With or Without You: A Memoir (22 page)

“That window!” I cried in Russian. “I know that window!”

It was a somber, beautiful design of blue and purple and turquoise. Nabokov describes it in such loving detail in his memoir
Speak, Memory
. “Grandmother,” I said to the docent, because I couldn’t remember the polite word for a woman of her age, “I have loved that window before now when I see it. I know that window very well!”

“I know you do.” She smiled.

That night I called my mother. “I had such a good day. I met this old woman. She was amazing. You would have loved her.”

I could tell by Kathi’s voice that she was coming down from a high. She was impatient and irritable and didn’t want to hear this.

“It’s over, Nikki,” she said. “We lost the house. Do you know what this means? We’re homeless. I’m going to kill myself. I have everything I need to do it. I can’t decide whether I should do it while you’re in Russia or wait until you get back. I want to see you one last time.”

The next morning, I told my writing teacher and the camp directors that I was leaving the program early. They were shocked but not at all curious about my reason. I managed to get an English-speaking airline agent to change my ticket and spent the next night sleeping in the airport. There was no bar open, and the small cache of Xanax I’d brought with me was long gone. St. Petersburg was in its fabled White Nights, a magical time in the far north full of celebration and romance and long, endless days. From a bank of plastic seats I watched the sky turn from pale pink to bright purple and finally an anxious, lonely blue. It was close to midnight when I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to block out the light.

“Can this please be my emotional bottom?” I wrote in my journal. “All I want is to fall asleep and that miserable sun refuses to set.”

——

WHEN I GOT HOME
to Danvers, my mother was still alive. Apparently, she hadn’t been too suicidal to visit a lawyer. While I was gone, she’d had papers drawn up to transfer her mortgage to me. I listened to her spiel while nursing one of Michael’s beers on the parlor couch.

“If you sign this for me, we won’t lose the house,” she said.

“Mum, I’m so jetlagged and hungover right now. Can I take a nap in your bed?”

“Have an Oscar, Hon. That’ll knock the hangover right out of you.” She began crushing a fresh pill on her plate. This task seemed to reenergize her and she talked at a faster clip. “I’ll pay you the mortgage every month. I’ll pay you with interest if you want. So you can start building a little nest egg and buy your own house one day. But you’ll have to be the one to make the actual payments to the bank.”

“I don’t know, Mum—”

“Please,” she begged. “You’re the only one who can save us.”

My choice, my fault. It’s how I know that my mother really loved me. In the end, she wanted me to be the protagonist of our story.

I’M IN MY IMMACULATE
, air-conditioned apartment in Austin, drinking whiskey from a plastic gallon bottle. My mother is on the phone again, begging me to take over her mortgage. She does this three or four times a day, every day.

“You miserable cunt. You don’t love me. You never loved me. I knew it. I always knew it.…”

Sometimes I cry, “Please, no, okay, Mum? I’m sorry, I just can’t.” Sometimes I scream “No!” and hang up.

“How can you do this to me?” my mother howls. She whacks the phone against the wall. “What did I ever do to make you despise me like this?”

Kathi had been asking me for money for a while at this point. I had no right to refuse. When she was a millionaire, I availed myself
of her credit card whenever the mood struck. She bought me a brand-new Ford during my senior year in college. It was eventually hauled away for lapsed payments, but still, it wasn’t as if I was contributing anything myself. Because of a generous, almost absurd fellowship, I was financially more stable in grad school than ever before, and my mother was on a sharp downward trajectory. I refused to give her cash, but I’d pay something specific, like a phone bill, because then I could control exactly where the money was going. She’d try to pay me back, but every time she did her checks bounced. This was nothing new, either. Even when her business was bringing in truck-loads of money, my mother was never very good at accounting. She was a bright, creative businesswoman who could spin straw into gold, but when it came to the practical tasks of running an operation she was helpless. In a few short years, Kathi had transformed a bankrupt suburban taxi operation into a million-dollar small business, yet she was constitutionally incapable of stocking her office with envelopes and stamps or of perusing a monthly bank statement. My mother had bounced checks purely by accident in the past, but she was now doing this with the full knowledge that she had insufficient funds.

“Please stop writing me checks,” I’d say to her. “The bank keeps charging me fees when they bounce.”

“Jesus Christ, Nikki. I’m fuckin’
sorry
, okay? What was it? A twenty-dollar fee? Is that what you’re so upset about?”

Nope. Not even close.

OUR VERY LAST CONVERSATION
took place the fall after my trip to Russia. My mother had become convinced that her phones were being tapped. Sometimes she’d hear a little click on the line and would start screaming at the DEA jerk-off she imagined was listening in on our conversation. “Why don’t you go fuck your mother?” was her favorite thing to say to them. I thought this was particularly vulgar, and when I said so she snapped.

“What’s the matter, Nikki? Is there something you want to tell me?”

“What?”

“You’re working on their side, aren’t you?”

“What are you talking about?”

This is when my mother accused me of ratting her out to the police.

It was the last insult I could take. Rat was the worst form a human being could take in my mother’s eyes. Child molesters, thieves, and junkies were cool, but someone who confessed the truth was the lowest of the low. I remember watching an episode of
The Sopranos
at her house in which a female character on the show begins talking to the FBI. My mother leaned over her chair and spat, literally expectorated, on her own living-room floor, to show her disgust. For my mother to hurl an accusation of that caliber meant that either she had lost all grip on reality or the last atom of respect she had for me had finally split. I think it was a little of both. There were so many things I should have told someone about, but I never said a word, not to my friends or my teachers or even to my therapists. I was so bound to her, so afraid of her, so afraid for her. Maybe I was trying to protect her.

