With or Without You: A Memoir (8 page)

———

I
’
M SURE MY FATHER HAS TOLD ME THAT HE LOVES ME. MAYBE WHEN
I was a baby. He might have leaned over my crib, tickled one of my pea-size toes, and whispered those three enormous and compact words.

It’s hard to picture Zeke doing this, though. He was twenty-two when I was born, and had the same sickening fear of babies that most men in their twenties feel. I can imagine him looking at me with tenderness, while out of the corner of his eye he was mapping every available exit.

“I love you.”

He must have said these words to me in my sentient years. Maybe when I had a fever, or early on Christmas morning? On my first day of school? After I said it to him first? I am sure it has happened. It must have. I just can’t remember a single time.

MY LEAST FAVORITE WORD
in the English language is
avuncular
. My stomach sours whenever it appears in print. I picture a gleaming scythe swinging out of nowhere and quietly, efficiently slicing off an arm, an ear, and a chunk of my scalp. Like it was easy. Like it was nothing.

The men and women I called Uncle and Auntie were not always related to me by blood, unless you consider the needle-sharing of pre-HIV
America to be an authentic rite of kinship. Cokehead women with feathered hair christened me their niece and invited me to serve as flower girl in their weddings. Their husbands and boyfriends took me to McDonald’s once in a while, and this, in my world, signified the intimacy of flesh and blood. Inevitably in relationships like these, some significant amount of money goes missing, a bag of dope is not fully paid for or paid back or picked up. I’d hear my mother screaming on the phone, and then these Aunties and Uncles would disappear. Like dandelions, a new pair would pop up around my mother’s coffee table, just as wild-eyed and shaky as their predecessors. They were no better or worse than my mother’s real-life siblings, so when they told me they loved me I felt compelled to love them back.

The man I called Uncle Vic had long tanned arms and every inch of them was covered with tattoos. Spiders and oil derricks and fire-breathing dragons. He had gotten them young, and their colors had already begun to fade when I first met him. He’d come to Massachusetts from one of those square-shaped states out West, where the clouds are bigger than East Coast cities. He was married to my mother’s friend Lucy, a fearsome, raw-boned woman with stringy blond hair so long that she could sit on it. Uncle Vic quit school after the eighth grade, left home at fourteen, and from then on worked long, hard hours at jobs only men of his size, strength, and lack of education will do. He had a way with animals both wild and domestic. There wasn’t a dog he couldn’t tame, a mouse he couldn’t catch. Aunt Lucy said that Vic could reach into a beehive without getting stung, but I wonder now if that was actually true or something she made up because she loved him.

It was love at first sight, he told me. And it was a secret. He would talk about it only when we were alone. Although sometimes, in a crowd, surrounded by the people we both pretended were our family, he couldn’t stop himself from kneeling down and whispering, “I love you,” into my ear.

The stink of beer resurfaced in a warm belch. The whiskers of his mustache scraped against my neck. If I linger too long in the reptilian stem of my brain, I can smell him right next to me now.

Pain, nausea, terror, humiliation—none of this was worse than the shameful precision with which dread had consorted with my most aching desire: I would have jumped on top of an open fire to be noticed, to be chosen, to win a precious minute of someone’s attention. Uncle Vic gave that to me, and now I was being burned alive.

It was wrong—I’m sure he knew this. Legally, morally, and biologically. Grown-ups aren’t supposed to find comfort inside the body of a child. But that doesn’t change the essential fact: Vic was a man undeniably in love. When he looked at me I could see in his eyes that he was terrified, not of jail or lynching but of the much more harrowing possibility of rejection. For a split second he would seem smaller than me, and I felt more sorry for him than afraid.

I THINK IT
was summer.

Sometime before then—a span of days that I couldn’t measure accurately in my mind, nor can I now—I walked into my mother’s apartment and found my dad on top of her, choking and thrashing her. I remember thinking it was her fault, and somehow mine as well, that there was something inside my mother and me—a howl or maybe a look—that made certain men lose their minds.

I wanted to go away. I would have gone anywhere, with anyone. As it happened, my mother’s entire circle of family and friends was going on a big camping trip to Vermont, so she sent me along. Kathi didn’t want to come. She had recently fallen in love with the cabdriver who would become my stepfather, and she was glad to have a week with him all to herself.

