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

“Is dead?” I offer.

“Yes,” he tells me softly. I never blame him. I can tell he didn’t make up the rule.

“Well,” my mother says all the time, “you’re lucky you had a good father for nine years. Some people have rotten fathers for the rest of their lives. You’re very lucky. I think what must be really hard is having two parents alive that are divorced. That would be terrible.”

“Oh,” I say. I want to believe her.

I decide my father is in Heaven. He’s dead but he’s awake and it is sunny. But I still want him to come home.

“I miss him,” I tell her one day when she catches me crying in my room.

“Listen very carefully to me,” my mother says. “This is very important. Are you listening? You can use this to make people feel sorry for you. Don’t do that. Don’t be manipulative. Manipulative people are no good. I don’t care for manipulative people.”

She also tells me I was too smart for him. “That man loved you no matter what you did. You were like a little miracle to him. You could have killed someone and he still would have loved you. But you knew better than that. You knew you had to earn love. You don’t just get love for nothing.”

My mother is forty-five. The first time she was a widow she was twenty-eight. She cried into her pillow every night, she had two kids and a mortgage, and she was so broke she had to take in boarders. She carried on with a man named Sterling Jackson who was no good. My six-year-old brother threw his dinner that she could not afford across the floor one night and yelled at her, “You don’t even miss him!” Her in-laws bought her a car. They didn’t like how she parked it. They said when she could afford to pay her own parking tickets she could park sloppy, but for now, they said, go move the car. She says she looked out the window and decided she would never be dependent on anyone again as long as she lived. “The seasons change. Death is a part of life. Nothing lasts. You are born and you die. Everything is cyclical,” my mother says, patting my hair. “If things are good, enjoy them,” she tells me, pulling my blanket up, “because it ain’t gonna last.”

THE WHITE CLAPBOARD HOUSE (#ulink_4e5fb99f-d267-5966-b87c-3ecfc743f727)

My mother rents a white clapboard house in Aspen the next summer. In exchange for free rent and groceries, my twenty-four-year-old brother and my twenty-one-year-old sister have to look after me, their ten-year-old sister. I fly by myself to Denver. It’s okay. It’s a jet. I like jets. It is the flight to Aspen from Denver that is always bad. It is not a jet. My brother meets me in Denver and flies the rest of the way with me. As usual, I heave into the white plastic-lined paper bag with the cardboard tabs the whole time. My brother moves to another row. I have one friend in Aspen. Her father owns the Jerome Hotel. He lets us hang out by the pool all day for free and snoop in the empty rooms. But she went to tennis camp in Michigan this summer instead.

My brother and sister buy lots of pot and records. My brother is trying to expand my sister’s musical repertoire. He wants her to move beyond the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan and Simon and Garfunkel so she can experience the flavors of The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys, Workingman’s Dead, Delaney and Bonnie, and the Laura Nyro album with LaBelle. (But only the album with LaBelle; he is very strict about this. Laura Nyro by herself is no good.) My sister has been buying pot since I can remember. The shelves in her room on Park Avenue were stacked with clear plastic boxes in different colors from Azuma filled with pot, seeds, rolling papers, roaches, and roach clips. She’s very organized. When I was eight she gave me a book called A Child’s Garden of Grass because she said she wanted me to know what she was doing even though she couldn’t do it with me for another ten years. She made my parents try it. My mother loved it and my father said he didn’t get it.

In the late afternoons Randy Newman wails on about blowing up everything but Australia and the kangaroos. My brother croons along, head back, eyes closed, in complete agreement. At night my sister makes dinner and they argue about Livingston Taylor. My brother believes James is the only Taylor with enough talent to have a recording career; Livingston and Kate should get out of the business, he says, and get real jobs. We eat mostly spaghetti. It is sort of like all the other times we are on our own. Except this time my father is not in the Far East. He is dead. We do not talk about this.

