Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bro (30 page)

Sister Christine wanted to tell Coco,
Get away from your family.
But she couldn’t. Not everyone could clamber onto a lifeboat from a sinking raft. You either made your way by hardening up, like Iris, or you stayed stuck. Coco didn’t see a choice. She admired Iris’s accomplishments, but she couldn’t live like that. Nor could she be like her older brother, Manuel, who dressed himself better than his children. Coco couldn’t ignore the people she cared for, which is why Foxy and her little brother Hector turned to her first for help. The word that came to Sister Christine’s mind whenever she thought of Coco was
enmeshed.
Coco would have said that she had heart.

M
onths after Coco had moved to Thorpe House, she was still visiting Foxy’s five or six times a week. The returning gave her a sense of purpose. However, sustaining the connection cost her—she missed appointments, her housing-application case lost momentum, not to mention the money she spent on bus fare. Still, she clung to her mother’s block and treated Thorpe as a satellite. There were dollar stores near Thorpe, but Coco bought her shampoo and soap at Bank of Bargains on University. There was a C-Town in her new neighborhood, but Coco preferred the one nearest home, where she could sometimes convince Foxy to shop with her. This devotion required Coco to pay a cab to take her, the girls, and the month’s twenty-three bags of groceries back along Tremont to Thorpe. At Foxy’s, Hector had taken over Coco’s old bedroom, but he let Coco keep her closet as an archive of cherished things: the black leather shearling coat Cesar had bought for Mercedes; two white fake-fur coats the girls had worn the previous Easter; Mercedes’s handmade pink satin birthday-party dress.

Coco’s new life was deeply entrenched with bureaucracies. The wide net of her institutional contacts with city, state, and federal agencies didn’t make her small world any bigger, however: the same girls and women traveled to the same offices with similar needs and waited for verdicts that seemed to be issued arbitrarily. The meetings themselves were usually pointless and brief—often just minutes—but the waits were sometimes whole mornings or afternoons. Coco’s days were a string of appointments—planned and unplanned visits to the clinic, recertification at welfare, screenings for public housing, the twice-monthly sign-in to collect her WIC. She reported weekly to the nuns who ran the shelter—for apartment checks (for cleanliness), refrigerator checks (for cleanliness and food), and for lectures about parenting and health. If Coco wasn’t getting the girls ready for an appointment, on the way to an appointment, or on the bus ride home from one, she was in a room crowded with women and children in the long yawn of waiting to be seen.

Even so, Coco was always glad to escape the shelter, where she felt constrained by its rules. “It’s so boring,” she said of Thorpe. Anything was better than being stuck indoors with her two restless girls, no money, no
telephone, her looming belly, and a nun at the door reminding her of some failed responsibility. Coco liked the nuns themselves, but didn’t like how “they all into my business.” There was a curfew, and you had to request a pass for an overnight guest. When, in recreation, Coco carved a clutch of balloons on a wooden plaque and inscribed Cesar’s name inside one balloon, in glitter, a staff person asked, “Why you always putting that guy’s name?” No one commented on the balloons inscribed with “Mercedes,” “Nikki,” and “Unborn Baby”; Cesar was part of Coco, too!

Coco signed out of Thorpe to conduct her business. Under “Destination,” if she didn’t write “welfare” or “the clinic,” she scribbled “mother’s” or “mother-in-law’s.” She caught the 36 bus on the corner of Crotona Avenue and disembarked on Tremont, near the Concourse. Lourdes brought her up-to-date on gossip, especially about Roxanne. Roxanne and her baby also passed by Lourdes’s frequently, and the possibility of a chance encounter gave the otherwise repetitive days a charge. Roxanne had said that if she saw Coco, she’d kick her in the stomach—at least, that’s what Roxanne’s sister had told Lourdes and Lourdes had told Elaine and Elaine had told Coco.

