With or Without You: A Memoir

by Domenica Ruta

  Her voice always became kittenish when she told these stories. Her eyelashes would flutter as though she were flirting with me. There were fables about rich boyfriends she refused to marry because she was too in love with my father (though not so deliriously in love that she remained faithful when a rich guy asked her out). She told me about the night three different dates showed up at the house, and my grandmother had to send each one away because Kathi had stood them all up for a fourth guy she’d met at the gas station. With the same strung-out lyricism, she would recall in graphic detail the afternoon she was raped by a cousin, and then again by a boy in ninth grade. There was the fairy tale of her first acid trip, when she was eleven years old and her older brother’s friend slipped a tab of LSD into her soda can. She was at a slumber party when the phantasmagoria began.

  “I don’t think I’ve been so scared in my life, Nikki. I thought bats were flying out of my friend’s wallpaper and getting caught in my hair.”

  “Tell me a story about me,” I’d beg her. “About when I was a baby.”

  “Did I tell you about the time when you were brand-new, lying on Nonna’s bed, reaching for me, and you were so cute I wanted to hit you? I mean really hit you! I leaned over and bit your foot and you started to cry. Oh, the face you made! Sometimes I would bite you just so you would make that face again. It was so fuckin’ cute! Do you remember the time I pulled over on the side of the highway and contemplated leaving you there?”

  Yes. Vividly. But I let her tell it again. I never interrupted my mother’s reveries. They were too important to her. She so badly wanted an audience, and I just wanted her to be near me, to smell the acrid mint of her cigarettes, feel the weight of her body pressing down my blanket. Our little nighttime chats. Was she trying to scare me? To push me away? It had the opposite effect. I clung even tighter. There’s a natural phase most girls go through, spurred on by hormonal upsurges and awakenings of consciousness, when they abruptly begin to despise their mother. Not me. The older I got, the more terrified I was of losing her violent, temperamental love.

  Sometimes Kathi would sit on my bed and tell me that she was dying. She had cancer, possibly AIDS, and that was why she needed to take so many pills. I would cry myself to sleep, her looming death a kind of apocalypse I dreaded night after aching night. Until years later, when I started hoping for it.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

  “Mumma, tell me a good story,” I would say, before all that happened.

  “Did I tell you about the time Rose Kennedy smiled at me when I was almost nine months pregnant with you?”

  “Who’s Rose Kennedy?”

  “She was the president’s mother and she knew a good thing when she saw it.”

  “Tell me more,” I said, rubbing the cuff of her sleeve between my fingers.

  “When you came out and they showed you to me, my first words were ‘Oh, no! She has her father’s dented chin!’ But you were so smart. It was obvious even before you could talk. I remember one day looking at you in your car seat—a shaft of light was coming in through the window and you wanted to hold it. You kept reaching for it and making little baby fists with your hands. You were trying to hold on to the light. And I said to my mother, ‘This kid is going to be brilliant.’ ”

  The Ring That Got Stuck on My Finger

  ———

  DANVERS, MASSACHUSETTS, THE TOWN I GREW UP IN, WAS ONCE infamous in the annals of American history, though most people have never heard of it. In 1692, the Puritans of Danvers (then called Salem Village) sent nineteen of their citizens to the gallows for practicing witchcraft. The actual hanging of these witches took place in Salem proper, and it was this neighboring city that went down in popular history. The city of Salem has a witch museum where, for eight bucks, teenage drama students in heavy eyeliner escort tourists through a series of dioramas. Mannequins who once modeled leisurewear at Sears now find themselves posed in the mischief of that pitiless New England winter. Red lights strobe below them, and hidden speakers blare the staticky screams of a black Sabbath.

  Up the street from the Witch Museum, the history of collective hysteria and Calvinist dissent has been immortalized with a bronze statue of Elizabeth Montgomery, from TV’s Bewitched. There she sits sidesaddle on her broomstick, smiling vacuously at the surrounding red-brick streets. This part of Salem is lined with souvenir shops where you can buy T-shirts and tote bags stamped with the generic outline of a witch, as well as peanut brittle, tarot cards, whoopee cushions, and bongs.

