With or Without You: A Memoir

by Domenica Ruta

  “Maybe I’ll become a lawyer,” she mused.

  Real-life lawsuits are utterly lacking in the drama she craved, and, like anything in Mum’s care, she gave up when the fight became more work than fun.

  With or without my mother’s help, some official code was eventually passed, and the boats were instructed to flush their heads farther out at sea. I never dipped a toe in that water even then, no longer from fear but from spite. My mother already had so little attention to give that sharing her with anything else made me mortally pissed off. I watched that river through the windows of our house like a jilted lover studying her rival. It was the ultimate antagonist, always beautiful and never the same. Sometimes the waves licked the grass gently as a dog attending to his fur. A strong wind would later chop the water into a rhythmic progression of crests. These sudsy waves might later shrink into the tiniest ripples. Or disappear altogether, like the day I noticed that the surface of the river was as smooth as a pane of glass. I stood at the kitchen window and stared, elated and afraid. What made this happen? Would it ever happen again? What did it mean?

  The Porter River, I learned it was called years and years after I left home. It was always just the River to us. Growing up, I thought that my mother was the one who called in the tides.

  KATHI AND I WERE the two most outrageous snobs ever to receive public assistance. My mother had grown up middle-class and, despite the succession of menial jobs she held, she refused to let go of certain standards. No matter how broke Mum was, she would find a way to outfit me in designer clothes. The telephone was sometimes cut off for nonpayment, but you’d better believe she paid that cable bill on time. Groceries could wait another day, but Calvin Klein and HBO could not.

  I remember nights when Mum would get really high and keep me up for hours, sitting on my bed and holding forth like a monarch unjustly deposed. We were not meant for this life, she would say. There were Cadillacs in our future. A summerhouse on Martha’s Vineyard. I was going to grow up and marry a Kennedy, she promised. In reality she sent me to a day-care center run by Catholic Charities, where I contracted diseases only babies in Third World countries still get.

  We made do with what we had, and for what we lacked we pretended. Learning our parts from our two favorite movies, Mommie Dearest and Reversal of Fortune, my mother and I would act out scenes in our tiny basement apartment, speaking in affected voices, wishing out loud that we could be the twisted, tormented millionaires who dominated our imagination. My mother was Sunny von Bülow, the bleach-blond tyrant in yet another coma, and I was her devoted maid, trying to wake her up. “My lady,” I would say, brandishing a feather duster, as I stood fretfully at her bedside. She was Joan Crawford, the abusive egomaniac, and I was her tortured Christina. Mum chased me around the apartment with a clothes hanger as though she were going to beat me. I would run from her in a fit of giggles, and when I finally let her catch me, she’d pin me to the bed, the hanger raised above her head. She would bite her lower lip and bring the hanger down hard and fast, stopping herself an inch, sometimes less than an inch, above my face.

  “Wire hangers!” she’d cry out. It was our favorite game.

  DURING KATHI’S SEDENTARY SPELLS, which could last anywhere between a couple of days and several weeks, she lay regally in her bed consuming four or five movies in a row. My mother was both a movie slut and a film snob: she’d watch just about anything that was on, but she would press Record only if the story was truly great.

  “What are you doing?” she’d call from under the covers, a smoldering ashtray always close by braiding threads of cigarette smoke in the air like a loom. “Make me some toast,” she’d yell. “Don’t be stingy with the butter.” Soup, a fresh book of matches, some chocolate milk—these were the things I was constantly fetching for her. Then sometimes she’d bellow, “Honey! You have to watch this movie with me.”

  “I’m doing my homework.”

  “This is more important. I promise. You’ll thank me later.”

  I watched the canon of American cinema in my mother’s smoky bedroom. The two Godfathers were a staple, and anything and everything by Martin Scorsese. Sonny Corleone, Travis Bickle—these guys were as real to us as Zeus and Apollo were in the homes of ancient Greece. Mum was a fool for zany real-estate comedies from the forties and their remakes in the eighties. She referred to Mel Brooks as her boyfriend. But her absolute favorite was Woody Allen. We raided the local video store for every film he ever made.

