Lost Girls

by Robert Kolker

  Maureen moved in with her sister, Missy, and her children in a low-income housing development in Groton called Branford Manor—once considered a grand experiment in suburban public housing, but by then another anonymous project in a struggling town. The three of them were reunited—Maureen, Missy, and Will, grown up, each with children of their own. As their mother receded from their daily lives, Missy hosted Thanksgiving and Christmas; she was younger than Maureen but had always been more grounded, more practical. At least once a week, Missy cooked large dinners to lure Will and his kids over. Will had been a Fitch High School football star and now was working as a mechanic at Midas. He became the family’s protector and paterfamilias. If Maureen ever complained to him about a boyfriend, she knew the conversation would end with her brother attacking whoever had caused her to worry.

  Maureen was the one everyone loved—the dreamer, the artist, the romantic. One morning she brought two stray kittens in from the rain. When Missy noticed they had fleas and told Maureen to kick them out, her sister went on about about how heartless she was, went shopping for the right shampoo, and came back and bathed them, even though they scratched her to pieces before it was done. The real world still stumped her sometimes. Her most promising job, as a card dealer at Foxwoods, ended in under a year when she started calling in sick too often. Delivering pizza or running the register at the ShopRite failed to capture her imagination. More and more, she left her daughter with Missy while she went out. Sometimes Missy would lose patience, and the little sister would lecture the big one, and Will, the peacemaker, would try to calm Missy down. These confrontations made Maureen feel guilty, and she’d spend whatever she earned to make amends—presents for Caitlin, a lobster bake, or pizzas for Missy and her kids.

  Still, when Missy thinks of their time together now, all she can remember is a family idyll: Maureen reading Shel Silverstein aloud to Caitlin and, later on, Missy’s children; Maureen playing dress-up with Missy’s daughter and the cat; the whole crew heading out together to get grinders and sit in the park; Maureen filling her stacks of marble composition books with poetry and rap lyrics. The apartments were almost like townhouses, each with a yard out back. All weekend long in good weather, the grills would be going, the neighbors would come out, and the children ate and played. Maureen would bring Caitlin there, too, when she could; Maureen never seemed more at ease than when she was barefoot and in a sundress, running free in the backyard, smiling broadly.

  It took a while for the situation to become strained. By 2003, Maureen was twenty-one with a four-year-old daughter, no steady job, and no place of her own to live. Another person might have resigned herself to the limitations that bound her life—no diploma, no job good enough to support her daughter—and never even tried. But Maureen wouldn’t make the same choices that Missy did. For Maureen, the possibilities lay ahead, the breaks this way and that of a life she had barely begun. She remained flexible and curious. Who knew what luck would find her? Maybe she’d be a rapper, maybe a model. The plan always changed. If nothing else, Maureen always had a plan.

  The following year, Maureen stopped by her friend Jay DuBrule’s place, almost giddy with excitement. She’d brought Caitlin, then five, and directed her into another room to play with Jay’s daughter, who was a year older. “Oh, look!” Maureen said before the kids ran into the other room. “I had the photo shoot!”

  Jay was living down the hall from Missy at Branford Manor when he first met Maureen. He worked for a time doing remote broadcasting setups for a local radio station. Maureen interned for him once, but when they asked her to wear an elephant suit, she wasn’t feeling it, and she quit before the shift ended. Since then, Jay had been laid off from that job and was working two others—delivering paint for Sherwin-Williams and delivering pizza. They had grown close. She could talk to Jay about anything. They slept together now and then, though neither of them talked about what that might mean. Better to be friends forever instead of ex-boyfriend and ex-girlfriend someday.

  Maureen saw plenty of men, but recently, she had left Missy’s and moved in with the one she was most serious about. Steve ran a pawnshop in Norwich. Tall with a mustache and beard, Steve was white but dressed and talked ghetto. He never wanted to be around any of Maureen’s friends or family, not even Missy and Will. Their relationship seemed strained almost from the start. One friend remembers Steve talking about Maureen as if she were a child who couldn’t be relied on to do anything. Maureen would say that was his way of saying he wanted her to stay home. Jay’s place had become another refuge for Maureen, the way Missy’s place had been. She and Jay wouldn’t always hook up. Sometimes she’d come there to share some weed or go online. Jay always had a few different computers lying around. Being at Jay’s place to tinker with her MySpace page was always better than using the computer at the public library. Other times they would hang out, watch their daughters play in the yard, watch a video, or write a new rap together.

