With or Without You: A Memoir

by Domenica Ruta

  I’M IN AWE OF those men whose addictions take them to thrilling, dangerous places—the cold barrel of a gun pressed against their temple, bricks of money stashed in their closet, the threat of incarceration hanging over their head—or those women whose minds disintegrate in a fascinating waltz, the girls who stub cigarettes out on their own skin, walk barefoot into crack houses, grit their teeth in mad bravery while the maniacs sodomize them. Compared with them, mine is a sluggish, vanilla downward spiral. I drink a lot. I cheat on a nice guy with some asshole who doesn’t love me. I blab about it to the wrong person, and she uses the information to backstab me. There’s no law against this kind of stuff, no physical danger. All of it neatly falls into the folder marked “melodrama.” Everything is fine. I’m what they call “high-functioning.” Always a roof over my head, money in my checking account, no one to hurt but myself and a few other people, mostly the boyfriends, but they all signed an invisible waiver the first time we got naked, and so, I tell myself, they’re asking for it. On my very worst days I drink alone in a spacious, air-conditioned apartment. I cry and get into fights, a lot of them via email. At some point in the afternoon, I end up facedown on my bed and wake up a few hours later in a puddle of drool. Looking around my room, I try to remember where I am. There is always a brief panic when I realize that I’m not in my mother’s house on Eden Glen Avenue. Then where am I?

  Seeing the stains on my pillow, scalloped and yellow like clouds of smog, I know exactly where I am. I’m home.

  WITHIN A FEW DAYS of graduating with a master’s in fine arts, I apply for a job cleaning houses. When I talk to Zeke or Carla, which is once a month or less, they ask me why I don’t get a better job. Even my boss, a smart suburban entrepreneur, wonders about this.

  “Why don’t you go back to teaching?” she asks me while reviewing my résumé.

  I don’t want a career, I assure her. I want to work. All that dust keeps me out of my own head. I love the dull serenity of vacuuming. There’s no better way to spend a morning than by attacking the hard-water stains of someone’s bathtub. It’s a battle I know I can win.

  Though the satisfaction of this lasts only so long. Gritting my teeth, scrubbing the checkerboard of shower tiles until my shoulders ache and my eyes get lazy, I start to float away. I’m somewhere else now, reliving it all over again. My aunts and uncles are all around me, my mean teachers. Her. I slide down a chute and land in a puddle of dirty water. Everyone who has ever given me so much as a scowl is there, standing dangerously close. Diving into another fantasy, I take a brick to their faces, then carefully mop up all the blood.

  “You have no idea how much I love to clean,” I tell my boss as she drives me home.

  And I’m not lying. I love my job. I smoke a joint for breakfast, and as soon as I get home I can drink as much as I want. The next morning my hands shake uncontrollably and a reenactment of Pearl Harbor takes place in my lower intestines, but it doesn’t matter. I can clean through my hangover, come home and drink, then do it all over again the next day. It’s not such a bad life. Could be a lot worse.

  The only problem is that I don’t sleep much, and when I do I have horrible nightmares. Some mornings it’s hard to shake them off. They cling to my eyes like a gluey caul. A succession of these restless nights makes me loopy and paranoid. Afraid of the sounds coming from the air vents in my bedroom, afraid of the car pulling up outside. Who is it? Is it her? I lean against the door and listen. My neighbor and his son are coming home, talking about dinner, unlocking their door. Okay. I’m okay.

  I need to take a shower, but I’m afraid to take off my clothes. Even with the door double-bolted, the windows locked, the shades drawn, it feels too dangerous. For the next three days in a row, there are no houses to clean. My only objective is: Take a shower. I write these words in big letters on a piece of paper and tape it to my bathroom mirror. The creature in the reflection is unfamiliar. A monster. Not me. I lean in very close to the mirror. Warm breath, cold glass, clouds fog up and disappear. I scrape the skin on my face with my fingernails as though trying to pull off a mask.

  “Ugly bitch, ugly cunt, no-good ugly fucking cunt.”

