With or Without You: A Memoir (10 page)

“My daughter has never even kissed a boy, and you people made her feel like a whore,” she shouted. It didn’t help our cause much, not with all the cleavage Mum was showing as she said these things.

Shortly after picture day, my classmates decided to impeach me as their president. They had discussed it all behind my back and elected a few representatives to broach the issue during social studies. I’d never thought much of my classmates’ intellect, so when this happened I was shocked and slightly impressed. The little plebeians had
organized. Our teacher, Mrs. King, was a frail, pretty sparrow, easily bowled over by a roomful of hateful thirteen-year-olds. She didn’t know what to do, so she made me wait in the hall while the rest of the students discussed my failings in a quorum and then, in democratic fashion, voted me out.

“Why are they doing this to you?” Mrs. King asked when she returned to the hall to deliver the class’s verdict. (“Not
totally
unanimous,” she offered as a consolation.) She was very tall, so she had to bend at the hips to meet me eye to eye, and when she finally looked at me she began to cry.

“I don’t understand, Nikki. How can they be so—so cruel?”

These questions weren’t purely rhetorical, I realized. Mrs. King actually wanted me to explain them to her.

For my entire life up to that point, school had been a six-hour respite from home. There was a reassuring pattern to every period, day, week, and semester. I understood exactly what was expected of me and could deliver it in return. I knew the right answers. Even if my teachers didn’t like me—and I sensed that many of them didn’t—I got concrete validation in test scores and letter grades. Now life at St. Mary’s was no better than it was at home.

The impeachment took place on a Monday, a night that I slept at my father’s, and as I walked to his house after school that day I decided to kill myself as soon as everyone went to bed. I tried to explain to my dad and Carla what had happened at school, but either they didn’t believe me or they didn’t fully understand. I took my diary to the backyard and wrote a poem about the moon, then swallowed a combination of allergy pills and generic-brand aspirin. I think now part of me must have understood that if I’d swallowed the kinds of pills stocked at my mother’s house I most definitely would have died. Thank God, it all ended ingloriously with a lot of vomit. I didn’t even fall into a coma, which was my ultimate goal—to lie like Sleeping Beauty on a hospital bed made of Lucite until a handsome college admissions officer woke me up with a letter of acceptance, a scholarship, and a kiss.

After a boring couple of hours in the Salem Hospital ER, I was interviewed by a therapist whose nametag read “Leesah.” For forty-five minutes, this woman and I stared at each other in tense silence.

“Has anyone ever touched you inappropriately?”

“No.”

“Have you ever been hit?”

“No.”

“Are you afraid for your safety at home … ?”

Leesah discharged me. I got one day off to watch game shows and soap operas at my dad’s house, then I went back to school and life as usual. Everyone knew that I had botched a suicide—my mother’s big mouth made sure of that—and I felt even more humiliated. Yet I was still acting my part as captain of the cheerleaders. I must have been a gloomy sight even before all this happened. With my thick black eyebrows and the dark circles under my eyes, there was no amount of ribbon or glitter that could make me appear very cheerful. Our primary purpose was to support the boys’ basketball team, which lost nearly every game that year, and sometimes compete against other girls in cheering competitions, where we always came in second to last.

“We suck so much, sucking is, like, our only superlative,” I said to myself aloud in the locker room.

Soon after the presidential coup d’état, I was kicked off the squad. The mother of my co-captain had orchestrated it. Her best friend’s daughter took my place. Around the same time, national news broke the story of a woman in Texas who tried to have someone killed so that her daughter could be captain of the cheerleading squad.

“Fuck!” my mother said. “Nikki, that could have been you!”

I spent a lot of time that year lying on the floor of my bedroom listening to Nirvana and the Cure. I produced a staggering number of poems. Most of them rhymed, though I was wont to write little prose pieces, like this one I found in my diary:

In order to maintain their social position, the circle of friends I’d acquired had to dump me. They had their eyes trained on higher stakes these days anyway—high-school boys with driver’s licenses. Through what I imagine to be a series of very ardent, clumsy hand jobs, one of them convinced their new car-driving friends to stalk and harass me at my house, prank-call me at all hours, and leave threatening messages on our answering machine.

