With or Without You: A Memoir (4 page)

NO ONE IN THE
world would ever describe me as plain. I take a lot of pride in that.

In the wrong light—fluorescent, especially—I look like a monster in a Halloween mask, all cavernous eye socket and bulging prefrontal lobe. But in a better light, with my head tilted just so and my lips parted in a wry, hard-to-fake smile, my face can take on a villainous beauty, like Cruella De Vil or Snow White’s stepmother in her better years. People often compliment my teeth. (“No braces? Ever?”) I have good hair days and bad, like anyone else. Makeup helps, but only so much, because I have never, not for one second, been the kind of woman who could get by on her looks alone.

My father assures me that this is a blessing. On a trip to the beach not too long ago, the old man was moved to appraise all the aesthetic flaws of my younger sister, his daughter by another woman, and me. Not one to take things lying down, my sister fired back at our father with a litany of the bad genes he’d passed down to us.

“Flat feet, oily skin, a friggin’ unibrow …”

Zeke tried to defend himself. “You know, your mothers had some part in it, too.”

I pointed out that my sister and I spend more time, money, and effort on hair removal than most drag queens, and that neither of our mothers possesses this trait.

“Listen, you two girls have no idea what it’s like to be really good-looking,” my father said. “It’s not what you think. People are always looking at you. They expect things from you. It’s an awful lot to live up to. And, frankly, I don’t think either of you could have handled it.” He smiled to himself and ran his fingers through his hair.

“Whatcha doing, Dad?” my sister railed. “Counting how many strands are still left?”

“I’d feel sorry for your future husbands,” my father said, grinning, “but who would ever be crazy enough to marry cows like you?”

“It’s a miracle we don’t have fatal eating disorders,” I told him, the perfect riposte, laced with guilt and the threat of debilitating illness. It must have had an impact, because the old man felt bad enough to offer a concession.

“You were pretty cute when you were little.”

Isn’t every mammal? We’re all ridiculously cute before we move on to solid foods. It’s a trick of evolution. Who would put up with us otherwise? As the darling glow of infancy wore off, the concomitants of maturity—my real face, my real character—began to emerge, and I couldn’t help noticing the puzzled expressions I’d begun to elicit from adults. I hit a particularly awkward phase when I was seven, peaking in ugliness around fifth grade. By junior high, my mother could stand it no more.

“I’m not leaving this house with you until you put on some friggin’ makeup and do something to that rat’s nest you call hair.”

I had no idea what she was talking about. As far back as I can remember, I had trained my eyes to avoid reflective surfaces. On a good day, I was and still am often startled by what the mirror has to offer. I don’t know who it is staring back, but it’s not—that
can’t
be—me. On a bad day, this disorientation can get gothic. I will start to imagine that one of my eyes is bigger than the other. If I stare too long, it begins to grow as the other eye shrinks, until I look like a helpless grotesque from Picasso’s
Guernica
. I have a talent for turning an invisibly clogged pore into a gaping wound, and, like most women in the industrialized world, I sometimes hallucinate that my legs are as thick as sequoias.

During my late childhood, I hid inside Double XL sweatshirts. I was in junior high when the nineties grunge-rock movement arrived. Though I was never cool enough to commit to the whole punk-rock aesthetic, I finally had both an explanation and an excuse for my billowing sweaters. I learned too late that it actually takes a lot of effort to look rebellious and morose, and my nihilism, however authentic, was just plain dumpy.

My mother was a product of the seventies. If you didn’t have to lie down horizontally and hold your breath to zip your fly, she felt,
your pants were obviously too big. All the flannel I was buying in my early teens had her deeply concerned. One Saturday after a very satisfying afternoon of moping in my bedroom, I walked into the kitchen to pour a bowl of cereal. My mother was sitting at the kitchen table. A cigarette dangled from her wrinkled lips. She looked me up and down, the ember of her Newport bobbing in sync with the scan of her eyes. She reached out and tugged on the enormous plaid shirt I was wearing.

“Honey,” she asked in a plaintive voice, “why do you always look like a fat forty-year-old lesbian?”

