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| ISBN-13: | 9780812983401 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Random House Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 03/11/2014 |
| Pages: | 240 |
| Sales rank: | 1,089,694 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.26(w) x 7.99(h) x 0.63(d) |
Dirty
My childhood took place in the 1980s. i cut my baby teeth on the cardboard record sleeve of Supertramp’s Breakfast in America. Ronald Reagan was president. Mr. Macaroni Mouth, I used to call him: I don’t remember why. Kathi had a special salute whenever his dour face appeared on TV.
“Ba fungul,” she said, brushing her hand under her chin. She flicked her thumb against her top front teeth, shot a middle finger into the air, pretended to spit. “He was an actor, you know. Not even a good one. Westerns. Glorified soap operas.”
My mother hated Ronald Reagan so much that I assumed she knew him intimately—that he was just another of the many in a revolving door of friends she was always complaining had ripped her off. As my mother saw it, the things Reagan was saying about her were getting low-down and personal. What she meant, of course, was her demographic—the single mother on welfare. It seemed every other night there was a special feature on the evening news reviling these women, until they became the fictional antagonist of the straining American economy. Mum took things like this to heart.
There were plenty of times when Kathi was capable of performing the role of the empowered, hardworking single mother. At Christmas, for example, she would take on a second, sometimes third job as a cashier at the local toy franchise just so she could get her hands on the coveted toy of the season. One year it was a pig-faced doll with a cowlick of orange yarn, which I later abused mercilessly by beating its oversize plastic head against the sidewalk. Kathi had hidden this doll under her register so that when the mad rush was over and the store had sold out there would be one left for me, one that she could pay for on layaway.
If there was an indulgence that could be purchased, my mother would find the money for it, any extracurricular curiosity I entertained had her whipping out the checkbook so she could pay someone to nurture it. This is how I became a passionate child-dilettante of ballet, photography, oceanography, and conversational French. At some point when I was eight or nine, I connected the notes of a famous classical piece I heard in cartoons to its composer, Beethoven. Kathi was so thrilled she bought me tickets to a children’s series at the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Every Saturday morning for six weeks, I rode with a troupe of young classical enthusiasts and their parents on a school bus into the city. Knowing she would never be able to wake up in time to drive me to the rendezvous point, Kathi hired a taxi to take me there and paid in advance. When I expressed an interest in computers, she waitressed at a Colonial-themed restaurant that made her wear a bonnet for the Sunday brunch shift. She worked every weekend for two months, long enough to buy me a brand-new Apple IIe, then called in sick one morning and never went back. She worked stints as a bartender, a salesgirl in a tourist attraction presiding over a lobster tank, and a canteen truck driver. This was my favorite of her jobs, though it didn’t last long. I enjoyed the endless stock of Kit-Kats and getting to ride in a great big truck with my mum. She did not enjoy getting up before dawn every day. I think the only reason she took that job in the first place was to go boyfriend hunting, but her prince was not to be found at a construction site.
Kathi was once inspired by an ad on TV to sign up for a course in TV/VCR repair. I remember seeing the thick hardcover textbook open on our coffee table, every single sentence ablaze with my mother’s pink highlighter. A razor and a shortened straw lay on a dish nearby. I think she went to the first two classes before quitting. In a pinch Kathi would sell cocaine, but, like waiting tables, it was a temporary means to an end, never something she counted on as her primary vocation.
Then there were periods when my mother was just as happy to sleep all day and collect welfare. On the first of the month she would hop around our apartment, waving her check at me and singing, “Free Money Day! Free Money Day!” I danced at her heels, rattling off the list of toys I had been dreaming about since the dissipation of last month’s check. My mother would spend every dime of her welfare check immediately on cocaine, new clothes, new coloring books and dolls, and maybe a night or two of take-out Chinese. We lived on the leftovers for as long as possible. By the end of the month we’d be fisting the couch for loose change and I’d be off to the corner store with a pocket full of quarters to buy milk, Slim Jims, and cigarettes.
The two of us lived in the basement of the house her father had built when she was in high school. She rented the one-bedroom apartment from her mother, who charged a hundred dollars a month, or whatever my mother was able to give her. Her brother lived in the big house upstairs, first with a group of single guys and later with his wife and kids, and paid the same monthly amount to his mother, who lived next door in the little ramshackle camp where the whole family had started out a generation earlier. Mum called our plot of land the Ruta Compound.
