Random Family

Mercedes is baptized. For the occasion, she is dolled up with expensive items: a dress, a veil, tights, and new shoes. Rocco stands in as her father figure. Coco then parades her daughter down her old block. When the girl attracts much admiration, Coco jokes that Mercedes is like a little Jessica.

Lourdes has moved across the hall from the apartment she once shared with Domingo. There, she lives with a woman named Maria, and Maria’s sad children. Maria is dying of cancer. Lourdes claims that Domingo has given her bed to Roxanne and Justine—Roxanne’s daughter by Cesar. Domingo and Lourdes, however, remain on good terms.

One day, when Coco visits Lourdes with Mercedes, Lourdes backhands Mercedes after the girl fails to heed Lourdes’s command to not put a dollar bill in her mouth.

Coco initially likes living upstate, but, having never lived on the ground floor, the unit spooks her. She feels better when Frankie visits, although Frankie is jealous of the hours that Coco spends on the phone with Cesar, and also has a contentious relationship with Mercedes, who constantly reminds him that he is not her father.

LeBlanc writes that “Fun [triumphs] over rules at Coco’s, where the door [is] always open [and] the neighborhood children [congregate] in and around her apartment” (228). She never fails to keep the atmosphere light and boisterous, and even occasionally succeeds in drawing the morose and detached Serena into the gaiety. Milagros, however, perpetually suspicious of men due to her numerous negative observations of them, does not let Serena spend the night at Coco’s when Frankie is there.

On the phone, Coco tells Cesar about her newest ambition: learning how to drive. Together, they fantasize about taking Mercedes and Nautica on a drive to somewhere far away—perhaps the Poconos—where they can be a family for once, before Cesar must return to Giselle. Cesar tells Coco that he wishes all of his children were mothered by her. He asks that his girls do not call Frankie “Daddy” (although Nautica does). Soon enough, Coco’s phone line is cut due to unpaid collect calls from Cesar, and the two must revert to correspondence through letters. 

Two months into her affair with Torres, Jessica has become pregnantwith twin boys. It is October when her pregnancy is confirmed by prison officials. She initially lies, saying that she was raped by a repairman she claims to be unable to identify, in the bathroom of her old unit. She perjures herself by signing an affidavit attesting to her lie, which puts her in danger of receiving additional jail time. Because the alleged attack occurred on federal property, the FBI opens a probe. By early November, she recants her story and admits that she had sex with Torres. Torres is suspended as a result. The investigation plods along, parallel to her pregnancy.

Jessica’s roommates give her leeway due to her pregnancy, although her popularity also flags due to the discovery of her affair with Torres. A woman named Ida, the designated inmate cook who regrets her own prison abortion, lavishes Jessica with food and cobbled-together treats.

In the spring of 1995, Elaine and Coco bring Jessica’s daughters to Danbury for a visit. Jessica shows her daughters the things she has made: two sweaters for her unborn twins, a cloth-covered photo album for Elaine, and a peach-and-yellow coverlet for Serena, which matches a skirt set she’d sent long ago. She fashions Serena’s hair into a perfect topknot, and Serena soaks up the physical attention. They indulge in their tradition: sharing a bagel from the prison vending machine. Serena must be cajoled into taking a photograph, as she does not like being asked to act cute, or sexy, or to flaunt herself. Surprisingly, Jessica demurs at the prospect of a photograph as well. One is, eventually, taken.

Jessica gives birth in a hospital, under the supervision of an armed guard. Her doctor, at least, affords her the mercy of refusing to allow her to be handcuffed during labor. Jessica, who was initially hopeful about her future with Torres, gives up on the man when he fails to show up for the birth. She names one boy Michael, after her father, and the other Matthew, after the son of a prison friend whom Jessica had met earlier at the MCC.

If babies born to prisoners are not picked up by family members within forty-eight hours, they become wards of the state. The burden of the twins’ care falls to Elaine, although Lourdes has promised to care for them. Angel, Elaine’s husband, has recently graduated from a drug-treatment program and uses methadone to maintain himself. Elaine, however, feels ashamed to have a husband who must line up for a cup of methadone every day. She struggles to hold her family life together, and the twins’ arrival seems to undo the progress that she has made in therapy, which she entered in order to help herself control her temper with her own children.

