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

“You know what, Mom? Don’t worry about them. They’re not losing any money, okay?” When I have auditions or a tech at the theater I still say I am going to the bathroom and punch out. But yesterday I left to go to the bathroom four times and really got on the subway and went to auditions. I am starting to feel guilty—even though I am probably saving them money because I rarely work a full eight-hour day. My new boyfriend writes speeches at the EPA for money. This is his work ethic: he hangs his coat on the back of his chair in the morning and rides his bike back home where he writes plays and takes a nap until the end of the day when he goes back to the EPA to say good night and pick up his coat. I tell him it is dishonorable. “I doubt that’s what they are paying you for,” I tell him. He tells me, “What do you care? I turn in all my work, I write the goddamn speeches. And they’re good.” I can’t tell if he reminds me more of my mother or of me. I am completely in love with him. The speechwriter wrote an amazing play for me. I play a rookie cop who is overcompensating for everything, for being a rookie, for being a girl. I am proving myself right, left, and center. I love the police force and am grateful to belong to something bigger than myself. I am in love with my partner. His father and his uncles are all cops. He takes me under his wing. I would do anything for him. He teaches me something moral and honorable every day. I will make him love me. I will be worthy of him. In the play I am waiting for him in the lobby of an apartment building while he picks something up. The doorman is trying to flirt with me, which is insulting. I keep calling him a doorman and he keeps explaining to me that he is a security guard. By the end of the play my partner breaks my heart. He is upstairs fucking a whore. And I break my own heart because I am falling in love with the doorman, who is charming and a better person than my partner will ever be, but I can’t let myself because I am still a kid trying too hard.

The play also happens to be hilarious. I’m pretty good in it. I win a little award for it. A lot of people from Barneys come. My mother comes and she says, “Maybe you should be a cop instead.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“We’re going to Paris,” my mother repeats out of nowhere.

“We are? What are you talking about?”

“I’m taking us to Paris. I want to show you Paris. I want to take you to Paris. Isn’t that a good idea? I just decided it just now. Isn’t it terrific? I love the whole idea.”

“My God.”

“Won’t that be nice? For our birthdays. Ach, I can’t wait. I am booking the tickets now,” and she hangs up. I had been planning a trip to Paris for a week, in September, by myself as recompense for turning thirty and being divorced and once again not being voted into the theater company that everyone I know, including my boyfriend the speechwriter, is in. And I have just been informed by my mother that I am in fact going to Paris for five days, in the spring, with her.

On the plane I read travel books looking for flea markets, trying not to dwell on why, for the sixth year in a row, that fucking theater company won’t let me in and my mother reads Vanity Fair, which she pretends is beneath her.

“It’s for the plane,” she says.

“Whatever.” The seat belt sign is turned off. Our first beverage arrives. “What time is it anyway?” I ask her. I’m thirty, with a divorce under my belt, but I don’t have a watch.

“It’s a quarter to five, which means it’s a quarter to one in Paris except I don’t know if they have daylight saving time in Paris. I know they do in London, but the French are so peculiar. What would you like to see first? Where shall I take you first? I absolutely cannot wait to show you my Paris.”

“Well, you know,” I say, “I was sort of thinking maybe we wouldn’t, you know, do everything together. Like maybe—”

“Don’t say ‘like.’”

“Well maybe I thought we could have adventures, separately, during the day and, you know, like meet for dinner and tell each other everything that happened.” And I can see for the first time in a long time, I have hurt my mother’s feelings. She hurts mine all the time, but for some reason that’s different. I cannot bear hurting hers. I want to be my Jewish person’s idea of Catholic and repent, so I take it back: “But we don’t have to do it that way,” I say. “I just thought you liked doing it that way.”

“Why would I want to do it that way?” she says.

“Because you did it that way with Spencer last year and you said you had such a good time.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. That was Spencer. He’s impossible. And we hate whatever the other one likes. He wants to drag me to those hideous flea markets, he likes to go to very expensive restaurants. He’s awful. This is totally different. You’re my kid. I’m taking you to Paris. It’s my gift to you. I want to share it with you.” I had not thought of it like that.

In Paris, we reach a compromise. I am allowed to visit the hideous flea markets and she is allowed to undermine my sense of self. We eat steak frites every night we are there. Eating so much steak frites makes her very rude to the waiters. It is as though she is embarrassed at how much steak frites she eats so when they take her order she just wants them to go away. “Steak frites!” she barks at them.

I, on the other hand, try to order very sweetly. We drink a lot of red wine and people watch. She kicks me under the table whenever there are Germans nearby because she is a Jew who grew up during the Holocaust and can’t help it. I would never tolerate this in New York, or anywhere in America for that matter, but somehow in Europe it seems different. I let it slide.

“What’s the matter? Are you all right? Are you not enjoying yourself? What’s wrong?” she says staring into me. Nothing is wrong. It is quite the opposite. Everything is great. Sometimes my mother has the uncanny ability to read my thoughts and totally reverse them.

We visit Chartres. On the train my mother says, “Look at all the ticky-tacky houses.”

“Yeah, I was just thinking that.”

“Do you remember that song?”

“What song?”

“The ticky-tacky houses song? It was a song on a Pete Seeger record you used to like to listen to when you were little.” I don’t remember actually, but I remember her telling me I liked it so many times it is as though I remember. Past the outskirts of the city we travel through fields and meadows where the grass looks so soft I want to take all my clothes off and lie down in it. We roll through little towns where it seems as if every blossom is blooming and every bud is bursting. There is euphoria in the air, as if all of nature is jumping up and down saying, “The leaves are coming! The leaves are coming!” I point out the buds and blossoms to my mother. “Mmm. They are so delicate,” she says. There is a long pause. “And things of delicacy don’t last.”

We walk through the town of Chartres eating amazing sandwiches: tuna fish, hard-boiled eggs, cornichons, and tomatoes on bread that is so delicious it makes the contents irrelevant. We inhale and savor every bite. Halfway down the block my mother wants to turn around and get another sandwich. “No!” I say. “If you do you’ll be too full for steak frites later.” She stops cold.

We arrive at the church. I get very emotional and respectful in churches. My mother doesn’t, which I don’t entirely understand, but I can tell she thinks her reaction is infinitely more practical than mine. In the back and up some stairs, a grail, some swords, several priests’ robes, and an entire outfit worn by Charles V are on display. I am moved to tears. I can tell my mother wishes I wasn’t. I can’t get over how old everything is and how long it lasts. It both comforts and depresses me. The exhibit is behind Plexiglas and an old plainclothes nun is sitting in front taking collections. I give her a heap of money. My mother shakes her head. As we walk out she says, “I think it’s the balance and the proportion. You know.” There is a long pause for me to visualize the balance and the proportion. She continues. “Yes, that’s what it is. The balance and the proportion. The height and the space. You know? That is what makes good architecture.”