With or Without You: A Memoir (26 page)

Fortunately, my father is recovering from a gruesome shoulder surgery. According to his doctors, he’s not supposed to be out running yet, but after six weeks of resting in his recliner he can’t take it anymore. This injury has slowed him down a lot, and I can tell that every footfall pains him as much as it does me. For the first and only time in our lives, my father and I run at the same pace.

The next day I’m loafing around the house when again my old man asks me in an incredulous tone what I’m doing. He resembles more the seventeenth-century Puritan settlers of his hometown than the more recent Irish and Italian Catholics who are his actual ancestors. To Zeke, life is toil, and it is a sin to allow oneself any undue affection for this world. My father is appalled by foul language, gift giving, and naps. He refuses to do the wave at baseball games, balks at the very idea of a birthday party, and shakes his head when people talk about sitting down to eat in a restaurant.

“You can eat at home! It’s a big waste.…”

Which is why it comes as such a shock when this time, instead of putting me to work or getting me to exercise, my father asks me to go out to lunch with him. We drive in silence to a restaurant in Essex called the Village and order a huge plate of fried clams. Even this becomes a competition, as my father and I race to eat as many clams as we can just so the other one can’t get them first. I’m losing, but not by much, which my father knows. As I raise a fork to my mouth, he reaches across the table and steals the clam off it.

“So this is where I get it,” I say.

“Get what?”

“We eat like refugees, Dad. Have you never noticed that other people let their food digest a little? They breathe between bites. They even talk sometimes.”

“Who cares what other people do.” He summons the waitress and asks for another basket of bread. I watch with mild disgust as he flirts with her, a fortysomething woman unremarkable in every way. I’ve seen this before. Men, especially misogynists, always fall a little bit in love with any woman who carries their food on a tray. The waitress giggles and smiles.

“A step
below
prostitution,” my mother always said of waitressing. “I’d rather you sell your body than have to touch people’s chewed-up food. At least hookers get to lie down sometimes.”

The silence returns, and my father and I scan the restaurant for anything to distract us from the unbearable presence of ourselves. Zeke examines the floor, and I keep looking at the bar. Why don’t we have anything to talk about? Why is this so painful? Why can’t I just relax and enjoy something simple like lunch with my dad without wanting to swill eight Bloody Marys? What’s wrong with me?

Then, out of this silence, comes something I still can’t believe.

“Remember the last time we ate here?” my dad asks.

“We never ate here,” I say. “I never ate here with you.”

“Yes, you did. You don’t remember? You were in eighth grade. You were very troubled. You were going through that, ah, that hard time.”

He was right. We had eaten at the Village once before. After my
suicide attempt, when I’d downed a bottle of aspirin at his house, my father took the next day off from work and we came here for lunch. We didn’t talk much then, either. We sat just as awkwardly across from each other, trying to look at anything but the person in front of us.

“So it’s all over, right? You’re okay now?” a younger, blonder Zeke asked the thirteen-year-old me.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Okay, good.” He knocked his fist twice against the table with the definitive ruling of a judge’s gavel.

“You were such a sad little girl,” he says now. There’s mocking in his voice, and tenderness, too. I shake my head, hardly recognizing this man. “But you’ve worked like a horse your whole life, and you grew up to be tough. I can’t help thinking you got that from me.”

“Father of the Year, Dad. I’ll get you a trophy.”

“Aren’t you awful!” He laughs. “You know, I really feel sorry for the man who marries you.” He takes the last roll from the bread basket and stuffs it into his mouth. “That is, if you ever get married, which is looking less likely every day.”

BY THE END OF
my third sober month, the rainy season ends. I wake up and dry my eyes, no longer wondering if and when I’ll drink again. A simple thought occurs to me: I don’t ever
have
to drink again. Not on the worst days. Not on the best days. And if that feels like too much, all I have to do is stay sober for one day: today. If I’m lucky enough to live until tomorrow, I can figure it out then.

A year passes, a momentous occasion in the sober community. I get a bouquet of foil balloons and a medallion the size of a silver dollar. “Put that medallion on your tongue and if it dissolves, then you can drink again,” one woman says to me. “No, no, no,” another man corrects her. “It’s throw it in the ocean and if it comes back to you, then you can drink.”

