CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Every opportunity Coco seized on improved her life, but sustaining the improvements proved impossible against the backslide of poverty. The financial advantage of a minimum-wage job for a family of five was imperceptible, but the disadvantages were quickly becoming clear: Coco was the spirit and the anchor of her household, and her unpredictable absence—given the irregularity of Price Chopper’s hours—made it difficult for the family to settle into any routine. What was good for Coco—getting out of the house—wasn’t always great for her children, and Frankie made a lackluster substitute.
He’d had to quit his job at the fruit-packing plant not long after Hector moved on to a slightly better-paying job as a security guard at a nursing home. At first, another coworker gave Frankie lifts to work, but the man then started on the day shift, and the buses didn’t run late in the evenings, so Frankie was back on the street. Coco had pretty much resigned herself to Frankie’s “doing what he do out there,” but Frankie seemed increasingly demoralized. Coco worried that he might hurt himself—one of his brothers had committed suicide—but other problems vied for her attention, such as Mercedes’s ongoing trouble at school. The school where Mercedes attended third grade was having its own problems. Its test scores were abysmal and it had a reputation for not being able to control its kids. The principal had suspended Mercedes several times and had told Coco that unless she got Mercedes to counseling, Mercedes would be expelled. Coco wrote Cesar and asked for guidance; when she explained to Mercedes that the situation was serious, Mercedes seemed to understand because she cried. Mercedes didn’t often show the softer side of her emotions; her tears usually came from frustration and rage. Coco thought her difficulties at school started at home: “I think it’s Frankie, but I can’t blame her because we always having problems in front of them, and I guess she feels, I don’t want my mother to deal with that.”
Mercedes watched her sisters while her mother worked. Sometimes she sounded exactly like Coco, such as the time when Nautica pointed out the “raper” in Corliss Park—a man rumored to be a sex offender who walked around the neighborhood pushing an empty shopping cart. “Shut your mouth, Naughty,” Mercedes said. “Don’t you say that, and besides, you don’t even know what that means.”
Coco quit Price Chopper after several weeks because of the erratic hours, but yearned for another job. “I want it so that when the kids ask for something at the store, I can say yes,” she said. Just before Christmas, she joined Hector at the nursing home where she served meals to the residents. The hours were steady—she worked the 6 A.M. to 3 P.M. shift—and her house benefited from the predictable schedule. To Coco’s surprise and relief, the fighting between Mercedes and Frankie calmed down.
Coco made it as easy for Frankie as possible: she got up at 4 A.M., woke the girls and dressed them, cooked breakfast, then jumped into the shower after she’d settled them in front of the TV with their food. They ate and went back to sleep. Coco reset the alarm for Frankie; all he had to do was wake them up again, help them into their coats, and give them their bookbags, all of which she’d left on the couch beside the door. Frankie didn’t even have to step outside; he could watch from the front window as Mercedes safely ushered her sisters across the busy street and onto the bus. Frankie stayed with Pearl, and Coco was back by the time the other children got home, after which he was free to go out.
Coco loved working. Her coworkers resented the old folks’ picky behavior, but Coco found their quirkiness interesting. By her second day, she’d memorized the names of each resident. At home, she cooked dinner, the girls did their homework, bathed, ate their evening snacks, then fell asleep, each in her own bed. Coco went to bed herself by ten.
A few weeks later, Pearl underwent another vomiting siege, and shortly after that, Coco, who had begun to suspect she might be pregnant, started vomiting as well. Without a car, Coco couldn’t manage the doctor’s appointments, which she couldn’t always schedule during the two free hours she had after work. So she quit the nursing home and tended to the most pressing problems first: she bused Pearl to her doctor in Albany, which required a minimum of three hours of travel—no local specialists were willing to accept Medicaid. Frankie stayed home with the other children, who couldn’t tolerate more waiting rooms. Coco understood: “I get impatient, and I’m a grown woman. Imagine how it be for a child.” Pearl, who was four, sometimes got so frustrated that she’d grab fistfuls of her uneven hair, yank herself backward, and smack her head on the floor.
At home, Mercedes baby-sat whenever Frankie stepped outside to conduct his business. Without Coco around, however, Frankie allowed the customers into the house. Mercedes would leap to the door at every ring of the bell—which, sometimes, seemed like every few minutes. Quickly, the household returned to chaos. People were always hanging out. As usual, Coco didn’t have the heart to tell her lonely friends to go.
