With or Without You: A Memoir Read Online Free

Federation or the
Nightmare on Elm Street
franchise.
    Watching TV with my cousin became a primer in the art of war.We were supposed to take turns, hour for hour, even stephen, but the only way she could get me to watch her wrestling or horror shows was to broker a deal. New Year’s Eve 1990, she dared me to watch a marathon of all three of
The Exorcist
movies. Our contract, which we put in writing, declared that if I stayed awake for all three movies and didn’t cry I got to pick every movie we watched for the entire month of January. As this included a whole week of school vacation, I thought it was more than generous.
    A brilliant scam, I can see in hindsight. Fafa was the size of a peanut, but she kicked my ass thoroughly every time we fought. She was the uncontestable victor long before midnight, when I passed out during the opening credits of the first sequel, my pillow soaked with tears.
    I had one trump card, though, and I used it liberally. All I had to do was look my cousin in the eye and say, “Wrestling is fake, you know.”
    Fafa would explode with tears of rage and willful disbelief. “You’re such a lying whore!”
    Whore
was one of the first swearwords I learned, a noun applicable as both an insult and a term of endearment in our family: “What are you whores up to this weekend?” “Son of a whore, I forgot my wallet at home!” Truly manifold in its application, sometimes
whore
simply meant “female.” Often it was used to denote something difficult or obstinate. For example, when struggling to open a tightly screwed jar of olives, my mother might utter, “What a little whore.” It had nothing to do with sex or money, unless, arriving at the bank just as the doors were locked, my grandmother would shake her fists at the whores inside.
    Like a saturnine dialect of Yiddish-cum-Latin, Italian swearwords were a lot safer than their English counterparts, in part because of their obscurity, but more so for the droll linguistic entanglements your mouth is forced to make while pronouncing them.
Buchiach! Schoocci a mentz! Minchia! Incazzato!
Precise translation issues abound, but who cares when a word is so much fun to say? Sicilian, and my grandmother’s peasant Sicilian in particular, ispretty much untranslatable in English. It’s a language composed of consonant pilings and blithe morbidity. So in our family the word for a woman who literally takes money for sex was never
whore
but
putan
. When I was five, my grandmother defined it for me as “a woman who only shops at night.”
    If cursing has a matriarchal order, and for the Rutas it did, then
cunt
is the Queen Mother. This was how I knew when Mum was really, really,
really
mad. She called me so many things, but this Grand Dame of words she saved for special occasions, those singular episodes of rage that carried on from sundown and well into the next day. “You cunt, you no-good cunt, you no-good miserable little cunt …,” she would say in a tired, malevolent hiss, like an infant having screamed herself into exhaustion. At times like these I clung to the word
little
. It suggested a seed of affection, a promise that when this mood blew over, she would love me again.
    Like any of our curses, the
c
-word had multiple uses. I’ll never forget the beautiful summer day when my mother dared Fafa and me to call a stranger a cunt.
    “Just say it to anyone,” she said. “I’ll give you five dollars.” We were lying on our towels at the beach. My mother had coated herself in olive oil and was holding a record cover unfolded and wrapped in aluminum foil to reflect more sun onto her face.
    “Why?” I asked.
    “To see what happens,” she said. “To see the look on the person’s face. A social experiment. Please. Just do it for me.”
    My mother was a creature that needed to lick her fingers and touch an open wire every once in a while. She required this kind of jolt. It was the only way she could be sure she was still alive.
    I knew from