I hang out with a lot of ex-Catholics and ex-fishermen.

At the end of every meeting, all the alcoholics stand up and pray
together. Holding hands, we break into a weird psychological cheer—“It works if you work it, and
you’re worth it
!” I feel both my hands being squeezed by the strangers on either side of me. Such explicit self-confidence is embarrassing to me. But, then again, before all this I was ready to have some idiot’s baby or throw myself in front of a train. So who am I to judge?

I RESORT TO PRAYER
as often as I drank, around the clock all day long. Sometimes I concentrate my prayers on the people I hate. I think of the woman I called Auntie Lucy, a creature so malevolently insane that she made my own mother look like a quaint sitcom character of dysfunction. Deep in meditation, I imagine a white light growing inside me, radiating compassion for Lucy, a damaged child of God. I get so spiritual I’m ready to burst with nondenominational love. Afterward I go out and walk my dog, feeling weightless and happy. Then, for whatever reason, my brain burps a memory of some girl I knew in high school, not even my friend but a friend of a friend named Tanya, how she made fun of my eyebrows once, like thirteen years ago, and I decide that I won’t rest until I track that bitch down and show her the meaning of the word
pain
.

It’s dizzying, all this rage. Disproportionate and insane. I can’t sit still with this throbbing in my veins. Since drinking is not an option, exercise is the only outlet I have left. I enlist my father as my new coach, and three times a week we go running together. Zeke’s recovery from shoulder surgery outpaces my recovery from drinking, and in a couple of months he’s racing ahead of me, looking back and shouting, “Come on, Thunder Thighs. Don’t wimp out on me now!” A window into my siblings’ childhoods opens up for the first time, and I realize what it must have been like for them, the athletes I could never measure up to, to have our father riding their asses before, during, and after every one of their hockey games. Any resentment or jealousy I felt toward them evaporates in an instant.

I run behind my father uphill, in the rain, in the snow, for longer and longer distances. I run a half marathon. A month later, the old
man completes a full marathon. “Don’t let that hurt your self-esteem, Nik,” he says. “I’m an exceptional person, an elite athlete. You really shouldn’t compare yourself to someone like me.” He rewards our accomplishments of half and full marathons with hill training. I’m in so much physical pain that I want to scream, but, deep down, I love it. That’s when I see something I’ve never seen before in my life: my father in a state of bliss. He loves this pain, too. He loves it even more when it’s cold out. It’s the only way he can relax. I realize he is a man who would be lost in a bleak abyss if he did not surround himself with conflict, both physical and emotional. He’s a runner. So am I.

NOW WHY CAN’T I
apply these principles of compassion to my own mother?

Hating Kathi is like begrudging a snake for hissing, a baby for crying, the sun for quietly sinking into the same corner of the sky every night. People are who they are and we cannot change them. It is easier to accept this than it is to fight it. She was sick like me. She did the best that she could.

Except, no. No! I want this to be true, but it’s just not working. There is no platitude that can get me over this.

———

M
Y FIRST DOG WAS A BLACK NEWFOUNDLAND NAMED GANJA
. My mother adopted her from some degenerate hippies she knew in Salem. Ganja’s first owners were acolytes in the Church of the Grateful Dead, perpetually stoned and reliably useless. They kept this ninety-pound bear of an animal cooped up day and night in their third-floor apartment. I don’t know how my mother convinced them to give the dog up. One day I came home from school and Ganja was sleeping on our living-room couch, like all the animals and people in our life, as though she had always been there.

This dog became the subject of all my elementary poems, stories, and illustrations. I could be elegiac about Ganja at school, when I needed a muse, but, like all muses, it was the Platonic ideal of her that inspired me. In real life, she was too big and lazy to do the frolicking puppy things that looked so attractive on TV. The dog spent most of her life sleeping on the cool cement floor of our garage and, when the weather was nice, swimming in the river, giving her a brackish smell tinged with raw sewage; cuddling with her was out of the question.

