With or Without You: A Memoir

by Domenica Ruta

  “Nikki,” she said, “your mother is literally a millionaire.”

  Millionaire became Kathi’s favorite word. She dropped it into every conversation, telling anyone who would listen how much money she made and spent in a given day. Coming from her demographic, it was hard for Kathi to understand money as the abstraction that it is. Saving, investing—these things were not within her ken. Profligate spending, however, was a talent she’d perfected long before she had the capital to fund it. While Michael sat on the living-room couch watching NASCAR races and drinking Budweiser, my mother and I went shopping. She bought me a calfskin trench coat the color of crème brûlée that cost what I now, as an adult who lives alone, pay for one month’s rent. Since the day she bought it for me more than ten years ago, I’ve worn it only twice. Both times, I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror without imagining a bullet ripping through the buttery leather and staining the beautiful coat with my blood. She bought my college boyfriend, now a filmmaker, his first professional-quality video camera. I had my own American Express card attached to her account, which she encouraged me to use whenever I liked. The lie I told myself was that Mum’s credit card was for emergencies only. Every time I got into a fight with her, I declared an emotional state of emergency and took my boyfriend out to dinner.

  For my college graduation present she flew us to Paris. I don’t remember much about this trip besides blowing my mother’s OxyContins and puking in front of the Eiffel Tower. For our last full day in France, I sobered up and demanded that we go to the Louvre. Kathi got good and high before we left, and for the first twenty minutes she walked around the museum with a truly inspiring sense of wonder. I remember watching her approach an early Christian painting of the Madonna and Child. She got so close that I was afraid she would reach out and touch the canvas. I held my breath and scanned the perimeter for both exits and security guards.

  Kathi stepped back and laughed. “Look at his little dinky!” she cried.

  I ushered her to another room filled with Greco-Roman statues. My mother shrugged. “Either there’s a head without a body or a body without a head.” She was coming down from her high, growing much harder to impress. When she sat on a bench to rest, I was relieved. For the moment, Kathi was at a safe distance from any work of art. I looked at some of the statues, forcing myself to think sophisticated thoughts about them, always glancing back at my mother to check on her. Right there on a bench in the middle of a grand hall in the Louvre, Kathi pulled a little straw out of her shirt pocket and an OxyContin that she had crushed up and saved in a folded scrap of paper. I watched her blow it up her nose while sitting in the eminent shadow of the Winged Victory of Samothrace.

  “What?” she cried when she caught me gaping at her. “We’re in France, for Christ’s sake. Why are you always so concerned with what other people think?”

  We never made it to Versailles, but my mother had obviously been inspired by her trip abroad, because when we got home from Paris she decided to build an addition on our house. This process necessitated home inspections from town bureaucrats, who not only said that we couldn’t build an addition but, after seeing the holes in the floor and the rats nesting between the walls, had our house condemned by the Department of Health. Mum said fine, then fuck it and had the whole house torn down so that she could build a new one in its place. During the next few months, a structure three times the size of the old house was built. Part of me never believed it would be finished, or that my mother would live long enough to move in. Kathi’s Xanadu, I called it.

  It was painful for Michael, a tall goofy guy always lurking at the edge of the room, to see the business he despised and was determined to destroy flourish in the hands of his bold, ambitious wife. The more she and the business succeeded, the more he drank. He started drinking in the mornings, and stealing my mother’s painkillers. She knew that he was stealing from her and was hurt only by the fact that he didn’t just ask her for them. Of course she would have said yes. My mother had to hire another mechanic to follow Michael around the garage and fix his shoddy work. Mang still dispatched sometimes, sitting in the dark, wood-paneled office surrounded by those same old comic strips, the same old pinup girls splayed across the hood of a hot rod, the paper now curled into crispy yellow flakes from thousands of cigarettes smoked by my parents and their employees. Sometimes he drove a van full of special-needs kids to and from school, though he should never have been allowed behind the wheel of a car. At night he sat alone in the living room watching TV, putting together model cars and huffing the glue.

