Exclusive First Read: 'With Or Without You' By Domenica Ruta
Text by NPR Staff
Domenica Ruta's memoir, With or
Without You, chronicles her youth in a working-class Massachusetts town, the
daughter of a wildly flamboyant mother who drove a beat-up lime green
hatchback, and held impromptu storm-watching parties on the porch. It's a raw
but elegantly told tale, about living with a mother who was an addict and
sometime dealer, who loved movies and let her daughter stay home from school when
The Godfather was on television — and who would take that daughter along
on an expedition to bash in the windshield of a woman who'd broken her
brother's heart. In this scene, Ruta describes her mother's determination to
get her into a better high school. With or Without You will be published
Feb. 26.
Gateway
According to my diary, I
spent the first day of summer 1993 reorganizing my bureau and closet. When that
was finished, I
rooted underneath the bathroom sink to find dozens of bottles of
lotion and shampoo, all one- eighth full, which I married off so that I could
throw away the empties. I then pulled all the towels from the bathroom
cupboards and refolded them so that they would stack more efficiently.
After that I scrubbed the bathtub and trimmed the brown mildewed hem of the
shower curtain. When my mother discovered that I had done this with her
expensive, professional-grade salon scissors, she screamed and wailed and threw
the scissors at me like a deranged circus act. The rest of the day and night I
watched a marathon of Beavis and Butt-Head, my bedroom door closed but
my ears focused on the sounds of Kathi's every movement.
"Now what?" I
wrote in my journal. I was thirteen going on fourteen and my handwriting was
tiny and painstakingly neat.
But a miracle would occur
later that summer. My mother joined a Twelve- Step recovery program for people
addicted to food. Eating was the least of Kathi's addictions, but this was definitely a
move in the right direction. She went to a lot of support meetings and set
aside time every day to pray for serenity, courage, and wisdom. She spent so
much time on the phone talking to her sugar- abstinent friends that she had
less energy to yell at me. She still blew up with the force of Mount Etna, but
these eruptions were significantly less frequent, and sometimes she even apologized afterward.
Her life was now full of
people she met at her meetings, and that summer those women became my friends.
There was a woman named Crisanne who believed the actor Kevin Costner was communicating
with her through the check engine light on her car's dashboard. Crisanne's
entire family had years ago stopped speaking to her, for their own sanity and survival,
so she turned to rooms full of strangers, people like my mother, to listen
patiently to her hallucinations. Too crazy to hold down a job, she lived on
Social Security. At least three times a week, she ate lunch at our house. She
had curly brown hair down to her shoulders and often wore her clothing inside
out by accident.
"Crisanne, Honey, go fix your
shirt," my mother would say between drags of her cigarette. Crisanne
would laugh and babble on as though no one else was there.
"The key to dealing with
her," Mum whispered to me, "is to stop listening when she gets
boring. Just think of something else to entertain yourself. All her stories
have a pattern. They get a little predictable. Christ, the poor kid just wants
to find
love."
There was another
Twelve-Stepper named Beth who was blind and frail. She had stringy gray hair
and the gaunt cheekbones of a glue-sniffing orphan. At most, this
woman weighed eighty pounds. Wherever Beth went she had to carry a pillow,
because sitting in most chairs was too painful for her bony rear. I have no
idea what this woman was doing in a support group for overeaters, but my mother
found her there, and Beth became a regular at our house and in our car.
That same summer my
mother's husband, Michael, had bought her a used, two-toned maroon-and-white
Caddy Coupe Deville. This car didn't run, it sailed. Kathi loved any
excuse to drive it and volunteered to serve as Beth's personal chauffeur. It
was part of my mother's Twelve Steps — she had to make amends for her past sins,
and, as she saw it, carting this blind lady around was one of the good and selfless deeds
that she owed to the universe.
"Nikki, how old do you
think Beth is?" my mother asked as we waited for one of Beth's many state-
subsidized assistants to help her
out of her house and into
our car.
Domenica Ruta was born and
raised in Danvers, Mass. She is a graduate of Oberlin College and holds an
Master of Fine Arts from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of
Texas, Austin.
"I don't know," I
said. "Sixty?"
