With or Without You: A Memoir (18 page)

MY FIRST BOYFRIEND, STEVE
, had strawberry-blond hair and full, pink lips, and wore large, billowing jeans that sagged below his waist.
He went to Hamilton High, where he bragged about sometimes dropping acid in homeroom.

“How is that even fun?” I asked him. I couldn’t imagine anything worse than an acid trip under fluorescent lighting and the suspicious glares of my teachers.

It must have offended him, because he quickly changed the subject. “You have the biggest calves I’ve ever seen on a girl. Seriously, they’re huge.”

Steve rivaled my mother in his ability to build me up and tear me to shreds in a single breath. “I love you,” he told me, “because you’re homely and smart. I’ve dated beautiful girls. But you’re so much more fun.”

I flew to him like a bird caught in a blizzard, not knowing which way is up, and I soared headlong into the ground. For a year and a half, I loved this boy with my every cell and no sense at all. He insulted me in public and pushed me around, and eventually dumped me for a girl in the eighth grade, whom he took to his senior prom. I know this because my mother lent him a car for the big night, as well as the money for a tux and his date’s corsage. I found pictures that Kathi had taken of Steve and his child date on her dresser one day while I was scavenging for pills. The pictures were clearly taken on our porch, with a view of the river behind the happy couple. I tore the photos up and threw them conspicuously in the trash can next to Mum’s bed.

Kathi was furious. “That wasn’t very nice of you, Nikki,” she said. “Steve wanted me to have those pictures. Steve’s my friend! Just because you’re done with him doesn’t mean I am.”

She must have forgotten that Steve was the one who’d broken up with me. I was so deranged by love that I would have stayed with this boy for the rest of my life. It was New Year’s Day 1997. I leaned in to kiss him, and he turned to me and said, “I’ve changed my mind. I don’t love you anymore.” I begged him to take me back, and when he said no, I puked uncontrollably until my mother gave me a Xanax. I sobbed for the remainder of winter vacation and into the start of the new semester. I couldn’t eat, having no appetite for anything but
vodka, which I drank straight out of a plastic bottle that I stored in my dresser, sometimes first thing in the morning.

All this must have slipped my mother’s mind.

Because that following spring, Kathi hired Steve to be her assistant at the taxi company that she had just begun to take over. She spent every day with him. He was her right-hand man. Mum claimed that Steve was “wicked smart, a genius at the computer.” In my mother’s eyes, an ability to open and close a spreadsheet qualified as technical wizardry; the only thing I ever saw Steve do on a computer was simulate combat in some gory video game. He was barely passing his remedial classes at school. This wasn’t because he had dyslexia or ADD or a disadvantaged background, all of which are legitimate roadblocks to academic success. He was just really stupid. I remember the crushing moment when I was forced to admit this to myself. We had just finished having sex for the third time (I was still counting) when a song came on the radio, “Paint It Black,” by the Rolling Stones.

“Do you know what it’s about?” Steve asked me.

We’d turned the music up loud to cover the sound of my squeaky mattress and I didn’t hear him. “What?” I asked.

“This song. It’s about depression,” he said instructively. Steve had had some dark and beautiful thoughts in his life, but this one was the biggest. “It’s, like, sometimes, the lyrics to a song are saying one thing, but they actually mean something else.”

I found my underwear balled up at the foot of the bed and pulled them back on, then lay down with my head on Steve’s chest. He patted my face, and I felt my heart sinking. Here was obviously the only boy who would ever love me in my entire life, and this was his intellectual big bang.

Steve was the kind of person who would wait until his friends passed out drunk, then rifle the cash from their wallets. If he stole from his own friends, you can imagine his ethics regarding an employer. In the end, he funneled tens of thousands of dollars from my mother’s cab company. But in the beginning he was just a petty scam artist who used to fill up his friends’ gas tanks on my mother’s company
account, then pocket their cash. Clever as this scam was, he wasn’t smart enough to keep his mouth shut. I heard through mutual friends what was going on, and mirthfully reported it to my mother.

“I’m disgusted with you, Nikki,” Kathi said. “I didn’t think
my daughter
would ever turn into a rat.” She shot me a look so hateful that I trembled. “And at least Steve helps me! It’s not like I can count on you to come home and help me with the family business.”