  “Your grandmother’s grandfather was a Sicilian Jew,” my mother mentioned as we watched Annie Hall for the thirtieth time. “It’s a big family secret. Don’t tell her I told you.”

  Who knows if that’s true or not, but there was something about our lives that echoed the paradox of Jewish history: we certainly felt like God’s chosen people, and that we had been cursed to live in exile.

  “My grammy never gave gifts,” Alvy Singer says to his pretty mid-western girlfriend. “She was too busy getting raped by Cossacks.”

  Mum and I lay in her big unmade bed, howling from the depths of our souls.

  THERE WERE VERY FEW books in our house beyond the Agatha Christies I brought home from the library. The only three books I can remember my family actually owning were a cartoon book about Italian stereotypes; an illustrated compendium of—let’s call it The Variety of Flatulent Experience; and Diaries of Mario M. Cuomo, the only hardcover of the three. These books circulated the bathroom floors of my mother and all her siblings for most of the 1980s, until the paper macerated to the pulp from which it came.

  I was born with a wolfish appetite for the printed word. Sometime in preschool I learned how to read—the words clam box on a chalkboard menu at a fried-fish stand were my first, according to my father; “Nikki (hearts) Mummy,” in a crayoned note, contended my mother, though both agreed on the fact that I was no bigger than four, and that reading seemed to be a skill I’d somehow picked up on my own. In an extended family where people stumbled—and stumbled proudly—over three-syllable words, such a drooling little fiend for literature was endearing to no one. (It should be noted that even the most illiterate of my clan knew their way around a food-stamp application, a subpoena, and a workman’s compensation claim. We were nothing if not adroit at manipulating the system.) To the philistines around me, books were a form of contraband, and curiosity wasn’t so much a sin as a force of nature that would eventually kill you. So I read the Salem Evening News, a daily paper that we bought only when someone we knew made an appearance in the police log. I read the weekly TV Guide that came in the mail. I read the electricity bill and learned my first Latin, arrears. If it had been possible to lap words off an aluminum can spilled out of a dumpster, I would shamelessly have gotten down on all fours.

  Hunger like this is pitiful. It never affords you the luxury of distinguishing between useless and important knowledge, between good and bad words. And, like movies, bad words were another resource in which my family was truly rich.

  GROWING UP, MY COUSINS and I were inseparable, all of us shuffling back and forth to one another’s houses every weekend. My mother and her sister Penny were the closest in age, and they both had daughters about two years apart, so it was ordained that this cousin and I would be best friends. On the day that Penny brought her baby home from the hospital, I had impetigo and my mouth was covered with contagious red sores. My mother made me stand in the far corner of the room, where I watched all the aunts gather around the bassinet to ooh and aah. It was clear that I wasn’t going to get a turn to hold the new baby, so I cried and cried, my arms reaching out to her. “Fafa, Fafa!” I whimpered, because I was too small to pronounce my cousin’s name. This gave rise to a lot of ridiculous diminutives. Fafa is the least nauseating, so that’s what we’ll call her here.

  My cousin lived with her mother and stepfather in an apartment on Interstate Route 95, behind a little commercial strip that included a tattoo parlor and a pawnshop. There was a nuclear power plant not far away. For fun, Fafa liked
to ride her bike to the plant and throw rocks against the chain-link fence that guarded it. I would wheeze behind her on a scooter, whining all the way, “Can we please go home now?”

  I found out later that she was lying, that the fence enclosed nothing more than an empty lot. Fafa was cunning. You had to respect that about her. She knew that I’d been traumatized by the news stories of Chernobyl. She’d seen me crying, practically hyperventilating, about the threat of nuclear holocaust to our grandmother, whose soothing words I will never forget:

  “What are you crying about, Nikki? If a nuclear power plant blows, we’ll all be nothing but fucking molecules. The whole human race is like a fart in the universe. Pllppllff, we’re here. Pllppllff, we’re gone.”

