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

by LeBlanc, Adrian Nicole

  That same September, Serena met her first boyfriend. Cristobal sported a profile from a Roman coin. He professed true love for Serena. Milagros proclaimed that a nineteen-year-old with earrings and a tattoo wanted a fourteen-year-old for just one thing. She ordered Serena to end the relationship. “All she was doing was caring, but caring for me in the wrong way,” Serena said. She and Cristobal snuck around. Milagros found out and confronted Cristobal’s parents, reminding Cristobal’s father that Serena was underage; she threatened to call the police. “I wasn’t going to give Serena up for anything,” Cristobal said doggedly.

  “I grew to love him, I had to see him,” said Serena. “I’d call him when she was in the bathroom, tell him, ‘Meet me at Video World.’ ” She would run through Corliss Park, taking the dirt path that led behind Family Dollar, and jump into his idling Sunbird. He whisked her to McDonald’s and treated her to her favorite Value Meal. “He always made sure I had, regardless,” Serena said.

  Coco scrunched her small nose disdainfully at Serena’s choice. “He too ugly for Serena—she’s beautiful, God bless her,” Coco said. But Jessica supported the relationship. Love mattered more than looks. The threesome spent hours on the telephone; Jessica switched between Cristobal on one line and Serena on another, consoling him and chastising her.

  Jessica got scolded for making calls at work and Milagros grounded Serena for failing all her classes. Serena spent much of the lockdown scribbling in her journal. She called the black-and-white Mead composition notebook her portfolio. Cartoons and magazine cutouts and pictures of her friends and family decorated the Magic Marker prose. She copied poems and passages from her favorite authors—Maya Angelou, John Steinbeck, Gandhi—and her favorite teacher, Mrs. Morace.

  She composed a letter to her dead father, Puma. She interviewed classmates and cousins. She practiced spelling and played solitary games of tic-tac-toe. She penned poems. She listed what she liked (“sleeping, nice people, amusement parks, bright colors, food, money, jewelry, boys”) and what she hated (“meatloaf, homework, racism, preps, stuck-ups, snobs, dumb people, scrubs, and nappy hair”). She honored her favorite people—Kevin’s baby son, Coco, and Milagros—naming the sketches “The New Baby,” “My Older Friend,” and “My Second Mother,” respectively. She wrote this, in part, about Coco:

  She has four girls and a unborn baby boy. Her son’s name is gonna be La-Monté. She is a very nice person. She is always there when I need her no matter how much it is. When I’m confused she helps me out a lot and I thank her for that. I used to live with my aunt when she lived with my grandmother, and that was like the funniest days of my child hood. When we moved up here I almost died cuz my aunt was not near us. Until she moved up here and moved in with us and then that was even funnier then before. . . . My aunt is like my second mother cuz when nobody was able to listen to me my aunt did no matter what time it was. If I was ever to decide to move out of my house or run away I will go to her house with the quickness. Well my aunt is the bestest of them all and that is why I love her so much.

  Of Milagros, she wrote:

  She took me in when my grandmother and my uncle couldn’t take care of me. She is so nice because she raised 6 kids that she didn’t even give birth to all by herself. My real mom was sent to jail when I was five years old. . . . Then my mother had twin boys and even though she had five kids (because she is also raising her friend Nellie’s son) she still took my twin brothers in. . . . She trys her hardest to keep a roof over our heads, clothes on our backs and food on the table. She is very strong because she managed to do all this by herself with nobody’s help. . . . She treats us all the same. If somebody gets something everybody gets something not better not worst. She is the strongest lady in the whole world.

  Serena was less generous with Milagros in person. Milagros scolded Serena and Serena sassed back. Sometimes, after school, Serena took the bus to visit her aunt. Serena said, “If I had a problem, if I lost my virginity, I would go to my Títi Coco. When I had my period, I told Títi Coco. When I got hair under my arms, I went to Títi Coco. When I’m bored, I go to Títi Coco’s.”

  Coco would tell her, “Growing up ain’t the move.” She wanted Serena’s life to not “go down, but up.” And yet Coco no longer emphatically sided with her niece. Her understanding of Milagros’s strictness had deepened. She regretted the covert alliance she’d forged with Serena against Milagros’s rules. “I wish I never talked about Milagros that way. . . . Now that I got a nine-year-old asking when she can have a boyfriend? It’s just scary,” said Coco.

