Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bro (61 page)

Frankie was trim from no home cooking and tan from afternoons at the community swimming pool. He wore sunglasses, which Foxy had given to Mercedes and Mercedes had given to him. The lenses were a cool light blue. The hard sun glinted on his newly shaven head. Coco spotted him instantly.

She had been hearing rumors since their latest split: at the pool, Frankie had tossed a girl in the water, then jumped in after her. Serena knew the girl, who was a friend of Kevin’s girlfriend’s. The girl had met Frankie while visiting her aunt, who lived in the apartment above Frankie’s basement room. The aunt had a crush on Coco’s cousin and sent the girl downstairs with plates of food. Coco reasoned, “What man isn’t going to want a hot little ass walking into your door delivering a plate of homemade food?” The aunt also had real dishes and pretty cups and silverware that didn’t bend.

During one of Frankie’s sojourns to the Bronx, Coco searched his room in the cellar apartment and unearthed a photograph. She said she also found a poem that began,
Roses are red, violets are blue.
“Come on,” Coco snorted, “my girls could do better than that.” And if she, Coco, were going to send a man a picture, she’d send a sexy one: this stupid girl had sent Frankie a regular picture of herself looking regular, on a couch. Coco conceded that the girl had pretty, fat lips. “But when she talk to you, she look all ugly cuz she have a mouth full of yellow teeth,” she added. When
Coco confronted the girl, her lack of sophistication was evident even in her denial that she’d messed around with Frankie at all: “She said, ‘You know I have a man, cuz I have hickeys all the time’ ”

But the girl’s age disturbed Coco most. Frankie was twenty-seven; the girl, fourteen. “Fourteen. That’s a child. Come on, that’s a child,” Coco repeated softly, as though she were still trying to absorb it. Coco confronted Frankie about the girl at the party. He denied that they were involved; when Coco persisted with her accusations, he said, “But, Coco, you ain’t got no proof.” Coco reasoned that if he was attracted to such a young girl then her own daughters were vulnerable. He said, “Coco, if you don’t know me now, talk to my mother. You know I ain’t like that.” Still, the possibility unnerved her. Said Coco, “I want him to go, then when he leaves I cry.” As a precaution, she instructed her daughters to wear shorts under their nightgowns whenever Frankie visited.

That same summer, Kevin’s girlfriend came out pregnant. The girlfriend’s cousin approached Milagros with the sobering news on the Number 80 bus. Milagros was furious. Kevin’s girlfriend had just turned fourteen. “How you gonna support a child when you can’t pay for a haircut?” Milagros asked.

“Welfare,” Kevin said. How, Milagros wondered, could he choose a life whose hardship lay right before his eyes? In fact, Kevin had walked through Corliss Park carrying the positive tab from the home pregnancy test like a miniature banner. But the pregnancy was only one car in the pileup: the girlfriend’s mother was in and out of prison; the girlfriend shuttled between her grandmother and an aunt; the aunt’s fast lifestyle was hectic. On weekends, Milagros took Kevin’s girlfriend in.

The girl’s name was Donna. She was a white girl—skinny, with brown hair, a tendency toward quietness, and a habit of keeping her fingers in her mouth. She and Kevin broke up by her third month, but Serena and Donna became quick best friends. Milagros hoped at least Serena would learn from Donna’s mistake since she could see, firsthand, the day-by-day discomfort of a belly. But Coco suspected the opposite could happen; Donna looked prettier the bigger her belly grew. Maybe it was the baby, maybe it was all the attention, or the confidence of sex. Coco knew that love and babies didn’t operate on logic. And Serena was thirteen.

“You better keep an eye on Serena now,” Coco warned. Guys certainly had their eyes on her. Mercedes had recounted to her mother what boys said to Serena out of the earshot of adults. The harassment reminded Coco of the way she’d been taunted when she was a virgin, but these boys
sounded nastier than the boys of her memory. Comments like
When I’m gonna get that?
and
When can I slap on that?
were common. Serena acted oblivious to the comments; Coco remembered hollering back at the boys who used to harass her on Andrews Avenue when she was Serena’s age, walking home from school; a few times, Coco had broken down and cried. Foxy had told her to stop walking home by Andrews, but Wishman had defended her on the street. “Stop disrespecting the girl,” he’d say.

