Jessica wrote Serena about her new boyfriend, telling her how they would all be together soon. She announced that she didn’t want to return to the Bronx: instead, they’d all go somewhere happy, somewhere far away. The mention of another upheaval rattled Serena; she missed Jessica, but she didn’t want to leave her siblings. Milagros chastised Jessica for filling the head of a nine-year-old with such plans.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Shortly after Cesar discovered Coco was pregnant by Wishman, Coco learned that Cesar had been courting Roxanne all along. Unknown to Coco still, Cesar had been writing Giselle and Lizette and several other girls. “He’s a motherfucker and I’m a bitch. We’re both the same and we’ll never change,” Coco said. Like Cesar, she worried constantly about money, and now, even more so, since her departure from Thorpe House was imminent.
For months, Coco had been scheduled for placement in a renovated apartment through the Special Initiative Program, SIP. The tenement was on 173rd and Vyse, not far from where Lourdes had once lived, but construction delays and paperwork kept postponing the move. In SIP buildings, a social worker would be available to help residents like Coco keep their disorganized lives on track, and ideally, with day care and other supports, Coco would find her way back to school or to a job. Coco’s other options were Section 8—a federal rent-voucher program that paid the difference between 30 percent of a poor family’s income and the fair-market rent—or the projects. It had taken Sister Christine some maneuvering to lure Coco away from the idea of the projects, where the housing authority covered the cost of gas and electricity. Coco didn’t pay rent at Thorpe and already couldn’t manage, even with her avid devotion to budgeting. Earlier that winter, Coco had agreed to take a look at the refurbished SIP building, and after seeing the bright, freshly painted place—near a park where her girls could play—she’d returned to Thorpe House thrilled.
But Coco’s open excitement made her the subject of envy among her fellow residents, and she became a target for ridicule. Had she been able to move out quickly, she might have escaped the usual snittiness, but the delays gave the discouragement of others time to take effect. Some of the residents, and one member of the staff, told her how the nuns received a commission for every person they sent to SIP; that men weren’t allowed even to visit; that the staff was nosier than the shelter’s; and that the on-site social worker did double duty as an agent for BCW. The social service system deserved its criticism, and the women were justified in their caution, but Coco never had the chance to figure it out for herself. She desperately wanted to get discharged from Thorpe House, and also to avoid sharing the news of her pregnancy with the nuns. By June 1994, she was in what she called a fighting mood—looking for trouble to relieve the stress. She could always tell she was about to “mess up” when her hands started shaking.
The chance to fight was one ghetto opportunity that was both constant and encouraged, but Coco usually avoided it; she didn’t want to fight in front of her kids. Now, however, Coco was ready, and she exchanged heated words with a girl at Thorpe who was pregnant as well. When the insults erupted into a physical fight, Mercedes pushed Nikki into the apartment but stayed in the hallway to watch over her mother; the security guard pulled the two women apart. Fortunately, the nuns agreed not to expel them since Coco was due to leave. Unfortunately, the pregnant girl’s enormous boyfriend had just been released from prison. According to Coco’s neighbors, he’d been pounding on her door, making it clear that when he did find Coco, he had every intention of avenging her disrespectful treatment of his unborn baby and wife.
Coco fled to Foxy’s, but it was too crowded for a distraught pregnant woman with three small kids. She canceled her arrangements with SIP, requested her Section 8 voucher, and moved into the first place she saw—an apartment on Prospect, just a few blocks south of Thorpe House. The follow-up worker expressed serious concerns about her safety and the building’s countless housing violations; Sister Christine worried about the risk of rape; Coco assured them she’d be fine. She didn’t mention the man she’d met in the building’s hallway who’d warned Coco about the rats; after all, her mother’s apartment had mice.
The location was convenient. “It’s big and near Tremont where the store’s at, that’s what I’m happy about. It’s light,” said Coco. The window near the fire escape didn’t have locks, but if she craned her head, she could see the display of a bridal shop—three dusty mannequins adorned in white—next to a party-supply store, where she would go for her daughters’ birthdays.
