With or Without You: A Memoir

by Domenica Ruta

“Honey, listen to Mummy,” Kathi told me. “Have Dave’s baby now. Before he finds someone better than you.”

  While I didn’t get pregnant, an unnatural domestication took place. Kids my age were going to rock shows, getting ironic tattoos, and hopping from one hip romance to another. I was pretending to be a married woman, doing laundry and cooking dinner. Dave balanced the checkbook, got the tires rotated, and fixed leaky faucets. Weekday mornings, as I stood at the kitchen sink rinsing out last night’s beer bottles, I would be seized by the sensation of a hand on my throat. Sometimes I could shake it off with a shot of scotch, which I kept in a crystal decanter on the counter, but the feeling never fully disappeared. It hovered in my apartment, in the grocery store, in the gym, where I killed myself with sit-ups, haunting me with questions I couldn’t answer.

  “When is it going to happen?” I would whisper as I washed the dishes. When was what going to happen? I had no idea.

  When I finally got a real job, I thought, Well, that must be it. It wasn’t, but I was distracted for the moment, and earning a bit more money. I was hired as an activities coordinator in the Alzheimer and Dementia unit of a nursing home. For eight hours a day I played the hapless leader to a dozen lost souls, men and women who’d led lives of dignity and now looked to me, a twenty-something-year-old stranger, to remind them who and where they were. I kept them busy with a kindergartenish program of finger painting and sing-alongs. Every day at sundown the old folks went berserk. One woman would put on her hat and coat and sit by the locked door, clutching an empty purse tightly against her chest as she waited for her mother to pick her up.

  “What did you do to her?” a man once blurted in the middle of our daily exercise class. He was holding a three-pound hand weight that he was ready to hurl at me. “What did you do to my mother?”

  Others had lost their ability to speak and simply howled.

  Every morning I would sit them down at the activities table with mugs of decaf. Even though I knew how all twelve of them took their coffee, I went through the ritual of asking them again. It always made them feel good to remember a simple script like “Cream, no sugar.” Sometimes we played bingo. I would pluck out numbers from a rotating wire basket as the old folks peered at their cards without making a move. Because they loved bingo, and always perked up when I started a game, I had to memorize twelve different bingo cards, which I dealt to the same people each week, and play all twelve games in my head simultaneously while calling numbers.

  Is it possible to have nostalgia for a time in which you never lived? I’m sure there is a word for this phenomenon in German—beautiful, absurd, and twenty letters long. I felt more at home playing bingo and listening to Artie Shaw records with a bunch of white-haired old wraiths than I ever did with my high-school or college friends. Here was the generation I belonged to: they loved to clip coupons for food they would never buy and complain about the exorbitant price of shoes. They could sit for hours listening to stories read out loud, and they’d learned the canon of American poetry by heart. Every once in a while, when we were sitting at the activities table for our tenth coffee break of the day, I would offer a single line:

  “The woods are lovely, dark, and deep.…”

  Like a pebble tossed in the still water of a koi pond, memories rippled out of them in concentric circles.

  “And I have promises to keep.”

  “And miles to go before I sleep.”

  “And miles to go before I sleep.”

  I didn’t play with poetry often, because it always made me cry, and tears are contagious in a nursing home. The residents mimicked whatever mood I was in. If I laughed, they laughed whether or not they got the joke, and if I started crying, a box of Kleenex worked its way around the table.

  “Your job is so sad,” Dave would say when I told him how my day went. “I don’t know how you do it.”

  I drank, that’s how. Two to three liters of scotch a week, usually alone, as Dave wasn’t much of a drinker. To slow myself down I’d buy a six-pack of beer, the logic being that since I didn’t really like beer this would force me to drink less. I wasn’t an alcoholic. I had a job, a boyfriend, and a college diploma. It was medicinal drinking, something classy people do in New Yorker stories. It’s not my fault, I would say defensively to no one but myself. Some people couldn’t open their eyes before drinking a pot of coffee. I hated caffeine. I just needed one, at most two, shots of scotch to face the day. And, besides, I worked hard. Didn’t I have a right to drink?

