With or Without You Read online

  “Why does it have to be in Spanish?”

  “Because it’s happy.”

  I smile because happy is as good as anything gets for Mimi.

  She uses the word the way other people say cool or excellent. It rolls from her tongue, sweet like strawberry margaritas, like her Spanish phrases I can understand thanks to Long Island’s exceptional public schools. In seventh grade, we were forced to check a box for either French or Spanish. Having no preference, I shut my eyes and dropped my index finger on the paper. It fell closest to Spanish.

  Mimi’s got a guy and a couple of kids outside. They all do; gay for the stay is how they put it, and I get the feeling it’s not something they talk about otherwise. It’s hard to imagine most of them wiping dirty faces and throwing dinner on the table. I get the feeling women have been through a lot of shit in their lives before ending up here. You can see it in their eyes like smudged nickels, their sandpaper skin, no matter what color. Faces blend into one another after a while. But not Mimi’s. She’s got the look, and that dusky aura like the ring around Saturn. It takes my builtin 3-D glasses to see it.

  This time, Mimi’s waiting trial on four counts of armed robbery and reckless endangerment. She shot the owner of an appliance store as she and a friend were loading her station wagon with television sets and videocassette recorders. She says the shooting was an accident and I believe her. She does not use drugs. She is an artist. She sounds like you.

  The handsome attorney my father hired says I shouldn’t talk about you. He’s convinced I didn’t do it, although I confessed to those moron cops, and the evidence against me is mounting. But when the bottom of the Hudson spit up what they thought was my gun, it had no fingerprints and didn’t match the deadly bullet. My lawyer had the cojones to claim my gun never existed. There is somebody else who’s seen it, I warn him, not to mention one house missing a .38 Special and blue Tiffany bag full of bullets. But so far he’s managed to talk our way around that, too. Still, the D.A. postponed my bail hearing, railing to the papers, “We’re going to prosecute this case to the fullest extent of the law!”

  So I’m stuck at Women’s House. Sounds like a safe space: some warm and cuddly hippie commune. But let me tell you, I’m scared. There are gangs in here who kill people in other gangs ’cause they look funny, women who gouge out eyeballs with their fingers or pound in heads with a padlock wrapped in a sweat sock. At first my lawyer tried to get the case moved to juvie, but since I’d just turned eighteen and the crime was getting so much press, the D.A. said I would be treated as an adult. And adults without bail end up here, waiting to be shipped Upstate, where most of the big prisons are—literally, up the river. When I’m in a funny mood, I tell myself it’s like being sent off to college, but usually I hate myself too much to joke. I wish I lived in California where they have the death penalty. I would be gassed for sure because it’s a television culture out there.

  In some ways, death would be easy. A quick electronic current or snap of the spine and it’s over. I’ve been having nightmares about dying—always violently. I’ve been nailed to a cross and stoned, shot by firing squad, had my limbs severed by the Long Island Rail Road. Dreams so vivid I wake up sweating and shaking, my body twisted in pain. So I try to stay awake, each night playing back your death in my head.

  I messed up, I tell Jack and Nancy when they come to visit. They ignore my sloppy confessions. Jack wrings his fingers together. Nancy stares at the couple making out by the front windows. In her eyes, a wandering glow. Hands on the table, the guard shouts.

  Jack asks if I’m eating right, if I’m talking to the shrink. Before they leave, he gives me ballpoint pens and yellow legal pads. Between reading up on my case and apprenticing with Mimi, I’m trying to write my story. One of the reporters asked for it, but I don’t give a shit about him. If I don’t tell it like it is, somebody else is going to get it out there first. I hear your mother’s been talking to some people. I guess she’s got a right.

  The problem is I spend a lot of time scribbling notes and shredding the pages. I feel guilty because paper can be hard to come by, but not for me because I’m a famous prisoner. Because my daddy’s rich and my lawyer’s good-looking.

  So hush, little darling.

  Don’t you cry.

