Anna Stolley Persky

With or Without You

My husband and I are bickering over the music in the car as we head 158 miles up 95 from Northern Virginia, where we live, to Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love.

My husband is driving so he gets to choose the tunes, according to our family rules. But I’m putting up a fight because I’m grumpy, which may have something to do with the 19-year-old saggy pants-wearing man-child in the back seat of our Subaru Outback.

We pass rest stops, gas stations, and giant cement walls.

The man-child, our son, came out of my body one second ahead of his twin brother, and now he’s being returned to Philadelphia for his sophomore year in college.

We don’t turn on the news. I already know that Russia and Ukraine are still fighting, the Middle East is a mess, and our president uses social media memes to taunt anyone he doesn’t like. On the flip side, there’s no mandatory draft for my children, and we aren’t worried about a nuclear winter, at least not today.

The earth is still dying.

My husband is playing a Grateful Dead song I don’t recognize. I tell him that it’s awful. My husband says he likes it.

Our son is studying music business and production. He listens to BabyChiefDoit, EssDeeKid, and Lucki. He normally has a lot to say about the songs we like because most of them are “ass,” but he’s sleeping, his muscular body curled up in a fetal position, his hands cradling his phone.

His mouth is open; his blue eyes are closed. He is, blissfully, silent.

It’s been a long, noisy summer with the twins home from college and making Kraft Mac & Cheese at 2 a.m. For example.

Our master bedroom is directly below the kitchen. The man-child and his brother stomp when they walk and clatter when they cook. Our daughter, two years younger than her brothers, spent the summer either storming out of her room to tell them to stop or joining them, depending on her mood.

I didn’t sleep much this past summer.

I kept screaming at our sons to shut up.

I screamed that the house wasn’t a dorm, but a family home where grownups had to work to put “certain ungrateful people” through college.

My husband says, “Well, what will make you happy?” and I say, “I don’t know.” We are poised to escalate Cold War style, but then we agree to try shuffling through the Eighties Top Hits because we both remember being teenagers. Once. A Long time Ago. In the 1980s, obviously.

We flip through the songs.  Ghostbusters?  “Absolutely not,” I say. Don’t Stop Believin’? Yes.

We are at peace.

Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.

I start singing, and my husband gives me the side eye. He grips the steering wheel at 10 and 2, just how he learned in 1987. I sing louder.

Maybe it’s less peace and more a fragile détente.

Our son stirs, and I lower my voice to a whisper because I like him better these days when he’s sleeping. Once, when he was a toddler, I put him in our minivan and drove in circles around our neighborhood, playing Hush, Little Baby on repeat until he fell asleep in his car seat, all soft folds in his Thomas the Tank Engine pajamas.

With or Without You?

“Perfect,” I say.

U2 released With or Without You in March 1987. It hit the number one spot on the Billboard Hot 100 in May, a month before I graduated from my high school in suburban Philadelphia, about 20 minutes from where our son attends college in the city. In 1987, my husband, two years younger than me, was finishing up his high school sophomore year in suburban Boston, a little over 300 miles from Philadelphia.

With or Without You stayed at the top of the charts for three weeks. Ronald Reagan was president, and, after calling the Soviet Union the evil empire, was in protracted arms control negotiations with General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev.

Two years later, in 1989, I was a junior in college watching the fall of the Berlin Wall on a black-and-white television from my bedroom. The Scorpions, a German heavy metal band, released the rock ballad Wind of Change afterwards, a tribute to the political atmosphere at that time.

My husband remembers Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start the Fire playing nonstop on the radio in 1989, with its rapid-fire chronological list of 40 years of world events, starting with Billy Joel’s birth in 1949.

In the song, Joel breathlessly defends himself and his generation to the angry young people decrying the world they’ve inherited.

My children have been bequeathed an earth with no Soviet Union. But the possibility of catastrophe hangs over us, even now.

It’s the middle of the day when I wake up our son. We’ve reached Philadelphia and Drexel University’s campus. We stop, briefly, in front of his dorm and drop him off with the blue Ikea-style bags that he packed (by himself!). We park the car in a lot a few blocks away.

