Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bro (49 page)

In the meantime, Mercedes had continued to complain about her toothaches, and she was still taking lots of baths; Coco brought her to the clinic. The dentist said that five of her teeth were rotten and needed to be removed; the doctor diagnosed Mercedes with genital warts. He explained that he had to notify BCW. Coco was devastated. Mercedes had always had warts, ever since she was a little girl, but the pediatrician in the Bronx had never treated it as a problem. Suddenly, this doctor was saying that her daughter might have been molested. Although there were other possible explanations, now that the suspicion had been voiced, Coco assumed the worst.

The sexual threat men posed to little girls was so pervasive that even the warnings meant to avert it were saturated with fatalism. For the mothers of girls, this threat hung over the whole of life, like a low cover of dread; it was one of the more commonly given reasons why expectant parents wanted boys. Good mothers didn’t go from man to man not only because promiscuity was frowned upon, but also because protecting children meant limiting the number of men that passed through a house. The rules sounded clear if you listened to what people said: never leave your girls alone with a man who wasn’t blood. In practice, however, that expectation was unrealistic, and women frequently failed to meet it: a neighbor would mind a baby while the mother made an emergency visit to the hospital; a sister would need to run to the store and her brother’s friend would watch her niece; a friend would offer to keep an eye on the kids to give an exhausted woman a break; children often stayed awake long after their mothers fell asleep. And all of this was further complicated if adults were drinking and using drugs.

Coco believed she was vigilant. From their infancy, she’d admonished her girls to keep their legs closed and to stay off men’s laps. She never let them go away with strangers but, given her profound insecurities and the fluid kinship relationships on which she depended, it was impossible—and sometimes rude—to draw a hard line between who was like family and who was not. A lifetime assault of contradictory messages—to be sexy, to respect, that all men were dogs but that without them women were nothing—reinforced her sense of powerlessness and futility. In a sense, Coco had been both fighting this eventuality and waiting for it all her life, so that now her guilt and failure trumped the very real question of whether the abuse had actually happened or not. Mercedes’s own confusion
showed during her examination with the doctor: her mother had always told her not to let a man touch her. The doctor had to bribe her with a lollipop.

Cesar had been transferred to Sing Sing. Coco felt that she had to tell him immediately, and in person. Foxy agreed to watch Nikki and Pearl. Coco, Mercedes, and Nautica took the train to Ossining.

Coco was frightened. She hadn’t been able to sleep the night before. In the visiting room, she approached a guard who stood at a podium. She explained to him about Mercedes’s warts and said, “I don’t know how my husband will take it.” He moved her to a table nearer him. Coco pulled Nautica onto her lap. “Don’t tell Daddy, Mercy,” Coco said.

“Why?” Mercedes asked.

“If Daddy gets mad, they will keep him in jail longer,” Coco said. Mercedes moved into the empty chair facing the officer. “Move here, Mercy, that chair’s for the inmate,” she added.

“What’s an inmate?” Mercedes asked.

“The person that’s in jail. Naughty, take the gum out your mouth.” Nautica refused. “Naughty, take the gum out and Daddy will take you to play in the playroom,” Coco tried. She spotted Cesar. “Mercy, Naughty—Daddy,” she whispered. Nautica clambered off her and ran after her sister. One on each arm, Cesar carried his daughters back to the table. Mercedes settled on his lap. Nautica tugged him toward the playroom. “You want to sit on Daddy’s lap?” Cesar asked Nautica. Nautica smiled bashfully. “Naughty, you wanna sit on Daddy’s lap?” he asked again. She declined. “Aw, all right then,” he said, hurt. He faked a punch to her belly.

“Mercedes,” Coco said, and sucked in her breath. She didn’t pause after that: “You know the warts on her that she had from the time I wrote you in Harlem Valley when Mercy was a baby? Well, down here, they never paid them no mind. But up there? They real strict, right, Mercy? They look hard into everything. I went to the doctor and they said somebody was messing with her, and on Monday she’s going to have a physical because she has to have one before they get removed, but they got BCW and everyone involved, and I have to find out from the hospital down here to get the records from how old she was. The only two people she was left with was my mother and your mother, and your mother says it might be Richie, but if he was going to do something, he would have done it to me and my sister. . . .”

Cesar stared at Coco; Mercedes looked at her mother, then turned up to her father, then turned back to her mother again. Coco finished and smiled dumbly.

“You find something funny?” Cesar said icily.

“No.”

“What so funny then?”

“Nothing.” Coco didn’t know why she smiled.

