With or Without You: A Memoir

by Domenica Ruta

  Until one day it really didn’t happen.

  I don’t remember many of the details now. But that can happen to any memory, toxic or not. If you can remember anything, it’s already wrong. The image or event has changed, just as you have—minutely, chemically, through the passage of time between then and now. Something happens to you, and then it’s gone. It becomes a memory that becomes shrapnel. Shards of experience still hot with life singe the brain wherever they happen to get embedded. Sometimes I swear I can feel the precise location of my memories like warm, tingling splinters under my scalp. Pictures with no sound, feelings with no pictures, the lost and found, mostly lost.

  There are times when these memories, distilled into words and uttered in my own voice, sound so strange to me—it didn’t happen—that I begin to doubt everything from the laws of gravity to the spelling of my own name.

  MY MOTHER SHOWED UP at the campground a few days later in a Checker cab with her new boyfriend, Michael. The cab was a late model from the seventies, one of the last of its kind ever made in America. Michael had planned to retire the car from the road, but my mother rescued it from the junkyard. She drove the Checker around in circles, showing it off.

  “This is the car Nikki will ride to the church on her wedding day,” she bragged. She’d already had it painted white in preparation. The car would survive another couple of months before it went the way of every other vehicle she tried to own. My mother and her cars—it was always a doomed, unrequited love.

  Kathi stepped grandly out of her big white boat. “I’m getting a hotel room” were the first words that came from her mouth. Mum hated camping. It reminded her too much of my competitive, outdoorsy father, who is famous for dragging his women and children on long hikes that he times with a stopwatch. My mother was driven mad by more than thirty minutes in nature. “The trees are nice, but after a while I just want to take a long, hot shower and order room service,” she said, flicking her cigarette into the campfire. She ate the s’mores I made for her, then started gathering her things to leave. It was clear she was going to glide away in that huge white car and leave me behind. I panicked, started crying, complained about my chronic stomachache, which, for some reason, always aroused her sympathy.

  “Nikki’s sick, Michael. You mind driving us all back to Danvers?”

  “No problem,” he said, and grabbed a case of beer for the road.

  We stopped for gas on the ride home. It was dark by then and the lights of the gas station were glowing a bilious green. When Michael got out to pump, my mother turned around in the seat and began gushing to me. “He loves me, Nikki. And he loves you, too! He told me he did. You know he’d buy you anything you want. Just ask him.” She leaned her head out the window and said to Michael, “Honey, buy her a prize.” Then to me, “Anything you want. He won’t say no to you. He loves you so much!”

  I pointed to the cashier’s vestibule, where a strand of little stuffed unicorns with clasping feet was hanging on a plastic ribbon in the window. Michael got back in and gave me the unicorn. I clamped it to my finger and waved it around weakly. I tried to smile but I couldn’t. Kathi turned away with a disappointed expression.

  “She said she loves you,” my mother told Michael. “She won’t say it to you out loud because she’s shy, but she loves you.”

  I thought, If she says the word love one more time, I’m going to throw up.

  As Michael drained can after can of Budweiser, the big Checker cab swerved gently in and out of the lane. I watched my mother’s reflection in the window. She was smiling dreamily to herself and singing along to the radio.

  “Ashes to ashes, funk to funky. We know Major Tom’s a junkie.”

  At some point she turned around and asked me if I’d had fun in Vermont.

  “That hot-air-balloon festival looked cool. Did you get to go for a ride in one?”

  “No,” I said. A lie. It escaped from my mouth like a puff of smoke, something real, something visible, but only for a moment.

  I had gone up in a hot-air balloon. Uncle Vic had bought us a ride, and this is what I remember: Green mountains, silent and immense. The thin blue vein of a river twisting between them. Giant balloons of all colors floating dumbly across the sky. Above my head the intermittent blast of fire; below me tiny evergreens, tiny buildings, tiny people—everything far away and unreal. But beautiful, and so painful, and then something more than either of those things. Just below the surface of the world, a great mystery was thrumming with the dim insistence of a pulse. It was much bigger than this moment, bigger than my uncle, bigger than my whole life, and I was lucky to be alive for even five minutes and feel it.