  I DON’T REMEMBER THE WOMB or coming out or any of the other stuff that happens when you’re really young. Without the baby book Nancy kept my first couple of years or my grandmother in the desert, I might never have known it took me only eight months to pull myself up off the floor or that the white streak in my hair had sprouted from a bald spot, that I was a most verbal child, though I made up my own names for everything, and that it was me who’d started calling my parents by their first names, actually one name: Jackanan, short for Jack and Nancy, says my grandmother.

  I spent a lot of time with her early on and then we moved out of the city and then my grandparents moved across the country and I hardly ever saw them. There were a few more houses and schools and summer camps before we landed on the northern tip of Long Island the day the president was shot. The day I met Blair.

  I was eleven years old. You were fifteen. We didn’t know each other yet, but later I discovered it was a special day for you, too: the day you got into the summer program at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. “I was opening the letter when I heard the news,” you would later say. “I thought it was weird I could be so lucky when there was so much violence and sadness in the world. I sat down and cried and cried and cried.”

  Was it as bruised and foggy on that day where you lived? The weathermen in New York all predicted rain. April showers had come early, and Nancy wasn’t happy. The land was more tender where we were going. “The last thing I need is everyone tracking mud all over my new floors,” she said. “You hear me, Lily? No running around!”

  “But what if it doesn’t rain?”

  “Don’t get cute with me, just watch your feet.”

  I stared down at my black high-tops, red laces strangling the tongue, and imagined they were stuffed with dynamite. One wrong move and I’d destroy the world. Was it better to hop and take fewer steps or glide on the tips of my toes? The fate of mankind rested in my feet. Go lightly, I decided, like walking on thumbtacks. I wanted to scream, “Look, Nancy, I’m watching my feet!” But she’d gone back inside.

  I crumpled into my father’s car and took out a small spiral notebook from my back pocket, sketching the moving truck in soft pencil lines. Nancy promised this move would be the last. She finally found the perfect house, she’d said, and Jack and I rolled our eyes. She had a way of getting lost in her own sales. But when Jack had gone with her a week later, he came back gushing over the views of the city and a backyard that folded onto the beach. He was a salesman, too. He said I’d practically have my own wing, and I imagined a house like a bald eagle soaring over the shore.

  Our new house was made of wood. And cinder blocks. And had all these curves and odd-shaped windows and a totally flat roof. It looked like a science lab nestled in the pine trees, a place where pro-nukers hatched plans to destroy the human race. Jack said the house was created in the sixties by an architect who worked with shorelines. We’d had the windows open on the drive out, and as we came closer, I could smell the beach. Slivers of muddy gray waves crashed behind the trees, growing bigger and bigger as we turned into the driveway.

  “Isn’t it amazing?” Jack said.

  I shrugged. “It doesn’t look like a house.”

  “Ahh! That’s the beauty of it. Who says a house has to be something you’d draw in second grade? Huh … who? It’s almost the twenty-first century for Christ’s sake and we’re still living like farmers. Why go back when you can go forward? Be of the time … you hear me?”

  “Where’s the front door?”

  “Wait’ll you see …”

  Jack led me up a path to what looked like a long cylinder. Hidden on the other side was the door. We stepped through, and the Long Island Sound spread out in fron
t of us. The space was huge and open, with different levels and lots of sliding glass. Dipping down a couple of steps, we came closer to the view: big, watery, and expansive. Between the clouds lay bits of Manhattan. On a clear day, Jack promised, I’d be able to see the skyline.

  He cracked open a cardboard box that said Stereo. “First things first,” he winked at Nancy, who was trailing behind a man carrying a couple of chairs.

  “Jack, I need you,” she said.

  “It’ll just take a sec.”

  She grimaced.

  “Come on, baby, we can’t unpack without music.”

  “You’re impossible.” She walked over to him, messed up his hair like he was a puppy. She never touched my head. My hair was knotty and I hated brushing. Only my grandmother ever noticed. She thought I was trying to hide the white streak in front. It meant I was wise, she told me. Some day I’d appreciate it. “Wait, wait, halt!” Nancy grabbed a mover by the arm. “That’s a picnic table. It goes in the yard.”

  “You said garage.” The mover sighed.

