With or Without You: A Memoir (7 page)

“Well, for crying out loud,” he said, taking the clover in his hand. “You really did.”

We went inside to show my stepmother, who was standing at the cluttered kitchen counter. She was always overwhelmed by something—groceries to put away, dishes to wash, dinner to cook.

“Isn’t that nice,” she said without looking.

I placed the four-leaf clover on a scrap of paper, which my father dated, and we sealed it between two squares of plastic wrap. Then we had to find somewhere safe to keep it.

“We need a book,” my father said.

Besides my stepmother’s cookbooks, there were only two books in the house at that time, the Audubon Society’s
Birds of America
and a tattered Bible crammed on a basement shelf underneath a shoebox full of loose change. My father and I both agreed that the bird book, which was big and had a hard cover, would work best. We tucked the clover among a spread of blue jays perched on flowering branches that vanished into the margins.

Zeke and I returned to the backyard. He continued chopping down his tree. I peeled swatches of moss off a stone and arranged them into the map of an imaginary world full of countries I named after girls: Victoria, Cassandra, and the Islands of Zoë.

And again without trying, I found another four-leaf clover. I ran to show my father. He wrinkled his forehead in disbelief and perhaps a tinge of envy. He’d already taken one break that afternoon. He wasn’t going to interrupt his work again.

“Go ask Carla to help you,” he said.

Carla was in her early thirties then, and still a very pretty woman. She and my father had recently returned from their honeymoon in Hawaii, and she was a quarter-moon pregnant with my younger brother. I went inside and found her standing before her Sisyphean mountain of housework. When I showed her the four-leaf clover this time, she twisted around and glared at me. Spite crackled in the air between us.

“Another one?” she cried.

——

CARLA INTRODUCES HERSELF TO
my friends as “the Wicked Stepmother.” She laughs from the belly whenever she says it. I do, too. I love everything about her self-appointed nickname. First, the use of the definite article: Carla does not see herself as
a
wicked stepmother but
the
Wicked Stepmother, a singular character of importance, even if it is an antagonist’s role. Second, the allusion to a fairy tale is as funny as it is true. I have an undeniable Cinderella complex. When I get into a martyr’s frenzy of vacuuming, no one is better than my Wicked Stepmother at putting me back in my place. “Nik, you’re a legend in your own mind” is her chosen refrain.

But the best of all this wicked-stepmother business is:
she said it, not me
.

Because there have been moments of wickedness. Oh, yes. Vicious, primal battles, icy competitions so subtle and silent that they seemed to be fought on a molecular level, and then some scenes so transparently nasty they bordered on cliché.

Like the Fourth of July party I can’t let go of. One of Carla’s friends asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. “A doctor,” I told the woman. I was eight years old and it was the most interesting and noble thing I could think of becoming.

“How do you know what you’re going to be?” Carla snapped. “For all you know, you’ll be pregnant by the time you’re sixteen.”

I don’t imagine it was easy for her. Three days a week she was responsible for feeding, bathing, and supervising another woman’s child. That this child had the same smile as her former sexual rival was an added insult. That this child was also demanding and imperious, telling her how she ought to run her household, that she was so oversensitive she cried at the drop of a hat—I doubt any of this was ever a part of Carla’s life plan. I’d arrive at her house in dirty clothes, my snarly hair clumped in Caucasian dreadlocks. My father would hand me over to his wife so that he could do whatever work there was to be done on the house. She’d shampoo me in the bathtub, then sit me in the middle of the living-room floor and drag a brush through
my knotted hair. I made a point of screaming loud enough for the neighbors to hear.

“Fay Wray,” she’d say with a shudder. “You’re an actress, just like your mother.”

From a safe distance I can see how, in Carla’s cosmology, I was both a burden and a threat. Even without a precocious and needy stepdaughter to weigh her down, Carla was failing miserably to manage the things in life that were legitimately hers. The house usually looked like a disaster site, the cupboards were stuffed with junk food and empty of essentials, the checkbook was overdrawn and the credit cards had been maxed. She and my father were always in a screaming match, and my little brother was plagued by night terrors.