  Again I lose contact. An hour and a half passes. There’s blood on my fingers. My face is shredded. What happened? Don’t look. Cover the mirror with paper, every inch of it, so that it’s no longer a mirror. Have a drink and renew the vow to take a shower. Put it in writing again and tape it on the wall above my bed.

  It will take another day and a half before it dawns on me to pour a glass of whiskey and put it in the corner of the bathtub, like a carrot on the end of a stick, to lure myself in there.

  Life disappears faster than it actually happens. Time becomes a fat and silent beast of prey, something that yawns, masticates, and churns food into waste. A short, miserable span dithering between heart-stopping fear and heart-crushing emptiness. Every day the weather is perfect and every day I drink. Sometimes stuff happens. A simmering tension finally explodes. The man I’m sleeping with is leaving me. Or I’m leaving him. Sometimes it’s a man I actually love, sometimes not. Either way, we get into a wicked fight, and for a moment I’m wide awake. Colors come to life, sounds sharpen. I notice every ring swirling in the wood beneath my feet. The dizzying symmetry of a fern. A live oak uprooted in the last storm, lying across the baseball diamond huge and despondent as a corpse slain in battle. The thing he said, so beautiful it hurt. The thing I said, so cruel it was beautiful. The song on the radio howling like a ghost from a forgotten past.

  Then, whatever it was is over. Things go back to normal. Life again, or something like it.

  Enormous parts of my day are lost inside one memory or another. Certain scenes replay themselves, and I don’t know how to make them stop. Sometimes I get so deeply possessed that I forget where I am. I look up to see, to my surprise, that I’m on the number seven bus. I’ve missed my stop, it was miles ago, and now I have no idea where I am.

  What if I lose my whole life like this?

  ONE DAY, GORGEOUS AS usual, I’m walking to the store and two short sentences pass through my head: I’m an alcoholic. I need help. I have no idea where these thoughts come from, nor do I really understand what they mean, but I know that they’re true.

  Later that day, I take the bus to an address I’ve found online. Alcoholic women meet there every Thursday night to talk about their drinking. When I show up, I discover that the address is a Thai restaurant. In a room at the back, unknown to diners in the restaurant or to people on the street outside, thirty ex-drunks sit around a table and share their stories. The women in Texas are the prettiest in the country. They know instinctually how to use the sun to their advantage. Even when these women cry, which many of them do, their skin is so healthy that it seems to glow. I’m jealous enough to kill. Angry enough to leave. There’s a bar across the street—incidentally, my favorite bar in town, the one that reminds me of home.

  But a miracle happens, a little wink from the universe that keeps me in my seat. I was born with a stray dog’s instinct to devour free food whenever I can. Just as my stomach begins to rumble, a woman with the shiniest hair I’ve ever seen lays out a platter of spring rolls and peanut sauce.

  “Is this for us?” I ask her.

  “Uh-huh,” she says. “Help yourself.”

  I eat one, then two, then three halves of spring rolls and watch as the other women sip coffee, sparkle, and chat. I’m pretending I’ve crashed someone’s bridal shower. Why not? Besides me, everyone here is impeccably dressed. There are finger foods and compliments for one another’s handbags, and a box of tissue in case someone starts sobbing. All of a sudden the lights dim. Someone lights a candle and a hush unfurls across the darkened room. In the flickering silence, these women’s faces take on a sacred solemnity. The room is packed, every seat taken, and many more women are standing along the periphery. It is now officially too late to leave without making a scene. I reach into my purse, find my pill case, break a Xanax in half, and gulp it down
. The woman with the shiny hair reads from a laminated sheet. This is when I learn about the program of lists, steps, and promises, the inventory of resentments and personal faults, people who have hurt me, people I have hurt. I fish around for the other half of that pill.

  The Texas beauties each take turns telling their stories. To my amazement, most of them talk about gratitude, how different their lives are now without alcohol, how hard they’ve worked and continue to work so that they never return to their old ways. I’m trying to imagine any of them doing or saying or even witnessing the things I’ve done, said, and seen. I want to shrivel up and die. I want to go across the street and drink in that grotto bar. I want … so much.

  Suddenly, it’s my turn.

