With or Without You

by Lauren Sanders

  We tightened together, connected by the pillow, and it felt so good, the two of us bumping together in that colossal bed as she whispered words that no longer made sense. Everything around me twitched and throbbed and flashed as I locked onto her raccoon eyes and shivered, she looked so much like a vampire or witch or Satan lover—all the things I’d heard about her before we’d met, all the things that DID … NOT … EXIST, no matter how she swallowed me like a psychedelic dot. I buried my face in her sweaty neck. She threw her arms around my shoulders and moaned so loudly it sent me into a flush of convulsions before I drifted into the silvery cotton sea.

  That night I dreamed of giant metal hangers sliding up and down mile-long racks of clothing. Opening my eyes to the glittery streams of day I saw a ghostly Edie wearing a sleeveless black dress down to her ankles.

  She floated toward me, her hair pinned up and long white neck exposed. I swear I saw vampire marks and blood. No, those were Hollywood thoughts. But there was a blemish on her neck, a small blot that recalled her face in the moonlight. My stomach sank, and I thought I might throw up.

  She’s still Edie, I reminded myself, still my best friend who at the very worst might be from the planet Andromeda. Before now it had never occurred to me to ask whether she’d come in peace. Mermaidlike, she slithered onto the bed and propped herself next to me. I stretched out my arm to touch her, to make sure I wasn’t dreaming, but she flinched as if I might contaminate her. “Rise and shine,” she said. “We’ve got work to do.”

  Then as quickly as she’d come she slid from the bed into the walk-in closet. I pulled the covers up to my neck and tried to steam the night from my brain. Edie backed out of the closet with a dress in each hand. They were for me to try on. “If we’re supposed to be VIPs,” she said, “we have to play the part. Now tell me, which dress do you like?” I couldn’t answer. My jaw felt as wobbly as the spooky marionette’s. Beneath the covers, the fingers of my right hand slipped down my stomach. “Fine, leave it to me—as usual. I like this one.” She held up a dress with blue sequins and ostrich feathers. “She’s just like my mom, she’s got fat clothes and skinny clothes. Of course the skinny clothes are nicer, but you can forget about those, most of them wouldn’t even fit me.” Fat clothes, skinny clothes, fat clothes, skinny clothes … If you repeated anything over and over again it sounded religious. I pushed the back of my head further into the pillow, my fingers dug inside my underwear.

  Edie dropped the dresses on the floor and sighed. Hand on her hip, looking like a lost cousin of the Addams Family, she said, “What’s the matter now?”

  “Nothing. Can we get stoned?”

  “Not until we’re out of wardrobe,” she smiled. “Jeez, Lil, when did you become such a burnout? Where was I?”

  “My head feels like I spent the night in a boxing ring.”

  “Poor baby,” she said, thighs leaning into the foot of the bed. I pushed my fingers against my crotch, hard. She stood frozen, staring in a way that made me think she knew what I was doing down there. She was smiling, too, as if she were controlling my fingers the way she’d conjured sounds out of the piano I could still hear playing faintly. The same bars over and over again. Like a bad dream. Or insanity.

  I threw off the covers and snubbed Edie’s dresses for my own trip to the clothing bin. No way was I wearing ostrich feathers! Edie looked forlorn, the end of a long line of salesladies who lost commissions the minute they tried to get me into a dress. Nancy’d grown so weary of explaining that she gave me a credit card. I’d been buying my own clothes for years. “The fat clothes are on the right!” Edie shouted.

  “Fuck you very much.”

  “Just stating the facts,” she mocked me.

  I plowed my hands through the fancy dresses and jackets. Never in my life had I seen so many different textures, such sheer and shimmering fabrics. The effect when combined with the early morning sun was almost blinding. Apparently Edie wanted me walking into that studio looking like a goddamn Christmas tree, when I knew you would expect me to be sophisticated and worldly and wise. I’d been through practically the entire fat rack before I found a herringbone skirt and matching jacket that belted at the waist like a trench coat. I imagined myself in the outfit, a war correspondent in a foreign country. Someone serious.

