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

It seems like a good time to transfer. I decide to apply to the drama department at NYU. I know it is what I was meant to do. I can cry on a dime and I have impeccable comic timing. I tell my mother, now a department head at NYU, how much money she would save if I transfer. “Sure,” she says. “I could get you in.” Until she put it like that I assumed I was good enough to get in myself.

Dr. Mellman thinks I am a danger to myself. She tells me to go home and pack a bag and meet her back at her office so she can bring me to a facility that can help me. I call my sisters, whom I haven’t spoken to for months. Neither of them is home. I don’t call my brother because I am mad at him. He comes to New York periodically and doesn’t call me. Some people, he said, think blood is thicker than water but he doesn’t. Just because I am his sister, he said, doesn’t necessarily mean he is interested in me. What an asshole. But I wish I were more interesting. I look at my clothes. I have nothing to wear at a mental hospital. I call my mother. What a shock: she is out of the country. I don’t want to be locked up. No one will know where I am. I close the door to my room and don’t come out for three days. I stop doing cocaine but I never go back to Dr. Mellman. Fuck her.

I take an apartment downtown so I can be closer to NYU and farther away from my bullshit friends at Barnard. I am in a van, driving the rest of my stuff from West 108th Street to Thirteenth Street. I see cop cars lined up in front of my new building. “What’s going on?” I ask a person on the street. “Someone got robbed, I think,” they say. Wouldn’t that be funny if it was my apartment, I joke to the man with a van as we carry the last of my belongings up the stairs. When I open the front door to my new apartment I see that my stereo is gone, my TV is gone, every garbage bag filled with my stuff is sliced open. The contents of my life are strewn all over the floor of my new living room. I pick everything up and try to make a home. It is a cute apartment. I guess I just have to keep the gate locked on the fire escape, and step over the junkies in the front hall, and not light the oven when I am alone so all the mice that fly out from the broiler don’t run over my feet.

I am sure I will feel better when my roommate comes. Her boyfriend, Chuck, moves in with us. Chuck is news to me. I don’t like running into Chuck and his shlong in the morning. We get a kitten for the mice and to keep me company. Chuck rolls over on it one night and kills it under the weight of his left arm. We fight about money. Chuck thinks we should split everything two ways, even though, as I point out, there are actually three of us. The halls stink like pee and Chuck never makes the rent because he is always lending money to one of the guys on the stoop I have to step over. I complain to my mother. She says, “I’ll call the housing department tomorrow. I’m sure I can get you a staff apartment.” As usual, I am nothing without her and because of her.

I can’t eat anywhere if the bathroom doesn’t have a single stall and if the sink isn’t close enough to the toilet because I need warm water and I need the water running to help me throw up. I eat, vomit, and go jogging. I’ve given up cleaning the bathroom. Today there was blood in the toilet along with everything else. It scared the shit out of me. My aggression and despair were aimed at my mother and myself. I never wanted to hurt my internal organs. I call my mother.

“I found a place to help me.”

“Well good,” she says. Her voice is flat as a pancake.

“They have a session that starts next month. I have to give them a deposit to hold my place.”

“How much is it?”

“Six hundred dollars.” She doesn’t say anything. “It is supposed to be really good.” She still doesn’t say anything. “Will you pay for it?” I ask finally. She sighs. “What is it?” I ask. She still hasn’t said yes or no.

“I don’t want to give you the money. Why will it be different this time? When will you get over it? I have been paying for your goddamn psychiatrists for six years and none of them have done you any good.”

“That’s not true.”

“What have they done? You are still bulimic, you still lie, you are still angry. When will you get over it? What are you going to do with your life?”

“There is blood coming out of my stomach and it frightens me,” I say.

There is a protracted sigh, and finally, “I’m giving you the money but I don’t believe you. It is part of your disease, I read about it. You are in denial and you lie.”

The program is a success even though the woman who runs it is chubby and addicted to cocaine the whole time and gets her license suspended six months later. I make one friend. She is in worse shape than me. She shits all over her apartment and cuts herself and finally commits herself to Columbia Presbyterian.

It was surprisingly easy for me to stop. I told them I would stop throwing up if I could lose weight while I digested. I am on Weight Watchers. I am a happy little digester. My mother is glad.

MY ROARING TWENTIES (#ulink_ac07936e-ef50-57c1-a76e-26da0ee7333a)

Dinner at my mother’s apartment. Alex and Molly are there. I hate Alex and Molly because every dinner I think I am having alone with my mother is ruined when she opens the door and says, “Alex and Molly are here.” My mother adores them. They are Canadian and, as my mother is so fond of pointing out, “Alex is a genius.” “So what,” I tell her. “He’s pretentious and a phony.”

“He is not. He’s just very, very, very, bright. He won a MacArthur, you know.”

