With or Without You Read online

  Out of the static came a Gustave Monde spot I’d seen them film. It had one of those jingles you couldn’t stop singing even though it sucked. “That’s one of Jack’s commercials,” I said, and Grandma and I watched the brunette on screen grab a subway pole, looking so tall and carefree. Grandma was shocked when I said she’d bawled her eyes out in between takes, who knows what about.

  On TV the jazzy voice behind her sang:

  So very sexy, sophisticated.

  Anything goes.

  From your hips down to your toes.

  “Sexy toes?” Grandma said. “Who ever heard of such a thing? She probably has athlete’s foot.”

  I laughed but thought of my father and how he’d followed that brunette with the eyes of a lovesick rebel. You were the sexiest thing I’d ever seen.

  MIMI SITS ON MY BED, watching me finish the tattoo I’m engraving on a lemon. I’d been carrying the piece of fruit around for three days trying to decide what to do with it. Mimi’s instructions were to pretend it’s a person. “If it was somebody, like somebody who was really muscular with a bald head and always wearing tank tops and big gold chains, think what kind of picture does it make? Maybe a bull or a lion. Animals are very good. Most people, they like some kind of animal.”

  “Then what about Angel’s devil?”

  “With her it was different. We needed an opposite. Sometimes it’s just that way. Feel it out, chica. You’ll know what’s right.”

  Easy for her to say. She’s been tattooing for years. Easier, too, when your subject talks. I’ve spent too many hours feeling out this lemon.

  Mimi’s so close I can feel her breath against my shoulder. Her watching makes me insecure about my design. At first I thought of doing a face, a silhouette, Mimi’s profile, but as I squeezed that lemon in my palm thinking about its destiny I became convinced it was like everything else here, captive. I started drawing chains, not the industrial kind, but more like something you’d find in the display case at Macy’s: S chains, box chains, beads, ropes, and herringbone gold. What made it to the lemon resembles a string of pinto beans beginning at the stump on top and winding its way along the bumpy yellow road.

  A final wipe with a tissue and I’m ready to pass it off to Mimi. I am excited, proud, and a little bit scared. Mimi sits down on my bed for her inspection. I don’t want to look nervous so I commit my cramped, ink-stained fingers to picking through the mail. As usual, there’s quite a bit of it. People telling me they hate me, calling me a monster. Nancy apologizing for not being around after school, never meeting with my teachers, and for ignoring me the day I’d come home and declared I was going to marry Blair. I didn’t think she remembered the way she’d laughed, “You sure about that?”

  “We don’t need a big wedding or anything,” I said, having somehow decided that Jack and Nancy should pay for it. Their house was much bigger than Blair’s, it was the least they could do.

  “Help me zip up,” Nancy tapped her shoulder, then lifted her hair into a ponytail. “Jack’s bringing home some people.”

  She sucked in her stomach, which made her more fidgety. The freckles on her back bounced up and down. I pulled the sides of her cocktail dress together and started zipping. “Then it’s okay?” I asked.

  “Okay?”

  “You’ll do it.”

  “Do what?”

  “Have the wedding.”

  “Sure, whatever … Oh shit, it’s late.” She’d turned her attention to the thick gold watch on her wrist. “Lily, do me a favor. Go down and take out the mozzarella salad. The basil’s gotta breathe.”

  I watched her sit down in front of the makeup mirror and adjust the rows of lights on both sides so her face looked peachy. Her eyes were wide and dark like mirrors. Cocaine eyes. When she was drunk her eyelids slid down like Levolors, her hips swaying back and forth the way Blair danced to disco songs, her laughter loud and wet. Like her lips. On coke, those same lips were chapped and dry. Kissing her must have been like sucking on a cactus.

  That day she puckered up to the mirror, layering her desert lips with Vaseline and amber lipstick. I couldn’t tell if she looked beautiful or like a clown. She must have thought it looked okay, if in her rose-tinted reflection she saw anything at all.

