With or Without You: A Memoir (11 page)

“That’s what he gets for being such a whore!” Nonna chastised the cat.

She would have said the same thing to any of her children had they come to her with such a diagnosis. But when her prodigal son returned mewling after a few nights on the prowl, Nonna’s eyes would tear and she would fry an egg just for him.

At this point in her life my grandmother had long since given up wearing a prosthetic breast, let alone a bra. She didn’t wear her dentures, comb her hair, or shave her armpits. Lisa and Donald had told me that all the kids on Eden Glen Avenue thought my grandmother was a witch. It was a natural conclusion, given her toothless, one-titted rants at the neighbors and the way she muttered angrily to herself while walking up and down the street. Jehovah’s Witnesses
once knocked on her door. Once. My mother and I were in the driveway next door, getting ready to go out, when we saw the two young men in crisp suits climbing the steps of her porch.

“Hold on, Nik,” Mum said. “I want to watch this.”

We saw them knock on her door and wait. A shriek and a curse later, they were running for their lives. Nothing could have made me prouder.

Living with Nonna had many advantages, the biggest being food. She had that Depression-era talent for making a feast out of nothing. One night I watched her take rotten, almost liquefied peppers and tomatoes from the windowsill where she’d left them to ripen. She cut off the green, fuzzy mold and fried the remaining bits in olive oil with meat and potatoes and garlic.

“That’s friggin’ gross, Nonna. I’m not eating it.”

“
Statta zite!
You’ll eat it, you
putan
!” she hollered, and banished me from the kitchen. After dinner I was licking the pan she had cooked it all in.

When I remember my grandmother now, I picture her sitting on her living-room couch, wearing a cheap cotton housedress, her one, lopsided boob drooping toward her hip, her wild, reddish hair sticking up in all directions, and the crooked smile on her face as she leans over to one side and waves her hands to divert a loud, rippling fart in my direction.

“You know, Nikki, every time a person passes gas invisible particles of shit are flying through the air!”

WHEN I HAD FINISHED
with my homework and the horrible sitcoms I watched, Nonna would transplant herself to the living-room couch so that we could watch TV together until one of us fell asleep. We stayed up late into the night watching old movies that my grandmother called “pictures.” The spring I lived with her we watched
The Pit and the Pendulum
, the entire
Shogun
series, and Alex Haley’s
Roots
. Several other movies I sometimes think we dreamed. If imaginations
can be inherited, mine certainly was, because Nonna and I had an identical subconscious. Those months when we lived together were full of magical projection. It was uncanny the way we were always finding bits of our darkest desires being enacted on the screen. There was one movie about a lake in rural North America infested with piranhas. As shoals of bloodthirsty fish shredded the limbs of teenagers from a nearby summer camp, I imagined the kids at St. Mary’s being devoured.

“I’m rooting for the piranhas,” Nonna said, as though she could hear my thoughts.

In another of our late-night B-movie horror shows, nuclear fallout causes the few surviving men and women to roam the scorched earth with painful, lumpy mutations growing out of their bodies. “We deserve a lot worse than that, after the way we’ve treated this planet,” Nonna said in disgust.

Even nature programs revealed to us the brutal world as we recognized it: sharks leaving flesh wounds as part of the courtship ritual, procreation by gang rape, and, for the finale, intrauterine cannibalism! Shakespeare couldn’t have done a finer job.

EVENTUALLY I MOVED BACK
home with my mother. I became a teenager and discovered sex—truly my gateway drug. Nonna was watching TV next door as always, though I went to see her less and less. My life was full of boys. I no longer needed the company of a crazy old lady. But I still called often to check on her.

“Hello, Nonna, it’s me. Just calling to make sure you haven’t died yet. Have you? Okay. Bye.” I was showing off for some guy, trying to prove how dark and fascinating I was.

The truth was that my grandmother and I talked about death often. “It’s gonna happen! To me, to you. We’re gonna die.” Nonna loved to remind me when I was a trembling little kid afraid of my own shadow. She took me by the shoulders and gently shook me.

“Listen to me,” she said. “Only a moron would be scared.”

