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

Fafa and I were our mothers’ daughters—we knew how to put on a good fight—but there were no shrieking Italian curses in our breakup, no fists full of each other’s hair. I was crushed, but my mother was the one who cried.
    “My sisters hate you,” Kathi sobbed. “They’ve been jealous of you since the day you were born.”
    I couldn’t bear to see my mother in tears, so I tried my best to comfort her. The cousins were growing up, I explained. Now that weweren’t little kids who needed to be watched, there wasn’t as much reason for the family to get together anymore.
    Or so we thought. Although we no longer spent every weekend together as before, our family still gathered on holidays and birthdays without inviting my mother and me.
    “It’s because of you,” Kathi loved to say. “Because you’re gonna go places and they know it.” She was crying, but she couldn’t wipe the smile off her face. We had been shunned—a mixed blessing, to be sure: to my mother it meant winning and losing everything at the same time.

Bedtime Stories
    ———
    “N EVER FALL IN LOVE WITH A BLOND,” MY MOTHER WARNED ME .
    “Why not?” I said, though there was no point in asking. Kathi was high and in the mood for a soliloquy. She had a trove of stories that she loved to tell over and over. My role was to shut up and listen, even if I already knew where the story was headed. Most of the time, I did.
    Kathi had somehow gotten wise to a scientific study that found that the human eye registers light colors before it does dark, ergo blond hair before black or brown. “Why do you think Cinderella and the Virgin Mary are always blondes? It’s utter bullshit,” she said. Blond hair, she went on to explain, is the first thing you see when you enter a crowded high-school gymnasium or a party in the dark woods.
    “And you think it’s love at first sight. But it’s not. Just your eyes playing tricks,” she said bitterly. “Blonds. They’re the vainest people on earth.”
    She was obviously talking about my father.
    MY PARENTS MET AS teenagers, when both of them were still high on the most dangerous intoxicant, the promise that good looks were enough to deliver them to their dreams. As the legend goes, seventeen-year-oldKathi was babysitting for a rich family that also employed a blond-haired, blue-eyed boy to mow their lawn. She watched him through the window for a few weeks before making her move.
    “When are you going to take me out to dinner?”
    “Tonight?” Zeke offered. He was nineteen, cute, and defenseless.
    I can imagine my young mother pulling my father’s blond hair, clawing his back with her long, sharp nails, my father grunting and roaring on top of her. A sickening thought for most people, it gives me great comfort now. Once there was love, brutal physical love, the kind that makes people scream, then wake up in each other’s arms hungry, tired, and a little sore.
    “He looked just like Robert Redford,” Mum used to say.
    Looking at the pictures now, I think, “Not quite …,” though Zeke was definitely handsome in a small-town way. My father never spoke about my mother’s former beauty. He didn’t need to. She bragged enough for herself. Neither of my parents tired of telling me how gorgeous everyone thought they were when they were young. Pride like this is both tyrannical and tragic, for the chief function of pride is to usher in the fall.
    My parents had sufficient raw materials to achieve a level of fame in a small town, but not much more than that. Zeke was the middle child of five black-haired, brown-eyed, hockey-playing brothers, the dazzling expression of a recessive gene with his long curly blond hair, his round blue eyes, and the winning smile of a natural-born athlete. Too short even to consider going pro, he would have liked to become a hockey coach on the high-school or maybe college level. Teenage Kathi wanted to be an actress. If she had gone to college, I think my mother would soon