  Kathi once told me that she and Michael had no sex life. “Like none whatsoever,” she said. How does any daughter respond to that? Die a small death, then search for a silver lining—I hoped that the ritual of shooting heroin together was at least tender for them.

  I CAME HOME FROM boarding school, and later from college, to find brown scars of cigarette burns on our living-room couch spreading like a pox. One summer I lifted a towel off the armrest and discovered that a large chunk of the sofa was charred. My mother told me about the night that she smelled smoke from her bedroom, and went to the living room to find that Michael had nodded off and the arm of the couch engulfed in flames.

  “He was still sleeping after I threw a pan of water on him,” she said. “I was so fucking mad I almost beat him to death with the pan. That was a brand-new couch!”

  As long as I had known Michael, he had been trying to kill himself just cowardly enough that he would live another day. I realized this one night in our old house when I was eleven or twelve. I had been woken up again by my stepfather’s snores. It was a loud inhuman sound, as if rocks and tar were tumbling in his chest. I heard him cough himself awake, then blunder down the hall to the bathroom, where he never bothered to shut the door. I pressed my eyes shut and listened to the clunk of the toilet lid being lifted and then all those tar-covered rocks being summoned in an efflux of vomit. Heaving. Liquids splashing. The flush of the toilet followed by Michael’s footsteps down the hall and around the corner to the kitchen. The seal of the refrigerator door opened and the hum of its motor groaned as though irritated at being woken up. The crack of a Budweiser, the hiss of carbonation, the sound of swallowing punctuated by gasps and grunts. The fridge door shut, feet shuffled back to bed, and the snore returned.

  I loved my stepfather, and so I had to dehumanize him a little in order to witness his slow-motion suicide. I began ignoring him whenever I visited, deleting him from the scene, so that now when I try to recall certain events of my past I wonder whether Michael was even there. The sight of him, his pitted gray skin, his shaky hand holding a Budweiser, his big stomach lopped over a pair of sweatpants cut into shorts, his naked chest broken out in large red welts—it was one trouble too many.

  I mean he. He was.

  During my twenties, I tried to limit my time at my mother’s house to three-hour sessions. I would spend that time binge-eating, and if I didn’t get too high on my mother’s pills I would clean her house with a martyr’s zeal. I breezed past Michael as I collected empty cigarette packs and moldy plates of food, either saying nothing to my stepfather or passive-aggressively muttering my disappointments under my breath, as though he were an inert lump of flesh and I had all the answers.

  “He’s the kindest man you’ll ever meet if you can catch him before noon” was my mother’s wifely refrain.

  It was true. Without Michael, I would not have gotten to school most mornings. Some of the best memories of my childhood are of my stepdad driving me to St. Mary’s. For those ten minutes, he was sober and alive in a way few people got to see him. But even when he was drunk I couldn’t help loving him. There were many lonely nights when my mother was still at work or passed out in her bedroom that I turned to Michael to get me through that knotted shred of darkness, the hours after the sun disappeared but before my eyes got tired. I could rely on my stepfather to be sitting on the same spot of the couch watching something I would like on TV. We must have watched The
Godfather together at least a hundred times, so that now, in my reimagined childhood, that movie is playing in the background on a perpetual loop.

  Michael Corleone stands over the baptismal font as the priest christens his baby nephew, while his enemies are exterminated in a violent waltz across the screen. Mang and Nikki clap and cheer at each new murder in a living room hazy with smoke. Michael Corleone goes to Sicily, marries a young girl who is blown up in a car before his eyes. Nikki grows up, starts smoking Mang’s cigarettes, starts drinking his beers. “I didn’t want this for you,” he says to her. “Congressman Ruta. Senator Ruta …”

  YEARS AND YEARS LATER, after everything was lost, after she was gone for good, and I had fucked up my own life in more ways than I could count, I would follow a friend’s sweet tooth into our local Dunkin’ Donuts. I stood by with mild impatience as my friend ordered a bag of chocolate Munchkins from the man behind the counter. The man in the brown uniform with the pink-and-orange nametag kept staring at me, hardly blinking. I was on the verge of snapping “What do you want?” when I heard the clerk call me by name. That voice, gentle and hoarse.