“We’re just like the Kennedys,” she said.
where and when we got the name Ruta I have no idea. There is no one I can safely ask, as the members of my tribe are notorious throughout the North Shore as a band of lunatics who lie even when the truth would do just as well. So I don’t know when the first Rutas got on that boat to cross the Atlantic or what port bit its thumb at them in a final farewell, only that some of us hail from a blister in the boot of Italy, the rest from that rock the boot’s aiming to kick out of the Adriatic, Sicily, and that all this emigrating was an old story by the time my grandmother was born.
After his tour in World War II, my grandfather bought a tiny summer cottage on a river in Danvers, Massachusetts, winterized it as cheaply as possible, and set up his family there. The street was called Eden Glen Avenue, a dead-end road surrounded on three sides by a river and a salt marsh. My mother grew up there and twenty years later, so did I.
Our home was always too hot, too cold, and too small, but worth it, my mother insisted, because when we left our windows open we could smell the tides going in and out. Out back was a field of tall, feathery reeds fringed by tidal flats of black mud. The river flowed into the Atlantic less than a mile past our house. Generations of swans nested in the marsh. Like my family, they had been living there since before I was born. Every summer a harem of seals swam down from the Arctic and piled on a floating dock in the middle of the river. My mother, grandmother, aunts, and I would all walk down to the beach at the end of Eden Glen to say hello to them, a homecoming parade that marked the official beginning of our summer. The seals lay one on top of another and sunned themselves all day long, fat and serene in their big glistening pile. Occasionally, and for no reason I could ever discern, the whole pod would start barking at the same time. Then, just as suddenly, they would fall silent.
These animals, this river—it all belonged to us. I decided this in the way that only children and dictators assume things, by pointing a finger and saying it is so.
i was afraid of everything in the natural and supernatural worlds and a river is the nexus of both. The waters surrounding Eden Glen were home to riptides, toxic waste, dragons, sharks, ghosts, naiads, and, in the phragmites growing up on the banks, bloodsucking Lyme ticks. Not until my teens—my late teens, really—was I brave enough to walk to the river alone. Before that I would get close to the water only if my mother or my grandmother came with me. We’d climb down the little hill to the tiny beach that surfaced at low tide. On clear summer nights, we’d cut through a path in the backyard to the small pier built by my grandfather years before. The pier was a scenic place to watch the sun set, brood, and slap mosquitoes on one another’s arms. No one had the patience for fishing and, besides, you couldn’t eat anything caught off Eden Glen. The river was too polluted, first by a shoe factory on another tributary a century earlier, and later by the yacht club across the channel from us. The boats were always spilling gasoline into the water, and they thought the shallow water near our house was the best place to flush their toilets. I remember the grotesque beauty of those hot summer days, when petroleum rainbows would encircle thousands of dollops of floating human shit. I would stare in stupefied wonder, as at so many mandalas rising and falling on the surface of the water.
The family that owned the yacht club lived next door to us, and for their crimes against the river my mother would spit on the ground whenever she saw them drive by. “Your baby’s going to come out mongoloid for what you did to that water,” she once yelled as the pregnant wife drove past our house.
“Mum!” I gasped. “Her window was down. She might have heard you.”
“Good,” my mother said.
The river was one of the few things in this world that Kathi felt like protecting. For a while she volunteered with local environmentalists who dispatched her to collect samples of river water in coded plastic vials. She woke before dawn and sneaked into our neighbors’ yards to take photographs of the marsh grass they mowed illegally and the seawalls they weren’t supposed to build. There was a lawsuit at one point, and my mother couldn’t wait to take the stand.
“Maybe I’ll become a lawyer,” she mused.
Real-life lawsuits are utterly lacking in the drama she craved, and, like anything in Mum’s care, she gave up when the fight became more work than fun.
With or without my mother’s help, some official code was eventually passed, and the boats were instructed to flush their heads farther out at sea. I never dipped a toe in that water even then, no longer from fear but from spite. My mother already had so little attention to give that sharing her with anything else made me mortally pissed off. I watched that river through the windows of our house like a jilted lover studying her rival. It was the ultimate antagonist, always beautiful and never the same. Sometimes the waves licked the grass gently, like a dog attending to his fur. A strong wind would later chop the water into a rhythmic progression of crests. These sudsy waves might later shrink into the tiniest ripples. Or disappear altogether, like the day I noticed that the surface of the river was as smooth as a pane of glass. I stood at the kitchen window and stared, elated and afraid. What caused this to happen? Would it ever happen again? What did it mean?
The Porter River, I learned it was called years and years after I left home. It was always just the River to us. Growing up, I thought that my mother was the one who called in the tides.
kathi and i were the two most outrageous snobs ever to receive public assistance. My mother had grown up middle-class and, despite the succession of menial jobs she held, she refused to let go of certain standards. No matter how broke Mum was, she would find a way to outfit me in designer clothes. The telephone was sometimes cut off for nonpayment, but you’d better believe she paid that cable bill on time. Groceries could wait another day, but Calvin Klein and HBO could not.