“It’s just like my mother’s,” said Iris. Most of the guests were the same as well: Bambi, Coco’s cousin, had just left Foxy’s in the Bronx and moved in next door to Coco’s with Weedo, Coco’s old neighbor. Munchie, another boy from Foxy’s building, now rented the apartment upstairs. At night, Platinum and her son slept on Coco’s couch cushions, which they arranged on the floor.
Iris accompanied Coco to the clinic for a pregnancy test toward the end of January 1999. But there were lots of young women waiting, and the clinic only tested eight girls a day. Coco’s stamina continued to weaken. In winter, she usually prepared her daughters warm breakfasts—microwave waffles, or eggs and toast—but now she overslept. Mercedes did her best to get her sisters to school, but she overslept as well. When she did get to school, she couldn’t seem to get along with her teachers or her classmates; at home, the battles were more familiar, but she lost them just the same.
On Super Bowl Sunday, after smoking a fat blunt with his homeboys in the bedroom, Frankie floated through the house in a happy cloud. He reclaimed his chair directly in front of the large-screen TV. His neighbors flanked him—Munchie to the left, Weedo to the right. The bowls of chips and nachos moved back and forth. The boys either didn’t notice the children’s hungry eyes or they ignored them.
Mercedes tried to negotiate. She asked Frankie to share. He wouldn’t. She went to the kitchen, where the women were preparing dinner. “Mami, Frankie won’t share,” she reported.
“Mercy, oh, please,” Coco sighed. She didn’t feel like having an argument with Frankie, so she surrendered her last $2 of food stamps, and Mercedes gallantly went to secure more snacks from across the street.
With all the houseguests, Coco had been going to three food pantries and still wasn’t managing. A fair amount of the food went to a pear-shaped seventeen-year-old with stringy hair named Marisol, who lived upstairs with Munchie; besides a bed, they didn’t have any furniture, let alone pots or pans. Marisol had just moved upstate but she already wanted to go back to the Bronx. “I’m too young to be here. I’m a girl. I don’t have no kids. I shouldn’t be living with a man,” she said. On her arm was a bite mark, the size of a lemon; Munchie had caught Marisol looking through his pants for his pay stub.
“I wouldn’t put up with that shit,” Platinum said.
“So, Marisol,” Bambi asked pointedly, “what are you going to do?” Bambi wasn’t one for small talk. She had served seven years for armed robbery and and had lost five kids to foster care. She had little patience for girls who thought they had all sorts of time to fix their problems. Just then, Nikki skidded into the kitchen. “Ma! Ma!” she shouted. Mercedes banged into her from behind. Nikki held up an empty bowl. “Frankie wants chips MA!”
Mercedes interrupted breathlessly. “Ma! Ma! Frankie-wouldn’t-let-us-have-any-of-the-nachos-and-the-cheese-dip-but-now-he-wants-ours!”
“Then give him some,” Coco said.
“Why we have to share, Ma?” Mercedes asked.
“Give them to him, Mercy.”
“It’s not fair!”
“I don�
�t care if it’s fair, dammit!” Coco said. “Give him them, Mercy!”
“Ma!” Mercedes wailed. “MAAA!!”
“Mercy, if you don’t shut up, you going into your room.” Coco ripped the bag from Mercedes’s hand, gruffly dumped the chips into the bowl, and shoved the bowl back at Nikki, who strutted away holding it too-cutely above her head. Mercedes spooked her with a fake punch.
“Ma!” Nikki cried, just as fake. Coco grabbed Mercedes under the arm, dragged her into her bedroom, and slammed the flimsy door.
“She like that. She always gets into it,” Bambi said softly. Marisol bit her lip. Platinum, who was usually never at a loss for words, stared silently ahead. The three decided to step outside to share a cigarette. Coco returned to the scrubbing, her lips tight. She clanked the pot.
The pork chops were ready. Coco put them on the plates and plopped the rice on top. The children ate on the floor. They anxiously awaited halftime, when their goddess, Mariah Carey, was going to perform. They knew all her songs and dance steps and had been practicing for her Super Bowl appearance. Just as she was to rule the screen, Frankie flicked the channel to pro wrestling.
“Aw, Ma!” Nautica moaned.
“What I’m supposed to do?” Coco yelled.