Around this time my mother got a job as a manicurist in a full-service beauty salon, and her co-workers persuaded me to bob my long, tangled hair. It was a ruse, I soon learned. Once they got me in their clutches these women held me down on a chair in the back room of the salon, swabbed my upper lip and eyebrows with hot wax, then ripped it off.

“Jesus Christ!” I screamed.

“You have to suffer for beauty,” they cackled. There was a gaggle of them, all small-town beauticians with electric tans and darkly penciled lips that made them look as if they were wearing masks. The smell of coffee and cigarettes wafted from their mouths as they hovered uncomfortably close and, one by one, plucked the more stubborn hairs from my face.

I have come to understand this moment in my life as a humanitarian act. Twelve-year-old girls aren’t supposed to have mustaches, and mine had been there since I was eight. For the sake of dignity, it had to go. While I didn’t twirl around my bedroom singing “I Feel Pretty” after the women in my mother’s salon worked their sadistic magic, I could look at a mirror without imagining that a lesser primate was looking back in the reflection. And who knew what puberty would bring? Maybe one day I
would
become beautiful.

Shortly after the makeover, while I was organizing one of the many heaps of clutter that Mum loved to amass in our tiny home, I stumbled upon a picture that crushed my hope of ever becoming an object of beauty. It was a black-and-white photo of twenty-year-old
Kathi standing in the glassy stream of a waterfall, naked except for a microscopic bikini bottom. Her arms are folded over her small but perfect breasts, her head is tilted back, and there’s a smile on her face that suggests a night of marathon sex.

“Mum, who took this picture?”

“My God,” she gasped. “Your father.” She snatched the photo from me and considered it. “You’re in there, too, Nikki.”

Hidden beneath the taut skin of her stomach, I am something bigger than bacteria but smaller than a tadpole, a whorling system of cells that my mother’s antibodies still recognize as an invasion. It was the first visual proof I’d ever found of one of my mother’s favorite bedtime stories: “How My Only Child Came into the World.” A trashy, extravagant creation myth, I heard it as often as other kids heard “The Three Little Pigs.”

MY PARENTS SPENT JANUARY
of 1979 in Hawaii. Like many New Englanders, they’d saved their money all year so that they could get away for the coldest, darkest month of the winter. My mother discovered that she was pregnant a few weeks into their trip. According to my father, this was a performance she reenacted every month. (Whether I came into the world by pure accident or by womankind’s oldest trick is still a matter of debate.) After he realized that my mother’s story was actually true, my father packed his bags and hopped on the next plane back to Boston. I don’t think I’ve met a man who wouldn’t do the same thing. He was twenty-two years old and just as terrified as she was. My mother stayed in their youth hostel and told everyone her story of abandonment, full of tears and theatrical gestures, riding on her beauty enough for strangers to buy her food and drive her around the island. She met a native Pacific Islander with mahogany skin and a giant belly, who offered to save her reputation by marrying her. This was Mum’s favorite part of the story.

“… so this big Samoan says to me, ‘Let me give your baby a name.’ ‘Fuck you,’ I tell him. ‘I’m giving this baby
my
name.’ ” In her
next breath she added, “He wasn’t the only one, you know. I was beautiful, and skinnier than you are now.
Everyone
wanted to marry me.”

As the son of devout Catholics, Zeke also asked my mother to marry him when she finally returned to Massachusetts, but she refused him in similar fashion. For the following months she claims to have gone completely sober, the first of only two sober spells in her adult life. She turned twenty-one that summer and in the fall I was born. She didn’t go back on her promise and gave me her last name.

This is not to say that she didn’t seriously consider all her options first. When I was in fifth grade, my mother confessed that she had made an appointment to abort me. Her brother drove her to the clinic, but she refused to go in. She could have made this decision at home and saved him the trip. It was the seventies. There was an energy crisis, gas prices through the roof. But that would not have been a fitting scene for the turning point in her drama.

“I was crying and crying, Nikki. My brother kept saying, ‘Go in there. Don’t be stupid!’ But I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t get out of the car.”

