With or Without You: A Memoir

by Domenica Ruta

  It was just as awful as my mother had said it would be. It was even worse that she was right.

  Two writers who drink are about as safe together in the same bed as a can of gasoline and a box of matches. When this boyfriend disappointed me, as any human being inevitably will, I deserted him ruthlessly for another man who drank even more. In less than a month, this replacement man hated me so much that he dumped me and drove across the country with a broken foot. I quickly found a replacement, whom I tortured for the next few weeks. Then I did it all over again with another guy. Then another and another.

  Throughout it all, I would call my mother for advice and support. I wanted her to send me care packages with cookies. I wanted her to tell me to forget all these guys and just buy a vibrator. In the screenplay I never wrote about my life, my movie mom strokes my hair and says, “It’s okay, Honey. Life is long. And, while relationships don’t last forever, I promise you, true love can never die.”

  That didn’t happen. Kathi was disgusted with me. She was angrier than the boyfriends I was backstabbing and throwing away.

  “I don’t understand how you can just turn your back on people, Nikki,” she said. “How did you—how did my daughter—ever become so cold?”

  (picnic, lightning)

  ———

  I WAS LIVING ALONE IN AN APARTMENT IN AUSTIN. MY BOYFRIEND of the past eight years had moved to New York. My mother didn’t trust me to survive without him, and she didn’t trust my new boyfriend, who lived down the street.

  “Someone could rape you, attack you, and I’m too far away to help,” she said.

  I ignored her perverted impulse to protect me now, bit my tongue before screaming, “Too late for that!”

  “Mum, I’m twenty-six. This isn’t the first time I’ve lived on my own.”

  “I can’t stand it,” she said. “You’re too far away from me. It’s different this time. I can’t explain it. I hurt. How far away you are—it physically pains me.”

  What’s different, I thought silently, was that she no longer had the money to come to visit. Even if she could find the one credit card that she hadn’t maxed out, her addictions kept her more or less housebound. There was no way she could get through airport security with all the syringes and plastic baggies and vials that she would need to survive even a long weekend away from home.

  Every time my phone rang, a hot stone rose in my throat, that familiar dilemma felt by everyone who loves a junkie: Please don’t be her. Please be her. Please be someone telling me she’s dead. Please don’t be someone telling me she’s dead.

  “Honey! I had a dream you died!” she told me.

  “Well, I didn’t.”

  “How will I know if something happens to you? You never call me!”

  “I called you last night,” I said, not mentioning that she had nodded off in the middle of our conversation. I was telling her a funny story when I heard her begin to snore, then cough, then wake herself up.

  “No, you didn’t. I haven’t heard the sound of your voice in weeks. Weeks!”

  I could feel the earth shake nineteen hundred miles away. The surface cracked open like an egg and the mucus of her hatred began to spew.

  “You think I’m no good,” she shrieked. “You think you’re so much better than me. I’m a loser! I’m a loser! My own daughter won’t call me anymore because she thinks I’m a loser.”

  I heard the sound of her wailing, then the whack of the phone repeatedly striking a table or countertop. If I was lucky, she would hang up, fall asleep, and call me later, having completely forgotten the previous hour of her life. We’d talk about my dog, a consolation prize for the grandchild I was still refusing to give her. I would try to make her laugh at least once before we hung up, as much for my benefit as for hers. Kathi’s joy was like a vitamin that I needed in order to survive and could get from one source only, the unruly crow of her laughter.

  Usually she would call back to tell me she was dying. That same old promise I knew she wouldn’t keep.

  I COMPLETED MY FIRST year of graduate school in Austin with neither success nor disgrace. That summer I’d received a grant that could be spent only on academic study, so I signed up for a writing course being taught by American novelists in St. Petersburg. I decided to bookend my two-week trip to Russia with a few days in Danvers.

  “I don’t think it’s such a good idea for you to go home,” my mustachioed boyfriend said to me. “Your mother’s a flesh-eating virus. I’m scared for you, baby.”