Nikki slapped herself.
“Ma!” Nautica cried again.
“Frankie,” Coco said.
“Ma,” he whined, and ignored them. He loved pro wrestling. Meanwhile, Pearl circulated among the company, holding out a new Barney book. “Read my book?” she asked. No one took the bait.
No, Mami, later.
After the game, Pearl.
No, Ma, go play.
But Marisol suddenly lifted Pearl onto her lap and read the book. “Again!” Pearl said. By the third reading, Pearl had the story down.
Coco slept her way through February. The girls missed school. Nautica cried bitterly; she loved school. Under the latest round of welfare changes, $60 was deducted from Coco’s check for each child who had more than two unexcused absences. Coco lost most of her cash allotment. Mercedes unsuccessfully orchestrated breakfast for her sisters, who wanted to prepare breakfast themselves. “Do you want to burn yourself? Do you want to burn yourself?” she yelled. “I’ma gonna punch you. MA!” Even Frankie was openly worried. Then Coco found out for sure that she was pregnant again.
The response to Coco’s fifth pregnancy was mixed. Frankie was pleased; he rarely saw his children. A new baby would give him a chance to do things right. He also wanted Coco to be the mother of his child. Unlike other girls he knew, Coco always put her children first. He confided to her, “I hope I’m the one to bless you with a son.” Iris was so upset that she refused to speak to Coco. The grandmothers worried about Coco’s health, given Pearl’s difficult birth. Milagros surprised Coco and didn’t even give her a lecture. All she said was “It’s going to be a lot of work and nobody dies from hard work.” Hector told her, “I support you no matter what. You my sister. Frankie’s my man, I love that nigga, yo. But not for nothing, Coco, he’s a loser. He ain’t going anywhere. You going to be raising that baby on your own. But you do what you gotta do.” Coco accurately imagined Cesar’s response—Why you having another baby when you can’t take care of the ones you’ve got? Coco called Sunny, Wishman’s mother, during a visit to the Bronx, and Sunny relayed the news to Wishman, who came over to see Coco at Foxy’s. He tried to talk to Pearl, but she ignored him. Wishman asked Coco, “How did it happen?”
“It just happened.”
“But why this?” he asked, poking her belly with his finger. She shrugged. Nikki’s father, Kodak, wished her luck.
The guests drifted away, but still there was never enough food in the house. Distraught, Coco returned to the Department of Social Services and applied for emergency food stamps. She mentioned the pregnancy to her caseworker.
“I don’t know whether to congratulate you or say I’m sorry,” the caseworker said. Coco smiled weakly; she didn’t know herself.
Coco wanted a son but was terrified of having a nervous breakdown as a result. How could she manage another child? “I feel like I’m gonna go crazy if I have this baby, for real. I’m gonna end up like my mother, in the hospital and taking all kinds of medication,” she said. Fresh red spots lined her hairline. Some bled, like sickly freckles. Coco considered getting an abortion, but then she thought about what people would think of her for murdering an unborn child. One night, she polled her girls on the way to the dollar store. “Mommy might take out the baby. I went through the same thing with the four of ya’aw, but I thought I could do it, and there’s so much I want to do for you—you know how Mommy wants to go to Great Escapes? And I swear, I’ll get you there this summer if I have to rent the damn van myself. But I can’t do this.”
“Mommy, that ain’t right,” Mercedes said.
“I know, Mercy, but Mommy can’t do it. You see the problems I got with Frankie now?”
“But, Mommy, it ain’t right,” Mercedes said again.
“We’ll help you, Mommy,” Nikki said. “We can make the bottle.”
“Mommy had ya’aw when she was young, but now ain’t a good time.”
Nikki seemed convinced. “It be better when we older, like eighteen, cuz we can do for you then. We can buy the baby’s bottle, buy the Pampers.”
“I be stuck with Frankie the rest of my life,” Coco said. “No matter what he do to me, if Mommy has the baby, I be stuck with him; no matter what, I have to stay with him. I ain’t joking. You girls could grow up and Mommy still have to be with him.” Coco began to cry, heaving, desperate cries. When she calmed down, she looked upward and asked God, straight-up, about her odds: “What if this is my son?” she said in a voice close to panic. The girls watched silently.
At the dollar store, Coco treated her daughters to three things each. Nikki tried, in kind, to lift up her mother’s spirits: “Mommy, thank you for all you do for us. You a nice mommy. You take us to nice places. I love you.”