  Except, I can’t possibly have held such a thought in my mind. The only thing I remember for sure was hovering above the earth, trying my hardest to forget.

  Lonesome

  ———

  WHEN I WAS A KID, THE MOST POPULAR BOOKS FOR GIRLS WAS a series called The Baby-sitters Club. There are around two hundred novels in total, all about a girl named Stacey and her vast network of best friends who work with her in a weirdly noncompetitive babysitting collective. Stacey is pretty, athletic, and entrepreneurial, the kind of girl who is overjoyed to get her first menstrual period. Nothing in the known world can get Stacey down. Not when the rival gymnastics team threatens to win the trophy (they will trip over their hubris in the finals, obviously), not even her parents’ sensible, compassionate divorce. (“Now I have two bedrooms to decorate!” our heroine might squeal.)

  But Stacey is no immortal. Like the rest of us, she has an Achilles’ heel, and hers lurks inside every cupcake that comes her way. Little Stacey, you see, is deathly diabetic, a fact that she seems to forget at the climax of every Baby-sitters novel.

  I read half a dozen of these books even though I hated them. I was afraid that if I didn’t, I would miss out on some arcane girl knowledge that the kids at school could use against me. The plots are formulaic and predictable. There is always a moment when Stacey goes to a birthday party and eats herself into diabetic shock, followed by the inevitable rescue, a trip to the hospital, and an outpouring of love from family, friends, and one cute boy whose devotion to her is as sincere as it is chaste.

  By this point in the book, I truly hoped Stacey would die. I wanted to execute her personally. Set her hair on fire. Hold her face underwater until the bubbles stopped. I hated her. I hated everyone.

  I DIDN’T HAVE MANY friends growing up; then I hit puberty and things got even worse. Here begins my angry phase, the self-centered, quietly homicidal years, that special hiccup of time between my first bra and my first joint. Fortunately for my peers, I spent most of my free time during childhood and early adolescence sleeping. This is no exaggeration. In fourth grade I discovered that I could knock myself out with prescription antihistamines. I would come home from school, flick on the TV, breeze through my homework while watching Donahue, then pop a couple of pills during the opening credits of The Oprah Winfrey Show. Making it that far into the day without any emotional pyrotechnics from my mother seemed like a real victory, and I would reward myself with a nice, deep, chemically induced nap. A few hours later, I would wake up and microwave a frozen lasagna to eat in bed while watching horrible network sitcoms. It’s possible that I hated the characters on these TV shows even more than the girls in The Baby-sitters Club. Yet I watched my sitcoms religiously. Even if I was engrossed in a book, I would leave the television on in the background. I didn’t know how to face the night without it. What would happen to me alone in my room, alone with my thoughts?

  Many nights, if my mother was rehearsing her next performance as Medea, or the networks were in reruns, I would take another allergy pill after dinner and pass out in my school uniform. Why bother taking it off? I’d just have to put it on again in the morning. If only there were a button I could push to fast-forward me into the future, I used to think, then I’d be an old lady with everything already behind me. I had no idea what everything was or even looked like. I just
knew that I wanted it to be over. Life felt trapped in slow motion, childhood was going to last forever, and I would always be bracing myself, squeezing my pencil so tightly my knuckles turned white, grinning and bearing, never knowing when or if it would ever be safe to relax.

  DESPITE ALL THIS, I started adolescence as a minor hero. In sixth grade I got boobs. They have since shrunk significantly, now sad puckered little things, like partially deflated balloons the day after a birthday party. A decade of yo-yo dieting will do that. But their debut was sudden, disproportionate, and newsworthy, as eighty percent of the girls at school were still flat-chested. The few girls who could fill a bra quickly formed a clique and recruited me to join. It was a very calculated, kind of ingenious, preteen maneuver: the deliberate consolidation of power. As far as I could tell, boobs were the only things we had in common; but for a brief period I walked with the alpha girls, floating high on the fumes of inclusion. Still an insatiable overachiever, I was always waving my hand hysterically in the air—Please, please call on me! I know the answer! Pick me! The girls in my clique tolerated this for a while. They already had a slutty girl, a rich girl, and a jock girl in their ranks, so a brainy one rounded out our portfolio.