I remember nights when Mum would get really high and keep me up for hours, sitting on my bed and holding forth like a monarch unjustly deposed. We were not meant for this life, she would say. There were Cadillacs in our future. A summerhouse on Martha’s Vineyard. I was going to grow up and marry a Kennedy, she promised. In reality she sent me to a day-care center run by Catholic Charities, where I contracted diseases only babies in Third World countries still get.
We made do with what we had, and for what we lacked we pretended. Learning our parts from our two favorite movies, Mommie Dearest and Reversal of Fortune, my mother and I would act out scenes in our tiny basement apartment, speaking in affected voices, wishing out loud that we could be the twisted, tormented millionaires who dominated our imagination. My mother was Sunny von Bülow, the bleach-blond tyrant in yet another coma, and I was her devoted maid, trying to wake her up. “My lady,” I would say, brandishing a feather duster, as I stood fretfully at her bedside. She was Joan Crawford, the abusive egomaniac, and I was her tortured Christina. Mum chased me around the apartment with a clothes hanger as though she were going to beat me. I would run from her in a fit of giggles, and when I finally let her catch me, she’d pin me to the bed, the hanger raised above her head. She would bite her lower lip and bring the hanger down hard and fast, stopping herself an inch, sometimes less than an inch, above my face.
“Wire hangers!” she’d cry out. It was our favorite game.
during kathi’s sedentary spells, which could last anywhere between a couple of days or several weeks, she lay regally in her bed consuming four or five movies in a row. My mother was both a movie slut and a film snob: she’d watch just about anything that was on, but she would press Record only if the story was truly great.
“What are you doing?” she’d call from under the covers, a smoldering ashtray always close by braiding threads of cigarette smoke in the air like a loom. “Make me some toast,” she’d yell. “Don’t be stingy with the butter.” Soup, a fresh book of matches, some chocolate milk—these were the things I was constantly fetching for her. Then sometimes she’d bellow, “Honey! You have to watch this movie with me.”
“I’m doing my homework.”
“This is more important. I promise. You’ll thank me later.”
DOMENICA RUTA TALKS WITH JACLYN FULWOOD:
MAKING ART AND A HAPPY LIFE
A native of Danvers, Massachusetts, Domenica Ruta graduated from Oberlin College and earned an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at UT-Austin. She's been the recipient of residencies at several artists' communities, including the Blue Mountain Center, Jentel, the MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo. Her memoir, With or Without You, is her debut. Ruta took a moment from working on her upcoming novel to speak with us about learning from the past and turning it into art.
Excerpted from the November 7, 2012, issue of Shelf Awareness, with permission from Shelf Awareness and Jaclyn Fulwood
Jaclyn Fulwood: In With or Without You, you focus heavily on your mother's influence on your life. What important lessons have you learned from her?
Domenica Ruta: I feel so lucky to have had a mother who could laugh so deeply. For her, and for us, comedy was a rich psychospiritual experience. As a genetic gift, I can't think of anything more important to my survival. I see so many people in this world who live as though a storm cloud hovers overhead; I've never had that problem, because my mother armed me with this sublime sense of humor. Like athleticism, it is in part something you are born with, but also something that needs nurturing to develop. It's the precondition for finding beauty—humor clears away the brush, tills an open space in the mind so that instances of beauty can be seeded and grow. For me it is so necessary in the process of making art and a happy life.
JF: If you could go back in time and talk to your teenage self, what would you say?
DR: This is hard. I'm tempted to beg her to get sober. Preserve those brain cells you are about to slaughter for the next decade and a half! You'll read Faulkner and for a moment touch the divine—you'll "get" it, what he's doing, how you can do it, too—then you'll forget it all a second later. All of your best ideas—the human frailty of your friends and teachers, the searing connections between mind and body, the metaphors echoing everywhere as though in a universal song—will evaporate as soon as you have them. You won't learn as much as you can! You won't grow!
But then again, I needed every scrape and burn to become the person I am. I couldn't learn the easy way—I think few people can. Suffering is a good teacher. So maybe I would just tell that teenager to relax and stop worrying about her body—it's fine the way it is and there are much more interesting obsessions in this world. I would also encourage her to stay out of the sun. And learn Spanish before the plasticity of her brain dries out.
JF: Tell us about your creative process.