"Thirty-two!" Mum
flicked her
cigarette out the window and waved the smoke away from my face. "I'd
rather be fat than look that old."
Summers in New England are
hot, but they're also merciful. A heat wave will go on for three or four days, five at the
absolute most, and then, without fail, a cool rain shower will break the spell.
My mother and I would sit on the porch with Nonna and watch these summer storms
the way other people watched the Boston Red Sox. Black clouds rolled across the
sky, the river turned the color of smoke, and the three of us sat on the picnic
table like giddy witches who had summoned the thunder with the power of our
thoughts. We loved nothing so much as a lightning storm. If it happened during
the day, my mother would stop everything to sit and watch it. If it came at
night, she'd wake me up so that we could watch it together. We'd listen to the
birds scream and scatter. The wind would swell with the momentum of a symphony
until it ripped open the sky.
My mother saw storms as a
cause for celebration, and that summer we had a full-fledged
hurricane. She got on the phone before the lines were cut and called everyone
she knew to come to our porch and watch the show. "Call your friends,
Nikki," she said, forgetting in her excitement that I didn't have any.
When no one showed up, she was totally baffled. She'd made a large bowl
of ranch dip and chopped up celery and carrots. We had hors d'oeuvres and
front-row seats. Why anyone would hide indoors was beyond her.
I huddled with her on the
porch, tucking my knees inside my sweatshirt to keep warm. Reeds of phragmite
six feet high swept flat across
the marsh. The sky and the river were the same shade of gray. Everything was
silent except for the wind.
"It must look gorgeous
farther out," Mum said. "Up in Gloucester ..."
The next thing I knew we
were in the car, driving into the heart of the storm. Mum followed a winding
coastal road with a view of the ocean pretty much the whole way. Every now and
then she veered off to the shoulder so that we could get a better look at what
was happening out at sea. I rolled down the window and stuck my head out.
Kathi pulled over on the peak of a rocky bluff. The waves were crashing higher
than I'd ever seen in my life.
"It's spilling over
the top! Onto the road!" I cried. It did not occur to me to be afraid. I
was with my mother. We were in a Cadillac. What on this small planet had the
power to hurt us?
The rest of that summer was
sticky and hot. A mixture of humidity and cigarette smoke left a grimy film on my
skin. Sleep was impossible. I woke up every hour drenched in sweat. One
morning Kathi had the brilliant idea to strip the sheets off our beds and store
them in the freezer during the day. We remade our beds that night, and seven
minutes later we were as hot and miserable as ever.
"These fans — they just
push the hot air around," my mother complained.
We went for long, aimless
drives to cool ourselves off. Sometimes we'd invite Crisanne, who was always
asking if we could stop somewhere and get ice cream. We'd pick up Beth and her
pillow and take her to do errands. Beth had a guide dog named Kenny, a
handsome, reserved German shepherd who sometimes came with us on our drives. I
wasn't allowed to pat him — no one was — but his quiet, dutiful presence was
something I could feel no matter how out of reach he was. Beth always spoke to
him in a dissatisfied tone
of voice and often threatened to get rid of him. Then, one day, she did.
"Where did he go? Can
we find him
and adopt him?" I begged my mother. "How can you be friends with a
person who would do something like that?"
"There but for the
grace of God go I," my mother said.
"What does that even
mean?"
My mother had no answer.
She often spouted the dogma of her Twelve Steps without doing much to
substantiate it. One of the steps required her to write down on paper an
exhaustive list of all the people who had ever done her wrong. She filled
several spiral notebooks with the details of her resentments, railing against
everyone who had ever hurt her, including me.
"Nikki, you're
incredibly abusive to me," she said in a calm voice after completing a
long afternoon of writing. "I want you to know that I'm no longer going to
accept that kind of treatment from anyone, least of all you."
"What? What?" I
was choking on sobs, gasping for air.
"I wrote you a long
letter about it."
"Can I read it?"
"No," she said.
"I tore it into little pieces and threw it away. You should write me a
letter, too, Honey. Then rip it up and throw it away. You won't believe how
good it feels."
My mother was working as a
manicurist at the time. She had a table at a small beauty salon in Beverly
Farms where the clients were all wealthy, blue-blooded housewives, including,
she reported proudly, some bona-fide Saltonstalls, the
preeminent Massachusetts dynasty who'd been running the state in one way or
another for more than three hundred years. These old-money New England WASPs
absolutely loved my mother, who turned out to be a very good listener when she
was getting paid.
