With or Without You: A Memoir (3 page)

My cousin lived with her mother and stepfather in an apartment on Interstate Route 95, behind a little commercial strip that included a tattoo parlor and a pawnshop. There was a nuclear power plant not far away. For fun, Fafa liked to ride her bike to the plant and throw rocks against the chain-link fence that guarded it. I would wheeze behind her on a scooter, whining all the way, “Can we
please
go home now?”

I found out later that she was lying, that the fence enclosed nothing
more than an empty lot. Fafa was cunning. You had to respect that about her. She knew that I’d been traumatized by the news stories of Chernobyl. She’d seen me crying, practically hyperventilating, about the threat of nuclear holocaust to our grandmother, whose soothing words I will never forget:

“What are you crying about, Nikki? If a nuclear power plant blows, we’ll all be nothing but fucking molecules. The whole human race is like a fart in the universe.
Pllppllff
, we’re here.
Pllppllff
, we’re gone.”

My cousin had the fearlessness of a little kid who’s too cute to get into any real trouble. She slept soundly in a bedroom with posters of Freddy Krueger and Hulk Hogan on every wall. I would lie in a sleeping bag on the floor, my eyes moving from the cold Aryan glare of the Hulk to the raw-hamburger flesh of Freddy Krueger’s face, and as soon as I shut my eyes my mind flooded with scenes of nuclear winter. The power plant was going to blow, I was sure of it, and probably on a weekend when I was sleeping over. As my cousin murmured softly in her sleep, I could hear the hollow, rhythmic bleating of an air raid. Outside, the highways were gridlocked with crashed cars. Trees turned to columns of ash before my very eyes. Even if I survived (doubtful with Aunt Penny in charge), the radiation poisoning would make all my hair fall out. No, I decided bravely on my cousin’s bedroom floor, I’d be lucky to be in the eye of the storm when it happened; I would rather die than go bald.

Fafa was an exquisite child. I was not. I had a wrinkled forehead and perpetual dark circles around my eyes, as though I were staying up all night grinding out coke-fueled solutions to the world’s problems. With my black, bushy unibrow, the faint scribble of a mustache on my upper lip, and my greasy, unbrushed hair, I looked like the bastard child of Frida Kahlo and Martin Scorsese. Fafa had a cute upturned nose, rosy cheeks, and dark brown eyes that shone like gem-polished stones. Her voice was sweet and got adorably squeaky when she talked about something she loved, like the World Wrestling Federation or the
Nightmare on Elm Street
franchise.

Watching TV with my cousin became a primer in the art of war.
We were supposed to take turns, hour for hour, even stephen, but the only way she could get me to watch her wrestling or horror shows was to broker a deal. New Year’s Eve 1990, she dared me to watch a marathon of all three of
The Exorcist
movies. Our contract, which we put in writing, declared that if I stayed awake for all three movies and didn’t cry I got to pick every movie we watched for the entire month of January. As this included a whole week of school vacation, I thought it was more than generous.

A brilliant scam, I can see in hindsight. Fafa was the size of a peanut, but she kicked my ass thoroughly every time we fought. She was the uncontestable victor long before midnight, when I passed out during the opening credits of the first sequel, my pillow soaked with tears.

I had one trump card, though, and I used it liberally. All I had to do was look my cousin in the eye and say, “Wrestling is fake, you know.”

Fafa would explode with tears of rage and willful disbelief. “You’re such a lying whore!”

Whore
was one of the first swearwords I learned, a noun applicable as both an insult and a term of endearment in our family: “What are you whores up to this weekend?” “Son of a whore, I forgot my wallet at home!” Truly manifold in its application, sometimes
whore
simply meant “female.” Often it was used to denote something difficult or obstinate. For example, when struggling to open a tightly screwed jar of olives, my mother might utter, “What a little whore.” It had nothing to do with sex or money, unless, arriving at the bank just as the doors were locked, my grandmother would shake her fists at the whores inside.

Like a saturnine dialect of Yiddish-cum-Latin, Italian swearwords were a lot safer than their English counterparts, in part because of their obscurity, but more so for the droll linguistic entanglements your mouth is forced to make while pronouncing them.
Buchiach! Schoocci a mentz! Minchia! Incazzato!
Precise translation issues abound, but who cares when a word is so much fun to say? Sicilian, and my grandmother’s peasant Sicilian in particular, is
pretty much untranslatable in English. It’s a language composed of consonant pilings and blithe morbidity. So in our family the word for a woman who literally takes money for sex was never
whore
but
putan
. When I was five, my grandmother defined it for me as “a woman who only shops at night.”

