With or Without You: A Memoir

by Domenica Ruta

  “I didn’t remember him at all,” my mother said to me later. “Of course, he knew exactly who I was.”

  Now Kathi was a single mother who needed a ride and Michael was the man who picked her up. We waited in the hospital for nearly three hours before a doctor saw me. I showed him my finger proudly, swollen and blue in its little vise. The doctor cut the ring off with an electric saw the size of a dime. When we left the hospital, Michael was still waiting for us. And this was the man my mother eventually married.

  Echo

  ———

  FOR TWO YEARS IN MY LATE TWENTIES I WORKED A RELIEF SHIFT at the National Domestic Violence Hotline. We fielded calls from all over the country, around three thousand a day, hundreds more if our number was mentioned on that afternoon’s episode of Oprah. For eight hours straight I’d listen to the living nightmares of strangers, stories so hateful they made the average horror flick look tender. A lot of them I wish I could forget. One caller told me about the morning that her husband beckoned her to walk with him into the remote edges of his ranch. Pointing with his finger, he indicated how far and wide his land stretched; then, in the stillness of the morning, he explained to his wife exactly how he was going to kill her—what method and tools he would use to dispose of her body—if she ever tried to leave him. I talked to another woman who had to change both her and her daughter’s names and Social Security numbers, effectively erasing their identities, because her ex-boyfriend, a cop, had stalked them all the way across the country. There were women who were forbidden to switch on a lightbulb while their lovers were out of the house, and mail-order brides who had been raped so severely that they required reconstructive surgery just to take a pee. One woman called simply to say, “The police won’t help me. I have to tell someone—if I’m found dead tomorrow, I want you to know this man’s name.”

  I kept these women on the line as long as I could, afraid of what might happen to them when they hung up. I got repeat callers who knew me by name, and for whom I would beg the local shelters to find a bed. At home I would fold my hands against my heart and ask Someone, Anyone, to protect these hunted women scattered across the country, then throw in a quick, half-superstitious Hail Mary for good measure.

  If only all battered wives could be so conveniently sympathetic. The monoliths of abuser and abused cast stark shadows across the American conscience, when the real picture is something more complicated, a prism that captures the full spectrum of good and evil and shatters it into fractured pieces of color and light. I spoke to several women who balked at the idea of state-subsidized housing; they informed me that they would rather be called “fat bitch” on a daily basis by their boyfriends than downgrade in apartment square footage. A sense of racist entitlement prevented many women from seeking shelter in a domestic-violence safe house. “I don’t want to share a bathroom with some Hispanic lady and her ten kids,” I heard more than once. “Can’t your organization just give me some money so I can stay in a motel for a couple months?”

  Some callers had an obstinate love of material comfort that made me want to slap them myself. These women were not slaves to their lovers or even to a violent, twisted concept of love. Their bondage was to a man’s steady paycheck and the meaningless things it bought.

  I heard stories of fear and self-hatred that echoed my own. I heard a lot of broken records. Sometimes I would be so numb at the end of an eight-hour shift I’d find myself stabbing my thighs with an uncoiled paperclip while the caller on my headset described being beaten with a power cord. This particular caller didn’t want to involve the police or get a restraining order or even break up with the man who did this to her. She told me she’d stolen his credit card and treated herself to a shopping spree instead. I could feel my eyeballs twitching as I listened to her, and buried somewhere inside my chest the beating of a cold, mad heart.

  ——

  I WAS FOUR YEARS old when my father married his girlfriend, Carla. My mother was forbidden to attend the wedding. It was a slight she never forgot.

  “They made this big deal, telling everyone in Danvers not to tell me where the ceremony was,” she told me. “Like I was going to burst in and stop the show.” My mother rolled her eyes. “Please. I just wanted to see you in your little flower-girl dress.”

  Kathi had known Carla in high school. In the shallowest sense, they were women of the same ilk—short, Italian-American brunettes. Girls like this can sniff each other out from across the room at a party, and either become best friends or instantly, rabidly despise each other.