One day I woke up, poured myself a whiskey and coke, and declared to the empty room, “From this moment on, my mother is dead to me.” Kathi was nineteen hundred miles away and she didn’t know my address. (As I said, bookkeeping had never been her strong suit.) With the support of my boyfriend and a few close friends, I began rejecting her phone calls. It felt like a violent, revolutionary act merely to let the phone ring without answering it. And it rang and rang. All night, all day, sometimes twelve or thirteen times in a row. Kathi left screaming messages so long that they got cut off and she had to call back to continue wailing. She left messages that were more like sound installations of her whacking her phone repeatedly against a hard surface. She would hold her phone up to the radio if it was playing a song we used to like. U2’s “With or Without You.” Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time.” It was maudlin and pathetic. Agonizing. My mother was acting like a brokenhearted lover. She was worse than any boyfriend I’d ever had, worse than I was at seventeen.

“I can’t believe my daughter, my only daughter, would do this to me,” she said. “I have nothing to eat. And you won’t give me five dollars. Five dollars, Nikki. That’s all I’m asking you for. Five fuckin’ dollars.”

She called to tell me that she was dying. For real this time. She said she was living in a homeless shelter. That her two dogs were going to be put to sleep if I didn’t send her some money. All lies, I suspected, and after a little investigation I learned that I was right. It brought no relief. I made myself listen to all her messages. It took almost six months to find the courage to change my phone number. The silence that followed was deafening. It was as though she really were dead.

NOT FOR YEARS DID
I realize what I had done to her.

Like so many times before, I couldn’t make sense of the events in my life until I saw them reenacted by someone else on a screen. I was watching a documentary about the mothers of soldiers who had been killed in the Iraq War. Speaking into the microphone, one woman spoke of how much she loved her only child, and how much he loved her. “Every night,” this mother said, “every single night, when he went off to bed, my son said to me, ‘Thank you, Mom. This was the best day of my life.’ ”

This kind of gratitude is astounding to me, especially in a teenage boy. There must have been nights when the boy had the flu and fell asleep without saying anything. Maybe even nights when he was sneaking a girl or a beer up to his bedroom and said good night quickly, so as not to get caught. Surely there were nights when he was angry with his mother for some temporary slight, nights when he simply said, “G’night, Mom,” and nights when he forgot to do even that.

I do not mean to denigrate this woman, or the form her grief has taken, but I can’t ignore the simple fact that she is a mom, and therefore a little bit insane, as every woman who has or will ever raise a child becomes. In the delusion of her pain, this mother was moved to revise her story. Not a lie, really, more of a myth, a little refrain to help her make sense of the world’s most incomprehensible despair. Her son was gone—her only child, her baby.

Watching this movie on my computer screen, I saw it clearly—the yowl of a mother who has lost her only cub—and I realized for the first time what I had put my mother through. The worst part is that my mother did not have the finality of death to comfort her.

I was alive.

———

F
OR THREE AND A HALF YEARS, I MAKE TEXAS MY HOME. AUSTIN
is a big, sprawling college town full of mellow ex-hippies and well-read misfits, a place where even the most ambitious people mosey along. The sky there is a sunny cartoon blue three hundred days out of the year. Perfect strangers look each other in the eye and smile. The women who ring up my groceries call me “sugar” and “baby.” They tell me to “take care,” as if they might even mean it.

For three and a half years I do nothing but drink and work, drink and read, drink and fight and love and drink. I can’t help it. It’s overwhelming—the sunshine, the friendly people, all the abundant life I don’t deserve.

So I shut the shades. Double-lock the door. Stay inside for days on end, speaking to no one. You learn a lot about yourself in isolation, like how little you actually need to survive. A big plastic bottle of whiskey, a bag of grass, a bottle of Xanax, some over-the-counter sleeping pills, a pack of cigarettes, a case of Diet Coke, a box of crackers, and a wedge of cheese. As long as there is electricity and plumbing, I can live on this for a week.

That’s one half of the story—me in my alcoholic hermitage. The other half of my days in Austin I laze by a swimming pool in a bikini, reading novels in the shade of a palm tree, sipping a whiskey and Coke. I drink alone only if I want to. There’s the brilliant young writer with absurd facial hair, who, despite all the deranged and lethal
things I said to him the night before, is happy to save me a seat next to him the day after. Then there are our fellows in the graduate writing program. Considered one at a time, we are frail and beautiful children of art; together, we form a race of humans so competitive and insecure that state politicians look Zen by comparison. We meet every night of the week at a circuit of bars known for tacos and cheap beer. Smoking indoors has recently been banned, but no one seems to oblige. If a bar doesn’t serve hard liquor, local custom allows us to bring our own as long as we offer the bartender a tip for a cup of ice. (I bring a handle of whiskey that I’m reluctant to share.) After two rounds of drinks, we become a noisy gang of scared little kids shamelessly competing for one another’s attention. A conversation about modernism all too quickly devolves into the same old narcissistic tournament—who had the hardest time growing up, who is the most fucked up and/or redeemed now. Nobody ever wins these contests. Why would anyone want to? But I’m just as insecure and competitive as the rest of them, so I play along, screaming obnoxiously as though insufficient volume was the reason I’m not being heard.