Three o’clock in the morning is an ugly hour. Little good ever comes to people who are awake to see it. It was at this time that my brother would be summoned from his bed as though hypnotized. He’d walk around the house sobbing in his footed pajamas, his eyes wide open but far away in a dream. No one knew what to do. Carla and Zeke had taken him to see neurologists in Boston. “Stop feeding him sugar after four
P.M
.” was their professional advice. But Carla could never say no to her bambino, and my brother would go to sleep with a belly full of candy and soda. At night she would follow her inconsolable son from room to room, feebly trying to reason with him. “Wake up. You’re having a bad dream.” This would go on for about half an hour, until my father finally got up and the pageant began.

The three of them were locked inside their collective nightmare. I wandered in the dark behind them, invisible and restless as a ghost. It was as though I wasn’t there. A blessing, I suppose, to be excluded from the drama. Until one night Carla shouted at my father:

“Why don’t you ever hit
her
?”

Carla pointed to where I stood clutching the banister, and the feeling of a rusty shiv pierced my ribs.
Why
was not an interrogative adverb in this sentence; it was a modal of suggestion, as in, Why don’t we invite the neighbors over for supper? Why don’t we go apple picking this weekend? Why don’t we try to be more egalitarian with our violence?

To my stepmother I was an assistant, a sometime friend, a scapegoat, and a competitor. Then, in the strangest turn of events, I became her personal hotline. When my father’s anger turned violent from time to time, she didn’t call my mother or her own family or friends. She called me.

“Leave him, Carla,” I have told her again and again. The fact that “him” is my father is something we both seem to block out.

“Well, his TV is on top of my oak bureau and my TV is all the way in the cellar. I can’t lift that thing by myself.”

Furniture and fear. I’ve heard it all before.

ANOTHER MEMORY, ANOTHER STORY
. I am six years old, and my little brother is one. My stepmother tries to make me jealous of the baby, who is blond and blue-eyed and objectively much cuter than I ever was. But I’m too in love with the little meatball to feel anything but glee when I see him. Before he came along, I used to fake stomachaches so that I could skip weekends at Dad’s and stay at home with my mother. Now I can’t wait for my dad to come and get me so I can go over to his house and hold the baby.

That Sunday, I’m waiting in my mother’s driveway for my father to pick me up. He pulls up in his truck, and when he gets out he won’t look at me. His eyes are red as wounds.

“Get in the car,” he says. Those four words—never a portent of good things to come. “I have to talk to your mother.”

Every pore in my skin sparks. I’m stuck there in the driveway. Waiting for something, I have no idea what. Then I hear it—my mother screaming for me, screaming for help, screaming for
me to help her
.

I run back into the apartment and see my father on top of her, his hands wrapped around her throat as he bangs her head against the thinly carpeted concrete floor. I jump on his back and pry him away, though that hardly seems possible now. Another fictive flight of memory? I don’t know. But that is how I remember it, so that’s what I’m telling you here. My mother scrambles to her feet and lifts me up,
holding my body in front of hers like a shield, while she and my father continue yelling. Curses, tears, and threats. My father drives away in his truck.

The next day Kathi walked me into school herself, something she had never done before, a necklace of bruises glowing on the delicate skin of her throat. She asked to speak to Sister Agnes alone in the hall. What did those two women say to each other? I wonder still.

I refused to go to my father’s house after that, and my mother certainly didn’t force me. What felt like a year later, though it was probably just a couple of months, I was with one of my aunts and some cousins downtown when we ran into my father and the baby. I hadn’t seen either of them since the fight. My little brother seemed to have doubled in size. I couldn’t believe the cool, confident way he sat on my father’s hip. His downy yellow hair had grown into thick ringlets. His smile was so big it wrenched at my heart.

“Hey, long time no see!” my dad said, grinning. “Almost forgot what you looked like, Nik!”

“Long time no see! Almost forgot what you looked like!” my brother repeated. A perfect imitation of my father’s smile dimpled his fat cheeks.

