Ruta - With or without you: a memoir

This is a work of nonfiction. Some names and identifying details have been changed.

Copyright 2013 by Domenica Ruta

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

S PIEGEL & G RAU and design is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.

LIBRARY O F C ONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Ruta, Domenica.
With or without you : a memoir / Domenica Ruta.
p. cm.

eISBN: 978-0-679-64502-3

1. Children of drug addictsMassachusettsBiography.
2. Drug addictsMassachusettsBiography. I. Title.
HV5831.M4R88 2013
362.2913092dc23

[B] 2012017991

Jacket design: Greg Mollica
Hand lettering: Rebecca Siegel
Jacket photograph: Michaela Gunter/Getty Image

www.spiegelandgrau.com

v3.1

YOU WERE SICK, BUT NOW YOURE WELL,
AND THERES WORK TO DO.

Kurt Vonnegut

M Y MOTHER GRABBED THE IRON POKER FROM THE FIREPLACE and said, Get in the car.

I pulled on my sneakers and followed her outside. She had that look on her face, distracted and mean, as though shed just been dragged out of a deep sleep full of dreams. She was mad, I could tell right away, but not at me, not this time.

Her car was a lime-green hatchback with blotches and stripes of putty smeared over the dents. The Shitbox, she called it. We called it, actually. My mother hated the thing so much she didnt mind if I swore at it. What a piece of shit, Id grumble whenever it stalled on us, which we could gamble on happening at least once a day, more if it was snowing. Far and away the most unreliable car we ever had in our life together, it was a machine that ran on prayer.

Among the cars many other defects, the inside casing of the passenger door had broken off, leaving the mechanical skeleton that controlled the window and lock exposed. I poked my fingers inside the levers, watching the sinewy rubber push and pull, the metal joints grasp and release. A spectacular display. I couldnt get enough of it.

Stop it, Mum said. She reached over and grabbed my hand. This cars old as me. More than twenty years, at least. I dont know how much longer its going to stay in one piece.

Where are we going? I asked her.

She lit the cigarette bobbing anxiously between her lips and slid her key into the ignition. I held my breath. It was a ritual so intuitive that I never questioned its provenance or worth, silently assuming that any exchange I might have with the present atmosphere would choke up the magic at work under the cars hood. And then what? Would we be able to drive to school, work, and stores, like everyone else in the suburbs? Or would we hear the familiar sputter and cough that so often ruined our day?

Come on, Mum whispered. Come on.

A rumble. The engine turned over. We were going somewhere.

My mother and I lived on the North Shore of Massachusetts. Boston was only thirty minutes away, though we seldom made it out that far. Not in one of her cars. Wherever we went that day was close to home, because we drove for only a few minutes before she parked on a quiet, tree-lined street and got out. I remember watching her body pass by through the windshield, then jumping into her arms as she opened the door, lifted me up, and sat me on top of the cars hood. It was a cool gray day and the metal felt warm beneath my legs. Mum leaned into the open drivers-side window and pulled out our fireplace poker from the backseat. Then, without a word, she began smashing the windshield of someone elses car.

This other car was red, I remember, but its possible Im wrong, that over the years Ive painted it in my mothers rage. How old was I? Four, maybe five? Small enough still that my mother sometimes carried me but too old to be shocked by the things she did.

My mother. Her name was Kathleen, which she shortened to Kathi. Spell it with a Y or, God forbid, a C, and shed lacerate your face with her scowl. She was a hair taller than five feet and I once saw her turn over a refrigerator during a fight with one of her boyfriends. The core of her strength was concentrated in her lungs. Like all the women in our bloodline, Kathi was a screamer. Sometimes she opened her mouth and the screech that came out sustained for minutes without breaking or getting hoarse. She used to bend down to scream directly into my face, and I would get lost staring at the black fillings in her molars, the heat of her breath touching my skin like a finger. But volume was never an accurate herald of my mothers mood; loud was simply the who and the what of her. That voice, those big dangling earrings, the long red nails and skintight jeans and shirts slit open a few inches below the cleavage of her enormous breasts. I was forever climbing onto my mothers lap, trying to button her shirt higher. No, Honey, shed say, pulling my hands off her chest. Mummy wants to show off her boobies right now. Her hair was almost black, but she insisted on bleaching it Deborah Harry blond. She had one tattoo, a small but regrettable crab on her left ring finger. It was her astrological signthe Cancer. Even she was ashamed of it, I know, because she hid it under a gold wedding band long before she ever married.

What else do you need to know about this woman before I go on with the story? That she believed it was more important to be an interesting person than it was to be a good one; that she allowed me to skip school whenever I wanted to, and if there was a good movie on TV she wouldnt let me go to school because, she said, she needed me to stay home and watch it with her; that, thanks to this education, I was the only girl in the second grade who could recite entire scenes from Scarface and The Godfather by heart; that she made me responsible for most of my own meals when I was seven and all the laundry in the house when I was nine; that her ability to make money was alchemical; that she was vainer than a beauty queen, but the last time I saw her she weighed more than two hundred pounds and her arms were encrusted with purulent sores; that she loved me so much she couldnt help hating me; that at least once a week I still dream she is trying to kill me.

Now, where was I?

Bashing the windshield of a red car.

This car belonged to a woman named Josie, an ex-girlfriend of my mothers only brother. I dont know whether my uncle asked my mother for this favor or if she had volunteered. Either way seems plausible now. My mothers Italian-American family had a thuggish, moronic code of honor that everyone violated as often as they upheld it. This windshield job was an act of loyalty. I learned as I grew up that my mother would demand nothing less of me.

At this point in Kathis life she weighed about a hundred and twenty-five pounds. With such a pillowy shape on her diminutive frame, the woman didnt have powerful torque on her side. But put a metal bar and some anger in her hands and Mum could swing like Ted Williams.

After what seemed a long time, the windshield chipped in one spot.

Dont look at Mummy right now, okay? she muttered to me.

What else was I supposed to be watching? And who was she trying to kid? My mother loved an audience. No one knew this better than I did.