——

THE LAST TIME I
saw my grandmother, I was an eighteen-year-old college freshman. My mother had turned her life around, financially at least, and for the first time we were confronted with the burden of surplus income. Kathi was of the mind that her money possessed the ability to fly out the window like a colony of bats leaving a cave at dusk, and she was determined to spend what she had before that could happen. It would be allegory in neon, this reversal of fortune, a spectacular failure about to burn the horizon like a hot summer sunset. I had to act fast if I was going to take advantage of my mother’s temporary boom, so I charged a round-trip ticket to Amsterdam and a two-month Eurail pass on her American Express card. It would be my first time leaving the country, traveling without a “grown-up,” traveling somewhere farther than Disney World. There were many firsts ahead of me, and I was so excited and self-absorbed and adolescent that I hardly remembered anyone in the world existed besides me. I am ashamed to admit that my mother actually had to remind me to go next door and say goodbye.

I knocked twice and walked in, as was my custom, and Nonna began shouting at me: “What are you doing here? I told your mother not to send you over! Get out of here!”

I started to say goodbye, and Nonna burst into tears. “I didn’t want to see you,” she shrieked and took me into her arms. “Now get! I told you—go!”

I hugged and kissed her and said goodbye. We both knew it would be the last time.

I wrote to my grandmother from Italy, a place we’d always dreamed about visiting together, but by then it was too late. I took a train from Rome to Champéry, Switzerland, where I crashed at the apartment of a rich college friend. We drank bottles of scotch, smoked potent Dutch hash, and had stoned, pretentious conversations with other backpackers about Life and Art. One morning, while I was walking to the market to buy cigarettes and milk, I saw a bright red biplane doing tricks in the air: loop-the-loops and flips
and turns. The plane looked like a toy in the wide blue sky, like a child playing, or the spirit of a child, or the spirit of an old body suddenly returned to youth. In an instant, I knew: my grandmother was dead and she had come to say goodbye to me.

“Bye, Nonna.” I waved at the little plane, and shortly afterward it flew away.

I walked back to the apartment, poured a glass of scotch, and made a collect call to Zeke. My mother had made a rule that I call her at least three times a week. During these conversations she provoked hysterical, transatlantic fights. She’d been on an especially manic swing since I’d left Italy. Something was clearly going on, and she wasn’t telling me. I figured, correctly, that my father, whom I hardly ever called even when we were in the same country, would be caught off guard and couldn’t lie.

“Nonna’s dead, isn’t she?” I asked him, and he told me that she’d had a stroke a few days ago and died in the hospital the night before.

“Don’t tell your mother I told you. She’s crazier than ever over all this.”

Kathi tried to maintain the lie until I came home a month later. When I got back from Europe that summer each of my aunts had ransacked their mother’s apartment, pillaging every memento they wanted before someone else could get her hands on it first. Gone were the large cast-iron skillets in which Nonna had cooked her best meals, her antique pasta-maker with the squeaky metal crank, all the afghans she had knitted until her eyes gave out, her small collection of costume jewelry, her large brown sunglasses with the spotted lenses that she would never clean.

“Don’t bother going over there,” my mother said. “My sisters—they got together without telling me and took everything. They didn’t leave anything for us.”

But they did. And I knew just where to look for it. Nonna had told me years ago, “You can have this when I die, but not until then.” It was a certificate for good penmanship, given to my grandmother in 1941, when she was in elementary school. This scrap of yellowed paper was something she’d treasured. She’d kept it folded up in a
copy of Carl Sagan’s
Intelligent Life in the Universe
for decades. Sometimes she’d pull it out and show me. “I had beautiful handwriting,” she’d say. “All my teachers said so.” It was the only award she ever received.

I READ ONCE THAT
by the time a female fetus reaches the second trimester every egg she will ever have in her life has already been formed. Bundled neatly in her tiny ovaries, these eggs will wait decades for their chance to seed the next generation. Meaning, once upon a time, before my mother was my mother, she was a helpless, hairless thing yearning to be born, and half of me was already inside her, and inside my grandmother as well.