All this listening gave
Kathi the idea to become a psychiatrist. "Not a psychologist," she
liked to stress. "I want to be able to write prescriptions."
Never one to start out
humbly, my mother enrolled as a part- time student at the Harvard University
Extension School. It was and still is an amazing program that offers Harvard
curriculum and faculty to working adults at night. There is no admissions process,
no SATs or letters of recommendation. Anyone who's able to pay the tuition can
enroll, but to pass and earn credits is just as rigorous as you'd expect from a
place like Harvard. My mother worked incredibly hard during her first few
semesters, and became the proudest woman in Cambridge ever to pull a C.
The WASPy old women at the
salon were tickled pink by their manicurist's aspirations. They invited my
mother to their mansions and served her lunch. These women taught Kathi things
like how to hold a knife and fork properly, and she would come home and pass
this knowledge on to me. My mother talked excitedly about all her homework
assignments — long readings by B. F. Skinner and Betty Friedan — while her
clients regaled her with stories about their husbands' business trips in
Europe, their vacation homes in Martha's Vineyard, their children away at
boarding school.
"Boarding
school?" Kathi's ears pricked up. "Now tell me, how do those work,
exactly?"
Apparently, Mum explained
to me later, these schools were all over New England and were full of the kinds
of elitists she and I aspired to be. We went to the Danvers library and looked
at some brochures. Next to glossy pictures of attractive, multicultural
teenagers were bullet- point lists of the schools' offerings: a dozen foreign
languages, every sport ever invented, art studios equipped with a dark room
and a kiln. My mother and I skimmed over these details; as we did on all of our
shopping excursions, we fixated on
the price tag. The more expensive something was, the more we felt we needed it,
and to run alongside those self-possessed teenagers for one year would cost the
same as a brand-new car, a brand-new European car, something no one in
the history of my family had ever owned.
Kathi rifled all
the brochures into her purse. "They'll give you a scholarship," she
said.
That year my mother and I
took a tour of the ten most expensive boarding schools in New England. Every
single one of these visits either began or ended in tears. On the morning of my
interview, my mother would straighten my hair and, squirming just as much as I
did when I was little, I'd end up getting burned with the flat iron.
We were clueless about how we ought to appear, so Mum dressed me up like a
prep-school fetish out of Playboy magazine. I wore the same costume to
all my interviews — a short, pleated plaid skirt with a decorative safety pin
and a mustard-yellow sweater set that was uncomfortably tight. When I argued
for another outfit, Kathi
blew a fuse and hurled the contents of our kitchen cabinets at my bedroom door.
"Would it kill you to
show a little leg?" she groaned.
We'd drive to Exeter or
Milton, my eyes still puffy and red from crying, and my mother would try to
pump me full of confidence.
"Tell them you're the smartest kid in your class and how much you love to
learn. Don't be afraid to brag. They're impressed by kids who brag. You have to
really sell yourself, Nik."
During the tours, my mother
asked a million questions and addressed our student tour guides as
"Honey." I skulked behind her, my eyes fixed on the ground. I didn't
want to let myself fall in love with these schools. What would happen to me when
I didn't get in?
Kathi hated to see me
slouch. Once she stopped in the middle of a perfectly landscaped quad and
started screaming, "What's wrong with you, Nikki? These kids are smaht.
This is where you belong. Ask someone for their phone number." She spotted
a teenager toting a cello case on his back. "Honey," she
yelled to him. "Can my daughter call you and ask some questions about
your academy? This is her right here. She's shy."
And so it was decided. I
would go to public school for one year in the neighboring town of Hamilton,
where there was a better than average academic program and a lottery for
admitting a few students from other towns. I would use this time to pad my
résumé while I applied to boarding schools.