  In Danvers there are no gift shops. Only a few houses remain from those dark last days of the seventeenth century. One of them belonged to Rebecca Nurse, the oldest victim of the witch trials, and it is open to the public free of charge. The site is half a mile from my father’s house. We had to drive by it every time we went to the mall. I would always crane my neck to watch the house whiz past the window, my heart pumping as I looked down the dirt road and imagined what it would feel like to be hanged.

  BOTH OF MY PARENTS were born and raised in Danvers, a place they have only ever left for a couple of weeks on vacation. It’s a small town breathing life into a slowly dying phenomenon: a place where everyone knows everybody else. Members of my family can’t drive to the post office without beeping or getting beeped at by friends of theirs. For me, Danvers exists as a collection of businesses—sub shops, roast-beef shops, pizza joints, and nail salons. I spent the first half of my life in this town and collected not one friend in the Zip Code. My father tried to integrate me every spring by signing me up for girls’ softball, and every spring I backed out. Asthma was my excuse, social terror and poor coordination my reasons. My neighborhood was teeming with boys and girls my age, but I didn’t play with them. They were morons, and I had a TV set up with premium cable in my bedroom.

  But that is a bitter revisionist’s history. The truth is, the kids on Eden Glen Avenue had rejected me long before I had a chance to disdain them. At one point or another, every woman on the street had had her turn babysitting me. The children at these neighbors’ houses regarded me like a strange vegetable their mothers had brought home from the grocery store, something they probably wouldn’t like but could tolerate for dinner once in a while. I’d watch these kids dump their book bags after school, then run outside to do whatever it was they did in their sunny, shrieking groups. I never ran after them. It didn’t occur to me that I should. Instead, I would sit at their kitchen tables and quietly do my homework. When I was finished I would get started on the next night’s homework, and the next, teaching myself a whole unit of arithmetic or geography while I waited for my mother to come home.

  When I heard Mum’s car choking in the driveway, I would run to her as fast as I could, without thanking my babysitter, without even saying goodbye. One day as we pulled out, a gang of kids was chasing one another in what I guess was a game of tag. They stopped and moved to the side of the street to allow my mother’s car to pass. The kids glared at me through the window. I glared back.

  “Why don’t you ask them if you can play,” my mother suggested.

  “Why?” I asked. Mum shrugged and let it go.

  Sometimes, when she wanted to torture me, Kathi would go behind my back and invite the neighbors’ kids, Lisa and Donald, to come over and play with me. This was her way of punishing me for saying something affectionate about someone other than her. I couldn’t stand Lisa and Donald, and she knew it. They were pale and meek in a way that would have ended their lives early if it weren’t for the invention of antibiotics. Someone, maybe my mother, had gotten the mistaken idea that these kids and I had sickliness in common, except that I usually exaggerated my symptoms to get attention, whereas Donald’s and Lisa’s scoliosis was quite real.

  My mother would wait until I was engrossed in a movie, then she would sneak up the street to collect the sniveling agents of her revenge. I would hear a knock on my bedroom door, and there would be Mum, ushering Lisa and Donald inside. They were such sad, wooden little kids, with m
ouse-brown hair and wet, gray eyes the color of sidewalk puddles on a murky day. Like me, they weren’t too successful making friends with the other kids on Eden Glen Avenue, although they were both crazy and brave enough to continue trying.

  What was I supposed to do with them?

  “Crimes and Misdemeanors is on. You missed the first half hour.” I’d seen it before and was willing to catch them up, but only if they asked. I offered them a seat on my bed, which neither accepted. They just stood there blinking at me.

  “What would you do if someone on the school bus offered you drugs?” Donald asked me gravely.

  I knew from previous playdate punishments that he and Lisa had learned everything they needed to know about life from the network after-school specials that were so popular in the 1980s. It took all my strength not to smack him.

  “I think our father’s an … an … alcoholic,” Lisa confessed on another visit. She looked at Donald, who was wringing his hands. Tears welled up on the pink rims of their eyes. I was not moved. Even when these kids were happy, their voices quavered as though on the verge of tears.

  “So what?” I said.