  Milagros said wearily of Serena, “She’s all into Jessica.”

  One day shortly before Coco’s due date, Jessica surprised her with a visit; Shirley, Robert’s ex-wife, and Jessica had driven up to Troy to see her kids. “I don’t know what the fuck is up with your brother, girl,” Coco said. She showed Jessica Cesar’s latest letter, in which he promised to rescue Mercedes from the chaos and berated Coco for having another child.

  Jessica said, “Don’t let him stress you. You pregnant. You’re doing a good job, Coco. You make them take time out to write to their fathers; how many mothers are going to do that?”

  They spoke easily that day as though the years had not passed. Jessica treated Nikki and Pearl as warmly as her blood nieces. Her presence reminded Coco of just how much she’d missed her. But Shirley wanted to go, so the visit was short. Jessica always seemed to be on her way to someplace else. Coco walked her to the door. “Damn bitch, you don’t live in the city no more,” Jessica said.

  Coco said, “I know.” She was a country girl now. Jessica hugged Coco and rubbed her belly for luck.

  Coco had, in fact, begun to sever her deepest ties with the city: she had decided that the Bronx did not deserve to be the birthplace of her first son. But, as luck would have it, the day before her scheduled cesarean, she and the girls got stranded at Foxy’s. Coco had driven down on a mission to fetch Frankie, determined to start her son’s life with his father standing by, “away from the nosy people who look at a baby and say, ‘Oh, he’s beautiful,’ then go away and say, ‘Oh, but he ugly.’ ” Coco was so anxious to get back to Troy that she abandoned the useless car and called a livery cab to take them all to the Port Authority—but they missed the last bus. Fortunately, the cabdriver agreed to bring them upstate for the equivalent fare—$200. The cabdriver and Frankie listened to the radio; Pearl and Nautica and Nikki fell asleep; Pearl and Nikki snored; Coco watched Mercedes watch the road.

  The next day, right on time, La-Monté Carmine Antonio John joined his family. He had his father’s lovely round head and melancholy mouth, and his mother’s happy disposition, and button nose, and brown eyes.

  Coco was supposed to convalesce in the hospital for a few days, but she convinced the doctor to discharge her early because Frankie wasn’t able to manage the girls back at home and Mercedes was overburdened. The baby’s arrival was hardest for Pearl. Her demotion in the household shocked her: in the weeks that followed, she wandered about the apartment like a tiny bumper car. She pawed at Frankie’s legs while La-Monté sat on his lap or tried unsuccessfully to wrap her arms around her mother’s neck while Coco cradled her precious son. If Coco put La-Monté on the floor on a towel, Pearl pushed against him, pretending she just happened to be going that way. Coco and Frankie’s relationship was in the best place it had been since they’d met, four years before—Frankie was helping and Coco wanted him to be involved—but they were both losing patience with Pearl’s cloying and clutching. Frankie would shoo her and Coco would say, “Ruby Pearl! Go away!” Nautica observed her baby brother without too much interest; Nikki, however, blossomed into the little helper Mercedes no longer wanted to be.

  Mercedes bragged about her baby brother to her teacher and her classmates, but for the first time in years, her primary focus was school. The principal with whom she had frequently clashed had been transfered, and Mercedes liked her replacement. Miss Scutari was funny. She had a black belt in karate and an ea
rring-studded earlobe. She invited Coco in for a conference, and Coco brought the baby and Frankie. Coco immediately liked Miss Scutari as well. She could tell the lady cared about kids.

  But the most important thing was that Mercedes loved her fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Cormier. Academic performance had never been Mercedes’s problem; she passed with little effort; the trouble always had to do with discipline. When confronted, Mercedes became defensive, but her fear was hard to see because she acted so tough. She was opinionated. She also had a slang street style, which some adults found off-putting or intimidating; it was actually her way of testing people’s interest and reaching out.

