With or Without You: A Memoir

by Domenica Ruta

  The girls in my dorm were always having spontaneous dance parties in their rooms. I would hear them laughing and jumping around on the other side of the wall. All I had to do was knock on their door and I would be welcomed inside, but it was impossible for me to do this. Back home, my mother and I blasted her stereo with the same songs the girls at school were listening to, Blondie and the Talking Heads and New Order. We turned it up loud enough to make the windows rattle, but we never, ever danced.

  It was a funny inhibition, considering that Kathi was utterly lacking in social restraint. There is a ripple of meat in the frontal lobe responsible for impulse control. When the neurons are firing appropriately, it prevents most of us from, let’s say, telling the hostess of a crowded restaurant to go fuck herself because we’re hungry and all the tables happen to be full. This part of my mother’s brain was a blitzkrieg. Her emotions could erupt anywhere, at any time—at a department store, in a dentist’s office, on an airplane. If I tried to intervene, all the radiation she was leaking would concentrate into one furious laser beam aimed right at me. I’d learned the hard way that the only thing I could do in these moments was step back and watch her detonate.

  Whenever she visited my dorm, my mother would walk around deliberately making a mess of my fastidiously clean room. “Uh-oh!” she’d say as she upset a stack of papers on my desk. Turning my hairbrush a few degrees so that it no longer lay parallel with the edge of the dresser, she’d look me in the eye and say, “Oh, sorry, Hon. Is this bothering you?” She’d pull a book out one inch from its neighbors on a shelf, laugh herself silly, then sit on my bed and light a cigarette.

  “Mum, please don’t,” I begged. “We’re not allowed.” I opened a window and fanned the smoke away from the smoke detector.

  “Relax. They can’t do anything to me. I’m a parent.”

  And yet the simple, instinctual impulse to dance alone in one’s bedroom had this brazen bear of a woman shrinking inside herself, and, like a still helpless extension of my mother’s body, I shrank, too. I could tell by the way she nodded to the music and swayed, just a little, that inside my mother there was a woman—a girl, really—roiling with dammed-up movement.

  I EVENTUALLY MADE FRIENDS with two girls in my dorm, falling in love in that consuming, half-homoerotic way young girls do. For about three weeks, Maggie, Cecily, and I ate every meal together. We’d camp out in my room at night, staying up until dawn, giggling and doing our homework. We would laugh until we fell asleep, the three of us squished into a tiny twin bed like kittens, only to wake up the next morning still laughing. On the third weekend of our friendship I went home, and while I was gone these two friends bonded over some arbitrarily evil pact to shun me.

  “Cecily can’t stand the way you eat,” Maggie whispered to me in the bathroom the Sunday night I returned. “You hunch over your tray like someone’s going to steal it from you. It’s embarrassing.” She ran her fingers nervously through her hair. It was a different color, I noticed, a coppery red. She and Cecily must have dyed it that weekend. “She told me to just ignore you when you got back to the dorm, like, don’t even talk to you at all. Don’t explain. But that seemed mean. So …”

  This kind of thing happened every weekend, if not to me then to someone else. A girls’ dorm is full of all the vicious drama but little of the pornography one assumes. I’m sure some girls were having sex with each other, but I was out of the loop. It was overwhelming enough for me just to have friends. We chastely seduced, ensnared, dumped, tortured, forgave, fawned over, petted, rivaled, envied, disgraced, despised, and nurtured one another, and I loved and dreaded every minute of it.

  Despite the savagery of girls during these seminal years, or maybe because of it, I think there is no better place for a teenager’s development than a boarding-school dormitory. In playing our little mind games, we were performing a critical exercise—sharpening ourselves like swords for what lay ahead. At a certain point it became clear that there were things that belonged to us, and things that were only for boys. We held exclusive rights to field hockey, eating disorders, Parliament cigarettes, menstrual periods, accessorizing, and tears. The boys had dominion over skateboards, snowboards, Marlboros, jerking off, open showers, and violence. Some things were anathema regardless of gender, like popping zits or missing your family—you did them only in private and prayed that no one caught you in the act. Certain things we agreed to share in the same way we claimed or rejected everything else, tacitly and with complete consensus. The Beastie Boys and Ritalin had the ability to cross camps, as did falling in love, getting dumped, wanting to fuck, and wanting to kill yourself.

