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

Irish-Catholic New Englander who, during basketball season, would include the Boston Celtics in our morning petitions. To this day, whenever Larry Bird’s name is mentioned, I feel moved to bow my head and pray.
    One morning at school I was sharpening my pencil when I noticed that my finger had become swollen and discolored. The night before, I’d bought a twenty-five-cent ring from a toy dispenser at the grocery store. The ring was painted gold, with a ruby rhinestone sparkling at the center. I couldn’t wait to flaunt it to all the kids at school. I fell asleep wearing it, having tried and failed to pry it offbefore going to bed. Now the circulation had been restricted for hours and my finger was turning blue. I showed it to Sister Agnes, who tried to pull the ring off while I stood beside her desk, then took me into the girls’ bathroom and lathered my hand with soap. When that didn’t work, Sister told me to keep scrubbing while she went to the cafeteria. She returned with a jug of corn oil to grease my finger. She pulled. I pulled. The ring would not budge.
    So far that year, I’d been sent home from school for having bronchitis, strep throat, and a condition that can only be described as hysterical vomiting. There were days I arrived crying so hard I had to be sent to the nurse’s office, where I would lie on a cot until lunchtime. I was late as often as I was on time, and sometimes I took weeks off from school with neither a medical excuse nor a decent lie to explain my absence. One day I showed up wearing no underwear beneath my uniform. My whole body ignites with shame when I remember the morning I sat cross-legged in our circle for story time, and Sister Agnes hopped up and yanked me into another room where I sat alone until a clean pair of underpants could be procured for me to wear.
    “Call your mother,” Sister Agnes told me now as we stood in the dark, tiled lavatory. Her hands clamped angrily around my shoulders, and I could feel her body quaking.
    By that time Mum didn’t have a car anymore. The Shitbox had met its inexorable end and we now relied on friends, family, and strangers for rides. From the front office I saw a black-and-yellow taxicab pull up to the school and my mother step out. It was a warm spring day. The trees were decorated with fuzzy green buds, and pale tulips had begun poking through the mud. My mother flirted shamelessly with the cabdriver during the ride to the hospital. His name was Michael, and he said that he had graduated from high school with my mother. “I played trumpet in the marching band,” he told her. “I had thick glasses.”
    “I didn’t remember him at all,” my mother said to me later. “Of course, he knew exactly who
I
was.”
    Now Kathi was a single mother who needed a ride and Michaelwas the man who picked her up. We waited in the hospital for nearly three hours before a doctor saw me. I showed him my finger proudly, swollen and blue in its little vise. The doctor cut the ring off with an electric saw the size of a dime. When we left the hospital, Michael was still waiting for us. And this was the man my mother eventually married.

Echo
    ———
    F OR TWO YEARS IN MY LATE TWENTIES I WORKED A RELIEF SHIFT at the National Domestic Violence Hotline. We fielded calls from all over the country, around three thousand a day, hundreds more if our number was mentioned on that afternoon’s episode of
Oprah
. For eight hours straight I’d listen to the living nightmares of strangers, stories so hateful they made the average horror flick look tender. A lot of them I wish I could forget. One caller told me about the morning that her husband beckoned her to walk with him into the remote edges of his ranch. Pointing with his finger, he indicated how far and wide his land stretched; then, in the stillness of the morning, he explained to his wife exactly how he was going to kill her—what method and tools he would use to dispose of her body—if she ever tried to