Random Family

Like Jessica, who clings to Serena as a lifeline, Cesar clings to Mercedes and her affections as a means of surviving. He feels that Nautica and Justine are lost to him, as they do not treat him as their father. He has been extorting people to finance his increasing drug usebut earns many stints in solitary confinement for the ensuing fights with fellow inmates. He and Jessica exchange up to three letters per week. He tells her that he feels abandoned by their familyand confesses that he has a hardened attitude because he hardened himself early in life in order to insulate himself from the pain of feeling neglected. He states that he cannot let his enemies in prison see him vulnerable, because they will kill him. He also asks Jessica to write the DA on his behalf.

Jessica hooks Cesar up with Lovely, one of her more well-connected co-inmates. Lovely’s mother begins contributing to Cesar’s commissary. Jessica’s cause is also taken up by an activist prison clinic at Yale, although they cannot help Cesar. Jessica is also initially hesitant to tell Cesar about her lesbian relationships in prison, but he quickly assures her that he does not judge her for them.

The legal clinic chooses Jessica to represent, among hundreds of other prospective clients. Her looks, along with her resistance to calling herself a victim, ingratiate her to them. The clinic pursues several cases against the prison, on Jessica’s behalf. One is for their failure to protect her from Torres, another regards her fall down a flight of stairs while she was pregnant, and another seeks redress for the fact that the prison made Jessica wait fourteen months for a laparoscopy that her doctor had ordered following the birth of her twins—a laparoscopy that discovered a substantial cyst on her ovary. Medical negligence on the part of the prison is hard to prove, however.

The Yale students become disturbed by what they learn about prison life—they are concerned and appalled by the neglect and mistreatment that Jessica has resignedly accepted as her lot in life. Jessica is also one out of only three women who volunteer to testify about prison conditions when a UN rapporteur visits Danbury to investigate violence against women, for a report that is eventually presented to the Commission on Human Rights.

By the spring of 1997, Coco and Frankie are spending so much time in the Bronx that their life in Albany’s Corliss Park is disintegrating. Mercedes, at seven, has grown haggard enough to be mistaken for a grown woman when Frankie’s friends catch a glimpse of her on the patio. Coco is also distressed by the attention that Mercedes is garnering from men, which borders on lascivious.

Foxy is in the frame-of-mind of a “mercenary,” as she has taken a job as a scout for an immigration marriage broker. She gets paid for every sham marriage she sets up, and even tries to get Coco involved in her schemes.

Wishman comes to call on Coco, and Coco hopes that he will finally step in as Pearl’s father, but all he really wants is sex. They spend a day together in a hotel room that Coco believes is beautiful, but his affections amount to nothing.

Frankie’s car breaks down, which moors the family in Corliss Park. Coco’s mounting impatience boils over into rage, which she expresses by occasionally hitting her children. Mercedes, in turn, acts out against her siblings, and gets into fights with other neighborhood children daily. Eventually, a white woman calls the police on Mercedes, accusing the child of harassment. Coco, floored and furious, goes to see the woman to confront her about calling the police on a seven-year-old child.

By the end of the summer, Coco accepts that there is nothing for her in the Bronx: her mother cannot be stopped from running around, and Wishman is committed to his girlfriend. Coco decides to throw herself into her small-city life. She accepts Frankie’s flaws, because he is ultimately there for her and her girls. As Milagros is enrolled in a GED course and preparing to go back to work, Coco must enroll Pearl in Head Start day care, and Pearl thrives there. Subsequently, Coco also decides to pursue a GED. On her academic assessment test, she scores at a fifth-grade level in reading, and sixth-grade level in math. She also stands up to Cesar, who mandates that Nikki and Pearl be left out of the photographs of the children that she sends to him. She specifies that he must accept all of her, and that each of her children are a part of her. To her surprise, Cesar does not fight her on that count, and he encourages her academic pursuits.

Frankie finds a job laying cement slabs for a sidewalk construction crew—his first almost-legal job. The chapter closes with an image of the family sharing a tender time as they all dance together in celebration. 

Jessica has taken up with a new girlfriend, Nilda, who is more significant than the other women that she has been involved with in prison. Because Nilda is enrolled in DAP, and wishes for Jessica to enroll as well, so that they can live in the same unit, Jessica does so. Jessica enrolls despite her fears of failing the program again. Nilda treats Jessica very kindly, refusing to hit her when Jessica baits her to, although she does grow jealous when Jessica is caught kissing Lovely, the girl whom Jessica hooked up with Cesar. Miranda, Jessica’s old rival who’d managed Boy George’s table, is also in the prison, and she and Jessica become friends.

