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

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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

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