  The movie Pulp Fiction should have been subsumed into the boys-only category, but the girls of Paul Revere got hold of it first. There was a lot of hype about this movie when it was released. The violence was supposedly graphic and disturbing, so much so that movie theaters across the country cracked down on checking IDs before you entered the theater, meaning that only a couple of kids from New York City had actually seen it. The house counselors at Paul Revere were pretty supportive of any weekend activity that didn’t leave us pregnant or dead, so not only did they rent Pulp Fiction for us one Saturday night, they baked us cookies, too.

  The entire dorm showed up to watch the movie on the common-room TV. The field-hockey Sarahs and Meghans, Connecticut blondes with doe eyes and patrician noses; the impeccably dressed Hong Kong girls, Alice and Angie; June and Margaret, the two black girls from the Bronx, a place I found no less exotic than Hong Kong; Heather, the white girl from Saudi Arabia by way of Texas; Sana, the Muslim girl from Saudi Arabia by way of Sri Lanka; Shiva, the skinny, witty Indian girl from western Massachusetts; Anna, my roommate from Vermont; Maggie and Cecily, my on-again, off-again best friends; and me. As many girls as possible squeezed together on two itchy couches. The rest of us sprawled out on the floor, lying on one another’s laps, leaning on shoulders, braiding and unbraiding one another’s hair.

  We had everything and nothing in common. The entire student body of Andover was smart, hardworking, and ambitious, but what I loved most about my dorm mates was that they imploded my entire paradigm of intelligence. I had always been quick to pick up foreign languages and could easily parse the symbolism of an epic poem, but the girls in Paul Revere were good at everything—chemistry, physics, and differential calculus. And they weren’t just clever; they were aware. I saw this so clearly that night as a coolly violent movie lit up our faces. One scene in particular nearly started a riot in the basement of our dorm. Bruce Willis’s character is getting ready for his big escape on a dead man’s motorcycle and his girlfriend, played by Maria de Medeiros, is stalling him with all her womanish questions.

  “That girl talks like a baby,” some Meghan or Sarah said with disgust. “She’s so fucking stupid.”

  “Why does she have to be so stupid?” someone else asked.

  “Because she’s a girl, Stupid.”

  We all cracked up laughing.

  “Shh!”

  “God, I can’t stand how stupid this French chick is. Her voice. Ugh.”

  “She’s like a child.”

  “That’s why guys think she’s hot, you know.”

  “So gross.”

  “Do you know what my mother said to me on the phone tonight? She said that I have too much testosterone. Seriously. She thinks I have a chemical imbalance and need medication because I’m ‘too aggressive.’ Can you believe that?”

  “What a bitch.”

  “Shhhhh!”

  “Shut up!”

  It wasn’t until I met these girls that I finally started to think for myself and make decisions about who I wanted to be, even if these decisions were silent and subterranean still. The girls at Andover were the first people in my life to teach me how to grow up.

  AND YET MY MOTHER insisted that I was a late bloomer. She couldn’t mean boobs, because I had those in sixth grade, or intellectual maturity, because I was a decade ahead of her by the time I left high s
chool, which she was the first to admit. No, Kathi was referring to her daughter’s latent interest in drugs.

  “Nikki’s totally square,” Mum used to tell her non-sober friends, as though apologizing for me.

  Once, while we were on vacation in Cape Cod, my mother picked up a hitchhiker, a harmless college boy who was too drunk to walk home. He sat in the front seat and lit up a joint, which he offered to everyone in the car, including my ten-year-old cousin, Fafa, and me. I tried to say no in as cool a way as possible. The hitchhiker was cute in a crunchy, hippie sort of way, and I wanted him to read a complicated subtext in my refusal, like maybe I was an Olympic hopeful in figure skating and subject to random drug tests. Or, at the tender age of twelve, I had already smoked both pot and crack, but not anymore—I was on the wagon these days.

