by Beam, Cris
Mindy understood this stance, at first. She grew up in Bensonhurst in Brooklyn, and her accent still betrayed her roots. The kitchen and living room were festooned with Saint Patrick’s Day decorations when I came to visit; green garland chains hung from the ceiling and leprechauns peeped from the cupboards. Mindy said these were a throwback to her childhood. “My mom died when I was ten, and my dad thought that holidays were a way to bring the family together,” she explained, but even without the decorations, the 1,500-square-foot house was packed with sentiment. Pictures of the family covered walls and tabletops, but there were none of Oneida. When Mindy pulled out her bulging floral scrapbook so she could trace back the whole arduous demise, she found one, of Oneida curled up on the couch. “Well, she looked cute when she was sleeping,” she said hopefully. Glenn shuddered; he wouldn’t even look at the photo. “Brings back too many terrible memories,” he said.
When Oneida first came to the house, there was a short honeymoon phase, they both told me, finishing each other’s sentences. Right at the beginning, they’d splurged on a weekend at Disney World for Oneida, the foster daughter, Nayelly, and the biological daughter, Kristine; Oneida had screamed dramatically and clutched Mindy’s hand on the plane, as she’d never flown before. They both admitted that the trip was fun; aside from Oneida wanting to parade herself at the hotel pool, Mindy said, everyone was on good behavior.
When they got home, Glenn said, the agency was frantic: Oneida was classified as “therapeutic” and Glenn and Mindy weren’t certified to house a child with therapeutic needs. (Because Oneida had shifted from the state’s jurisdiction and back to a city agency, she fell back under her old foster requirements. Doris worked for the state and likely hadn’t noticed this stipulation; besides, Doris had landed the much larger prize—a married couple willing to adopt.) The agency argued that Glenn and Mindy had to drop everything for the next three weekends and attend the requisite classes up in the Bronx if they wanted to keep her. So they took the classes.
“That’s the way the agencies are. When they need you to do something, they need it done tomorrow. When you need something for the kid, you get nothing,” Glenn said, shaking his head. What Glenn and Mindy needed, for the therapeutically classified teenager, was therapy. Within a few weeks of her arrival, Oneida started acting out. At first, she just lied: she’d say she was going to Brooklyn, but she’d end up in the Bronx. Or she’d promise to be home at a certain time and trot in hours later. But then she started disappearing for nights at a time, which later morphed into weeks. Glenn and Mindy would talk to her, ground her, take away her privileges, but they wanted some backup from the agency. They felt that some of this behavior was rooted in Oneida’s early traumas and her years in foster care; she was authorized for free therapy, but for the entire summer she lived with them, no one returned Glenn’s phone calls to set it up.
“We’d call and they wouldn’t call back. When Oneida was in the RTC, she was in therapy all the time. What changed? Just because she’s in Staten Island, she doesn’t need therapy anymore?” Glenn fumed. He also said they didn’t receive an agency check for Oneida’s care until August, though she moved in with them in June, and their water and electric bills doubled due to her hour-long showers and her inattention to lights. Arguments in the home escalated; Oneida believed Glenn and Mindy were hoarding her allowance money, and she disappeared for longer and longer stretches. “Even when she was AWOL and she ran away, we’d call the agency and they wouldn’t follow up on it. They’re useless, totally useless.”
The crisis peaked in September, three months after Oneida’s arrival. Glenn got a call from someone who knew Oneida, who also made Glenn promise never to reveal his or her identity. Glenn agreed, and the person told Glenn that Oneida wanted out of the house, but she was afraid the agency wouldn’t allow it without cause. So Oneida had hatched a plan: she was going to peg Glenn with an accusation of sexual abuse.
“I panicked,” Glenn said. “The postmaster is the second most powerful governmental official, and in the little towns like where we are, everybody knows you. If this would have gotten back to my job, I would have been fired, like that.” Glenn snapped his fingers. “Once the allegation’s been made, even if it’s disproved, there are still people who’ll believe it. I didn’t work twenty-three years to get fired, just because I’m trying to help a kid.”