Nonna was the only person in my family to ask me if my new stepfather “was trying to get at me.” No, he wasn’t. But I was haunted, nevertheless, and she knew it. One night I crossed the yard that separated our homes, walked into her apartment, and for no reason that I could explain, began to cry. A pressure was building inside me—I felt it all the time, even in moments of quiet contentment. Lying on my grandmother’s couch, I folded my legs and arms into my body. I wanted to make myself as small as a seed, something tiny and weightless that could easily be carried away by the wind and lost in the world.

“You’re just one of those people, Nikki,” she said. “Like me. We’re lonesome. That’s all.”

There isn’t a word in the English language more beautiful than
lonesome
. Nonna’s understanding of it was neither a pathology, like depression, nor a mood that comes and goes with sociable visitors. I would grow up to find that no friend, no boyfriend, not even a room full of people throwing a party just for me, could pry the lonesomeness from the body it inhabited. It was a shadow sewn to the soles of my feet, something as inexorable, dark, and magical as death. The whole world could be contained in that single word, and for me, right then, that was enough.

———

A
CCORDING TO MY DIARY, I SPENT THE FIRST DAY OF SUMMER
1993 reorganizing my bureau and closet. When that was finished, I rooted underneath the bathroom sink to find dozens of bottles of lotion and shampoo, all one-eighth full, which I married off so that I could throw away the empties. I then pulled all the towels from the bathroom cupboards and refolded them so that they would stack more efficiently. After that I scrubbed the bathtub and trimmed the brown mildewed hem of the shower curtain. When my mother discovered that I had done this with her expensive, professional-grade salon scissors, she screamed and wailed and threw the scissors at me like a deranged circus act. The rest of the day and night I watched a marathon of
Beavis and Butt-Head
, my bedroom door closed but my ears focused on the sounds of Kathi’s every movement.

“Now what?” I wrote in my journal. I was thirteen going on fourteen and my handwriting was tiny and painstakingly neat.

But a miracle would occur later that summer. My mother joined a Twelve-Step recovery program for people addicted to food. Eating was the least of Kathi’s addictions, but this was definitely a move in the right direction. She went to a lot of support meetings and set aside time every day to pray for serenity, courage, and wisdom. She spent so much time on the phone talking to her sugar-abstinent friends that she had less energy to yell at me. She still blew up with
the force of Mount Etna, but these eruptions were significantly less frequent, and sometimes she even apologized afterward.

Her life was now full of people she met at her meetings, and that summer those women became my friends. There was a woman named Crisanne who believed the actor Kevin Costner was communicating with her through the
CHECK ENGINE
light on her car’s dashboard. Crisanne’s entire family had years ago stopped speaking to her, for their own sanity and survival, so she turned to rooms full of strangers, people like my mother, to listen patiently to her hallucinations. Too crazy to hold down a job, she lived on Social Security. At least three times a week, she ate lunch at our house. She had curly brown hair down to her shoulders and often wore her clothing inside out by accident.

“Crisanne, Honey, go fix your shirt,” my mother would say between drags of her cigarette. Crisanne would laugh and babble on as though no one else was there.

“The key to dealing with her,” Mum whispered to me, “is to stop listening when she gets boring. Just think of something else to entertain yourself. All her stories have a pattern. They get a little predictable. Christ, the poor kid just wants to find love.”

There was another Twelve-Stepper named Beth who was blind and frail. She had stringy gray hair and the gaunt cheekbones of a glue-sniffing orphan. At most, this woman weighed eighty pounds. Wherever Beth went she had to carry a pillow, because sitting in most chairs was too painful for her bony rear. I have no idea what this woman was doing in a support group for overeaters, but my mother found her there, and Beth became a regular at our house and in our car.

That same summer my mother’s husband, Michael, had bought her a used, two-toned maroon-and-white Caddy Coupe Deville. This car didn’t run, it
sailed
. Kathi loved any excuse to drive it and volunteered to serve as Beth’s personal chauffeur. It was part of my mother’s Twelve Steps—she had to make amends for her past sins, and, as she saw it, carting this blind lady around was one of the good and selfless deeds that she owed to the universe.

“Nikki, how old do you think Beth is?” my mother asked as we
waited for one of Beth’s many state-subsidized assistants to help her out of her house and into our car.