If cursing has a matriarchal order, and for the Rutas it did, then
cunt
is the Queen Mother. This was how I knew when Mum was really, really,
really
mad. She called me so many things, but this Grand Dame of words she saved for special occasions, those singular episodes of rage that carried on from sundown and well into the next day. “You cunt, you no-good cunt, you no-good miserable little cunt …,” she would say in a tired, malevolent hiss, like an infant having screamed herself into exhaustion. At times like these I clung to the word
little
. It suggested a seed of affection, a promise that when this mood blew over, she would love me again.

Like any of our curses, the
c
-word had multiple uses. I’ll never forget the beautiful summer day when my mother dared Fafa and me to call a stranger a cunt.

“Just say it to anyone,” she said. “I’ll give you five dollars.” We were lying on our towels at the beach. My mother had coated herself in olive oil and was holding a record cover unfolded and wrapped in aluminum foil to reflect more sun onto her face.

“Why?” I asked.

“To see what happens,” she said. “To see the look on the person’s face. A social experiment. Please. Just do it for me.”

My mother was a creature that needed to lick her fingers and touch an open wire every once in a while. She required this kind of jolt. It was the only way she could be sure she was still alive.

I knew from experience that there were far worse things you could be called than cunt. Earlier that year, my mother and I had gone shopping at a Neiman Marcus. Mum had somehow earned a thick wad of twenties and was impatient to spend it, every last dollar, on something frivolous. None of the salesgirls at Neiman’s would help us. To be fair, I don’t remember them being rude. They just skated out of our way as we examined a rack of leather skirts. Kathi was
insecure and often preemptively slaughtered the nearest human being to compensate for her feelings. This person was usually me, but on that particular day it was a young redhead wearing a gold nametag and too much mascara.

“Do you see this, Nikki? They won’t stop watching us, like we might steal something. It’s prejudice.” She marched over to the redheaded clerk and shook a fistful of cash in her face. “Excuse me,” my mother said. “I won’t be treated like white trash by some cunt who works
retail
.”

The insult there was not the expletive but that disgraceful word beginning with
r
.

Though we tossed the
c
-word around fearlessly in my family, I knew that in the outside world it was the hydrogen bomb of curses, and I was afraid to deploy it at a peaceful place like the beach.

“Mum, please, I don’t want to. Okay?”

“If you don’t, I will,” Fafa piped up. She was eight or nine years old that summer, and was, to use my mother’s phrase, a lot ballsier than I was.

A woman in a pink bikini was approaching our spot on the sand. As much as I prayed that this woman would walk by without incident, something about her seemed to beg for degradation. She swaggered past us, audaciously comfortable in her own skin, trusting in a world she believed to be civilized.

“Cunt!” Fafa said.

The woman looked back at us with a stupefied expression and almost tripped on her flip-flops. My mother laughed her loud, gull screech of a laugh. I felt my face go up in flames and covered my head with a towel. As soon as we got home from the beach, my mother got on the phone and called Penny. I remember shrinking in the dark hallway where the phone hung while she talked to Aunt Penny, her body keeling with laughter.

“Oh no, no, no,” my mother said into the phone. “You know Nikki. She’s so afraid of what other people think.”

Later, when I started high school in a new town where no one knew me, I decided it was a good time to start over and go by my real
name, Domenica. Even though this was the name on my birth certificate and on every single legal document pertaining to my life, Aunt Penny saw it as proof of what an élitist phony I was. She wouldn’t shut up about it.

“Hey, Nikki—oh,
excuse me
, Domenica.” She rolled her eyes.

“I don’t get it,” I said to my mother. “It’s not like I’m asking to be called Lady Di.”

I wasn’t even asking my family to call me Domenica, only the teachers and kids at my new school. Aunt Penny balked as if I’d started wearing a monocle and affecting a British accent. That is, when I saw her, which was becoming more seldom. Penny had sensed a rift coming between her daughter and me, and though our growing apart was inevitable, it was still a few years away. I was becoming more bookish and withdrawn, Fafa more social and tame. My cousin was two years younger than I was, but she was already submitting herself to that ritual teen-girl change that demands hours of primping in front of a mirror.

