With or Without You

WITH OR
WITHOUT YOU
A MEMOIR
DOMENICA RUTA
spiegel & grau | new york
YOU WERE SICK, BUT NOW YOU’RE WELL,
AND THERE’S WORK TO DO.
—Kurt Vonnegut
PROLOGUE
Glass
My 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 she’d 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. Wecalled it,
actually. My mother hated the thing so much she didn’t mind if I
swore at it. “What a piece of shit,” I’d 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 car’s 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 couldn’t get enough of it.
“Stop it,” Mum said. She reached over and grabbed my hand.
“This car’s old as me.” More than twenty years, at least. “I don’t
know how much longer it’s going to stay in one piece.”
4  WITH OR WITHOUT YOU
“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 car’s 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 car’s
hood. It was a cool gray day and the metal felt warm beneath my
legs. Mum leaned into the open driver’s- side window and pulled out
our fireplace poker from the backseat. Then, without a word, she
began smashing the windshield of someone else’s car.
This other car was red, I remember, but it’s possible I’m wrong,
that over the years I’ve painted it in my mother’s 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 Yor, God forbid, a C,and she’d 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
DOMENICA RUTA  5
fillings in her molars, the heat of her breath touching my skin like
a finger. But volume was never an accurate herald of my mother’s
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 mother’s lap, trying to button her shirt higher. “No, Honey,” she’d say, pulling my hands off
her chest. “Mummy wantsto 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 sign— the 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 wouldn’t 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 Scarfaceand The Godfatherby 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 couldn’t 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 mother’s only brother. I don’t know whether my uncle asked my
mother for this favor or if she had volunteered. Either way seems
plausible now. My mother’s Italian- American family had a thuggish,
moronic code of honor that everyone violated as often as they up-
6  WITH OR WITHOUT YOU
held 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 Kathi’s life she weighed about a hundred and
twenty- five pounds. With such a pillowy shape on her diminutive
frame, the woman didn’t 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.
“Don’t 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.
She took a few more whacks and the chip began to crack outward
in jagged spokes, the shape of the sun as I drew it in my crayon landscapes.
Sitting on the hood of the car, I wanted nothing more than to
hear the glass shatter, but it was taking forever. My mother and I
seemed to realize this at the same moment, because she stopped,
turned to look at me, and shrugged, as if to say, “You’d think this
would be easier.”
My body leaned toward hers like a plant stretching in the direction of the sunniest window in the room. I prayed with each strike
that we would finally hear it— the lovely, delicate rainfall of something whole now in pieces. My mother beat that woman’s windshield
with everything she had, but it would not shatter. Eventually she
gave up. We got back into the car and drove home in silence, both of
us longing for the sound of broken glass.
Dirty
My childhood took place in the 1980s. i cut my baby teeth
on the cardboard record sleeve of Supertramp’s Breakfast in America. Ronald Reagan was president. Mr. Macaroni Mouth, I used to
call him: I don’t remember why. Kathi had a special salute whenever
his dour face appeared on TV.
“Ba fungul,”she said, brushing her hand under her chin. She
flicked her thumb against her top front teeth, shot a middle finger
into the air, pretended to spit. “He was an actor, you know. Not even
a good one. Westerns. Glorified soap operas.”
My mother hated Ronald Reagan so much that I assumed she
knew him intimately— that he was just another of the many in a revolving door of friends she was always complaining had ripped her
off. As my mother saw it, the things Reagan was saying about her
were getting low- down and personal. What she meant, of course,
was her demographic— the single mother on welfare. It seemed every
other night there was a special feature on the evening news reviling
these women, until they became the fictional antagonist of the straining American economy. Mum took things like this to heart.
There were plenty of times when Kathi was capable of performing the role of the empowered, hardworking single mother. At Christmas, for example, she would take on a second, sometimes third job
as a cashier at the local toy franchise just so she could get her hands
on the coveted toy of the season. One year it was a pig- faced doll
8  WITH OR WITHOUT YOU
with a cowlick of orange yarn, which I later abused mercilessly by
beating its oversize plastic head against the sidewalk. Kathi had hidden this doll under her register so that when the mad rush was over
and the store had sold out there would be one left for me, one that
she could pay for on layaway.
