With or Without You: A Memoir (15 page)

“Okay, Honey. Call me later to check in. Wait a minute—who’s driving?”

“Jesse.”

“I don’t like the way that Jesse drives. Tell him I said to slow down or I’ll kill him myself.”

If I forgot to check in with my mother, all hell would break loose. One spring break a group of college friends and I drove down to New Orleans. This was in the days before cell phones, so I had to stop every couple of hundred miles to call my mother from a highway pay phone. After a few days on the road and several dozen joints, we arrived at our youth hostel ready to eat our way through the city. The hostel manager recommended a nearby restaurant, so we went there first and ordered gumbo. Feeling confident, I tacked a beer on to my order, coolly, casually, as if it was an afterthought. “Bud Light in the bottle. If you have it,” I added, so that she wouldn’t think it was a big deal. The waitress didn’t ask for an ID, and I sat there sweating until she returned and plopped the beer down without incident.

“I’m serious, you guys. I’m moving here,” I told my friends. “New Orleans is the only enlightened city in the U.S.”

We ate and drank and smoked and listened to live music. The night was young, and we were planning our next move when the waitress came over to our table and stared at me.

“Um, is your name Domenica?” she asked.

My heart stopped. “Why?”

“Your mother’s looking for you. She’s on the phone right now.”

Horrified, I got up from the table.

“Phone’s behind the bar,” the waitress said, then, behind my back, I heard her tell my friends, “That woman is scary.”

“Oh my God, Mum?”

“You forgot to call me,” my mother sang in a creepy voice.

When she hadn’t heard from me, Kathi had called her credit-card company to find out where I had checked in, then called the hostel and spoke to the manager to see if he knew where I had gone.

“But how did the waitress know who I was?” I asked her.

“Oh, that was the easy part.” My mother laughed. “I just told her to look for a teenage girl with ratty brown hair and black eyebrows. ‘If she’s a foot and a half shorter than all her friends, that’s my daughter.’ ”

“I’m so sorry. I’m so, so—”

“It’s okay, Honey. I just wanted to make sure you were still alive. Be careful, okay? Mummy would have to kill herself if anything ever happened to you. You know that.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“Have a good time. Call me tomorrow!”

I never forgot to call her again.

SOMETIME DURING MY SENIOR
year at Andover, my mother told me not to come home for the next few weekends. Why? I asked her. She had started shooting heroin again and was trying to get herself off it.

“I’m going to be really sick, Hon. I don’t want to scare you. I don’t want you to see me this way.”

Kathi didn’t stay up all night talking anymore, as she did when she was on coke. There were several bottles of pills at her bedside,
but that was nothing new. I knew that she had dropped out of her classes at the Harvard Extension School and that she had quit her job at the salon, but heroin? How could I have missed something like that? Probably because I was so stoned myself.

For as long as I was a conscious being, my mother had been afflicted with some incurable pain. First she was recovering from a car accident. A few years later, when she was thirty-four, she had a hysterectomy. This surgery, I’m certain, was unnecessary, a solution concocted by a male doctor trying to shut up what he generalized as another complaining woman. The hysterectomy caused a slew of reactions, one disease after another. These diseases were elusive and always changing. Some of them were very real—my mother had lost her uterus and both ovaries in one scoop; it was only natural that her body would howl in protest. But some illnesses were most definitely her invention, a ploy to get prescriptions for stronger pills.

At some point in my adolescence, the brief period of sobriety ended and my mother’s pills became bigger and stronger. She was always good about sharing—with my stepfather, with her so-called friends, with my own so-called friends. Even her dog, an obese Dalmatian that was dying of cancer, got licks from the plate she used to crush up and snort her pills. Naturally, she shared her pills with her own daughter, too.

The first time I took one of my mother’s pills I was ten years old. I had a headache and we didn’t have any aspirin. We never had any practical stuff like that in our house. I doubt we had Band-Aids or Q-tips that day, either. But we were well stocked with Percocet and Vicodin and Ativan. Whenever I went to a friend’s house and complained of a headache, I would look at the aspirin I was given with confusion. “Is this really all you have?” I felt like saying. I assumed that other people’s mothers were just stingy.