  “Hi,” I say. “I’m here because I’m twenty-nine years old and I can’t remember the last time I went more than a day without drinking. I drink until I black out around five nights a week. I drink as much when I’m happy as when I’m sad. I drink when I’m frustrated, curious, anxious, scared … I drink when I’m really just hungry. I drink in the morning, which is considered a low point for some people, though I don’t understand why. It’s actually the best time of day to drink—nothing bad has happened yet. I drink at lunchtime to get myself ready to write. I drink in the afternoon either to reward myself for a job well done or to console myself for another wasted, unproductive day. I drink at night because it’s dark out. I drink all the time, often alone. Here’s the strange part—sometimes, I’m not joking, I drink by accident. I’ll be out walking, ruminating, and suddenly I’ll come to, like out of a trance, and find myself at the corner store, in the wine aisle. There is a bottle of Chianti, right in front of me. There it is, in my hand. I’ll pretend I’m reading the label, but who am I trying to kid? I don’t know anything about wine. All I see is the price tag and the picture. For eighteen bucks, a bird in the silhouette of a gibbous moon. For a bullfighter, only twelve. A castle is $7.99. What’s weird is that I didn’t even mean to buy booze today. In fact, I swore, when I woke up in the morning, that I wouldn’t. Then I end up buying two bottles because they’re on sale. Because one is never enough. I go home and finish the first bottle in under an hour, get all sentimental and depressed. I’ll try to remember what my mother’s voice sounds like. Then I’ll remember and open the second bottle and try to forget.

  “The worst part, I’m realizing, is that my drinking has nothing to do with her. She’s not refilling my glass. I am.

  “I always have a hangover. They get worse and worse. I puke so much, if I were a dog, I swear, my owners would have me put to sleep. Every year, since I can’t remember when, I have tried to stop drinking. Just a month, I tell myself. To cleanse my liver. Always the month of February, because it’s the shortest. But I never make it for more than a week or two. I can’t.

  “Now I’m done with all that. It’s over. I’m ready to stop.”

  But I don’t say any of that. Not yet.

  “Hi” is what I actually say to them. Then tearfully, stupidly, “Um, hi.”

  For this I get what appears to be a silver poker chip, half a dozen unsolicited phone numbers, and a thunderous round of applause.

  FOR ABOUT SIX MONTHS I count and recount the days of my sobriety, one day at a time, just as they tell me to do. (They are a grass-roots program of recovering addicts who wish to remain nameless.) My first time around, I’m able to collect enough consecutive days to total one month. For this I am rewarded with the red metallic chip. A whole month without drinking! I’m cured! Just for fun, I decide to abstain for another day, then another week, then two more weeks. After that I go to a bar and order one glass of wine. Just one. One and a half, because I spilled the first glass and so it was only fair to order another. There. I can stop there.

  Until the next day. And the next.

  I set up all these goals—I’m only going to drink until Thanksgiving, then I’ll stop. Christmas comes and goes, and I’ve been in a blackout for days. But that was the last time, I promise myself. No more. I keep drinking to the end of the year and the beginning of a new one.

  In the months that follow, I have two recurring nightmares: my boss tells me that we’ve been hired to clean my mother’s old house. I try to get it done as quickly as I can and get out before she comes home and finds me there. I keep seeing things from our past and wondering if I should try to take them with me or leave them behind.

  In the other dream I’m stuck at St. Mary’s, sitting in a child-size desk that makes my legs feel huge. Sister Agnes is there, as well as my old classmates. They won’t let me leave until I solve these stupid math problems. I keep saying, “But I’ve got my master’s degree! I shouldn’t have to do long division anymore.”

  Fucked up as I am, the insight is inescapable: even in my sleep, I’m repeating the same mistakes.

  One Saturday night I go to a coffee shop that shares a building with a vintage clothing store. It’s been a couple of days since my last relapse, and this feels like a really long time. I sit in this coffee shop pretending to read, hoping the hours will just disappear so that I can go home and lock the door on another miserable, sober day. Outside the vintage shop there’s some kind of party going on. People are drinking free beer and wearing costumes. It isn’t Halloween, it’s just Austin, a town where a lot of misdirected creativity goes into the simple act of getting drunk. I see this one man with white bandages covering his entire body, like a mummy. He wears a Stetson and a denim jacket and has fake blood leaking out of the place where his mouth should be. When I walk past him, he offers me a beer. “No,” I say, trembling, as though I’ve seen the Devil himself, and run the whole way home.

