With or Without You Read online

  The next morning she flew to Paris. Not long after that she was gone. No note, no forwarding address, nothing. It had been days since I’d seen her, so I went over to her place. Shutters closed up the windows, and when I lifted the mat, the key was gone. I walked around to the bedroom window and through a crack saw the empty white walls. “Blair?” I said, tentatively at first, then screamed and banged on the front door until a man came out of the mansion.

  “What’s going on?” he said.

  “Where is she?”

  “Beats me,” he said. “She never told me where she was going.” She’d left the key in his mailbox a few days ago. At first he was upset she didn’t give notice but after thinking it over he and his wife decided to trash the place and build a swimming pool. I could use it if I wanted, he said, and disappeared up the slate pathway to his house.

  I walked to the beach, sat down on my rock, and stared out at the water without really looking. Afternoon became evening and I knew she’d gotten lost somewhere and couldn’t come home or didn’t want to. I’d driven her away.

  My house was dark and emptier than ever. I went upstairs but turned toward my parents’ bedroom instead of mine. Opening the top drawer of Jack’s dresser, I found the cigar box where he kept his pot under a cover of bunched-up pairs of thin black socks. I rolled a joint and sat back on the steely gray sheets and smoked. This bed was bigger than Blair’s. King-sized, my father had said, and it could have held the entire royal family, even with the pretty new princess, or two parents who entertained after dark, or me and Blair and the girls. I couldn’t imagine sleeping alone every night, never again hearing her whisper, “Give us a hug,” then clamp around me like an octopus. It wasn’t fair. I went into the bathroom and ran burning hot water in the sink and shower. Steam fogged the mirror, condensing on the pale green tiles and black window. Lights dim, my face a skeleton, I punched the mirror until my knuckles stung and little knives shot up my arm. The face was still there, mocking me. Guess she didn’t really need you after all … I picked up Nancy’s round, plastic razor and rubbed the blade against the purple veins in my wrist, watching as a few dots of blood rose along the frayed skin. I cut deeper … and deeper … until I should have felt it. In the mirror, the face: That’s not a kill-yourself kind of razor, shithead.

  There was blood all over the sink; I was numb. I stuck my wrists under the scalding hot water and screamed.

  THE LITTLEST DIV

  MILDRED HARRISON OFTEN TOLD THE STORY of her older daughter’s first performance. It was back in 1970 when, at the tenacious age of five, Brooke was cast as the youngest daughter in the town’s production of The Sound of Music and, as they say in the business, ended up stealing the show. Said piracy occurred during the “So Long, Farewell” number. Some claimed the move was a ruse, calling the girl a little schemer; others chalked it up to sheer stage presence. Either way, the fact remains that after singing her final lines and being scooped up in Mr. Von Trapp’s brawny arms, instead of resting her head on his shoulder as Mildred had seen her do in rehearsals, Brooke beamed a half-toothed grin and winked at the crowd, breaking the time-honored wall between actor and audience. It was an inclusive gesture, generous, and hardly conscious of its cheeky colonization, for it seemed as if that flash of gum and brand-new pearlies had been part of the original script, perhaps a move left behind in the hills of Bavaria to be resurrected when the audience was ready. And that night in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania, they were ready.

  There came a sudden burst of laughter, then a round of extended guffaws prompting all present to rise one by one until the entire auditorium was swept up in the beneficent cacophony of a standing ovation. Mildred herself never having been on the receiving end of such public idolatry tried to imagine the power of those hundreds of hands working in unison. If the clamoring palms could speak, she mused, they might have said, “Enough already, my fingers are numb!” Or perhaps: “Watch your elbow on the negative swing, sir.” Yet for the person on stage—her child, who’d barely lost her baby teeth—the sound of those arms thundering against each other bellowed like an edict from Mount Sinai: We love you, We adore you, We’re crazy about you!

