Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bro (73 page)

Cesar had conducted a “positive asset search” on Mercedes’s letter. He’d learned the technique in psychology. “She doesn’t like the name of the team,” he said. “She has a critique.” He suggested Mercedes help the outfielder; perhaps they could practice together? He told her not to worry if the outfielder rejected her offer; she wouldn’t be a sucker for being kind. Offering would make Mercedes feel better about herself
either way. “Use that muscle,” Cesar wrote. He wanted to try to make it safe for Mercedes to take risks. In thinking about his adolescence, he’d realized the punishments for his behavior never gave him clues about how to go about making improvements: “They made me pay the consequences when I did wrong, but not one ever tried to show me a solution or identify the cause.”

After the superintendent’s hearing, Coco had mailed Cesar a copy of Mercedes’s records. Cesar pored over the notations. He said sadly, “It’s like reading a book about myself.” All her teachers believed she was capable. Mercedes’s problem was “her attitude.” But her assertiveness served her badly in only one of the two worlds she had to negotiate. Bossiness at school might have rendered her a bit of a bully, but at home, lording over little kids was a necessary skill. At school, outbursts caused chaos; at home, they somehow focused things; in either place they generated the attention she needed and craved. But unlike her sister Nikki’s behavior, whose sweetness disguised anger, Mercedes’s only served to underscore it. As a result, she couldn’t, or didn’t, move between the two worlds easily.

Cesar still blamed Coco for burdening herself and Mercedes with too many children—Coco had been “too ignorant, or too selfish,” he wasn’t sure which. Rather than attack Coco, however, he placed Mercedes’s struggle in a wider context. Mercedes’s predicament extended beyond personal history or family or attitude or teenage parenting. “Poverty is a subculture that exists within the ghetto,” he said. “It goes beyond black or Hispanic, at least in my mind. Overworked teachers. Run-down schools. It looks like they designed this system to make our children fail. Socioeconomic conditions. Why are we so passive? We accept conditions that don’t benefit us—economic oppression we’ve been suffering for years. That’s the primary condition.”

But Cesar mainly blamed himself. He’d been in prison for most of Mercedes’s life. At first, he was going to send her copies of his syllabi to show her how busy he had been and to explain why he missed her birthday, but he decided to apologize instead. He’d still failed her—even if the reason was worthy. He wrote, “School was no excuse not to keep in touch.” It wasn’t often that anyone admitted their mistakes to Mercedes; the default posture of poverty was defense. Cesar told her that he hoped his degree would make Mercedes proud of him when he came home.

In Troy, children shared the same probationary space as wayward adults. The two-story office building sat opposite the local newspaper, not far
from the storefront that used to house the shelter where Mercedes had stayed six years before. The city’s homeless population had continued growing, and Joseph’s House had since moved to larger digs. A plump receptionist buzzed Mercedes and her mother in.

Coco looked tiny next to Mercedes, who towered over her by a full head. Mercedes’s long mane of brown-blond hair spilled from a bandanna of the Puerto Rican flag, which she’d positioned with the star facing front. Like Wonder Woman, she assessed the scene—a skinny white guy nervously sitting, a black woman reading a magazine. She sat down and nibbled her nails. Her door-knocker earrings swung, a cursive
Mercedes
inscribed in their cradle. Coco moved almost primly, each gesture snug with anxiety.

Miss O’Connell, Mercedes’s probation officer, beckoned them through a metal detector and led them to a chilly interview room. On the wall was a tattered Xerox,
LOVE, THE ANTI-DRUG.
It read in part, “Drug Free is achieved in a series of small, personal ways.”

“Do you understand why you’re here?” Miss O’Connell asked without introducing herself.

“No,” Mercedes said.

“Why did you leave detention without permission?” she asked.

“Cuz I didn’t think I was supposed to be punished,” said Mercedes.

“What else could you have done?”

Mercedes knew the drill: “Listen to Mrs. Hutchins.”

“What else?”

“Asked?” Mercedes tried.

“What could you have changed to make a better situation?” Miss O’Connell asked, but it wasn’t a question. “Attitude,” she added. Probation tackled that.

Mercedes would be routed to Diversion, a program that aimed to keep her at home. Miss O’Connell outlined Mercedes’s options: If Mercedes “didn’t cooperate,” she’d “choose to go to family court.” There, a “judge would weigh the truth, like judges did.” Then Miss O’Connell asked Mercedes to sign a voluntary form that acknowledged that she understood she had a choice. Mercedes looked perplexed, so Miss O’Connell elaborated: the voluntary form involved “rights in America.”

“You have a right to accept this part of probation, so which do you pick?”

Mercedes’s eyes widened and she looked at her mother. Coco uncertainly reached for the pen.

Because she was a minor, the terms of Mercedes’s probation required that she follow the rules both at school and at home. “What does it mean to follow the rules?” Miss O’Connell asked.

“Listen to my mom,” Mercedes said.

“That’s right, listen to your mom. You’re old enough to help a little bit. Set the table. Do the laundry.” Mercedes’s house had no table; she ate on her lap on the floor; Coco thought her daughter helped too much. Miss O’Connell quickly ticked off a checklist of questions she was supposed to ask Mercedes. “Drugs,” Miss O’Connell said. “Drugs, hopefully, that’s not a problem at eleven. Curfew?”