  “Carla thinks she’s won some big prize,” my mother said when she heard about my father’s engagement. “Ha! She’s getting exactly what she deserves.”

  And yet when my father was in one of his moods, clearing the kitchen table of dishes with one impulsive sweep of his arm, punching holes into the walls, swinging a baseball bat inside the house, it was my mother’s kitchen where Carla went to recoup. A couple of times a year, my stepmother would appear at the front door in tears.

  “Oh, Jesus, Carla,” my mother would say. “Sit down. Relax.”

  “Kathi, you know how he gets.”

  “Believe me. I remember.”

  For some sick reason, Carla’s crises brought out my mother’s perky side. Kathi would practically chirp as she whipped up something for Carla to eat. My mother and stepmother would sit at the kitchen table smoking cigarettes and snacking like two girlfriends on their lunch break. When Carla decided that she was ready to go back home, my mother respectfully showed her the door.

  “She’s not the brightest person in the world,” Kathi said of Carla. “And she’s lazy, always has been. The woman has two speeds—slow and stop. But, Christ, if I had to live with your father, I’d want to sleep all day, too.”

  ——

  MY STEPMOTHER WAS THE youngest of three girls, the only member of her immediate family who was born in America. Her parents and sisters moved from Italy after World War II ended. Carla’s mother, Elda, was a big, square-faced woman with a loud, brusque voice, who in her sixty-one years as an American citizen never learned to speak English. She didn’t need to. If Elda wanted something, she would simply holler and thrash while everyone around her scrambled to figure out what had to be done.

  My father hated Elda so much that he refused to go to his mother-in-law’s house even on Christmas Day. The one time I remember Elda visiting our house, she commandeered my father’s yard tools and did some pruning on the birch Dad loved more than any other tree in the yard.

  “Get away from that,” Zeke yelled when he saw what she was doing. Elda snapped back at him in Italian, a long, Fascist-sounding rant, then went home. A few months later, the birch tree died.

  “She killed it,” my father said. “She did it on purpose.”

  My stepmother grew up to be the exact opposite of her mother: a quiet, sluggish woman with her head in the clouds. Carla’s only expressed ambition in life was to become a flight attendant or a florist. She’s been a waitress and a hospital tech, sometimes simultaneously, for the almost thirty years that I’ve known her. A devoted mother, she always made sure that her work schedule allowed her to go to my brother’s and sister’s hockey games. She has probably spent half her adult life shivering in ice rinks, cheering for her offspring as they skated in circles and clobbered other kids with their sticks.

  As soon as he married Carla, my father bought back his childhood home from the couple who had bought it from his widowed mother. It’s a New England cape with weather-beaten shingles that look like slices of burned toast. The house is small, but the backyard is one of the biggest on the street, with room enough for a garden and a decent game of Wiffle ball. At the edge of the yard is a hill that my father gutted of trees and terraced with long wooden planks he scavenged from the town dump. Below the hill is a meadow of wild-flowers and reeds. Every winter the Danvers Fire Department floods the meadow with water so that it can freeze into a public skating park. Zeke taught my brother, sister, and me how to
skate there by pushing a plastic milk crate around the ice until we were sturdy enough to glide away on our own. He and his four brothers all learned to skate the same way, in the same meadow, a generation before us.

  I spent Sundays, Mondays, and Tuesdays at my father’s when—if—visitations were being properly observed, and I cannot recall a single day in my life when his house was not under construction. Zeke has remodeled the interior himself slowly over the years, tearing apart floors and knocking down walls. He works room by room, often leaving a project unfinished for several months in the spring only to resume it later in the winter. There have been spells when we washed our dishes in the bathtub, or shared one toilet among six people. Inevitably, in the rubble of these renovations, my father will find something—a baseball card, a bag of marbles—that whispers to him from a lifetime before us. At one point, my father’s mother moved back into the house for the penultimate stage of her Alzheimer’s, and the former matriarch now wandered the half-renovated rooms like a quiet, baffled toddler. Here was the same backyard and the birch tree that my father and his father planted together. Here were the slate front steps, the blackened shingles, the meadow. Here we were, life circling around once more.