Serena denied ever having kissed a boy, but Coco knew otherwise. Kevin had caught Serena in the woods kissing one of his friends. It was less than a year before Jessica’s release date. “Serena had a I-don’t-give-a-fuck attitude. She knows her mother’s coming out,” Coco said.

Soon the threats posed by and to the various teenaged girls in Coco’s life were muted by a larger, more immediate crisis. For months, Coco’s landlord had ignored her pleas to fumigate the apartment, which was flea-infested. By fall 1998, the girls scratched so much that the skin around their ankles looked like thick pink socks. The school sent them home with lice. Milagros suggested that Coco call the Department of Health, and Coco did. Requesting help from agencies was always risky, but Coco was desperate. She didn’t want her girls to be ashamed of something that wasn’t their fault. Instead of sending an exterminator, however, the Department of Health dispatched a housing inspector, who condemned the place. Con Ed shut off the electricity, then sent her a $900 bill. Coco drew an extension cord to the refrigerator from the apartment next door and rushed the girls through their baths at night. The lady told Coco to feel free to use the shower during the day while she was at work, but Coco didn’t feel safe with the lady’s boyfriend in the house. She also hated to be a burden. She then received a notice that if she didn’t move off the premises within seventy-two hours, the Department of Health would report her to the Bureau of Child Welfare for neglect. She was homeless again, for the second time in a year.

Frankie was also about to get kicked out of Coco’s cousin Leo’s for not paying his share of the rent. But Frankie looked to Coco to resolve the situation; he was making no effort to find them all a new place to live. When Jessica heard about Coco’s troubles, instead of the sympathy Coco expected, Jessica lobbed back a hard note of advice: “Stop giving, start getting. How can you say they love you and not help you? Say he love you if he ain’t doing? If he ain’t doing, get rid of him.”

Coco criticized herself: “I been through so much in my life, if I can’t pass through this, something is wrong with me.” She drew strength from
remembering Lourdes: the distance between them had grown, but she still felt a connection. “All the times Lourdes been in trouble, owed rent. How the hell she get out of her mess?” Coco asked herself. Lourdes had a block on her telephone line, so Coco couldn’t call collect, and Coco didn’t have enough money for a telephone card. But if she had, she would have dialed Lourdes up and asked her, as she had when she was a teenage girl, “What you did?”

A
t forty-eight, Lourdes continued to cobble together an existence, as she always had. She’d joined up with Emilio, the six-foot-three army veteran who’d lived with Maria, the neighbor with cancer who had taken Lourdes in. After Maria’s death, Lourdes had briefly inherited custody of Maria’s children and the apartment, until the authorities decided otherwise. The eight-year-old reported Lourdes to BCW, claiming that Lourdes wouldn’t feed her and her brother, and that she locked them out in the hall. Lourdes claimed she fed them, but refused to let them eat her pantry clean—how, she asked the caseworker, could they be hungry and so overweight? Social Services placed the children in foster care; shortly afterward, Lourdes and Emilio came home to find a padlock on the door and all of their belongings piled in the hall.

Emilio’s veteran’s status qualified him for rent subsidies, and they found an apartment on a leafy residential street at the end of one of the Bronx subway lines. Lourdes believed that she’d left Mount Hope for good. She called her new neighborhood “civilized.” She regularly complained of chest pains and shortness of breath, and the proximity to doctors and a decent hospital reassured her.

She earned extra money baby-sitting Justine, Roxanne and Cesar’s daughter, and Justine’s half sister. Roxanne, who was pregnant again, dropped them off on her way to the Laundromat, where she worked long hours folding clothes. Lourdes also rented the couch to Angel, her soon-to-be-ex-son-in-law. Elaine had left him and the Bronx for Yonkers, where she lived with her two sons in a working-class neighborhood. Lourdes did Angel’s laundry and cooked him dinner. He worked at a law firm in Manhattan as a mail-room clerk.

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.