My husband and I walk back to his dorm and take the elevator up to his room. Our son waits for us there and points to the bags.

Wordlessly, we help him unpack.

There’s a bed, a desk, two small bureaus, and a view of a busy city street. Our son’s suitemates pop in to say hello. One of his suitemates takes off his headphones long enough to shake my hand and tell me how glad he is to meet me. When the door is closed, I comment on the suitemate’s good manners. Our son ignores me. He’s setting up his sound system.

When he was in my belly, our son was nestled between his brother and my cervix. I was convinced I could feel his fingers tapping away inside me, and we nicknamed him “Mr. Hands.” It should not have surprised us that “Mr. Hands” should take so effortlessly and dexterously to the piano and then the guitar. During the pandemic, when we were stuck in our house for a year, our son taught himself song arrangement, mixing and mastering, and manipulating sounds to create tone and texture.

Neither my husband nor I can read music, although we both had grandmothers who played piano.

The bags are filled with crumpled up clothes and, as it turns out, XL twin sheets for his full-sized bed. The sheets don’t fit the bed. He also forgot to pack hangers. He also forgot to pack a laundry basket. He also forgot to pack any decorations for the walls, even though I mentioned to him three times that he might want to bring the family photos I’d framed for him.

I don’t remind him that I offered to help him make a checklist of what he needed for school and that he rebuffed me. I don’t tell him that he should have checked the housing information for the size of the bed. Instead, I remind myself that independence can mean forgetting things. It’s part of the learning process, according to the parenting websites I pretend not to read.

When I went to college in New York, I always packed a camp trunk without my parents’ help and without forgetting anything, but I was a list maker even back then. Our son apparently doesn’t yet have the necessary survival skills of a proper checklist, and I wonder, briefly, if he will make it without me this year.

Maybe I should bring him home.

Of course, I won’t.

We pull out the baby blue twin-sized blanket our son brought from home and decide that it’s big enough to cover the full-sized bed, even though it’s arguably a little small. We need a win here.

“Good enough,” my husband says.

With or Without You is the third track on U2’s fifth studio album. The song begins with a simple drum machine loop and a synthesizer with a repetitive four bar loop in the D major key. The synthesizer is joined by a gentle bassline and a high, ethereal-sounding guitar. The lead singer Bono comes in next, crooning.

I can’t live
With or without you 

My husband says he likes the ending.

Hoo-ooh-hoo-ooh
Hoo-ooh-hoo-ooh

“It’s so upbeat,” he says.

To me, it sounds like Bono is wailing and wailing, culminating, as the music fades off, in an echoing emotional howl into the abyss. It sounds like Bono’s limbs are being torn out of his body, one-by-one, until he disappears into nothingness, acceptance, and silence.

My husband and I walk with our son to Target, almost a mile from his dorm. We buy him sheets and hangers. We buy him a plastic laundry basket even though we have about seven of them at home. He remembers he’s out of shampoo and conditioner, so we buy that for him, too. I make him carry it all back since we just shelled out $150, and he should take some responsibility.

I pace myself with him.

“Do you like Philly?” I ask our son. His blond curls flop up and down against his forehead. The city smells like coffee, rotting trash, and weed.

“It’s alright,” he says, which I know translates to yes.

I point to a street sign.

“How do you pronounce that?” I say.

“Shulschool.”

“Nope,” I say. “Skoo-kl.”

“Nah,” he says.

“For sure,” I say.

“Do you know what a hoagie is?”

He nods his head.

“Do you know who Rocky is?”

He nods.

“How about Fresh Prince?”

“From Philly,” he says. “1980s. Reaganomics. Trickle-down theory. Wargames. Yuppies. Blow.”

“That about sums up the decade,” I say.

“I know some things,” he says. I agree.

I tell him that his great great grandfather lived in Philadelphia after fleeing pogroms in Eastern Europe.

I tell him that his grandfather worked right next to Drexel’s campus. I tell him that we used to go to Chinatown for Sunday dim sum. Has he been to Chinatown yet? He has.

“It’s alright,” he says.

I tell him that I used to go to South Street to hang out at a punk rock store called Zipperhead. (It closed in 2005.)

