With or Without You: A Memoir (13 page)

Right away my mother smelled trouble. “Don’t let those people fool you,” she warned me before dropping me off at Katie’s house. “They’re just teachers.”

After hanging out at Katie’s for a few weeks, I invited her to sleep over at my house one Friday night. I don’t know what I was thinking—proof of my place somewhere on the autism spectrum, or another undiagnosable deficiency in self-awareness. How else could I have believed that this sleepover would go well?

As long as I live, I will never forget the look on Katie’s face as my mother drove us down Eden Glen Avenue and parked in front of our house. Katie touched the little gold charm on her necklace the way the nuns sometimes clutched their rosary beads, with horror and fear.

“Ohmygod!” she exclaimed. “Your house is so—cute!”

Our roof was festooned with drooping Christmas lights hung and then forgotten so many years ago that all the color had peeled off the bulbs. The porch was loaded with bags of trash next to but not inside the trash cans, and our front door was frosted with bird shit. (My mother refused to evict the purple martins that nested on our porch.) There was even an old toilet on the porch. It was the toilet of my mother’s childhood, long broken and removed from the bathroom but never taken the extra twelve paces to the curb for trash day. Mum and I used to joke about planting flowers inside the bowl, and maybe some basil in the tank. I tried to explain this to Katie. Surely she would get the sardonic wit of it all.

Katie held her overnight bag close to her chest as she climbed the steps of our front porch. The cheap wallpaper we had put up to cover the wood paneling was already peeling off in golden, smoke-stained curls. More beer cans and trash bags of junk were piled inside the kitchen and in the hallway to my room, crowding the floor space. My mother went shopping in the same fury she consumed her drugs. During her sober spells, she filled the void in her life with rabid consumerism. I don’t even know what she bought, just … 
stuff
. Packages of new bedsheets she would lose in the mess and later have to replace. Packages of exotic spices she would lose inside the kitchen cabinets. Thigh-high leather boots she would never wear. Cans of metallic paint for that make-believe day when we finally renovated our house. It was the pursuit and never the bounty that thrilled her. Swiping her credit card at the register of even the lowliest bargain basement, basking in that singular capitalist illusion of purchasable control—this was for her the climax of the shopping experience. Once home, whatever she’d bought was immediately forgotten and added to the wayside of her neglect.

It was a lot to keep up with in our little house, especially considering that both she and Michael found it hard to part with anything, even legitimate trash. When an ashtray filled up, which could happen in a span of a few hours, my stepfather would reach for the nearest coffee cup or Styrofoam take-out container and fill that rather than
empty the ashtray. The two of them saved issues of
TV Guide
the way other people saved
National Geographic
. Which is to say, they let them pile up on the floor with everything else.

I was used to living like this and had made my bedroom a temple of spartan, minimalist order. On my mantel, spaced precisely three inches apart, I had what I described then as “artsy” pictures culled from magazines: a pair of red high heels casting a long Expressionistic shadow; a wolf looking solemnly into a distant field; a tiny reprint of van Gogh’s
Starry Night
. I matted these pictures on squares of cardboard that I attacked with glitter and glue. My bed was made with hospital corners, and the night before Katie came over I had vacuumed and dusted from floor to ceiling. I didn’t do all this for her alone, though I hoped Katie would notice my good housekeeping. Thursday vacuuming was a ritual for me, and if I tried to leave my bedroom without arranging my pillows
just so
, I would get a burning pain in my stomach and have to go back to remake it.

The door to my bedroom had two holes kicked in the bottom and the footprints of my mother’s size-seven shoe. Katie had tact enough not to ask about the holes, but I think they scared her, because she refused to venture beyond my room alone and made me escort her to and from the bathroom. The next morning, her mother came to pick her up and Katie never called me again. She was friendly to me at school, but there were no more sleepovers or homework dates or invitations to the movies.