“Why you love me?” Coco asked.
“Cuz you do for us. You buy us things.”
“You love me only cuz I buy you things?” Coco asked.
Nautica said, “Yeah!”
“Listen to her!” said Coco.
Nikki tried again: “I love you cuz you do for us.”
The night felt silent and huge. “I’m waiting for the right answer,” said Coco. “I’m waiting.”
Mercedes knew it: “Because you’re my mother.” Coco was pleased. That was the right answer in her book.
Sometimes Coco slept through dinner. She dragged herself out of bed and vomited blood. “I make them suffer, I feed them out of cans,” she said sadly. She ignored the telephone, which always seemed to be the school, calling about Mercedes:
Mercedes refused to listen to her teacher.
Could someone collect Mercedes from detention?
Mercedes fought with a classmate.
Mrs. Rodriguez, we’ve suspended Mercedes again.
Again the school demanded that Coco get Mercedes into counseling.
Coco did not believe in counseling. Her family had been required to go into therapy after their father died, when Coco was eight years old. The therapist had continued to see Hector individually, and he’d placed Hector on Dilantin, but Hector remained the most volatile one in her family. Foxy’s condition hadn’t improved in the six years of weekly therapy since her three-week stay in what she called “psychiatric.” As far as Coco was concerned, the doctors had only made Foxy’s drug use more dangerous; in addition to the cocaine, now she took prescription pills. Coco didn’t think her mother was equipped to be her own pharmacist. Besides, pills turned into their own problems. If Iris didn’t take her antidepressants, she became frighteningly ill. Said Coco, “I see how it brought my brother down, I see how it brought my mother down, and how my sister can’t be without it.”
When Coco finally did take Mercedes to a therapist, Mercedes spent the first session hiding beneath her coat. That couns
elor told Coco that giving in to Mercedes’s demands was unproductive—an observation that Coco found obvious. “I give in with all my girls,” Coco later said. “I guess they always going to end up blaming me, anyway. It’s a waste of my time. Mercedes won’t say nothing. Counseling ain’t for me.”
For Mercedes, counseling presented different obstacles. To speak forthrightly with a therapist meant navigating a minefield of secrets, which meant betraying her mother and placing her sisters in jeopardy. Welfare couldn’t know about Frankie, because Coco could be disqualified for her housing subsidy and cash benefits. And what about the drugs that Frankie sometimes hid from Coco in the house?
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
For the first few years of prison, sitting in his cell, Cesar had imagined a limited future: He’d get out and go back to what he called his “crimey ways.” He’d reappear on Tremont, stronger than ever, and exact revenge upon those enemies and former friends foolish enough to have written him off. He’d enjoy lots of girls. He could already hear the comments women would make about his chiseled body. “Damn, he been in nine years and he come out looking young. He look brand-new!” If he blessed Coco and Roxanne with a nighttime visit, they would remember why they should have waited for him.
But the length of the enforced separation from Tremont and the distance from the day-to-day struggles of his family had granted Cesar an unanticipated reprieve. He hadn’t been able to see the shape of his life until he’d been removed from it. Giselle’s lack of interest in Cesar’s toughness had also cleared a way for him to explore less familiar parts of himself. While Cesar was growing up, if Lourdes or Jessica or Elaine ran into trouble, they would say, “Cesar will take care of it.” His friends expected him to resolve their beefs; Cesar remembered the time Rocco got into a fight in the pool hall on Mount Hope and Cesar pulled out his gun, after which Rocco disappeared. Mighty had been the only one who equally shared the burden of being the tough guy. Cesar had gone into these situations willingly, but now his naïveté disturbed him; he’d begun to wonder whether his friends’ and family’s dependence actually qualified as love. In the box Cesar couldn’t intimidate, protect, or save anyone; his physical powerlessness was complete. The box had also forced Cesar to contend with what he later called his greatest demon—the terror of being alone. He thought about the comfort he’d received from all the girls who he’d been with. Sleeping with a girl beside him, he said, “was the only time I felt safe, at peace.” The enforced solitude had also made him reevaluate what it meant to be a son, a father, and a man. “The box gives you time to think why your kids act the way you do,” Cesar said. Protecting family was too large a responsibility for any child. Mercedes was weighing heavily upon Cesar’s mind.
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