With or Without You: A Memoir

by Domenica Ruta

  The next day Kathi walked me into school herself, something she had never done before, a necklace of bruises glowing on the delicate skin of her throat. She asked to speak to Sister Agnes alone in the hall. What did those two women say to each other? I wonder still.

  I refused to go to my father’s house after that, and my mother certainly didn’t force me. What felt like a year later, though it was probably just a couple of months, I was with one of my aunts and some cousins downtown when we ran into my father and the baby. I hadn’t seen either of them since the fight. My little brother seemed to have doubled in size. I couldn’t believe the cool, confident way he sat on my father’s hip. His downy yellow hair had grown into thick ringlets. His smile was so big it wrenched at my heart.

  “Hey, long time no see!” my dad said, grinning. “Almost forgot what you looked like, Nik!”

  “Long time no see! Almost forgot what you looked like!” my brother repeated. A perfect imitation of my father’s smile dimpled his fat cheeks.

  Sometime after that encounter, I resumed my weekend visits at Dad’s. It was as if nothing had happened. What I remember most about my father from then on was his absence. A loosely refolded newspaper on the kitchen table, an empty mug of coffee in the sink. At breakfast I would sit in his chair at the table, hoping to catch the lingering warmth his body had left behind.

  Zeke was off to work by five in the morning every weekday. On weekends, he allowed himself to sleep until six before he dived into some backyard project he’d created for himself. He has been a construction worker since he was a teenager, owned his own business for several years, then sold all his machinery and joined a labor union. His trade is paving—driveways, sidewalks, streets, and curbs. During the winter he plowed snow for the town. While everyone else in New England cursed the sky for dumping another six inches on the frozen ground, my father told me to pray for twelve more. Blizzards put food on the table four months out of the year. They kept us hovering just barely above bankruptcy. Carla’s ability to max out multiple credit cards was startling. Every time Zeke managed to hack away her debt, another bill would surface with twice the interest rate. A winter without snow meant that we would be broke and Dad would be idle—the basic human recipe for family violence.

  For the next two years, when I was seven and eight, I spent three days a week with my brother and stepmother more or less peacefully. At four o’clock my father returned home from work. There was always a slight jolt in the air when he entered the house, a charge that put us all on edge. My brother and I would follow him around like ducklings, from the basement to the living room to the kitchen and back again. Some days Zeke seemed to enjoy his little shadows. He’d take us into the backyard and toss a ball directly at our yellow plastic bat so that when we swung we couldn’t miss. We ran around an imaginary baseball diamond and he would lift us up onto his shoulders, the champions of the world.

  At other times he walked through the door with squinted eyes, scanning the room for something to destroy.

  “What are you lying around for?” he would snap. “Why don’t you ever play outside? Jesus, Nikki. Run around a little!”

  Zeke’s an athlete by nature, a laborer by culture, a blue-collar New Englander who believes that sunshine is a resource you have to earn the right to enjoy and that rest is only for the dead. If I simply read my book in the backyard, instead of on the couch, he’d leave me alone. In that big backyard I read about the spider who spun prophetic words into her web, about the lion who gave up his life for the sake of four bereft orphans, about the pioneer family in a covered wagon battling scarlet fever and blizzards. I read about the gods and goddesses of Greek antiquity, who were as real to me as the people in my family. It was amazing how much time could disappear while I was reading.

  My stepmother got pregnant again. This time it was a girl. The baby arrived precisely at the moment when I was too old to play with dolls but secretly still wanted to. I met my sister for the first time when I was nine years old and she was a tiny cloud on an ultrasound. An obstetrician rubbed clear gel over Carla’s stomach and with a wand projected an image of her insides onto a little TV. It looked like the faint cluster of stars in another galaxy, something immaterial and very far away.

  I decided then and there in that office that, no matter what this creature turned into, I’d make her be my best friend whether she liked it or not. My mother and her sisters were always embroiled in a war that nobody ever won. My sister and I had a better chance of making it if we were on the same team.