“You weren’t punk rock,” our son says dismissively. He’s right. In my sophomore year of high school, I briefly spiked up my hair with gel, but that was about it. I liked Zipperhead’s T-shirts, including one that said, “I’ll Do Anything Once.” It shames me now that I ever wore it.

“I wasn’t punk,” I admit. “But I could have been.”

“But you weren’t,” he says, and I realize that this is one of the longest conversations we’ve had in the past few years.

U2 was borne in the 1970s out of Dublin’s punk scene.

The name refers to a spy plane designed by Lockheed in the 1950s and nicknamed the “Dragon Lady.”  But Bono says that the band simply chose the name because, out of a list of options, it was the one they hated the least.

By the 1980s, U2 was internationally known for its passionate rock anthems and ballads laced with socio-political commentary and spiritual searching. New Year’s Day was written as a tribute to Poland’s Solidarity Movement. Bullet the Blue Sky condemned U.S. foreign policy in Central America. Bono is still known for his activism. He writes most of the lyrics to U2’s songs. Bono and his wife have four children.

I never got into U2 in high school or college. Maybe the group was too cerebral for me at the time. Maybe I was smart enough to know I didn’t want to sing along to a song I didn’t understand, and what did I know as a teenager about world politics? I was more likely to be cruising down the Schuylkill Expressway in my parents’ hand-me-down Buick to head-bashing Add It Up by the Violent Femmes or pithy melancholic throwback songs by Simon & Garfunkel. Cecilia was always breaking my heart. I was a rock. I was an island.

My husband says he liked U2’s Sunday Bloody Sunday, but “we had no idea what it was about.” (The song is about the 1972 massacre in Derry, Northern Ireland when British soldiers shot and killed 13 unarmed protestors.)

My husband remembers learning to drive to the Beastie Boys in 1987.

We both remember the threat of nuclear war hanging over us.

Our son learned to drive in 2022 listening to electronic dance music, along with rap and hip-hop. For the most part, the songs he likes aren’t written to be deep social commentaries, he says.

There are some notable exceptions.

Released in 2001 by rapper and activist Immortal Technique, Dance with the Devil tells the story of a young man born in the projects and enticed by a life of crime, leading to his unwitting participation in the gang beating and rape of his mother.

The song, our son says, “is dark and sad and just overall depressing,” but it’s “good music.”

On our way back to our son’s dorm, we stop at the college bookstore to find something to decorate the walls of his new bedroom. The displays are based on sports: the Eagles are in one row; 76ers in another.

I stand in front of Gritty, the orange-furred, googly-eyed Flyers monster-mascot.

“What about Gritty?” I say. “He could add some color to your room.”

My husband and I hauled our son back-and-forth to his hockey games for 12 years, gear stuffed into the back of the minivan, so I assume that Gritty, a hockey mascot, would appeal to him.

“Nah,” the man-child says. “Gritty sucks.”

Our son used to follow me around like a baby duck.

If I went into the bathroom and closed the door, he would bang against it, bawling.

When it rained, he told me to make it stop. When I said I couldn’t, he wouldn’t believe me.

Gritty looks back at me. Gritty is hanging in the middle of the display, splayed out, spread eagle, orange T-shirts on one side, black T-shirts on the other.

“Gritty does not suck,” I say.

 Here’s what I want to tell my son: Gritty is spunky. Gritty has grit, like the city. Gritty is chaos and loyalty. Gritty is funny even when the team is losing. Gritty is laughter through tears. Gritty is contradiction. Gritty is me saying goodbye to my first-born child again and again.

Gritty is me stretched between my past and my future.

A year earlier, when we first dropped the twins off at their respective universities, my husband and I cried on the way home and in bed together at night, holding onto each other.

For weeks, I wandered through the silent house while our daughter was at school. I went into the twins’ rooms, made their beds, and sat on them.  I thought about how our daughter would be off at college soon, too.

And then I got used to the quiet. Mostly.

When our son came home for the summer, he was on his own schedule of working all night making beats for rappers and pop artists and sleeping during the day. From his bedroom, he built his business, negotiating with record labels and discussing kick drums and filters with music celebrities.

