With or Without You: A Memoir (6 page)

Please don’t die. Please don’t be mad at me. Please.

She lifted her head and looked at me. Her long bangs fell into her face and I couldn’t see her eyes. Then she smiled. That big, screeching laugh. Okay, I exhaled. We’re okay.

“Mum, my uniform is ripped.” I showed her the falling hem.

“Oh, shit,” she said. She sat up and pulled the chain on my bedside lamp. Her pupils were almost gone, small and black as flakes of pepper. She removed a long thread from the skirt and squinted at it in the light.

“I have an idea!” she snapped. She ran out of the room and came
back with scissors and a roll of duct tape. She cut out strips to fit the length of the pleats and, voilà, my uniform was hemmed.

“You are a
genius
!” I hugged her neck.

“I do my best,” she agreed.

Her work was flawless, until the hot spring day when the glue began to melt and again my hem fell at recess, this time rimmed with gooey silver tape.

MY FIRST-GRADE TEACHER WAS
Sister Agnes, a short, stern woman who had given up a large family fortune to become a nun. She wore pastel blouses and nylon skirts and beige sneakers whose soles had worn down over the years to a smooth, eerily silent rubber pad that allowed her to sneak up on her students unawares. Even on the coldest winter days, I could track the brown elastic of Sister Agnes’s knee-highs as they slowly descended her thick, veiny calves. On either side of the chalkboard, Sister Agnes had stapled a picture of equal size at equal height, both bordered with a scalloped frame of green construction paper. On the right was the Virgin Mary holding the Baby Jesus on her lap. Jesus sat with absurdly dignified posture for an infant, a gold disk like a plate perfectly balanced on his head. Mary was a luminous blonde with dark, hooded eyes that looked exhausted and a little bit stoned. On the left side of the chalkboard was a signed photograph of Larry Bird. Sister Agnes was an old Irish-Catholic New Englander who, during basketball season, would include the Boston Celtics in our morning petitions. To this day, whenever Larry Bird’s name is mentioned, I feel moved to bow my head and pray.

One morning at school I was sharpening my pencil when I noticed that my finger had become swollen and discolored. The night before, I’d bought a twenty-five-cent ring from a toy dispenser at the grocery store. The ring was painted gold, with a ruby rhinestone sparkling at the center. I couldn’t wait to flaunt it to all the kids at school. I fell asleep wearing it, having tried and failed to pry it off
before going to bed. Now the circulation had been restricted for hours and my finger was turning blue. I showed it to Sister Agnes, who tried to pull the ring off while I stood beside her desk, then took me into the girls’ bathroom and lathered my hand with soap. When that didn’t work, Sister told me to keep scrubbing while she went to the cafeteria. She returned with a jug of corn oil to grease my finger. She pulled. I pulled. The ring would not budge.

So far that year, I’d been sent home from school for having bronchitis, strep throat, and a condition that can only be described as hysterical vomiting. There were days I arrived crying so hard I had to be sent to the nurse’s office, where I would lie on a cot until lunchtime. I was late as often as I was on time, and sometimes I took weeks off from school with neither a medical excuse nor a decent lie to explain my absence. One day I showed up wearing no underwear beneath my uniform. My whole body ignites with shame when I remember the morning I sat cross-legged in our circle for story time, and Sister Agnes hopped up and yanked me into another room where I sat alone until a clean pair of underpants could be procured for me to wear.

“Call your mother,” Sister Agnes told me now as we stood in the dark, tiled lavatory. Her hands clamped angrily around my shoulders, and I could feel her body quaking.

By that time Mum didn’t have a car anymore. The Shitbox had met its inexorable end and we now relied on friends, family, and strangers for rides. From the front office I saw a black-and-yellow taxicab pull up to the school and my mother step out. It was a warm spring day. The trees were decorated with fuzzy green buds, and pale tulips had begun poking through the mud. My mother flirted shamelessly with the cabdriver during the ride to the hospital. His name was Michael, and he said that he had graduated from high school with my mother. “I played trumpet in the marching band,” he told her. “I had thick glasses.”

“I didn’t remember him at all,” my mother said to me later. “Of course, he knew exactly who
I
was.”