  “Michael?”

  My friend told me later, “Your face just crumpled like a piece of paper.” It had been more than five years since I’d seen my stepfather. What was I supposed to do? What was I supposed to say?

  “Can I have a hug, Mang?”

  “You betcha!”

  Michael came out from behind the counter and lifted me up in his arms. My feet were dangling off the ground and I had to wipe my eyes and nose on my sleeve.

  “Come see my new bike,” he said.

  I followed him outside. The twentysomething woman acting as his manager sniffed indignantly. Michael waved his hand without turning to look at her and said, “I’m taking five.”

  On the sidewalk, he showed me his two proudest possessions—a bright-blue Schwinn chained to a tree and a full set of dentures in his mouth. “The teeth are brand-new, but the bike is used.” He rapped on his teeth with his knuckles. They were perfectly square and white. “Pretty cool, huh?”

  “Michael, I’m so sorry. You have no idea how sorry I am.…”

  “Shhhhh!” he said, and hugged me again. “I always hoped I’d run into you one day.”

  BUT BEFORE ALL THAT, in my freshman year of high school, the last year I lived at home, Michael and I went to see Tommy at the Shubert Theatre in Boston. The show was on a school night and both of us got dressed up—jeans and a tie for him, jeans and a blouse for me. Michael, who had been drinking since noon, as usual, and was already pretty loaded, downed a six-pack of Budweiser on the drive in. We picked up our tickets at a bar called the Penalty Box, where we stayed for another beer. When we left the bar, Michael tried to hold my hand as we crossed the street. The feeling of his sweaty palm against mine nauseated me. I pulled my hand away dramatically, a gesture that left an instant and visible wound on him. I watched him dash to the nearest convenience store and buy a sixteen-ounce beer, which he drank from a paper bag as we hurried to the theater. I felt awful. I knew that I should reach for his hand again, that I should find a way to apologize.

  “Come on, we’re late,” I said instead, and we broke into a silent run.

  At fourteen, I considered myself a pretty discerning judge of what passed for good theater, and that night’s production of Tommy was amazing. Roger Daltrey was sitting in the audience not far from us. Or so Michael said. His blood-alcohol content was in the whole numbers by the time we took our seats. The lights went up and the opening chords of the overture filled the auditorium. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw my stepdad reach for his cigarettes then put them back, remembering with bemusement where he was. But he couldn’t stop himself from dancing in his seat, from pumping his fist, playing air guitar, and drumming on his knees. Everyone around us was quiet and still, but Michael was rocking out.

  At one point he turned to me and said much too loudly, “I don’t get it. Why is everybody just sitting here?”

  “Michael, it’s a play, not a concert,” I whispered.

  “But it’s the fuckin’ Who.”

  He was right. He was totally right. I wish more than anything that I had told him so.

  The Curse

  ———

  MY MOTHER WAS ALWAYS HOUNDING ME TO GET PREGNANT WHILE I was still in high school. It was an easy favor to refuse. Sex looked like an awful lot of work to me, whereas chastity was a virtue I could fulfill while lounging in front of the TV. Although I wasn’t quite a virgin, I did enjoy the romantic fantasies of all young girls who have yet to fall in love. Lying in bed, I dreamed up draft after draft of a fantasy boyfriend, a swarthy hybrid of this tall, lanky guy in my English class spliced with Johnny Depp and Huck Finn, an erotic imaginary friend who, like me, loved Shakespeare and Toni Morrison and, like Huck Finn, knew how to build a fire and gut a fish. This dream boy and I would go for long, romantic walks in a mythical wilderness, and when we found the perfect spot we’d stop and make out for hours.