Drug activity was the life force of Coco’s new building. There was no pretense of security: doors were always propped open, and the interior courtyard made for a nerve-racking trip from the sidewalk to the hall. Pigeon droppings formed a putrid sand castle in the building’s crumbling fountain. The mailboxes were bashed in, their little doors dented and askew. People snatched lightbulbs from the hallways.
The disrepair was nothing new, but here Coco was a stranger, without her family to protect her. On Foxy’s block, she was insulated by her connection to the local histories of blood and love. She also knew the personalities and could weigh the threats against knowledge and experience. In this courtyard, there were unfamiliar people, not her girlfriends or her neighbors’ boyfriends or her brothers’ friends. The dangers may or may not have been similar, but the unfamiliarity heightened the sense of risk: the potential for trouble felt random. Hector could no longer be whistled down to escort her and the girls upstairs. “My house scary,” Nikki whispered, summing up the general sentiment.
Coco’s approach wasn’t much different from her approach to the pregnancy—she would do her best with what was in front of her and avoid the rest until she had to improvise again. She soothed her own anxiety by concentrating on Mercedes’s and Nikki’s and calmed their escalating panic by distraction: she plugged in the radio, cranked up the music, and tackled their bedroom first. With her $750 furniture voucher, Coco had bought them bunk beds, a set of couches for the sala, and a double bed for herself and Nautica. Beds, she proclaimed, were for sleeping, not bouncing, but she let the girls bounce anyway. She hung a framed picture of the Little Mermaid. Near it, she placed the clown she’d carved at Thorpe: Cesar and Shorty and our unborn baby, Mercedes, Nikki. Done by Coco. Mom loves Dad, 1993. She invited their opinions in her whirlwind decorating tour: should the shelf go in their room, for dolls, or in the living room, to display Abuela Lourdes’s figuras? In the living room, Coco tacked up peach polyester curtains and spruced them up with a red Christmas bow. She unpacked her beloved pictures, which she arranged beside her girls’ baby shoes.
The larger problems, however, Coco’s touch couldn’t mend: the clogged toilet; the leaking sink; the front door that refused to close without a karate kick; the drug dealer who managed the spot in the front of the building. “Hey, Shorty,” he’d call out suggestively, and, “Shorty, what’s your name?” Coco mumbled hello and hurried by. She also tried to ignore the gutter outside her kitchen window, trimmed with trash—a ball, a diaper (used), a child’s sock, a gnawed Popsicle stick.
The rats made their debut her very first overnight; they were the size of skinny cats and shameless. Coco was shaken. One might bite Nautica. Coco dreaded going into the kitchen—the light didn’t work—but Nautica needed a bottle, and the water from the bathroom sink wasn’t hot enough. But as soon as Coco stepped into the hallway, a rat slithered along the wall and disappeared inside the kitchen door. Coco backed into the bedroom. Nautica howled until her voice became hoarse. She continued heaving long after she stopped making noise.
The next morning, Coco couldn’t face the kitchen; food attracted rats; the girls were hungry. How could she cook? Wearily, she packed some clothes in plastic grocery bags, gathered up her girls, struggled to lock the apartment’s disjointed door, and retreated to the comparative safety of Foxy’s house. It was the summer of 1994; Coco had left home a year and a half earlier; now she was back, pregnant again.
The first day of J
uly, Coco’s brother Manuel’s girl Yasmin gave birth to a baby boy. Their intense happiness took up space in Foxy’s overcrowded apartment. By the end of the week, armed with a small entourage, Coco ventured back to Prospect; her crew included her three girls, Wishman’s two younger sisters, Hector’s gaunt friend Weedo, and Weedo’s girlfriend, Lacey. (Weedo had earned the nickname because he was always smoking blunts.) Coco had been baby-sitting Wishman’s sisters to give his mother a break, but they were wearing Coco out: she had to watch them every minute. They’d taught her girls curse words. Earlier, at Foxy’s, Coco had walked into Foxy’s bedroom and found the older one, who was rather plump, lying on top of Nikki. Coco went crazy; her hands started shaking, and she’d had to call Hector to intervene. But Weedo and Lacey were easy: they were fourteen and in love and hunting for privacy. Coco was also afraid to stay in the apartment alone.
When Mercedes heard that Weedo would stay overnight, she folded her arms across her chest and glared at her mother. “You said no boys in the house!”