Besides, Ganja was my mother’s pet, not mine. Every once in a while Kathi would cook an entire meat loaf just for the dog. She loved this animal so much that she paid one of her friends to do a charcoal portrait of her that she hung on the wall. “Is Leah going to do a picture of me after?” I asked.

“Are you kidding?” Mum said plainly. “I don’t love you
that
much.”

Despite our rivalry, Ganja won my heart the summer day she met my mother’s boyfriend Raúl. I was playing in the driveway when Raúl’s car pulled up. It must have been shortly after we adopted Ganja, and Raúl hadn’t met her yet, because when he saw her strolling out of the garage, he jumped, screeched like a little girl, and ran back to his car.

“There’s a bear! Kathi, call 911! There’s a bear!”

“What a moron, Ganj,” I said, petting her head.

MY FATHER IS A
man whose heart falls for a very specific “type”—short, brunette women and medium-sized mutts with black fur and brown-and-white markings. The mothers of his three children fall into the first category, and every single dog he’s ever owned falls into the second. The first incarnation of this dog that I personally knew was Woody, a springer spaniel mix who roamed the town of Danvers before the days of leash laws. Several neighborhood housewives and a few restaurant owners knew Woody by name and would leave food for him on the porch or at the back door of their shop when he stopped by on his rounds. My father once passed by the local ice-cream parlor and saw a teenage employee, whom he had never met in his life, giving Woody a dish of vanilla. “I’m not even handsome enough to pull that off,” my dad said.

Before he got Woody—before he got me—my father had a mutt named Jagger. This dog was the first animal that was truly
his
, a stepping-stone into manhood who came into Zeke’s life two years after his father died and two years before I was born. One morning my father woke up in his apartment on Archer Street and rolled over to find that his dog wasn’t there. (My mother was in bed with him; I know, because she’s told me her version of the story many times, though my father, who also likes to retell it, intentionally deletes her from it now.) My father lived in a high-traffic neighborhood where an escaped dog would surely get hit by a car. Zeke ran outside, calling
Jagger with the dizzy helplessness one feels for a lost pet. He and Kathi drove around looking for him, hanging their heads out the window and yelling his name. The dog was gone. They gave up and went back to their apartment. Just then the phone rang.

“Zeke?” It was Rita Ruta, his girlfriend’s mother. “Do you know where your dog is right now?”

It was a question similar to the one she would ask my mother, years later, when in the middle of the night, waking up to find that my mother had gone out and left me alone, I would run next door to my grandmother’s house. I ran to her once when my mother was actually asleep in her bed but curled up under the blankets in such a way that I couldn’t see her and assumed that she was gone. “Kathi, this is your mother,” she would say with a smirk. “Do you know where your daughter is right now?”

Jagger had gotten loose and navigated the five-mile trek from Zeke’s apartment to Kathi’s mother’s house on Eden Glen Avenue. After swimming a few laps in Rita’s pool, the dog shook himself off, trotted through the back door into the house and up the stairs to my grandmother’s bedroom, jumped onto her bed, lay down next to her, and fell asleep.

“You know what she did then?” Zeke says, his blue eyes crinkled by a boyish grin. “Got up and cooked Jagger liver and onions for breakfast. You should’ve seen the smile on her face when I came to pick him up. Oh, did your Nonna love to tell that story.”

Jagger ran away for good when my mother was eight months pregnant with me. “When you were a baby and you were crying and I didn’t know what to do, I would just drive you around in the car and look in people’s backyards for him,” my mother said. It’s a shaky leap of logic, a little psychotic and probably childish, too, but I can’t help thinking that Jagger was a harbinger. He was the first creature to elicit parental care from my teenage mother and father, an animal they both adored with innocence, rivalry, and need. Kathi and Zeke have never had a kind word to say about each other, but in Jagger they have been able to come to an agreement. “He was the best dog I’ve ever met in my life,” they’ve both said many times. And so it is
this dog, not me, that is the symbol of their former love. Jagger’s disappearance coincided with the two biggest crises of Zeke’s and Kathi’s young lives: the arrival of their first child and the end of their relationship.

“It’s as if he knew you were coming,” Mum used to say.