With or Without You Read online

  “Did you hear me?”

  More silence.

  “It’s what he thinks—and I want to, too.”

  Almost religious, my father’s wordlessness. A droplet forms in the corner of his right eye.

  “We can get this over with, maybe. Move things along. Know what I’m saying, Jack? Jack?”

  Droplets called back: false alarm: his face ices over.

  “Come on, you don’t understand what—”

  “Stop it, okay, just shut up!” he shouts, and I can’t remember ever hearing such pain in his voice. Around us women talk, smiling when they touch their people. Some couples grope furiously. They should be home on their couches, not sitting in folding chairs, one dressed, the other in green pajamas. Keeps us all equal inside but nobody’s really the same. There’s a hierarchy, a social ladder not too different from on the outside, how pretty girls got picked first for tetherball and my mother always thought she was better than everyone ’cause she drove a fancy car. In here I’m on the high end because of Mimi and because I’m a tabloid prisoner. I get the TV people, the journalists, the famous shrinks and experts in youth crime, even a renowned feminist. Makes me pretty well hated by a lot of girls in green pajamas. I want to explain this to somebody, but the only one here is Jack and he’s in no mood.

  I need a visitor who’s not family, not a professional or parasite. In biology we learned about parasites—most of the time they cause diseases in their host. I want a different kind of parasite, a new disease. I wish I had a boyfriend to slobber over while everyone tries not to look. It’s all boys out here, no girls together, and that’s strange considering how much of it goes on inside. Here it’s about a quick kiss, hands fiddling with zippers underneath the table. Cock. I’ve never seen Mimi with her man. That would piss me off royally and we are trying to control my anger. The rabbi says anger is our way of acting out our mortal fury, the fear we’re going to die expressed as rage at the almighty. I don’t believe in any god, I tell him, and he says this itself is a form of anger.

  My father taught me to be an atheist. He hates religion.

  His mother had believed in the Son of God. She hung his picture in every room and near her bed raised a statue of his dying body. When she passed, she kissed her fingertips then let them graze against his smooth little arms. She believed in his power to drive away demons and heal the sick. To save her people from their sins. She knew what he might say in any situation. He was inside her always. Kind of like you and me, but I wouldn’t say that to anyone.

  The first bell sounds, and I am relieved. No more avoiding my father’s face. Guards start breaking up couples. This is when the tears come, but not mine. Jack stands to leave. “Listen,” I say.

  “Would you just think about it, okay? I’m going crazy in here.”

  “I’m sorry, but it’s better this way.”

  “Better for who?”

  “That’s what Brickman says.”

  “I don’t trust him. I think I need another lawyer—there’s this woman.”

  “Forget it.” He sighs, runs a hand through his hair, and a few black satin strands fall forward. For one second I hate myself for turning his life upside down, making everything unfamiliar to him. Me in here, and Nancy gone, too.

  “Look, Brickman’s your hire,” I say. “He doesn’t know anything about me, he doesn’t want to hear it.”

  “So what? It’s not like your marrying the guy. He’s being paid to get you out of here, not listen to your problems.”

  “My problems are his problems. The other lawyer says—”

  “Oh for Christ’s sake, stop it! I’ve got problems, too, you know. You think this guy comes easy—he’s the best there is and he bills more per hour than Jesus, so I don’t want to hear it, okay? This is your lawyer—Jonathan Brickman—and you’re gonna listen to what he says and stop talking to the fucking rabbi!”

  The second bell rings. Jack puffs out his cheeks, flutters his lips. “Look, I’m—”

  A guard taps his shoulder. “Let’s go, pal. Save it for next week.”

  Jack nods. Opening his arms, he turns toward me. I reach out and hug him around his stomach, hating myself. When I let go, he tries giving me his J.F.K. but is waylaid by droplets.

  I watch him angle his broad shoulders past the guard and hop into the elevator.

  After he leaves, I have someone take me to the library. I check our clippings almost every day as I sit by the window near the case law books. There are a few new articles, some stuff about all the journalists swarming around your family. If she does tell their story, your mother says in Time, it won’t be sensational, and I know it’s a jab at me. Like anything I do’ll be sensational. I shove the magazines off the table and look out the window at the tomato plants. Though it’s late in the season, they’re exploding in red and orange. A girl in green pajamas digs her fingers into the soil and that’s the job I want. They’re almost ready to let me work, my lawyer says. I’m no longer dangerous to myself and others.

