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

I touch the lever. “Okay. I’m done. Thank you,” I say. I think we are finished.

“No. Come closer. Sit up here and I’ll show you,” he says.

“That’s all right,” I assure him. “I don’t need to drive the elevator.”

“Come over here.” He pats a space between his legs on the seat he’s sitting on. “Sit over here.” I shuffle over and sit between his legs on the little metal elevator stool and he takes my hand and puts it on the lever. “There,” he whispers sliding my hand and the lever across his lap. He lets go of my hand and holds on to my hips sliding me up and down. I run out of the elevator when we get to my floor.

The next week the elevator is broken two more times. It is never broken on any other doorman’s shift or in the mornings. Oh well. This is my new afterschool activity, I guess, riding my doorman’s crotch. I follow him to the back. He never talks anymore, he just holds my hips and slides me up and down very slowly while I stare straight ahead counting the floors to my apartment, where I go inside and space out until my mother comes home and the sun goes down, putting this day out of its misery.

“What is it that you would like me to do?” my mother replies in a voice I don’t expect.

“I don’t know. Something,” I suggest feebly. “I mean don’t you think it’s weird that the elevator is broken all the time and I have to go up the back with him?”

“Well, what do you think I should do?”

“I don’t know, Mom.” I really don’t know what she should do. “But don’t you think you should do something?”

“Well, I could write a letter,” she says finally.

“Okay,” I say, assuming the conversation is over.

“But he’ll probably lose his benefits.”

“Okay.”

“Is that what you want?”

“I don’t know. I guess so.” I just want to go in my room and rock.

“He’ll get fired.”

“Okay.”

“And he will lose all his benefits, Cathy.”

“Okay.”

“Well, no, Cathy. It’s not okay. He probably has a wife and kids and they need those benefits.”

“What do you mean? What are you talking about?”

“Their benefits. They’re probably all covered under his benefits. Their life insurance. Their health insurance. Their dental insurance. Is that what you want? It’s a very serious matter. Do you want them to lose all those things?”

“I don’t know. I just don’t want to ride up in the elevator with him anymore.”

“I don’t understand what you are doing with him in the elevator in the first place,” she says.

“The elevator’s always broken.”

“Well it’s not broken now, I just came up in it.”

“It was broken this afternoon.”

“Well it’s not broken now,” she says as though the problem is solved. She’s making me feel bad. But if I tell her she will say, “No one makes anyone anything, Cathy. You can’t make a person do or say or feel anything. I don’t make you do anything, whatever you do you do yourself.”

“What is it Cathy?”

“I don’t know,” I say, whining.

“I don’t know what you want me to do. Do you want me to write a letter? I will. He will lose his benefits. But I will do it. Is that what you want?”

“No. I guess not,” I say. It’s only nine floors.

My mother has found herself.

After eleven years of being the female traveling companion to a male executive, she has reentered the work force. Through a connection to NYU and the benefit of several grants, she runs an office operating out of a third-floor space above the Bleecker Street Cinema called the Alternate Media Center. She carries a porta-pack everywhere and is always talking about two-way video interactive this and telecommunications that. It is a very exciting time in her life. She is having a renaissance. Not me. I am in the Dark Ages. She works constantly and the more she works the happier she is. When she goes away on business trips a designated adult stays with me at night and during the day I am on my own. She leaves me with two twenty-dollar bills for my expenses.

“I expect the change,” she says.

“Here,” I say when she comes back.

“What is this?” she says.

“The change,” I say.

“The change? I don’t want the change, where are the receipts? What did you spend the money on?”

“The bus, a sandwich. What are you talking about?” I say like she is crazy.

“I want to see what you spent the money on,” she says. “I want an accounting.” I roll my eyes; she catches me. I am still a child and she is the adult and for some insane reason she is in charge. There is nothing I can do about it. I am supposed to do what she says. The next time she goes away I take a piece of paper and write down what I spend the money on: $2.99 on Clairol Herbal Essence Shampoo, $3 on ham sandwich with mustard and mayonnaise on roll, $3 on bus tokens, 49¢ on blue ballpoint pen. When she comes home I give it to her.

“What is this?”

“It’s what I spent the money on,” I say.

“This is not what I asked for. Where are the receipts? This is not an accounting. This is a list. I don’t want a list. I want to see what you did with the money. I want an accounting with the receipts and a tallying up of what you spent against what you were given.” I stand there, dumbfounded.

“Honestly, Cathy. Use your head.”

BUXTON (#ulink_99155f88-b14e-5718-be94-01435956bcbd)

In the middle of eighth grade I suggest boarding school. A friend of my brother and sister’s who wrote a hit song for Carly Simon suggests his alma mater. And even though everyone more than slightly suspects him of stealing every single one of my mother’s flower and bug pins at a Christmas party three years ago to buy drugs, his suggestion is accepted. The school is small. They call it a community. Kids help build the buildings and make yogurt. You are only allowed to go home four designated weekends a year. Thanksgiving is spent at school. Parents can come visit you. There are no rules, just customs. Every senior makes a speech at graduation. I am given a collection of last year’s graduation speeches to take home with me at my interview. My mother is impressed with how self-assured the students seem. I’m not. The speeches are all the same: Before I came to Buxton I was selfish and now I’m not. Or subtitled , I Was Lost and Now I Am Found. All that impressed me was their policy about leaving. You can’t.

I didn’t bring the right clothes. My roommates laugh at me every time I walk through the door. I figured the dress code was L.L.Bean, Levi’s, turtlenecks, flannel shirts, work boots—in other words, basic country, but it’s not. It’s charge a bunch of cowlneck sweaters and gauchos at Bloomingdale’s with your parents’ credit card and complain when the ice and salt ruin your new high-heeled boots. I dream every night that my mother is burning up in a white clapboard house. I want to rescue her, to save her, but I leave the house empty-handed every time, shaking with fear as red and gold flames leap up and devour it. I stand on the dark street, flanked by the Rocky Mountains, sobbing. Then, as if someone flipped all the lights on at once, the sky turns white. I am blinded by the light and there was no fire at all. Strangers walk past me not understanding why I made such a big deal over a house that wasn’t even burning.

I am not allowed to go home for another eight weeks. In the meantime my mother sends me an extra blanket because I am freezing. The box arrives bent and one side is ripped open. The blanket is black and gummy from where it was pressed into the floor of the mail truck and God knows what else. There is no note.

There is a list posted every Tuesday right before they ring the bell for dinner. If the faculty thinks you are emotionally well adjusted there is a gold star next to your name, which means you can study in your room during day- and nighttime study halls. This is not a reward. This is not a popularity contest. This is a custom. I wait by the bulletin board, like a starving animal, ravenous for affirmation. Even though I always have a star I still feel like nothing.