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

my father, this was a performance she reenacted every month. (Whether I came into the world by pure accident or by womankind’s oldest trick is still a matter of debate.) After he realized that my mother’s story was actually true, my father packed his bags and hopped on the next plane back to Boston. I don’t think I’ve met a man who wouldn’t do the same thing. He was twenty-two years old and just as terrified as she was. My mother stayed in their youth hostel and told everyone her story of abandonment, full of tears and theatrical gestures, riding on her beauty enough for strangers to buy her food and drive her around the island. She met a native Pacific Islander with mahogany skin and a giant belly, who offered to save her reputation by marrying her. This was Mum’s favorite part of the story.
    “… so this big Samoan says to me, ‘Let me give your baby a name.’ ‘Fuck you,’ I tell him. ‘I’m giving this baby
my
name.’ ” In hernext breath she added, “He wasn’t the only one, you know. I was beautiful, and skinnier than you are now.
Everyone
wanted to marry me.”
    As the son of devout Catholics, Zeke also asked my mother to marry him when she finally returned to Massachusetts, but she refused him in similar fashion. For the following months she claims to have gone completely sober, the first of only two sober spells in her adult life. She turned twenty-one that summer and in the fall I was born. She didn’t go back on her promise and gave me her last name.
    This is not to say that she didn’t seriously consider all her options first. When I was in fifth grade, my mother confessed that she had made an appointment to abort me. Her brother drove her to the clinic, but she refused to go in. She could have made this decision at home and saved him the trip. It was the seventies. There was an energy crisis, gas prices through the roof. But that would not have been a fitting scene for the turning point in her drama.
    “I was crying and crying, Nikki. My brother kept saying, ‘Go in there. Don’t be stupid!’ But I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t get out of the car.”
    Later in the pregnancy, my mother also told me, she had set in motion a possible adoption, contacting an agency and filling out forms for prospective parents. Somewhere in the world my long-lost adoptive parents sat in a lonely house waiting for me to arrive. I spent countless hours imagining them, rewriting the script of
Annie
, so that instead of a redhead in an orphanage it starred a mangy brunette removed from her home by Social Services.
    Betcha they’re smart! Betcha they’re cool!
    Vegetarian lunch box at my Waldorf school!
    The story of how I actually learned about my almost-adoption is less a Broadway musical than something out of a daytime soap opera.
    In seventh grade I was invited to a summer pool party. Kids from other schools would be there, including boys. When my mother heard this, she demanded that I wear a bikini, a hot-pink one that she picked out herself. “Please, Honey! Wear it for me,” she begged. I covered it up with a T-shirt that came down to my knees. This ishow I gleaned my first lesson in attracting the attention of boys and men—that desire is only intensified by concealment and withholding. When my wet T-shirt stuck like a second skin with a neon bathing suit peeking through, I found myself in the middle of a swarm of boys, all of them constantly readjusting their shorts. The cutest one, I thought, was a boy from Salem named Seamus. I mentioned this to a girl at the party and a commitment ceremony soon followed. That’s all it takes in seventh grade—vague interest and a series of emissaries to handle the details.
    The next day Seamus and I had our first conversation on the phone. We had little in common apart from the fact that we shared the same birthday and were both die-hard fans of U2. I’d prepared for our chat by writing down a list of things to talk about. Item one was which song