“They said things, Nikki, I don’t even want to tell you,” my mother said with a shudder.

Though, a minute later, she did.

“They said they were going to rape and kill you and leave your body for me to find! I was so nice to your friends.” My mother pouted. “I can’t believe they would turn on me like this.”

Reports of young girls being raped and murdered were always on the evening news. In light of everything else that was going on, it didn’t seem impossible that I could be next. I didn’t feel safe living at my mother’s house anymore, where the trill of the telephone made my pulse race and the sound of tires on the gravel had me ducking away from the windows. Nonna had just survived her first heart attack. Under the pretense that my grandmother needed my help to recover, I moved into her apartment next door.

WHEN MY MOTHER WAS
a little girl, my grandmother tended bar at a place called the Tack Room. “I was raised in that barroom,” Kathi said of her childhood. It was an unfortunate necessity, because Nonna’s husband, Mike, had left her for another woman years before they legally divorced, and she couldn’t afford to choose between raising her children and earning an income. One of Nonna’s sisters had married a man who owned a stable of racehorses, and my grandmother
took up side work running numbers for him. Rita wasn’t afraid to move a bag of dope when she needed the money, and she taught her most intelligent and enterprising daughter, Kathi, how to do the same. The critical difference between this mother-and-daughter pair was that my mother grew up to be a narcotic omnivore, while her mother remained staunchly sober. My grandmother refused to touch alcohol and never developed any personal interest in the drugs she occasionally sold; she was, ironically, disgusted by anyone who did. “No-good fuckin’ losers!” she said, referring to such people, which included almost all of her relatives by both blood and marriage.

My grandmother was just as crazy as everyone else in our gene pool, but I had rightfully identified her as the most trustworthy person among us. Since I was old enough to balance on two feet, I would toddle to where she lived next door and she would look at me as no one else in our family did—as if I was really there.

I had always loved to read, and as I got older my appetite for fiction grew in ways I didn’t know how to meet. By the time I turned eleven, I’d ripped through every Agatha Christie novel I could find in both the school and the town library. I knew there was something better out there, but I didn’t know what it was or how to find it, so I asked my mother to buy me nothing but books for my birthday. Kathi came home with a stack of Disney books with huge illustrations and one dull sentence per page.

“Thanks, Mum.” I pretended to smile as I opened the books, inwardly ashamed for us both. When she was high, she often forgot how old I was, and shopping was one of those chores made more bearable by Percocet or cocaine.

Later in the week, I walked over to my grandmother’s house for my birthday dinner. She’d decided my present that year would be a trip to the bookstore, where I could pick out whatever I wanted. I chose the complete works of William Shakespeare. I liked the heft of the volume, the black leather cover, and the gold paint on the edge of the pages. As my grandmother worked on dinner, I sat on her porch and read
Romeo and Juliet
, because it was the most famous and I thought it would be the easiest to understand.

“They weren’t really in love!” I shouted to Nonna through the screen door. She was frying disks of breaded summer squash in olive oil, our favorite snack. “They didn’t even know each other! They’re just young kids and wicked overly emotional.”

“Everyone always thinks it’s this big love story,” she yelled back.

“It’s not! It’s much better than that!”

I heard my grandmother laughing above the crackle of oil, felt a warm breeze swirl around me. The river looked like a wrinkled sheet of silk, blue and green and black and white. If we get to keep anything of this life after we die, that afternoon is what I would choose.

Growing up, I could wander over to my grandmother’s house at any hour of the day or night, and she would always get up to cook something for me. We would sit together in her kitchen, listening to Billie Holiday on the AM radio station she loved, and stuff ourselves silly on loaves of warm bread. Nonna was a shrieking harpy to her own children, but she truly enjoyed the genetic remove of being a grandmother.