This time, when Glenn called the agency, he got a response. He located a director and said, “When I go home today, I’m packing up all her stuff and leaving it in front of my house. You need to come pick it up, because she’s never coming back. We’re done with her.”
Suddenly, Glenn and Mindy were the terrible stereotype: foster parents who hurl a foster kid’s belongings to the curb, in garbage bags.
“We were petrified,” Mindy said. “This was our life.”
But the agency fought back. Glenn said they told him, “You’re not done with her; she’s in your house and she’s staying there. Otherwise, we will shut down your house as a foster home.”
Glenn relented; after all, they had Nayelly, and Nayelly was still a foster child. They couldn’t, and wouldn’t, lose her. They agreed to have a meeting—with Oneida, with the agency, and with ACS.
Mindy interrupted, her dark eyes blazing: “We had to say we were going to have Oneida removed before they would even think about helping us. And we’d been asking for help all along!”
It was clear at the meeting, both Glenn and Mindy asserted, that Oneida was happy to leave Staten Island. They believe she originally wanted any escape from the residential treatment center, and once Glenn and Mindy had provided that, Oneida could think only of Brooklyn.
“She uses people,” Glenn said bitterly.
Mindy nodded, watching her husband carefully. “She uses people, but that’s how she’s gotten through her life.”
At the meeting, despite Glenn’s impatience, the agency said Oneida had to stay one more night; then they’d find her another placement.
Oneida stayed, but once everyone was sleeping she used a knife to cut all the cords to the house computer. In the morning she left for Brooklyn.
It took me several months to track down Oneida, so I could get her side of the story. I finally found her online, promoting some dance at a club in the Bronx.
“Ya this is me,” Oneida texted when I landed her phone number. “How r u?”
We met on a sunny afternoon in the Bronx, on the corner of 180th and Morris Park, across from the transit police station. She was about half an hour late, giving me plenty of time to peruse the real estate listings tacked onto a sandwich board, offering Section 8 apartments. Little kids bought popsicles from the bodega, and a drug dealer eyed me suspiciously; I was standing there too long.
Oneida looked the same as she had the day of her adoption meeting with Glenn and Mindy some eighteen months before, though she was missing her glasses and squinted a bit to see. Her curly hair was crimped with gel, her bangs crispy straight lines down her forehead. Her puffy upper lip makes her look as if she’s been either crying or kissing, though that day it was neither; Oneida had just been relaxing at home—her fifth since she’d left Staten Island.
“Them white people?” Oneida answered, when I asked her what happened with Glenn and Mindy. She made a face as if she had swallowed something bitter, and also as if she was remembering something very long ago. “They was racist.”
We were walking toward East Tremont, looking for someplace to eat. McDonald’s was out, because Oneida had just been fired from there, for “getting into an altercation with a customer.” Oneida waved her hand vaguely down the block. “My biological dad lives not too far from here, just a couple blocks away,” she said. I asked if she had seen him. “Not for a long time, maybe a few weeks before the summer. I don’t really like seeing him; he lives in this bummy basement apartment. He’s a junkie. I mean, I don’t mind if people ask me for money, but every time?”
We settled on a Chinese place, with a $6 all-you-can-eat buf
fet. “I’m a very picky eater,” Oneida said, piling her plate with bright red sweet-and-sour pork and cheesecake from the end of the table. She ate only meat and cheese and bread; no rice, no vegetables, no fruits. And cheesecake, when she could get it.
At the beginning, Oneida admitted while chewing thoughtfully on her pork, she liked being a part of the Staten Island family. But shortly after she moved in, Oneida said, Glenn and Mindy became “judgmental.” One time her boyfriend stopped by when she wasn’t home, and Glenn wouldn’t let him in, “not even to use the bathroom!” Oneida was outraged. “And then they were judgmental of my music. The guy was Catholic and the lady was Jewish. If you that way, why take me? I’m Hispanic, you know I’m going to listen to Hispanic music.”
