With or Without You Read online

  “Yeah, but I didn’t pick it out,” I nodded.

  “I should think not,” she smiled again. “What’s your name?”

  “Lillian G. Speck.”

  “Well, hello, Lillian G. Speck. I’m Blair.” She pointed a long red fingernail through the fog. “I live over there.”

  “In the water!”

  “Next to it. In a little cottage.”

  “Cool.”

  “Want to see? I have tea and cookies. We can be neighbors.”

  I followed her along the beach and around the back of our trees. Right there was a little white house with a normal roof, two front windows with bunched-up curtains behind them and green shutters outside. It was closer to our place than to the mansion on the other side, but it looked like a key-chain version of the bigger house. Blair said the cottage was originally a guesthouse; now the people in the mansion rented it out. She said she liked listening to the waves before she fell asleep, and it was close to the airport. “Unless I’m flying overseas, but lord knows I try to avoid that. Long flights make my skin flake.” She bent down at the front door and lifted a mat that said, Ring My Bell. Underneath was a shiny gold key. She picked it up and stuck it in the keyhole. “I never take it unless I absolutely have to,” she smiled. “Now you know my secret. Promise you won’t tell.”

  “I promise.”

  I stepped inside behind her. Heat pumped loudly, and everything smelled perfumed. To the right was a tiny kitchen, to the left what looked like a living room. Before I could take it all in, two hairy white cats rushed to the door, sniffing and pushing their faces into my shins. Blair bent down and pet their heads, same as my mother had touched my father. Like she owned him. Staring up at me, she said, “These are my girls, Grace and Marilyn. Yes, you …” She nuzzled her lips against theirs for kisses.

  Rubbed behind their ears. “Such gentle babies … yes …” She looked up at me. “Maybe you’ll take care of them when I’m away. They haven’t been doing well at the kennel. Do you like cats?”

  I nodded yes, though I had no idea.

  “Then it’s settled,” Blair smiled, stood up. She unbuttoned her coat and hung it in the front closet. “May I take yours?” she asked, and I wriggled out of my down jacket. We were both wearing sweatshirts. Mine was plain and bulky, hers cut off at the waist, just below the Delta Airlines logo. When she stretched up I could see her belly button. An inny.

  She told me to have a seat on the couch, while she went to the kitchen, filled a kettle with water, and set it on the stove to boil. The couch was white and slippery. I had to plant myself all the way back so my feet barely touched the floor. Grace and Marilyn jumped up with me, fluffy little armrests. I couldn’t tell which was which. Blair brought over a tin with pictures of butter cookies on the cover—the same one my grandmother kept on top of her refrigerator in the desert—then returned to the kitchen. The house was so small I could see everything. She poured steaming water into two mugs, dropped in tea bags, then set them on a tray with a few packets of Sweet’N Low, tiny containers of nondairy creamer, and napkins that said Delta Airlines. She’d taken them from work. She was a stewardess.

  “Wow!” I said. I’d never met a stewardess. At least not outside of a plane.

  Filling our cups with water, Blair apologized for not having real milk. “I can’t keep it in the house with the girls around,” she said.

  “It’s okay.” I dumped a couple of creams or whatever into my cup. The steam rising from it felt good after being outside, but it started my nose running. I covered one nostril with my finger and sucked up the other, no use: A few seconds later the runoff was back. Blair didn’t seem to notice.

  She kept on talking about the cats and milk. “They love it but it makes them vomit. People think milk is so good for cats … I don’t know where that comes from. Anyway, I feel too guilty drinking it around them …”

  I tried to nod, but felt the snot escaping and tilted my head back. A glob of it landed in the back of my throat. I reached for my cup and choked on a mouthful of steam. Blair smiled. I took a deep breath, relaxed. Then this small cough ballooned into a fit, with so much spunk to it I slid forward, forcing the cats away. I couldn’t stop hacking.

  “Easy there,” Blair said. She reached over and grabbed my cup. Pulled me back up. I was still coughing and smoldering with embarrassment. Feeling like a two-year-old with her hand rubbing my back, her hair so close I smelled the burnt-vanilla scent of the dye. Same as Nancy’s. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s too hot. Here …” She handed me a napkin. “Blow your nose. Sometimes that helps.”