  According to the ultrasound, my fetal sister had tucked both of her hands behind her head, like a sunbather in repose, and would have to be delivered by Cesarean. My stepmother said that she, too, had been discovered in the womb with her arms in the same position. This was a revelation to me: people can resemble their parents not just in the shape of their eyes or the color of their hair but in the way that they occupy space in the world.

  A year later, I came inside after reading in the backyard and the sudden contrast between the bright sunshine and the shady interior of the house blinded me. I walked through the kitchen in a dazzling blackness. When my eyes finally readjusted, I saw my stepmother and baby sister napping on the living-room couch. Carla lay on her back with her hands behind her head; my sister lay on her mother’s stomach, sleeping in the same position, just as both of them had slept in the liquid dark of the womb. I looked at the shape of their bodies, one on top of the other, and whispered a single word:

  “Echo.”

  It wasn’t until much later that I understood what had happened that day. Inside me was someone new waiting to be born, not a baby, like my sister, but a future version of me, a grown-up, someone who would devote her life to describing such moments in time. This was her first word.

  Hot-Air Balloon

  ———

  I’M SURE MY FATHER HAS TOLD ME THAT HE LOVES ME. MAYBE WHEN I was a baby. He might have leaned over my crib, tickled one of my pea-size toes, and whispered those three enormous and compact words.

  It’s hard to picture Zeke doing this, though. He was twenty-two when I was born, and had the same sickening fear of babies that most men in their twenties feel. I can imagine him looking at me with tenderness, while out of the corner of his eye he was mapping every available exit.

  “I love you.”

  He must have said these words to me in my sentient years. Maybe when I had a fever, or early on Christmas morning? On my first day of school? After I said it to him first? I am sure it has happened. It must have. I just can’t remember a single time.

  MY LEAST FAVORITE WORD in the English language is avuncular. My stomach sours whenever it appears in print. I picture a gleaming scythe swinging out of nowhere and quietly, efficiently slicing off an arm, an ear, and a chunk of my scalp. Like it was easy. Like it was nothing.

  The men and women I called Uncle and Auntie were not always related to me by blood, unless you consider the needle-sharing of pre-HIV America to be an authentic rite of kinship. Cokehead women with feathered hair christened me their niece and invited me to serve as flower girl in their weddings. Their husbands and boyfriends took me to McDonald’s once in a while, and this, in my world, signified the intimacy of flesh and blood. Inevitably in relationships like these, some significant amount of money goes missing, a bag of dope is not fully paid for or paid back or picked up. I’d hear my mother screaming on the phone, and then these Aunties and Uncles would disappear. Like dandelions, a new pair would pop up around my mother’s coffee table, just as wild-eyed and shaky as their predecessors. They were no better or worse than my mother’s real-life siblings, so when they told me they loved me I felt compelled to love them back.

  The man I called Uncle Vic had long tanned arms and every inch of them was covered with tattoos. Spiders and oil derricks and fire-breathing dragons. He had gotten them young, and their colors had already begun to fade when I first met him. He’d come to Massachusetts from one of those square-shaped states out West, where
the clouds are bigger than East Coast cities. He was married to my mother’s friend Lucy, a fearsome, raw-boned woman with stringy blond hair so long that she could sit on it. Uncle Vic quit school after the eighth grade, left home at fourteen, and from then on worked long, hard hours at jobs only men of his size, strength, and lack of education will do. He had a way with animals both wild and domestic. There wasn’t a dog he couldn’t tame, a mouse he couldn’t catch. Aunt Lucy said that Vic could reach into a beehive without getting stung, but I wonder now if that was actually true or something she made up because she loved him.

  It was love at first sight, he told me. And it was a secret. He would talk about it only when we were alone. Although sometimes, in a crowd, surrounded by the people we both pretended were our family, he couldn’t stop himself from kneeling down and whispering, “I love you,” into my ear.

  The stink of beer resurfaced in a warm belch. The whiskers of his mustache scraped against my neck. If I linger too long in the reptilian stem of my brain, I can smell him right next to me now.

