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

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       BUXTON

      In the middle of eighth grade I suggest boarding school. A friend of my brother and sister’s who wrote a hit song for Carly Simon suggests his alma mater. And even though everyone more than slightly suspects him of stealing every single one of my mother’s flower and bug pins at a Christmas party three years ago to buy drugs, his suggestion is accepted. The school is small. They call it a community. Kids help build the buildings and make yogurt. You are only allowed to go home four designated weekends a year. Thanksgiving is spent at school. Parents can come visit you. There are no rules, just customs. Every senior makes a speech at graduation. I am given a collection of last year’s graduation speeches to take home with me at my interview. My mother is impressed with how self-assured the students seem. I’m not. The speeches are all the same: Before I came to Buxton I was selfish and now I’m not. Or subtitled , I Was Lost and Now I Am Found. All that impressed me was their policy about leaving. You can’t.

      I didn’t bring the right clothes. My roommates laugh at me every time I walk through the door. I figured the dress code was L.L.Bean, Levi’s, turtlenecks, flannel shirts, work boots—in other words, basic country, but it’s not. It’s charge a bunch of cowlneck sweaters and gauchos at Bloomingdale’s with your parents’ credit card and complain when the ice and salt ruin your new high-heeled boots. I dream every night that my mother is burning up in a white clapboard house. I want to rescue her, to save her, but I leave the house empty-handed every time, shaking with fear as red and gold flames leap up and devour it. I stand on the dark street, flanked by the Rocky Mountains, sobbing. Then, as if someone flipped all the lights on at once, the sky turns white. I am blinded by the light and there was no fire at all. Strangers walk past me not understanding why I made such a big deal over a house that wasn’t even burning.

      I am not allowed to go home for another eight weeks. In the meantime my mother sends me an extra blanket because I am freezing. The box arrives bent and one side is ripped open. The blanket is black and gummy from where it was pressed into the floor of the mail truck and God knows what else. There is no note.

      There is a list posted every Tuesday right before they ring the bell for dinner. If the faculty thinks you are emotionally well adjusted there is a gold star next to your name, which means you can study in your room during day- and nighttime study halls. This is not a reward. This is not a popularity contest. This is a custom. I wait by the bulletin board, like a starving animal, ravenous for affirmation. Even though I always have a star I still feel like nothing.

      The school wants me to see a psychiatrist. I prepare myself for what my mother will say because I’ve heard it my whole life: “You know what my mother always said to me? She said, ‘Where is it written you have to be happy. Show me where that is written.’ You know what a real problem is, Cathy? Cancer. That is a real problem. Stu Weiner has cancer. That is a real problem.” But she surprises me. “Well,” she says. “I have real problems, Cathy, I have to get a new secretary.”

      There are a lot more customs than they let on about: Don’t drink or get high. Don’t go in the opposite sex’s dorm. Be happy and well adjusted. It is easy to be happy about all the customs because if you are not happy about the customs it means you do not have enough school spirit, which means you are a menace to the community. Which means you won’t get a star next to your name and you might have to be removed from the school community, in the middle of the night if necessary, like my last roommate, Theresa, or be held back a year in broad daylight, like Oscar. Oscar’s mother committed suicide when he was five and his father is a very busy Broadway producer. They live in the Dakota. John Lennon and Yoko Ono are his neighbors, but he hardly gets to see them anymore because he is away at school. Oscar has been a sophomore twice and is on his way to being a junior for the second time in a row. Oscar hardly ever has a star next to his name.

      Another custom is that it is not against the customs to smoke cigarettes. This is a good custom.

      A taxi picks me up Thursday afternoons and drives me to my psychiatrist’s red barn house. It feels like a house where a family eats dinner together and laughs so much peas and carrots come out of their noses. It looks like a house people can’t wait to come home to. I wish I lived in this house. “So why don’t we begin with your childhood,” she says warmly.

      I talk for forty-five minutes. When I’m done she says, “Do you have a mother?”

      “Do СКАЧАТЬ