If there was an indulgence that could be purchased, my mother
would find the money for it, any extracurricular curiosity I entertained had her whipping out the checkbook so she could pay someone to nurture it. This is how I became a passionate child- dilettante
of ballet, photography, oceanography, and conversational French. At
some point when I was eight or nine, I connected the notes of a famous classical piece I heard in cartoons to its composer, Beethoven.
Kathi was so thrilled she bought me tickets to a children’s series at
the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Every Saturday morning for six
weeks, I rode with a troupe of young classical enthusiasts and their
parents on a school bus into the city. Knowing she would never be
able to wake up in time to drive me to the rendezvous point, Kathi
hired a taxi to take me there and paid in advance. When I expressed
an interest in computers, she waitressed at a Colonial- themed restaurant that made her wear a bonnet for the Sunday brunch shift.
She worked every weekend for two months, long enough to buy me a
brand- new Apple IIe, then called in sick one morning and never went
back. She worked stints as a bartender, a salesgirl in a tourist attraction presiding over a lobster tank, and a canteen truck driver. This
was my favorite of her jobs, though it didn’t last long. I enjoyed the
endless stock of Kit- Kats and getting to ride in a great big truck with
my mum. She did not enjoy getting up before dawn every day. I think
the only reason she took that job in the first place was to go boyfriend hunting, but her prince was not to be found at a construction
site.
Kathi was once inspired by an ad on TV to sign up for a course in
TV/VCR repair. I remember seeing the thick hardcover textbook
open on our coffee table, every single sentence ablaze with my mother’s pink highlighter. A razor and a shortened straw lay on a dish
nearby. I think she went to the first two classes before quitting. In a
DOMENICA RUTA  9
pinch Kathi would sell cocaine, but, like waiting tables, it was a temporary means to an end, never something she counted on as her primary vocation.
Then there were periods when my mother was just as happy to
sleep all day and collect welfare. On the first of the month she would
hop around our apartment, waving her check at me and singing,
“Free Money Day! Free Money Day!” I danced at her heels, rattling
off the list of toys I had been dreaming about since the dissipation of
last month’s check. My mother would spend every dime of her welfare check immediately on cocaine, new clothes, new coloring books
and dolls, and maybe a night or two of take- out Chinese. We lived on
the leftovers for as long as possible. By the end of the month we’d be
fisting the couch for loose change and I’d be off to the corner store
with a pocket full of quarters to buy milk, Slim Jims, and cigarettes.
The two of us lived in the basement of the house her father had
built when she was in high school. She rented the one- bedroom
apartment from her mother, who charged a hundred dollars a month,
or whatever my mother was able to give her. Her brother lived in the
big house upstairs, first with a group of single guys and later with his
wife and kids, and paid the same monthly amount to his mother,
who lived next door in the little ramshackle camp where the whole
family had started out a generation earlier. Mum called our plot of
land the Ruta Compound.
“We’re just like the Kennedys,” she said.
where and when we got the name Ruta I have no idea. There is no
one I can safely ask, as the members of my tribe are notorious
throughout the North Shore as a band of lunatics who lie even when
the truth would do just as well. So I don’t know when the first Rutas
got on that boat to cross the Atlantic or what port bit its thumb at
them in a final farewell, only that some of us hail from a blister in the
boot of Italy, the rest from that rock the boot’s aiming to kick out of
the Adriatic, Sicily, and that all this emigrating was an old story by
the time my grandmother was born.
10  WITH OR WITHOUT YOU
After his tour in World War II, my grandfather bought a tiny
summer cottage on a river in Danvers, Massachusetts, winterized it
as cheaply as possible, and set up his family there. The street was
called Eden Glen Avenue, a dead- end road surrounded on three sides
by a river and a salt marsh. My mother grew up there and twenty
years later, so did I.