  I blew so hard my eyes watered. I was all liquidy, but she didn’t care. Guess it wasn’t as bad as milky cat vomit. Everyone should have to have pets. I let the coughing go until there was nothing left in me. Blair gave my arm a quick squeeze. “All better, little flower?” she said, her smile so cozy it was worth the goopy mess. I slid back closer to her. Neither one of us said anything for a few minutes as we drank our tea and the cats came back and she turned on the TV and there was the news about the president. Blair shouted, “Good God!” She had no idea, she said, and if she’d known … Wasn’t it just so dreadful? Who would do such a thing? She looked grave. Like stewardesses in airport movies. I wanted to say something, but couldn’t think of anything nice about the president and remembered a teacher or counselor or somebody telling a group of kids who’d been calling me skunk puddle that if they didn’t have anything nice to say they should keep their mouths shut, and I couldn’t believe people actually said that kind of stuff in real life, not just on after-school specials. I decided to zip it. Blair stood up and paced, making me nervous, and I wished she’d never turned on the damn TV.

  She stopped in front of it and bent down. On the shelf below were a few bottles that clanked between her fingers. “He’s a movie star and he freed the hostages,” I blurted out, thinking of what my father had said, only making it sound better. “He’s going to live.”

  Blair lifted a bottle that looked like a genie could make a nice home of it. “Oh, let’s hope so, Lillian,” she said, and popped the cork. The booze rushing into her teacup smelled sweeter than Nancy’s gin. Stronger, too. After a few sips Blair’s face untangled, her smile veering upwards as if someone had attached a line to the corner of her lip and lightly tugged. She leaned her body into mine, everything more rubbery. I liked her like that.

  Watching the news we learned the guy who’d shot the moviestar president had been planning it for weeks, to win the love of a pretty blond actress. It was a Hollywood thing. But an outsider, one of the president’s men, who’d never been in the movies, took the worst of the bullets. They weren’t sure whether he’d make it. Meantime, the president would be out of surgery shortly. The news people said he was expected to make a full recovery. They talked about his strength and good nature. When they brought him in he joked about forgetting to duck, they chuckled. At one point, I looked over at Blair and, seeing her close to tears, wondered why she was so upset about a Republican. Maybe she was an illegal immigrant.

  The more she drank the more teary she became. Like my father when he talked about John Kennedy, but Ronald Reagan … It’s not like he was a real politician. Or a rock star. Blair was quiet and breathy, her shoulders rising into hiccups. She kept saying it was awful, just awful …

  “Are you a Republican?” I asked.

  “Me?” She crossed her hands over her chest. “I don’t even vote.”

  “Then—”

  “It’s just too much. All of these, these guns … and … Any loser can pick up a gun and … I was in the city right after Lennon.”

  “John Lennon!” I shouted. It was like she’d read my mind.

  “Such a tragedy.”

  “I thought about him, too.”

  Blair turned toward me, eyes focusing through her rubbery mask. “I’m so depressed,” she said. “Lillian, will you stay?”

  I SIT CROSS-LEGGED ON THE BED in my cell with a brand-new legal pad and write
your name: Brooke Kelsey Harrison. You never used your middle name. I didn’t even know you had one until that last night out on the Island, when stumbling through a fiery afterglow, I discovered an old-fashioned drugstore and jumped ten feet upon opening the door and hearing the bells announce my arrival. A couple of people looked up. Heart beating wildly in my chest, I lifted a pack of bright orange peanut butter crackers. Overhead light made the plastic glimmer, the squares a radioactive orange, salt chips like diamonds, and to think I’d never noticed how beautiful they were when I used to steal them from the deli, all cotton mouth and craving, and suddenly I wished more achingly than a stoned-out longing for salt and sweet to go back and undo it all, when the words burst through the TV set behind the cash register: Brooke Kelsey Harrison died at St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York. She was twenty-one years old and star of the popular daytime drama World Without End.