  Two months later, Blair was gone and nobody ever mentioned her. But sometimes when we drove past her house I’d catch Nancy staring, waiting for me to confess I’d driven her off and she’d left a hole so deep inside me I’m not sure it ever closed. Maybe those holes never do. We just find new places to drill inside ourselves.

  Every day my mother’s letters get fatter. She’s got lots to apologize for. I write her back and say it’s okay, everything’s Aokay. Odd, how I’m taking care of people outside, when in here I can barely look out for myself. I need Mimi, but I’ll never let her know how much—I learned that from Nancy, too.

  The shrink says my mother felt like she sacrificed her life giving birth to me. I was not planned, never supposed to be there. Some people die a little bit when they have a child and can’t get themselves back. Nancy even had her tubes shut down to prove it. No more babies. Everything about her said Dead End. Except when she was high. I don’t tell my mother what this shrink says. I don’t mention Mimi or the tattooing. I tell her I am reading spy novels in between all of the legal books and that I am going to grow tomatoes.

  Mimi holds the lemon between her fingers, squinting like her eye’s some kind of decoder. I want to yell out, “Tell me, tell me already!” But then I’d pay. A big envelope from my lawyer breaks away from the pack. Opening it I find my mental status examinations.

  “My psycho tests are here,” I say out loud. Mimi looks up for a second, then gets back to studying my lemon. The citrus scent reminds me of blond girls seducing the sun down by the beach. Once I’d tried it, figuring the blond highlights would help my white hairs blend in, but my sticky lemonhead only attracted swarms of yellow jackets and made my forehead itch. Nancy laughed, asked why didn’t I just open a bottle and dye it the normal way. She thought I was such a freak.

  This I remember from my baby book: Lily has peculiar habits. She likes to stick her hands in her diaper and play with the contents. Sometimes she rubs it on the wall. S says encourage experimentation, so we’ve covered her bedroom with tack paper.

  Nancy’d be surprised to see how sane I come off in my MSEs—a bit bored and condescending, but smart. Now maybe the media will stop comparing me to Hinckley and Chapman, although I see the similarities. We were all lonely, all too much in love, but that’s the extent of it. And to the moron reporter who said we’d all been inspired by The Catcher in the Rye: I never read the book. The cover was so boring.

  What they don’t say is that you answered two of my letters, each time telling me to follow my dreams, and even though your letters were typed, yes, typed with eight-by-ten glossies attached, I knew you’d really signed them because the guy at the copy shop in town had explained how to decipher a real signature from a copy under a magnifying glass. I imagine your thin fingers holding a silver pen with your initials engraved on the side, when the words come: Dream, Lillian! Follow your dreams. Your face melts behind my eyes.

  To get back to Mimi, back into the moment, I start reading my mental tests out loud:

  —Who is the president of the United States?

  —Ronald Wilson Reagan.

  —Who is the vice president?

  —George Herbert Walker Bush. The United States senators from New York are Alfonse D’Amato and Daniel Patrick Moynihan. The mayor is Edward I. Koch, governor Mario Cuomo.

  —Okay, okay, that’s sufficient. Do you know who Brooke Harrison is?

  —I refuse to answer that question.

  —Where are you?

  —Bellevue. Manhattan. State of New York. America.

  Western Hemisphere. Earth.

  —Do you know why you’re here?

  —I have no idea why any of us are here.

  —In Bellevue. What are you doing in Bellevue?
>
  —I’m accused of murder and being tested to see if I’m a loon.

  —Did you know Brooke Harrison?

  —Once again, I refuse to answer that question or talk about her on the grounds that it might incriminate me.

  —Lillian, your lawyer hired me, I can’t incriminate you.

  —You mean you work for me?

  —In a manner of speaking, yes.

  —Then stop asking questions you know I can’t answer or you’re fired.

  —Fine. May we continue?

  —Go for it.

  —Okay, I want you to start with the number one hundred and subtract seven. Then keep subtracting seven until you get as close as you can to zero.

  —The other shrink did this with threes yesterday. Why aren’t we doing threes?

  —Just do sevens please.

  I’m reading my calculations when Mimi breaks in. “It’s fantastic,” she says.

  “Would you believe I got Cs in math? Except for geometry.”