Now Kathi was a single mother who needed a ride and Michael
was the man who picked her up. We waited in the hospital for nearly three hours before a doctor saw me. I showed him my finger proudly, swollen and blue in its little vise. The doctor cut the ring off with an electric saw the size of a dime. When we left the hospital, Michael was still waiting for us. And this was the man my mother eventually married.

———

F
OR TWO YEARS IN MY LATE TWENTIES I WORKED A RELIEF SHIFT
at the National Domestic Violence Hotline. We fielded calls from all over the country, around three thousand a day, hundreds more if our number was mentioned on that afternoon’s episode of
Oprah
. For eight hours straight I’d listen to the living nightmares of strangers, stories so hateful they made the average horror flick look tender. A lot of them I wish I could forget. One caller told me about the morning that her husband beckoned her to walk with him into the remote edges of his ranch. Pointing with his finger, he indicated how far and wide his land stretched; then, in the stillness of the morning, he explained to his wife exactly how he was going to kill her—what method and tools he would use to dispose of her body—if she ever tried to leave him. I talked to another woman who had to change both her and her daughter’s names and Social Security numbers, effectively erasing their identities, because her ex-boyfriend, a cop, had stalked them all the way across the country. There were women who were forbidden to switch on a lightbulb while their lovers were out of the house, and mail-order brides who had been raped so severely that they required reconstructive surgery just to take a pee. One woman called simply to say, “The police won’t help me. I have to tell
someone
—if I’m found dead tomorrow, I want you to know this man’s name.”

I kept these women on the line as long as I could, afraid of what might happen to them when they hung up. I got repeat callers who knew me by name, and for whom I would beg the local shelters to find a bed. At home I would fold my hands against my heart and ask Someone, Anyone, to protect these hunted women scattered across the country, then throw in a quick, half-superstitious Hail Mary for good measure.

If only all battered wives could be so conveniently sympathetic. The monoliths of abuser and abused cast stark shadows across the American conscience, when the real picture is something more complicated, a prism that captures the full spectrum of good and evil and shatters it into fractured pieces of color and light. I spoke to several women who balked at the idea of state-subsidized housing; they informed me that they would rather be called “fat bitch” on a daily basis by their boyfriends than downgrade in apartment square footage. A sense of racist entitlement prevented many women from seeking shelter in a domestic-violence safe house. “I don’t want to share a bathroom with some Hispanic lady and her ten kids,” I heard more than once. “Can’t your organization just give me some money so I can stay in a motel for a couple months?”

Some callers had an obstinate love of material comfort that made me want to slap them myself. These women were not slaves to their lovers or even to a violent, twisted concept of love. Their bondage was to a man’s steady paycheck and the meaningless
things
it bought.

I heard stories of fear and self-hatred that echoed my own. I heard a lot of broken records. Sometimes I would be so numb at the end of an eight-hour shift I’d find myself stabbing my thighs with an uncoiled paperclip while the caller on my headset described being beaten with a power cord. This particular caller didn’t want to involve the police or get a restraining order or even break up with the man who did this to her. She told me she’d stolen his credit card and treated herself to a shopping spree instead. I could feel my eyeballs twitching as I listened to her, and buried somewhere inside my chest the beating of a cold, mad heart.

——

I WAS FOUR YEARS
old when my father married his girlfriend, Carla. My mother was forbidden to attend the wedding. It was a slight she never forgot.

“They made this big deal, telling everyone in Danvers not to tell me where the ceremony was,” she told me. “Like I was going to burst in and stop the show.” My mother rolled her eyes. “
Please
. I just wanted to see you in your little flower-girl dress.”

Kathi had known Carla in high school. In the shallowest sense, they were women of the same ilk—short, Italian-American brunettes. Girls like this can sniff each other out from across the room at a party, and either become best friends or instantly, rabidly despise each other.

“Carla thinks she’s won some big prize,” my mother said when she heard about my father’s engagement. “Ha! She’s getting exactly what she deserves.”

And yet when my father was in one of his moods, clearing the kitchen table of dishes with one impulsive sweep of his arm, punching holes into the walls, swinging a baseball bat inside the house, it was my mother’s kitchen where Carla went to recoup. A couple of times a year, my stepmother would appear at the front door in tears.