  I backed out of the closet and held up the jacket for Edie. “Bo-ring!” she sang, but I stepped into the skirt which was a pain to zip up the side. My pink kneecaps poked out like shrunken heads. Edie put the pipe in my mouth and lit up. While I smoked she kneeled over the trunk at the foot of the bed and found a transparent black scarf. She wrapped it around her head and came up behind me in the mirror, her chin peeping over my shoulder and black polished fingernails clinging to my hips. “I wouldn’t have thought it but it’s okay,” she said, although together we were a mixed metaphor, the war correspondent and vampire.

  She turned me around, slowly running her index finger down the back of my thigh, and I liked what I saw. Rounded calves heading into an upside down V, the slit saying, come a little bit closer, not that close; closer, not that close; closer … And in that moment, watching the muscles in my lower legs expand and contract, I felt as if Edie had given me passage to a secret colony. So I trusted her with my bare calves and correspondent’s clothing and believed her when she said I looked good in the outfit. She knew about these things; she was a nuclear reactor.

  I AM SAD TODAY. Reading about the secret war in Nicaragua. If what they’re saying is true, the president and his Contras should be jailed one hundred times over. Only he can’t seem to remember any of it and if he doesn’t remember it then it couldn’t have happened. Memory, imagination, it’s a jungle in there.

  I feel bad for the Contras, fighting a war nobody will own up to. At least they can congratulate themselves privately. It’s okay to kill in the name of freedom, but not for love.

  Remember, what I write is circumspect. Isn’t that a great word? It’s one of those SAT words that sounds like the opposite of what it is, bottled-up and overly cautious. I hear a whirlpool of risks and rumors spinning around the cum in the middle, and it should be in the middle. Everything at its core is about sex.

  Ever since I told Mimi about the fat lady in my cell, she’s been making me wear a plug up my butt. Two condoms wrapped around the thick stub of a carrot. To get it out I have to yank it by the dental floss she’s fixed to the end and left hanging from my body like a wimpy tampon string. I removed it the first day to shower, and while soaping up my ass started burning like crazy, as if it had lost its core. That damn plug had given it life. Without it, I felt abandoned. I ran back to my cell and reinserted the thing with a glob of lard I’d swiped from the kitchen.

  She’s been waiting for me to mess up, Mimi. Deliciously anticipating the moment she pulls down my pants and finds the string has disappeared. But I won’t give in without a fight. Not even at night when she forces me down on the bed, asking whether I’ve been good or bad, if she’ll have to throw me to the she-wolves. Going out, the carrot feels like a big fast dump. Next comes the throbbing, her gloved hand on the back of my thigh, the woolen blanket scratching my neck and chin. One by one she fills me with the fingers of her left hand. Her tattooing hand. It takes everything I have not to scream. I’m too feisty, she says, always repeating her words in Spanish as if we were playing it for a Telemundo soap. As if she’s a Contra or something.

  She fucks me like she’s funded by the CIA.

  She fucks me like she’s got the whole world in her hands.

  She fucks me because she can, whenever she wants, and there’s nothing I can do about it.

  I have not shit for three days. Nor have I been eating. At meals I take bites and spit the half-chewed particles into tiny rectangular napkins. The thought of swallowing food is repulsive. I don’t deserve to eat as long as I’m wearing Mimi’s plug. I only allow myself water and orange juice made from concentrate, the kind that’s full of pulp and still tastes bitter. Jack used to squeeze oranges in the ju
icer at our summer house. He would stand over the glossy white sink in his shorts and sneakers, bare ankles peeking above nylon and leather. A casual guy, fun-loving beyond the convention of socks. He always squeezed my glass of orange juice first.

  I say this now, circumspect. You of all people should know that one in the flurry of a public imbroglio (another kick-ass SAT word, though this one means exactly what it should) cannot be too cautious. I have reason to believe someone’s been stealing my notes and smuggling them to the newspapers. How else would they know the things they know? The real question is why should I care? It’s not like I have a life anymore, thanks to you. If only you’d listened. Then we wouldn’t have to rely so heavily on hypotheticals.