“Don-ah look atta my granddaughter! Oh, please! Don-ah look! She eez homely and stunata!”
she would wail in public, holding her hand over my face. It was a trick of advertising in reverse that she had learned from her own Sicilian grandmother, who believed that Gypsies were always lurking around the corner, scouting young blood to steal into their clan. Publicly denouncing your offspring as damaged goods sent a message to these Gypsies that they’d be better off kidnapping someone else’s child. If I’d had a tail, it would have wagged hysterically whenever Nonna hid my face and told strangers at the supermarket that I was an ugly simpleton. If someone wanted to steal me, I thought, I must be a person of real value. Better still, someone wanted to protect me from being stolen.

WHEN MY MOTHER AND
Michael got married, they slept in a water bed behind our living-room couch and used my bedroom closet for their clothes and other effects. The storage space of one closet wasn’t nearly sufficient to contain the hoard of their boxes and trash bags.
These things piled up and blockaded the door to my bedroom so that it couldn’t be shut without causing an avalanche. It was clear to everyone that our family of three needed more privacy and space, so Nonna offered to swap homes with Kathi and Michael. She moved into our little one-bedroom apartment and we took over her house at 35 Eden Glen Avenue. In the spring of 1993, my stepdad disassembled my twin bed and reassembled it in the space where the water bed once stood behind the living-room couch. Nonna was in my old bedroom, her TV blaring all day and night. The oblong teak mask that my grandfather had brought home from the Pacific after World War II hung on the wall across from my bed. I would fall asleep staring into its wooden eyes, the thick lips pressed into a bemused smile, and wonder what secrets the mask was keeping from us.

My grandmother had recently retired from her job as a kitchen aide in a hospital cafeteria. She was in her golden years now, a time she spent screaming at her television and trying to re-clog her recently shunted arteries.

“Nonna, that has a lot of cholesterol,” I would say as I watched her drop an entire stick of butter into a pot of angel hair.

“Ba fangul,”
she shouted back. She added olive oil, salt, and a pound of crispy bacon to the pot. “Maybe I want to die!”

Nonna was very weak from her surgeries, and I enjoyed playing her nurse. I occupied myself with cleaning and other chores, keeping her to a schedule of medications, and taking her blood-sugar readings. After a triple-bypass surgery, Nonna couldn’t stand longer than a few minutes or raise her arms to wash herself. We put a plastic deck chair in the shower and I would stand outside the curtain with a cloth, gently soaping her back and shampooing her hair. At thirteen I was still afraid of the dark, but I didn’t flinch at the sight of my grandmother’s wiry gray pubic hair, the ribbon of scar tissue from the bypass that sliced her from heart to thigh, the pink satiny coil of skin left by the mastectomy she had before I was born. It was the image of my grandmother with wet hair that I found distressing. Nonna had those fabled Sicilian follicles—thick, coarse strands of hair, each one gleaming and tough as steel wool.
Throughout my grandmother’s battle with breast cancer and the course of chemotherapy, she did not lose a single strand. All five of her children corroborate this story, which leads me to believe that it might actually be true. I had always known my grandmother as a woman with a thick pouf of hair, set and curled like the typical old lady’s and dyed a purplish red. Sitting in the shower with her head sopping, she looked small and meek in a way I had never imagined possible.

As with my father, I don’t remember my grandmother ever saying that she loved me, but I never questioned that she did because of the names she called me
—giugiunelle
or
putan
, chickpea or whore. Terms of endearment, obviously, because she also used to call her cats these names. Nonna’s cats, Balthazar and Nicodemus, were the two biggest whores we knew. They used to disappear for days. “Out whoring!” Nonna would yell as though summoning them home. When the cats finally returned, she would cook them their own dinner of liver and tripe. One of them—Balthazar, I think—contracted a feline strain of the AIDS virus. This was in the eighties, at the height of the HIV epidemic, when misinformation was rampant and everyone was paranoid about catching it from a toilet seat. There were several heroin addicts in our extended network of friends and family who were HIV positive.