  I saw my face on a Wanted poster. Walls closing in, heat fizzling under my sweatshirt, I bolted from the store back to the beach and threw myself down on the sand. KELSEY!? The name hung between the blackening clouds, mocking me. Like an echoed scream on a basketball court … Kelsey … elsey … else … Everywhere I turned was that name and cantaloupe-orange crackers, and my throat lumped up realizing how much of the world I’d barely registered before smearing my shit all over it.

  I throw the pad against the cinder blocks. My heart pounds and I’m wheezing. If only my breath would stop. But whenever I try and hold it I end up coughing worse than that day at Blair’s—I’m a total wimp. I pick up the pad and tear at the pages. Somebody shouts, “Shut the fuck up, psycho!” I fall back onto the bed and dig my fingers into my wrist, my nails wrapping around that vein I know won’t burst without major assistance. Like I said, I never had the guts, not even … What was I supposed to do? Huh? You tell me. After you’d broken the covenant, burned me … literally. I was just trying to help. That play was attracting the wrong kind of people, those who’d heard you took off your shirt and wanted to see Brooke Kelsey Harrison’s tits. Guys, of course. Girls were more interested in the real you. There I go generalizing, but I can because I’ve never felt like a guy or a girl.

  And I don’t give a damn about politics. I would never shoot the president or any other politician. Dead or alive, they become heroes too easily. My father was right. Ronald Reagan was more popular after the assassination attempt, and the actress wrote a magazine article. I am not making this up. It’s how things go in America. Scratch that. My lawyer says I’m not supposed to talk about America, says it makes me sound fanatical. I know the difference between love and fanaticism, I tell him. I know I never really dated you, that you weren’t my actual girlfriend. He says I’m not supposed to mention you, remember.

  So I keep it in, like always. We never needed words, it was deeper with us anyway: the kind of bond most people only dreamed about, like something out of a buddy movie. I didn’t have to tell you what I was thinking, you just knew, and maybe you weren’t my girlfriend, but you could have been once you got rid of that idiot boyfriend and we … I don’t care what they say, you knew why I’d come. You had the look, the dusky glow I’d first seen in Blair. It starts in the eyes, the way a girl holds a stare too long before her face lights up, how she’s not afraid to get her lips wet when she speaks.

  This is different from the women who write me letters. It’s crazy how they want to claim me only to pounce all over me. I never said I was part of their group; never took any oath or entrance exam. They talk about visibility, saying if “we” were seen as normal I might have been less ashamed and found better girlfriends. They tell me I am self-hating. If so, it’s got nothing to do with girls, it’s because of you, Brooke; you who died by the bullet though you visited children’s hospitals and raised money for leukemia research and went on the Jerry Lewis Telethon and talked to every single person waiting in line for an autograph at the mall. That’s what the world saw. What the world needs now.

  Heroes and villains.

  Want to know who’s who? See how many women in here become your biggest fan when I’m around. They sneak up on me in the shower, or when I’m alone in my cell and can’t scream for Mimi.

  If I bleed enough afterwards I can go to the infirmary, where the doctor winces, unable to hold back his disgust. I see myself through his eyes, only a kid. A white girl at that. Privileged. It’s a damn shame. I want to break through the wrist guards and smack his face, left right left, shouting, “That’s the point, you racist motherfucker!” But instead I look down and count the specks. Sad, there’s so many of them. Count the Lillian Ginger Speck, the John Homer Speck, the Nancy formerly Cooperstein never had a real middle name maybe that’s why she’s so fucked up Speck …

  I see the three of us smiling on a Christmas card.

  Wishing you happiness

  and love,

  The Specks

  If I’m lucky the doctor turns away long enough for me to grab a handful of tattoo needles. Mimi says we can’t reuse them because of the virus. Mimi has a strong name: Miriam Adorno Colon. She says her family was royalty back in Puerto Rico.

  Sometimes I don’t know why she bothers with me, why she slipped into my cell those first weeks they had me on suicide watch and told me she was going to take care of me. It was her job, she said, and I wondered if she’d been assigned to me the way they’d given her the mop and pail before I arrived. “Muñeca,” she named me, early on. “You know what it is, muñeca?”