  My cousin had the fearlessness of a little kid who’s too cute to get into any real trouble. She slept soundly in a bedroom with posters of Freddy Krueger and Hulk Hogan on every wall. I would lie in a sleeping bag on the floor, my eyes moving from the cold Aryan glare of the Hulk to the raw-hamburger flesh of Freddy Krueger’s face, and as soon as I shut my eyes my mind flooded with scenes of nuclear winter. The power plant was going to blow, I was sure of it, and probably on a weekend when I was sleeping over. As my cousin murmured softly in her sleep, I could hear the hollow, rhythmic bleating of an air raid. Outside, the highways were gridlocked with crashed cars. Trees turned to columns of ash before my very eyes. Even if I survived (doubtful with Aunt Penny in charge), the radiation poisoning would make all my hair fall out. No, I decided bravely on my cousin’s bedroom floor, I’d be lucky to be in the eye of the storm when it happened; I would rather die than go bald.

  Fafa was an exquisite child. I was not. I had a wrinkled forehead and perpetual dark circles around my eyes, as though I were staying up all night grinding out coke-fueled solutions to the world’s problems. With my black, bushy unibrow, the faint scribble of a mustache on my upper lip, and my greasy, unbrushed hair, I looked like the bastard child of Frida Kahlo and Martin Scorsese. Fafa had a cute upturned nose, rosy cheeks, and dark brown eyes that shone like gem-polished stones. Her voice was sweet and got adorably squeaky when she talked about something she loved, like the World Wrestling Federation or the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise.

  Watching TV with my cousin became a primer in the art of war. We were supposed to take turns, hour for hour, even stephen, but the only way she could get me to watch her wrestling or horror shows was to broker a deal. New Year’s Eve 1990, she dared me to watch a marathon of all three of The Exorcist movies. Our contract, which we put in writing, declared that if I stayed awake for all three movies and didn’t cry I got to pick every movie we watched for the entire month of January. As this included a whole week of school vacation, I thought it was more than generous.

  A brilliant scam, I can see in hindsight. Fafa was the size of a peanut, but she kicked my ass thoroughly every time we fought. She was the uncontestable victor long before midnight, when I passed out during the opening credits of the first sequel, my pillow soaked with tears.

  I had one trump card, though, and I used it liberally. All I had to do was look my cousin in the eye and say, “Wrestling is fake, you know.”

  Fafa would explode with tears of rage and willful disbelief. “You’re such a lying whore!”

  Whore was one of the first swearwords I learned, a noun applicable as both an insult and a term of endearment in our family: “What are you whores up to this weekend?” “Son of a whore, I forgot my wallet at home!” Truly manifold in its application, sometimes whore simply meant “female.” Often it was used to denote something difficult or obstinate. For example, when struggling to open a tightly screwed jar of olives, my mother might utter, “What a little whore.” It had nothing to do with sex or money, unless, arriving at the bank just as the doors were locked, my grandmother would shake her fists at the whores inside.

  Like a saturnine dialect of Yiddish-cum-Latin, Italian swearwords were a lot safer than their English counterparts, in part because of their obscurity, but more so for the droll linguistic entanglements your mouth is forced to make while pronouncing them. Buchiach! Schoocci a mentz! Minchia! Incazzato! Precise translation issues abound, but who cares when a word is so much fun to say? Sicilian, and my grandmother’s peasant Sicilian in particular, is pretty much untranslatable in English. It’s a language composed of consonant pilings and blithe morbidity. So in our family the word for a woman who literally takes money for sex was never whore but putan. When I was five, my grandmother defined it for me as “a woman who only shops at night.”

  If cursing has a matriarchal order, and for the Rutas it did, then cunt is the Queen Mother. This was how I knew when Mum was really, really, really mad. She called me so many things, but this Grand Dame of words she saved for special occasions, those singular episodes of rage that carried on from sundown and well into the next day. “You cunt, you no-good cunt, you no-good miserable little cunt …,” she would say in a tired, malevolent hiss, like an infant having screamed herself into exhaustion. At times like these I clung to the word little. It suggested a seed of affection, a promise that when this mood blew over, she would love me again.

  Like any of our curses, the c-word had multiple uses. I’ll never forget the beautiful summer day when my mother dared Fafa and me to call a stranger a cunt.