The stated issue was one of noise control, but Oneida felt racism was underneath. “I’d only play my music on the computer, and you know that can’t get that loud,” she explained. “And then one day I came home and they’d put Krazy Glue on the volume!”
Oneida agreed that she took off for Brooklyn a lot, but that was only to visit her best friend, and to get a break from Staten Island, which she described as “too much of a suburb. All you see is bushes and trees.” The high school, too, was a difficult adjustment. “The school was huge, like four thousand children, and it was nothing but Chinese and white. I didn’t mind being at that school, but it was how the kids looked at me—like I was some ghetto Spanish girl.”
Glenn, she told me, was more troubling than Mindy because he had a temper. They had their biggest argument right before their final meeting with the agency. “I wanted to go into my room and he was in there watching TV,” Oneida said. Oneida’s bedroom was in the basement, where the sixty-four-inch flat-screen TV was mounted to the wall and where Glenn had always watched sports—long before any kids arrived. I saw this room when I visited Staten Island; despite the girly bedspread it still looked like a sports fan’s room: team pennants were pegged all over the walls. “I was like, ‘Can you get out? I want to get my things for a shower.’”
Glenn told her to wait; he was at an important part of the game. Or she could simply get her clothes and go. Oneida was horrified, and furious. “I said, ‘You want to watch me get my bra and panties? Have some type of respect—I’m a female, I sleep here!’ I called him a pervert.”
Oneida knew from past experience that she had to be extra-vigilant to protect herself. She told me she’d been raped twice, in her teens, by two different men, and she was molested repeatedly as a young child. She never confessed to these early incidents, but she was examined at three different hospitals and the doctors figured it out; she remembers these exams distinctly. Oneida knows these experiences have sometimes made it difficult for her to assess true danger. “Like one night, Glenn stood in my room while I was sleeping because somebody called the house at three in the morning,” she said, by way of example. “I was scared. I didn’t know what that was about. I didn’t know if he was being inappropriate.”
So were these incidents the reason that Glenn got a phone call about Oneida’s idea of charging him with sexual misconduct? I told her that in Glenn’s version of events, she was planning to file an accusation of abuse.
Oneida didn’t blink. “Not at all. I guess they just felt like that.”
In Oneida’s memory, the reason she was removed from Staten Island was that Glenn believed she was going to set fire to the house. It was an apt metaphor, but one I’d never heard from Glenn. In the end it didn’t matter much to Oneida what anyone thought she was plotting; all she wanted at that time was out.
Unfortunately for Oneida, she didn’t like any of her next placements better. After Staten Island, Oneida was moved to a home where, Oneida claimed, the foster mother hit her children with spatulas and her foster sister stole her sneakers.
Oneida was removed and sent to “a Trinidadian lady who was cool.” But she lived in the neighborhood where Oneida had been raped, and Oneida didn’t want to leave the house to go to school. “The guys in that neighborhood is all on top of me, on top of me, and the lady is calling me lazy. I kind of messed it up for myself; I got in an altercation,” she said. “Horrible.”
In the next house, Oneida was alone—too alone. There were no other foster kids, and the mother made Oneida stay home by herself whenever she left. “It was horrible. There was no phone reception there; I had to go to the bathroom and talk through the window, that’s how bad the connection was. And there was no cable!”
The next place had kids, but the mom was stingy, Oneida said. She wouldn’t give Oneida her allowance money, and she never did the laundry. “She was an elderly lady and all she do is talk about you to the other foster girl. Horrible.”
The long string of horrible seemed to have hit pause recently, Oneida said. She liked her new foster family, just a few blocks away from the Chinese restaurant. There was a mom and a dad, and a few foster kids, and the parents had even let Oneida’s ex-boyfriend sleep over, on the couch. She had her own room with a queen-size bed, and the family watched movies together, on cable.
Oneida had lived with her latest family for only two weeks, and she knew all about the deceptive promise of a honeymoon period. Still, this short reprieve from upheavals had allowed her to think again about her long-term plans. Oneida was almost eighteen and figured she had about one year of high school left to graduate. She’d attended three different high schools in the past academic year alone, and all of those infrequently, so it was hard to tell where her credits really lined up. She knew she wasn’t prepared to take the Regents exams, and the new high school she was thinking of attending didn’t even offer a Regents diploma, which was a requisite for college.
