With or Without You: A Memoir (17 page)

“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.

———

M
Y 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 money. “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.”

“I intend to.”

“But that has its problems, too.”

“What do you mean?”

“Men don’t like a woman who’s
too
independent. Or too smart.”

“Uh-oh.”

“Don’t worry, Hon. You won’t have any trouble attracting men. You have that smell, and that look in your eyes. The women in our family are very fertile. Men can smell that. They like it, too, even if they don’t think they do.”

I knew she was right, but I didn’t want to admit it. Even though I wasn’t conventionally pretty, at St. Mary’s I’d always been the girl that the boys wanted to stand next to in line. Somehow they knew they could lift up my skirt, sneak a sweaty palm down my panties, and squeeze, and though I would gasp and my eyes would burn with hot, stifled tears, I wouldn’t let myself cry, and I would
never
tell on them. If there was an indecent exposure at the food court in the mall, you’d better believe the lecher in the sweatpants chose the table next to mine to whip out his greasy hamster of a dick. It was as if my body hummed at a pitch that only the most desperate men could hear. I wheezed a secret dog whistle to the soulless and the depraved. But this phenomenon wasn’t a secret if even my mother knew about it, and here she was describing it as a smell, not a sound. It called to mind the wet nose of a Doberman pressed into my crotch.

“Mum, that’s so gross.”

“What? I’m telling you the truth.”

FOUR YEARS LATER, MY
mother’s story had completely changed. As Kathi approached forty, her ambitions and ideals for both of us were fast corroding. “You can’t choose who you fall in love with,” she now told me. “Love is a curse. An awful, miserable curse. And once you’re in it you can never get yourself out.”