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

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      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.

      My mother calls long-distance to tell me that in spite of the recession and the fact that apartments cost a fortune she got us a sprawling three-bedroom in a prewar doorman building overlooking Washington Square Park. We are moving downtown. I am changing schools too. I burst into tears. My sister tells me not to worry because even though all the kids from my old school seem important now, one day, she says, I won’t even remember their names. I tell her that’s not true. I tell her I will always remember their names. She smiles at me like I am too young to know what I am saying. But I do know what I am saying. And I feel older than all of them.

      

      I move in with my sister and the singer. The singer is learning to play the harpsichord. I am not allowed to touch the harpsichord. The singer’s house is in the mountains and my sister can’t spend all her time driving me around so I stay inside not touching the harpsichord and climbing up and down the shag-carpeted sunken living room. I play with the ice dispenser on the door of the fridge. I listen to Blue. The singer is impressed that I know all the words. I fly back to New York in August listening to “This Flight Tonight” on headphones. Turn this crazy bird around. I shouldn’t have got on this flight tonight, Joni Mitchell sings.

       GREENWICH VILLAGE

      My mother has a boyfriend who wears hiphuggers and is pretentious. I may be eleven but I know an idiot when I meet one. They have a lot of sex. They aren’t trying to hide it either. It is the grossest thing I have ever seen in my life. They look like ferocious little animals. I bring them coffee every morning. I don’t know why. Maybe it is an attempt to make them behave responsibly, to get them to cut down on their morning fornication. I bring it to them on a tray, like a little servant girl. His cup always gets a big shake of Tabasco. They never say anything about it. He is younger than one of my sisters. He is disgusting.

      It is freezing cold. We are walking home through Washington Square Park after pretending to say goodbye to him in front of a bunch of people they work with. I would pay money to say goodbye to him for good, forever. But five minutes after we get home the doorbell will ring and they will start humping each other again.

      “Why don’t you like Donny?” my mother asks me under the arch.

      “Because he’s gross.”

      “Well,” she says. “You may not like him, but he’s not gross.”

      “Then why are you ashamed of him?” I counter.

      “I am not ashamed of him,” she says.

      “Oh really? Then how come he has to sneak over? Why are you too embarrassed to walk down the street with him?”

      “I am not embarrassed, Cathy. It’s very complicated. There are people I work with who wouldn’t—he knows people that––it’s very complicated. But I certainly don’t have to explain it to you.”

      It is clear to me I won the argument. I should be a fucking lawyer.

      I rock every day after school. I curl up in a ball and put my head in my hands, tuck my legs under my stomach, and rock СКАЧАТЬ