She was right. Despite her pleas and outright demands, I didn’t drop out of boarding school or college to come home, have illegitimate babies, and run the taxi business for her. To punish me, she gave Steve a car, and after he wrecked it she bought him another one. She took him and his various girlfriends on vacation with her and Michael to Florida. Sometimes she let him live in my bedroom while I was away at college.

“Whose bra is this?” I’d ask my mother as I sorted through a heap of laundry piled up on the bathroom floor. The bra in question was definitely not mine, and it was much too small to be my mother’s.

“Oh, that must be Allison’s,” Mum said. “Steve’s girlfriend. She’s a tiny little thing.”

I always knew who had been sleeping in my bedroom by what had been left behind. Condoms and drugstore cologne meant Steve; crack pipes and porn on VHS meant my stepfather. There were several occasions on which my mother let Uncle Vic sleep in my bed when Auntie Lucy threw him out.

“You know that Uncle Vic is a child molester,” I said to my mother. I was home on vacation and putting the pillows and sheets his body had touched through their third round in the washing machine.

“You know that he—”

“Oh, Honey, no,” my mother interrupted. “Please! I don’t want to believe that. I love Uncle Vic. He’s such a good guy.” Her knees buckled. She looked like a little kid who needed to pee but was waiting for permission to go. “And Mummy owes him a lot of money right now, so I’m not exactly in a position to argue. Okay?”

Heat waves rippled my mother’s face, her body, the knotted wood
paneling of the hallway where she stood. I saw these things quiver as though through a bonfire, and in an instant the entire house went up in silent black flames. Disappeared, sucked backward at the speed of sound and dropped for one heartbeat in the past. Those last few words were familiar. Mum’s exact tone of voice, pleading, desperate, almost resentful that I would even suggest … When had I heard those lines before? Maybe as a kid? I couldn’t remember in any logical or narrative sense, but I could hear a warped feedback echoing inside my chest.

Don’t ask me to protect you right now, because I can’t afford to. Okay?

No, that didn’t happen.

I came back. I was in my bedroom again. The emerald-green walls, the taxi-yellow door, my short, lumpy mother posed inside the doorframe like a distorted work of art.

IT DIDN’T MATTER, I
decided after a couple of beers. I had turned eighteen and gotten another scholarship to a small college in Ohio called Oberlin. I would have dropped out the first week if it weren’t for the massive quantity of drugs available on campus. What I remember most about college is eating mescaline and mushrooms with trust-fund kids, and smoking opium on a bunk bed in a dorm. I recently combed my journal from those years hoping to find something worth writing about. I found nothing but the illegible notes from one of my acid trips.

My mother would mail me one or two of her OxyContins every month. “Just in case you get bad cramps,” she’d say. In all my years as a menstruating woman I have never once had cramps, and my mother knew this. I would open my care packages in the student mailroom and run to the bathroom to snort an Oscar off the back of a toilet tank. The sleaziness of it was half the fun. It was another role I was trying to play, and playing badly—the cool, mysterious addict. Nobody was fooled. Even with the crumbs of opiates packed into
my nostrils, I was way too high-strung to be considered cool by anyone.

Oberlin was like an extended summer camp for aspiring drug addicts. Everyone had ADD, and, even if they didn’t, a quick doctor’s visit between classes could get you a diagnosis and a prescription for Ritalin or Adderall. The college had an extremely lax policy regarding marijuana. Kids in my dorm who got caught with four-foot pot plants growing in their closet were punished with two weeks of community service—mowing the lawns, spreading mulch around trees, stuff like that. In the end, they would actually learn how to grow a hardier plant.

Since I was no longer afraid of getting kicked out, as I had been at Andover, there was nothing to stop me from getting drunk or high whenever I liked. Smoking pot forced me to exhale, which led to the mistaken conclusion that I was relaxed. By the end of my first semester at college, this drug-induced tranquility had quickly cascaded to resignation. All ambitions drained away. I didn’t want to be a doctor or to liberate political prisoners. I didn’t even care if I got a C in history. For the first time in my life, I didn’t care about anything, and it felt wonderful. Once or twice a week, I would grace my professors with my presence. Most of the time I wandered the woods in a hallucinogenic stupor. When midterms or finals came, I would trade an OxyContin for someone else’s Ritalin or Adderall and make up months of work in one blinkless night.

