Read Online With or Without You: A Memoir by Domenica Ruta - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Domenica Ruta
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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 timewhen 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.
Hot-Air Balloon
———
I ’ M SURE MY FATHER HAS TOLD ME THAT HE LOVES ME. MAYBE WHEN I was a baby. He might have leaned over my crib, tickled one of my pea-size toes, and whispered those three enormous and compact
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 timewhen 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.
Hot-Air Balloon
———
I ’ M SURE MY FATHER HAS TOLD ME THAT HE LOVES ME. MAYBE WHEN I was a baby. He might have leaned over my crib, tickled one of my pea-size toes, and whispered those three enormous and compact
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