Sometime after that encounter, I resumed my weekend visits at Dad’s. It was as if nothing had happened. What I remember most about my father from then on was his absence. A loosely refolded newspaper on the kitchen table, an empty mug of coffee in the sink. At breakfast I would sit in his chair at the table, hoping to catch the lingering warmth his body had left behind.

Zeke was off to work by five in the morning every weekday. On weekends, he allowed himself to sleep until six before he dived into some backyard project he’d created for himself. He has been a construction worker since he was a teenager, owned his own business for several years, then sold all his machinery and joined a labor union. His trade is paving—driveways, sidewalks, streets, and curbs. During the winter he plowed snow for the town. While everyone else in New England cursed the sky for dumping another six inches on the frozen ground, my father told me to pray for twelve more. Blizzards
put food on the table four months out of the year. They kept us hovering just barely above bankruptcy. Carla’s ability to max out multiple credit cards was startling. Every time Zeke managed to hack away her debt, another bill would surface with twice the interest rate. A winter without snow meant that we would be broke and Dad would be idle—the basic human recipe for family violence.

For the next two years, when I was seven and eight, I spent three days a week with my brother and stepmother more or less peacefully. At four o’clock my father returned home from work. There was always a slight jolt in the air when he entered the house, a charge that put us all on edge. My brother and I would follow him around like ducklings, from the basement to the living room to the kitchen and back again. Some days Zeke seemed to enjoy his little shadows. He’d take us into the backyard and toss a ball directly at our yellow plastic bat so that when we swung we couldn’t miss. We ran around an imaginary baseball diamond and he would lift us up onto his shoulders, the champions of the world.

At other times he walked through the door with squinted eyes, scanning the room for something to destroy.

“What are you lying around for?” he would snap. “Why don’t you ever play outside? Jesus, Nikki. Run around a little!”

Zeke’s an athlete by nature, a laborer by culture, a blue-collar New Englander who believes that sunshine is a resource you have to earn the right to enjoy and that rest is only for the dead. If I simply read my book in the backyard, instead of on the couch, he’d leave me alone. In that big backyard I read about the spider who spun prophetic words into her web, about the lion who gave up his life for the sake of four bereft orphans, about the pioneer family in a covered wagon battling scarlet fever and blizzards. I read about the gods and goddesses of Greek antiquity, who were as real to me as the people in my family. It was amazing how much time could disappear while I was reading.

My stepmother got pregnant again. This time it was a girl. The baby arrived precisely at the moment when I was too old to play with dolls but secretly still wanted to. I met my sister for the first time
when I was nine years old and she was a tiny cloud on an ultrasound. An obstetrician rubbed clear gel over Carla’s stomach and with a wand projected an image of her insides onto a little TV. It looked like the faint cluster of stars in another galaxy, something immaterial and very far away.

I decided then and there in that office that, no matter what this creature turned into, I’d make her be my best friend whether she liked it or not. My mother and her sisters were always embroiled in a war that nobody ever won. My sister and I had a better chance of making it if we were on the same team.

According to the ultrasound, my fetal sister had tucked both of her hands behind her head, like a sunbather in repose, and would have to be delivered by Cesarean. My stepmother said that she, too, had been discovered in the womb with her arms in the same position. This was a revelation to me: people can resemble their parents not just in the shape of their eyes or the color of their hair but in the way that they occupy space in the world.

A year later, I came inside after reading in the backyard and the sudden contrast between the bright sunshine and the shady interior of the house blinded me. I walked through the kitchen in a dazzling blackness. When my eyes finally readjusted, I saw my stepmother and baby sister napping on the living-room couch. Carla lay on her back with her hands behind her head; my sister lay on her mother’s stomach, sleeping in the same position, just as both of them had slept in the liquid dark of the womb. I looked at the shape of their bodies, one on top of the other, and whispered a single word:

“Echo.”

It wasn’t until much later that I understood what had happened that day. Inside me was someone new waiting to be born, not a baby, like my sister, but a future version of me, a grown-up, someone who would devote her life to describing such moments in time. This was her first word.