  “No, I didn’t. I wouldn’t say that. Anyway, let’s go, move it outside … you’re causing gridlock in here.”

  He hurled the picnic table higher over his head and shuffled off. Jack watched him, smiling. “Poor guys have no idea who they’re dealing with.”

  Nancy was impossible. The movers cowered before her, thick sweaty men reduced to gurgling infants whenever she lifted her clipboard or pointed a finger. Carting the stuff is only half the job, she said. They were supposed to put everything in the right place, and only she knew where that place was. They worked for her, remember. She’d made them lay plastic over her wood floors, and it still wasn’t raining.

  Hooking up the stereo took longer than Jack had planned. The wiring and all. I watched him for a while, then sat down on a folding chair in front of the sliding-glass doors. The waves looked icy. Someone had opened one of the doors, leaving only a screen, and I was freezing. I put on my down jacket but felt silly. Most of the movers were wearing T-shirts. Red. With the name of the company written across the chest. They spoke to each other in another language, and there was a sped-up, silent-movie rhythm to the way they moved, like the colonies of ants in the sidewalk cracks at our old house, rushing in and out of their sandy little hills with sticks and grass and other bugs for dinner. The movers carried furniture wrapped in waffled blankets and tossed box cutters back and forth to snip off the tape. They had their own cooler.

  A static blast rocked the half-empty house. Crazy echoes. Everything stopped, even the mover-ants. Jack shouted, threw his hands over his head, and did his Mets dance to a jingle for a bank. “Whoo-hoo! How do you like that?” he shouted. “I’m the music man!” I giggled. A couple of movers smiled, then went back to their lifting and circling. Jack bent over, turned down the commercial, and started thumbing through the channels … an old Elvis song … more fuzz … stock market numbers … then the voice: “… No word yet on the president, who according to reports is currently undergoing open-heart surgery at a local hospital after a shooting outside the Washington Hilton this morning …”

  “Holy shit!” said my father. A couple of movers locked to a couch stopped dead in their tracks. Some shouted in their language. A few more gathered around, all ant eyes and wide-open mouths. Their world shut down.

  “Nance!” Jack screamed. The movers whispered, so sad and serious I wished I could understand them, wished I had someone to whisper with. Jack looked too weird. He called Nancy’s name a few more times, tried to find a new radio station. Nancy appeared on the balcony above. “Somebody got Reagan,” Jack said. “They shot him.”

  “What? Who?”

  “I don’t know … it’s impossible to get any goddamn information on the radio. I should’ve hooked up the TV first.”

  Nancy stepped down the staircase, her long curls bouncing against her shoulders like she was walking into a ballroom, and joined us around the stereo. Jack found a station with less screaming and commercials. The announcer said the president was in surgery (this one didn’t say anything about his heart). A witness said he’d heard a sound. Like flashcubes going off. Then there was a big commotion. Shouting. The Secret Service tackled the president and shoved him into his limo. Three other people were left lying on the sidewalk. The president walked into the hospital himself, smiling, strong. He was a cowboy. Or he’d played one in a movie. Now he was ruler of the free world. Bullets didn’t scare him. Police had arrested a young man at the scene. An assassination attempt for sure.

  “Not again,” Jack said, and turned down the radio. I thought he’d be happier. He hated the president. Last fall, when there was still hope, he’d tacked a bumper sticker to the refrigerator that said, Anybody but Reagan.

  “This is different.” Nancy touched his arm, and I knew they were talking about John Lennon, who’d been killed a few months earlier. Jack and Nancy had been playing Beatles albums nonstop. Kids at my old school said it was Yoko’s fault for breaking up the Beatles. But they’d also said the white streak in my hair meant I was retarded. Jack said Yoko was good for John. She helped release his genius.

  “Jesus, Lily, I was just about your age,” Jack said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The last time.”

  “With John Lennon?”

  “John Fitzgerald Kennedy,” Jack said, drawing out every syllable. Same name as his own: John-but-everyone-calls-me-Jack. “Didn’t I ever tell you about the day Kennedy was shot?”