We are in the living room nibbling on my mother’s typical pre-meal fare, olives and a variety of cheeses from Balducci’s. My mother always forgets to put out bread for the cheese and never provides a dish for the olive pits. Her hostessing style is both gracious and awkward. “Tell us again, Goldie,” Molly coos, rolling an olive pit around in the palm of her hand. “Tell us again.” They always make my mother tell this story. I don’t blame them. It’s a good story.

“Well, I skipped grades when I was a kid because I had scarlet fever,” my mother faithfully begins. “I was quarantined, and all I did for those three years was read. I read books and I discovered that there were places in the world other than Ottawa and people in the world other than my sister and I couldn’t wait to see them. I knew one day I would get out, but in the meantime I read and finished high school early. My mother told me I couldn’t just hang around the house every day. So for the first year after high school I went to the library every day and read. Which suited me fine because I couldn’t stand my sister and I wanted to get out anyway.

“And then, when I was seventeen I went to a party at the National Film Board and met a man who took me up in a back elevator to drink liquor. And it changed my life. I will never forget it. I smelled the silver nitrate on the film stock and I was intoxicated. I could think of nothing else. I knew I wanted to make films.

“So I went back the next day. ‘Can I help you?’ a woman behind a desk asked me. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’d like a job.’ ‘What can you do? Are you a writer?’ she said. ‘Are you a director? An editor?’ she asked. ‘No,’ I said. ‘What can you do?’ she asked. ‘Nothing. But I can learn,’ I said. ‘No,’ she said, ‘that’s not how it works.’ ‘Well this is where I want to work,’ I told her. ‘That may be true,’ she said to me, ‘but unless you know how to do something we can’t hire you.’ ‘Oh,’ I said and I went and sat down in the waiting room.

“‘Excuse me? What are you doing?’ she asked me. ‘Well I’m just going to sit here until something opens up,’ I said. ‘You can sit there as long as you want, but even if something opens up we’re not hiring you until you know how to do something.’ ‘Well I think I’ll just sit here. This is where I want to work.’

“So I sat in the waiting room at the National Film Board of Canada every day for two weeks until they gave me a job. And I followed a man down a long hallway to a door with a sign on it that said NFBC DISTRIBUTION. Now, I had no idea what distribution meant but I went back to the woman at the front and I said, ‘Excuse me this isn’t what I had in mind.’ ‘I beg your pardon?’ She looked like she was going to kill me. ‘Well there’s just a lot of desks and filing cabinets in there,’ I said. ‘It’s not very interesting. I want to learn how to make films. That’s what I came here for. I don’t think I’ll learn that in there.’”

And thus began my mother’s illustrious career at the National Film Board of Canada, where she escaped her family, made documentaries, met two men with whom she had four children and each of whom left her a widow. The end.

Dinner is served.

I meet a woman named Rita Marie Ross. She is Italian. She has inkblack hair in the style of Louise Brooks and a signature that strongly resembles the logo for Saks Fifth Avenue. Her skin is the color of vanilla ice cream and her lipstick is the color of the inside of a pomegranate. She is the most well-read, educated person I have ever met. She is appalled that I do not have a skin-care line. When I invite her for dinner she sends flowers and a thank-you note. She instructs me on the importance of good manners. She takes me to get a manicure every week right around the corner from where I grew up on Park Avenue. She makes me get a Saks card and commit to a moisturizing program. She teaches me that there is no shame in being a waitress. She says everyone in the world has a job to perform and there is honor and satisfaction in a job well done. She worked at a newspaper. She taught English to Raymond Carver. She published two books. She had a baby when she was nineteen and gave it up for adoption. She has lived more than anyone I know except my own mother. She smokes Camel straights, and when she laughs it rocks the room. She owns art. She is forty-five. I am twenty-five. She is my hero. When I meet my husband, who I don’t know is going to be my husband, she smiles at me and says in her low smoker’s drawl, “Oh, Catherine, you are having a life-changing experience.” She is a waitress where I work. My mother doesn’t like her at all.

“Sterling Jackson made my knees into jelly,” my mother says walking out the double door of her office building. It is a story I have loved hearing ever since I started dating. “I was absolutely helpless. He treated me rotten and I would say, ‘I’m not gonna see him anymore,’ and the weekend would come and he would call and I would send the kids to my mother’s so I could be alone with him. Half the time he’d cancel and I would curse him and swear not to see him anymore and the next weekend would come and he would call and I would drop everything. Finally, thank God, he stopped calling me. Years later I was having a business lunch at the Dorset and someone said, ‘Isn’t that Sterling Jackson?’ And I hadn’t thought about Sterling Jackson for years. He hadn’t entered my mind. And there I was at lunch and I heard his name and my knees turned to jelly and I thought I was going to fall right under the table. ‘Whatever happened to Sterling Jackson?’ I managed to ask. ‘He just got married,’ someone said. ‘Again,’ someone else said and the rest of lunch was a blur. He made me crazy.”