  I nodded no. The word had never come up in Spanish class.

  “It means baby-doll, and that’s what you are now, my little muñeca.” She held open her mouth on the ca, the closest she ever got to smiling, and I was touched. For some reason this tall, muscular woman with sleeves rolled up over her biceps and hair held back with scotch tape had taken a liking to me, even after everything she must have heard. Or maybe because of it. Whatever her reason, I vowed not to let anything slip by me this time.

  I WAS WALKING HOME, NOT UNHAPPY, when Blair found me. It was late afternoon, the sun still alive. Summer. I heard the hum of her 280Z before she idled up and slid down the window, slowly revealing herself: blond hair, sunglasses, bright red lips, stewardess’ uniform. “Hello, little flower,” she said, and I felt her Blairy warmness. Nobody had ever called me anything but my own name. She asked where I was coming from.

  “Camp. The bus just dropped me off.”

  “And where are you off to now?”

  “Home, I guess.”

  “Me too! I was in Houston and Chicago this morning.”

  Yawning, she stretched her arms up and out. Her right palm landed on the stick shift. Blair loved her stick. It was why she’d plucked the 280Z from the used car lot in Bayside. That and the color. White. Like the crests of waves spilling off the Long Island Sound and always wet-looking. Cruising, the wheels even swished. Inside vinyl seats sparkled. White teacups. Blair wiped them down every morning with window cleaner. I could see her driveway from my bedroom window. I got up every morning that summer to watch. Blair. In her uniform or cutoffs. Bent over the front seat, caressing it with a clean white handkerchief, her thighs bumping back and forth as she hummed along with the girls on the radio.

  Someone was singing now. About a man with a slow hand. Easy. Like the words added up to something. Sexy. But I didn’t know that word yet. I thought of the magazines delivered in brown paper packages to my parents. There was always a hose and sudsy water and, sometimes, a stewardess.

  Blair turned to me, lifting her glasses. “Let’s go check on the girls.”

  The lock clicked open. I rubbed my muddy high-tops against the curb. Didn’t want to offend her car. Her. Everything about her was so clean and perfumed. Like my mother. But with Blair it didn’t bother me so much.

  Sunglasses back in place, she pushed the stick into first. The car jumped. “I was going to ask you to feed them,” she said. The stick went down. Her left knee extended. “Then I figured I’d be gone less than twenty-four hours so why bother you.”<
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  “I love those cats.”

  She smiled and shifted into third. I wished I could see under her sunglasses. She had great eyes: big and sweet and always reminding me of the day she’d come up from the underworld and given me tea. Her grip tightened around the stick and she pushed down, all knuckle, strong. We jolted back a second. Suspended in time. I stared at her legs, so close her knees touched when she shifted. She made the most boring stuff look like fun.

  We swished down the road. Blair turned up the radio and swayed. Every so often she sang out a line. Opening my window, I felt the warm air. Smelled the salt and pines. I loved how spread apart the houses were here, the cover of trees. “Mmmm, aren’t those pines heavenly!” Blair shouted, and it amazed me how she always knew what I was thinking, how great it was that we’d moved in right next door, how she always seemed to find me on the nights Jack and Nancy were in the city, like we’d had an invisible, unspoken plan.

  Downshifting, she turned onto our street. “You want to stop off at home?” she asked, slowing up a bit.

  “Nope.”

  Blair pushed her left leg down, her palm on the stick, and shifted back into third. And music pumped from the radio. Her knees grazed each other. And her shoulders rocked as she sang about turning upside down and round and round, and I watched her body go up on the inhale and down on the exhale. Blair was movement, and you couldn’t get that from a magazine, no matter how you twisted and turned the pages.

  The car hiked forward, and I startled.

  “Why are we—?”

  “Look.” My mother was backing out of the driveway. Blair honked, waved. Like it was all part of the song. The muffler in my stomach buckled. I didn’t want Nancy anywhere near Blair. She was mine.

  Nancy backed up behind us, then inched forward and slid down her window. She was dressed all sparkly, wearing tinted driving glasses. Blair turned down the radio. The two cars growled at each other, sides almost touching. Nancy’s was bigger.