Instead, they smoke joints all day and I ride my bike. I glide through puddles, watching the water fan out in a slow-motion V around my front wheel and play “Born to Be Wild” inside my head pretending that I am not a chicken through and through. A couple of weeks into June, a friendship is arranged for me with a boy and girl whose family rented a house nearby. Their parents knew my father. They are in show business. They smoke pot. There are always some famous people lying around naked on the back deck working on their tans. Jack Nicholson was there yesterday. We spy on them. We also write and stage cinema verité–style theater pieces. We make the adults put their clothes back on and be our audience. Our shows contain many complicated action sequences. It is necessary for the audience to run after us, otherwise they will miss important plot points. They trip and fall a lot because they are high and my friend’s mother slows us down the most because the fringes of her embroidered shawls get caught on branches and outdoor furniture as she runs. Someone has to stop and untangle her, which messes up our show. We also kill time wandering up and down the aisles of the drugstore downtown. My friend and I look at makeup and candy while her brother spends hours slowly turning the covers of Playboy magazines, determined to find the right angle that will expose more boob. We call him “pervert” and run away. Sometimes they try and take my clothes off. They are a family and I am not. I wish I belonged to them, or to someone. No one’s parents are ever as nice to me as I think they should be.

A famous singer comes to sunbathe. He is new in town. My sister is assigned the job of tour guide. They fall in love. He asks her to move in with him but she can’t because she has to stay in the white clapboard house with me. The singer doesn’t understand. The singer has hair that sticks straight up, like an Afro, but he is white and you can see the other side of the room through his blond hair.

“Come on, Michael,” my sister says. Her beaded leather bag and her big, thick black hair are smushed under her body, against the door frame, for support. “I want to move in with Artie. I had her all of June and July. You do August.”

“I don’t know what to do with her all day. What am I supposed to do with a kid all day?” my brother says.

“Oh Jesus, you drop her off at the pool in the morning and you pick her up in the afternoon. How hard can it be? You haven’t had her one fucking day since she got here.” I feel like there is blood in my ears, rocks in my throat. Today was not the right day to skip my bike ride. My sister looks up and sees me. She takes me to the kitchen and smashes something up in a spoon with some honey and tells me to eat it.

“What is it?” I ask, as the gritty sweetness slides down.

“It’s a Valium,” she says. “It will make you feel better.”

When I wake up my brother takes me away from the white clapboard house to live with him and two friends from college in an apartment on the other side of town. My sister has already moved in with the singer. The white clapboard house is empty. I feel sorry for the white clapboard house. My brother’s friends are nice to me. They are a couple. They sleep in the same bed like my parents did. They listen to Aerial Ballet and Brewer & Shipley. There is a lot of kissing. A lot of pot. They always have the kind of doughnuts you buy from the supermarket. I really want a chocolate one, but I don’t know if it is okay to eat that kind. Nobody told me what to eat for breakfast. I eat a gross cinnamon one because there is only one left and I think no one will notice it missing. I eat it and clean up all the crumbs and move all the other doughnuts around so it looks like a full box. I check it three times. It looks like nothing is missing. When my brother wakes up at noon he yells at me for eating the last cinnamon doughnut. “How could you do that? The reason there was only one left is because I like them the most. Now I have to eat a chocolate one. I hate chocolate!” He slams the refrigerator door for effect and goes back to bed, mad and doughnutless.

My mother calls long-distance to tell me that in spite of the recession and the fact that apartments cost a fortune she got us a sprawling three-bedroom in a prewar doorman building overlooking Washington Square Park. We are moving downtown. I am changing schools too. I burst into tears. My sister tells me not to worry because even though all the kids from my old school seem important now, one day, she says, I won’t even remember their names. I tell her that’s not true. I tell her I will always remember their names. She smiles at me like I am too young to know what I am saying. But I do know what I am saying. And I feel older than all of them.

I move in with my sister and the singer. The singer is learning to play the harpsichord. I am not allowed to touch the harpsichord. The singer’s house is in the mountains and my sister can’t spend all her time driving me around so I stay inside not touching the harpsichord and climbing up and down the shag-carpeted sunken living room. I play with the ice dispenser on the door of the fridge. I listen to Blue. The singer is impressed that I know all the words. I fly back to New York in August listening to “This Flight Tonight” on headphones. Turn this crazy bird around. I shouldn’t have got on this flight tonight, Joni Mitchell sings.

GREENWICH VILLAGE (#ulink_6beca88c-ecf8-5291-bfbd-055f0ac1e531)

My mother has a boyfriend who wears hiphuggers and is pretentious. I may be eleven but I know an idiot when I meet one. They have a lot of sex. They aren’t trying to hide it either. It is the grossest thing I have ever seen in my life. They look like ferocious little animals. I bring them coffee every morning. I don’t know why. Maybe it is an attempt to make them behave responsibly, to get them to cut down on their morning fornication. I bring it to them on a tray, like a little servant girl. His cup always gets a big shake of Tabasco. They never say anything about it. He is younger than one of my sisters. He is disgusting.

