It Hit Me Like a Ton of Bricks: A memoir of a mother and daughter

“Yes. Really.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Cathy,” my mother said, ending the conversation. But I won’t give in. We argue until she backs down. This is the plan: from now on she will pretend all food prepared for me is really for her and then I will steal it when she isn’t looking. This is the only way I can be certain of the quality. I take a bite of my freshly stolen bagel. It’s good, but not amazing. The plan is sound. But her heart isn’t in it.

My mother wraps my hair in a towel after my bath and says, “Well, Lady Josephine, what do you have to say for yourself?” It is like magic the way she gets the towel to stay on top of my head. Even though it’s twirled around and around so many times, it never falls off. She carries me all the way down the green carpeting to my room. She tucks me in and says, “Good night, blessing.” She pats my hair until I fall asleep but I don’t let myself fall asleep because I don’t want her to stop. Ever. Nannies don’t do this. They say I am too old.

This is another game.

“What do you say, Cathy. Dog or dawg?”

“Dog.”

“Very good. Now do you say, I wanna cuppa wooda or I want a cup of water?”

“I want a cup of water.”

“Good. Cawfee or coffee?”

“Coffee.” I am four but I win every time.

“I don’t want you to end up like a truck driver,” my mother says. “It’s my biggest fear for you. Those New York accents are just terrible.”

My mother is from Canada. They don’t have those terrible accents there.

My mother has a black shiny alligator purse with a big gold H on the front. It smells like mint and leather and the bottom is soft from strands of tobacco. When you open and close it, it makes a clicking noise that is very good. In her top drawer are rows and rows of black velvet boxes with pins made of jewels in the shape of flowers and bugs. I pry open every lid until I find the butterfly. She has a watch in there too, made of real gold and real diamonds. My father gives her these things, and fur coats, and endless bottles of limited-edition Joy perfume, and she says she hates them. In his top drawer is a beige suede pouch filled with cuff links. He has hundreds of them: smooth ones, shiny ones, bumpy ones, gold ones, silver ones, ones with jewels, ones with ridges. My father travels a lot for his job. My mother used to have a job, but now she travels with my father instead because he is old-fashioned and a male chauvinist. Before she met him she was poor but now they are comfortable.

We live on Park Avenue and Sixty-first Street. I am pretty sure we are rich. We used to live on Central Park West and Ninety-first Street, until my father decided it was no place “to raise women and children” because my brother saw a holdup with a gun on his way home from school. My mother’s first husband died when she was twenty-eight and my brother and sister were six and three. Seven years later she married my father. He brought a daughter from his first marriage who was sixteen. I was born right after their second anniversary. My brother and sisters are my half brother and sisters, but I don’t call them that.

I sit on my parents’ bed, in a fort made of clothes, watching my mother pack. I press the crisp cuffs of my father’s shirts between my fingers and pray that he will go alone on this trip and leave my mother here with me. And then I worry I will burn in hell for wishing my own father would go away. The night before they come back I make a welcome-home sign for the front door. They always bring me a doll in native dress. The dolls are hard, not cuddly. You can’t take their clothes off and only their arms move so you can’t make them do anything. I don’t like them. But I guess their outfits are interesting. I have France, Spain, Japan, China, Thailand, Switzerland, Australia, Greece, Canada, and Mexico.

My father works for Screen Gems in foreign distribution. Fer-nando Rey comes for drinks and crabmeat dip, which is pink and made out of ketchup and mayonnaise. I am allowed to stir it with the fork. It tastes good. Sean Connery sent roses to my middle sister for her sixteenth birthday. He is not a Screen Gems star, just a friend. I wish the Monkees were our friends so they could come over. I wish the Flying Nun would come over. My father has a picture of himself with her. And with Elizabeth Montgomery. And with Barbara Eden, except she isn’t wearing her I Dream of Jeannie costume in the picture so she doesn’t look that good. I have a photo album of him posing with all the stars from the Screen Gems lineup. I love TV. I dress up to watch TV because the people on TV get dressed up for me so it seems fair. There are also lots of pictures of my parents on their trips; getting off of planes, walking down runways, being greeted by little Japanese girls holding boxes of roses and dressed like one of my souvenir dolls. My mother always wears a fur coat and sunglasses and a scarf. She looks as good as the people on TV.

Evelyn is a nanny. Evelyn’s name is hard to say. I have no control over Evelyn’s name when it comes out of my mouth. Evelyn always says, “Wait till your mother comes home.”

“I’m thirsty, Elvelyn.”

“Wait till you mother comes home.”

“I’m cold. Can I have a sweater?”

“Wait till your mother comes home.”

“Can I have a snack, Elevyn?”