  It’s fair to say that by the time Mildred and Tom Harrison carted their young starlet out of the Blue Bell Recreation Center, Brooke was the cynosure of the night. Half the cast followed the Harrisons to Friendly’s, where Brooke ordered a banana boat and stared out the front window at the stream of station wagons pulling into the parking lot, the green grass and tall trees lit up in the spiral glow of their headlights. Brooke did seem rather taken with the lights, Mildred thought, watching as her daughter’s attention returned to the table, where they were joined by the head of the rec center. “I knew you had it in you,” he said, reaching across Mildred to squeeze Brooke’s nose the way that had always made her giggle during rehearsals. Just then, Ed Barclay, who’d played Mr. Von Trapp, entered the restaurant and smiled warmly, though Mildred wondered if he resented Brooke for running off with the show as his six children watched from the audience. If there’d been any ill will on the kids’ part it was buried in their caroming about the restaurant with toy guns and bandannas and GI Joe dolls, even the two girls, and Mildred silently thanked herself for talking Tom out of having a third child although he’d really wanted a boy. After two you seemed to lose track.

  Brooke waved to Ed Princess-Grace style, a subtle pivoting that reminded Mildred of her grandmother, who’d been something of a small legend on the local Pennsylvania stages back in the twenties. “Maybe it’s genetic,” Mildred said, wiping a drop of chocolate syrup from Brooke’s chin.

  “What is?” Tom said.

  “Her. Tonight. All of this.”

  “Whatever it is, she’s got it. You’ve got it,” the director cooed, again reaching for Brooke’s nose. This time she flicked a spoonful of vanilla ice cream at his chest.

  “Brooke!” Tom tried to sound disciplinary but couldn’t contain his laughter. Neither could Mildred.

  Even the director had to smile, though the ice cream had left a wet spot on the lapel of his brown leather jacket. “Oh, she’s a little star all right,” he said, taking pains to keep his hands folded in front of him until he stood to leave.

  Later that night as they lay in bed, Mildred and Tom decided they would enroll Brooke in acting classes and find her an agent. It was an idea they usually laughed off when someone told them, and someone was always telling them, that Brooke should go into modeling, perhaps do commercials. She had that penetrating yet comfortable gleam in her eyes. A friendly, middle-American smile that said, I am just like you but cute. What Tom and Mildred hadn’t been aware of—though now that they thought about it, they really should have seen—was Brooke’s knack for performance. Back and forth the eager parents volleyed, prompting each other with examples of their child’s singular talent. There was the way she sat with her face pushed up to the TV set, lip-synching to, say, Mary Tyler Moore and reciting the lines at dinner as if she were taping the next day. Then, every morning, she would descend upon Mildred’s makeup mirror, instructing her mother to comb her natural blond hair into pigtails, though the style of the day was either scrappy waves or harsh picture-frame cuts. Brooke, too, always made certain the marble balls of her hair bands matched her outfit, a perplexing goal, or so it seemed to Mildred who’d never thought much about linking the tans and grays and blues she favored and kept her hair pulled back with utilitarian metal barrettes. But Mildred and Tom had unearthed the motive for Brooke’s fashion regimen at back-to-school night when they learned that Brooke had waltzed into her kindergarten class demanding that she read the daily weather reports their teacher scrawled across the blackboard. It was with great pride that they envisioned their daughter standing at the front of the room: “Good morning, classmates … today is Tuesday … the sky is overcast …”

  A weather girl did have to look her best, so Mildred and Tom had decided that Brooke would model her outfits for them and two-and-a-half-year-old Cynthia. Mildred t
hought they should try and incorporate Cynthia into Brooke’s life since the little girl already spent most of her time shadowing Brooke up and down the stairs of their turn-of-the-century farmhouse. For her part, Brooke treated her younger sister as a doll, mute and malleable. And Cynthia played the part. “Head down!” Brooke would say, and Cynthia pretended to sleep. “Eat!” and she opened her mouth for Brooke to stuff with canned corn, raspberries, or bittersweet chocolate chips. “Play dog!” and she curled up in the basket their golden retriever pup had outgrown soon after they’d bought him. Brooke also liked to roll a blanket around her sister’s body so only her head and feet were visible, turning her into a cocktail frank.