At Catholic school there had been lots of onetime sleepovers and girls who were allowed to invite me over to their house but couldn’t spend time at mine. I had always ascribed that to my unwed mother and the moral threat she posed. We stank of sin, not trash. Katie was suggesting something altogether different. Here was a smart girl from a progressive-minded family. They read the
New York Times
and begged for the freedom of all sorts of political martyrs via bumper stickers on their minivan. If someone like Katie couldn’t sympathize with me, who in the world ever would?

It didn’t matter, I told myself. I would be leaving Katie and the rest of them behind for boarding school soon enough.

When springtime came, the rejection letters filled our mailbox. I was furious at my mother. I blamed her completely, not for my failures but for making me believe that I had a chance in the first place.

“See!” I shouted at her. “Only
you
think I’m smart. No one else does! Big fish in a small pond. Nothing more! Do you get it now?” I slammed my door, threw myself on my bed, and sobbed.

“We still haven’t heard from Phillips Academy,” Mum said from the hallway. Her voice was calm and reassuring, and this made me want to strangle her so badly that my hands shook.

“Andover is, like, the hardest school I applied to. Are you really that delusional? There’s no way in hell …”

The letter we were waiting for finally arrived. Phillips Academy Andover had accepted me as a new tenth grader that fall. A year’s tuition plus room and board there cost more than most state colleges, but they sent along another letter saying they had some money set aside just for me. Not a “full boat ride,” as we say in New England, but ninety percent of a boat ride.

I learned all this from my mother, whom I called every day from the pay phone in the lobby of the high school. Katie was standing there with me, along with Julie and a gaggle of wide-eyed virgins. When I hung up the phone, I started to cry. I had won the lottery. I was leaving!

“Oh my God, congratulations.” Katie forced herself to smile. I saw her brow wrinkle as she tried to assimilate this news into her worldview. What did this say about her and me and the differences between us? The little cogs inside her brain were slowly turning. I could almost smell the smoke. Soon she had her answer.

“If you ever get date-raped at boarding school, you
have
to call me. I will totally be your counselor,” she said.

THE DAY BEFORE I
moved to Andover was the hottest day of the summer. My mother and I walked warily around each other like two pieces of flint that might catch fire if we touched. I had a long list of things to do—laundry and last-minute shopping, in addition to
cleaning my mother’s house one last time. No one else would so much as throw away an empty pack of cigarettes while I was gone, so I wanted to be thorough. I was so anxious that it was hard to focus on anything. I remember dropping and breaking several dishes that day. My mother gave me a glass of water to hold while she searched for a hairbrush in her purse, and I spilled it all over a pile of papers, letters to the new parent of an Andover student that she had been avoiding all summer.

“I can’t stand you when you’re like this!” My mother slammed her fist on the kitchen table. “I can’t stand it!”

All day long we screamed and fought about everything except the real thing between us: I was leaving. My mother was envious, heartbroken, and scared, but, more than that, more than anything, she was proud.

MY ROOM WAS ON
the top floor of a dorm called Paul Revere Hall. I’d picked out a black-and-white-striped comforter for my bed and decorated the walls with black-and-white posters of Martin Luther King, Jr., and U2. There was nothing with color in my room except an iridescent beta fish named Figaro who lived in a tiny glass bowl on my dresser. All the girls in my dorm that year had the same hunter-green floral-print bedspread from a designer I’d never heard of named Laura Ashley. I’m not exaggerating when I say everyone. For a second, both Kathi and I wondered if it had been issued by the school and mine had been lost in the mail.

Of all the girls in that esteemed academy, the one to be randomly assigned as my roommate was none other than the great-great-granddaughter of Emily Post, doyenne of American etiquette. I was sure that this girl would judge me as a freak raised by wolves, but Anna Post turned out to be a practical, kindhearted roommate whose parents had taught her to rise above petty snobbery.

Anna Post was the first of many people I would meet whose last name signified something more than where one was seated in homeroom. (Besides, we didn’t have homerooms at Andover.) After we
had unpacked, my mother and I pored over the directory of students, where everyone’s picture and home address were listed. We scanned the pages in search of the rich and famous. My classmates at Andover were the sons and daughters of senators, governors, and foreign heads of state whose names were so renowned that even my mother and I easily recognized them. There were other kids whose last names were printed on the labels of products we had in our kitchen, bathroom, and garage.