My aunts and uncles rented campground plots along a steep majestic gorge. As we set up the tents and trailers that first day, a shock of yellow peeked above the tree line. It crested, rising slowly like the sun, and revealed itself as a giant hot-air balloon. All my aunts got out their cameras, my uncles raised their beers up to the sky, and I waved at the tiny dots of people inside the basket, wondering if they could see me.

My cousins and I roamed the campground all day long, fishing and swimming and fighting with one another. The aunts and uncles hung around their campsites eating chips and onion dip and drinking cases of beer. Around dusk that first night my cousins all drifted back to their parents, and I started to panic. Where was I going to sleep?

I knew that I didn’t want to camp anywhere near Aunt Lucy. She never ate anything but apples and had one lazy eye that made her look as dangerous as she actually was. Certifiable, we called Lucy behind her back. She was the kind of woman who hit babies. I had seen this with my own eyes. At the time, it seemed as indulgent to protest as it does to poeticize now; these are simply things that happened in our world. Everyone was terrified of her—men, women, and children alike. I was riding shotgun with Lucy once when a cop pulled her over for running a stop sign. “Ma’am, are you aware—” the police officer began. If he said anything else, I didn’t hear it. Aunt Lucy started screaming as if she were in the throes of demonic possession. The word
scream
really doesn’t capture a voice like hers. Think of the sound you would hear rising from the trenches of Ypres. The screech of virgins summoned to Mount Pelée. What came from Medea’s mouth when she realized that she was now all alone.

“Aaaaaaaiiiiyyyyeeeeeee! Who do you think you are?”

She accused the police officer of pedophilia and cannibalism, shrieking so loudly that the cop jumped away from her window, stuttered a warning, and jogged back trembling to his cruiser.

When I was left alone at Lucy’s house, she would tell me sick and twisted stories. “Did you hear?” she asked me one day. “The swans that nest in your river were butchered. All of them. Shred to pieces. The police found machetes near their bodies.”

“Machetes?” I wondered. “Do we have those in Danvers?”

“You don’t believe me?” she screamed. Her lazy eye lolled in its socket as though unhinged. “You think I’m a liar! Go look it up in the paper if you don’t think it’s true!”

Of course she had thrown away the paper and there was no mention
of murdered swans on the TV news that night. I read my library book silently in Lucy’s living room until my mother came to get me. On the car ride home, I told Mum what Auntie said about the swans.

“Lucy should have been a writer,” Kathi said. “Nothing real, mind you. Not books. But the
National Enquirer
or something like that. With an imagination like hers, she could make a fortune.”

Lucy was insane, and her husband was in love with me. It would have been safer if I slept alone on the precipice of the gorge. I remember stopping systematically at each of my relatives’ campsites, hovering around their fires, waiting for someone to invite me to stay. Night falls faster in the woods. I watched with a leaden feeling as daylight drained from the sky. The serrated edges of treetops turned from green to gold and then, in a heartbeat, they disappeared. Now there was only darkness, the smell of fire, and the sound of shrill invisible birds. I ran to Aunt Sandy’s trailer. Sandy was my favorite aunt, because she was the only adult I knew who didn’t swear, and she spent her free time preserving fruit and baking pies. Mum claimed that Sandy had been a professional model in her teen years—a spread in a bridal magazine, I think. Like any story Kathi told me, there’s a fifty percent chance that it’s true, but I’ve never seen the pictures. What I remember clearly was my mother’s proud invocation of her: “Your Auntie Sandy was pretty enough to marry money.” This was the highest honor a woman could aspire to in my family.

Sandy’s modeling career never took off, and the rich husband never arrived. She married a moody alcoholic, whom my mother described as “scantily employed,” and became an overweight housewife who knowingly wrote bad checks at the local grocery store. Growing up, I was oblivious of Sandy’s failures. Like my mother and everyone else in our family, I’d fallen for my aunt’s high cheekbones, her nursery-school voice, those moist, buttery cookies always cooling on the stove.

“Please let me sleep here tonight.” I clamped myself to Sandy’s hip.

“What’s wrong with you?” She peeled me off her like a wet sock. “Why are you always crying?”

“I just want to stay with you.”