  “Only a million times,” Nancy cut him off, then glanced at the movers who’d gathered in a tight circle, a hand on a back, arm wrapped around another neck. A colony. Jack followed her gaze. I wanted him back.

  “Let’s hear it again,” I begged my father. “Please …”

  “Later, Lily,” said my mother.

  “Come on.”

  “She’s right, you’ve heard it a gazillion times,” Jack said. His eyes dropped, and I knew he was remembering how he’d come home from school to find his neighborhood spilling into the streets, people crying and praying and hugging each other, like the mover-ants, others walking around with transistor radios plastered to their ears. It was an Irish-Catholic neighborhood. Jack Kennedy was their guy. So, earlier, they’d gathered in front of tiny black-and-white TV sets, congregated at Kelsey’s, or stood before the window at Sears, proud to see their guy and his beautiful wife parading through Dallas. And then …

  This is the part where my father always got teary, especially if he had a few drinks in him. He even spoke kindly of his mother who’d let him spend the night at his cousins’ watching replays of the grainy loop since they didn’t have a TV set at home. My other grandmother—the dead one—thought television was the devil’s tool. But on that day the devil himself had come to America in the body of man called Lee Harvey Oswald. TV didn’t seem so bad.

  Jack was right; we could have used the TV. To see the shot. Like flashcubes going off. Watch the Secret Service tackle the president.

  “Okay, look, there’s no use sitting around,” Nancy said, and I thought she was talking to me. But she stood with the movers. “He could be in surgery for hours, and we’ve got half the truck to unload. Come on, let’s go!” She clapped her hands. A couple of movers looked shocked. Rolling deep-brown eyeballs. They hated Nancy. I hated her for making them hate her. “You are bosslady,” one smiled, then called out to the others in mover-words. He had big ringlets of brown hair and talked with his hands. He must have been the leader. Jack patted his shoulder. “It’s all right, man, I’ll let you guys know if anything happens.”

  “He is a strong man, this president.” The leader-ant made a fist with his right hand. “He will live.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of.” Jack flashed his JFK smile and the leader-ant’s face softened. They laughed together. When you had his attention, Jack could make you feel like there was nothing or nobody else in the world. You wanted to keep him happy, even if you thought he was full of it. The leader-ant gui
ded his men back to work. Walking toward us Nancy whispered, “Ever think you’d see a bunch of illegal immigrants crying over a Republican?”

  “Doesn’t matter what he was,” Jack said. “Now he’s gonna be a hero.”

  “I’m telling you, this is different, we don’t even know him,” Nancy said, and stalked off.

  “Are you kidding?” Jack popped up after her. “He rides horses. He got the hostages out. He’s a movie star for Christ’s sake; even Kennedy only looked like a movie star …” His words fizzled out. Left was the faint voice of a deejay. Clouds rumbling outside the sliding-glass doors. The waves, though small, were violent and white, thousands of hands shaking up the underworld. Confusion down there, too.

  I slid open a door and slipped outside. A deck led down to our own little beach. One side was fenced in, the other had a few bushes and barky trees. The air smelled sappy, salty. Wind slammed into my face, nonstop stereophonic blasts of static, under a sky so blank and low you couldn’t really make out the horizon. Everything was gray. I walked a few feet to a big rock, climbed up, and stared out at the water. A light drizzle came. More of a mist really. Then a figure emerged through the fog, like it had popped straight out of the underworld. A mermaid or different kind of mover-ant, one that lived in the sea. But the closer it came the more womanlike it was. She wore a tight gray raincoat.

  Stopping a few feet away, she smiled, and I turned my head, thinking one of my parents must have snaked up from behind. People never smiled at me. But it was just the two of us, almost the same height with me on the rock. “Nice day for a walk,” she said.

  Her voice was hard and soft at the same time, and I felt like I’d seen her somewhere before. She said days like this she loved the beach. “The sky, the water, everything’s bursting at the seams.”

  That’s what I was thinking. About her.

  “You live here?” she said, raising her chin toward our house, her eyes all squinty, like she knew how way past ugly it was.