  “The flight is much cheaper out of Boston,” I said. That was only half the reason.

  I MADE IT TO Danvers by the end of June. My mother was waiting for me on the back steps when I pulled into the driveway. She took a last drag from her cigarette, then threw it into the yard. I noticed the trash bags piled up against the side of the house and the scraggly blades of grass sprouting in patches over what could have been a lawn. Mum’s arms clamped around me. She squeezed so tight I started to choke. I pulled away and took a good look at her. She was wearing Michael’s clothes, a pair of his gray cotton shorts and a big white T-shirt. Either she or Michael had cut off the sleeves, offering a glimpse of her large, sagging breasts. She hadn’t bothered to put on a bra, and her sallow skin was covered with scabs. Her once glossy hair was wiry and streaked with white. Pulled back in a rubber band, it reached all the way down her back like the tail of a mangy horse.

  “You didn’t say anything about how skinny I am.”

  Kathi reached into her pocket for another cigarette. She had bragged on the phone about all the weight she’d been losing, but I didn’t understand what this meant until I saw her a full year later. “I lost fifty pounds!” she said. Which meant that she was still a solid one hundred pounds overweight. Nevertheless, this weight loss was significant to her. And to me as well.

  “What happened to your arms?” I asked. There were large, crusty yellow sores on the tops and backs of her wrists, as well as the undersides of her elbows.

  “Arthritis.” She glared at me. “Not that you care …”

  I followed her into the house, and she collapsed into a reclining chair facing an enormous television. Oliver the sober drug dealer was gone. He must have realized before the rest of us where Kathi was headed and given up on her. There was a new entourage of drug dealers, skinny junkies younger than me, who came in and out of the house over the next couple of days. My mother tried to introduce me to her new “friends,” but I couldn’t be bothered to look them in the eye, let alone shake their hands.

  “I’m sorry,” she said to some strung-out kid in a baseball cap. “My daughter can be very rude.” The kid stood there smoking in the squalid room that she insisted on calling her “parlor,” then pocketed her cash and left.

  Her bracelets and rings were gone, all those diamonds and rubies and sapphires she’d bought off the Home Shopping Network when she was a millionaire. She loved to get good and high, then polish them in a special solution I think she also bought off TV. More than once I’d caught her talking to her jewelry with great affection, the way I sometimes talk to my plants. Now her hands looked wrinkled and naked without ornaments. I saw her finger tattoo for the first time since I was a child.

  I knew exactly what had happened, where it all had gone. There was no need to ask. But I did. I wanted to rip off that scab. I wanted to see blood.

  “What happened to all your jewelry, Mum?”

  “Pawned it. I had to! The fucking IRS. You wouldn’t believe what they’re putting me through. You would know if you ever called me. Ungrateful cunt …” Her voice got low and sleepy. “You never—”

  Her head slumped against her shoulder and her body deflated like a scarecrow suddenly released from its post. For a split second I wondered, then hoped, then worried that she had died. A snore, soft and congested, slid out of her slack, open mouth.

  No, still alive.

  I took the opportunity to survey and silently criticize the state of my mother’s home. Not even two years o
ld, this new house was already in the same condition as the old one: trash piled and packed into every room until half of them were rendered uninhabitable. In various spots on the floor, I noticed layers of newspapers soaked with dog urine.

  My mother and Michael always had a pair of dogs—one male, one female, both diseased and poorly trained, an archetypal duo that blatantly reflected their own lives like a fun-house mirror. The dogs, at this point in time, were Lexi and Tyson. Lexi was a miniature Doberman pinscher the size of a medium subway rat. Hyper and intrepid, she liked to crawl up my mother’s arm and perch on her shoulder. Kathi had bought Lexi from her sister Penny for sixteen hundred dollars. (“Mum, she’s scamming you,” I said when I heard about the transaction. “I know, but she obviously needs the money and I need a dog” was my mother’s answer.) Tyson was a pit bull, and, like all pit bulls I’ve personally known, he was muscular enough to tow a cart of bricks and had the brains and the temperament of a marshmallow. Tyson had belonged to a Portuguese mechanic who briefly worked for my mother at the taxi company, until she saw him beat his dog. Kathi fired him on the spot, and threatened to have him deported if he didn’t surrender the animal to her.