“Mercedes, he can come in, but just once,” Coco said.
“No!” Mercedes said. “You said no boys, only girls in the house!”
“This will only be one boy, for one night, because he’s Lacey’s friend,” Coco said. “Don’t you like Lacey?”
“You promised!” Mercedes said. Her upset wasn’t the usual frustration she directed toward her mother before Coco caved in to her demands: this anger had a lower, despairing pitch.
At Prospect, the children played in one bedroom. Weedo and Lacey jumped into the shower. Their laughter trailed Coco as she roamed through the stifling apartment, trying to create fresh air. Their joyful noise made her happy. “Reminds me of me and Cesar when we was young,” she clucked to herself. Most of the windows were misaligned and many had been painted shut. She fought one open—no breeze. She ripped the plastic covering off the couch. She wanted to preserve it, but she also wanted her guests to feel comfortable. She left Weedo and Lacey her only set of sheets.
Coco put the girls in their big room and retired to the tiny one, but soon they clustered by her door. They didn’t want to sleep alone. She dragged her mattress onto the floor and they climbed on.
“Mommy suck my thumb?” Nikki asked. Coco had been trying to break Nikki of the habit, but Coco’s directives, however well-intentioned, often got lost in the day’s landslide of minor catastrophes. Coco shared with Nikki a story about Daisy, Jessica’s cousin and old clubbing pal, who had a boyfriend who once complained that Daisy still sucked her thumb. The moral of the tale was eclipsed by Daisy’s bravado, which was more inspiring. “Daisy do that and she’s grown. She told her man, ‘Take me like I am!’ ” Coco said. She peered over the mattress, down at Mercedes. “Your daddy sucks his thumb, too,” she added kindly. Mercedes smiled. Wishman’s sisters immediately placed their thumbs in their mouths.
Lacey peeked in, her pale body wrapped in a towel. “Why you all in the same room?” she asked.
“My girls aren’t afraid to sleep on their own,” Coco lied. She also didn’t mention the flimsy kitchen knife beside her bed. The knife was a habit Coco had acquired from her mother, although it wasn’t strangers but Coco’s father whom Foxy had feared.
The children drifted off, but in the next room, Weedo and Lacey started arguing. Weedo had a violent temper. Coco fidgeted on the uncovered box spring beside Nautica, who pumped her pacifier, asleep. Coco could barely breathe. She worried about Nautica’s asthma but didn’t dare open the door because of the rats. She finally cracked open the window over the fire escape. Still, it was unbearably hot. Sweat dripped onto the plastic mattress cover. Lazy conversation from the sidewalk punched through the dead air. An alley cat cried without much conviction. Weedo, however, was hollering at Lacey with the whole of his raging heart. “I’m getting the fuck outta here,” he yelled. She encouraged him to do that. “I’m going the fuck home,” he shouted. She told him to do that, too. Coco was grateful that her girls slept through the next several rounds.
Coco hoped it didn’t get physical; she’d have to get involved. In fact, Coco got involved whenever she saw other people—even strangers—fighting in front of little kids. She attributed this to the time that Nikki’s father, Kodak, had gone after her in Foxy’s courtyard. Mercedes was only two. The courtyard was packed with kids, teenagers, and adults. Kodak drove up in a fancy car with a new wife and demanded, “How come every time I come around you ain’t with Nikki?”
“She’s with your mother,” Coco replied. “If you came around more often, you’d see me with her.” Coco remembered that Kodak had gone berserk. Even with Mercedes screaming wildly for someone to help her mother, no one had intervened.
Recently, Coco had inserted herself into the middle of a fistfight a guy was having with a woman near Thorpe. She didn’t know either of them, but she’d courageously told the man, “You a grown man. You want to do that? Take it in the house.”
Finally, Coco dozed. Around three o’clock in the morning, she bolted up; she smelled smoke. Voices—men’s voices—sounded awfully close, as though they were on the fire escape. She rolled over to look. What she saw made her leap—the tip of a sneakered foot on her windowsill, two hands tugging up the frame. She plopped Nautica on the mattress into the twist of sleeping girls, scrambled under the box spring she’d been sleeping on, hoisted it up on her back, flipped it against the window, then body-slammed herself against it to hold it up. The voices murmured. One man cackled. Eventually, they left. Had they wanted to, the men could easily have pushed their way in.