  By eighth grade Mum got ambitious. She had her heart set on a college scholarship, though college was still four years away, and began prodding me to get serious about extracurriculars. “Good grades aren’t enough these days,” she said. “You’ll need to start doing volunteer work and play a team sport.”

  She signed me up to start babysitting little kids at a domestic-violence shelter. Class president proved to be an easy win and carried no real responsibilities. For a sport, I picked cheerleading, because, at the very least, it spared me the indignity of having to use a mouth guard. Our school was tiny, and every girl who tried out got a spot on the team. As we were all equally inept at back handsprings, the role of captain was chosen based on a one-page essay entitled “Why I Should Be Captain of the Cheerleaders.” On the second day of practice, the coaches passed out sheets of paper and told us that we had twenty minutes to write.

  I looked around at all the girls spread out on the gymnasium floor, with their sparkly notebooks and pens, and almost felt sorry for them. It wasn’t fair, really, how devastated they were about to be. I toyed with the idea of humbly withdrawing from the contest. Then I cracked my knuckles, licked my lips, and scribbled out the Gettysburg Address of cheerleading.

  That winter I was chosen for the role of the Virgin Mary in the annual Christmas pageant. Since this was the highest honor a girl at my school could achieve, the person who would play Mary became a topic of speculation at least a year in advance. Long brown hair and a simple majority vote among fellow students were the only criteria; it was essentially a popularity contest that took into account your everlasting soul. I tried my hardest to accept the role with the grace and poise befitting the Mother of God, but I had always been a bad winner.

  Loud mouth, straight A’s, and boobs—I had no idea how or for what these things were exploited, only that they attracted all kinds of attention from men and women, girls and boys. Aunt Sandy once scowled at me in my bathing suit as I prepared to cannonball into her pool, and said to my mother, “That’s not right. She’s too young to be that busty,” as though my body were somehow my fault. So it was only a matter of time before the witch hunt, before someone came after me.

  And they did. My classmates and some of their mothers and even some of the teachers. Who does she think she is? Her mother is that bleach-blond you-know-what. They never go to church. Her mother didn’t even come to the Christmas pageant. (Because, she told me, she was bored to tears by singing schoolchildren and would rather stay at work and make money.) Clearly, my mother and I weren’t in the same league as these whispering middle-aged women and their scrawny-legged scions. How dare I have the things that belonged to their girls? How dare I win, and worse, win everything?

  The beginning of the end fell on picture day in eighth grade. Because we wore uniforms, picture day was a big deal, one of only four days throughout the year in which we showed up at school in normal clothes. My mother woke up uncharacteristically early that morning so that she could blow-dry and straighten my hair. I wouldn’t let that woman near my eyes with a sharpened eyeliner pencil, but I let her brush rouge onto my cheeks (“Subtle, Mum! Please be subtle!”) and a little mascara, which she let me apply myself. Kathi and I had put an outfit together the night before: black cotton sweater, jean shorts, black tights, and a pair of brown leather ankle boots with a tiny heel.

  “How do I look?” I asked Mum.

  “With those boots?” she said. “Killer.”

  Just before I left the house my mother added a final touch, a black beaded necklace with a black cross in the center.

  My homeroom teacher was Mrs. Collins, a middle-aged prune with a helmet of stiff, prematurely gray hair. Earlier in the year I’d spotted a pack of cigarettes in her desk drawer, and I shot her a knowing look. “I thought you smelled familiar!” I joked. She didn’t laugh, and a mortal enmity was born. Like all people who dislike me, Mrs. Collins became the center of my universe. Her opinion meant everything, and I would have sawed off my left arm if it meant that she would scribble “Good” in red pen at the top of my papers.

  I think it was the black cross that did me in. Mrs. Collins looked me up and down, then quickly got up from her desk. She grabbed me by the arm and pulled me into the girls’ bathroom. I didn’t resist or even question her. I was too afraid. I had never seen Mrs. Collins touch any of her students before. I assumed that she was having a Lizzie Borden breakdown, about to murder us all one by one, starting with me.