  Of the two dogs, only Tyson was housebroken. Lexi was one of those cute, inbred things you buy at the mall, stripped of even the most basic genetic instincts for self-preservation. Judging by the size and quantity of messes on the floor, I surmised that Tyson was now relieving himself inside, too. What was clear was that, instead of cleaning up the old newspapers, my parents just put new ones down in another spot. I could smell the stench only faintly beneath the stratum of cigarette smoke.

  My mother’s head snapped up a few minutes later. She didn’t seem to see me sitting with her in the living room. She just stared vacantly at the TV. What was on? Some horrible comedy that wasn’t the least bit funny. Of all the details in this scene, that’s the one I find unbearable, so I’ve blocked it out. I remember her laughing, hoarse and broken, like a stalled engine. She realized that the cigarette had burned up without her ever taking a drag, lit a new one, and nodded off again. I watched her face anxiously as she slept, something I hadn’t done since I was a little girl. Some mornings, and even some nights, I would stand next to my mother as she lay corpselike in bed and watch the movement of her eyeballs beneath their lids. What is Mum looking at? I wondered then. What is she reading in her dreams?

  Now, as an adult daughter, I played a game with my mother’s unconsciousness instead. How long would her smoldering cigarette hold together in that perfect cylinder? If the ash broke and fell on her before she woke up, I would steal a pill from her bottle; if she woke in time to take the last drag, I would wait for her to offer me one. Either way the game played out, I was guaranteed to win.

  “Why are you doing this to yourself?” my boyfriend asked me on the phone that night.

  What I couldn’t admit to him—or to anyone else, including myself—was that after a full year without seeing her I desperately missed my mother.

  Sleeping over at Kathi’s house was clearly a bad idea. I had traveler’s checks in my suitcase, which would surely get stolen there. I kept my bags at my father’s house and spent my days in my mother’s parlor, drinking Michael’s beer and watching the two of them fade in and out of consciousness. A big event occurred on my second day home. One of Kathi’s friends, a boy of twenty-three, had just gotten out of a thirty-day rehab. Instead of going home to see his parents or his ex-girlfriend, this kid came straight to my mother’s house. Kathi got on the phone with his mother and promised to take care of him.

  “Oh, don’t worry, Debbie. He’s safe at my house. We’re all clean and sober here. I’m making his favorite dinner, my meatballs and sauce. My daughter’s home from Texas, too, so we’re celebrating. First thing in the morning we’re all going to an NA meeting.”

  This kid—I’ll call him Bobby—sat next to me on the couch and crushed up some of my mother’s OxyContins on a dinner plate. Soon after snorting it, he went to the bathroom to throw up. I glared at my mother. I couldn’t help it. I thought I might throw up, too.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” she said. “Bobby’s a good kid, but he’s an idiot. Kids like him get out of rehab and they think they can just shoot up like before. That’s when they overdose and fucking die, Nikki. I’m saving his life.”

  She offered me the plate with a little crushed-up Oscar left on it. It was one of those haunting emotional crossroads: do I get high on my righteousness or on my mother’s painkillers? The choice was made before I began deliberating. I blew a line up my nose, then lay back and shut my eyes.

  ON THE DAY OF my flight, Kathi insisted that she and Michael drive me to the airport. I was amazed when they arrived at my father’s house on time.

  “We have some very bad news,” Mum said as soon as I got into the car. “We’re going to lose the house.”

  I grabbed one of Michael’s cigarettes. Just get me to the airport, I prayed. Get me there alive and on time, that’s all I ask. Michael sat silently in the driver’s seat, a can of Budweiser between his legs. The car swerved in and out of the lane. Whatever happened to the Navigator? I wondered. Don’t ask. Just shut up. If I have to, I can call a cab, a real one, not one of my mother’s, and pay for a ride to the airport. I watched all the mile markers and exits on the highway, calculating how much the fare would be if I hopped out now. Simple arithmetic would have to suffice as a coping mechanism until I could get a drink at the airport bar.