Our home was always too hot, too cold, and too small, but worth
it, my mother insisted, because when we left our windows open we
could smell the tides going in and out. Out back was a field of tall,
feathery reeds fringed by tidal flats of black mud. The river flowed
into the Atlantic less than a mile past our house. Generations of
swans nested in the marsh. Like my family, they had been living there
since before I was born. Every summer a harem of seals swam down
from the Arctic and piled on a floating dock in the middle of the
river. My mother, grandmother, aunts, and I would all walk down to
the beach at the end of Eden Glen to say hello to them, a homecoming parade that marked the official beginning of our summer. The
seals lay one on top of another and sunned themselves all day long,
fat and serene in their big glistening pile. Occasionally, and for no
reason I could ever discern, the whole pod would start barking at the
same time. Then, just as suddenly, they would fall silent.
These animals, this river— it all belonged to us. I decided this in
the way that only children and dictators assume things, by pointing
a finger and saying it is so.
i was afraid of everything in the natural and supernatural worlds
and a river is the nexus of both. The waters surrounding Eden Glen
were home to riptides, toxic waste, dragons, sharks, ghosts, naiads,
and, in the phragmites growing up on the banks, bloodsucking Lyme
ticks. Not until my teens— my late teens, really— was I brave enough
to walk to the river alone. Before that I would get close to the water
only if my mother or my grandmother came with me. We’d climb
down the little hill to the tiny beach that surfaced at low tide. On
clear summer nights, we’d cut through a path in the backyard to the
DOMENICA RUTA  11
small pier built by my grandfather years before. The pier was a scenic
place to watch the sun set, brood, and slap mosquitoes on one another’s arms. No one had the patience for fishing and, besides, you
couldn’t eat anything caught off Eden Glen. The river was too polluted, first by a shoe factory on another tributary a century earlier,
and later by the yacht club across the channel from us. The boats
were always spilling gasoline into the water, and they thought the
shallow water near our house was the best place to flush their toilets.
I remember the grotesque beauty of those hot summer days, when
petroleum rainbows would encircle thousands of dollops of floating
human shit. I would stare in stupefied wonder, as at so many mandalas rising and falling on the surface of the water.
The family that owned the yacht club lived next door to us, and
for their crimes against the river my mother would spit on the ground
whenever she saw them drive by. “Your baby’s going to come out
mongoloid for what you did to that water,” she once yelled as the
pregnant wife drove past our house.
“Mum!” I gasped. “Her window was down. She might have heard
you.”
“Good,” my mother said.
The river was one of the few things in this world that Kathi felt
like protecting. For a while she volunteered with local environmentalists who dispatched her to collect samples of river water in coded
plastic vials. She woke before dawn and sneaked into our neighbors’
yards to take photographs of the marsh grass they mowed illegally
and the seawalls they weren’t supposed to build. There was a lawsuit
at one point, and my mother couldn’t wait to take the stand.
“Maybe I’ll become a lawyer,” she mused.
Real- life lawsuits are utterly lacking in the drama she craved, and,
like anything in Mum’s care, she gave up when the fight became more
work than fun.
With or without my mother’s help, some official code was eventually passed, and the boats were instructed to flush their heads farther
out at sea. I never dipped a toe in that water even then, no longer
from fear but from spite. My mother already had so little attention
12  WITH OR WITHOUT YOU
to give that sharing her with anything else made me mortally pissed
off. I watched that river through the windows of our house like a
jilted lover studying her rival. It was the ultimate antagonist, always
beautiful and never the same. Sometimes the waves licked the grass
gently, like a dog attending to his fur. A strong wind would later chop
the water into a rhythmic progression of crests. These sudsy waves
might later shrink into the tiniest ripples. Or disappear altogether,
like the day I noticed that the surface of the river was as smooth as a
pane of glass. I stood at the kitchen window and stared, elated and
afraid. What caused this to happen? Would it ever happen again?
What did it mean?
The Porter River, I learned it was called years and years after I left
home. It was always just the River to us. Growing up, I thought that
my mother was the one who called in the tides.
kathi and i were the two most outrageous snobs ever to receive
public assistance. My mother had grown up middle- class and, despite the succession of menial jobs she held, she refused to let go of
certain standards. No matter how broke Mum was, she would find a
way to outfit me in designer clothes. The telephone was sometimes
cut off for nonpayment, but you’d better believe she paid that cable
bill on time. Groceries could wait another day, but Calvin Klein and
HBO could not.