It is freezing cold. We are walking home through Washington Square Park after pretending to say goodbye to him in front of a bunch of people they work with. I would pay money to say goodbye to him for good, forever. But five minutes after we get home the doorbell will ring and they will start humping each other again.

“Why don’t you like Donny?” my mother asks me under the arch.

“Because he’s gross.”

“Well,” she says. “You may not like him, but he’s not gross.”

“Then why are you ashamed of him?” I counter.

“I am not ashamed of him,” she says.

“Oh really? Then how come he has to sneak over? Why are you too embarrassed to walk down the street with him?”

“I am not embarrassed, Cathy. It’s very complicated. There are people I work with who wouldn’t—he knows people that––it’s very complicated. But I certainly don’t have to explain it to you.”

It is clear to me I won the argument. I should be a fucking lawyer.

I rock every day after school. I curl up in a ball and put my head in my hands, tuck my legs under my stomach, and rock back and forth. It’s total bullshit. It is what crazy people do. I read it in I Never Promised You a Rose Garden. I am waiting for her to say something about it. My oldest sister calls from Canada all the time to tell me the worst thing you can do to a child is tell them that the way they feel isn’t true. I don’t like our new apartment. I miss Park Avenue. I miss the split-pea-green carpet in the hall, which was ugly but was the same carpet in my room and in my parents’ room and in my sister’s room. I miss the breakfast nook where my parents read The New York Times every morning and where my mother taught me about clothes. “Ach, have you ever seen such an awful dress, who would wear this? Look at this, Cathy, it is hideous.” I miss the kitchen cabinets with the glass doors that went all the way to the ceiling and you could see what was inside and the glass was covered with psychedelic decals my sister stuck on the year before my father died. I miss my father, but I try not to think about that. I have two lives: one with a father, friends, and a nice school; and this one. They have nothing to do with each other. And one of them is over anyway so it doesn’t matter. It was a life that belonged to someone else.

“Do you know I am ashamed to bring people over to this house? You are so rude. You are so sullen. You are always with the long face. Sometimes I just want to flush you down the toilet,” my mother says to me.

“Why does he have to be here all the time?”

“Because he lives with us and I invited him.”

“Well I didn’t.”

“Don’t make me choose, Cathy. I will. And we will both regret it. Don’t make me choose.”

It never occurs to me that she will choose me.

This is my plan: I will leave my mother and her fuck buddy and move to the Plaza. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before. It’s perfect. I will continue going to school but I will live alone. I hate them. I hate her. How could she have forgotten my father? There is a candlelight vigil in my heart every day. I promise him that even if no one else acts like he mattered I will. Without going into a lot of detail I tell the Plaza that I want to move in. They don’t seem as excited as I am. Plus it turns out to be really expensive. I have money from my father, but not enough to live at the Plaza while I finish eighth grade. And they won’t let me check in as a minor. I’ve got to find an adult to fill out the paperwork. I always thought if you had money you could do anything in this world. But I guess not at the Plaza. I call my brother. He’s not a minor. He repeats my plan back to me.

“I got to say, kid, it sounds like not a bad plan. Although quite expensive.”

“I know. That’s the drawback.”

“Well,” he says after a long pause. “Let’s wait a week and if you still think it’s a good idea I’ll call them and try to check you in.”

“Miss Bunes, the elevator’s broken, I gotta take you up in the back,” the doorman mumbles to me. I watch him hang a sign up in the lobby that says BE RIGHT BACK. We go to the back elevator. He shuffles his feet. He smokes a cigarette. He takes me upstairs.

“Thank you,” I say and go inside. My mother has never been home when I got home from school but someone used to be there—a nanny, the housekeeper, or my sister before she moved out. I do my homework and make some scrambled eggs with dill, and go watch Julia Child. The next afternoon the elevator is broken again. He hangs the sign and I follow him to the service elevator.

“You, uh, want to drive the elevator?” he says after the door closes.

“No thank you.” Why he wants me to have a turn driving the elevator is beyond me. What is his problem? I always thought this doorman was weird. I miss Charlie the doorman from Park Avenue. Charlie had soft brown hair and a lilting voice that sounded like the beginning of a show tune. His face lit up when he saw me like he was really happy to see me. This doorman looks like a hit man and he talks like he’s got a bunch of loose teeth in his mouth. He’s gross but you can tell he thinks he’s really hot shit, which makes him grosser.

“Come here,” he mumbles. “I’ll show you how it works. Hold on to here. Come.”