With or Without You: A Memoir (28 page)

“Say hi to Mr. Thoreau, Jimmy.”

“Hi.” He waves without looking out the window.

The nature of Jimmy’s handicaps requires slow, incremental transitions between each new experience. For three weeks in a row, we park across the street and cautiously approach Walden Pond; each time, Jimmy spins around and runs back to the car before we can step onto the man-made beach. One day I get him all the way to the trail. We walk for a few minutes before he says, “Take a break,
please.” This is Jimmy’s code for “Bring me home right now.” Later in the year, I get Jimmy to follow me halfway around the pond without stopping. It’s one of those beautiful autumn days that give New England such a good reputation. The air smells cleaner when nature is in decay. Falling leaves twirl like figure skaters in an eddy of wind. It is just sunny enough for me to love being outside and just cool enough for me to enjoy wearing a light sweater—the most perfect temperature on planet Earth. Red, orange, gold, and blue glitter on the surface of Walden Pond like sloshes of metallic paint. I look back at Jimmy. A wide smile stretches across his face. For the first time in years, maybe ever, I’m completely satisfied with my life just as it is. Watching Jimmy walk intrepidly through the woods feels like a gift that I’ve worked hard to earn. I’m broke and I’m single, a shameful state of being for an educated American woman of my age, but I have enough money to live simply. I have my sobriety and my health, and every single day I get a little saner.

“Life is good, huh, buddy?” I ask Jimmy.

“Yes,” he says as he stares at the molting branches above us.

We get about three-quarters of the way around Walden Pond when Jimmy stops walking. He squats down on the ground, and I hear him grunt. As he stands back up, a trickle of urine soaks through his jeans. I watch as it crawls down his pant legs. Jimmy looks at me with a patient, trusting expression.

“Need some help, please,” he says.

For the most part, Jimmy is continent and self-sufficient in the bathroom, though his parents have warned me that he has accidents every once in a while. “Okay, buddy,” I tell him. “Let’s go home.” Since we’re already three-quarters of the way around the pond, turning back is pointless. We press forward. A busload of Japanese tourists pass us on the trail. They march past us one by one, and I notice that they’re holding their noses. This is when I realize, slowly, as in a dream, that Jimmy has done something more than just wet himself.

I lay some newspaper on the passenger seat of the station wagon and roll down all the windows. We have a twenty-minute drive before
I can get him into the shower. I tally a list of ways I could possibly escape this situation. Isn’t there a grown-up who should step in right about now? Someone who is capable of dealing with all this?

Yes, it’s me.

THE BUDDHISTS BELIEVE THAT
every human life is like an ornament made of glass, something precious, beautiful, and bound to be destroyed. The trick is to see the world as a glass
already
shattered, freeing yourself from a life exhausted in dread of the moment of breaking. It was a lot easier for me to do this in my first year of sobriety, when every new experience had novelty. I got a job, published a couple of stories, had my first boyfriend as a sober woman, then my first sober breakup. I served as the maid of honor in my best friend’s wedding. I went to another friend’s funeral. Living life on life’s terms is what they call it. One day at a time.

But in my second year of sobriety this perfect job starts to get tiring, not to mention embarrassing to explain on dates. In the most selfish and childish way possible, I am jealous of my best friend’s marriage. I live in the suburbs with no car, an ambitious paperboy would have a bigger savings account than I do, and there is still no heat in my bathroom or kitchen. One winter morning, I’m wiping deodorant under my arms and the stick is so cold that I scream. A year ago, this studio apartment was a quaint, three-dimensional metaphor for hope and resilience. Now I look around and say, “Another winter in this dump? I can’t do it.…”

I’m driving Jimmy home to his apartment. I get him into the shower, clean him up, lay out fresh clothes for him to put on in whatever order makes sense to him. Sock, sweatshirt, sweatshirt, another sock, then underpants.… When it’s all done, he asks to go to Dunkin’ Donuts. I order him a coffee with cream and sugar. Like a priest performing a rite, he takes one sip, then pours the coffee into the trash. Right now it is early twilight, a short lapse that cinematographers refer to as “the magic hour.” The sky was a flood of gold
pouring over a cliff of blue-gray clouds. These colors, this exact quality of light, are enough to make me drink.

NOT LONG BEFORE
I changed my number and silenced her for good, my mother left me a voice mail that was stranger than any other. She wasn’t crying or screaming or banging the phone against the table. Her voice sounded even, almost calm. “I don’t know why you won’t talk to me, Nikki,” she said. “Maybe you’re writing a book about me, that’s why. Well, good luck.”

I deleted the message, stomped my foot in childish rage, then pulled a long, hard swig from the plastic bottle of whiskey I always kept close by. “I would
never
write about you,” I whispered, as though, two thousand miles away, she might hear me.