  “Nikki’s too ambitious to smoke grass,” my mother said to the kid sitting next to her. “Look at her.” She turned around and laughed. “Right now she’s wondering if this moment is going to come up in her Senate hearing when she gets nominated for the Supreme Court.”

  It was partly true. At twelve I hadn’t ruled out a career in politics. But at that moment in time my only aspiration was for my mother’s car to drive off a bridge and drown us all so that I wouldn’t have to hear the sound of her and the hitchhiker laughing at me.

  It was not until the summer after my first year at Andover that I started smoking pot. I’d maintained a friendship with Julie from Hamilton High, and we smoked for the first time at her family’s summer camp in New Hampshire. Julie informed me that it was a medical fact you couldn’t get high the first time you smoked but that I might as well get the first time over with so that the next time would be better. I’d really like to know who started this rumor, because the first time I smoked pot I felt like my face was going to slide off my head.

  Teenagers are bigger children who are embarrassed by how much they still want to run around and just play. That’s when and why hallucinogens walk onstage. Smoking pot or eating mushrooms turned everyday objects into toys. It gave us permission to be imaginative and silly. As Julie and I finished that first joint, a family of ducks swam by in a row, all of them bobbing for fish, and I laughed with an ease and a shamelessness that I hadn’t felt since I was a little kid.

  When I got home and told my mother what I’d done, she got on the phone and called the sisters she was still speaking to. “You’ll never believe it!” she said, beaming. “Nikki got high!”

  From then on my mother made sure to stuff a nickel bag of pot, always green, sticky, and fragrant, into my stocking at Christmas. She didn’t smoke pot herself. For her it was a preadolescent experiment; by the time she was a freshman in high school, she had permanently moved on to hard drugs. Mum remembered fondly the pleasure potheads found in salty and sweet snack foods, so once I started getting high she made sure the cabinets were stocked with good “munchables.” If I was getting high with a boyfriend, she might even cook for us.

  Kathi was my first drug dealer, and without a doubt the best one I ever had. She never ripped me off, in fact, she never charged me, and she always had access to higher quality stuff than the ponytailed high-school dropouts my friends bought from. My mother’s big claim to fame was that she once sold cocaine to Steven Tyler, of Aerosmith. This was before MTV and the big-arena shows, back when Aerosmith was still a local Boston band. I don’t know anything else about it, except that one sentence my mother repeated when she was feeling insignificant or dejected—“I sold coke to Steven Tyler, you know”—each word a sharp note until the last, released with a sigh and a puff of smoke.

  My mother didn’t fuss over me as much once I started smoking pot. She seemed relieved. I had friends coming over to the house when I was home and another set of girls to hang out with at school. I moved seamlessly, though not without guilt and tiny pricks of shame, between my two different worlds. This is fairly typical of scholarship kids at prep schools. My Andover friendships felt more like business associates. Finishing our homework and getting high without getting caught were occupations we shared. We studied together, baked cupcakes in the dorm counselor’s apartment, debated about Kant and free will versus determinism, practiced our Russian with elderly immigrants, tutored inner-city children after school, and found every possible opportunity to sneak into the woods and get stoned. Back home I became known as the girl who lived in That House, the broken-down one with no rules. Kids from my old public high school and then friends of their friends discovered that they could drink and smoke at my place with impunity. There were times when I would return home from boarding school to find kids I had never met before sitting on my porch, smoking cigarettes. They would nod at me sullenly, as if to say, “What are you doing here?”

  I was well into my twenties before I realized that the people you sit next to while ripping bong hits or blowing lines off a CD case weren’t the same as friends. Drug friendships are shaky alliances. Kids would steal pills from my mother while I was away at school, and then snort them without me. Those were my pills to steal, not theirs. Lucky for them, the price of my mercy was cheap. Back then, an offering of high-grade pot or a case of Budweiser was all it took to forgive and forget.