I remember nights when Mum would get really high and keep me
up for hours, sitting on my bed and holding forth like a monarch
unjustly deposed. We were not meant for this life, she would say.
There were Cadillacs in our future. A summerhouse on Martha’s
Vineyard. I was going to grow up and marry a Kennedy, she promised. In reality she sent me to a day- care center run by Catholic Charities, where I contracted diseases only babies in Third World countries
still get.
We made do with what we had, and for what we lacked we pretended. Learning our parts from our two favorite movies, Mommie
Dearestand Reversal of Fortune,my mother and I would act out
DOMENICA RUTA  13
scenes in our tiny basement apartment, speaking in affected voices,
wishing out loud that we could be the twisted, tormented millionaires who dominated our imagination. My mother was Sunny von
Bülow, the bleach- blond tyrant in yet another coma, and I was her
devoted maid, trying to wake her up. “My lady,” I would say, brandishing a feather duster, as I stood fretfully at her bedside. She was
Joan Crawford, the abusive egomaniac, and I was her tortured Christina. Mum chased me around the apartment with a clothes hanger as
though she were going to beat me. I would run from her in a fit of
giggles, and when I finally let her catch me, she’d pin me to the bed,
the hanger raised above her head. She would bite her lower lip and
bring the hanger down hard and fast, stopping herself an inch, sometimes less than an inch, above my face.
“Wire hangers!” she’d cry out. It was our favorite game.
during kathi’s sedentary spells, which could last anywhere between a couple of days or several weeks, she lay regally in her bed
consuming four or five movies in a row. My mother was both a movie
slut and a film snob: she’d watch just about anything that was on,
but she would press Record only if the story was truly great.
“What are you doing?” she’d call from under the covers, a smoldering ashtray always close by braiding threads of cigarette smoke in
the air like a loom. “Make me some toast,” she’d yell. “Don’t be
stingy with the butter.” Soup, a fresh book of matches, some chocolate milk— these were the things I was constantly fetching for her.
Then sometimes she’d bellow, “Honey! You have to watch this movie
with me.”
“I’m doing my homework.”
“This is more important. I promise. You’ll thank me later.”
I watched the canon of American cinema in my mother’s smoky
bedroom. The two Godfathers were a staple, and anything and everything by Martin Scorsese. Sonny Corleone, Travis Bickle— these
guys were as real to us as Zeus and Apollo were in the homes of ancient Greece. Mum was a fool for zany real- estate comedies from the
14  WITH OR WITHOUT YOU
forties and their remakes in the eighties. She referred to Mel Brooks
as her boyfriend. But her absolute favorite was Woody Allen. We
raided the local video store for every film he ever made.
“Your grandmother’s grandfather was a Sicilian Jew,” my mother
mentioned as we watched Annie Hall for the thirtieth time. “It’s a
big family secret. Don’t tell her I told you.”
Who knows if that’s true or not, but there was something about
our lives that echoed the paradox of Jewish history: we certainly felt
like God’s chosen people, and that we had been cursed to live in exile.
“My grammy never gave gifts,” Alvy Singer says to his pretty midwestern girlfriend. “She was too busy getting raped by Cossacks.”
Mum and I lay in her big unmade bed, howling from the depths
of our souls.
there were very few books in our house beyond the Agatha
Christies I brought home from the library. The only three books I can
remember my family actually owning were a cartoon book about
Italian stereotypes; an illustrated compendium of— let’s call it The
Variety of Flatulent Experience;and Diaries of Mario M. Cuomo,
the only hardcover of the three. These books circulated the bathroom floors of my mother and all her siblings for most of the 1980s,
until the paper macerated to the pulp from which it came.