  “Just say it to anyone,” she said. “I’ll give you five dollars.” We were lying on our towels at the beach. My mother had coated herself in olive oil and was holding a record cover unfolded and wrapped in aluminum foil to reflect more sun onto her face.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “To see what happens,” she said. “To see the look on the person’s face. A social experiment. Please. Just do it for me.”

  My mother was a creature that needed to lick her fingers and touch an open wire every once in a while. She required this kind of jolt. It was the only way she could be sure she was still alive.

  I knew from experience that there were far worse things you could be called than cunt. Earlier that year, my mother and I had gone shopping at a Neiman Marcus. Mum had somehow earned a thick wad of twenties and was impatient to spend it, every last dollar, on something frivolous. None of the salesgirls at Neiman’s would help us. To be fair, I don’t remember them being rude. They just skated out of our way as we examined a rack of leather skirts. Kathi was insecure and often preemptively slaughtered the nearest human being to compensate for her feelings. This person was usually me, but on that particular day it was a young redhead wearing a gold nametag and too much mascara.

  “Do you see this, Nikki? They won’t stop watching us, like we might steal something. It’s prejudice.” She marched over to the redheaded clerk and shook a fistful of cash in her face. “Excuse me,” my mother said. “I won’t be treated like white trash by some cunt who works retail.”

  The insult there was not the expletive but that disgraceful word beginning with r.

  Though we tossed the c-word around fearlessly in my family, I knew that in the outside world it was the hydrogen bomb of curses, and I was afraid to deploy it at a peaceful place like the beach.

  “Mum, please, I don’t want to. Okay?”

  “If you don’t, I will,” Fafa piped up. She was eight or nine years old that summer, and was, to use my mother’s phrase, a lot ballsier than I was.

  A woman in a pink bikini was approaching our spot on the sand. As much as I prayed that this woman would walk by without incident, something about her seemed to beg for degradation. She swaggered past us, audaciously comfortable in her own skin, trusting in a world she believed to be civilized.

  “Cunt!” Fafa said.

  The woman looked back at us with a stupefied expression and almost tripped on her flip-flops. My mother laughed her loud, gull screech of a laugh. I felt my face go up in flames and covered my head with a towel. As soon as we got home from the beach, my mother got on the phone and called Penny. I remember shrinking in the dark hallway where the phone hung while she talked to Aunt Penny, her body k
eeling with laughter.

  “Oh no, no, no,” my mother said into the phone. “You know Nikki. She’s so afraid of what other people think.”

  Later, when I started high school in a new town where no one knew me, I decided it was a good time to start over and go by my real name, Domenica. Even though this was the name on my birth certificate and on every single legal document pertaining to my life, Aunt Penny saw it as proof of what an élitist phony I was. She wouldn’t shut up about it.

  “Hey, Nikki—oh, excuse me, Domenica.” She rolled her eyes.

  “I don’t get it,” I said to my mother. “It’s not like I’m asking to be called Lady Di.”

  I wasn’t even asking my family to call me Domenica, only the teachers and kids at my new school. Aunt Penny balked as if I’d started wearing a monocle and affecting a British accent. That is, when I saw her, which was becoming more seldom. Penny had sensed a rift coming between her daughter and me, and though our growing apart was inevitable, it was still a few years away. I was becoming more bookish and withdrawn, Fafa more social and tame. My cousin was two years younger than I was, but she was already submitting herself to that ritual teen-girl change that demands hours of primping in front of a mirror.

  “You’re becoming docile,” I told my cousin. “Your friends are all cretins.”

  Half of me understood what these words meant, the other half just loved to hear myself say them. Fafa was every bit as smart as I was, but she had picked up a new skill that would evade me for years—how to maintain a group of friends. On weekends she preferred going to the mall with them than watching movies with me. Later that year she stopped returning my phone calls altogether. It was a silent dismissal, almost harrowing in its civility. Fafa and I were our mothers’ daughters—we knew how to put on a good fight—but there were no shrieking Italian curses in our breakup, no fists full of each other’s hair. I was crushed, but my mother was the one who cried.