Otherwise, Coco went to Foxy’s, but she didn’t get much attention there. Sometimes she stopped by Sheila’s, Foxy’s neighbor, or she passed by Milagros’s. Milagros still lived on Andrews, a few blocks from Foxy’s, with Kevin, and Jessica’s three girls. Sometimes Milagros would baby-sit so that Coco could go clubbing, but the frequent fights and shoot-outs at the clubs dampened her enjoyment, now that she had children: “I would be there dancing, and all I be doing is thinking of them. What if something happened to me and they waiting for their mother and I never come home?” Sometimes Coco would baby-sit, and Milagros would go get high, what Coco called “do her thing.” Lots of afternoons, they talked, and Coco would amicably reject Milagros’s advice about Cesar. Sometimes they let other people’s problems talk: One day, on a talk show called
Shirley,
the topic was marriage without sex. On the
Shirley
set, dumpy women with bad posture sat in an uneven row, jiggling their feet in too-short skirts. Subtitles ran beneath their double chins:
Didn’t have sex in her ten-year marriage
or
Hasn’t had sex in six years.

“I could never go more than two months. You going to go nine years. You gonna be able to do it?” Milagros asked.

“I know this, I ain’t never going to look like that, all fat and ugly looking,” said Coco, scoffing. “That’s why I want to get married. I can only do it if I can be married.” If Cesar chose Roxanne to be his legal wife, Coco planned to remain alone. Cesar vacillated about his marriage plans. He
said Coco needed to prove her loyalty. Milagros told Coco she was only setting herself up to be hurt. Coco suspected that Cesar was waiting to see if she gave him a son.

While Coco and Milagros watched television, the children played in one bedroom. Serena organized a game called Moving. The play baby stroller had already been packed with baby powder, the dolls strapped with knapsacks, ready to go. Brittany was scrunched up on the windowsill, painting her toenails, knees to her ears, leaning against the window guard. Stephanie applied fake makeup to Mercedes’s upturned face. Serena balanced a tray toppling with the fake food bought years earlier by Jessica.

“We’re moving,” she announced. They had no destination. She added, “We gotta bring this food. We just need to take our things.”

Milagros, in fact, had been talking a lot about moving. In the last year, she’d lost her closest friends to prison and death: Jessica was locked up; Puma had been gunned down. Milagros wanted to get away from the partying; she’d been using too much coke. She also wanted to put some distance between herself and Kevin’s mother, who was due out of jail and making noises about taking Kevin back. And the Bronx had nothing for the children. The only play area was a concrete space between two buildings. Kevin was eleven and regularly getting into trouble at his school. “When he asks me if he can carry a knife, I think it’s time to do something,” Milagros said. He had already been mugged, and recently, there’d been another stabbing at his junior high, the same one Coco had attended. Twice a day, Milagros had to walk to the school to escort Kevin to the bathroom because he was too afraid to go alone.

Milagros’s older brother, who was married to one of Puma’s sisters, had recently joined a growing number of Bronx friends and neighbors who had moved upstate, and the news that drifted back to Milagros was all good. Apartments were spacious. Children could play outdoors safely. Schools were strict about classwork and attendance. Mothers didn’t have to break night waiting in the emergency room. There were jobs. Willy, the twins’ father, already lived there, as did his mother and several sisters. Milagros thought it would be good for the twins to be near him, and the family could help take care of the children so that she could return to work.

Milagros suggested to Coco that she join her; they could go through the shelter together and help one another with the kids.

“I can’t be that far from my mother,”

Coco said. “Coco, you is a mama’s girl,” Milagros said affectionately. But she’d started Coco thinking.

Coco appeared content during those spells she stayed put at Thorpe, almost in spite of herself. She loved the games during parent-child recreation. She excelled at apartment inspection. She was exuberant after meeting with Sister Christine and filling out the housing-application forms. She threw herself into the role-plays in drama, playing a pregnant girl jealous of an unpregnant friend working toward her GED. She had meat thawing under a stream of hot water in the kitchen sink by the time she fetched Mercedes from preschool and Nikki from day care. Day care, in Nikki’s case, meant mornings spent with an anxious lady in a dark apartment in front of the TV; the lady’s husband walked around the house in his undershirt and dress slacks. Coco didn’t like the situation, but she thought it was unfair to send Mercedes to school and keep Nikki home, and it was hard to complete anything with both of them underfoot.

