Landing from the Sky: Ten years in the life of a young woman from the Bronx.

In 1987, when Jessica was nineteen and already had three children, she returned home to her mother’s fifth-floor tenement apartment, on Tremont Avenue. She had been staying with her boyfriend, and when they broke up she had nowhere else to go. Living with her mother, Lourdes, wasn’t easy. (Some names have been changed.) Lourdes, who was thirty-six, hadn’t had a job in years. Money was tight, visitors were frequent, emotions ran high. Jessica no longer had a room of her own; she now slept on a velveteen couch in the sala, or living room.

Like her mother, Jessica slept late—through the sounds of working people picking their way around the previous night’s detritus, the sibilant noise of old wooden brooms slapping against cement, the tinkle of smashed glass as it dropped into the gutter, the whoosh of water buckets clearing away vomit and cigarette butts and pork-rind bags. Jessica’s three-year-old daughter, Serena, shared a room with Lourdes. Jessica’s twin girls had a crib next to the couch. Even though Jessica was living with her kids, she wasn’t really looking after them: she might bathe them, or style their hair, but Lourdes had more or less been raising Serena, and Jessica’s friend Rosa, who loved children, often took care of the twins. Jessica’s first loyalty was to the street.

Jessica and her mother argued constantly about Jessica’s irresponsibility, but Lourdes’s pronouncements carried little weight: she, too, loved to party and, in recent years, had sometimes been a reluctant mother to her own kids. Jessica had always wanted to be taken care of; Lourdes, who had had to raise her own siblings, wanted to be taken care of, too.
Tremont marks the north end of the South Bronx; Lourdes’s apartment was just off the Grand Concourse. The neighborhood drug trade was booming, and although cellular phones hadn’t hit the street level of the business yet, there were plenty of beepers—on boys riding skateboards, on boys buying Pampers for their babies or heading for the stores on Fordham Road and Burnside to steal. But the boys who caught Jessica’s eye were the ones walking out of the bodega with cash and attitude. They pushed open the smudged doors plastered with Budweiser posters as if they were stepping into a party instead of onto a littered sidewalk beside a potholed street. It was similar to the way Jessica stepped onto the pavement whenever she left the three girls with her mother and descended the four flights of stairs, to emerge, expectant, from the paint-chipped vestibule. Outside, anything could happen.

The block was hectic, but her appearance usually caused a stir. Jessica created an aura of intimacy wherever she went. You could be talking to her in the middle of Tremont and feel as if a confidence were being exchanged beneath a tent of sheets. Guys in cars offered rides. Grown men got stupid. Women got worried or jealous. Boys made promises they didn’t keep.
Although Jessica wanted to be somebody’s girlfriend, she was usually the other girl, the mistress; boys called up to her window after they’d dropped off their main girls. Her oldest daughter, Serena, whom she had had when she was sixteen, belonged to a boy named Kuri. Jessica had met Kuri at a toga party on Crotona Avenue, when she should have been in school. He was a break dancer, a member of the Rock Steady Crew. One thing led to another, and they ended up in a bedroom on a pile of coats.

Kuri, who had a steady girlfriend, refused to admit that Serena was his child. When Lourdes asked Jessica who the father was, she lied and told her it was a neighborhood boy she’d dated. Then one day she came home with a video of the movie “Beat Street,” in which Kuri had a small part. Lourdes had heard enough about Kuri to be on the alert as they settled down with their dog, Sparky, to watch the film. In it, a boy who looked a lot like Serena did a break dance and challenged a rival crew to a battle at the Roxy.

“Hold that pause,” Lourdes shouted. “That’s Serena’s father! I will cut my pussy off and give it to that dog if that ain’t Serena’s father.”

After Serena’s birth, Jessica dropped out of school. She became increasingly depressed, and even attempted suicide by swallowing pills. When she was in the hospital getting her stomach pumped, she learned that she was pregnant with twins, by Kuri’s brother. He acknowledged the children, but he cheated on her, and now she was home again.
At Lourdes’s, the life of the apartment moved in lockstep with the life of the street. The beginning of the month, when the welfare check came in, was a good time—a time to buy things, a time to go out dancing. Lourdes packed the shelves with food. She sent Jessica to the dollar store to get King Pine and cocoa butter and shampoo. Outside, the drug dealers enjoyed the surge in business. By late afternoon, Lourdes was up—blasting Spanish music, clanking around the kitchen, cooking rice and gandules and pork chops. Evelyn, her younger daughter, was coming home from working at C-Town; Phil, her older son, was back from his classes at Hunter College, holed up in his room. Jessica’s baby brother, Joey, rolled in and out with his posse. Boyfriends and neighbors were dropping by. Lourdes was an excellent cook: she fed them all.

Everything changed at the end of the month, when the money ran out. Lourdes would take to her bed. Meals were sometimes reduced to white rice and ketchup. Jessica gave the girls sugar water before bed to fill them up. Joey stole fruit from a nearby Korean market and bread from a grocery store across the street. Jessica might try to cajole the girls’ fathers to provide Pampers, but they didn’t always come through.

Phil and Evelyn were trying to stay out of trouble, but Joey and Jessica were playing the odds. Joey was drifting into crime; Jessica still counted on being rescued. “Jessica was a dreamer,” Lourdes recalled recently “She always wanted to have a king with a maid. I always told her, ‘That’s only in books. Face reality.’ Her dream was more upper than herself.” Lourdes would caution her beautiful daughter as she disappeared down the dreary stairwell: “God ain’t gonna have a pillow waiting for your ass when you fall landing from the sky.”

Jessica did take a fall. The decade that followed brought high times and hard times, and the hard times usually came from Jessica’s thralldom to her chosen saviors. Her life would change utterly, and then change again. In some ways, though, Jessica was lucky. Not everyone survives being rescued.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2000/04/24/landing-from-the-sky-leblanc?