  “You made a lemon chain.” Beaming, she dangles the oblong ball in front of me. She’s hyped my design resembles a string of tiny lemons, the fruit kept down by her own people. I’m not kidding, she really says that, and with so much pride I pretend her interpretation had been my intention. You can do that with art. Mimi lifts my shirt and rolls the tattooed lemon around my stomach, kneading harder and harder, like she’s pummeling dough for bread, though I can’t imagine she’s much of a cook. Just as I have trouble picturing her sitting down to dinner with her husband and kids in their kitchen filled with curios. The Virgin Mary and friends. “I had a feeling about you, muñeca,” she hums, so close to my ear it tingles all over. I’m not used to being touched like this, I wish she’d hit me or pull my hair. If I turn my head I can still read my psycho test.

  —How long has it been that you’ve liked girls?

  —That’s a stupid question.

  —Well, when did you know you were a lesbian?

  —Who said I was a lesbian? I never said that. I’m not into labels. Besides, I sometimes like boys. There was this boy, in my senior year—

  Mimi’s hand clamps down on my arms. She shoves the test to the corner of the bed, then sits down on my stomach, holding my arms above my head. “You’re not paying attention.”

  “Yes I am.”

  “Then what did I just say?” She tightens her grip around my wrists.

  I worm beneath her. “The lemon’s down by her own people.”

  She bursts out laughing, throwing her head back, then comes up and smacks my cheek. It’s a different kind of tingling, one I can deal with. “That was maybe three sentences ago. You don’t listen too good. When are you going to learn?”

  She ties my hands above my head with a T-shirt. I don’t resist. Out of the corner of my eye, I spot a couple of women standing outside my cell, watching. I’m strangely impressed with myself, having always been afraid to change pads or take a shit if anyone was within earshot. Being shy requires freedom and I have none. Mimi unzips my pants, pulls everything down. A few wiry black hairs peek over my stomach. She rubs the lemon back and forth over my pubes so hard it burns.

  I kick my legs up behind her, flipping like a caught fish.

  She slaps me, then grabs my chin. “You want to play rough?” she says. Slowly, not removing her eyes from mine, she moves the lemon to my hole, pushing to where it pains a bit, then taking it away. My stomach muscles contract. “You goin’ weak on me now?” She pushes a bit farther this time, then pulls it back. Pushes and pulls so I’m dying for the whole thing.

  Outside they whoop and holler, someone says, “Tastes like Sprite!” and they all crack up.

  Mimi’s face looms smugly. She rolls the lemon up my stomach and I nod my head, no. “You want it?” she says, and I bite my lip. I won’t say so.

  She shoves the lemon up my cunt so hard I gasp. Fucks me royally, and their watching only makes it easier. The lemon half in, half out, she digs her fingernails into my stomach and I scream. Those nails’ve been sharpened into triangles. If I were tattooing her, I’d draw a tiger. She grazes lightly up the sides of my body, under my arms where it tickles, but I don’t dare move or she’ll stick me again. The lemon pops out and I’m fired, afraid she’ll notice and give it to me harder, more afraid she’ll get disgusted and walk away.

  She unties my hands, leans back, and pulls me down on top of her. Taking my hands in hers, she slides them underneath her shirt. I pinch around her nipples. She yanks my head down between them, and I sigh like I’m finally home, though it’s a place I’ve never been. A tit-bit from my baby book: I was raised on plastic nips and fake milk and maybe that’s why it feels so good. I suck like I’m pulling from an ultralight. Hard. “Chica,” Mimi whispers, and I know what’s coming next, one of the first things she’d ever said to me, the thing that no matter how many times she says it never fails to send tiny needles down the back of my legs: “I know exactly what you want.”

  WHAT I REMEMBER MOST about that summer in Scottsdale is you. Not the star you would soon become, but the girl I discovered those afternoons in my grandparents’ condo. You were part of the whole cocktail routine, the everyday drink and settling in. Grandma swore it would help her live to be a hundred. “A drink a day keeps the doctor away,” she said. “What? That’s how they do it in Europe. Ask your friend Mister Monde.” And every day the ladies down by the pool chuckled as Grandpa and I followed her upstairs, passing the glowing red digital clock that said 15:00. Military time. Fifteen hundred hours at base camp meant you were just minutes away.

