Catherine Burns - It Hit Me Like a Ton of Bricks - A memoir of a mother and daughter

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.”

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.