Shortly after the twins’ birth, Lourdes finally makes it to Danbury to visit Jessica. Jessica cruelly jabs at Lourdes, mocking her appearance, but beneath her cruelty is her perennial thirst for her mother’s affections. Although Jessica assumes that the reason for Lourdes’s failure to visit is her inability to peel herself away from the block, or a series of insincere lies, the real reason is that Lourdes can hardly stomach both the long journey to prison and the visit to prison itself. When Jessica lifts Lourdes’s hair to braid it, at Lourdes’s request, she sees that Lourdes is wearing the gold boxing glove charm that George gave to Jessica long ago. She touches it tenderly, while also barbing Lourdes with recollections of all of the valuables that Lourdes has pawned or sold away. Jessica also tells Lourdes to give her her earrings, which Lourdes does (Jessica has made arrangements for the guard to look the other way). When Jessica’s figure appears in the prison window at the end of Lourdes’s visit, Lourdes waves from the parking lot. Jessica, “from a distance [and] without the power of her expressive face, the sultry voice, the intelligence in her hazel eyes,” looks beaten down (238).

By summer, Jessica feels completely abandoned. Torres is gone, and Matthew, her old friend, is spending a suspicious amount of time with Elaine. She is placed on suicide watch. This means that a guard checks on her every hour, to the dismay of her roommates. Many of them, on the cusp of leaving, and wishing to do so quietly, eventually ask her to leave. She moves into a corner cube. Jessica tries to seek solace in her family. However, Lourdes and Coco both have blocks on their phones. Her older brother Robert has attempted suicide again.Elaine has no patience for Jessica’s complaints. Baby Matthew’s ceaseless crying keeps Elaine’s sons up, and her own patience is wearing thin. Elaine is making arrangements to ship the twins off to Milagros.

Jessica purposefully defies the guards in order to be confined to the Solitary Housing Unit (SHU). While there, she demands to be screened for bipolar disorder, which Robert has been diagnosed with. She seeks “oblivion through medication, which prison medics liberally [provide]: Naprosyn, Flerexil, Dolobid,”but then she fights against her own medicated oblivion (240). Imagining her reunion with Serena, along with listening to the R&B harmonizing of other women in the SHU, gets her through the worst stretches. 

Pearl joins her family in Corliss Park on Mother’s Day, 1995. The baby’s health needs animate Coco, and she also lavishes sweet affection upon the baby. Coco also leans on Milagros for medical expertise, as Milagros has worked as a home aide. The two women quarrel over their differing parenting styles, however, as Milagros is sometimes harsh and stern with even Mercedes, who is not her child.

LeBlanc also states that, according to the cultural rules of the community,children who are known as “bad”—those who are rebellious, those who talk back, those who entertainingly use adult slang—are actually regarded fondly. “Bad” denotes a spunk and vitality that is welcomed, although that “badness” morphs into actualthreat once these children become old enough to both physically resist adults and to court the attention of the law. Mercedes has always been one of these “bad” children.

Frankie asks Coco if she loves him, and she, perhaps imprudently, admits that she does not and cannot love him the way she loves Cesar. Frankie, able to shed his Bronx reputation as a punk because he lives upstate, makes friends with various white kids, who come to him, as a requisite representative of the hood, in order to indulge their fascination with inner-city culture, or to buy drugs from him. He also begins to groom himself better and to dress in a more appealing way, which Coco notes, suspiciously.

Mercedes begins to constantly complain of toothaches, and to take five showers a day. She goes to the dentist, who finds that she has several rotting teeth. She is also eventually brought to a doctor, who diagnoses her with genital warts. Coco is notified that Mercedes has likely been molested, and the Bureau of Child Welfare is notified. When Coco tells Cesar about the diagnosis during a prison visit, specifying that the culprit could be Richie, although Coco doubts it, because Riche would have touched her when she was a child as well. Cesar, clearly angry, passes the rest of the visit playing with his daughters, but then goes on a rampage in his cell, destroying all of his belongings except his photographs.

Frankie’s steady entourage of friends and their girlfriends attract the attention of the Troy Housing Authority, and Coco faces eviction for the violation of the long-term guest clause of her lease. Rick Mason, head of security for Troy’s public housing, testifies against her during her eviction hearing. He has been surveilling Coco’s unit for some months, observing the comings and goings of Frankie and his friends, and he also impugns Coco’s mothering skills. He specifies that he will arrest Frankie if he sees him at Coco’s, and Coco signs an interim contract, which will be effective for eight months. She promises that there are no other tenants besides her and her children, and will be restored to her regular lease after one year without further incident.