Then came a new pill, OxyContin. My mother had lots of pet names for her pills. I wish I could remember all of them—Oscar de la Rentas, Oscar De La Hoyas, and, in honor of the Academy Awards, plain old Oscars. It was a prescription painkiller new to the market
in the 1990s. On the off chance that you haven’t heard of it, here is a little analogy:

These two drugs follow the same pathway through the human body, producing the same chain of reactions from bloodstream to brain, except that one is derived from natural opiates harvested in an Afghan poppy field and the other is synthetically engineered by the Purdue Pharma corporation. My mother had a rotation of specialists whom she consulted for her various ailments, and all of these doctors were men who doled out OxyContin as though the pharmaceutical companies were giving complimentary blow jobs for every new prescription they wrote. In 2001, OxyContin was the highest legally sold drug of its kind. And it was all over the street. Kathi was one of the first people in our area to get a prescription.

I’ll never forget the day she broke a twenty-milligram Oscar in half, giving me one piece to swallow as she snorted the other half in solidarity. I don’t remember why she did this. I might have complained about a headache. Maybe I was crying over a fight I’d had with one of my toxic, ephemeral best friends. Mum never distinguished between physical and emotional pain, especially when she had a pill that could cure both.

Imagine a hundred-pound teenager on the equivalent of one bump of heroin. The moment the pill kicked in, there was a warmth in my stomach that spread to my arms and legs. I could feel my heart pulsing in my hands, and every beat seemed to pump a new surge of contentment and hope into my veins. I floated from my bedroom down the hall to the bathroom, where I knelt on the filthy tiled floor and vomited a day’s worth of food in less than thirty seconds. Puking violently, I swear I have never felt so good in my entire life. I had an overwhelming urge to tell my mother how much I loved her, but there I was, hugging the toilet bowl for Act 2 of my own private opera.

When I was finally through, I rinsed my mouth and climbed up onto Kathi’s bed.

“Mum,” I said as I lay down beside her, “you are my best friend in the whole world.”

“I know I am, Honey.” She raked her long fingernails through my hair, something she hadn’t done since I was a little girl. “I always will be.”

———

M
Y MOTHER ONCE HAD A DRUG DEALER WHO FELL MADLY IN
love with her. His name was Oliver. He had a football player’s build, shaved his head to the bone every morning, lived in the city of Lynn, a notoriously crime-ridden satellite of Boston, and was briefly a member of the Nation of Islam.

Or, as Mum put it in her first descriptive sentence of him, “Ol’s black!”

Oliver lent Kathi a stack of his favorite CDs, which she listened to like an obsessive teenager. “Ol likes that rap music,” she told me. “It’s not usually my thing, but have you heard of the rapper Notorious B.I.G.? He’s really good. He reminds me of me.”

I had just finished my first semester of college, where Biggie’s album
Life After Death
was a staple in my dorm. It was late December of 1997. I scribbled the answers to my last final exam as fast as I could and caught a direct flight back to Boston. My heart had been pounding the whole day with the fearful, euphoric rhythm that always carried me home. After landing, I waited for about three hours at Logan Airport for my mother to pick me up, then got on a pay phone to call her collect.

“Where are you?”

“Where are
you
?”

She had completely forgotten that I was coming home that day.
“I’m on my way right now, Honey. Oooh, I have so many surprises for you! Just you wait!”

One of them was the white Lincoln Navigator SUV she arrived in. It was a luxury war chariot that got about twelve miles to the gallon, the vehicle of choice for multiplatinum-selling pop stars that year. Mum didn’t know any of this when she started leasing hers. She just picked out the biggest thing on the lot.

“Sometimes, when I’m stuck in traffic, I fantasize about driving right over the other cars,” Mum told me. “I could really do it, you know. Did you see the size of those tires?”

Looking out the window, I realized how high we were elevated. “It feels like wearing platform shoes,” I said.

“Oh, I almost forgot!” Mum cried, then reached across my lap to open the glove box. She pulled out a tiny stainless-steel revolver with mother-of-pearl inlay on the handle. “Look! It’s white to match the ’Gator. Do you want one for Christmas?”