“You finished?” he said impatiently. She nodded. “We’ll talk about this later,” he said, then reached for his daughters’ hands. They spent the rest of the visit in the children’s room. They built houses with bright blocks and ate the plastic food Nautica served them on dishes she washed in a plastic sink. They played dominoes. He gave them pony rides so fast that between the bumps and the laughter they couldn’t catch their breath.

Back in the Bronx, Coco stopped by Lourdes’s to report what had happened, but Lourdes was “all into her business.” Coco next tried Elaine, who was down the block, visiting her mother-in-law. Coco hollered up to the window and Elaine and her family met her in the lobby. Mercedes was hungry, so Elaine’s husband, Angel, went off to get french fries. Since the last time Coco had seen her, Elaine had put on a lot of weight. She’d returned to school. She and Angel were having problems. The children started a game of tag. Elaine asked Coco how she was. Whole minutes passed before Coco could stop crying enough to be able to speak. “Don’t you think if Richie woulda done it, that he would have done it to me and my sister?” she asked.

“It never happened in your family,” Elaine said quietly. “It never happened in your family,” she repeated, her voice getting firm. “It happened in my family. I said to my mother, ‘Mom, if it happened in our family, and the only place the baby was, was with our family and her family, don’t you think that it means it probably happened in our family?’ She said she never left the baby with her boyfriend except for when she went to the store. And you know my mother, Coco. She wasn’t at the store for no five, ten minutes. Forty-five minutes every time. ‘And who gave the girls a bath while you were cooking? And who went to hit the girls to go to bed? And who stayed with the girls when you went to the store?’ My mother just cried.”

Coco cried during the ride back to Foxy’s. Mercedes and Nautica watched her silently. Coco’s thoughts returned to something Elaine had said about Jessica—how Jessica didn’t do anything when the doctor discovered Serena’s abuse. Elaine had emphasized the point. “She chose to not hear. She
chose
it. But you are doing something about it, Coco. You are trying to find out,” Elaine had said. It also touched Coco that in the
eight years she’d known Elaine, it was the first time Elaine had ever given her a hug.

Back at Sing Sing, after Coco’s visit, Cesar trashed his cell. “It was mad dark. It was deep,” a friend said. “I ain’t never seen Cesar like that.” Cesar tore up his letters and ripped apart his books. He shredded his clothes and his bedsheets. He destroyed everything he owned but the photographs. The guards let him be.

Coco told everybody she spoke to in the Bronx that day about what she believed had happened to Mercedes—neighbors, cousins, Rocco’s wife—as though the craziness she felt could find relief by raising the general level of alarm. She also told them so she could anticipate their judgment, receive their comfort, and assuage her guilt. Mercedes pulled Coco aside: “Why you telling everybody for?” Mercedes seemed humiliated, but her mood improved as soon as she got back to Corliss Park. The following day, she told Stephanie and Brittany that she had been abused and bragged that she’d gotten to miss a day of school and spent the whole day playing with her dad—an unexpected treat.

That evening, the girls trooped upstairs to the bathroom; since her trip to the dentist, Mercedes had anointed herself the family dental czar. She lorded over the bathroom sink, above her smaller sisters, dispensing toothpaste generously. Nikki closed the lid of the toilet, climbed up, and placed one foot on the rim of the sink. Like an accomplished general, she turned the water on—blasting—with her toes.

“
I
brush my teeth at night,” Mercedes boasted. More softly, she whispered, “Naughty don’t.” Nautica, who had several rotten teeth herself, preferred to play with the dolls beside the bathtub. Mercedes, still full of her day with Cesar, dedicated a song in his honor.

“This is the song I sing at night, when I cry for my dad,” she said solemnly, launching into R. Kelly’s “I Believe.”

“Me, too! I cry for my dad at night,” Nikki added.

But Mercedes was the chosen one. She saw her father more often, and he always sent letters and pictures and birthday cards. All Nikki had from Kodak were some outfits he’d surprised her with for her last birthday. Lately, whenever Mercedes received yet another letter from Cesar, Nikki asked, “Mommy, why my daddy don’t write?”

As Mercedes belted out the blues, Nikki tried to join in, but when Mercedes hushed her, Nikki retreated to her room. She took the crimson velvet skirt her father had sent her out of the closet gently and smoothed an imperceptible wrinkle. With her free hand, she reached for
a dog-eared photograph curled on top of her broken TV. It was a picture of her with her mother. Every day, Nikki carried the picture with her to school. In it, Nikki was a baby, sleeping blissfully in Coco’s arms. Coco, whose eyes were also closed, rested her chin on Nikki’s head.

Nikki pressed the picture to her chest. She pulled out Mercedes’s pink satin first-birthday dress and twirled around the room, watched by her bedraggled dolls. “I’m always a prin-cess, I’m always a prin-cess,” Nikki sang softly to herself.