  But Mrs. Cormier enjoyed her spiritedness and had deciphered from her meetings with Coco that Mercedes’s chores at home included parenting; she understood that having such a young mother made Mercedes older than her age. “Mercedes wants to achieve, but she also wants to be in charge,” Mrs. Cormier said. So she expanded Mercedes’s responsibilities whenever possible and overlooked the small things—the shoulder rolls, the feet on the desk—and she completely ignored the outbursts, Mercedes’s “bids for negative attention.” Almost always, Mercedes came around. Mrs. Cormier also spoke Spanish and translated for those Hispanic parents who had recently moved to Troy and spoke little English. Mercedes still didn’t speak much Spanish, but the connection helped. Mercedes was showing interest in her Puerto Rican heritage. She continued to cause a ruckus in art and stack up warnings for refusing to change her clothes in gym—an acute physical self-consciousness Coco had noticed ever since the discovery of Mercedes’s warts—but she behaved, and sometimes thrived, under Mrs. Cormier’s ironic tutelage.

  With her mother at home, Mercedes seemed more childlike. She sprawled across the couch and moaned, “Ma, all the attention’s on the baby.” Coco, however, wasn’t as fully absorbed as her eldest daughter imagined. La-Monté delighted her, but—to her own surprise—she missed work. One of the provisions in the revamped welfare legislation required that Coco start looking for paid work when La-Monté turned three months old, but she found herself fantasizing about a job just weeks into his life. She missed the freedoms and pleasures of a paycheck—taking the girls to the movies and treating them to meals. The car—still stranded in the Bronx—needed fixing. Her son’s first Christmas was just one month away. But her tubal ligation surgery was scheduled in a few weeks’ time, and in the interest of her family’s future, Coco was doing her best to stay put.

  She had asked for the procedure during her cesarean for La-Monté, and the doctor had been willing, until a nurse warned him that Coco could sue and that she required counseling. Coco made the initial appointment shortly after she was discharged from the hospital. In the meantime, she’d opted for another three-month Depo-Provera shot. But Coco heard through her brother-in-law that Garden Way was hiring, and Garden Way was one of the only jobs available to Coco that paid more than minimum wage. They hired at $9 an hour. The downside of Garden Way was the layoffs.

  Garden Way, which produced garden tools and lawn mowers, was one of the few factories left in Troy. The steel plants—Allegheny Ludlum, Adirondack, Republican, Cluett—had gone. Arrow Shirts, which had given Troy its Collar City moniker, no longer existed. Coco had briefly worked at Garden Way after she’d left the nursing home, but she’d been laid off. This time, however, Coco was hired to start the following week. Coco asked her boss if she could delay her start date; her doctor had told her she’d need to rest after the operation, and she didn’t want to start a good job, then call in sick. Her boss said, “I hope attendance is not going to be a problem.” Coco canceled the appointment for the operation and reported to work.

  Coco splurged her first paycheck on Christmas. She even gave her daughters money so she, too, could be surprised with gifts: Mercedes bought her a calculator, to help her budget; Nikki bought a bathtub pillow to rest her head; Nautica bought candy; and Pearl gave her a coloring book. Frankie gave her a dish set and silverware.

  Coco was grateful that Garden Way was within walking distance of River Street; even after the car had been fixed, she knew she couldn’t rely on it. To open the driver’s door, she had to bring down a glass of hot water to unstick the lock. She sat on two pillows so she could see over the dashboard. When the car wouldn’t budge, she hurried along the icy sidewalks, her arms wrapped around herself. She’d given Mercedes her winter coat.

  Since Coco left early and Frankie slept late, Mercedes woke and fed and dressed her sisters. During the day, Frankie watched La-Monté; he didn’t trust strangers with his son. If the car was working, Coco sped home during her half-hour break; while she believed that La-Monté was physically safer with Frankie than he would have been in day care, Frankie watched a lot of television, and Coco worried that he’d neglect to play with the baby. Coco made it home before the girls returned from a latchkey program they attended after school—all but Mercedes, who had been kicked out for mouthing off. Some afternoons, Coco returned to find Mercedes alone with La-Monté; Frankie would have ducked out early, even though he and Coco had agreed that he was supposed to wait.