  Sad as my day job was, I loved it. I felt completely at home in that place, where life was stripped down to the barest elements. Emotions in the dementia ward rose up, exploded, and cooled like the same forces of nature that formed the universe. People screamed when they were angry. They cried when they were sad. The laughter in those rooms was made of a hard, indestructible material, something mined from the deepest recesses of the human heart. We laughed a lot. Even an aphasic could tell a good joke. One woman named Leah swiped a pickle from a man’s plate at lunch and regarded it curiously for a moment. She then looked at me, held the pickle at her crotch, and swung it around. Leah was seventy-two years old and had lost the ability to form a sentence, but she knew one thing instinctually:

  PICKLE = PENIS = COMEDY

  Leah was shorter than I was and wore unintentionally hip polyester pantsuits. I loved her to pieces. But my favorite person in the ward was a ninety-seven-year-old man named Saul. He was a hunchback with a shock of milky white hair and large blue eyes that still glimmered with understanding. Once the head of surgery at a famous New York hospital, Saul had enjoyed decades of comfortable retirement before finding himself stranded in our unit. He spent most of his days hiding behind a New York Times that he would snatch from the nursing home’s library. Staff and residents from the main unit were constantly asking me about this.

  “Did that man steal the paper again?”

  “Who, Saul?” I would say. “Impossible. He’s been with me all morning.”

  Saul didn’t have Alzheimer’s, as far as I could tell. He was able to recall in startling detail a time when the Bronx was a hamlet that brushed up against wilderness, when traveling a relatively short distance was unthinkable if you didn’t own a horse. He knew that there was a war going on in the Middle East, that it was suspiciously similar to another war we’d fought there not long before, and that war was a terrible thing even when it seemed just. Yet there were certain facts of his personal life that he had blocked out. His wife of sixty years had died a few years earlier; his healthy forty-year-old daughter had died very suddenly not long after his wife; his only surviving child had left him there to live the last of his days among strangers. When quizzed by specialists at the nursing home about these events, Saul would draw a blank, become very confused, and change the subject.

  It made sense to me. There are some things that we have to forget about in order to get through the day.

  Saul could be forgetful about other, less dramatic facts, too, but for him this seemed to be more of a lifestyle choice. He refused to remember the names of the other residents, for example, but that was because he didn’t like them. They were a band of lunatics, he told me one afternoon. “I mean, they’ve really lost their minds!”

  When certain old women in our ward got upset, they could be soothed almost instantly by being given a lifelike baby doll to hold. These dolls and all their blankets and bibs were stored in a plastic box in my office. I felt that the dolls, like Valium, should be dispensed only in an emergency. The women would swaddle the babies and hold them expertly against their breasts. Their voices would become very soft and tender as they stared into the painted, unchanging faces. Saul was horrified by these scenes.

  “Are these women soft?” he asked me. “Those aren’t real babies! They’re dolls—am I right?”

  I agreed that it was one of the creepier activities going on in our unit. I usually asked one of the nurses’ aides to distribute the dolls for me, because I couldn’t bring myself t
o pretend that the babies were real. It was too much, a line I wouldn’t cross. Until a particularly bad day, when all the residents were belligerent and wailing as though possessed by a wild, bewitching moon. I treated myself to a couple of cocktails at lunch—Bloody Marys, because they counted as a serving of vegetables. When I got back to work, the residents were still raging. I surrendered and decided to open the box myself. Holding a doll in my arms, I approached a group of women who were staring blankly at their coffee mugs.

  “Oh, wookit da baby!” I cried. “Ooochie cooochie coo.”

  The women looked at the doll and their faces lit up with sheepish glee. Just then I felt a tap on my shoulder. Saul was standing behind me. He lifted a gnarled and shaky finger up to my face. His skin was very pale and flooded with thick veins.

  “Et tu, Brute?” he said.

  I could not have loved anyone more.

  I’d been working at the nursing home for more than a year when Saul went into the hospital with pneumonia. A few days after Christmas, I was reviewing the logbook at the beginning of my shift and read, “On December —, the ——— family reported that Saul has expired.” Expired? Beneath this were the usual reports of what the other residents had eaten and what their bowel movements had been like. I was furious. His family hadn’t felt it necessary to tell us, the nursing-home staff who’d spent all day and night with him, until after his body had been taken to New York for burial. If there was any kind of memorial service, we weren’t invited.