“With the diploma that I’ll get, I’ll be better off with a GED. I can only go to a vocational school, like a cooking school. Or dancing, I love dancing,” Oneida said, tapping at her cell phone. “I want to do something professional, where you get up in the morning and wear a suit. Like a lawyer, or a security guard. I want to have high income, but I don’t know how to do that with my diploma.”
Oneida’s real dream, she said, was to move into her own apartment in Bushwick, Brooklyn, near Knickerbocker and DeKalb, where she was born. Ideally, she’d work for the Special Victims Unit. “I want to be a detective, like on Law and Order,” she added, finally putting down her phone and widening her small brown eyes. “The only thing is it may not be possible because I’m too emotional. I’m emotional when I see dead people, or kids getting raped.”
Bruce Green ended up hitting the same psychological wall that Glenn did after Oneida left. While Bruce had once believed he could contain any teenager’s chaos in his strict and loving household, Bruce had reached the limits of his faith. Three years after I met Bruce, he and Allyson had accepted their eighth teenager, and they had just called the agency with a ten-day notice to send him back.
“David was on a gay crusade,” Bruce said, referring to the boy who had moved in and promptly sparked a crush from their autistic son, Russell. Bruce was standing on the stoop, drinking a beer and sanding the door frame, preparing it for a new coat of varnish. Over the past year or so, Bruce had rarely been around when I came over after school let out to see the kids or Allyson; he had taken to working the swing shift as well as most weekends. But a recent knee injury had landed Bruce some comp time, and he was using the spare hours to make repairs around the house. Allyson was down at the carport with Allen and baby Anthony, where the cement had been broken down for some repaving. “We did a ten-day notice on David because he wanted to show out. He was arguing with everybody about being gay—he said we isolated him in the house, said Allyson pushed religion on him.”
Rather than working to mold David into the Green ideology, Bruce sent him back; it was easier that way, and besides, Bruce’s ideas about foster care had shifted over the past three years. He sanded more slowly and looked at me. “I used to think that any child that came to us, we could help, but . . .” Bruce paused to take a drink from his beer. “We won�
��t be taking any more teenagers. They already have too much damage.”
Bruce’s tone was sad, with a bitter edge. Allyson was often stressing the ways the system failed the kids, but in Bruce’s eyes, the foster parents were a primary casualty. He reminded me of the way he’d suggested that Edwin Gould merely provide photo vouchers for foster families whenever they took in a new child. The agency had loved the idea, he said, but it had been three years, and nothing had come of it.
Still, Bruce said, even without the benefits, and even with all the hard times, he would stick it out with the kids he had left. They may try his patience, they may disobey and run away, but, he said, “Most foster parents would just give up, they’d say, ‘You’re grown.’ But we don’t do that—we’re family, and we’re in it for the long haul.”
I asked about Dominique and Bruce flinched. He was squatting to sand the lower part of the door frame. “Dominique was supposed to be a favor,” he said, defensive. “She was supposed to be an emergency placement and she stayed seven months.”
I reminded him that he was going to adopt her. I was there.
Bruce stood up to look me square in the face. He had a good twelve inches on me. “Yes, we were going to adopt her. But even Dominique, in her most honest moment, will say she pushed. And that was her mistake. She fought with everybody—she fought with Fatimah, she fought with Tonya, she even fought with Charles, and he doesn’t fight with anybody.” Bruce sighed and wiped his hands on his jeans, which had elaborate crosses stitched into the back pockets. “I used to think I could save any child who walked through my door, but I can’t. Dominique just wasn’t a fit.”
Bruce moved on to varnishing. He worked in silence for a while until Russell suddenly emerged from around the corner.
“Why aren’t you downtown?” Bruce and Allyson said, almost in perfect unison. Bruce put down his paintbrush to cross his arms. “What time is it?” Bruce asked.
