With or Without You: A Memoir (21 page)

“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 old, 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 literally 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.

I took blurry pictures of stray dogs searching for food. There were packs of them all over the city, some kind of German shepherd mix. An impressive group of them lived in a park near my flat. One morning I bought a bottle of vodka at the grocery store and decided to follow these dogs down whatever streets they roamed. They led me to a national landmark that I didn’t know I was looking for, the childhood home of Vladimir Nabokov. Before the revolution, the Nabokovs lived in a mansion the size of a city block. One wing of it had been preserved and converted into a small museum. The sign on the door said that admission was free for students on Thursdays. It was a Thursday. I thought, Drinking in the morning always pays off.

“Spasibo, moyi sobachki!”
I called to the dogs loping down the street.

As I entered the building, the heavy front door slipped out of my hand and slammed shut with a loud bang behind me. A docent was seated at a small metal desk near the entrance. She was an old woman with one glass eye and wavy white hair combed neatly into a bun. She looked up from her newspaper and, I think, commented on the slamming door. I picked up the word
door
, at least.

“I’m sorry,” I said to her slowly. “My Russian is very bad. I don’t understand many words that you speak.”

“No, girl. You understand fine,” she declared. “Every minute. Every minute, every day, I listen to that door.”

She got up from her desk and took me by the arm. Standing upright, she was no more than four and a half feet tall. The feeling of her hand on my arm made my skittish heart beat a little slower; I didn’t want her to let go. I listened to her prattling off I don’t know what as she led me to each of the exhibits. She showed me the tiny samizdats of
Lolita
and
Pale Fire
, and drawings of butterflies Nabokov had made as a child.

“Thank you,” I kept saying. “This is very good. Very big thanks.”

When I had seen all the exhibits, the docent pushed me down in a chair in front of an old television set and played a VHS recording of an interview with Nabokov just before he died. The footage was grainy, the way videos get when you dub a copy of a copy, and the audio was warbled from being played so many times. For some reason watching that video unlocked something inside, and I began to weep. I’m not one of those women who cry gracefully. I heave and honk and disgusting liquids spray out of my face. The docent pulled a tissue out of the cuff of her silk blouse and handed it to me, as though she had expected exactly this response to the video and was well prepared for it. I blew my nose, thanked her warmly, and made for the door.

“No, girl,” she said. This was followed by a succession of steely, rapid sentences that I couldn’t understand. The old woman put her arm around my waist and led me to a staircase cordoned off by a rope and a sign that said, I assumed, no entry. We walked up the stairs arm in arm, and she continued to tell me things I pretended to
understand. “Yes, yes,” I said dumbly.
“Konechno.”
It was a dark, almost gloomy staircase whose stone steps sloped in the middle from wear. We turned a corner on the second floor, where I stopped and gasped. Above us was a large stained-glass window glittering in the afternoon sun.