  When I see Piper, one of the few women guards, I slip my yellow legal pad into the slit I’d carved in the foam pillow with the sharpened plastic of a Bic. At school I used rollerballs. The better choice for drawing while I was supposed to be taking notes or listening or doing whatever it is regular kids do in school. The art teachers loved me, though the shrinks say they should have discerned my foxy temperament from the way I bent and stretched my women. Picasso had to deal with the same shit. Always slammed for distorting his women, and he never killed one of them. At least not off-canvas.

  Piper unlocks my cell and cuffs me, saying I have a visitor. A current hurls through my stomach, bloated from constipation yet growling as if I’d swallowed a rodent. Nerves have a way of loosening my sphincter, but luckily I’m clogged by the stub of a carrot. There is sudden comfort in this thought. I am guarded by Mimi’s charms just I was shielded by you.

  We make the long walk through the cell blocks, cold today, like a train platform in winter, and quiet as Christmas. I am calm until I see the visitor’s list. Nancy’s perfect cursive. The room goes blurry. I double over in pain. Anonymous woman has finally come. “You got a problem?” Piper asks.

  I can’t speak, can’t get beyond the slicing through my stomach, though I manage to nod no, no problem. She removes the cuffs and frisks me ’cause I’m still in pants. Not a real criminal yet. I fall forward, blurt out: “I have to use the bathroom!”

  “Now?”

  I nod.

  Piper rolls her eyes. “You better not be messing with me, sugarplum.” She flags down another guard to take the group downstairs and leads me to the bathroom. I barely make it inside before vomiting orange pulp and saliva into the sink. My head spins. I run the tap water, flushing my liquids down and out into the river where the gun that killed you still lies. Amazing things can wash away so easily. I try to drink but it’s too painful. Instead I stick my nose under the cold water and snort from its stream. At first I can’t breathe, then I want to sneeze. Finally, a few soothing drops slip down the back of my throat.

  Piper knocks. “Don’t you want to see your mother?” I don’t respond. “Damn, girl, you are getting on my last nerve today. This is what I get for being the good guy, they take advantage …”

  I splash a few handfuls of water on my face and walk outside.

  “Okay, Cinderella, time for the ball,” says the guard, who thinks she’s a comedian. All the way to the elevator and down into the visitor’s room, she cracks herself up.

  The doors open revealing the usual scene in the pit. Family, lovers, friends. I spot Nancy fiddling with a cigarette. Her hair looks shorter, hiked up with mousse and stylish, and she’s wearing tinted glasses. Seeing her I am instantly six years old and I’ve slipped off my grandmother’s roof in the Bronx. They have to call an ambulance. I am lying on the grass surrounded by my grandmother, my grandfather, other kids, and a couple of paramedics when Nancy crawls out of her car. She doesn’t hug me. She barely even looks at me. As if she’s mortified I had the stupidity to fall off a roof. I blank out.

  As I approach the table I see my mother’s upper lip shake. A vital thing. She lights a cigarette. I sit down across from her and pick up the pack of ultralights. “Can I have one?”

  “You smoke?”

  “I used to steal them from you.”

  She nods. “I guess I knew.”

  A ring of red lipstick clings to her filter making it feel like home, and at home we do not talk to each other. We smoke silently, elbows on the table, cigarettes teetering between the first two fingers of our right hands, our inhale-exhale motions in tandem.

  It’s scary how much we resemble each other. Both small-shouldered with chunky hips and thighs, hers more tethered and toned; both redheads, though I’m the natural right down to my white streak in front, which seems to have gone whiter since I’ve been in here. In the high fluorescents it even looks gray. Odd for my age, but I’ve always felt older than the numbers say.

  Nancy smashes her cigarette into the gold cardboard ashtray and asks how they’re treating me. I say okay and joke that it’s probably like rehab only with drugs. She doesn’t laugh. I guess there’s no comparing our incarcerations. She tries to light up again but is too jittery. It’s as if she’s thumb wrestling with her lighter. “Dammit!” she says, and crushes the cigarette between her fingers. Tobacco shavings fall over the table like soiled confetti. I’ll be spending New Year’s Eve in jail.