The truth was, I wrote about her all the time in my fiction. She was a quadriplegic housewife torturing her family from her wheelchair. She was the schizophrenic shut-in who talked to the fisher cat outside her window. “These characters aren’t sympathetic enough,” the people in my writing workshops said. “I don’t believe these characters are real,” one classmate asserted. “I mean, poor people don’t talk like this.”

It’s an axiom of writing workshops that if a gun is introduced at the beginning of a story, it has to fire at the end. Following that prescription, if the protagonist is shooting up in the opening scenes, he or she has only two fictional destinies: to get clean or to die. “If you write about morally compromised people,” one of my teachers stressed, “they
have to
make the choice to get better. Otherwise there’s no
redemption
.” In movies, transformation like this happens in a mechanical blink of the eye. Gaping flesh wounds are healed in the space of a song. A war is won, a baby is born, and all the blood is cleaned up during the invisible cut between scenes. Everything has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and after a climax there is always an epiphany and a resolution. It sounds lovely and sometimes it’s even true, but not for us. My family does not magically repair itself.
We hurt one another and make feeble amends and just go on torturing ourselves for years without musical accompaniment. My father and Carla separate. Neither has the money for a divorce. They are bound legally by a mortgage and the worst home-selling market the country has ever seen. For them, my brother and sister, even the family dogs, it all gets about as ugly as these things can get. My mother does not get sober. From what I hear, her hair has turned completely white and she relies on a portable oxygen tank to breathe. Just a few miles away from where we used to live, she is gasping her way through another twenty-four hours.

While a few things change, much remains the same. I used to be a miserable, spiritless, insecure egomaniac who smelled like whiskey. Now I am a well-intentioned, sometimes volatile, even more insecure egomaniac who smells like coffee. My friends in the recovery movement tell me that’s just fine for now.

“Progress, not perfection,” they say.

“You know, I really hate all the sententious crap you people spew out,” I answer. “It makes me feel like a member of a brainless cult.”

“That’s okay, honey. You just keep coming.”

JIMMY AND I DRIVE
past two liquor stores and five restaurants that serve beer and wine. I make a note of each and every one. But I don’t drink that day, or the next day, or the next, because one thing has changed dramatically: I no longer have any excuses.

IN SOBRIETY, MEMORIES RETURN
slowly and in the wrong order. Often there’s no trigger, just a rumble in my stomach or a fluttering in the rib cage, like a small animal is trapped inside and wants to find its way out. Pieces of dialogue, images, entire scenes sometimes spill out unexpectedly, then slither into the grass. I try to catch them, to see what more they have to say, only to watch them slip between my fingers. Pinning down a memory is like gathering a handful of water and trying to hold on. In the end, it’s an act you can only mime.

Something my mother said pops into my head one day. It was years ago, when she was trying to recover from her own resentments.

“Write me a letter, Honey.”

But I have so much to say to you. How could I explain? How would I even begin?

“Say a prayer, get a pen and a notebook, and just see what happens,” my sober friends tell me. So that’s what I do. I start to write about that day, a lifetime ago, when Mum and I went and smashed the windshield of some woman’s car.

Brian McGreevy,
il mio migliore fabbro
, love and thanks without end.

Lydia Wills and Celina Spiegel, your faith and guidance have been the biggest gift. Hana Landes and Nora Spiegel, your patience and hard work are invaluable.

Writers’ residencies and fellowships have made it possible for me to write this book. Profound thanks to the generosity of: the Michener Center for Writers; the Keene Foundation; the Blue Mountain Center (best colony ever), Jentel; Yaddo; Hedgebrook; MacDowell; and Guili Pecci.

My mother and father are exceptional beings who will always fill me with gratitude and love. I feel so lucky to have had two extra parents, My Wicked Stepmother and Michael. Thank you, Paul and Elyse, the very best partners in crime and virtue; Jason—I could write a whole book about you alone.

Without the love and support of the following people, I would not be able to breathe let alone write: David Andalman, no limit soldier, I am indebted to you for life; Ellie Egan, tall, brilliant, beautiful, and generous; Chelsee Shiels and the Lowes, who really ought to be listed in the family section; Barb B. and Barb W., for love and chocolate; everyone at the Danvers Eye Opener and the White Whale; Joe and John Ahern; Rev. Beckie Hickok; Missy McCutcheon
and Birdie; Nate Rostron and Paige Normand, who read ugly first drafts yet offered life-sustaining encouragement; Duff Hildreth; Adam Gardner; all the people in and out of the rooms who prayed for me, you know who you are; last, first, always and forever—Zazy.

D
OMENICA
R
UTA
was born and raised in Danvers, Massachusetts. She is a graduate of Oberlin College and holds an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin. She was a finalist for the Keene Prize for Literature and has been awarded residencies at Yaddo, MacDowell, Blue Mountain Center, Jentel, and Hedgebrook.