“Oh, Jesus, Carla,” my mother would say. “Sit down. Relax.”

“Kathi, you know how he gets.”

“Believe me. I remember.”

For some sick reason, Carla’s crises brought out my mother’s perky side. Kathi would practically chirp as she whipped up something for Carla to eat. My mother and stepmother would sit at the kitchen table smoking cigarettes and snacking like two girlfriends on their lunch break. When Carla decided that she was ready to go back home, my mother respectfully showed her the door.

“She’s not the brightest person in the world,” Kathi said of Carla. “And she’s lazy, always has been. The woman has two speeds—slow and stop. But, Christ, if I had to live with your father, I’d want to sleep all day, too.”

——

MY STEPMOTHER WAS THE
youngest of three girls, the only member of her immediate family who was born in America. Her parents and sisters moved from Italy after World War II ended. Carla’s mother, Elda, was a big, square-faced woman with a loud, brusque voice, who in her sixty-one years as an American citizen never learned to speak English. She didn’t need to. If Elda wanted something, she would simply holler and thrash while everyone around her scrambled to figure out what had to be done.

My father hated Elda so much that he refused to go to his mother-in-law’s house even on Christmas Day. The one time I remember Elda visiting our house, she commandeered my father’s yard tools and did some pruning on the birch Dad loved more than any other tree in the yard.

“Get away from that,” Zeke yelled when he saw what she was doing. Elda snapped back at him in Italian, a long, Fascist-sounding rant, then went home. A few months later, the birch tree died.

“She killed it,” my father said. “She did it on purpose.”

My stepmother grew up to be the exact opposite of her mother: a quiet, sluggish woman with her head in the clouds. Carla’s only expressed ambition in life was to become a flight attendant or a florist. She’s been a waitress and a hospital tech, sometimes simultaneously, for the almost thirty years that I’ve known her. A devoted mother, she always made sure that her work schedule allowed her to go to my brother’s and sister’s hockey games. She has probably spent half her adult life shivering in ice rinks, cheering for her offspring as they skated in circles and clobbered other kids with their sticks.

As soon as he married Carla, my father bought back his childhood home from the couple who had bought it from his widowed mother. It’s a New England cape with weather-beaten shingles that look like slices of burned toast. The house is small, but the backyard is one of the biggest on the street, with room enough for a garden and a decent game of Wiffle ball. At the edge of the yard is a hill that my father gutted of trees and terraced with long wooden planks he
scavenged from the town dump. Below the hill is a meadow of wild-flowers and reeds. Every winter the Danvers Fire Department floods the meadow with water so that it can freeze into a public skating park. Zeke taught my brother, sister, and me how to skate there by pushing a plastic milk crate around the ice until we were sturdy enough to glide away on our own. He and his four brothers all learned to skate the same way, in the same meadow, a generation before us.

I spent Sundays, Mondays, and Tuesdays at my father’s when—if—visitations were being properly observed, and I cannot recall a single day in my life when his house was not under construction. Zeke has remodeled the interior himself slowly over the years, tearing apart floors and knocking down walls. He works room by room, often leaving a project unfinished for several months in the spring only to resume it later in the winter. There have been spells when we washed our dishes in the bathtub, or shared one toilet among six people. Inevitably, in the rubble of these renovations, my father will find something—a baseball card, a bag of marbles—that whispers to him from a lifetime before us. At one point, my father’s mother moved back into the house for the penultimate stage of her Alzheimer’s, and the former matriarch now wandered the half-renovated rooms like a quiet, baffled toddler. Here was the same backyard and the birch tree that my father and his father planted together. Here were the slate front steps, the blackened shingles, the meadow. Here we were, life circling around once more.

ONE DAY, AS
I was lying in my father’s backyard, I pulled a four-leaf clover out of the ground. I was stunned. I hadn’t been looking for a four-leaf clover—or anything else, for that matter. It just seemed to find my fingers as they absently stroked the thick, glossy lawn. When I realized what it was, I ran to show Zeke, who was up on a ladder denuding his blighted birch. At first he didn’t believe me and continued stripping branches. I was nearly five years old, wont to see the world as a magical place. I hounded him until he finally stopped to look.