Read Online With or Without You: A Memoir by Domenica Ruta - Free Book Online
Authors: Domenica Ruta
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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 throughmy 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
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 throughmy 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
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