  Getting there was grueling. I walked back and forth down the long carpeted halls of Palm Court, where the air never changed. It was cold and brittle and smelled antiseptic, cleaned out of everything that actually made it air. What was air anyway? Nitrogen, oxygen, a little carbon dioxide. We’d studied this in science class. I should have paid attention. I wanted to know why the air inside the condo was so different from the air outside. Maybe they’d messed with the elements, mixed in a few chemicals so it was freshened but not fresh, like the air inside a plane. I hated planes.

  I tried holding my breath and got headspins. Goosebumps stretched up my arms and legs. My long shorts did nothing to ward off the cold and made me look like a troll, but a cool one. Leader of the trolls on a troll-filled planet. I proclaimed myself ruler of the hallway.

  At all costs I avoided swimming, which was a shame because I was good at it, but even without teen-girl diapers I hated wearing a bathing suit and girls weren’t allowed to swim in shorts. Out by the pool, I watched some of the other kids, visitors like me, a few I remembered from earlier trips. A girl on the diving board sneered before launching herself into the water, Olympic-like. She was popular at Palm Court. The year before, she’d held hands with a boy near the tennis courts and one afternoon in the game room told me to scram while the rest of them huddled silently. The same kids who jumped in and out of the water.

  The girl’s grandmother stood next to the lifeguard, practically licking his ear. “Richie,” she said, “Richie, are you watching her? I’m talking to you, Richie. Can you hear me?”

  He laughed, said yes. “Of course he’s watching her, he can’t take his eyes off her,” another girl said. Richie ignored her. Only a few years older than us, he had an important job, guarding the kiddie cargo shipped to Grandma’s for the summer. He wore a cowboy hat and Speedo bathing suit. White cream covered his nose. He smiled as the stuck-up diver hoisted herself out of the pool by her palms. Dripping wet, hair plastered against her face, she was all eyelashes. She skipped back to the board. A few kids egged her on from the water. Richie watched. I wanted her to miss. Trip over the board. Crack up.

  It was better in the hallway. I owned the hallway.

  And I liked the art room. Early in the trip I’d set up an easel outside on the terrace. The lady who monitored the room thought I was odd. None of the other kids painted in the daytime, they were all out by the pool. And most never used watercolors. They like
d the plaster sculptures, she said. Prefabricated ashtrays, napkin holders, plaques, animal heads, soldiers—anything they could slobber with tempera paint. Watercolors were more subtle. Better for the oldies, easier on their eyes. Where did I learn to paint?

  I’d been messing with art stuff since forever but had no idea what I was doing. Pretending, I squeezed brushes in between my teeth, splashed diluted colors across the thick paper. My thumbprints dotted the foreground, imitating the desert landscape, craggy sand and far-off mountains, rugged like the surface of the moon but tinted reddish brown, the side that never came out in public. Sometimes the moon got tired of being a black-light poster.

  I met a man named Mickey who painted in oils and wore a smock covered with pineapples, bananas, and mangoes. On top of his easel was a photograph of his grandchildren, two young boys who between them craved more than a few teeth, like the idiot from MAD magazine. Mickey had outlined the photograph on his canvas in pencil and was painting it section by section. He was the most patient person I’d ever met. Every day he tackled another sliver of canvas, a few strands of hair, an eye, the rounded collar of a shirt. I couldn’t get anywhere with my watercolors. It was tough drawing the nubby cactuses and thorns, plateaus adrift in a pale blue sky. Everything I did looked like a bad version of the print by a famous artist we had hanging at home in the den. I think she lived in New Mexico. I used to look into the fossils and sand and think New Mexico was as foreign as China. That was before my grandparents moved to Arizona. Now the desert was familiar. I understood its muted colors and canyons, the big irrigation systems, wells like monsters, wires crisscrossed above everything. Grandpa said it took years to tap enough water to build Palm Court.