  Maureen talked more and more about writing for a rapper one day, or better still, becoming one herself—like Lil’ Kim, she joked, only hotter. Her approach was different—less playful and more grave, like Three 6 Mafia. Where Lil’ Kim wrote with coy, self-aware swagger about money and sex, Maureen wrote indignantly about coming up in hard times.

  There’s too many people walking around with plastic faces

  Too many children hanging in the wrong places

  Too many dirty cops controlling ghetto blocks

  Too many fistfights ending in shots

  Too many girls taking to wrong paths

  It’s not too late to do the math

  Jay thought she was nothing short of a poet. Missy thought so, too. But Maureen was twenty-two, and her music wasn’t getting the attention she’d hoped it would. The photos were her solution—a stepping-stone. She had been using MySpace to market her music and network with other rappers when she noticed ads for modeling there. Those ads led her to a site called ModelMayhem.com, which invited her to send in a portfolio that bookers could reference. She’d found a friend to take some photos for free, as long as he got to keep the negatives. The pictures she showed Jay that night weren’t provocative—just Maureen smiling from head to toe, wearing a few different dresses and one that would be considered lingerie, a red nightgown. Jay thought she looked adorable.

  She was open to anything: catalogs, magazines, music videos. When she enrolled on the site, she started getting dozens of e-mails from places purporting to be modeling agencies that, after a few clicks, turned out to mean nude modeling and sometimes escorting. She wasn’t exactly surprised. What surprised her was the money. Clicking some of the links, Maureen saw how escorting was made to seem like webcam stripping, only in person, with no sex involved. From there, it was easy to see how much money she could make if she did have sex. As far as she could tell, the only major catch was having to sign on with an escort service. Maureen had no interest in sharing her money or being an employee—trading, essentially, one dependency for another.

  But there was another way to make the same amount of money completely on her own. On Craigslist, Maureen saw women posting ads right in Groton, earning a living without leaving their homes, and not having to share what they made with anyone—not a pimp, not a service, not a boyfriend.

  MELISSA

  The black walk-ins at the Continental Beauty School were paying about an eighth of the normal price to get their hair styled. So they couldn’t say a word, not one of them, when they saw that the girl who was about to work on their weaves and extensions was white.

  As the customers mouthed silent prayers, Melissa Barthelemy went to work—smiling, confident, almost unnaturally relaxed for a stylist-in-training entrusted with kinks that she had never known herself. She’d comb through the hair first, making a neat part, and grab a very small section as close to the hairline as possible, pulling tight without sending the woman into hysterics. Using her hand as a pitchfork, she’d divide that tiny section of hair into three puffy strands that sh
e held between her middle and index fingers. Next came the twist, from left to right, and finally the tuck. The twist was nothing without the tuck—grabbing the free hair left underneath and moving it into the braid. The underneath catch, followed by another twist, was what was so hard to remember each time, and even harder to get right without having to start all over. Braid, tuck, and twist, braid, tuck, and twist, braid, tuck, and twist. Melissa never slipped.

  The cornrow designs weren’t just a snap for Melissa; they were a pleasure. She had spent years practicing, not only on her friends but on her half sister. Amanda was nine years younger than Melissa; her father, unlike Melissa’s, was black. On countless afternoons, Amanda would squeal as Melissa tugged and pulled and braided and twisted and experimented. Yet Amanda probably would have preferred white-people hair. She shopped at American Eagle and Abercrombie. Melissa, meanwhile, wore tight braids herself for a time, listened to nothing but hip-hop, and dated black guys almost exclusively. Sometimes their mother, Lynn, thought her daughters had been born in the wrong bodies. Amanda, in her heart of hearts, wanted to be white. And Melissa, for as long as anyone could remember, wished she had been born black.

  Lynn Barthelemy had known before she bought a pregnancy test. She never missed her period. She told Mark the results. Mark, proud of himself, proposed marriage. That only upset her more—she didn’t already have enough to worry about?