  For a while, I watch that girl dig and pick and point to where she wants a guard to cut back the leafy vines. I imagine kidnapping her and filling the position. I grow the fattest tomatoes of the season. They feed the entire city. And win prizes. I end up on television, this time for the right thing.

  I was supposed to be helping Mimi with Angel’s tattoo. A devil with a pitchfork, which Mimi says is happy since her name is Angel. Angel’s not much older than me, but she’s been schooled on the system, in and out of detention centers and jails for drugs, stealing, cutting people up, troubles that began when she was twelve. She says she used to have sex with other girls’ boyfriends just so they’d fight her. Once she participated in a human autopsy. “You know what that is, Long Island?” she asked, and I could only guess. “It’s when you cut somebody from their neck down to their private parts and they’re still alive, you know? You pull ’em open and poke around with their organs.”

  It was straight out of a horror movie, what I might have fantasized when I was really mad, but there is a big jump from saying I’m gonna rip your guts out and actually doing it. It makes pulling a trigger seem chicken-shit. Angel’s one of the toughest girls I’ve ever met. I almost can’t believe she’s got two kids, would have had three if she didn’t miscarry after a fight last year. Now she’s pregnant again.

  Sometimes she lets me put my hand on her stomach and feel the baby. “You have to talk to her,” she says. Her her sounds so much like huh it reminds me of the girls in my high school. They’d all drop their Gucci purses at the sight of Angel with her scarred neck and arms, the extra piece of skin hanging over her right eye.

  “What should I say?”

  “I dunno, anything. Sing something,” she nods, her hand on mine on her stomach. “Sing to my baby, Long Island.”

  Like I’m going to say no to her. So even though I’m tonedeaf and can only remember the tune to the theme from World Without End, I hum to Angel’s stomach. She loves the song and asks me to do it whenever I see her. That’s another reason I’m hiding out in the library—afraid of messing up the baby’s karma humming the theme to a show forced to change more than a few story lines after I murdered its star. Instead, I watch the lucky girl clip tomato vines and try to remember your unsensational face.

  NANCY’D PLANNED A PARTY for my thirteenth birthday and told me to invite some friends. Nothing big, she said, just a cookout. She had the food delivered from the supermarket. Around noon Jack rolled the grill out of the garage and puffed two yellow umbrellas over the picnic table. Nancy brought out the good plates and napkins and silverware. From my bedroom window, I watched the back-and-forth, excited. Blair was coming at two.

  Gustave and Pamela arrived first—they always came for parties—Gustave in one of his baseball hats and dark sunglasses, Pamela in a bright dress and high heels, her thick brown hair styled differently every time. She was Gustave’s second wife and younger than the rest of them. She had been studying photography at a university in France when
they met, love at first look for Gustave. She called him a romantic boy. They were full of champagne bottles and gulpy laughs and loved parties. For my birthday they gave me a little white box with layers of tissue paper and, underneath, a silver necklace in the shape of a thick bubbly L. I said thanks and kissed them on both cheeks the way Gustave had taught me. For years I’d thought this was a French kiss, until I overheard a couple of girls at camp saying, did he French you? did he use his tongue? and knew it had to be more. The rest I learned from movies. Nancy brought out a pitcher of gin & tonics and eyed the necklace. “It’s positively gorgeous,” she said. “Put it on.”

  I did, even though I hated things hanging from my body. “That looks great,” Nancy said. “Doesn’t it?”

  “Fantastic, I’m so glad we went for the silver,” said Pamela, who was wearing quite a bit of it herself. She was born in Morocco where her father had been a jewelry maker.

  “Yep,” shouted Jack, over his shoulder. He was at the grill. “The thing about silver is you can wear it with anything.”

  Talk about the necklace went on for some time. How I was going to love it, could even wear it with jeans, blah blah, meow meow. They were so loud, their gestures exaggerated. Like I was deaf or something. I couldn’t care less about jewelry or my parents or Gustave and Pamela, all I knew was Blair hadn’t arrived. I walked over to the side table where Nancy’d set up hors d’oeuvres, ate a few chunks of bread loaded with brie and pâté, some olives and chips, then poured a g & t and headed to the beach. It was almost three and I was getting worried. What if she’d gotten stuck in another city? Or one of the cats was sick? But she would have called. But she never called. I just went over, mostly at night, and we played the traveling game before squeezing with the girls into bed.