  ONE DAY, AS I was lying in my father’s backyard, I pulled a four-leaf clover out of the ground. I was stunned. I hadn’t been looking for a four-leaf clover—or anything else, for that matter. It just seemed to find my fingers as they absently stroked the thick, glossy lawn. When I realized what it was, I ran to show Zeke, who was up on a ladder denuding his blighted birch. At first he didn’t believe me and continued stripping branches. I was nearly five years old, wont to see the world as a magical place. I hounded him until he finally stopped to look.

  “Well, for crying out loud,” he said, taking the clover in his hand. “You really did.”

  We went inside to show my stepmother, who was standing at the cluttered kitchen counter. She was always overwhelmed by something—groceries to put away, dishes to wash, dinner to cook.

  “Isn’t that nice,” she said without looking.

  I placed the four-leaf clover on a scrap of paper, which my father dated, and we sealed it between two squares of plastic wrap. Then we had to find somewhere safe to keep it.

  “We need a book,” my father said.

  Besides my stepmother’s cookbooks, there were only two books in the house at that time, the Audubon Society’s Birds of America and a tattered Bible crammed on a basement shelf underneath a shoebox full of loose change. My father and I both agreed that the bird book, which was big and had a hard cover, would work best. We tucked the clover among a spread of blue jays perched on flowering branches that vanished into the margins.

  Zeke and I returned to the backyard. He continued chopping down his tree. I peeled swatches of moss off a stone and arranged them into the map of an imaginary world full of countries I named after girls: Victoria, Cassandra, and the Islands of Zoë.

  And again without trying, I found another four-leaf clover. I ran to show my father. He wrinkled his forehead in disbelief and perhaps a tinge of envy. He’d already taken one break that afternoon. He wasn’t going to interrupt his work again.

  “Go ask Carla to help you,” he said.

  Carla was in her early thirties then, and still a very pretty woman. She and my father had recently returned from their honeymoon in Hawaii, and she was a quarter-moon pregnant with my younger brother. I went inside and found her standing before her Sisyphean mountain of housework. When I showed her the four-leaf clover this time, she twisted around and glared at me. Spite crackled in the air between us.

  “Another one?” she cried.

  ——

  CARLA INTRODUCES HERSELF TO my friends as “the Wicked Stepmother.” She laughs from the belly whenever she says it. I do, too. I love everything about her self-appointed nickname. First, the use of the definite article: Carla does not see herself as a wicked stepmother but the Wicked Stepmother, a singular character of importance, even if it is an antagonist’s role. Second, the allusion to a fairy tale is as funny as it is true. I have an undeniable Cinderella complex. When I get into a martyr’s frenzy of vacuuming, no one is better than my Wicked Stepmother at putting me back in my place. “Nik, you’re a legend in your own mind” is her chosen refrain.

  But the best of all this wicked-stepmother business is: she said it, not me.

  Because there have been moments of wickedness. Oh, yes. Vicious, primal battles, icy competitions so subtle and silent that they seemed to be fought on a molecular level, and then some scenes so transparently nasty they bordered on cliché.

  Like the Fourth of July party I can’t let go of. One of Carla’s friends asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. “A doctor,” I told the woman. I was eight years old and it was the most interesting and noble thing I could think of becoming.

  “How do you know what you’re going to be?” Carla snapped. “For all you know, you’ll be pregnant by the time you’re sixteen.”

  I don’t imagine it was easy for her. Three days a week she was responsible for feeding, bathing, and supervising another woman’s child. That this child had the same smile as her former sexual rival was an added insult. That this child was also demanding and imperious, telling her how she ought to run her household, that she was so oversensitive she cried at the drop of a hat—I doubt any of this was ever a part of Carla’s life plan. I’d arrive at her house in dirty clothes, my snarly hair clumped in Caucasian dreadlocks. My father would hand me over to his wife so that he could do whatever work there was to be done on the house. She’d shampoo me in the bathtub, then sit me in the middle of the living-room floor and drag a brush through my knotted hair. I made a point of screaming loud enough for the neighbors to hear.

