Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bro (58 page)

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.”

P
risoners 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.)

Serena continued to do poorly academically, but she had learned how to circumnavigate the school dress code. When necessary, she’d zip up her jacket in the hallway to hide her midriff-exposing top. She earned attention from the boys who hung around Corliss Park, Kevin’s friends, older boys. They commented when she and her best friend made a point of passing by the basketball court.

Jessica spoke to the children on the phone after she’d resettled into DAP. “Why haven’t you written me?” she asked Serena. “You chillin’? You love me?”

“Yeah,” said Serena.

“How much you love me?”

Serena answered without much heart, “Two fingers put together so nobody can come between us.” Jessica reminded her that, if she earned a time cut, she could be home by the end of the year. Stephanie grabbed the phone. Jessica said, “You still see your daddy, then? Tell him to send me money.”

“He still with his wife,” Stephanie said.

“Your father’s full of ca-ca,” Jessica said, before remembering her newer approach to parenting. “Even though youse are big, I’m gonna take you to school.”

Brittany reported an 85 average and recited the days of the week in Spanish. “Love you smushies,” she chirped.

“Bunches and bunches,” said Jessica. Serena came back on the line. Jessica asked Serena to sing a song, remembering how, as a child, she’d loved to croon into a hairbrush. “Make believe the phone is a microphone,” Jessica urged.

Serena said, “I don’t want to.”

“Why?”

“Cuz my voice is all cracky.”

“It’s a feeling, you’ll get over it,” Jessica said, hurt. Serena passed the phone to Kevin. Jessica marveled at his deep voice. “You are sounding like a whole man. Before you was a little cutie, now—you are using the condoms, right?” She reminded him to protect his sisters and to take
care of himself. He’d been getting into trouble—placed on probation for stealing a bicycle with a group of his friends and suspended from school for fights. Jessica added, “This ain’t no life for nobody. It’s boring. Yo, you be good.” If he mailed her some pictures, she promised to hook him up with some pretty prison girls.

Milagros finally had her turn. Jessica teased her, too. “You gotta keep him away from me. You know how I am with the young boys.”

“I’ll beat you up if you show him things,” Milagros replied cheerfully.

“How the boys?”

“They bad.”

“Serena?”

“Bad. She got a body and a half.” Usually, Jessica deflected her dependence on Milagros with sarcasm, or by criticizing Milagros’s mothering, soaking her own wounds in blame. This time, she tried something different. “Thank you for everything, girl,” she said, venturing to speak aloud what Milagros understood. Then Jessica quickly changed the subject, as if embarrassed not only by the help Milagros had given her, but also by the expanse of the need that remained.