  35 Eden Glen Avenue became a haven for the stoned and the wasted. My mother wanted it that way. She thought it was safer, and I guess it was. No one I knew ever careened off a highway or wrapped his car around a telephone pole. Violent hangovers were the most dramatic consequences any of us faced, and I was usually the one kneeling over the toilet. I was allowed to do whatever I wanted, go wherever I felt like going at any time of the day or night, as long as I called my mother and reported in to her every couple of hours.

  “Hey, Mum, we’re going to eat mushrooms at Singing Beach and then crash at Kevin’s place. His parents are out of town.”

  “Okay, Honey. Call me later to check in. Wait a minute—who’s driving?”

  “Jesse.”

  “I don’t like the way that Jesse drives. Tell him I said to slow down or I’ll kill him myself.”

  If I forgot to check in with my mother, all hell would break loose. One spring break a group of college friends and I drove down to New Orleans. This was in the days before cell phones, so I had to stop every couple of hundred miles to call my mother from a highway pay phone. After a few days on the road and several dozen joints, we arrived at our youth hostel ready to eat our way through the city. The hostel manager recommended a nearby restaurant, so we went there first and ordered gumbo. Feeling confident, I tacked a beer on to my order, coolly, casually, as if it was an afterthought. “Bud Light in the bottle. If you have it,” I added, so that she wouldn’t think it was a big deal. The waitress didn’t ask for an ID, and I sat there sweating until she returned and plopped the beer down without incident.

  “I’m serious, you guys. I’m moving here,” I told my friends. “New Orleans is the only enlightened city in the U.S.”

  We ate and drank and smoked and listened to live music. The night was young, and we were planning our next move when the waitress came over to our table and stared at me.

  “Um, is your name Domenica?” she asked.

  My heart stopped. “Why?”

  “Your mother’s looking for you. She’s on the phone right now.”

  Horrified, I got up from the table.

  “Phone’s behind the bar,” the waitress said, then, behind my back, I heard her tell my friends, “That woman is scary.”

  “Oh my God, Mum?”

  “You forgot to call me,” my mother sang in a creepy voice.

  When she hadn’t heard from me, Kathi had called her credit-card company to find out where I had checked in, then called the hostel and spoke to the manager to see if he knew where I had gone.

  “But how did the waitress know who I was?” I asked her.

  “Oh, that was the easy part.” My mother laughed. “I just told her to look for a teenage girl with ratty brown hair and black eyebrows. ‘If she’s a foot and a half shorter than all her
friends, that’s my daughter.’ ”

  “I’m so sorry. I’m so, so—”

  “It’s okay, Honey. I just wanted to make sure you were still alive. Be careful, okay? Mummy would have to kill herself if anything ever happened to you. You know that.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “Have a good time. Call me tomorrow!”

  I never forgot to call her again.

  SOMETIME DURING MY SENIOR year at Andover, my mother told me not to come home for the next few weekends. Why? I asked her. She had started shooting heroin again and was trying to get herself off it.

  “I’m going to be really sick, Hon. I don’t want to scare you. I don’t want you to see me this way.”

  Kathi didn’t stay up all night talking anymore, as she did when she was on coke. There were several bottles of pills at her bedside, but that was nothing new. I knew that she had dropped out of her classes at the Harvard Extension School and that she had quit her job at the salon, but heroin? How could I have missed something like that? Probably because I was so stoned myself.

  For as long as I was a conscious being, my mother had been afflicted with some incurable pain. First she was recovering from a car accident. A few years later, when she was thirty-four, she had a hysterectomy. This surgery, I’m certain, was unnecessary, a solution concocted by a male doctor trying to shut up what he generalized as another complaining woman. The hysterectomy caused a slew of reactions, one disease after another. These diseases were elusive and always changing. Some of them were very real—my mother had lost her uterus and both ovaries in one scoop; it was only natural that her body would howl in protest. But some illnesses were most definitely her invention, a ploy to get prescriptions for stronger pills.

  At some point in my adolescence, the brief period of sobriety ended and my mother’s pills became bigger and stronger. She was always good about sharing—with my stepfather, with her so-called friends, with my own so-called friends. Even her dog, an obese Dalmatian that was dying of cancer, got licks from the plate she used to crush up and snort her pills. Naturally, she shared her pills with her own daughter, too.