  “What are you wearing?” Mrs. Collins said once the lavatory door swung shut.

  What was the right answer to that question? For the first time, I didn’t know. I stared into my teacher’s eyes and burst into tears. More questions followed, more bumbling tears, until the inevitable:

  “Did your mother see how you dressed yourself this morning?”

  “Yes.”

  Many women leave their reproductive years with wisdom and dignity, but not everyone crosses the threshold so willingly. Those women become the warty hags of our childhood fairy tales, the big-nosed, green-skinned witches with ovens equipped to broil a nubile thirteen-year-old girl. Envy is like oxygen to these miserable gorgons. They gargle with lamb’s blood and spit out napalm. I know all this firsthand because, almost every year, a Hydra like this resurfaced in the form of a schoolteacher. Mrs. Collins was the meanest of them all.

  She called in another teacher, and then the school principal. The three women stood in the bathroom shaking their heads, clicking their tongues at me, literally tsking. They never said prostitute, trollop, or hussy, though I’m sure all of these and more crossed their minds; as Catholic-school professionals, they used the words disgrace and shameful instead. Someone procured a pair of gray sweatpants, and I was told to take off my shorts and put them on. Then Mrs. Collins marched me back to class, to thirty pairs of eyes waiting feverishly for our return, and everyone got in line according to height. In the pictures, which I tore up the second I saw them, my eyes are small and red and my smile is tired.

  That same day, Melanie Higgins was wearing a spandex skirt that looked as if it had been painted on her skin. Krista McDonald’s bra was so padded that it laughed in the face of reality. Amanda Di Lorenzo looked like a midget Tammy Faye Bakker, with her blue eye shadow and clumped blue mascara. The shorts I had on were neither scandalous nor ripped. My tights were opaque, and the sweater’s only offense was its color; it had a high neck that grazed my collarbone and fell loosely to my waist. These were the points my mother made when she came in the next day to raise hell.

  “My daughter has never even kissed a boy, and you people made her feel like a whore,” she shouted. It didn’t help our cause much, not with all the cleavage Mum was showing as she said these things.

  Shortly after picture day, my classmates decided to imp
each me as their president. They had discussed it all behind my back and elected a few representatives to broach the issue during social studies. I’d never thought much of my classmates’ intellect, so when this happened I was shocked and slightly impressed. The little plebeians had organized. Our teacher, Mrs. King, was a frail, pretty sparrow, easily bowled over by a roomful of hateful thirteen-year-olds. She didn’t know what to do, so she made me wait in the hall while the rest of the students discussed my failings in a quorum and then, in democratic fashion, voted me out.

  “Why are they doing this to you?” Mrs. King asked when she returned to the hall to deliver the class’s verdict. (“Not totally unanimous,” she offered as a consolation.) She was very tall, so she had to bend at the hips to meet me eye to eye, and when she finally looked at me she began to cry.

  “I don’t understand, Nikki. How can they be so—so cruel?”

  These questions weren’t purely rhetorical, I realized. Mrs. King actually wanted me to explain them to her.

  For my entire life up to that point, school had been a six-hour respite from home. There was a reassuring pattern to every period, day, week, and semester. I understood exactly what was expected of me and could deliver it in return. I knew the right answers. Even if my teachers didn’t like me—and I sensed that many of them didn’t—I got concrete validation in test scores and letter grades. Now life at St. Mary’s was no better than it was at home.

  The impeachment took place on a Monday, a night that I slept at my father’s, and as I walked to his house after school that day I decided to kill myself as soon as everyone went to bed. I tried to explain to my dad and Carla what had happened at school, but either they didn’t believe me or they didn’t fully understand. I took my diary to the backyard and wrote a poem about the moon, then swallowed a combination of allergy pills and generic-brand aspirin. I think now part of me must have understood that if I’d swallowed the kinds of pills stocked at my mother’s house I most definitely would have died. Thank God, it all ended ingloriously with a lot of vomit. I didn’t even fall into a coma, which was my ultimate goal—to lie like Sleeping Beauty on a hospital bed made of Lucite until a handsome college admissions officer woke me up with a letter of acceptance, a scholarship, and a kiss.