  I stormed down the hall to Saul’s bedroom. The door was unlocked, and I went inside. The blinds were shut but sunlight poured in at the edges and crawled around the windowsill in stubborn, shattered rays. Everything was neat and orderly, just as Saul kept it. There were his spare set of glasses on the dresser, his pile of annotated newspapers and magazines, a little mangled by his shaky hands but neatly stacked on a chair by his bed. Beneath them lay an atlas he had borrowed, permanently, from the library, bookmarked with little scraps of paper to the pages he’d been studying, mostly of Asia and the Middle East.

  I wanted something of his to keep. I felt that I deserved it. If Saul had known that he was leaving, he would have given me a token himself. (My God, I realized, we never even said goodbye.) I knew that I couldn’t take anything of value. His family would be coming to clean out his room, and accusations of stealing were common whenever anything got lost. My heart thumped audibly in my chest. I didn’t have much time before someone noticed that I was gone, or came in and saw me, and there would be no way to explain. I opened the top drawer of his dresser, and there it was—the spiral-bound three-by-five-inch index cards that Saul had kept in his shirt pocket to scribble his questions and notes of the days’ events. I slipped it inside my sleeve, quietly closed the drawer, and squirreled the cards away to my office.

  I took my lunch break early that day and sat alone at a Mexican restaurant to read Saul’s notes. As I read the scraggly script on each card, I realized that this tiny notebook had become a journal of Saul’s disintegrating mind. There were pages of questions about the geography of Iraq, as well as the answers he’d found in the atlas. (“The newspaper is not incorrect,” he wrote. “Iraq has a Q divorced from its customary U … not a misspelling?”) He’d recorded what was served for lunch on a random day. The name of his doctor appeared several times, as well as her phone number. I flipped to the next card.

  “My girlfriend has a new winter coat. It looks smart on her. Camel wool. Did I buy it for her? Where did I get the money for her coat?”

  He was talking about me. I remembered his pleasure when he saw me in the new winter coat that my mother had bought for me at Filene’s. It was indeed camel-colored wool, knee-length, and in a plain cut that hadn’t gone out of style since the days when Saul was a single man.

  “You look swell!” Saul had said the first morning I arrived at the ward wearing it. He reached to me from where he sat at the breakfast table and took my hand in his. “I mean it. That coat looks very smart on you.” After lunch that day, he asked me to go for a walk with him. His spine had permanently frozen in the shape of a lowercase r; a walk with Saul meant bearing all the weight of him on one of my arms, because he refused to hold a cane, let alone a walker. We moved together at the speed of sap and stopped every few steps to sit down and rest. The nursing home was equipped with dozens of chairs along every wall for just this purpose. During one of our rests, Saul turned to me and said, “I’m very fond of you.”

  “I’m very fond of you, too,” I answered.

  When was the last time I’d said something half as kind to my own boyfriend? When was the last time I’d let him touch me while I was sober?

  On another note card Saul had written, “How am I going to support my girlfriend? I don’t have a job. Does she have a job? I must contact the hospital. Surely they need a physician. I must find work.” And then, a few cards later, floating solemnly in the white space:

  “What ever happened to my mother?”

  I closed the book of index cards and stuffed it into my purse. My eyes stung from fighting back so many tears. I ordered two shots of tequila, which I took the only way one can take tequila, like a fast bullet to the brain. Feeling a little warmth in my belly, I ordered another. “And a chicken fajita,” I added, so that I wouldn’t look like a degenerate. I tried to drink the third tequila more slowly. Who was this show for? I wondered. The restaurant was empty except for two waiters and me. When I’d eaten enough food to convince myself that I was sober, I went back to work and gave my two-week notice.

  On the bus ride home from work, I got off in front of a hotel where the bar had a good happy-hour menu. Free cheese and crackers and four-dollar martinis, which was cheap for Boston at the time. It wasn’t the first time I’d stopped at this bar on my way home from work, and it certainly wasn’t the first time I had sat alone at a bar and gotten drunk, but never before that day had I acknowledged precisely what I was doing—running away from my feelings—and then righteously, imperiously, said to myself, So what?