Later in the pregnancy, my mother also told me, she had set in motion a possible adoption, contacting an agency and filling out forms for prospective parents. Somewhere in the world my long-lost adoptive parents sat in a lonely house waiting for me to arrive. I spent countless hours imagining them, rewriting the script of
Annie
, so that instead of a redhead in an orphanage it starred a mangy brunette removed from her home by Social Services.

Betcha they’re smart! Betcha they’re cool!

Vegetarian lunch box at my Waldorf school!

The story of how I actually learned about my almost-adoption is less a Broadway musical than something out of a daytime soap opera.

In seventh grade I was invited to a summer pool party. Kids from other schools would be there, including boys. When my mother heard this, she demanded that I wear a bikini, a hot-pink one that she picked out herself. “Please, Honey! Wear it for me,” she begged. I covered it up with a T-shirt that came down to my knees. This is
how I gleaned my first lesson in attracting the attention of boys and men—that desire is only intensified by concealment and withholding. When my wet T-shirt stuck like a second skin with a neon bathing suit peeking through, I found myself in the middle of a swarm of boys, all of them constantly readjusting their shorts. The cutest one, I thought, was a boy from Salem named Seamus. I mentioned this to a girl at the party and a commitment ceremony soon followed. That’s all it takes in seventh grade—vague interest and a series of emissaries to handle the details.

The next day Seamus and I had our first conversation on the phone. We had little in common apart from the fact that we shared the same birthday and were both die-hard fans of U2. I’d prepared for our chat by writing down a list of things to talk about. Item one was which song from
The Joshua Tree
best represented our love.

“Um, I don’t know,” Seamus said.

Fine. I moved on to the topic of our cosmically aligned birthdays. “Where were you born?” I asked him.

“Beverly Hospital,” he said.

“So was I! That means we were there together as babies!”

I was in raptures. How could any girl be lucky enough to meet her soul mate in junior high? I would wait until I was eighteen to move in with him, twenty-one to have our first child, just like my mother, only the situation would be slightly more dignified by a legal marriage.

Kathi overheard me talking to Seamus and she came running into my bedroom. “Tell him to put his mother on,” she said, and took the phone from me. The two women spoke for a while, my mother’s voice hushed and excited. Afterward, Mum sat on my bed and told me her version of my first days in the world outside her body:

Seamus and I both had young single mothers planning to give their babies up for adoption. The hospital put these two girls in the same room, thinking it would spare them the pain of sharing a room with happy families who had conceived their babies on purpose. Or, as my mother liked to explain, “They wanted to consolidate the two whores in the
Scarlet Letter
room.” Seamus’s mother actually went
through with the adoption, while my mother had again changed her mind.

“It was a whim,” she admitted. “You were so small and hairy and you looked vaguely Chinese. I couldn’t get over your feet.”

And so my mother had met my seventh-grade boyfriend long before I did, and had shared intimate postpartum words with the birth mother he had never known.

Mum loved to relive moments like these. Stories of her lost youth were our nightly bedtime ritual. She never read books to me. She wanted to, but whenever she tried to read she said the letters jumped around and flipped backward on the page. It was frustrating, and also humiliating. “Mummy’s not smart,” she’d say, pouting. Stupidity was the diagnosis that her teachers in the Danvers public schools had given her.
Stunata
was the word in her mother’s native tongue. Dyslexia was not even mentioned until late in my mother’s senior year of high school. By then Kathi had carved her own path that was more successful.

“I was beautiful and popular,” she told me. “Everyone worshipped me. And you know what? I was nice to everyone. Even the geeks. The geeks
loved
me. I won class president four years in a row by a landslide. The geek vote was crucial. My senior year, no one even bothered to run against me.”

The crowning achievement of her presidency, she told me one night as she sat smoking at the foot of my bed, was a screening of the 1930s cult film
Reefer Madness
in the high-school auditorium. A natural-born entrepreneur, my mother saw her position in student government as an opportunity to make some money for herself. She and a friend went in on an ounce of grass, rolled dozens of joints with a little tobacco sprinkled in them to make the marijuana stretch, and sold them at the movie screening on the sly.

“We made more money from the first showing than the PTA had collected all friggin’ year!” she said. “It was a coup, Nikki! Your mother was something.”