Kathi began hunting for my future husband. “What about So-and-So?” she asked me after discovering a boy in my grade who was from the family that manufactured the number-one-selling dishwashing detergent in the nation.

I took the directory from her. “He looks like a frog,” I said.

“Who cares? There are a lot more important things than looks. Honey, when you grow up, you’ll learn how easy it is to just shut your eyes, hold your breath, and fuck someone.” She studied this particular boy’s face and frowned. “But you’re right,” she conceded. “There’s nothing uglier than an ugly WASP. Poor little thing.”

MY FIRST NIGHT IN
the dorm was hard, not because I was away from home and my family but because we weren’t allowed to have televisions in our rooms and, except for camping trips, I had never fallen asleep without one flickering softly in the background. For the first time in my life, I lay alone in the true silence of nighttime. My heart was beating so fast that I considered calling an ambulance. I covered my face with a pillow and swallowed the urge to cry. In the next room, I heard the sound of Anna weeping in her bed. If
she
couldn’t handle being here, I was sure I never would. I started to cry, then immediately blacked out as though struck in the head with the blunt force of all my emotions at once. When I opened my eyes again, it was morning.
This is my new home, I have to make this work
, I repeated a hundred times a day like a prayer. If I failed at Andover, I told myself, I would not live to be eighteen.

My dorm was full of bright, interesting girls from around the
world. Class difference didn’t matter to them nearly as much as to the kids at my public school, because these girls slept on mattresses stuffed with ostrich feathers and hundred-dollar bills and wore pajamas that were more expensive than my prom dress would be. They had enough money not to harbor any class anxiety. We were all so eager to re-create a semblance of family life in the dorm that the things we would ordinarily hide from our friends, at least at first, came tumbling out early on. Late one night during that first week of school, I confessed to my roommate that I had been conceived and born out of wedlock. Her response had more class and grace than any other I’ve heard.

“You were a
love child
!” Anna said. “That’s
sooo
romantic!”

She assured me that a genesis like mine was essential to becoming the heroine of an epic life story. I liked Anna’s brand of grandiosity a lot more than my mother’s. When the kids at Catholic school or their parents said something snide about my illegitimacy, Kathi would say, “What the fuck? Chrissie Hynde had Ray Davies’s baby, and that all turned out fine.”

Around most everyone outside my dorm, I was so afraid of saying the wrong thing that I refused to say anything at all. I ate my meals as quickly and inconspicuously as possible in the Andover Commons, an odd name, I thought, for a dining hall with glittering nineteenth-century chandeliers. For weeks I would run back to my room after dinner and call my mother in tears.

“Why aren’t you making friends?” Mum asked me. “Maybe you smell bad, Honey. Do you wear deodorant?”

“Yes.”

“Every day?”

“Of course!”

“Put on some lipstick. You don’t even try to look pretty, do you?”

There were Saturday classes every other weekend, which felt like a godsend. It meant two Friday nights a month when I didn’t have to lie about why I didn’t have social plans. I usually spent weekends listening to the same Radiohead CD over and over on my cheap
boom box. Every single weekend that we were allowed to leave campus, I went home.

“Those girls are all jealous of you,” my mother said, trying to console me. Kathi couldn’t seem to make up her mind: one minute I was too hideous to appear in public without bringing deep shame on the family; a second later, my beauty was so staggering that it alienated commoners on the street.

“The other girls in your dorm can’t stand you because you’re so gorgeous. You should see the way they look at you. They want to kill you. But you’re lucky. You have me. Mummy will always be your friend. I’m your best friend.”

And she was. For that one year, we were finally on the same level: I turned fifteen, and Mum, in her better moods, had the emotional maturity of a fifteen-year-old. I was at Andover, and she was plugging away at her Harvard Extension bachelor’s degree one credit at a time. We both stressed over our homework and found relief in the same movies and music.