  I would stop at a few more bars that night, drinking alone, realizing, also for the first time, that I didn’t have a single friend in my life besides my boyfriend, who didn’t drink, and Saul, who was now dead. Later that night I threw up on the train, staining the front of my nice wool coat. I took it off before my stop and left it on the subway floor.

  SIX WEEKS LATER, I got a new job teaching English at a small language school in Boston. I wanted to write a collection of short stories, maybe linked stories that I would call a novel. Or perhaps a screenplay about an ESL teacher and her eccentric students. I’d call it Love as a Second Language. My plan was to teach classes Monday through Saturday, then devote evenings, weekends, and holidays to writing. Teaching would give me just enough money to pay the bills while I scribbled a salable draft of my masterpiece. It felt like a more legitimate way to make a living than the nursing home. Now if someone at a dinner party asked me what I did, I had an answer that wouldn’t make them step back and wince.

  After a year and a half of teaching, I’d written only two stories, though I’d started and abandoned many others. I kept all of them hidden in my desk, holding on to the hope that when I died this cache of fiction would be published and my talent posthumously acknowledged, like some hard-drinking Emily Dickinson.

  Dave had gotten a low-paying job at a small film-production company in Boston. He was more talented and experienced than anyone in his office understood, living far below his potential. What he needed, it was clear, was to move to New York. Deep down I knew this, and wanted it for him, but I was too selfish to say so and he was too scared to go anywhere without me. The line that demarcated him from me had long ago been erased. I couldn’t tell whose fault this was, or what we should do about it. At night I used to whisper into his ear as he slept, hoping to insert myself into his dreams. When we ate together we didn’t bother with separate bowls; instead, we hunched over a still-warm pot of macaroni and cheese with one spoon that we passed back
and forth.

  How do you end something like that? I tried to leave Dave honestly at first, then I went back and tried to make it work. We adopted a dog, we made a 35-mm short film, we accrued thousands of dollars of debt on a shared credit card. I knew it was over, but when I tried to imagine falling asleep without him it felt like being shipwrecked all alone on the moon. Four years after finishing college, I applied to graduate writing programs in the hope that a university could furnish the direction and structure that my life seemed to lack. After several unceremonious rejections, I was offered a place at one school in Manhattan and one in Austin. Texas was a place I’d seen only in movies; it seemed very, very far away. I was so excited by these simple facts that I skimmed over the part of the letter that said I’d get a scholarship and a stipend.

  “I’m coming with you,” Dave said when I made my decision, his eyes brimming with tears.

  “Of course,” I answered.

  We fought for the entire nineteen-hundred-mile drive from Massachusetts to Texas, and our car broke down three times. For a few days we stopped in New Orleans. It became a spontaneous honeymoon for the wedding that we were always putting off. We went to rock shows and got drunk together and made love as if we meant it. Almost as soon as we got back into the car we started fighting again, tossing all the cruel and tiresome scraps of barbed wire you have left when something is over but you refuse to give it up. Once in Austin, as we were unpacking our collective belongings, I accidentally threw away the ring he had given me to tide me over until we became officially engaged. Later that day, Hurricane Katrina pounded her fists on the city where we had briefly fallen back in love.

  In Austin I met other graduate-school writers, people who read and drank as much as I did, including a twenty-two-year-old guy with a Freddie Mercury mustache that he sported as shamelessly as the dark-green girl bike he rode to class. This young man liked to drink, but he liked to go to the movies even more, and in Austin you could do both of those things in the same place, thanks to a local chain of movie theaters called the Alamo Drafthouse. While Dave was making lattes at a miserable coffee chain—the only job he could find in a big college town—I was skipping off to matinees with my new writer friend. Even cross-eyed drunk, this boy was a genius. He could twirl out breathtaking sentences with the speed and flair of a majorette’s baton, and this was after eight or nine glasses of Drambuie. Moments before puking, he would offer me a slurry insight into the craft of fiction that was more useful and enduring than anything any teacher has ever said. I didn’t want to fall in love with him, but something happened to us in the dark of the movie theater sitting side by side, sometimes the only two people in the audience, our faces awash in the same coil of reflected light, our arms almost touching, then actually touching; then a transmission, a seizure, a curse.