Serena remains the foremost child in Jessica’s mind, as she essentially lets Milagros take over as mother for her younger children. Jessica, at twelve, is flaunting her body in skimpy clothing while courting the attention of boys. Most of Serena’s letters to Jessica are about boys. Kevin is fifteen, and growing into a man. He is on probation for stealing a bicycle, and he often gets into fights at school. He picks up the younger children from school, but babysitting duties often fall to Serena: Milagros is working full-time as a home aide.

Coco receives another eviction notice, and is actually relieved by it, as she believes there is too much “come–and-go” at Corliss Park (303). The apartment that he relocates to, however, immediately fills up with cast-offs from Foxy’s: Coco’s nineteen-year-old brother, Hector; Iris, Hector’s wife; Iris’s friend Platinum and her son; and Foxy’s old neighbor Sheila, who is hiding from her crack-addicted son (303). Foxy has been hauled in during a drug raid and needs to lay low.

Life in Coco’s overcrowded apartment is difficult, and Sheila and Platinum’s cigarette habit aggravates Pearl’s asthma. Mercedes wars with Hector in the same way she had with Frankie. Coco matter-of-factly beats Mercedes, and Mercedes takes the hits, stone-faced. Head Start expels Pearl, because they are understaffed and unable to care for the young girl’s health maladies: she still has seizures and vomits whenever she eats. Pearl’s removal from Head Start jeopardizes her benefits, and Coco must prove to SSI that Coco wasn’t responsible for keeping Pearl out of school. Pearl’s teacher therefore writes a letter which details Pearl’s condition, which Coco brings to Pearl’s doctor. The doctor finally hears what Coco has been trying to tell various medical professionals for years, and diagnoses the girl with reflux, which is cured by a simple operation.

Upsetting rumors reach Coco about Giselle, Cesar’s wife. Word is that Giselle owns a car, is studying law, that she was in Elaine’s wedding (Elaine remarried Angel), that she took her son (who looked distressingly like Cesar) to Disney World, and (most hurtful to Coco) that she was corresponding with Jessica. 

As it turns out, the rumors about Giselle are only half true. In truth, Giselle had never responded to Jessica’s letter. The car she drove belonged to her godmother, and she borrowed it in exchange for repairs and gas. She had taken her son, Gabriel, to Disney Land, but was still paying for the trip on installment. She was enrolled in community collegebut had to borrow from a loan shark in order to pay for her tuition. She and Gabriel do, however, enjoy trailer visits with Cesar, although Cesar has not yet told her that he has received an additional 1-3 years for possessing a shank, nor that he is actively using heroin.

In the spring of 1998, Cesar asks Giselle to make arrangements to bring Mercedes and Nautica along on the next trailer visit. Mercedes and Nautica cannot stop talking about the planned visit, and their bags are packed days ahead of time. However, the trip is abruptly canceled when Cesar is attacked: he is jumped by three men following a fight with the men’s friend, and Cesar is forced into protective custody with thirty-two stitches. Cesar fears making his daughters easy targets for further attack.

When Lourdes and the girls visit Jessica, Jessica is in a reflective mood; she has been analyzing her relationship with her family and mulling over her patterns with men. Jessica does, however, badger Lourdes about Jessica’s own father. She also expertly grooms and braids her daughter’s hair, and promises Serena that, upon her release, she will take the girl clubbing and pretend that they are sisters. (When Jessica was young, she would make Lourdes pretend they were sisters. By this time, however, Lourdes has settled into being a matronly older woman). Also, without any other housing options, Jessica tells her mother that she is awaiting state approval to come back and live with her upon her release. She makes it clear, however, that she disapproves of Lourdes’s boyfriend. Jessica eyes a young man at the vending machine, pointing out how cute he is to Serena. Serena, pleased but demure, replies to Jessica with “You so bad” (310). 

Coco is holding on for dear life, overwhelmed by the demands of school and Pearl’s onerous healthcare. After Frankie hits her during a dispute, she throws him out. To make up for his financial contributions, she takes up babysitting, adding three children to her own four. She receives $40 per week for 35 hours of babysitting. She sometimes walks down the hill to Fallon, the garden apartments where her sister Iris lives. Iris is studying to become the owner of a funeral home. Coco, on the other hand, is forced to drop out of school to manage her family.