DR: For every three to four solid hours of writing, there are an equal number of hours in which I pace, fret, clean, fuss, open and close the refrigerator—without actually eating, mind you, just saying hello to the produce, I guess-then some more worrying and cleaning. On top of that, I've spent enormous amounts of time excoriating myself for this waste of time, which becomes a vicious cycle. Funny how a little validation can change everything. Once Cindy Spiegel bought my book, it suddenly occurred to me that perhaps I was doing something right, that maybe these hours of discursiveness are actually an essential part of my process. So now I do what I've always done—10A.M. to 2 P.M.: fidget; 2 P.M. to 6 P.M.: work—just with more joy and (slightly) less reproach.
JF: We hear that running has become a big part of your life. Every runner seems to have an essential playlist. What's on yours?
DR: I discovered runner's high in those dark first months of my sobriety, and it was as essential to me as antidepressants or acupuncture have been to other recovering addicts. To get me through a tough run, long distance or not, I've relied on selected songs and/or entire albums of the following artists on shuffle: Amy Winehouse, Biggie, Bowie, the Cars, Florence and the Machine, the Fugees, Liz Phair, M.I.A., Michael Jackson, the Pixies, the Stones, the Supremes, the Talking Heads, and U2. Though there have been runs when I just listened to the theme from Rocky on repeat.
JF: Your book is intensely personal. How did you decide to tell such intimate stories to the world?
DR: I tried not to think about that aspect for the first draft. I wrote as if no one in the world would ever read a word of it, and told myself, if the issue of personal revelation becomes relevant, I will be more grateful to have this problem than I will be worried. But this approach is critical to writing anything. There are too many voices telling you that everything is a bad idea from the start. I'd never get anywhere if I considered these things in the beginning stages of development. It's a good thing writing is 90 percent rewriting, because with every new draft, I was growing as a person and a craftsman. I was getting stronger and more confident in my decisions—what to tell, what not to tell.
JF: What do you hope readers will learn or take away with them from your book?
DR: The point of almost all memoirs, especially the subgenre of trauma and recovery, is the simple promise that there is hope. I hope my book expands on this—that, like hope, there is also beauty, everywhere and always, as long as you are willing to search for it. Ultimately I want readers to feel they've been given a good story, something worth retelling.
JF: With or Without You has been compared to The Glass Castle and The Liar's Club. What do you feel sets your story apart from other memoirs?
DR:I intentionally avoided memoirs as a genre during my drinking years because I didn't want anyone to ruin my pity party or kill my buzz. While writing the first few drafts of my memoir I continued this abstention, but this time to protect myself from being influenced. I didn't know what a memoir was supposed to look like structurally or sound like tonally, and this ignorance felt to me like a precious state, the ideal place to start. After a couple of drafts, when I felt like I knew the basic shape and texture of this thing I was writing and was secure in that at least, I went on a memoir spree with an intentionally innocent curiosity. How does So-and-So do it? It was a great experience. I remember the day I read that Mary Karr's mother had the same gun my mum did, and I was so happy. It felt like an omen, or a blessing from the queen. I think all of the mother-daughter stories, the addiction stories, the traumatic childhood stories, speak for themselves. I consider myself lucky to be another voice in this chorus. What we have in common as memoirists is a subjective observation of a common humanity. It's what everyone has in common, whether they write their life stories or not.
1. Ruta begins her book with a scene from her childhood, when Kathi takes her along with her when she goes to destroy someone's car. Why do you think Ruta chose to begin her book with that scene? What does it tell you about Kathi? How are the themes that it sets out subsequently explored throughout the rest of the book?
2. The dedication of With or Without You is "For Her." Why do you think that is her dedication?
3. In her late twenties, Domenica worked for the National Domestic Violence Hotline. "If only all battered wives could be so conveniently sympathetic," Ruta writes. "The real picture is something more complicated, a prism that captures the full spectrum of good and evil and shatters it into fractured pieces of color and light" (p. 4 3). How does With or Without You explore this theme?
4. In a quietly momentous scene in the book, Domenica sees her sister lying on Carla's stomach and whispers a single word. "It wasn't until much later that I understood what had happened that day," Ruta writes. "Inside me was someone new waiting to be born...someone who would devote her life to describing such moments in time" (p. 53). What does Ruta mean? Why is that moment so significant?
5. What do you consider Kathi's biggest betrayal?
6. What would you consider Kathi's best attribute?
7. What do Kathi and Domenica have in common?
8. The extended Ruta family is almost continuously burdened with debt. Explore the theme of debt, both literal and metaphoric, in the book. How do debts affect their relationships and hold them back?
9. Why does Domenica enjoy working in the dementia ward?
10. When Domenica is recovering, how does she find solace?
11. While in Austin, Domenica falls in love with another writer. "It was just as awful as my mother had said it would be," Ruta writes."It was even worse that she was right" ( p. 145). What is Ruta referring to? What is the larger significance of Domenica's realization?