Her new friend Oliver had
connections
, she said. He promised to hook her up with another pistol for next to nothing. I politely declined.

“Are you crazy?” My mother waved her little gun in the air. “At that price, it would be a waste
not
to buy another one. Come on. We can take a class together so it’ll be totally safe and legal. Get certified and everything.”

I handled the gun with my scarf and returned it to the glove box. “Didn’t you just say this gun was stolen?”

“Jesus, Nikki. Do you ever get exhausted being you?”

With the gun now out of sight, I relaxed and stretched my legs. Fiddling with the dials on the seat, I found that there was enough room for me to kick my feet in the air without grazing the dashboard. There was also a seat warmer. I helped myself to one of my mother’s cigarettes and reclined way, way back. The Navigator made me very nervous (too big, too white, too expensive—I didn’t see this ending well), but I had to admit it was a comfortable ride, and hard-core rap sounded so good booming through its speakers.

The sky that day was a soiled white sheet sagging with the threat
of snow. We rounded a corner. Bright flashes of silver shivered then vanished through gaps in the trees. The ocean. I was home.

When we got to Eden Glen Avenue, Mum transferred Oliver’s CD to the stereo. She’d recently bought a new sound system outfitted with eight small, state-of-the-art speakers that she piled up on the cardboard boxes they came in. This whole setup was worth more than every other electronic appliance in our house combined; it was probably more expensive than the negligible slice of tuition my college scholarship didn’t cover, which my mother was reliably delinquent in paying. That stereo had a lot of weight to pull in a house that was otherwise in shambles. New floors, roof, plumbing, and heating were long overdue when we had moved in six years earlier. Now there were holes in the floor that glimmered light from the kitchen above when I did laundry in the cellar. It was no longer safe to drink water from the tap, and there was an infestation of both rats and squirrels that I could hear fighting inside the walls at night.

The most significant change during the past few months that I’d been away at college was the crack pipe on the coffee table. There had always been paraphernalia hidden around the house while I was growing up. Items would turn up from time to time like a sloppy Easter-egg hunt. Searching for a lost TV remote, I would open a curtain or lift a towel off a cardboard box and find a burned spoon and the cap of a disposable syringe. Now, it seemed, my parents were leaving it all out in the open as casually as they would a pair of dirty socks.

Kathi skipped ahead to her favorite track on Oliver’s CD, “The Ten Crack Commandments.” It’s a violent, nihilistic yet danceable how-to guide for dealing crack cocaine. My mother knew every word by heart:

“Keep your fam’ly and business / completely separated / Money and blood don’t mix / Like two dicks and one bitch / You find yourself in serious shit.…”

She turned up the volume as loud as it would go, then went outside to the porch and shot her two middle fingers at our neighbors’ house. Her knees bobbed in a funny, fat-white-lady dance. I knew
that I had grown up a great deal when I saw her do this, because for the first time I was not embarrassed by but
for
her.

I turned down the stereo. Mum came back inside and lit a cigarette. “I just love it when Ol comes and picks me up. The neighbors look at us in horror. I told him, ‘Play your music loud enough to give all these fucks aneurysms, Ol!’ He thinks I’m a riot.”

It had been a long time since I’d seen my mother this happy. She started chopping garlic for a sauce that would eventually burn, so rapt was she in her quixotic tale of interracial love.

OLIVER WAS A SUCCESSFUL
drug dealer on the North Shore and my mother was one of his best clients. He would drive up from Lynn to make his deliveries to her and afterward he and my mother would go for a ride. “He has the same Lincoln I do, same year and everything, only his is black!” Mum swooned. They would ride around for hours together, talking and enjoying the well-preserved scenery of Cape Ann, a tiny lobe of rock bulging just north of Boston. If they saw a nice house that was for sale, they’d stop and collect real-estate flyers. Oliver had lived in the city of Lynn all his life and he was sick of the robberies and the stabbings. He’d saved enough money over the years to move to the suburbs. My mother gave him the scoop on every single town in the area, recommending, above all, that he buy a house on the water. She had spent her entire life gazing at the same river from her kitchen window and couldn’t imagine how anyone could get along otherwise.