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

It Hit Me Like A Ton of Bricks

A Memoir of a Mother and Daughter

Catherine Bloyd Burns

My mother said, “When am I going to read it?”

“When I’m done,” I said.

“Are you being sensitive to my sensitivities? I hope.”

“I told you, it is a very three-dimensional, realistic portrait. Of both of us. I probably come off worse than you do.”

“Well I think you should write a disclaimer,” she said, “which clearly states there are three truths: mine, yours, and the truth.”

This book is dedicated to my mother. And to my daughter, who I hope will be sensitive to my sensitivities when the time comes.

Also for RM.

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Part One

SOMETHING NICE ABOUT MY MOTHER

565 PARK AVENUE

THE WHITE CLAPBOARD HOUSE

GREENWICH VILLAGE

BUXTON

THE FINGER

MY ROARING TWENTIES

LOS ANGELES

Part Two

IT’S A MAN’S WORLD

AFFECTION DEFICIT DISORDER

ME, MYSELF, AND I AM MY MOTHER

MIND THE GAP

GRACE AND INTEGRITY

Acknowledgments

Copyright

About the Publisher

Part One

SOMETHING NICE ABOUT MY MOTHER

My answering machine is ablaze. I have sixteen messages, all from her. She needs to see me right away. What a pain in the ass. She lives in the Village. I live in Harlem. “Please hurry,” she begs.

I walk in her front door an hour and a half later. She is in tears. I have been her daughter for nineteen years and this is the first time I have ever seen her cry. I don’t like it. I thought I would like it. I concentrate on hanging up my vintage faux fur coat. “I thought you were dead,” she tells my back.

“Well I’m not,” I say. She leads me to the living room, to the center of the U made by her three white Knoll sofas. There are tissues everywhere. She is shaking, clinging to me.

Oh my God, I think, this is it. This is the moment I have steered my whole little life toward.

“I’m so glad to see you,” she says, blowing her nose. “I thought you were dead. I was terrified you were dead.”

“I’m not,” I repeat.

“And then it hit me like a ton of bricks.”

I sit down next to her. She is going to reach out to me. She is going to apologize. I look into her bloodshot blue eyes.

“It suddenly hit me today,” she says. “I don’t know why, but it hit me like a ton of bricks. This has nothing to do with me. If you kill yourself, it is simply not my fault. I am off the hook. None of this is my fault. I am not responsible.” She looks almost euphoric as she takes my hand. “And I couldn’t wait to tell you.”

565 PARK AVENUE

I am the chef, the star, the main ingredient. My mother is just the assistant. She explains what I do to the camera. “Cathy will pour the egg into the bowl,” or “Cathy will now mix.” Julia Child is also a chef and personality on TV. Julia Child throws all her garbage on the floor, which my mother cannot believe. I want to throw all our garbage on the floor too, but we are allowed to throw our garbage only in the sink, not on the floor like Julia Child. I also like how on Julia Child’s show the finished recipe is always waiting, fully baked, bubbling, and brown, in the oven. It makes her show very professional. I wish our show were that professional. But, as my mother points out, our show is just a game.

My mother says, “Oh I’ll just put my bagel right here while I go answer the phone.” She is not saying it to me, because I am not here. I am invisible. I am hiding behind this chair. I gaze at the buttery golden brown perfectly toasted bagel. I can smell the yeast from across the kitchen. When the coast is clear I take it—plate, napkin, and all—and creep out of the room. This is the life I am forced to live because the food my mother makes for herself tastes significantly better than the food she makes for me.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Cathy, it’s the same bagel,” she said when I told her.

“No. Yours is better. It has better butter. You try. Taste.”

“There is no difference.”

“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.

“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

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.