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

have discovered that the stage was a better outlet for her than film. She had the kind of talents that were best seen live. She loved a monologue, and her lungs were astonishing. Although fascinating as a performance artist, Mum would have been incapable of the subtlety even bad movies have required of actors since the pictures went talkie. But I believe she could have made a name for herself in local theater, and that my father could have been a popular coachand PE teacher if their ambitions had not already begun to wane before an unexpected pregnancy extinguished these small dreams.
    NO ONE IN THE world would ever describe me as plain. I take a lot of pride in that.
    In the wrong light—fluorescent, especially—I look like a monster in a Halloween mask, all cavernous eye socket and bulging prefrontal lobe. But in a better light, with my head tilted just so and my lips parted in a wry, hard-to-fake smile, my face can take on a villainous beauty, like Cruella De Vil or Snow White’s stepmother in her better years. People often compliment my teeth. (“No braces? Ever?”) I have good hair days and bad, like anyone else. Makeup helps, but only so much, because I have never, not for one second, been the kind of woman who could get by on her looks alone.
    My father assures me that this is a blessing. On a trip to the beach not too long ago, the old man was moved to appraise all the aesthetic flaws of my younger sister, his daughter by another woman, and me. Not one to take things lying down, my sister fired back at our father with a litany of the bad genes he’d passed down to us.
    “Flat feet, oily skin, a friggin’ unibrow …”
    Zeke tried to defend himself. “You know, your mothers had some part in it, too.”
    I pointed out that my sister and I spend more time, money, and effort on hair removal than most drag queens, and that neither of our mothers possesses this trait.
    “Listen, you two girls have no idea what it’s like to be really good-looking,” my father said. “It’s not what you think. People are always looking at you. They expect things from you. It’s an awful lot to live up to. And, frankly, I don’t think either of you could have handled it.” He smiled to himself and ran his fingers through his hair.
    “Whatcha doing, Dad?” my sister railed. “Counting how many strands are still left?”
    “I’d feel sorry for your future husbands,” my father said, grinning, “but who would ever be crazy enough to marry cows like you?”
    “It’s a miracle we don’t have fatal eating disorders,” I told him, the perfect riposte, laced with guilt and the threat of debilitating illness. It must have had an impact, because the old man felt bad enough to offer a concession.
    “You were pretty cute when you were little.”
    Isn’t every mammal? We’re all ridiculously cute before we move on to solid foods. It’s a trick of evolution. Who would put up with us otherwise? As the darling glow of infancy wore off, the concomitants of maturity—my real face, my real character—began to emerge, and I couldn’t help noticing the puzzled expressions I’d begun to elicit from adults. I hit a particularly awkward phase when I was seven, peaking in ugliness around fifth grade. By junior high, my mother could stand it no more.
    “I’m not leaving this house with you until you put on some friggin’ makeup and do something to that rat’s nest you call hair.”
    I had no idea what she was talking about. As far back as I can remember, I had trained my eyes to avoid reflective surfaces. On a good day, I was and still am often startled by what the mirror has to offer. I don’t know who it is staring back, but it’s not—that
can’t
be—me. On a bad day, this disorientation can get gothic. I will start to imagine that one of my eyes is bigger than the other. If I stare too long, it begins to grow as the other eye shrinks, until I look like a helpless grotesque from Picasso’s
Guernica
. I have a talent