12. Near the end of the book, Ruta wonders why she can't have compassion for Kathi. Do you think that Kathi is deserving of Domenica's compassion? Do you believe that Domenica does not have compassion for Kathi?
A Conversation with Domenica Ruta, Author of With or Without You
One of the things I find most inspiring about your book is the way that your love of reading helped save you—it got you out of your mother's house, and it turned you into a writer. And yet reading wasn't something that was encouraged in your household, where there were no books.It seems like a gift that was naturally yours.What were some of the books that inspired you most early on?Was there a particular point when you thought you might be a writer?
To be clear, my mother never, ever, discouraged me from reading. She thought it was adorable how bookish and nerdy her daughter turned out. And when I was reading I was quiet and out of her hair and she appreciated that. While my love of reading was instinctive, my love of narrative came directly from Kathi. Whether it was someone's drunken monologue at our kitchen table or an actual monologue from a Neil Simon play (or in our case, movie-adaptation), Kathi had a good ear for dialogue and a keen sense of rhythm.
There wasn't much available to me, but I (thankfully) gravitated toward the classics as young reader. I loved books about girls living in another time. Laura Ingalls Wilder, Lucy M. Montgomery. The popular kid-lit of the 1980s never appealed to me. I found it condescending.
I did not want to be a writer when I was a child. I wanted to be a part-time figure skater/surgeon. It was not until high school, when I read Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son, that it dawned on me that writing was something someone like me could actually do.
Despite the strong bond you felt with your mother, living with her wasn't always easy, to put it mildly.Do you wish that your childhood had been more stable, or now, as a writer, do you believe that some of that craziness lent you a greater richness of perspective than you might otherwise have had?Do you feel that your ability to see the world from different perspectives, to see the complexities and ironies in relationships and situations has its roots in your complicated home life?Or is it instead that as a writer, you have the ability to present that world to us as complex and filled with humor and love as well as pain?
Regret is a waste of time. Imbedded in grammar of the conditional mood is all the awkward futility of regret - if I had had another chance... if it weren't for her. All those unwieldy modals and contradictory tenses. It's ugly. I hate thinking in these terms. I can only reflect on the life I have lived and continue to live, and it has been exactly what I needed, every moment, even the bad ones.
There's a line inA Farewell To Armsthat could have been the epigraph of this book -"The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places." No one in this world escapes suffering. And that suffering is a gift if you want it to be. That's the alchemy of art. We are all capable of it. I don't know which came first - the perspective or the voice - only that I am grateful for both.
How do you think your mother might describe the way she raised you?How much awareness do you think she has of what was different about your childhood from those of other kids?
Kathi was the first one to point out how outrageous she was. There was a television show we both loved -Absolutely Fabulous- about this coke-head clubbing fashionista and her mousy, intellectual daughter - and my mother shrieked from her bedroom, "Nikki? Are you watching this? They're just like us, only British!" She had a deep sense of pride in the way she raised me. She sensed the stimulation I needed was different than other kids my age, and she was right. As her diseases progressed, she lost a lot of her fierce wit. The fire of her own intellect dulled and her world view got very, very small, and eventually collapsed. I became to her this two-dimensional traitor, an ingrate.
Your grandmother is one of my favorite characters in the book—practical, foul-mouthed, and totally reliable and devoted to you.Do you have any sense of how she felt about the life her daughter was leading, and how you were being raised?
She was an old-world Italian and lived by a code - You don't open your mouth. You don't interfere. I think she surrendered to the failings of her children long before I came along.
I know you're working on a novel now.How are you finding writing fiction different from non-fiction?
What I love about writing fiction is how often I am surprised by the characters I think I know. Threads are woven in unexpected ways in the world of fiction. Memoir writing is more like ironing a wrinkly linen shirt.
Who have you discovered lately?
I loved Tracy K. Smith's collection of poetryLife on Mars. Donika Ross and Miriam Greenburg are also poets I love, both working on their first collections. Brian McGreevy's Hemlock Grove was the best new novel I read in 2012. Karen Russell is my favorite out of my "generation" of fiction writers. Smith Henderson, a fantastic short story writer, is soon to be selling his first novelFourth of July Creek, which I am really excited to read.
Domenica Ruta, author of the critically-acclaimed memoir With or Without You (Spring ’13) discusses the books that inspired her as a child (though she wanted to be a figure skater/surgeon, not a writer, at the time), the differences between writing fiction and memoir, and “the alchemy of art ” with Discover Great New Writers.