  I swear—I didn’t mean to hurt their feelings. I just wanted them to go away so I could finish my movie. Gluttons for punishment (their father probably was an alcoholic), they would come back again and again. Every time Donald got a new computer game or Lisa got a tube of lip gloss, they would run over to my house, thinking, for some reason, that this concerned me.

  “What do they want?” I would yell from my bedroom when I heard knocking at our door. As my mother had the kind of guests who just let themselves in, we both knew these visitors were for me.

  “They probably want to play with you,” my mother would yell back.

  Neither of us would bother to get up from our respective beds to answer the door. I’d turn up the volume of my television.

  “Tell them I’m sick.”

  “You tell them.”

  “Please! I called in sick for you last week.”

  Even if I had nurtured solid friendships with the neighborhood kids, nothing could have redeemed me after the summer I got head lice. My mother made me walk up and down the street and confess this to any neighbor whose house I’d ever entered. Like a registered sex offender, I had to knock on their doors and identify myself as the carrier of a plague.

  “You should probably throw away all your hairbrushes,” I said, scratching behind my ears. “Wash your pillowcases and towels in hot water. It wouldn’t hurt to dump in some bleach.”

  One group of girls saved a hairbrush that I may or may not have touched and sealed it in a Ziploc bag. “The Nikki brush,” they called it. It became a weapon whose power mushroomed with every succeeding year. They would throw it at one another and scream, the way young girls do, with churlish delight. Even Lisa had been party to this. Poor thing, she was probably grateful that, for once, the joke was not on her.

  THANK GOD I DIDN’T go to school with those kids. It was one of my mother’s few life goals that I never set foot in the Danvers public schools. She had endured twelve years in that system, and what good had it done her? Within a week of my sixth birthday, she enrolled me at the local Catholic school, St. Mary of the Annunciation, then helped someone move a brick of cocaine and paid the full year’s tuition, twelve hundred dollars, in cash.

  I would have to wear a uniform every day, which I loved. From a distance, I would appear just like everyone else. “It’s hideous,” my mother said. She rubbed the fabric between her fingers. “Ugh. Polyester.” She looked ready to spit.

  The jumper was red-and-green plaid. Underneath we had to wear a white button-down blouse with the compulsory rounded collar. Never pointed collars, I found out the hard way. Pointed collars, I guess, were for Protestants, Jews, and tramps. Only a sedate shade of red or hunter-green socks was allowed, and our sweaters were supposed to match our socks as closely as possible. The school sent home notices to reinforce the dress code, and I seemed to get these notices more often than the other kids. It needled my mother’s vain heart to see her only child disappear in a crowd, so she would outfit me in sparkly teal stockings and cherry-red patent-leather shoes, marking me as someone different. Hers.

  I wore my uniform every day that first year. I wore it on weekends. I wore it to bed. I wore it so much that the hem of the skirt unraveled. For some reason, I decided that the person who should fix this for me was the school nurse. I remember the way she took a long look at me, brushed my knotted hair, and cleaned my ears with a Q-tip. “You silly girl,” she said, laughing. “Just tell your mother to sew the hem.”

  Asking my mother for help could be risky. It required perfect timing. Her waking hours were mapped by a wave of chemical highs and lows. If I asked her to hem my skirt, I could get a cold shrug of the shoulders. I could get a temper tantrum and an ashtray flung very close to but not exactly at my head. I could get a wild shopping spree for a new wardrobe but not a new uniform. I could get roller skates, a puppy, or the following: “Get the fuck away from me. I can’t stand the sound of you breathing right now.” I could get kicked out of my own house, banished to my grandmother’s, or simply ignored for the next three days.

  I stayed up late one night, listening to my mother and her friends talking and laughing outside my bedroom window. People were coming in and out of the house to blow coke off the kitchen table. I knew when it was my mother and not someone else entering our apartment by the sound the screen door made when it slid open and shut. Like an animal, I could sense my mother’s body from far away.

  Her feet pounded down the hall toward my room. Despite Mum’s diet of cigarettes and cocaine, she was about thirty pounds overweight at this point, and growing fatter by the day. She burst through my door and collapsed onto my bed as if she had just had a massive heart attack and died. I waited for a moment, holding my breath, smiling so wide my cheeks hurt.

