With or Without You: A Memoir by Domenica Ruta Read Free Book Online Page A

than the other kids. It needled my mother’s vain heart to see her only child disappear in a crowd, so she would outfit me in sparkly teal stockings and cherry-red patent-leather shoes, marking me as someone different. Hers.
    I wore my uniform every day that first year. I wore it on weekends. I wore it to bed. I wore it so much that the hem of the skirt unraveled. For some reason, I decided that the person who should fix this for me was the school nurse. I remember the way she took a long look at me,brushed my knotted hair, and cleaned my ears with a Q-tip. “You silly girl,” she said, laughing. “Just tell your mother to sew the hem.”
    Asking my mother for help could be risky. It required perfect timing. Her waking hours were mapped by a wave of chemical highs and lows. If I asked her to hem my skirt, I could get a cold shrug of the shoulders. I could get a temper tantrum and an ashtray flung very close to but not exactly at my head. I could get a wild shopping spree for a new wardrobe but not a new uniform. I could get roller skates, a puppy, or the following: “Get the fuck away from me. I can’t stand the sound of you breathing right now.” I could get kicked out of my own house, banished to my grandmother’s, or simply ignored for the next three days.
    I stayed up late one night, listening to my mother and her friends talking and laughing outside my bedroom window. People were coming in and out of the house to blow coke off the kitchen table. I knew when it was my mother and not someone else entering our apartment by the sound the screen door made when it slid open and shut. Like an animal, I could sense my mother’s body from far away.
    Her feet pounded down the hall toward my room. Despite Mum’s diet of cigarettes and cocaine, she was about thirty pounds overweight at this point, and growing fatter by the day. She burst through my door and collapsed onto my bed as if she had just had a massive heart attack and died. I waited for a moment, holding my breath, smiling so wide my cheeks hurt.
    Please don’t die. Please don’t be mad at me. Please.
    She lifted her head and looked at me. Her long bangs fell into her face and I couldn’t see her eyes. Then she smiled. That big, screeching laugh. Okay, I exhaled. We’re okay.
    “Mum, my uniform is ripped.” I showed her the falling hem.
    “Oh, shit,” she said. She sat up and pulled the chain on my bedside lamp. Her pupils were almost gone, small and black as flakes of pepper. She removed a long thread from the skirt and squinted at it in the light.
    “I have an idea!” she snapped. She ran out of the room and cameback with scissors and a roll of duct tape. She cut out strips to fit the length of the pleats and, voilà, my uniform was hemmed.
    “You are a
genius
!” I hugged her neck.
    “I do my best,” she agreed.
    Her work was flawless, until the hot spring day when the glue began to melt and again my hem fell at recess, this time rimmed with gooey silver tape.
    MY FIRST-GRADE TEACHER WAS Sister Agnes, a short, stern woman who had given up a large family fortune to become a nun. She wore pastel blouses and nylon skirts and beige sneakers whose soles had worn down over the years to a smooth, eerily silent rubber pad that allowed her to sneak up on her students unawares. Even on the coldest winter days, I could track the brown elastic of Sister Agnes’s knee-highs as they slowly descended her thick, veiny calves. On either side of the chalkboard, Sister Agnes had stapled a picture of equal size at equal height, both bordered with a scalloped frame of green construction paper. On the right was the Virgin Mary holding the Baby Jesus on her lap. Jesus sat with absurdly dignified posture for an infant, a gold disk like a plate perfectly balanced on his head. Mary was a luminous blonde with dark, hooded eyes that looked exhausted and a little bit stoned. On the left side of the chalkboard was a signed photograph of Larry Bird. Sister Agnes was an old