Читать книгу It Hit Me Like a Ton of Bricks: A memoir of a mother and daughter - Catherine Burns L. - Страница 9

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 back and forth. It’s total bullshit. It is what crazy people do. I read it in I Never Promised You a Rose Garden. I am waiting for her to say something about it. My oldest sister calls from Canada all the time to tell me the worst thing you can do to a child is tell them that the way they feel isn’t true. I don’t like our new apartment. I miss Park Avenue. I miss the split-pea-green carpet in the hall, which was ugly but was the same carpet in my room and in my parents’ room and in my sister’s room. I miss the breakfast nook where my parents read The New York Times every morning and where my mother taught me about clothes. “Ach, have you ever seen such an awful dress, who would wear this? Look at this, Cathy, it is hideous.” I miss the kitchen cabinets with the glass doors that went all the way to the ceiling and you could see what was inside and the glass was covered with psychedelic decals my sister stuck on the year before my father died. I miss my father, but I try not to think about that. I have two lives: one with a father, friends, and a nice school; and this one. They have nothing to do with each other. And one of them is over anyway so it doesn’t matter. It was a life that belonged to someone else.

“Do you know I am ashamed to bring people over to this house? You are so rude. You are so sullen. You are always with the long face. Sometimes I just want to flush you down the toilet,” my mother says to me.

“Why does he have to be here all the time?”

“Because he lives with us and I invited him.”

“Well I didn’t.”

“Don’t make me choose, Cathy. I will. And we will both regret it. Don’t make me choose.”

It never occurs to me that she will choose me.

This is my plan: I will leave my mother and her fuck buddy and move to the Plaza. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before. It’s perfect. I will continue going to school but I will live alone. I hate them. I hate her. How could she have forgotten my father? There is a candlelight vigil in my heart every day. I promise him that even if no one else acts like he mattered I will. Without going into a lot of detail I tell the Plaza that I want to move in. They don’t seem as excited as I am. Plus it turns out to be really expensive. I have money from my father, but not enough to live at the Plaza while I finish eighth grade. And they won’t let me check in as a minor. I’ve got to find an adult to fill out the paperwork. I always thought if you had money you could do anything in this world. But I guess not at the Plaza. I call my brother. He’s not a minor. He repeats my plan back to me.

“I got to say, kid, it sounds like not a bad plan. Although quite expensive.”

“I know. That’s the drawback.”

“Well,” he says after a long pause. “Let’s wait a week and if you still think it’s a good idea I’ll call them and try to check you in.”

“Miss Bunes, the elevator’s broken, I gotta take you up in the back,” the doorman mumbles to me. I watch him hang a sign up in the lobby that says BE RIGHT BACK. We go to the back elevator. He shuffles his feet. He smokes a cigarette. He takes me upstairs.

“Thank you,” I say and go inside. My mother has never been home when I got home from school but someone used to be there—a nanny, the housekeeper, or my sister before she moved out. I do my homework and make some scrambled eggs with dill, and go watch Julia Child. The next afternoon the elevator is broken again. He hangs the sign and I follow him to the service elevator.

“You, uh, want to drive the elevator?” he says after the door closes.

“No thank you.” Why he wants me to have a turn driving the elevator is beyond me. What is his problem? I always thought this doorman was weird. I miss Charlie the doorman from Park Avenue. Charlie had soft brown hair and a lilting voice that sounded like the beginning of a show tune. His face lit up when he saw me like he was really happy to see me. This doorman looks like a hit man and he talks like he’s got a bunch of loose teeth in his mouth. He’s gross but you can tell he thinks he’s really hot shit, which makes him grosser.

“Come here,” he mumbles. “I’ll show you how it works. Hold on to here. Come.”

I touch the lever. “Okay. I’m done. Thank you,” I say. I think we are finished.

“No. Come closer. Sit up here and I’ll show you,” he says.

“That’s all right,” I assure him. “I don’t need to drive the elevator.”

