Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bro (57 page)

One afternoon, Coco and her children were in front of Foxy’s building when Wishman appeared in a livery cab and invited Coco to play pool. Nautica threw tantrums whenever Coco tried to leave her behind, just as
Mercedes had as a child. But Nikki jumped at the chance to assist her mom. She shooed her little sister into the building, so that Coco could make a run for the car, cheering her mother on: “Naughty’s inside, Mommy! Go! Go!
Go!
”

It had been years since Coco had been alone with a man without having to worry about her children in the house. “I haven’t been spoiled for a long time,” she said later. “We went to a hotel. The room looked like the Poconos.” She floated on the soft cloud of Wishman’s whispered voice—
Let’s get busy
—as he lifted off his shirt. His stomach still had cuts from workouts during his prison bid.
Damn, Coco, you used to kiss good. What happened?
She pulled him toward her and corrected that. She loved how he said with certainty,
This shoulda been mine. This is what I always wanted, Coco, one whole day with you.
Until then, even with a baby between them, they’d never had such privacy.

After they’d made love, Coco confessed that it hurt her feelings that he’d ignored Pearl. She would have liked to ask him other questions, but she didn’t want to push and spoil what they’d just had. Wishman gave Coco another $50 for Pearl.

The next night, Coco brought Nikki and Nautica down to Foxy’s courtyard. Pearl was up the block, at her grandmother Sunny’s. Mercedes was still upstate with her aunt. Coco wanted to be outside in case Wishman passed by, but it was a perfect summer night that needed no excuse. The children had spent the whole day indoors, waiting and restless, and they were eager to run around.

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.