I was born with a wolfish appetite for the printed word. Sometime in preschool I learned how to read— the words clam boxon a
chalkboard menu at a fried- fish stand were my first, according to my
father; “Nikki (hearts) Mummy,” in a crayoned note, contended my
mother, though both agreed on the fact that I was no bigger than
four, and that reading seemed to be a skill I’d somehow picked up on
my own. In an extended family where people stumbled— and stumbled proudly— over three- syllable words, such a drooling little fiend
for literature was endearing to no one. (It should be noted that even
the most illiterate of my clan knew their way around a food- stamp
application, a subpoena, and a workman’s compensation claim. We
were nothing if not adroit at manipulating the system.) To the philis-
DOMENICA RUTA  15
tines around me, books were a form of contraband, and curiosity
wasn’t so much a sin as a force of nature that would eventually kill
you. So I read the Salem Evening News,a daily paper that we bought
only when someone we knew made an appearance in the police log.
I read the weekly TV Guide that came in the mail. I read the electricity bill and learned my first Latin, arrears. If it had been possible to
lap words off an aluminum can spilled out of a dumpster, I would
shamelessly have gotten down on all fours.
Hunger like this is pitiful. It never affords you the luxury of distinguishing between useless and important knowledge, between
good and bad words. And, like movies, bad words were another resource in which my family was truly rich.
growing up, my cousins and I were inseparable, all of us shuffling
back and forth to one another’s houses every weekend. My mother
and her sister Penny were the closest in age, and they both had daughters about two years apart, so it was ordained that this cousin and I
would be best friends. On the day that Penny brought her baby home
from the hospital, I had impetigo and my mouth was covered with
contagious red sores. My mother made me stand in the far corner of
the room, where I watched all the aunts gather around the bassinet
to ooh and aah. It was clear that I wasn’t going to get a turn to hold
the new baby, so I cried and cried, my arms reaching out to her. “Fafa,
Fafa!” I whimpered, because I was too small to pronounce my cousin’s name. This gave rise to a lot of ridiculous diminutives. Fafa is the
least nauseating, so that’s what we’ll call her here.
My cousin lived with her mother and stepfather in an apartment
on Interstate Route 95, behind a little commercial strip that included
a tattoo parlor and a pawnshop. There was a nuclear power plant not
far away. For fun, Fafa liked to ride her bike to the plant and throw
rocks against the chain- link fence that guarded it. I would wheeze
behind her on a scooter, whining all the way, “Can we pleasego home
now?”
I found out later that she was lying, that the fence enclosed noth-
16  WITH OR WITHOUT YOU
ing more than an empty lot. Fafa was cunning. You had to respect
that about her. She knew that I’d been traumatized by the news stories of Chernobyl. She’d seen me crying, practically hyperventilating, about the threat of nuclear holocaust to our grandmother, whose
soothing words I will never forget:
“What are you crying about, Nikki? If a nuclear power plant
blows, we’ll all be nothing but fucking molecules. The whole human
race is like a fart in the universe. Pllppllff,we’re here. Pllppllff,we’re
gone.”
My cousin had the fearlessness of a little kid who’s too cute to get
into any real trouble. She slept soundly in a bedroom with posters of
Freddy Krueger and Hulk Hogan on every wall. I would lie in a sleeping bag on the floor, my eyes moving from the cold Aryan glare of the
Hulk to the raw- hamburger flesh of Freddy Krueger’s face, and as
soon as I shut my eyes my mind flooded with scenes of nuclear winter. The power plant was going to blow, I was sure of it, and probably
on a weekend when I was sleeping over. As my cousin murmured
softly in her sleep, I could hear the hollow, rhythmic bleating of an
air raid. Outside, the highways were gridlocked with crashed cars.
Trees turned to columns of ash before my very eyes. Even if I survived (doubtful with Aunt Penny in charge), the radiation poisoning
would make all my hair fall out. No, I decided bravely on my cousin’s
bedroom floor, I’d be lucky to be in the eye of the storm when it happened; I would rather die than go bald.
Fafa was an exquisite child. I was not. I had a wrinkled forehead
and perpetual dark circles around my eyes, as though I were staying
up all night grinding out coke- fueled solutions to the world’s problems. With my black, bushy unibrow, the faint scribble of a mustache
on my upper lip, and my greasy, unbrushed hair, I looked like the
bastard child of Frida Kahlo and Martin Scorsese. Fafa had a cute
upturned nose, rosy cheeks, and dark brown eyes that shone like
gem- polished stones. Her voice was sweet and got adorably squeaky
when she talked about something she loved, like the World Wrestling
Federation or theNightmare on Elm Street franchise.
