With or Without You: A Memoir Read Online Free Page A

experience that there were far worse things you could be called than cunt. Earlier that year, my mother and I had gone shopping at a Neiman Marcus. Mum had somehow earned a thick wad of twenties and was impatient to spend it, every last dollar, on something frivolous. None of the salesgirls at Neiman’s would help us. To be fair, I don’t remember them being rude. They just skated out of our way as we examined a rack of leather skirts. Kathi wasinsecure and often preemptively slaughtered the nearest human being to compensate for her feelings. This person was usually me, but on that particular day it was a young redhead wearing a gold nametag and too much mascara.
    “Do you see this, Nikki? They won’t stop watching us, like we might steal something. It’s prejudice.” She marched over to the redheaded clerk and shook a fistful of cash in her face. “Excuse me,” my mother said. “I won’t be treated like white trash by some cunt who works
retail
.”
    The insult there was not the expletive but that disgraceful word beginning with
r
.
    Though we tossed the
c
-word around fearlessly in my family, I knew that in the outside world it was the hydrogen bomb of curses, and I was afraid to deploy it at a peaceful place like the beach.
    “Mum, please, I don’t want to. Okay?”
    “If you don’t, I will,” Fafa piped up. She was eight or nine years old that summer, and was, to use my mother’s phrase, a lot ballsier than I was.
    A woman in a pink bikini was approaching our spot on the sand. As much as I prayed that this woman would walk by without incident, something about her seemed to beg for degradation. She swaggered past us, audaciously comfortable in her own skin, trusting in a world she believed to be civilized.
    “Cunt!” Fafa said.
    The woman looked back at us with a stupefied expression and almost tripped on her flip-flops. My mother laughed her loud, gull screech of a laugh. I felt my face go up in flames and covered my head with a towel. As soon as we got home from the beach, my mother got on the phone and called Penny. I remember shrinking in the dark hallway where the phone hung while she talked to Aunt Penny, her body keeling with laughter.
    “Oh no, no, no,” my mother said into the phone. “You know Nikki. She’s so afraid of what other people think.”
    Later, when I started high school in a new town where no one knew me, I decided it was a good time to start over and go by my realname, Domenica. Even though this was the name on my birth certificate and on every single legal document pertaining to my life, Aunt Penny saw it as proof of what an élitist phony I was. She wouldn’t shut up about it.
    “Hey, Nikki—oh,
excuse me
, Domenica.” She rolled her eyes.
    “I don’t get it,” I said to my mother. “It’s not like I’m asking to be called Lady Di.”
    I wasn’t even asking my family to call me Domenica, only the teachers and kids at my new school. Aunt Penny balked as if I’d started wearing a monocle and affecting a British accent. That is, when I saw her, which was becoming more seldom. Penny had sensed a rift coming between her daughter and me, and though our growing apart was inevitable, it was still a few years away. I was becoming more bookish and withdrawn, Fafa more social and tame. My cousin was two years younger than I was, but she was already submitting herself to that ritual teen-girl change that demands hours of primping in front of a mirror.
    “You’re becoming
docile
,” I told my cousin. “Your friends are all
cretins
.”
    Half of me understood what these words meant, the other half just loved to hear myself say them. Fafa was every bit as smart as I was, but she had picked up a new skill that would evade me for years—how to maintain a group of friends. On weekends she preferred going to the mall with them than watching movies with me. Later that year she stopped returning my phone calls altogether. It was a silent dismissal, almost harrowing in its civility.