“And then you ran into him again eventually. Right?” I say, knowing the ending.

“That’s right. Years later I went back to Toronto for a conference and he was there. I’d heard he’d had some trouble and he looked old. He came up to me and, I’ll never forget it, he said in the same voice, ‘God I’ve missed you. Let’s get together. Where you staying?’ And I said, ‘The Sutton Place. Room 217.’ But I was staying at the Park Plaza. And the next morning he found me and he was furious and he said, ‘Where were you last night?’ and I said, ‘I must have forgotten,’ and I walked away. And that is the last time I saw Sterling Jackson.”

My new boyfriend, who Rita smiled so wisely about, is older than me and makes dinner reservations. He wears real shoes. I have never gone out with anyone who didn’t wear Converse All Stars or combat boots. He has a car. He has a gold American Express card. He takes me in like a stray. I decide to break up with him because I am bored. But before I do, he appears carrying a breakfast tray covered in red roses. I watch him bring it to me in my bed and have the strangest sensation. I feel feverish and my stomach hurts. And then I realize: I am safe. He makes me feel safe. I borrow money from a family friend to buy him a gold watch for Christmas. I get it engraved “Boy oh Boy.” He gives me a gold watch on a chain engraved with my initials. It is very “Gift of the Magi.” When he tells me he loves me, I wish he hadn’t. It is too soon and I have nowhere else to go. He owns a store across the street from the bar I work in and he watches me every day from his window. He proposes on our one-year anniversary. I call my mother from a phone booth in upstate New York, ashamed. My giant engagement ring doesn’t suit me. I feel like I am wearing a big SOLD sign. “I’m getting married,” I say. I want to hear her say, “Don’t worry.”

“Well good luck,” she says. And hangs up.

I get a job at Barneys. I can sneak out and run a half a block down Seventeenth Street to the theater I work at for fittings. I can go to rehearsals on my lunch break and my husband can’t see me through the window anymore. The dressing room at the theater company is just one room with a curtain hanging down the middle. My husband says this is wrong. He thinks all we do at the theater is undress in front of each other. He says he will start undressing at his store. I tell him it’s not really the same thing. “Why?” he says. “If there’s nothing wrong with it at the theater then there shouldn’t be anything wrong with it where I work. Barneys,” he continues, “has separate locker rooms. Why? Maybe because it is not normal to undress in front of people that you work with!” He is really bugging me. I get a part in the Issues Project. This year’s “issue” is censorship.

“Oh great,” my husband says. “Censorship. So what, there’ll be like what? A bunch of naked people on stage?”

“Gross,” I say. “What is wrong with you? Only someone as narrowminded as you would think of such a dumb expression of censorship. There are a lot more interesting and imaginative, less literal, classier ways of expressing censorship than taking your clothes off. And believe me, they will think of them, even if you can’t.”

I storm out. The night of dress rehearsal I watch all the plays for the first time. The lights dim for the first set change and four people silently appear on stage to move the furniture. And what do you know? They are all naked. The naked people come back between every play. There are eight plays. Eight times four, I calculate in my nervous head. That’s thirty-two appearances by naked people each show.

I am in so much trouble.

Barneys is the most beautiful store in the world. We have 8:30 a.m. breakfast meetings every other Saturday and I don’t even mind. The Hermès meeting made me cry. The same family is still running the business. We ate croissants and watched a video of a sunny warehouse in France where women hand rolled and hand stitched hems on all the beautiful scarves. It showed how every bag is started and finished by the same person who lovingly began cutting and dying it. Every single detail is done by hand. I worship my mother’s purses in a new light. Barneys is still run by the Pressman family too. In my orientation they told us how Barney Pressman hocked his wife’s engagement ring to open the store. We learn that Gene Pressman, Barney’s grandson, is the good-looking fashion genius responsible for opening the women’s store. All the girls in my department flirt with him. He throws a lot of parties. He is married to a former model who wears jodhpurs and looks sad all the time. Mrs. Pressman, Gene’s mother, always says, “Hello, dear” to me and it is my dream that she will pluck me like a flower from behind the counter and say, “You, little shop girl, you are different than the rest. Come with me.”