“You’re becoming
docile
,” I told my cousin. “Your friends are all
cretins
.”

Half of me understood what these words meant, the other half just loved to hear myself say them. Fafa was every bit as smart as I was, but she had picked up a new skill that would evade me for years—how to maintain a group of friends. On weekends she preferred going to the mall with them than watching movies with me. Later that year she stopped returning my phone calls altogether. It was a silent dismissal, almost harrowing in its civility. Fafa and I were our mothers’ daughters—we knew how to put on a good fight—but there were no shrieking Italian curses in our breakup, no fists full of each other’s hair. I was crushed, but my mother was the one who cried.

“My sisters hate you,” Kathi sobbed. “They’ve been jealous of you since the day you were born.”

I couldn’t bear to see my mother in tears, so I tried my best to comfort her. The cousins were growing up, I explained. Now that we
weren’t little kids who needed to be watched, there wasn’t as much reason for the family to get together anymore.

Or so we thought. Although we no longer spent every weekend together as before, our family still gathered on holidays and birthdays without inviting my mother and me.

“It’s because of you,” Kathi loved to say. “Because you’re gonna go places and they know it.” She was crying, but she couldn’t wipe the smile off her face. We had been shunned—a mixed blessing, to be sure: to my mother it meant winning and losing everything at the same time.

———

“N
EVER FALL IN LOVE WITH A BLOND,” MY MOTHER WARNED ME
.

“Why not?” I said, though there was no point in asking. Kathi was high and in the mood for a soliloquy. She had a trove of stories that she loved to tell over and over. My role was to shut up and listen, even if I already knew where the story was headed. Most of the time, I did.

Kathi had somehow gotten wise to a scientific study that found that the human eye registers light colors before it does dark, ergo blond hair before black or brown. “Why do you think Cinderella and the Virgin Mary are always blondes? It’s utter bullshit,” she said. Blond hair, she went on to explain, is the first thing you see when you enter a crowded high-school gymnasium or a party in the dark woods.

“And you think it’s love at first sight. But it’s not. Just your eyes playing tricks,” she said bitterly. “Blonds. They’re the vainest people on earth.”

She was obviously talking about my father.

MY PARENTS MET AS
teenagers, when both of them were still high on the most dangerous intoxicant, the promise that good looks were enough to deliver them to their dreams. As the legend goes, seventeen-year-old
Kathi was babysitting for a rich family that also employed a blond-haired, blue-eyed boy to mow their lawn. She watched him through the window for a few weeks before making her move.

“When are you going to take me out to dinner?”

“Tonight?” Zeke offered. He was nineteen, cute, and defenseless.

I can imagine my young mother pulling my father’s blond hair, clawing his back with her long, sharp nails, my father grunting and roaring on top of her. A sickening thought for most people, it gives me great comfort now. Once there was love, brutal physical love, the kind that makes people scream, then wake up in each other’s arms hungry, tired, and a little sore.

“He looked just like Robert Redford,” Mum used to say.

Looking at the pictures now, I think, “Not quite …,” though Zeke was definitely handsome in a small-town way. My father never spoke about my mother’s former beauty. He didn’t need to. She bragged enough for herself. Neither of my parents tired of telling me how gorgeous everyone thought they were when they were young. Pride like this is both tyrannical and tragic, for the chief function of pride is to usher in the fall.

My parents had sufficient raw materials to achieve a level of fame in a small town, but not much more than that. Zeke was the middle child of five black-haired, brown-eyed, hockey-playing brothers, the dazzling expression of a recessive gene with his long curly blond hair, his round blue eyes, and the winning smile of a natural-born athlete. Too short even to consider going pro, he would have liked to become a hockey coach on the high-school or maybe college level. Teenage Kathi wanted to be an actress. If she had gone to college, I think my mother would soon have discovered that the stage was a better outlet for her than film. She had the kind of talents that were best seen live. She loved a monologue, and her lungs were astonishing. Although fascinating as a performance artist, Mum would have been incapable of the subtlety even bad movies have required of actors since the pictures went talkie. But I believe she could have made a name for herself in local theater, and that my father could have been a popular coach
and PE teacher if their ambitions had not already begun to wane before an unexpected pregnancy extinguished these small dreams.