  Pain, nausea, terror, humiliation—none of this was worse than the shameful precision with which dread had consorted with my most aching desire: I would have jumped on top of an open fire to be noticed, to be chosen, to win a precious minute of someone’s attention. Uncle Vic gave that to me, and now I was being burned alive.

  It was wrong—I’m sure he knew this. Legally, morally, and biologically. Grown-ups aren’t supposed to find comfort inside the body of a child. But that doesn’t change the essential fact: Vic was a man undeniably in love. When he looked at me I could see in his eyes that he was terrified, not of jail or lynching but of the much more harrowing possibility of rejection. For a split second he would seem smaller than me, and I felt more sorry for him than afraid.

  I THINK IT was summer.

  Sometime before then—a span of days that I couldn’t measure accurately in my mind, nor can I now—I walked into my mother’s apartment and found my dad on top of her, choking and thrashing her. I remember thinking it was her fault, and somehow mine as well, that there was something inside my mother and me—a howl or maybe a look—that made certain men lose their minds.

  I wanted to go away. I would have gone anywhere, with anyone. As it happened, my mother’s entire circle of family and friends was going on a big camping trip to Vermont, so she sent me along. Kathi didn’t want to come. She had recently fallen in love with the cabdriver who would become my stepfather, and she was glad to have a week with him all to herself.

  My aunts and uncles rented campground plots along a steep majestic gorge. As we set up the tents and trailers that first day, a shock of yellow peeked above the tree line. It crested, rising slowly like the sun, and revealed itself as a giant hot-air balloon. All my aunts got out their cameras, my uncles raised their beers up to the sky, and I waved at the tiny dots of people inside the basket, wondering if they could see me.

  My cousins and I roamed the campground all day long, fishing and swimming and fighting with one another. The aunts and uncles hung around their campsites eating chips and onion dip and drinking cases of beer. Around dusk that first night my cousins all drifted back to their parents, and I started to panic. Where was I going to sleep?

  I knew that I didn’t want to camp anywhere near Aunt Lucy. She never ate anything but apples and had one lazy eye that made her look as dangerous as she actually was. Certifiable, we called Lucy behind her back. She was the kind of woman who hit babies. I had seen this with my own eyes. At the time, it seemed as indulgent to protest as it does to poeticize now; these are simply things that happened in our world. Everyone was terrified of her—men, women, and children alike. I was riding shotgun with Lucy once when a cop pulled her over for running a stop sign. “Ma’am, are you aware—” the police officer began. If he said anything else, I didn’t hear it. Aunt Lucy started screaming as if she were in the throes of demonic possession. The word scream really doesn’t capture a voice like hers. Think of the sound you would hear rising from the trenches of Ypres. The screech of virgins summoned to Mount Pelée. What came from Medea’s mouth when she realized that she was now all alone.

  “Aaaaaaaiiiiyyyyeeeeeee! Who do you think you are?”

  She accused the police officer of pedophilia and cannibalism, shrieking so loudly that the cop jumped away from her window, stuttered a warning, and jogged back trembling to his cruiser.

  When I was left alone at Lucy’s house, she would tell me sick and twisted stories. “Did you hear?” she asked me one day. “The swans that nest in your river were butchered. All of them. Shred to pieces. The police found machetes near their bodies.”

  “Machetes?” I wondered. “Do we have those in Danvers?”

  “You don’t believe me?” she screamed. Her lazy eye lolled in its socket as though unhinged. “You think I’m a liar! Go look it up in the paper if you don’t think it’s true!”

  Of course she had thrown away the paper and there was no mention of murdered swans on the TV news that night. I read my library book silently in Lucy’s living room until my mother came to get me. On the car ride home, I told Mum what Auntie said about the swans.

  “Lucy should have been a writer,” Kathi said. “Nothing real, mind you. Not books. But the National Enquirer or something like that. With an imagination like hers, she could make a fortune.”