  It was September 1984. Lynn was sixteen, beginning her sophomore year at Seneca Vocational High School in Buffalo. Mark was two years older, a senior on the track team. He was from a Polish family in Kaisertown, the German-Polish section of South Buffalo. She was from the North Side, a neighborhood called Kensington-Bailey, a leafy section of town with large houses and wide, quiet streets. They had been together for a year. Mark used to join Lynn’s family on picnics to Emery Park and the beach at Port Colborne, just across the border in Canada. The pregnancy posed a problem.

  She thought about marrying Mark and what that might be like, and she drew a blank. Mark was so meek. He let his family run his life, and whatever free agency remained, he ceded to Lynn. She couldn’t see spending the rest of her life that way. She thought about abortion, but that scared her. Mark was against it, too. They both came from Catholic families. Lynn had trouble processing the idea of giving a baby away. Whenever she thought about it, she’d start to cry.

  For two months, she kept the pregnancy a secret. Finally, in October, she told her mother, Linda. The news was a shock; usually, it was Lynn’s little sister who misbehaved, while Lynn was the one who had always performed well in school and followed the rules. Lynn was too afraid to tell her father, Elmer, so her mother did it for her. When he heard, he punched a hole in the bathroom door. They didn’t speak for months. Her mother told Lynn not to worry, he’d get over it. Meanwhile, Lynn had a decision to make.

  Lynn’s grandmother offered her wedding rings for a ceremony, if that was what Lynn wanted. At the same time, she tried to be candid. “Don’t marry him just because you’re pregnant,” she said. “You make sure you love him.” When Lynn decided to say yes, her grandmother didn’t let up. “Why don’t you live together for a few months?” she suggested. Mark moved in with Lynn and her parents and sure enough, Lynn learned how he really was. He didn’t dote; he hovered. If she got up off the couch to go to the bathroom, Mark would say, “Where are you going?” If she took a phone call, he wanted to know who was calling. She was about seven months pregnant when she told him the wedding was off.

  Her parents feared for her. “You’re going to have to get a job,” Lynn’s mother said. “And you’re going to have to pay for day care.” Lynn agreed to do both.

  Lynn was offered a spot at a different school, one for teenage mothers. She said no. She wanted to stay at her school and graduate like everyone else. Her swollen belly drew catcalls from the boys as she walked the halls. She got into fights. When the instructor in her church’s confirmation class started talking about abortion and locking eyes with her, Lynn walked out and told her mother the bitch was lucky she didn’t slap her in the face. That spring, when she went into labor at a nearby Catholic hospital and the nun in the room tried to quiet her through her pain, Lynn, as furious as she was terrified, cursed her out: “Shut up! You probably haven’t even had sex!”

  Lynn’s baby entered the world on April 14, 1985, after eighteen hours of labor, weighing seven pounds, nine ounces, with a stubborn head that needed coaxing out with forceps. A few weeks earlier, Grandma Mary had died during an epileptic seizure. Lynn named the baby Melissa Mary Barthelemy.

  Lynn went back to school six weeks after Melissa was born. After the baby’s three-month checkup, Lynn got a job washing dishes after school at the Manhattan Manor nursing home, a twenty-minute walk from her parents’ house. Lynn didn’t know it then, but she would keep that job for the next twenty-five years.

  Linda and Elmer agreed to help with child care. Melissa spent most of her childhood in their house, a three-bedroom clapboard colonial on Stockbridge Avenue in the neighborhood of Kensington-Bailey. The family had moved there in 1978, when Lynn was in third grade. Elmer had paid nineteen thousand dollars for the place, putting down 10 percent, saving the money from his four-hundred-a-week salary working nights in industrial maintenance—first at Freezer Queen, a meatpacking company on the waterfront, and later at Wonder Bread. Both were union jobs; that was when Buffalo still had enough blue-collar work to go around. The neighborhood was warm and welcoming back then. Elmer, a reformed drag racer who served as an air force mechanic during the Vietnam War, tore the house apart room by room and restored it, adding a fourth bedroom up top. Black and white mingled well in the neighborhood; Buffalo had one of the least painful forced school integrations of any big city. Only in looking back did they notice how the conversations with their white neighbors had changed from “Isn’t this a nice place” to “Let’s get out before our house isn’t worth anything.” By the time Melissa was growing up on Stockbridge Avenue, the ice-cream and candy shop on the corner was gone, as was the big Rite Aid, victims of Buffalo’s great rust-belt decline. A pizzeria was destroyed in a fire, and the movie palace also burned down. The crime rate was rising, people were leaving, and the new black neighbors frightened some of the older whites. Elmer thought the new people were decent, but their kids were trouble. He guessed it was jobs: They didn’t have any. Both Freezer Queen and Wonder Bread had left town, around the same time that Buffalo lost Bethlehem Steel and Westinghouse and the auto plant that had employed their neighbor. Elmer found non-union work mowing lawns at an assisted-living community. In the end, it wasn’t just a question of black or white. The whole middle class seemed to be fleeing Kensington-Bailey, the same way Elmer’s parents had fled the East Side a generation earlier.