Frankie is rumored to be seeing a fourteen-year-old girl, which makes Coco feel like her own girls are in danger whenever he is around. She instructs them to wear shorts under their nightgowns when Frankie resumes visiting the apartment. Kevin, Milagros’s oldest, impregnates his fourteen-year-old girlfriend, Donna. While the two break up by Donna’s third month, Serena and Donna become fast friends. Coco hopes that Serena, who is thirteen, will learn from Donna’s mistakes by witnessing the pregnancy firsthand. The pregnancy, however, only makes Donna more beautiful. Serena continues to receive lascivious attention from men, and Coco observes that Jessica’s impending release emboldens the girl.

When Coco’s apartment becomes unbearably flea-infested due to the landlord’s persistent negligence, Coco calls the Department of Health. However, instead of sending an exterminator, they send a housing inspector, who condemns the place. Con Ed shuts off the power and sends Coco a bill for $900. Under threat of receiving a visit from the Bureau of Child Welfare unless she vacates the apartment, Coco finds herself homelessfor the second time in a year. Frankie, who also finds himself homeless, promises to help while, in truth, he waits for Coco to make arrangements for them both. When Coco confides in Jessica, Jessica surprises her by telling her not to brook Frankie’s empty insincerity. Coco longs to call Lourdes, whose phone line has been long disconnected, to ask for advice, as Lourdes herself has somehow always managed to scrape by under similar circumstances. 

Lourdes is forty-eight, and still managing to “cobble together an existence, as she always had” (317). She has coupled up with a 6’3 Marine veteran named Emilio, who’d lived with Maria, the neighbor with cancer, and with whom Lourdes had briefly lived. Emilio’s veteran status qualifies him for rent subsidies, and the pair find an apartment on “a leafy residential street at the end of one of the Bronx subway lines” (317). Lourdes, believing that she has left the Bronx behind, celebrates the clean and “civilized” nature of her new block (317). She also earns extra money babysitting Justine (Roxanne and Cesar’s daughter), as well as Roxanne’s other child. Lourdes also rents her couch to Angel, her soon-to-be ex son-in-law. Elaine has left Angel for Yonkers, where she lives with her two sons in a working-class neighborhood. Lourdes, however, still has to hustle to get by, relying on extra money and produce given to her by her ex-boyfriend Domingo, and emergency food stamps in the absence of SSI, from which she was rejected. Lourdes no longer parties or stays up all night, and is on Ambien, which prevents her anxiety attacks by putting her to sleep.

LeBlanc depicts the intimate details of Lourdes preparing a batch of pasteles for her family.Cooking has always been one of her greatest joys.

Christmas is approaching, and Cesar has been transferred to a facility only ninety miles away, while Jessica will be home for the holidays.

Coco, fresh from her eviction, shuffles herself and her children between the homes of her siblings, Hector and Iris. She feels that she is imposing, especially upon Iris, whose husband Armando is short with both the children and herself. Galvanized by her struggle, Coco gets a job in the deli at the Price Chopper. She is a meat-slicer. She is paid $5.14 an hour. She hastily rents a run-down tenement apartment at the intersection of River and 101st Streets, at the heart of Troy’s growing ghetto. The neighborhood is composed of “the working and unemployed poor, who [are] white, Puerto Rican, and black” (321).

Meanwhile, Cesar settles into his latest prison: Shawangunk. He has come out of a five-month stint in solitary: “weakened, enraged, and somewhat dazed” (322). His relationship with Giselle is precariously mending itself, after a period of estrangement. Coco’s letters fill him with anxiety, as they usually document Mercedes’s troubles at school or the way she upsets Coco with her talk of boys. He also is granted a cell without a roommate, due to his prison classification as a “violent-suicidal type” (323). Instead of posting up his photographs, as he had in the past in order to flaunt his sexy girlfriends and beautiful children, he now keeps them in a box, as the photographs give him anxiety about all of the time with his loved ones that he has lost.

On River Street, Mercedes places her father’s picture in a place of honor in her roomand puts up a set of rules for anyone who might enter her room. She has her own room because she is the eldest, and also because Coco does not entirely trust the girl around her sisters; she fights Nikki and Nautica not as if they are her family, but as if they are strangers on the street, and sometimes shakes Pearl so hard that it appears she is trying to truly hurt her.

Coco puts her Christmas tree up well before Thanksgiving. When she and Frankie have a severe fight in November, she lets the children open their Christmas gifts early, and then worries about how she will replace the presents. Luckily, a haul of presents arrives from Cesar, who has gotten money from Rocco.

Rocco keeps Cesar informed about the movement of the streets. He is married to Marlene, and half-heartedly attempting to reform. However, he cannot resist the call of criminal activity, and soon assembles a group of younger men, with whom he successfully robs a stash house. They come away with $50,000 each.