In sunny weather, Coco brought the girls across the street. Mercedes rode her tricycle in the little park. Coco would borrow Sister Christine’s camera if she had money for film. Taking pictures was one of Coco’s greatest pleasures; Nikki loved posing almost as much. She’d jut out her hip, tuck her chin in, and beam. Mercedes preferred the gangsta style she saw in the Polaroids of her father and his friends—hands on bent knees, with a menacing look of having been interrupted, or standing, arms folded across her chest, her expression intently grim. Nikki loved girlish clothes, but if Coco dressed Mercedes sexy—cropped tops that showed off her belly—Mercedes got anxious. A few times, when she was younger, she’d wet herself. Like Serena, Mercedes was shy about showing off her body. So Coco gave Mercedes a sporty style instead.

At dusk, Coco would settle the girls in the tub while she started dinner, which the girls ate from plastic bowls on their laps in front of the TV.
Cops
was Mercedes’s favorite show. Coco prepared rice and beans and fried chicken, or rice and beans and fried pork chops, or rice and beans and Spam, or—if it was the end of the month—rice and beans. It was always a battle to get Nikki to eat and to get Mercedes in bed. Coco easily won with Nikki, but often surrendered to Mercedes, then—in an attempt to be fair—let Nikki stay up, too. After Coco carried the sleeping girls into the bedroom, she always turned on the radio. Like her, Mercedes and Nikki couldn’t rest in silence. Then Coco cleaned, or visited with Jezel and Maritza, the other Puerto Rican girls at Thorpe.

A group of the mothers stayed up late one night talking in Jezel’s apartment. Coco told them about Cesar—their first meeting, his other girls, how they planned to marry if he decided on her.

“I’d have binned him if he did all that to me,” one girl said.

“You won’t know until you stand in my shoes what my love is,” Coco said, her eyes filling with tears. “I am in love.”

“I bet you in love. But all he ever done for you is got you pregnant,” the girl said.

Coco socialized less after that. She rearranged her living room furniture a lot, as many as three times a week; Mercedes and Nikki came home to a new house every day. She longed for visitors. Foxy was “always making excuses.” Lourdes was “all into her business.” Iris needed her husband’s permission to visit, although she did manage to pass by, said Coco, “once in a blue.” At least Cesar kept her company.

Whenever Coco returned to Thorpe, she beelined for the mailbox. No load of groceries, no weight of a sleeping child, kept her from the silver boxes first. She got letters from her old boyfriend Wishman, who was in prison on attempted murder charges in Baltimore, but Cesar’s letters were the ones Coco craved. “When he don’t write, I get depressed,” Coco said. Envelopes addressed with his surname, to
Coco Santos,
promised good news;
Coco Rodriguez
letters, addressed to her own name, were ominous. If
Santos
had been crossed out and replaced with
Rodriguez,
she tried to open the letters in private, to avoid crying in front of the girls—then they’d cry, too—but she rarely had the patience to wait.

Coco composed long letters in reply. She also copied by hand letters Cesar sent her to forward to his incarcerated friends. They wrote in a secret code, which Coco tried to decipher. His friends may have been in prison, but through their letters she learned some of the juiciest gossip on the street. A few times she took the liberty of introducing herself: “By the way, this is Cesar’s wife, Coco, the one that had his first child and now his last,” she once added. These communications suited her indirect style.

Cesar complained about prison, but it sometimes seemed easier and more fun than Coco’s life. Cesar had no children to feed and bathe and dress; he had no worries about basic necessities; he lived in a dorm with his friends. Hype, the boy who had introduced Cesar to West Tremont, was also at Harlem Valley. They had towel fights after showers and played basketball for whole afternoons. Cesar was studying for his GED; he already had better penmanship and a larger vocabulary. Coco’s limitations were her failures; but Cesar’s immobility was the prison’s fault. And Cesar still dictated the terms of the relationship—to choose her or to cast her aside. She wrote him and asked if it was okay if she gave birth to a girl. “Coco,” he wrote back. “I hope if it’s a girl you don’t start that bullshit about (I hope you love her) because you know that no matter
what it is I’ll love her or him. As long as it’s mine I don’t give a fuck if it’s gay I’ll still love it the same so don’t sweat it alright!”