  Once Mildred found Cynthia hot-dogged in the linen closet. “Come on, honey,” Mildred said, tugging at the blanket.

  “Nooooooo!”

  “Cynthia!”

  “Book! Book! Book!” Cynthia wailed.

  Finally, Brooke appeared. She was in her cowgirl pajamas and biting into a big green apple. She towered over her tightly wrapped sister. “It’s just like a cartoon!” Brooke giggled.

  “Book!”

  “Brooke!”

  “Book!” Cynthia’s tears fell even heavier, saliva dripping from her nose onto the yellow blanket.

  Brooke reached down and with her appleless hand patted Cynthia’s head. “There, there, hot-dog girl, there’s no need to yell. Nobody’s gonna eat you. Didn’t we talk about sacrifice?”

  “Will you please unwrap her,” Mildred requested of her firstborn, although her distressed tone seemed to give Brooke a feeling of power, as if Mildred were asking her daughter’s permission instead of commanding her. And the way Cynthia quieted down under Brooke’s palm was astounding, the two of them locked in a graceful staring contest.

  “I’m losing patience,” Mildred said.

  “This is for her own good.”

  “Oh, for the love of God, Brooke.”

  “Mother, I’m warning you, just let her finish the activity. She’s got to learn things for herself.” Brooke batted her glassy blue eyes and took a crispy bite of her apple before tramping back downstairs. Mildred watched her little head descend then turned back to Cynthia who looked more comfortable than ever, rolled up in her pink baby blanket on the floor of the linen closet. She sat down in the hallway beside the closet, and after hearing a few tiny snores, unraveled her daughter and carried her to bed.

  The following weekend, Cynthia opened the front door to Mildred’s parents and ran through the house shouting:

  “Book, Book, your grandparents are here!”

  That was weeks ago, when Brooke was merely the core of the Harrison household. Now that she’d become Blue Bell’s favorite daughter, Mildred thought of Cynthia and felt a heavy weight on her heart. She reached beneath the covers for Tom’s hand and tucked it in the cavern between her breasts, her favorite spot. In their first blurry weeks of marriage, after they’d moved in and started working on the farmhouse, it wasn’t all the decorating and household budgeting, nor was it the dinners with new neighbors and Sunday morning church services, the way she’d learned how to sign a check, “Mrs. Tom Harrison,” or even their lovemaking, which always left Mildred feeling a bit illicit, for it wasn’t anything like she’d imagined, and it had been difficult keeping still underneath Tom the way her mother had instructed was essential for impregnation (luckily all that business was over now and they were none the worse for it), but rather, from the beginning, it was the heat of Tom’s hand nestled close to her heart as they fell asleep—a gesture as simple as flashing a cherubic grin—that made Mildred Harrison feel married, and that feeling made all the difference. Whatever happened with their daughters would be all right as long as she and Tom stayed connected, Mildred told herself, although on that cool summer night after witnessing Brooke’s Gretl, even Tom’s cornerstone gesture and all that it implied wasn’t working its magic. They were going to have to watch the girls more carefully from that day forward.

  REFLECTIONS IN RED GELATI

  YOU WERE THE NEW GIRL ON THE SHOW. In the middle of the night a group of rebels had come, blindfolded you, tied your hands behind your back. You woke up in a bed covered by mosquito netting, confused. Pulling back the net, you saw the large flowering cactus scaling the cement wall, guard and protector. You touched the petals, poked your forefinger against a spike, and there it was: a tiny dot of bright red blood, more beautiful than any drippings that ever popped through my own veins. Which were throbbing. You pounded your fists against the door until your knuckles turned pink, then collapsed against the prickly tentacles. I was ambushed by your tears. Pale blue eyes. The desert sky. My stomach clenched and the room started spinning and I was glad I was sitting on my grandmother’s couch but wished she’d go away. She talked loudly during commercials.