“She’s barely outside,” Coco said.

Ordinarily, Miss O’Connell saw her charges weekly, but since it was summer, she suggested every other week: It didn’t make sense to Coco. Summer streets were the worst, and without school, the children had less to do than ever. Miss O’Connell was ready to conclude the interview: “So what are you leaving with? What’s the message you are getting from me, from school, from home?”

“Try to control my temper,” Mercedes said.

“You
need
to control your temper.”

Then a remarkable thing happened—Mercedes asked for help: “I can’t—I don’t know how,” she said. It was an extremely rare admission of weakness, but Miss O’Connell didn’t respond. Coco, however, understood the significance of what had just happened, and she tried to keep Mercedes’s request for help afloat: “How come Mercedes try to calm me down when I get upset, but she can’t realize it for herself?” Coco asked anxiously. Without glancing up from her paperwork, Miss O’Connell assured Coco that Mercedes would learn all she needed to know in anger management.

That spring, Rocco’s luck changed again. He’d fallen in love with Maya, a short religious missionary from the Philippines. She conducted Bible studies with several people in Rocco’s assisted-living apartment building and had tried to invite Rocco, but he’d been so depressed the day she knocked on his door that he hadn’t bothered to open it. But when Rocco made the connection that the pretty girl he’d spotted leaving the building was Maya, he was ready for religion.

Rocco was a dutiful student during their sessions—no wisecracking, no cursing. He offered her Pepsi and avoided his past. He finally worked up the courage to leave a love note in the pages of her Bible. After she’d discovered it, she told him, “Brother, I’m not the girl.” But once Rocco had
given up his romantic hope, he started speaking more freely with Maya. He unburdened himself; his humorous personality came out. One night, he showed her the X-ray film from his spinal injuries.

Around this time, Maya said, “God interfered.” Maya had seen a dream interpreter on television who said some dreams were prophetic in nature, and she’d had several that stayed in her memory. In the first, she and a girlfriend went to buy shoes. They hurried; it was late, and the store was about to close. Maya quickly grabbed a pair of purple shoes, which are wedding shoes in Filipino culture. On the way home, she was pushing her friend in a wheelchair, and when they came to a hill, they switched places, so Maya could enjoy the ride down: Maya waved a shoe in each hand, she said, “rejoicingly.”

In the second dream, Maya was looking in the mirror and a Latina face was reflected back. She was wearing a wedding gown, zipped halfway, and she went to find her mother to ask her to zip it. “Who am I marrying?” Maya asked.

“Basta magiging masaya ka,”
her mother said. Just go ahead, you will be happy.

In the third dream, Maya lay on a gurney in the hospital awaiting spinal surgery to make her taller. The night that Rocco showed her his X rays, Maya realized that she had had a premonition, and she cried the whole subway ride home. “I was thinking, ‘Is he my destiny? I hope not.’ ”

They held hands a long time before they kissed. When Rocco proposed and Maya said yes, Rocco’s friends warned him against it; she might be marrying him for a green card. But Rocco decided it was worth the risk.

Mercedes returned to school in time to graduate with her fifth-grade classmates. Money was tight, but Coco still surprised her with a new bicycle. Coco did her best to keep her financial problems away from her children, but Mercedes watched her mother carefully. For weeks, Mercedes had refused to let Coco take her to the mall to buy shoes for graduation. However, graduation morning, Mercedes faced the problem of walking in the sandals Coco had borrowed, having anticipated that her daughter’s only other option—sneakers—wouldn’t match her dress. Mercedes tottered over to the couch and threw herself down, leaned her head on one hand, and plucked at the black lace sheath that covered the crimson dress. Her white bra straps stuck out from beneath the spaghetti straps. She said she didn’t want to go. “Mercy,” Coco said, her concern sounding through. She wanted Mercedes to enjoy the day.

Coco had done what she could to create an air of festivity. The night before, she had styled everybody’s hair—her four girls and the two white girls downstairs. She treated them all to fake fingernails from the River Street Store. She painted Mercedes’s real toenails, too. That morning, Coco tried to make Mercedes laugh by dramatically karate-kicking a roach. Mercedes ignored her. Coco quickly combed her own hair out, smoothed it with hand lotion, and squinted at her reflection in the mirror over the clogged fireplace, displeased. She was wearing a short-sleeved red cotton top and black slacks. She stuck her door-knockers in and opted for a ponytail. She squirted herself with perfume and headed toward Mercedes, who craned her neck back.

“Honesty—” Coco appeased.

“I don’t want it,” said Mercedes.

“Mercedes, you didn’t put any on—”

“I want my Tommy Girl.”

“You are going to have to find it, then,” said Coco, wounded. Mercedes didn’t bother looking.

“I hate these shoes,” Mercedes said.

“I wanted to go shopping, Mercedes,” Coco chided.

“You needed the money,” Mercedes said, stinging her.

“It’s not your business what I need, Mercy,” Coco said, biting her lip.