  “Fay Wray,” she’d say with a shudder. “You’re an actress, just like your mother.”

  From a safe distance I can see how, in Carla’s cosmology, I was both a burden and a threat. Even without a precocious and needy stepdaughter to weigh her down, Carla was failing miserably to manage the things in life that were legitimately hers. The house usually looked like a disaster site, the cupboards were stuffed with junk food and empty of essentials, the checkbook was overdrawn and the credit cards had been maxed. She and my father were always in a screaming match, and my little brother was plagued by night terrors.

  Three o’clock in the morning is an ugly hour. Little good ever comes to people who are awake to see it. It was at this time that my brother would be summoned from his bed as though hypnotized. He’d walk around the house sobbing in his footed pajamas, his eyes wide open but far away in a dream. No one knew what to do. Carla and Zeke had taken him to see neurologists in Boston. “Stop feeding him sugar after four P.M.” was their professional advice. But Carla could never say no to her bambino, and my brother would go to sleep with a belly full of candy and soda. At night she would follow her inconsolable son from room to room, feebly trying to reason with him. “Wake up. You’re having a bad dream.” This would go on for about half an hour, until my father finally got up and the pageant began.

  The three of them were locked inside their collective nightmare. I wandered in the dark behind them, invisible and restless as a ghost. It was as though I wasn’t there. A blessing, I suppose, to be excluded from the drama. Until one night Carla shouted at my father:

  “Why don’t you ever hit her?”

  Carla pointed to where I stood clutching the banister, and the feeling of a rusty shiv pierced my ribs. Why was not an interrogative adverb in this sentence; it was a modal of suggestion, as in, Why don’t we invite the neighbors over for supper? Why don’t we go apple picking this weekend? Why don’t we try to be more egalitarian with our violence?

  To my stepmother I was an assistant, a sometime friend, a scapegoat, and a competitor. Then, in the strangest turn of events, I became her personal hotline. When my father’s anger turned violent from time to time, she didn’t call my mother or her own family or friends. She called me.

&nbs
p; “Leave him, Carla,” I have told her again and again. The fact that “him” is my father is something we both seem to block out.

  “Well, his TV is on top of my oak bureau and my TV is all the way in the cellar. I can’t lift that thing by myself.”

  Furniture and fear. I’ve heard it all before.

  ANOTHER MEMORY, ANOTHER STORY. I am six years old, and my little brother is one. My stepmother tries to make me jealous of the baby, who is blond and blue-eyed and objectively much cuter than I ever was. But I’m too in love with the little meatball to feel anything but glee when I see him. Before he came along, I used to fake stomachaches so that I could skip weekends at Dad’s and stay at home with my mother. Now I can’t wait for my dad to come and get me so I can go over to his house and hold the baby.

  That Sunday, I’m waiting in my mother’s driveway for my father to pick me up. He pulls up in his truck, and when he gets out he won’t look at me. His eyes are red as wounds.

  “Get in the car,” he says. Those four words—never a portent of good things to come. “I have to talk to your mother.”

  Every pore in my skin sparks. I’m stuck there in the driveway. Waiting for something, I have no idea what. Then I hear it—my mother screaming for me, screaming for help, screaming for me to help her.

  I run back into the apartment and see my father on top of her, his hands wrapped around her throat as he bangs her head against the thinly carpeted concrete floor. I jump on his back and pry him away, though that hardly seems possible now. Another fictive flight of memory? I don’t know. But that is how I remember it, so that’s what I’m telling you here. My mother scrambles to her feet and lifts me up, holding my body in front of hers like a shield, while she and my father continue yelling. Curses, tears, and threats. My father drives away in his truck.