We get a 45 percent employee discount twice a year for complete outfits. The rest of the time we get 35 percent and it doesn’t include accessories. I have three pairs of Clergerie shoes and two Gaultier suits and three Hermès scarves. The display department is the only area of the store run by someone outside the family. The person in charge is a very little man with enormous ideas. He controls everything; the way we fold scarves, the palette of the sock display, the composition of the jewelry display. Cases of merchandise arrive and we have to page the display department so they can oversee the way we arrange it. No one would dare just open a box. He orchestrates the windows along Seventh Avenue and Seven-teenth Street, which are very provocative and rapidly becoming important in the retail world. In the fall the windows are going to be decorated with live performance art. I am asked to be in one. I am totally excited. It is my first paying acting job since the TV movie I did in Canada when I was still in college—the one I thought would change my life and give me a career but actually did nothing of the sort. I tell my mother. The event is from six to nine. When I come home there is a message on my machine from her. “I saw you! I saw you in the window. It was fabulous. You were wonderful. You were funny and that hat you were wearing was so dramatic and that dance you did was sensational. I loved that dance. When did you learn to dance? I was so proud I thought I would bust. You were so funny and terrific. You are such a good dancer. Congratulations.” I press delete. I wasn’t in that window. That wasn’t me.

My husband gives me one ten-dollar bill a day. I give him all my paychecks. I do not have a cash card for our account. When I say I would like my own money he says, “Don’t I buy you everything you need?” His voice sounds like his heart is breaking. “Yes,” I say, “but I have to ask permission. It’s my money too. Doesn’t that seem a little fucked up?” He also safety-pins my shirts closed so no one can see in the gap between my buttons when I lean over a display case. He agrees to couples therapy after coming home one night and finding me holding the front door knob in one hand and a suitcase in the other. The first day of therapy the therapist says, “People come to couples therapy to break up or to stay together. Why are you here?” He asks me first. I lie.

I can’t stop thinking about the fifty thousand dollars my in-laws spent on our wedding versus the money my mother did not contribute. She said she would give us a down payment for a house but she had absolutely no interest in wasting money on a wedding. I felt like Debra Winger in Terms of Endearment. His family lives on Long Island. My mother is a snob. She hates Long Island. She has nothing in common with his parents. They are married and they don’t read The New Yorker and the angriest his mother ever gets at his father is to say, “Ooh, I am going to hit you with a wet noodle.” His mother is the nicest person I have ever met. She is warmth personified, softness in motion. She says yes to everyone. She can’t prioritize. Everything is equally important for her. Someone’s car broke down, someone was just diagnosed with cancer, someone needs a paper clip—she’ll be right over. Every time his father sees me he says, “Oh I could pick her up and put her in my pocket.” It is purely by rote but I blush and want to crawl into his pocket every time he says it. After we tell them we are separating he never says it again.

Against advice from agents who won’t sign me and acting teachers who don’t get me, I cut off all my hair and do not get blond highlights. I book a commercial the following week. When the check comes I steal it so I can bankroll my escape. My husband packs my things. He decides what is fair dispensation of our wedding presents (nothing from his parents or any of their friends). He says I may leave, but I must leave behind the boxes he packed. If I still want a separation two months later I can take everything. I move in with my mother. She seems sad. I assumed she’d be happy I took my life in my own hands. That is all I have ever seen her do.

I watch Matthew Broderick win a Tony Award and dedicate it to his father, who is dead. I vow to do the same. I change my name to Catherine Lloyd because when I join the unions there already is a Catherine Burns. Lloyd was my father’s first name. I don’t want to have the same last name as the rest of my family anymore. I didn’t take my husband’s name either. I am attached to no one.

“Hello, Miss Bunes.” I feel a breath go through me, which is what my acting teacher at NYU always said should happen before you speak in a scene, but I am not in a scene. I am in the lobby of my mother’s building. I manage to get myself upstairs.

“Oh Cathy. You are a grown woman. When will you get over it?” my mother says when she finds me pacing the floor like a caged animal. If I had a grenade I would throw it at her. “He’s a harmless old man now.” She is breaking the rules. She is saying things that cannot be said if we are to share the same life. I will not stay in this apartment another second. But the decision to leave is not empowering. Because I don’t know how to stay anywhere.

I have done five commercials, eleven plays, and two television shows, and I still have to work at Barneys. Every morning I walk across Greenwich Avenue and have a conversation with myself

Cathy, you can do it. It’s just eight hours. You can do it. You need money and they are paying you for your time. It is a totally fair exchange. I believe myself until I walk in the employee entrance, punch in, and am instantly overwhelmed by nausea. I can’t handle it anymore. My roommate the well-paid working actress came down the marble staircase yesterday all aglow from her ten-thousand-dollar shopping spree. I try to look at it as a challenge to be a good employee. Today I will fold all the scarves and use the brush to clean out the display case. If I really concentrate time will go by faster. It is easier to work hard than be bored, I tell myself. But I haven’t done it yet. Instead I stare into space and ignore the customers I am not in the mood to deal with. Every morning before we open I call my mother. We are getting along better since I stopped throwing up, plus I got her a really cool Prada raincoat that folds up into nothing. My discount makes me very popular.

“Aren’t you at work?” she says. “I doubt calling me on the telephone is what they are paying you for.”