Watching TV with my cousin became a primer in the art of war.
DOMENICA RUTA  17
We were supposed to take turns, hour for hour, even stephen, but the
only way she could get me to watch her wrestling or horror shows
was to broker a deal. New Year’s Eve 1990, she dared me to watch a
marathon of all five of The Exorcistmovies. Our contract, which we
put in writing, declared that if I stayed awake for all five movies and
didn’t cry I got to pick every movie we watched for the entire month
of January. As this included a whole week of school vacation, I
thought it was more than generous.
A brilliant scam, I can see in hindsight. Fafa was the size of a
peanut, but she kicked my ass thoroughly every time we fought. She
was the uncontestable victor long before midnight, when I passed
out during the opening credits of the first sequel, my pillow soaked
with tears.
I had one trump card, though, and I used it liberally. All I had to
do was look my cousin in the eye and say, “Wrestling is fake, you
know.”
Fafa would explode with tears of rage and willful disbelief.
“You’re such a lying whore!”
Whorewas one of the first swearwords I learned, a noun applicable as both an insult and a term of endearment in our family:
“What are you whores up to this weekend?” “Son of a whore, I forgot
my wallet at home!” Truly manifold in its application, sometimes
whoresimply meant “female.” Often it was used to denote something difficult or obstinate. For example, when struggling to open a
tightly screwed jar of olives, my mother might utter, “What a little
whore.” It had nothing to do with sex or money, unless, arriving at
the bank just as the doors were locked, my grandmother would shake
her fists at the whores inside.
Like a saturnine dialect of Yiddish- cum- Latin, Italian swearwords were a lot safer than their En glish counterparts, in part
because of their obscurity, but more so for the droll linguistic entanglements your mouth is forced to make while pronouncing them.
Buchiach! Schoocci a mentz! Minchia! Incazzato!Precise translation
issues abound, but who cares when a word is so much fun to say?
Sicilian, and my grandmother’s peasant Sicilian in particular, is
18  WITH OR WITHOUT YOU
pretty much untranslatable in En glish. It’s a language composed entirely of consonant pilings and blithe morbidity. So in our family the
word for a woman who literally takes money for sex was never whore
but putan. When I was five, my grandmother defined it for me as “a
woman who only shops at night.”
If cursing has a matriarchal order, and for the Rutas it did, then
cuntis the Queen Mother. This was how I knew when Mum was
really,  really, really mad. She called me so many things, but this Grand
Dame of words she saved for special occasions, those singular episodes of rage that carried on from sundown and well into the next
day. “You cunt, you no- good cunt, you no- good miserable little
cunt . . . ,” she would say in a tired, malevolent hiss, like an infant
having screamed herself into exhaustion. At times like these I clung
to the word little. It suggested a seed of affection, a promise that
when this mood blew over, she would love me again.
Like any of our curses, the c- word had multiple uses. I’ll never
forget the beautiful summer day when my mother dared Fafa and me
to call a stranger a cunt.
“Just say it to anyone,” she said. “I’ll give you five dollars.” We
were lying on our towels at the beach. My mother had coated herself
in olive oil and was holding a record cover unfolded and wrapped in
aluminum foil to reflect more sun onto her face.
“Why?” I asked.
“To see what happens,” she said. “To see the look on the person’s
face. A social experiment. Please. Just do it for me.”
My mother was a creature that needed to lick her fingers and
touch an open wire every once in a while. She required this kind of
jolt. It was the only way she could be sure she was still alive.
I knew from experience that there were far worse things you could
be called than cunt. Earlier that year, my mother and I had gone
shopping at a Neiman Marcus. Mum had somehow earned a thick
wad of twenties and was impatient to spend it, every last dollar, on
something frivolous. None of the salesgirls at Neiman’s would help
us. To be fair, I don’t remember them being rude. They just skated
out of our way as we examined a rack of leather skirts. Kathi was
DOMENICA RUTA  19
insecure and often preemptively slaughtered the nearest human being
to compensate for her feelings. This person was usually me, but on
that particular day it was a young redhead wearing a gold nametag
and too much mascara.