  Lucy was insane, and her husband was in love with me. It would have been safer if I slept alone on the precipice of the gorge. I remember stopping systematically at each of my relatives’ campsites, hovering around their fires, waiting for someone to invite me to stay. Night falls faster in the woods. I watched with a leaden feeling as daylight drained from the sky. The serrated edges of treetops turned from green to gold and then, in a heartbeat, they disappeared. Now there was only darkness, the smell of fire, and the sound of shrill invisible birds. I ran to Aunt Sandy’s trailer. Sandy was my favorite aunt, because she was the only adult I knew who didn’t swear, and she spent her free time preserving fruit and baking pies. Mum claimed that Sandy had been a professional model in her teen years—a spread in a bridal magazine, I think. Like any story Kathi told me, there’s a fifty percent chance that it’s true, but I’ve never seen the pictures. What I remember clearly was my mother’s proud invocation of her: “Your Auntie Sandy was pretty enough to marry money.” This was the highest honor a woman could aspire to in my family.

  Sandy’s modeling career never took off, and the rich husband never arrived. She married a moody alcoholic, whom my mother described as “scantily employed,” and became an overweight housewife who knowingly wrote bad checks at the local grocery store. Growing up, I was oblivious of Sandy’s failures. Like my mother and everyone else in our family, I’d fallen for my aunt’s high cheekbones, her nursery-school voice, those moist, buttery cookies always cooling on the stove.

  “Please let me sleep here tonight.” I clamped myself to Sandy’s hip.

  “What’s wrong with you?” She peeled me off her like a wet sock. “Why are you always crying?”

  “I just want to stay with you.”

  Did Sandy know what a pedophile Uncle Vic was? I can’t be sure. My mother knew, as did others in our family; it was one of the many open secrets I overheard the women whispering about—sometimes not whispering at all—in the kitchens of my youth. A fact like that would seem hard to ignore, until you consider the human mind’s most maladaptive feat of intelligence: we have a remarkable ability to believe our own lies. Denial and the desire to self-destruct are elemental cousins; mining one yields the other in equal proportion. In a family like ours, instincts like these—to hurt and to lie, reflexively first, then extensively in consequence—are so powerful that you can take them for granted as easily as, say, the lungs’ ability to continue breathing when the rest of the body is fast asleep.

  I remember unambiguous cries for help, and the cloud of cognitive dissonance that followed—no one did anything, no one said anything, nothing happened, nothing would change. Why? Mayb
e it was a warped interpretation of omertà, the Sicilian code of silence. Maybe everyone was afraid that if they reported Vic to the authorities, Lucy the Certifiable would try to get revenge, and the police would come knocking on their doors to break their families apart, too. There exists a nuanced arms race among those in the lowest echelon of society, a system of threats and reprisals that follows this script: If you report me to Child Services, I’ll report you for welfare fraud; if you report me to Welfare, I’ll report your husband for selling pot.… And so on. After all, not one member of my extended family had what you could call a model home.

  Maybe Aunt Sandy was just overwhelmed with her own family troubles that night. Maybe she simply didn’t think about me and where I would be sleeping.

  “There’s too many of us already,” she said. “We don’t have room for you.”

  I walked back to Aunt Lucy and Uncle Vic’s campsite. What happened next had happened to me before and would happen a few more times until I got a little older. If I do my best mental gymnastics, I can sometimes convince myself it was a rite of initiation, a vestige of the ancient world that the rest of us pretend doesn’t exist. An unholy First Communion, a sacrifice of innocence for some greater spiritual good, an act of random, senseless animal lust, a divinely inspired transgression.…

  I’ve tried so many ways to make sense of my experience. Obliteration was the one that worked best. Pretend it never happened at all.

  It didn’t happen. It didn’t happen. It didn’t happen. It didn’t happen. It didn’t happen. It didn’t happen. It didn’t happen. It didn’t happen. It didn’t happen. It didn’t happen. It didn’t happen. It didn’t happen. It didn’t happen. It didn’t happen. It didn’t happen. It didn’t happen. It didn’t happen.