  A few times there was someone else in the bed. I watched from my window as she stepped out of a car that wasn’t her own and a shadowy figure followed her inside. Much as it killed me, I knew I wasn’t supposed to go over. Maybe whoever was there now, but not in the daytime. That’s when I’d go over, boil water for tea, and carry the Delta tray to bed, where she lay with a washcloth over her forehead. “You’re my savior,” she’d smile, and I felt important. We had to get her ready for work. It was tough when she had a transatlantic flight. She was terrified of sailing over oceans.

  But she wasn’t flying, and I’d told her three times about the party.

  Jack called out, “Hey, birthday girl! It’s chow time.”

  I climbed up on my rock and stared at the Sound, its still blue cover a torment. Blair only came out in the mist. I picked up a stick and tried to sketch her in the sand. Maybe whoever in the dark car had taken her into the city for lunch. She loved the seaport. And whoever would want to make her happy, she was so great, who wouldn’t want to make her happy? Thousands of strings clenched around my stomach. I hated Blair.

  “These burgers are raring to go!” Jack said again.

  I hurled the stick out to sea and decided to go find her. Halfway to her house she appeared through the trees, practically glowing in a white sundress and hat that looked like Saturn. She held a package wrapped with a shiny silver ribbon.

  “Didn’t you hear me!” Jack was pissed. “We’re almost ready up there. What are you doing?”

  I suppose it looked funny. Me, standing in the pines with—she was gone! I swallowed and said nothing, I was doing nothing, then crunched over the fallen pine needles behind my father in his chef’s hat. Gustave had taken over at the grill, where he stood pressing a couple of hamburgers with a spatula, charcoal clouds rising above him. “Whoa, Gus!” Jack said. “You’re searing too heavy, the outsides’ll burn.”

  “It’s the way the hamburger should be enjoyed.”

  “But keep mine raw inside!” Nancy called out from the end of the table, where she and Pamela huddled together smoking cigarettes.

  “You are some kind of wild animal or something,” Gustave growled.

  I sat down a few places away from my mother and noticed all the settings around the table. Slow-mo strings worked deep into my stomach. Gustave dropped a burger on my mother’s plate and she nudged it open with her fork. It was pink and slimy but the meaty smell cut a trail to my nostrils. I wanted to sink my teeth into the flesh, feel the juices running down my chin. I was starving AND I felt like throwing up. If I could get away now, I thought, I’d be fine. Escape to my room and watch TV until the sun set and Gustave and Pamela returned to the city and I could get over to Blair’s. “Okay, Lily G-for-genius …” said my father, for a moment taking a break from emptying the grill, though still holding a pair of tongs and brushing the back of his hand against his forehead. Weary. Steamed out. “I burned these babies just the way you like ’em.”

  “I forgot to call back Grandma!” I blurted out. “To thank her for the check.”

  “You can do that later,” Jack said, and plucked those remaining hot dogs, blackened for me. But I was too queasy.

  “I want to do it now.”

  “What’s your problem?” Nancy said.

  Gustave brought over the platter full of hamburgers and hot dogs. “It is finished,” he said, and sat down next to Pamela.

  “No problem, it’s just I don’t want to forget is all.”

  “I’ll remind you … later. And where are all your friends? You did tell them it was an afternoon thing, right? I am not going to start feeding people all over again in a few hours.”

  Nancy stared, slow-mo turning brute, and the tea bag burst. “You don’t have to feed anybody, okay?” I snapped.

  “I don’t—”

  “Nobody’s coming!”

  “Nobody? What happened to—”

  “Leave me alone!” I shouted. “I just want to go to my room!”

  “Your room! Why!?”

  “Let her go …” said my father as I stalked inside.

  Wind carried their voices upstairs over the clatter of silverware, ice cubes shifting in tall glasses, the smell of graying barbecue coals giving way to coffee, cigarettes, and a thicker, sweeter kind of smoke. Summertime. I sat at the window, listening. At first they talked about it, Nancy saying she was at the end of her rope with me, and Pamela comforting, “They’re all sulky at that age,” and they both laughed, which raged me up. I wanted to scream, “I am not sulky! I’m like Gustave: a romantic boy,” but soon they moved on to other things and hummed along with my father’s jazzy records and carried the pitcher of gin & tonics over to the hot tub before the birds, tired of competing with sad songs, settled in for the evening, and the floodlights shot on … like flashcubes going off. A picture: two loud couples in a hot tub at dusk. There’s nothing more depressing.