Did Sandy know what a pedophile Uncle Vic was? I can’t be sure. My mother knew, as did others in our family; it was one of the many open secrets I overheard the women whispering about—sometimes not whispering at all—in the kitchens of my youth. A fact like that would seem hard to ignore, until you consider the human mind’s most maladaptive feat of intelligence: we have a remarkable ability to believe our own lies. Denial and the desire to self-destruct are elemental cousins; mining one yields the other in equal proportion. In a family like ours, instincts like these—to hurt and to lie, reflexively first, then extensively in consequence—are so powerful that you can take them for granted as easily as, say, the lungs’ ability to continue breathing when the rest of the body is fast asleep.

I remember unambiguous cries for help, and the cloud of cognitive dissonance that followed—no one did anything, no one said anything, nothing happened, nothing would change. Why? Maybe it was a warped interpretation of
omertà
, the Sicilian code of silence. Maybe everyone was afraid that if they reported Vic to the authorities, Lucy the Certifiable would try to get revenge, and the police would come knocking on
their
doors to break
their
families apart, too. There exists a nuanced arms race among those in the lowest echelon of society, a system of threats and reprisals that follows this script:
If you report me to Child Services, I’ll report you for welfare fraud; if you report me to Welfare, I’ll report your husband for selling pot.…
And so on. After all, not one member of my extended family had what you could call a model home.

Maybe Aunt Sandy was just overwhelmed with her own family troubles that night. Maybe she simply didn’t think about me and where I would be sleeping.

“There’s too many of us already,” she said. “We don’t have room for you.”

I walked back to Aunt Lucy and Uncle Vic’s campsite. What happened next had happened to me before and would happen a few more times until I got a little older. If I do my best mental gymnastics, I can sometimes convince myself it was a rite of initiation, a
vestige of the ancient world that the rest of us pretend doesn’t exist. An unholy First Communion, a sacrifice of innocence for some greater spiritual good, an act of random, senseless animal lust, a divinely inspired transgression.…

I’ve tried so many ways to make sense of my experience. Obliteration was the one that worked best. Pretend it never happened at all.

It didn’t happen. It didn’t happen. It didn’t happen. It didn’t happen. It didn’t happen. It didn’t happen. It didn’t happen. It didn’t happen. It didn’t happen. It didn’t happen. It didn’t happen. It didn’t happen. It didn’t happen. It didn’t happen. It didn’t happen. It didn’t happen. It didn’t happen
.

Until one day it really didn’t happen.

I don’t remember many of the details now. But that can happen to any memory, toxic or not. If you can remember anything, it’s already wrong. The image or event has changed, just as you have—minutely, chemically, through the passage of time between then and now. Something happens to you, and then it’s gone. It becomes a memory that becomes shrapnel. Shards of experience still hot with life singe the brain wherever they happen to get embedded. Sometimes I swear I can feel the precise location of my memories like warm, tingling splinters under my scalp. Pictures with no sound, feelings with no pictures, the lost and found, mostly lost.

There are times when these memories, distilled into words and uttered in my own voice, sound so strange to me
—it didn’t happen
—that I begin to doubt everything from the laws of gravity to the spelling of my own name.

MY MOTHER SHOWED UP
at the campground a few days later in a Checker cab with her new boyfriend, Michael. The cab was a late model from the seventies, one of the last of its kind ever made in America. Michael had planned to retire the car from the road, but my mother rescued it from the junkyard. She drove the Checker around in circles, showing it off.

“This is the car Nikki will ride to the church on her wedding day,” she bragged. She’d already had it painted white in preparation. The car would survive another couple of months before it went the way of every other vehicle she tried to own. My mother and her cars—it was always a doomed, unrequited love.

Kathi stepped grandly out of her big white boat. “I’m getting a hotel room” were the first words that came from her mouth. Mum hated camping. It reminded her too much of my competitive, outdoorsy father, who is famous for dragging his women and children on long hikes that he times with a stopwatch. My mother was driven mad by more than thirty minutes in nature. “The trees are nice, but after a while I just want to take a long, hot shower and order room service,” she said, flicking her cigarette into the campfire. She ate the s’mores I made for her, then started gathering her things to leave. It was clear she was going to glide away in that huge white car and leave me behind. I panicked, started crying, complained about my chronic stomachache, which, for some reason, always aroused her sympathy.