  Lynn was too busy working to pay much attention to where Melissa went or who her close friends were. With no one person to answer to, Melissa was left to police herself—or not, if she didn’t feel like it. The other kids growing up in Kensington-Bailey were the kids of laid-off union workers—most not interested in finishing school the way Lynn had, and some in gangs. As a little girl, Melissa was adorable, and smart in school with lots of friends, just like Lynn had been. Despite her pixie looks, she was formidable—quick to shout down someone twice her size for looking at her the wrong way. That reminded everyone of Lynn, too. Lynn was kind of glad her daughter was feisty, as she’d been. Her only rule for Melissa was never to hit first.

  Lynn never thought she would live in Kensington-Bailey forever. Melissa was just three when Lynn got an apartment with a boyfriend about ten miles away in South Buffalo. About a year later, Lynn came home early from work, and he was in bed with another woman. She and Melissa moved back to Elmer and Linda’s house. A few years later, Lynn met Andre Funderburg, and they had Amanda, Melissa’s little sister. Andre worked lots of different jobs, from nursing to telemarketing. Though he was black, Elmer and Linda never raised that issue with Lynn. Amanda was born when Melissa was nine. And
re got along well with Melissa, and for a time, the four of them were a family, living in the north end of town. When Andre cheated on Lynn, too, she came to live with Elmer and Linda again, this time with the baby.

  By her early teens, Melissa had boyfriends, although years of long talks about how young Lynn was when she got pregnant seemed to successfully dispel any of Melissa’s romantic notions about having a child. But as Melissa got older, the tough girl Lynn had seen so much of herself in was doing things Lynn had never done—leaving at night and staying out late with friends, then skipping school the next day. Lynn decided something needed to change. She tried sending Melissa to a Friends school for a time, and a teacher told her, “You don’t belong here.” Only when Lynn met one of her daughter’s boyfriends did she start to panic. Jordan was tall and rail-thin, with pitch-black skin. That wasn’t an issue—Amanda was black, Andre was black, most of the neighborhood was black now—but Lynn worried anyway. “He was like a hoodlum,” Lynn said. “He was into dealing drugs, things I didn’t want her to be around. She didn’t agree. She was like, ‘Aw, Mom, he’s my friend.’ ” Lynn was running out of ideas, and now she felt she was running out of time. She had worked so hard to graduate from high school, even with a baby at home; her daughter didn’t seem to care about going to school at all.

  Melissa was about sixteen when Lynn thought of a Hail Mary maneuver. She called Melissa’s father, Mark. He had recently moved to Dallas, where he and his wife had relocated for his wife’s job. Mark agreed to take his daughter in. The reunion failed almost from the start. Melissa called Lynn every chance she could, complaining: “There are cockroaches as big as cows!” She and her stepmother fought. Lynn secretly liked hearing that they hadn’t hit it off, though she knew she might not be hearing the whole story. Maybe Mark’s wife tried to be more like a mother to her, and Melissa fought back. Maybe Mark didn’t know how to deal with Melissa. Plenty of people didn’t. She stayed two and a half years in Texas until she acted out in a way that couldn’t be ignored. Melissa stole her father’s work van and drove it around without a license. She was so tiny—four feet, eleven inches and ninety-five pounds—that the police pulled her over, thinking there was no way she could be old enough to drive. Melissa was sentenced to community service. Her dad got a fine and, soon after, presented his daughter with a plane ticket home for Christmas. The trip was supposed to be just a visit. Mark hadn’t told Melissa that she wasn’t welcome back, leaving that part for Lynn. On the phone, Melissa told her father that his wife must be keeping his balls in her purse.