  When their voices melted into the clanking of plates and turning of car engines, I knew the coast was clear. I went downstairs, sipped from a few half-drunk glasses on the counter, licked their powdered leftovers off a portable mirror, and opened the refrigerator. Inside was my untouched birthday cake. White with blue flowers and lettering: Happy Birthday Lily. I took the box and went over to Blair’s. She opened the door in her bathrobe. “Do you hate me?” she said, so soft and crybabyish I couldn’t stay mad at her. She let me in, poured us a couple of glasses of brandy, and explained that she’d been home all day, something had gotten into her. “I just couldn’t get out of bed,” she said.

  “But I saw you.”

  “What?”

  “Outside. This afternoon.”

  “Oh, honey, I am so sorry,” she said, and put her arms around me. I hugged her back, forgiving her for running off and missing my party. It was okay, I said, all I’d wanted was to be with her, and look where you are, she said. Now, did I want my birthday present? She handed it to me and I didn’t question why it was different from the box she had earlier. This one was in a plastic bag from the art store. I pulled out a gigantic black book and my chest swelled. “For your drawings,” she said. “Now you can keep them all in one place.”

  “It’s amazing.”

  “And whenever you d
raw you’ll think of me.”

  “I think about you all the time.”

  “That’s very sweet.” She stroked my cheek, then looked away. She was sadder than usual and could barely keep her eyes open. “Should we have some cake then?” she smiled, and I nodded, thankful a bit of the Blairyness had returned.

  She put on the soundtrack to A Star Is Born and brought over the cake. For good luck I smeared my name with my pinkie and cut us each a big square. We washed it down with brandy, listening to the record. Blair cried when Barbra Streisand sang at Kris Kristofferson’s funeral. “It’s so sad. He turned her into the person he wanted, made her this big fantastic star, and then hated her for it,” she heaved, and I sat there not knowing what I was supposed to do. She took a gurgly breath. “Come and give us a hug.” She held open her arms. I hugged her and it was the longest I’d ever held anyone, the two of us in that little cottage, candles burning, three-quarters of a birthday cake and a bottle of brandy in front of us. Surfacing, her eyes tinted pink, she said, “Oh, don’t mind me, I’ve been going all day.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing.” She rubbed my arm, then bit her lower lip. “And everything … it’s just …”

  “What?”

  She shut her eyes and took a deep breath. “You know that I tried, right? I really really tried, but I can’t be your mother.” A thousand floodlights beamed in my face. I was red-hot, exposed, and felt like I was being slowly strangled. I didn’t want her to be my mother—who would want to be someone’s mother? If I could’ve I would’ve stuffed that word back behind her faded red lipstick. But it hung between us like a rain cloud. “It’s okay,” she continued, “you’re very smart, you’ll figure it out someday, and they won’t have me to kick around anymore.”

  “What do you mean? Who’s kicking you? Why are you talking like that?”

  She laughed, then her eyes pooled again.

  “Are you okay?”

  Big sigh, head thrown back, she said, “Be a stewardess, they told me. You’re the perfect height for it. A lot of women are too short or too tall, did you know that? There’s a perfect height and a perfect weight.” She’d told me this before, all the rules. Everything down to the color of lipstick she was supposed to wear. “Half the people I know eat laxatives for days before, but I never had a problem with that. It was the flying that got me, Lillian. How’s that for irony? Nobody ever said anything about what happens to your brain when it’s stuck up in the air day after day. Everything’s got something hidden in it … there’s a lesson for you. I can still teach you things, even if …” She was tearing too much to speak. I put one hand on her shoulder, the other on her arm, and managed to get her standing, thinking how weird we’d look if anyone saw us, but that was the beauty of it: it was just between us. We needed each other. I took her into the bedroom and helped her kick off her jeans. “Thank you, darling,” she said, and sat me down on the bed, taking my hands in hers. “When you remember me, Lillian—” she paused for a long breath, “and you will … please be kind.”