  They brought you water, a hard roll, thin slices of meat. They wore party masks and beards like Castro’s. Strapped machine guns to their tan fatigues. You asked, “Where am I? Why am I here?” So small next to them, but defiant. Your cheeks fire-brushed. I couldn’t believe how much you reminded me of Blair, not your face really but the aching, the reaching behind your eyes. Since she left I’d looked all over for that.

  One of the rebels leaned in close. “It won’t be much longer,” he said in a bizarre accent, breath shifting his beard to the left. Behind him, the deep whine of an organ. “We’ve contacted your real father.”

  Your face torched, totally Blair—the look, of course, but I didn’t know it yet.

  Imagine you’re not who you think you are. That when someone, say, a masked rebel, says your father, he’s talking about a different person from the man you’ve always called Dad. I thought about this a lot the day after your kidnapping, the day I started seeing again. I was staying at my grandparents’ condo in Arizona, banished for being kicked out of the final camp, waiting for the man I’d never once called Dad to join us on the weekend. It wasn’t looking good. He was busy, and Nancy had a cold. She’d been getting sick a lot. I pretended I had another father, with a different (dead) wife. A multimillionaire who thought I’d died at birth until he was contacted by the rebels, and when they told him his daughter was still alive, switched at birth, he knew it was true, he’d always known, and set off for the dunes.

  I asked my grandmother if maybe I was adopted. Her hand a soft mitt on my cheek, she said, “Don’t be silly. You’re the spitting image of your father.”

  Was, I thought. Was …

  My grandfather and I set out for the mall in his olive-green Cadillac. I adjusted my thighs on the hot vinyl seat, eager for the air-conditioning to get going. It was almost midday in Scottsdale and sunny. Heat pounded the windows of the old Caddy, gravel snapping beneath its wheels. Back in the Bronx this car was classy, here it seemed rundown, a level up from the metal carcasses left alongside the highway. It roared through the streets, straining to pump cold air through the vents inside while coughing up black fumes outside, the seats covered with silver duct tape to keep the hard yellowed foam from cracking through the vinyl. Worst of all, the Cadillac symbol on the hood was gone, the result of an accident last year. Grandpa swore he’d seen the pole in front of him and then somehow had forgotten it. He was starting to forget stuff—closing the refrigerator door, his favorite radio show, where he’d left his flip-flops. Grandma said he was getting more and more like the president. He even wore cowboy hats.

  I pulled my seat belt across my lap and Grandpa sighed. In profile he looked like Einstein, bushy white hair and eyebrows, thick black glasses, droopy doglike eyes. I wanted to tell him I still trusted his memory, but my gesture had been anything but innocent. There was talk about selling the Caddy, which made me mad. What was he supposed to do, ride horses?

  We drove through the blond mountains, cutting across the highway. Grandpa wanted to visit Radio Shack to pick up a new antenna for the television set. I said I’d go along, not out of camaraderie, but because I’d woken up with brownish stains on the rolled-up toilet paper between my legs
and needed something stronger. It was no sweat losing the old guy and slipping off to the drugstore. I found a small box of pads, the kind I’d been taking one by one from the machine in the girls’ bathroom since the bitch had come. My earlobes pricked as I put the box on the counter. It was the first I’d ever bought; didn’t want any evidence in the house. The saleslady lifted the box, holding it above her head for the whole store to see, like she was trying to get it higher than even her stubby arms would allow. I started to sweat. She lifted her glasses, turning the box, mumbling, “Kotex, Kotex …” It sounded like a missile or fighter plane, blasting smoky cunt farts through the sky. The prickling moved down my neck. I thought, Hurry up, lady! I thought, You wrinkled-up idiot! Zeroing in on the price tag, she lifted her glasses, half-glasses really, attached to a chain around her neck. “It’s hard to see the numbers sometimes,” she said, and all the burned-up hatred since the bitch had come sizzled inside me like a well-done hamburger. Stupid bitch!