“Come over here.” He pats a space between his legs on the seat he’s sitting on. “Sit over here.” I shuffle over and sit between his legs on the little metal elevator stool and he takes my hand and puts it on the lever. “There,” he whispers sliding my hand and the lever across his lap. He lets go of my hand and holds on to my hips sliding me up and down. I run out of the elevator when we get to my floor.

The next week the elevator is broken two more times. It is never broken on any other doorman’s shift or in the mornings. Oh well. This is my new afterschool activity, I guess, riding my doorman’s crotch. I follow him to the back. He never talks anymore, he just holds my hips and slides me up and down very slowly while I stare straight ahead counting the floors to my apartment, where I go inside and space out until my mother comes home and the sun goes down, putting this day out of its misery.

“What is it that you would like me to do?” my mother replies in a voice I don’t expect.

“I don’t know. Something,” I suggest feebly. “I mean don’t you think it’s weird that the elevator is broken all the time and I have to go up the back with him?”

“Well, what do you think I should do?”

“I don’t know, Mom.” I really don’t know what she should do. “But don’t you think you should do something?”

“Well, I could write a letter,” she says finally.

“Okay,” I say, assuming the conversation is over.

“But he’ll probably lose his benefits.”

“Okay.”

“Is that what you want?”

“I don’t know. I guess so.” I just want to go in my room and rock.

“He’ll get fired.”

“Okay.”

“And he will lose all his benefits, Cathy.”

“Okay.”

“Well, no, Cathy. It’s not okay. He probably has a wife and kids and they need those benefits.”

“What do you mean? What are you talking about?”

“Their benefits. They’re probably all covered under his benefits. Their life insurance. Their health insurance. Their dental insurance. Is that what you want? It’s a very serious matter. Do you want them to lose all those things?”

“I don’t know. I just don’t want to ride up in the elevator with him anymore.”

“I don’t understand what you are doing with him in the elevator in the first place,” she says.

“The elevator’s always broken.”

“Well it’s not broken now, I just came up in it.”

“It was broken this afternoon.”

“Well it’s not broken now,” she says as though the problem is solved. She’s making me feel bad. But if I tell her she will say, “No one makes anyone anything, Cathy. You can’t make a person do or say or feel anything. I don’t make you do anything, whatever you do you do yourself.”

“What is it Cathy?”

“I don’t know,” I say, whining.

“I don’t know what you want me to do. Do you want me to write a letter? I will. He will lose his benefits. But I will do it. Is that what you want?”

“No. I guess not,” I say. It’s only nine floors.

My mother has found herself.

After eleven years of being the female traveling companion to a male executive, she has reentered the work force. Through a connection to NYU and the benefit of several grants, she runs an office operating out of a third-floor space above the Bleecker Street Cinema called the Alternate Media Center. She carries a porta-pack everywhere and is always talking about two-way video interactive this and telecommunications that. It is a very exciting time in her life. She is having a renaissance. Not me. I am in the Dark Ages. She works constantly and the more she works the happier she is. When she goes away on business trips a designated adult stays with me at night and during the day I am on my own. She leaves me with two twenty-dollar bills for my expenses.

“I expect the change,” she says.

“Here,” I say when she comes back.

“What is this?” she says.

“The change,” I say.

“The change? I don’t want the change, where are the receipts? What did you spend the money on?”

“The bus, a sandwich. What are you talking about?” I say like she is crazy.

“I want to see what you spent the money on,” she says. “I want an accounting.” I roll my eyes; she catches me. I am still a child and she is the adult and for some insane reason she is in charge. There is nothing I can do about it. I am supposed to do what she says. The next time she goes away I take a piece of paper and write down what I spend the money on: $2.99 on Clairol Herbal Essence Shampoo, $3 on ham sandwich with mustard and mayonnaise on roll, $3 on bus tokens, 49¢ on blue ballpoint pen. When she comes home I give it to her.

“What is this?”

“It’s what I spent the money on,” I say.

“This is not what I asked for. Where are the receipts? This is not an accounting. This is a list. I don’t want a list. I want to see what you did with the money. I want an accounting with the receipts and a tallying up of what you spent against what you were given.” I stand there, dumbfounded.

“Honestly, Cathy. Use your head.”