He also left dirty dishes in his bedroom and crumbs on the kitchen counter. He broke the fridge. He broke a cabinet. He clogged the toilet. My husband didn’t seem to mind. I yelled at our son to clean up and think about someone other than himself. Then I hated myself for yelling.

“Gritty sucks,” agrees my husband. He’s siding with our son but only because Boston is always better than Philadelphia in any sports-adjacent conversation we’ve had ever since we met. People from Boston are obnoxious. People from Boston suck.

Our son picks a blue-and-yellow Drexel banner depicting the university’s dragon mascot breathing fire. We head back to the dorm.

Over the years, the lyrics of With or Without You have undergone scrutiny.

Most critics assume that the song is a plea from someone trapped in an impossible, toxic romantic relationship. But some reviewers say the song is about an individual’s complicated relationship with God.

In his memoir, Bono writes that artists make music as a “balm for the ache inside us, a dressing for the wounds we hide.” He writes about the black hole, the void, he feels when he can’t express the music playing inside his head.

He also writes that life is “constant dying and being reborn, dying and being reborn.”

As for With or Without You, Bono writes that he was inspired by the internal struggle between “artist and family.” He says the song is about “bittersweet duality.”

But he leaves some room for other interpretations.

In a 1993 interview, Bono says that he “didn’t grow up in the tradition of pop songwriters who feel it is essential to make everything clear to the listener.”

He says that the band was interested in abstraction and “letting things be out of focus.”

We are in a crowded elevator. Our son is still carrying the laundry basket. Another saggy pants-wearing man-child with unruly hair looks over at our son and says, “hey.” Our son says “hey” in return. The other man-child says that his band is performing at a bar down the street and does our son want to “pull up?”

“Alright,” our son says as the elevator doors open to his floor.

I don’t tell our son that I know the bar. I used to underage drink there just like he will be underage drinking there tonight. I don’t tell him that he can’t escape my teenage ghost still wandering the streets of Philadelphia just as I can’t escape his ghost when I am home.

I don’t tell our son that sometimes when he’s away, I see him as he used to be – his thin, child body shivering in his room. That child still needs me to tuck him into bed. He needs me to scare away the monsters that hide, always, in dark places.

In 2013, FX released the first season of The Americans, a period drama depicting a fictional KGB couple posing as stereotypical American parents raising two children in suburban Virginia in the 1980s. Elizabeth and Philip Jennings struggle with parenting choices, befriend their neighbors, recruit other spies into their Soviet network, and sometimes kill people in their efforts to win the arms race against the U.S. and destroy capitalism.

Elizabeth is portrayed as a mostly ruthless ideologue who often prioritizes her love of her country over the family she was hired to make. Each season, Elizabeth watches in disgust as her family assimilates into a culture she doesn’t understand.

All six seasons, with the final one airing in 2018, are laced with the music of the 1980s. The songs of Elton John, Talking Heads, and Peter Gabriel are all featured. In the fourth season, Philip murders an airport security officer to Soft Cell’s Tainted Love.

And, in the show’s finale, Elizabeth and Philip, their covers blown, are forced to flee America, leaving their son and, eventually, their daughter, behind, With or Without You interlaced into the closing montage.

I hang our son’s shirts and jeans in his closet, organizing them by color and style – jeans on the right, shirts on the left. My husband pulls the new sheets out of the packaging and makes the bed. Our son works on wires and plugs for his computer.

My husband says he’s done. He’s put the blanket over the sheets but hasn’t tucked anything under the mattress. He hasn’t folded the top sheet over the blanket to make a clean, inviting space under the pillow.

The pillow is missing.

“You aren’t done,” I say to my husband. “You have to tuck the sheets in.”

“What difference does it make?” he says. “You think that’s going to last for more than a few hours?”

When our son was little, he had a favorite stuffed animal, Blueberry, a dopey bear with fuzzy bright blue fur. I would gently place Blueberry in the middle of the bed, his fuzzy head nestled on the pillow, his body resting over the blanket. Blueberry still lives in our son’s room at home, shoved into a corner, trapped between a guitar and some abandoned speakers.

 “I’m not leaving him here with it done half-assed,” I say.