“Do you see this, Nikki? They won’t stop watching us, like we
might steal something. It’s prejudice.” She marched over to the redheaded clerk and shook a fistful of cash in her face. “Excuse me,” my
mother said. “I won’t be treated like white trash by some cunt who
works retail.”
The insult there was not the expletive but that disgraceful word
beginning with r.
Though we tossed the c- word around fearlessly in my family, I
knew that in the outside world it was the hydrogen bomb of curses,
and I was afraid to deploy it at a peaceful place like the beach.
“Mum, please, I don’t want to. Okay?”
“If you don’t, I will,” Fafa piped up. She was eight or nine years
old that summer, and was, to use my mother’s phrase, a lot ballsier
than I was.
A woman in a pink bikini was approaching our spot on the sand.
As much as I prayed that this woman would walk by without incident, something about her seemed to beg for degradation. She swaggered past us, audaciously comfortable in her own skin, trusting in a
world she believed to be civilized.
“Cunt!” Fafa said.
The woman looked back at us with a stupefied expression and
almost tripped on her flip- flops. My mother laughed her loud, gull
screech of a laugh. I felt my face go up in flames and covered my head
with a towel. As soon as we got home from the beach, my mother got
on the phone and called Penny. I remember shrinking in the dark
hallway where the phone hung while she talked to Aunt Penny, her
body keeling with laughter.
“Oh no, no, no,” my mother said into the phone. “You know
Nikki. She’s so afraid of what other people think.”
Later, when I started high school in a new town where no one
knew me, I decided it was a good time to start over and go by my real
20  WITH OR WITHOUT YOU
name, Domenica. Even though this was the name on my birth certificate and on every single legal document pertaining to my life,
Aunt Penny saw it as proof of what an élitist phony I was. She
wouldn’t shut up about it.
“Hey, Nikki— oh, excuse me,Domenica.” She rolled her eyes.
“I don’t get it,” I said to my mother. “It’s not like I’m asking to be
called Lady Di.”
I wasn’t even asking my family to call me Domenica, only the
teachers and kids at my new school. Aunt Penny balked as if I’d
started wearing a monocle and affecting a British accent. That is,
when I saw her, which was becoming more seldom. Penny had sensed
a rift coming between her daughter and me, and though our growing
apart was inevitable, it was still a few years away. I was becoming
more bookish and withdrawn, Fafa more social and tame. My cousin
was two years younger than I was, but she was already submitting
herself to that ritual teen- girl change that demands hours of primping in front of a mirror.
“You’re becoming docile,” I told my cousin. “Your friends are all
cretins.”
Half of me understood what these words meant, the other half
just loved to hear myself say them. Fafa was every bit as smart as I
was, but she had picked up a new skill that would evade me for
years— how to maintain a group of friends. On weekends she preferred going to the mall with them than watching movies with me.
Later that year she stopped returning my phone calls altogether. It
was a silent dismissal, almost harrowing in its civility. Fafa and I were
our mothers’ daughters— we knew how to put on a good fight— but
there were no shrieking Italian curses in our breakup, no fists full of
each other’s hair. I was crushed, but my mother was the one who
cried.
“My sisters hate you,” Kathi sobbed. “They’ve been jealous of
you since the day you were born.”
I couldn’t bear to see my mother in tears, so I tried my best to
comfort her. The cousins were growing up, I explained. Now that we
DOMENICA RUTA  21
weren’t little kids who needed to be watched, there wasn’t as much
reason for the family to get together anymore.
Or so we thought. Although we no longer spent every weekend
together as before, our family still gathered on holidays and birthdays without inviting my mother and me.
“It’s because of you,” Kathi loved to say. “Because you’re gonna
go places and they know it.” She was crying, but she couldn’t wipe
the smile off her face. We had been shunned— a mixed blessing, to
be sure: to my mother it meant winning and losing everything at the
same time.
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WITH OR WITHOUT YOU
By Domenica Ruta
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