  “The fucking IRS,” Mum hissed. “They have a vendetta against me. I don’t know what I did to them.” She lit a cigarette and held it dramatically in the air as though posing for a photograph.

  “I just don’t know what we’re going to do unless someone helps us.”

  EVER SINCE I WAS a little girl I had dreamed of going to Russia—a land, in my imagination, of secrets and snow. Many Americans who grew up during the Cold War were fascinated by the USSR, but I was obsessed. It got so that my classmates and even my teachers at St. Mary’s would groan when I walked up to the front of the classroom, a glittery poster board rolled up in my hand, ready to deliver yet another oral presentation on Russia. In elementary school I had a Russian pen pal, a girl my age named Nastya M., arranged by my mother’s manicure client who worked for the State Department. Nastya and I exchanged letters in English, two or three in the course of a year. Although I had been careful not to talk up all the conveniences of my life in a capitalist democracy, I was quite sure that Nastya’s letters stopped coming because she had been dragged from the bleak, colorless classroom of her shkola and executed by a firing squad in the playground. When we wrote petitions to the priest for Friday Mass at school, I always asked that he pray for those suffering under Gorbachev’s regime of silence and oppression. In fourth grade I taught myself to read and write in Cyrillic, using it as a code for the petty secrets I recorded in my diary. I hate Kristin Cunningham and Nate Leblanc and Mrs. Morris, I would spell out in strange loopy cursive, each letter hooking up to the next like bulbs in a string of Christmas lights. I love Ben Chang, but he thinks I’m a dog. At Andover, I got the chance to learn Russian formally and even won a minor award for reciting a Pushkin poem.

  Now the excitement I felt over my trip to Russia was tinged with a childish morbidity. What if an innocent conversation I had with a local was misinterpreted as espionage? What if I was picked up by the secret police, my identity papers stolen, my human rights obliterated? I made photocopies of my passport and visa and gave them to my dad and my boyfriend back in Texas. “Keep them somewhere safe,” I said solemnly. “Just in case.”

  I drank a fifth of Jack Daniel’s while I was packing for this big trip, and assumed by an inebriated logic that, because of the latitude, summer in St. Petersburg would be equivalent to autumn in New England. St. Petersburg was in the middle of a heat wave when I arrived. All I’d brought with me were long pants and a couple of sweaters.

  I attended classes in a run-down university building that was literal
ly crumbling before our eyes, and stayed in a Soviet-era apartment building where there was no hot water and the power went out at random times every day. Most of the other students in the workshop were wealthy Canadian women who had signed on for a kind of Writers’ Fantasy Camp. I tried to say nice things about their stories, but they could tell that I was lying, and when cliques formed—as they always do in summer camp, no matter the age of the campers—I was not a part of them.

  The dogwoods were pollinating and their white blossoms blanketed the entire city like snow. After class I trolled the streets in my sweaty clothes, pursued by a nameless panic. Every single decision I made, whether it was what to eat or where to go, felt not only wrong but catastrophic, a turning point that would lead to a path of imminent destruction. If I write at that café, it will be bombed by terrorists. If I take that guided museum tour, I will miss the serendipitous moment that will seed the entire plot of the great American novel I ought to be writing.

  The Hermitage, the Summer Palace, the Church of the Spilt Blood—I dragged myself to all these sites but saw none of them. What I noticed, instead, was the homeless veteran of the Chechen War begging on the street, a useless pair of sneakers placed neatly beside him so that he could showcase the rotted stumps where his feet used to be. I peered at hundreds of matryoshka dolls lined up in stalls outside St. Isaac’s Cathedral, fat and rosy-cheeked ladies smiling alongside outdated dummies of Ozzy Osbourne and Monica Lewinsky, all of them looking sorry and expectant.