  Breathing through my nose, I feel the cold water slip down my throat, no less a talisman than the carrot in my ass. I shift positions to make sure it’s still there. Nancy taps her fingers on the table. The lighting is obnoxious. Looking out I can barely see the other faces, each involved in their own thirty-minute dramas, hazy like the city in summertime, when the living was easy and Jack squeezed me fresh orange juice.

  I turn back to Nancy and light a cigarette for her. She nods no as if my igniting the damn stick had tainted it, as if it were another damn competition. “Go on,” I say. “Take it.”

  She gives in, sucking once from the filter before setting it down in the ashtray. “I’m drinking too much coffee these days,” she says, exhaling deeply. “It’s my only addiction—well, that and these. If there’s any justice in the world I’ll get clean and die of lung cancer. Oh well, everything at its own pace. Its own time. It’s eighty-four days I’m clean, Lily; eighty-four long grueling days. What do you think of that? No, don’t tell me what you think, I don’t know if I can handle it yet. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do; I mean, we were so young when we got married, so responsible, and let me just say it was like that for everyone around us. I always told you the hippies were a myth, we were the reality. Both of us struggling through school and with a kid, it’s like we were born old. We just kept thinking if we did everything before we turned thirty we could relax, slow down a bit, but let me tell you, you get used to things really quickly. Do you know what I mean?”

  I nod, a bit uncomfortable with this monologue. Only she won’t stop. It’s as if she’s a talking machine, a jukebox packed with anonymous lingo instead of songs. All of the phrases she’s been pumping into her letters these last few months. One day at a time. You only live once. Bottomed out. There but for the grace of god go I. When she says god, she doesn’t mean the big G or any of his prophets. In anonymous-land they call it your higher power, but even this dogs Nancy. If there is any such thing, it resides within, she says. Eastern philosophy understands this. She’s thinking of checking out Buddhism.

  “You can’t just become a Buddhist,” I say.

  “Why not?”

  “Because you already have a religion.”

  “Oh no I don’t, I never asked for that one. Nobody ever said to me, ‘What religion do you want to be? It’s your choice.’ You’re the one who had the choice.”

  “Some choice.”

  “We always wanted you to choose, when you were old enough.”

  “You said it was all bullshit. What kind of choice is that?”

  “This is exactly what I mean, Lily. You have to learn these things for yourself. Took me almost forty years to understand this, but you’re lucky, you’re still young. And you’ve got all the time in the world.”

  “Thanks … thanks for reminding me.”

&nbs
p; “I’m just being honest. All we’ve got now, Lily, is honesty, right? Do you want to ask me anything? Go ahead, I’ll tell you anything. Just ask me.”

  Why is it whenever anyone says ask me anything I can’t think of a single thing?

  Nancy waits.

  I am anxious, on the spot. Two-dimensional, I could slide right through the space between the chair and table. Slip away. Nancy gives up the wait. She says she and Jack had it all but somehow that wasn’t enough. She says she was depressed since childhood and learned to self-medicate. Who is this woman? I want my snide, sharp-as-manicured-nails mother to joke about the food in rehab, tell me all they served was Wonder Bread, creamed corn, squares of red gelatin. I want to watch her dip into her pill vial, sit down in front of the vanity, and when I tell her I’m going to marry Blair she says okay, sure, whatever, as if the dream of every twelveyear-old girl in America is to marry the drunk stewardess next door. Frame it as question, I tell myself. Ask her why she never once mentioned Blair’s name, not even after she’d been erased and we went to barbecues around the swimming pool that used to be her house. But how do you turn all of this into a question? On Jeopardy they give you the answers first, and Nancy isn’t helping, the way she’s going on about herself. Meanwhile, I’m slip-sliding into the cafeteria-like cacophony, the fuzzy smoke-filled edges. I hike up my hips—carrot still there. It burns from my asshole up through my ears. I imagine suiting up in my disc jockey space gear and floating above this woman in her designer jeans and pearls. Her Chanel No 5 and cigarettes. This woman now dissecting her former life—a, quote, zoned-out, chrome-and-steel existence without core or conscience. Sounds like hippie shit to me. Maybe we’re destined to become what we fear most. My fears were more basic: I became a murderer.