When our son was in elementary school, he became convinced that our universe would collapse into a black hole, and we would all die. I promised him that would never happen.

“You’re being ridiculous,” my husband says.

Our son jumps in to say it’s good the way it is.

“It’s not good,” I say.

I push my husband aside and finish making the bed, tucking the sheets and blanket under the mattress on each side and then, along the foot of the bed. I fold the top sheet over the blanket.

“This is good,” I say.

Starfish lack brains and blood, but they can regenerate their limbs. Rabbits can regrow ear tissue, but I’m not sure why.

My phone has Life360, a location-tracking app that shares the real-time locations of everyone in the family. Each family member is represented by a face inside a little bubble. Each bubble hops around on a tiny phone screen map. When our son first moved to college, I would track his bubble face as it moved from his dorm room to a sound studio to a bar to his dorm room again. I would follow him and his twin brother, at college in Williamsburg, Virginia. They were two bubble faces stretched hundreds of miles in each direction of me.

After a while, I stopped checking their locations. Mostly.

When a portion of the human liver is damaged or removed, the healthy tissue that remains grows, allowing the liver to function.

But, when a human’s leg or arm is amputated, there is this tingling, still, called a phantom limb sensation. The body is calling out to the mind, “There is something missing that used to be here.”

I ask our son to get his pillow so we can put it on the bed. He says he can’t find it and must have left it in the car. We all go back in the elevator and walk to the parking lot. We look inside the car. It’s empty.

“I guess I forgot my pillow, too,” our son says.

In the final season of The Americans, Reagan and Gorbachev are negotiating nuclear disarmament. Henry, the son, is playing hockey at a posh New Hampshire boarding school. Philip has quit the spying business and drives a fancy car. The daughter, Paige, has an apartment and attends George Washington University.

In the season finale’s final montage, Elizabeth and Philip decide to leave their son in America while they escape to the Soviet Union with a reluctant but obedient Paige in tow. Before they can eat their borscht in the Motherland, they must take a train from the U.S. to Canada and pass through a border check.

The music begins with a simple drum machine and a synthesizer with a repetitive four bar loop in the D major key. The camera diverts to the Christmas tree Elizabeth and Philip left behind in their American home.

The synthesizer is joined by a bassline and high, ethereal-sounding guitar.

There’s a long distance shot of the train.

The train pulls up to the last stop before the Canadian border. Philip and Elizabeth make it through the security check.

The train starts moving. The conductor announces, “Next station: Montreal.”

Elizabeth looks out the window to see that her daughter has gotten off the train. Paige is standing on the platform staring calmly back at her mother. She’s not going with her parents to the Soviet Union.

Hoo-ooh-hoo-ooh
Hoo-ooh-hoo-ooh

Elizabeth presses her palms desperately against the train window as mother and daughter slip further and further in opposite directions.

We drop the man-child back at Target and leave him there to buy a pillow with his own money and walk himself back to campus. It feels like the right parenting choice. We can’t pay for every mistake he makes. It feels wrong, and then it feels right again.

We turn right and left and left again until we are leaving Philadelphia behind.

Traffic is terrible. We inch down the road, stopping and starting to Spirits in the Material World, Glory Days, and Don’t You (Forget About Me).

We take a break at the Chesapeake House rest stop in Maryland. We head into our separate bathrooms, then meet up at the Kentucky Fried Chicken so my husband can get a snack.

Back on 95 again, I dunk my husband’s chicken nuggets into barbecue sauce and feed him each one straight into his open mouth. His hands stay on the steering wheel.

I turn off the music. We glide past billboard signs. We sail through Baltimore. The back seat is empty, the traffic has cleared, and, in silence, we are hurtling down the long stretch of highway to home.

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Anna Stolley Persky: I’m a journalist and lawyer raising a family in Northern Virginia. I recently graduated from George Mason University’s MFA Program for Creative Writing. I’m a journalist who specializes in legal affairs, and, in my spare time, I write essays and mysteries. This piece was inspired by a long, long summer and then a long, long drive to (finally) deposit one of my twin sons off at college for his sophomore year. The essay explores physical, emotional, and temporal distance against the backdrop of 1980s music.