Coco jimmied the window shut with a screwdriver and returned the box spring to block it, pressed her back against it, and slid to the floor. She cradled the knife against her swelling belly. She tried to break night but nodded off. Once, she startled, but it was only Weedo or Lacey laughing in the next room.
By morning, the bedroom was hotter than a greenhouse, the children a tangled vine of arms and ponytails and legs. Mercedes moaned softly. Nautica gasped. Nikki, who had a sinus condition, snored raspily. Weedo and Lacey slammed the busted door behind them, and the noise woke Nikki up. She crawled over to the window and watched them go, her chin in her hands. Above the grubby street, Lacey’s blondness dissolved into the summer haze. A garbage truck halted. The young lovers crossed over Prospect Avenue, looking disheveled, and headed south to catch the Tremont Avenue bus back toward University, the same bus that Coco used to ride from Cesar’s to her mother’s house.
Back at Foxy’s, Coco and Foxy fought the way they had when Coco was a teenager. Coco complained bitterly about Hernan. “She don’t want me with nobody,” Foxy said. “She’s got to let go.” During one argument, Foxy threw a glass at Coco; after another, Foxy took extra prescription pills to knock herself out. Coco brought Mercedes and Nautica upstate to visit Milagros and let matters cool. Nikki was spending a few weeks with her father in Baltimore. When Coco returned to the Bronx, she announced that she was considering moving to Troy. The small city was boring, but it was pretty and quiet and the children had all kinds of space to play. Foxy kept her fingers crossed. “The girls need an environment. . . . Wishman’s not gonna do shit for her. She’s got to do what she’s got to do on her own.”
Coco and Wishman still got together, and Wishman continued to publicly deny that Coco’s pregnancy was his doing. “I leave him alone,” Coco said. But she hoped for a son.
At the end of August, Hector’s Iris gave Hector his baby boy; they named him Lil Hector. A few nights later, Coco went dancing and met up with Wishman. Afterward, they went to a room he rented from a lady in a building around the corner from his mother’s house. They made love three times; Coco later wondered if he was trying to hurt the baby. She had to go to the bathroom, and dressed for the walk down the hall. But when she stood up, a rush of blood came out. Wishman dialed his mother; Sunny dialed 911.
In the meantime, Wishman ushered Coco to the bathroom and helped remove the bloodied clothes. Then Sunny barreled in; Coco felt woozy; par
amedics arrived; she continued losing blood. While two EMTs strapped Coco to a gurney, another was trying to get information from Wishman—Coco’s name, birthday, and address. Wishman nervously kept repeating, “She’s a Sagittarius.” This amused Coco later on, when she was at the hospital.
The next few days were a jumble of emergency room visits. Coco continued bleeding heavily and was finally admitted to the hospital. For a week, the doctors tried to stop the bleeding; at one point, Coco was told, incorrectly, that the baby was dead. Finally, they wheeled her in for an emergency C-section at 3 A.M.
If Coco could have held the new baby, it would have fit into the palm of one hand. Its spindly legs were not much larger than a frog’s, but they didn’t kick; they just hung down. And it was another girl. Ruby Diamond Pearl was three months premature and weighed in at 636 grams, her veiny skin punctured with tubes the size of cocktail straws. Her chest heaved up and down; it was smaller than a chicken breast. Coco felt so undone that she wanted to believe they’d switched her child with another by mistake. “She actually looked like a crack baby would look,” she said, mortified.
While the baby struggled in neonatal intensive care, Coco spent an anxious week on another floor of the hospital. Foxy snuck Mercedes in; Wishman didn’t visit; Sunny did. The gossip had already started:
Wishman must be using something, Coco.
Someone doing something. That baby isn’t right.
All of Coco’s other children were healthy, so Coco called Sunny and asked if Wishman was using drugs. He only smoked weed. Wishman also assured Coco, and put his last name on the birth certificate. Coco was discharged and returned to Foxy’s, and Pearl stayed on in the hospital.
Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bro Page 27