  Coco tried to lighten the extra burden on her oldest daughter by driving her to Secrets, the teen nightclub where Jessica’s twins daughters liked to dance. Serena snubbed Secrets, but it was thrilling to Mercedes still. It gratified Coco to see Mercedes relax and act like a young girl. Every few weekends, Coco and Mercedes traded places—one baby-sat, the other went dancing—so long as Coco had money for the cover charge and gas. But before long, she got laid off again.

  Serena spent Christmas with Jessica, who arranged a rendezvous between Serena and Cristobal in the Bronx. The second night of the getaway, Milagros, who still had legal custody of Serena, found out and called the police. Cristobal was sent back home, and Jessica, furious, had to make arrangements for Serena to spend the night at her grandmother’s house. Lourdes held little faith that Jessica would ever be ready for her children. Her oldest daughter had never had the patience, and since her release from prison, Jessica seemed more easily overwhelmed.

  One Friday in February, Jessica departed for Troy. It would be her first overnight on her own with her children in the fourteen months since she’d been released. Milagros had welcomed Jessica’s offer to baby-sit and made plans for a weekend in the Bronx without any kids. Unknown to Milagros, Jessica had made plans to go out dancing as well, with Coco. Jessica had also brought along extra company—Elaine’s two sons and Robert and Shirley’s daughter, Tabitha, who was fourteen. Jessica made a deal with Serena: Serena would watch her siblings that night, and Jessica would stay home the next. As planned, Milagros headed for the Bronx straight from work. Jessica arrived four hours late.

  Milagros’s temporarily unsupervised house was overrun with teenagers when Jessica finally pulled into Corliss Park: Music pulsed from the apartment. Girls danced on the lawn, and other girls watched them. Someone’s baby lay facedown on the dirt; Milagros’s broken screen door flapped open and shut like the wing of a hurt bird. Matthew? Michael?—Jessica couldn’t tell her sons apart—zipped by on bicycles. If one veered into the street, someone yelled “Michael!” or “Matthew!” and they obligingly swerved back onto the sidewalk. Big Kevin had left his son, Baby Kevin, strapped in a stroller while he courted a girl new to the neighborhood. Baby Kevin screeched hysterically as his father chased the girl’s baby daughter, who giddily drank in his attention. Brittany and Stephanie breezed by with weak hugs. Serena kissed Jessica and looped her arm through her cousin Tabitha’s. Mercedes stepped to the side to allow Serena and Tabitha to pass, and watched the older girls as they disappeared upstairs.

  Jessica kissed Mercedes. “Mami, aren’t you hot?” Jessica asked.

  “No,” Mercedes said. The apartment was extremely warm, yet Mercedes wore Coco’s oversize down coat. Jessica walked upstairs with her bag of dry cleaning. Mercedes followed, leaned against the doorway of Brittany’s room, and watched her legendary aunt get ready to go out.

  Brittany had done what she co
uld to spruce up her space: she’d hung Barbie curtains from some shoelaces, which she’d knotted together; she’d arranged her three Magic Markers neatly on the bureau; she’d lined up the bottles of lotion and stacked her toys in one corner. Jessica ripped open the plastic of her dry-cleaning bag. She peered at her outfit closely and plucked at invisible lint. The knee-length black jacket had see-through polyester sleeves. Jessica held the hanger at arm’s length, scrutinized it as though she were still at the store. Then she foraged through her bag. She pulled out a clutch of candy and offered Mercedes some. Mercedes declined. She didn’t much like candy. Her favorite treat was fruit—oranges and melon. The level of noise in the house went up.

  “My father’s taking me to wrestling,” Mercedes said.

  “Oh yeah?” said Jessica distractedly. Mercedes called Frankie her father in front of people she wanted to impress. She and Frankie were going to the World Wrestling Federation Gala at the Pepsi Arena in Albany. Mercedes couldn’t wait; she told Jessica that the event was going to be broadcast on TV. Frankie had waited overnight in line just to get the tickets, which he’d given to Coco to celebrate their fourth anniversary, but Coco wasn’t keen on wrestling.

  Mercedes watched Jessica lift off her T-shirt and unpeel her jeans.

  “Close the door, Mami,” Jessica said.