  The next day I say fuck it, drink some whiskey, smoke a joint, and come to the conclusion that I need to quit my job. I’m sick of cleaning urine stains off wealthy people’s toilets. My job is the problem. It’s driving me to drink. My job and my apartment. I keep locking myself out of my apartment. I’ve gone through three sets of keys in one month. It’s a sign, obviously. Time to leave.

  I call my stepmother and sheepishly ask if I can move into the studio on the top floor of her sister’s apartment building. I don’t have much money, and I’m hoping she can negotiate some kind of deal for me. My stepmother makes a phone call and gets back to me in less than an hour. The apartment is unoccupied, she says, but her sister can’t rent it out. There’s no fire escape and no heat in the bathroom or kitchen, so the city won’t let her have tenants. But I can stay there as long as I don’t report her to the Housing Authority.

  “It’s furnished,” Carla says. “It’s ready and waiting for you. I’ll even clean it up a little if you want.”

  I ask Carla about my mother. She is reluctant to tell me everything she’s heard. A few days later, I talk to my father. “She’s not in jail yet. So there’s that,” he says. “How she’s managed to escape getting locked up I don’t know. No one can believe it.” According to the mostly reliable network of small-town gossipers, my father reports that neither my mother nor my stepfather has a job. “I don’t know where they get the money for, you know, the stuff they need.”

  “She was always really good at solving that problem,” I say bitterly. Was. As though she really were dead.

  My sister says she passed my mother going into a pharmacy. “I put my head down, and so did she,” she told me. “I don’t know if she even recognized me. She looked pretty out of it.” My brother tells me that he saw her once, driving around town in a beat-up old Chevy. “Looked like one of the old cabs painted black.” She was wearing sunglasses and a baseball cap pulled down over her eyes, slouching low in her seat, my brother reports, like a person on the run.

  She’s not just hiding from the police. She’s hiding from everyone. Danvers is a small town. You can’t go around telling people you’re a millionaire and then lose it all without having a steamy shovel of schadenfreude flung back in your face.

  “Where does she live?” I ask my father.

  “I’ll find out,” he says.


  The next time we speak, about a week later, I have to ask him again. This kills me. I don’t like saying her name. Even the pronoun she, when it refers to my mother, swells into a stone in my throat.

  “They’re over at Michael’s mother’s place, that apartment next to the old taxi garage.”

  I wish I could travel invisibly into her life, observant and untouchable like a ghost in a Dickens novel. I would be able to check up on her from time to time without her knowing I was there. What would I see? Nothing new. My mother hiding in the back bedroom of her mother-in-law’s apartment. All the windows covered up with towels. There were curtains in that room, but they’re lacy and white and wouldn’t block enough sun, or maybe Michael’s mother took them down to protect them from all the cigarette smoke. My mother sits in her bed smoking. Next to her is a small table, every inch of it covered with pill bottles. There are enough bottles of similar size to make a flat surface, and balanced on top is a tea saucer with a spoon and a lighter. In the little drawer is where she keeps her syringes or the empty bottles of methadone, whichever is her dependence at the moment, along with a thick pile of losing scratch tickets. All over the floor, at exactly arm’s length from where she sits, are several disposable plastic cups with the remnants of chocolate milk. The floor is littered with dirty paper plates, the plastic wrappers of beef-jerky sticks, and dozens, possibly hundreds, of packs of cigarettes, most of them empty. Facing the bed is a television that is never turned off. In the far corner of the room are a mini fridge and a microwave, the kind of setup you would find in a college dorm. Maybe Michael or a dog is lying next to her on the bed. Maybe she’s alone, the light of the television flickering on her—a thing in the shape of a woman, neither alive nor dead.

  I get it into my head that if I can know exactly what’s happened to her I’ll be okay. So I do a very banal thing I’ve done countless times when I wanted to know more about a person: I Google my mother. It is hilarious and surreal to type her name in the search box.