  Please don’t die. Please don’t be mad at me. Please.

  She lifted her head and looked at me. Her long bangs fell into her face and I couldn’t see her eyes. Then she smiled. That big, screeching laugh. Okay, I exhaled. We’re okay.

  “Mum, my uniform is ripped.” I showed her the falling hem.

  “Oh, shit,” she said. She sat up and pulled the chain on my bedside lamp. Her pupils were almost gone, small and black as flakes of pepper. She removed a long thread from the skirt and squinted at it in the light.

  “I have an idea!” she snapped. She ran out of the room and came back with scissors and a roll of duct tape. She cut out strips to fit the length of the pleats and, voilà, my uniform was hemmed.

  “You are a genius!” I hugged her neck.

  “I do my best,” she agreed.

  Her work was flawless, until the hot spring day when the glue began to melt and again my hem fell at recess, this time rimmed with gooey silver tape.

  MY FIRST-GRADE TEACHER WAS Sister Agnes, a short, stern woman who had given up a large family fortune to become a nun. She wore pastel blouses and nylon skirts and beige sneakers whose soles had worn down over the years to a smooth, eerily silent rubber pad that allowed her to sneak up on her students unawares. Even on the coldest winter days, I could track the brown elastic of Sister Agnes’s knee-highs as they slowly descended her thick, veiny calves. On either side of the chalkboard, Sister Agnes had stapled a picture of equal size at equal height, both bordered with a scalloped frame of green construction paper. On the right was the Virgin Mary holding the Baby Jesus on her lap. Jesus sat with absurdly dignified posture for an infant, a gold disk like a plate perfectly balanced on his head. Mary was a luminous blonde with dark, hooded eyes that looked exhausted and a little bit stoned. On the left side of the chalkboard was a signed photograph of Larry Bird. Sister Agnes was an old Irish-Catholic New Englander who, during basketball season, would include the Boston Celtics in our morning petitions. To this day, whenever Larry Bird’s name is mentioned, I feel moved to bow my head and pray.

  One morning at schoo
l I was sharpening my pencil when I noticed that my finger had become swollen and discolored. The night before, I’d bought a twenty-five-cent ring from a toy dispenser at the grocery store. The ring was painted gold, with a ruby rhinestone sparkling at the center. I couldn’t wait to flaunt it to all the kids at school. I fell asleep wearing it, having tried and failed to pry it off before going to bed. Now the circulation had been restricted for hours and my finger was turning blue. I showed it to Sister Agnes, who tried to pull the ring off while I stood beside her desk, then took me into the girls’ bathroom and lathered my hand with soap. When that didn’t work, Sister told me to keep scrubbing while she went to the cafeteria. She returned with a jug of corn oil to grease my finger. She pulled. I pulled. The ring would not budge.

  So far that year, I’d been sent home from school for having bronchitis, strep throat, and a condition that can only be described as hysterical vomiting. There were days I arrived crying so hard I had to be sent to the nurse’s office, where I would lie on a cot until lunchtime. I was late as often as I was on time, and sometimes I took weeks off from school with neither a medical excuse nor a decent lie to explain my absence. One day I showed up wearing no underwear beneath my uniform. My whole body ignites with shame when I remember the morning I sat cross-legged in our circle for story time, and Sister Agnes hopped up and yanked me into another room where I sat alone until a clean pair of underpants could be procured for me to wear.

  “Call your mother,” Sister Agnes told me now as we stood in the dark, tiled lavatory. Her hands clamped angrily around my shoulders, and I could feel her body quaking.

  By that time Mum didn’t have a car anymore. The Shitbox had met its inexorable end and we now relied on friends, family, and strangers for rides. From the front office I saw a black-and-yellow taxicab pull up to the school and my mother step out. It was a warm spring day. The trees were decorated with fuzzy green buds, and pale tulips had begun poking through the mud. My mother flirted shamelessly with the cabdriver during the ride to the hospital. His name was Michael, and he said that he had graduated from high school with my mother. “I played trumpet in the marching band,” he told her. “I had thick glasses.”