It Hit Me Like a Ton of Bricks: A memoir of a mother and daughter. Catherine Burns L.

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.”

      “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. СКАЧАТЬ