out her own weaknesses and hypocrisies. Girls were surrounded by women who ignored the contradictions between what they said and what they did. Women routinely made grand pronouncements about all they wouldn’t tolerate, but the particulars were another thing entirely. Women didn’t ask questions of men in public directly, unless they were angry, and then the questions weren’t really questions but indictments that called attention to their own wounds. Iris asked Armando’s permission to lend Coco money or give her a lift, and every night—whether or not she actually did—Frankie expected Coco to cook. And Coco had her moments of defiance: at family gatherings, instead of serving the men, the children were the first to get their plates of food.
Mercedes believed in Coco’s best self, and when she recited Coco’s ideals back to her mother, the old refrains would strike Coco anew. But the idealism required vigilance. Mercedes cautioned her mother about spending too much money on birthday presents for other people’s children and reminded her, when the house swelled, that they didn’t have enough food to feed everyone. Mercedes publicly rebuffed the guests whom her mother privately scorned (“How come you always show up right when we about to eat?” Mercedes asked Platinum once). If Coco talked about putting $50 toward new outfits for her daughters on layaway, Mercedes would discourage her, advising instead, “Fifty to the house, not to us.” Yet it was Coco’s awareness of Mercedes’s dissatisfaction with Frankie that had become the focal point of their relationship. “I’m not going to give you what you want, but I am going to listen to what you want,” her mother would say.
While Coco settled into her new apartment, Cesar settled into his latest prison. He’d emerged from the grueling five-month stint in the box weakened, enraged, and somewhat dazed. He and Giselle had undergone a period of estrangement, but she wanted to salvage the marriage. She believed in the relationship with a faith he could not imagine for himself. Cesar loved her and knew he needed her, but he still felt at a crossroads between need and his pride. It had been over a year since he’d seen any of his children. Coco’s letters filled his head with only more problems—usually, complaints about Mercedes, who was getting into trouble at school and upsetting Coco whenever she talked about boys.
Cesar’s avalanche of trouble did, however, create a pocket of opportunity. The latest addition to his institutional file labeled him as depressive—“violent-suicidal type”—and the categorization merited something called a double-bunk override. A double-bunk override was a coveted stigma in the crowded prison system, rather like SSI. Cesar was assigned his own cell.
For the first few months at Shawangunk, the authorities placed him on keep-lock—twenty-three-hour lockdown in his own cell. Keep-lock had restrictions, but it was much better than solitary, because Cesar had access to his property. He could open his locker, or peruse the sneaker box he stored beneath his bed, where he kept his letters, filed by writer and by date. He could look at his hundreds of photographs. He no longer pinned up his pictures, like some of the other inmates. The first few years he was locked up, he’d posted the pictures—wanting the world to see his beautiful daughters and his sexy girlfriends. But now the photographs were too painful. “I was getting really stressed seeing my children grow and not being able to be there.”
Back on River Street, Mercedes placed Cesar’s picture prominently in her new bedroom, on top of the toy chest he had made. Next to it, she put another picture of her father and her godfather, Rocco, taken in the Harlem Valley visiting room. The bedroom, a narrow, dark space off the kitchen, overlooked an alleyway. Mercedes mopped the floor and covered the drafty window with a sheet. There was no closet, but she folded her clothes neatly and stacked them on the floor. She arranged her toys beside them. She made up her bed, which was only a box spring, and posted a notice on her door:
RULES
Take your shoes off when you come in.
Don’t sit on the bed.
Knock when you come in.
Don’t come in if I’m not here.
Mercedes had her own bedroom because she was the oldest, and also because Coco didn’t entirely trust her with her sisters alone. “She shakes Pearl as if she really wants to hurt her,” Coco said. Sometimes Mercedes became so angry that she hit Nikki or Naughty, not the way you would hit a sister, but as though she were fighting a stranger on the street. Once, when Coco was reluctant to take her along on an errand because of the chorus of wailing sisters, Mercedes said, “You gotta take me, I’m a problem child. I’ll get into a fight.”
As usual, Coco had her Christmas tree and all her decorations up long before Thanksgiving. She spent most of her first two Price Chopper paychecks on gifts. She reimbursed Mercedes $35 she owed her. Mercedes said, “I’m going to save it. So when Mommy run outta money, or don’t got no gas, or if we hungry, I can give it to her.”
As before, Mercedes and Frankie argued if they were left alone too long. One day, Iris and Coco returned from sho
pping and found them wrangling on the sala floor. Coco and Frankie yelled a lot themselves. They had a big fight in November. To cheer up the house, Coco let the girls open all their Christmas presents, then she immediately began to worry about how she would replace them. Frankie, contrite, tried to help, but then he got arrested for boosting videocassettes from Ames. He’d stolen a gangster movie for himself and a Barney tape for Pearl. Then, the next thing you know, miraculously, gifts from Cesar arrived in the mail. Cesar had gotten the money from Rocco, who’d had a windfall.
Rocco kept Cesar abreast of the news on the street, and Cesar kept Rocco up-to-date with the goings-on inside. Plenty of times, the news overlapped. Those friends and acquaintances who were involved in what Rocco and Cesar called the thug life—full-time or part-time—were constantly shuffling among the prisons, getting arrested or rearrested for parole violations or for new crimes, and occasionally getting released.
Rocco hadn’t returned to prison since his 1993 bid at Rikers. He had succumbed to what he derisively called “a Rick’s life”—legally married, renting an apartment in the north Bronx on a quiet street, holding down two jobs, still not meeting all the bills. The apartment had been robbed while he and his wife and daughter were vacationing in Disney World; Marlene was so upset that she ripped up her birthday gift—theater tickets Rocco had bought for Miss Saigon. Now Rocco was back with his in-laws, “back to a rougher place where they have more respect for me and know who I am.” Days, he drove trucks in Jersey; nights, he worked as a support technician for a software company.
Rocco hated the predictability of the straight world. He said he felt dead. He pined for the old glory days of spontaneous brawls and shoot-outs; he missed the excitement and the camaraderie. Much to Marlene’s annoyance, he played Wu Tang Clan constantly. He flirted with a Chinese girl he’d noticed at the desk of a car dealership he passed on the way to his trucking job. But chess was the only thing—besides crime—that engaged Rocco entirely. He competed on-line in the morning and played on the computer at his second job. The first thing he did whenever he visited Cesar was to challenge him to a game.
Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bro Page 41