“Wait till your mother comes home.”

Evelyn wears a uniform. Once I saw her without it. It was embarrassing. Evelyn always closes my door all the way. I tell her to leave it open a little bit, but she never does. She thinks everything I ask for is going to get her into trouble. I am in my room and I am supposed to take a nap but I’m not going to because I am too nervous about breathing up all the air before my nap is over and dying of suffocation because the door is closed.

“ELEVYN!” I scream at the top of my lungs, but only once because I don’t want to get winded. If I get winded I’ll breathe harder and use up the air sooner, and die faster.

On the other side of the door I hear Evelyn say, “Wait till your mother comes home.”

“My mother is in Europe. She’s not coming home for two more weeks. I’m sure she doesn’t want me to suffocate!” I say. But I am just talking to a closed door. I can hear Evelyn’s feet. They are already walking down the hall. I hate Evelyn.

My mother only lets me wear navy blue. Navy brings out my eyes. She can’t buy anything for me unless it is navy. Sometimes a saleslady does not know this and will show us something in green or red.

“We’ll take the navy,” my mother instructs.

“Please can I have red?” I ask. My mother ponders the implications of this request while the saleslady and I wait. “No,” my mother finally says. “We’ll take the navy. The navy brings out your eyes. It brings out her eyes.”

I am nine. My parents are in Tokyo and London. My sister is in charge. She is always in a good mood. She lets me have cookies for breakfast. They leave her with thousands of cash dollars. She pays the nanny, the maid, the butcher, and the baker. We take taxis everywhere. The big wrought-iron door at my school opens at three o’clock. I am watching this one say goodbye to that one, that one tease another one, someone else borrow money for the Good Humor man. The air is clear as a bell. The cherry blossoms are in bloom, the sun is bright, and there are birds chirping all over the place. It is a Technicolor New York City day, until my sister appears halfway down the block.

“What are you doing here? I don’t get picked up anymore. I am allowed to go home by myself.” I rail at her, daring her to come closer. She is going to embarrass me in front of my friends, I can tell.

“I have to tell you something. Something bad happened,” she keeps coming toward me. “It’s about Daddy.”

“What, he’s dead?” I say the most ridiculous thing I can think of.

“Yes,” she says. Her face is the color of cement. “He died this morning.” Everything turns to filth. I am covered in soot. I want to go back. Five minutes. Not even five minutes. Just to right before I said it.

“I didn’t mean it. I was kidding. I didn’t mean it!” I am shouting but no sound comes out. My sister picks me up and carries me like a baby. I am high above all the other kids. I can see the tops of their heads. We turn left onto Fifth Avenue and get in a taxi. I can’t breathe. I want my mother. Our apartment is filled with adults, people I don’t know who think they know me. I want my mother. She’s still in London where my father died. I can see her in Toronto at the funeral.

“What’s the funeral?” I ask my brother because he usually tells the truth and I happen to be alone with him in the pantry. He flew home this morning from college.

“Oh,” he says. “It’s where the dead person is.”

“Papa will be there?”

“Well sort of. He’ll be in a coffin,” he says.

“What’s a coffin?”

“It’s like a box they put the dead person in so they can bury it in the ground.”

“Oh,” I say.

“I wouldn’t go if I didn’t have to,” he tells me. He messes up my hair with his hand. We stand there for a minute. He does it again and then he leaves.

“I don’t want to go,” I tell my mother when she calls from London. I stay in New York with a nanny who used to look after me until she got married and had her own child. I know my father is dead. But I still think he will come home. I decide if I can walk down the hall, all the way to the bathroom, in four giant steps, he will come back. If I drink a whole glass of milk without putting it down, he will come back. If I get to the corner before a light turns red, he will come back. I want to make it happen before everyone comes home from the funeral.

I imagine their stunned faces as they open the front door and I say, “Look who’s here.” Everyone will hug me. I will be the hero. I will have saved my family. My father will be the happiest of all.

At school all the kids in my class wait for me on the stairs. They know my father died. They tell me they know because there was an article in the paper.

I ask my mother to show me the article. She doesn’t know what I’m talking about. I say the kids at school told me it was there. She says, “Oh for Christ’s sake, the obituary? Is that what you’re talking about? It’s not an article.” She hands me the paper open to the page. I scour the tiny little blurb. There is no picture, no description of his life or accomplishments, and they spelled my name with a K. It is totally anticlimactic.

At night I don’t sleep. I can’t. I’m on watch. I stare into the dark and wait for his return. A month goes by. He’s still dead. When I do sleep I dream they ask me to leave my school.

“It’s not that we don’t like you, it’s just that your father…” my teacher says very kindly and then can’t seem to finish his sentence.