Not more than ten minutes
away from the town of Danvers, Hamilton was a different world. There is a
country club called Myopia — a piece of found poetry that no one in the town
seems to appreciate — where the queen of En gland once participated in a fox
hunt. There are plenty of alcoholics there, but they don't show it on their
faces the way people in Danvers do. Hamiltonians wear sweaters, not
sweatshirts, and houses are on a septic system. Snob zoning, I would learn it
was called. Communities on a septic system require bigger lots of land per
house, therefore generating higher tax revenues. The reality of this — that
pumping a household's shit into a tank buried in the backyard allowed for
better public schools — was utterly revolting to me. My year at Hamilton High
School became a painfully advanced lesson in American class warfare.
The truly wealthy in
Hamilton sent their children off to the very private schools I was hoping would
award me a scholarship, leaving the public high school full of
upper-middle-class kids whose parents needed to save for college. With the
super-rich culled from their ranks, the kids in Hamilton were dying for someone
to outclass. I was a walking target. A week before my first day
of high school, my mother had taken me on a manic shopping spree to the outlet
stores in southern Maine. I had been wearing a plaid jumper for the past eight
years and had no idea how to dress myself. I put all my trust in Kathi, who
bought me hundred-dollar jeans that were so tight I couldn't cross my legs and
logo-branded shirts that couldn't be sold at standard stores because they were
"irregular."
These clothes advertised me
as both an impostor and someone who was trying too hard to fit in, the
two worst crimes you can commit in high school. I used a very scientific method
in my efforts to deconstruct my fashion mistakes. Wool socks could be worn with
Birkenstocks, but only with flared leg jeans; dyeing your hair magenta was a good move regardless of
your skin tone, but bleach blondes were tacky unless they pierced their faces
in at least three places, as this transformed peroxide into anti-aesthetic
rebellion. As trenchant as these observations were, I could never figure out
how to pull a functional outfit together. Like natural flexibility or singing in
key, it's a skill some people are just born with.
Hamilton is the kind of
lily-white New England town where Jews, Italians, and Greeks are considered
exotic, and even those tiny distinctions melted away as long as you spoke with
the right diction. Every time I opened my mouth to speak, the kids in my
classes would snicker and exchange looks. I wasn't aware that I had an accent
until then.
"Say car
again," my classmates taunted. "Say hair."
Naïvely, I'd repeat the
words they told me to say, and they'd laugh in my face.
The New England accent,
unlike the southern one, is not considered cute or sexy. No one has ever been
called charming when she added a nasal extra syllable to the preposition for.
There are subtle variations in diction from state to state that only an insider
can detect. I wince when movie actors playing Bostonians sound like rural
Mainers, just as I've known Kentuckians to explode when it's assumed, as many
casting directors do, that everyone with a twang is from Georgia. From what
I've observed, though, while complicated and nuanced — and, I'm sure,
delightful to tourists and linguistics PhDs alike — southern accents extend
across class lines, whereas the New England accent does not. Dropping your r's
means one thing only: you are ignorant, broke- ass, uncultured trash. A handful
of extremely handsome white boys can get away with saying they drink at
"bahs in Hahvid," and only in their twenties. These same words coming
from a woman or an overweight man, or anyone over thirty, will inspire looks of
pity and derision.
Although I failed to master
the dress code of the preppy, hippie, or punk-rock kids at Hamilton High (those
were the only three alternatives), I did discover a gift for language and
imitation. I spent the first few
months of ninth grade listening to the way the kids at Hamilton talked,
training myself à la Eliza Doolittle, until I had a nice, innocuous inflection
completely devoid of regional color. Like many people who have crossed over an
imaginary line to pursue higher education, I have since lost my ability even to
fake a Boston accent. Only in primitive emotional states, when I'm screaming at
someone I love, or saying the Lord's Prayer, does a vestige of my old voice
bleat through.
"Ah Fathah, Who aht in
heaven ..."
By the time I had this figured
out, it was too late for me at Hamilton High. Everyone knew exactly who I was
— a girl from another town, a town where we pumped our sewage out to a plant
and where people swallowed the letter r.
Excerpted from With or
Without You by Domenica Ruta. Copyright 2013 by Domenica Ruta. Excerpted by
permission of Spiegel & Grau, a division of Random House Inc. All rights
reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without
permission in writing from the publisher.
http://www.npr.org/2013/02/12/171507784/exclusive-first-read-with-or-without-you-by-domenica-ruta?ft=3&f=100876926&sc=nl&cc=bn-20130214
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