What did I learn in college? How to write a bullshit twelve-page Marxist critique of a book I never opened. How to grind my teeth quietly when a coke binge with so-called friends got too tense. How to persuade a doctor to write me a year’s prescription for Xanax. How to alienate myself from nice people and assholes alike. How to get through the day without ever touching the ground or soaring above it, either. How to get by.

My only achievement at Oberlin was entrapping a really handsome boyfriend. Dave was a smart, sensitive Jewish boy from Mississippi. He could juggle three apples and take a bite out of one while it
was still in the air. He was a chess master, a talented artist, and a pretty good basketball player. To make me smile, he would moon-walk across the floor of the library like Michael Jackson. When he laughed, his cheeks dimpled. He was the most beautiful boy I had ever seen. One night I tossed a forty-ounce bottle of Olde English off the roof of our dorm, grabbed him by the collar, and made him kiss me. The moon was so full that it looked too big to hang there in the sky without falling. Two weeks later, Dave and I moved in together. We spent the following semester in a tiny twin bed where we hardly ever slept. People in our dorm would bang on the walls and shout at us to be quiet. Dave turned up the music on his stereo and we’d keep going. I wish everyone could know a first love like this.

After four years, it was time to graduate. This was a big deal in my family, as no one had ever done that before. Everyone flew out to witness the momentous occasion—my dad and his family, my mother and Michael. On the morning of my graduation, I was hungover as usual. Dave had recently confessed to cheating on me. His infidelity was at least half my fault, if not more. One night a couple of months earlier, he drank a few beers at a poker game, which was rare for him, as he hardly ever drank. When he came home we started to kiss and something inside me snapped. The scent of beer on his breath and the prickle of hair on his face sent a shudder that ripped through my head straight down to the sore spot between my legs.

I had been cursed. A fairy-tale explanation, it was the only thing that made sense to me. I was being punished because I was too happy, too much in love.

“What’s happening to me?” I asked Dave. I had woken up from a sound sleep screaming in his bed. Again. We went for a walk to the playground near his house and I confessed, “I can’t tell whether it’s real or just a bad dream I keep having.” He knew exactly what was happening. He’d met my family, he’d been to my house. He wasn’t surprised at all, only heartbroken—for me and for us.

From that moment on, sex had as much appeal to me as sticking a rusty needle in a gangrenous wound. I did anything to avoid it.
Nagged, bitched, fought, complained, got black-out drunk, and puked, finally pushing this sweet, handsome boyfriend as far away as I could.

On the morning of graduation day I still hadn’t decided if I was going to kill Dave, forgive him, or run away to Moscow. I didn’t even know where I was going after graduation. We had a lease together for an off-campus house that was running out in a couple of days. My mother’s house was a hoarder’s prison, and I was sick of trying to clean it. My father had a kid in every bedroom and his elderly mother squeezed into the corner of the living room behind a bookcase, so there was no room for me there. I didn’t have a job. Gainful employment was one of many items on a long list of “Things I’d Rather Not Think About.” Between drinking, fighting, nursing hangovers, and making up, who had time to write a résumé?

I stood in front of my bathroom mirror that morning and swiped some mascara on my eyelashes.
What the fuck am I going to do?
I asked myself. As if on cue, my mother arrived at my house armed with a hairbrush and a curling iron. We’d decided the night before that she would do my hair and, surprisingly, she had remembered. The woman had brilliant timing, I could never deny her that. She stood in the bathroom doorway while I smudged concealer under my eyes. I braced myself for some criticism, but she didn’t say anything for a long time. She just watched me.

“Honey,” she said softly. “Here—”

I looked at her and she offered me a plate with a little straw and a crushed-up OxyContin raked into a line.

Was this a bad idea? I wondered. Could she tell that I was scared? Was this the paradox of a junkie’s love, the only way she knew to help? Or was this an initiation rite? Was my mother now taking over the next phase of my education, molding me into the kind of woman she had become, a sporadically functioning addict? Was she really that sick? Was I? What was going to happen to us now?