  In real life, when a guy at school got up the courage to ask me out on a date, I immediately assumed the worst—it’s a joke, it’s a plot, he’s a lunatic who’s going to kill me, kill me and then rape me, or manipulate me into writing his English paper for him.

  I didn’t have a real boyfriend until my junior year in high school. The smart, WASPy Andover boys were intimidating, with their squash racquets and their acoustic guitars, so I settled for a suburban pothead named Steve. I’d met him through my friend Julie over Thanksgiving break that year. Together we went on long walks in the woods of Hamilton and when we found the perfect spot we’d stop and smoke a joint.

  Steve and I dry-humped for about six months straight, until we wore holes in our jeans. Then there was the rainy unromantic Easter weekend that my mother and Michael went away to Martha’s Vineyard and left Steve and me alone to watch the house. Between us we had no car, no driver’s license, no job, and no money. How else were we supposed to entertain ourselves?

  When my mother returned, she knew right away that I had had sex. She walked into my bedroom and hoped out loud that I was pregnant. Shortly afterward, I had my annual physical. When the nurse called me in, my mother got up and followed me into the examining room. It was rare that she even accompanied me to the doctor’s. Usually a cab dropped me off at my appointments, and when they were over I called another cab to pick me up. My mother sat in a leather chair, and I turned my back to her as I got into a paper gown. When the doctor came in, Kathi hopped up and said, “Nikki wants to go on the pill,” then scooted out of the examining room and down the hall. It would take me twenty minutes after my physical to realize that she had left me there, and it was another two hours before a cab came to take me home.

  Kathi contradicted this moment of maternal intuition just a few days later. “You know, Honey, if you just skipped a pill every once in a while Mummy wouldn’t be mad at you at all,” she said in a cloying, babyish voice, as though trying to appeal to a much younger, more easily manipulated version of me.

  I rolled my eyes. “I’m applying to colleges.”

  “Oh, that’s okay, Sweetie. You can still go to school. Mummy will take care of the baby. You wouldn’t have to do a thing.”

  She was thirty-seven years old and could never again have children because of the hysterectomy she had had in the prime of her reproductive years. She knew that I was moving further away from her, and her body longed for something small and witless to cuddle. I should have been more sympathetic, but the pleasure I took in saying no to her felt even more liberating than my new sex life.

  “Not gonna happen, Mum.”

  “Oh!” She stomped her foot. “Why can’t you be just a little less responsible?”

  ——

  WHEN I WAS A young girl, my mother tried to drill into me a pragmatic, almost mercenary concept of love. She had an ongoing lecture series for me, her audience of one, which always delivered the same message: smart women never marry for love; they marry for mone
y. “I wish I was smart like you,” she’d say. Her eyes would roll up toward the sky and she’d fold her hands above my head and pray out loud, “Dear God, please don’t let my daughter fall for a man with limited education or seasonal employment.”

  Sometime during her sober, back-to-school endeavors, Kathi took me to see Gloria Steinem, who was giving a reading at the local state college. Steinem talked about the revolution that can happen when people share their deepest secrets with one another. It was one of those moments, instantaneous as a chemical reaction: I could feel myself changing. After the applause, Mum pushed me to the front of the auditorium. “Go introduce yourself to her.”

  “No. Why?”

  “So she can know who Nikki Ruta is.”

  It was a school night, so I said something about having homework to finish and we left. On the drive home my mother talked about the books she was reading at Harvard, and this somehow turned into another lecture about love and marriage.

  “If I could do it all over I’d marry a much older man,” she said. “Someone rich. Someone who would die early in the marriage.” She pulled a cigarette out of her pack, a long, minty Newport 100, and lit it with the end of the cigarette that was still in her mouth. She tossed the old butt out the window, and I turned to watch it. A tiny orange gem fell backward, smashed into the blacktop, and broke into even tinier sparks that quickly disappeared in the road behind us.

  “You’ll be different.” Mum looked at me for a second and smiled. “You’re smart, so you’ll make your own money.”