Coco’s life is coming unraveled, and she cries at the drop of a hat. Distressingly, Nautica has picked up Coco’s habit of picking at her skin. Frankie has morphed into the kind of boy she sought to get away from, rather than the quiet and stable family man whom she thought she was going to get. She tries to confide in Lourdes about Mercedes’s possible abuse, but Lourdes is “all into her business” (252). Elaine, however, encourages Coco by reminding her that Coco is trying to get to the bottom of the abuse, and to find the perpetrator—unlike Jessica, who stood idly by when she learned of Serena’s abuse. Also, Coco’s sister Iris advises Coco to see a therapist, but Coco coldly asks her if she thinks she has time to schedule an appointment for herself, on top of all of Pearl’s appointments. (Pearl still needs asthma treatments three times a day, and sometimes vomits three times in a day. She even turns blue one day and is rushed to the emergency room). 

In prison, Jessica attempts to piece her life together. Due to her documented history of using drugs, she qualifies for entering the prison’s Drug Abuse Program (DAP). Successful completion of the program grants one year shaved off of a sentence. She enters the program, which is run like a boot camp and requires five hundred hours of therapy and education in five areas: Thinking Skills, Communication Skills, Criminal Thinking, Relapse Prevention, and Wellness. Her favorite class, Feelings, allows her to plumb “the connections between the present and her memories of the past” (258). She initially makes strides, although she resists categorizing herself as a victim of domestic violence, citing complexities in her relationship with Boy George which foreclose such a neat categorization. However, when Coco writes to her about Mercedes’s abuse, Jessica is overtaken by memories of both her own abuse, and that of Serena. Additionally, she aids a fellow inmate couple by lending them the top bunk of her bed without telling the authoritiesand receives a second strike on her prison record. Her threat to beat up one of the coupled inmates earns her a third strike, and she is thrown out of the DAP program.

Amazon, the inmate who practices Santeria, predicts that Serena will leave Jessica, never to be heard from again. Amazon also predicts that a new man, tall and strong, will enter Jessica’s life, and Jessica dreamily believes it. Jessica re-enters therapy, and the therapist reports promising results.

Jessica imagines Serena’s life, which is a composite of Jessica’s own experiences when she was Serena’s age.

Torres, whose wife has left him, is sentenced to probation due to his conviction on a misdemeanor charge—Sexual Abuse of a Ward. Jessica is not allowed to attend his sentencing, but makes three requests, all of which the judge dismisses on the grounds that they are civil issues: “that Torres acknowledge the paternity of the twins...that the children bear his last name…[and that he] help support the boys financially, or at the very least, provide bus fare so that Milagros could bring them to Danbury” (263). 

Coco makes a maverick decision and enrolls Nikki and Mercedes in Ramapo Anchorage Camp, in Rhinebeck, New York. In her community, good mothers are measured by their ability to keep their children away from authorities, and her decision flies in the face of this norm. Milagros, wary of Coco’s decision, counsels the girls to never allow male counselors to touch them, and to wear shirts under their tank tops. When it is time to drop off the girls, Nikki goes willingly, but Mercedes resists mightily. This aggrieves Coco greatly: it is the first time that she has ever been truly separated from her daughter.

Frankie goes off on a three-day trip, which he claims is a camping trip. Mercedes rages at him and threatens to leave him. She also laments the parallels between her mother’s love life and her own. Manuel, her father, viciously beat and even raped Foxy, her mother. They did not yet know that he had schizophrenia. While Manuel was incarcerated, Foxy met Richie, whom Coco loved, but who also had a heroin addiction.

Mercedes writes a loving letter from camp, saying that she is having a wonderful time, and that she has friends. When Coco goes to retrieve her girls after three weeks, they are thriving, and it wounds her, as she sees their camp success as an indictment of her own mothering skills.

One night, when Milagros stays over at Coco’s Coco awakes to Milagros burrowing into her. Coco shoves Milagros away, and their relationship immediately becomes icy as a result of Milagros’s perceived advance. Coco also begins to eye Jessica and Milagros’s relationship with suspicion.

Due to a series of misfortunes, Coco is saddled with the care of her older brother Manuel’s sons, and they test her patience, until Foxy takes them back to their mother. The episode fills Coco with guilt and anxiety. After a vicious domestic dispute in which Frankie shoves Coco, Coco throws Frankie out. He comes back to visit when Coco’s great-grandmother dies, however, and the two smoke weed together. Coco smokes it simply to be and feel close to Frankie, but the weed knocks her out, and she vows never to do it again.

The influence of camp, which initially calmed Mercedes down, eventually fades. Mercedes resumes her rambunctious and pugilistic ways, warring with Brittany and Stephanie.