Running with Scissors (2 page)

My father is home.

He will come inside the house, pour himself a drink and then go downstairs and watch TV in the dark.

I will have the upstairs to myself. All the windows and the walls and the entire fireplace which cuts straight through the center of the house, both floors; I will have the ice maker in the freezer, the hexagonal espresso pot my mother uses for guests, the black deck, the stereo speakers; all of this contained in so much tall space. I will have it all.

I will walk around and turn lights on and off, on and off. There is a panel of switches on the wall before the hall opens up into two huge, tall rooms. I will switch the spotlights on in the living room, illuminating the fireplace, the sofa. I will switch the light off and turn on the spotlights in the hallway; over the front of the door. I will run from the wall and stand in the spotlight. I will bathe in the light like a star and I will say, “Thank you for coming tonight to my poetry reading.”

I will be wearing the dress my mother didn’t wear. It is long, black and 100 percent polyester, my favorite fabric because it flows. I will wear her dress and her shoes and I will be her.

With the spotlights aimed right at me, I will clear my throat and read a poem from her book. I will read it with her distinctive and refined Southern inflection.

I will turn off all the lights in the house and go into my bedroom, close the door. My bedroom is deep blue. Bookshelves are attached to the wall with brackets on either side of my window; the shelves themselves are lined with aluminum foil. I like things shiny.

My shiny bookshelves are lined with treasures. Empty cans, their labels removed, their ribbed steel skins polished with silver polish. I wish they were gold. I have rings there, rings from our trip to Mexico when I was five. Also on the shelves: pictures of jewelry cut from magazines, glued to cardboard and propped upright; one of the good spoons from the sterling silver my grandmother sent my parents when they were married; silver my mother hates (“God-awful tacky”) and a small collection of nickels, dimes and quarters, each of which has been boiled and polished with silver polish while watching
Downy & Marie
or
Tony Orlando and Dawn
.

I love shiny things, I love stars. Someday, I want to be a star, like my mother, like Maude.

The sliding doors to my closet are covered with mirror squares I bought with my allowance. The mirrors have veins of gold streaking through them. I stuck them to the doors myself.

I will aim my desk lamp into the center of the room and stand in its light, looking at myself in the mirror. “Hand me that box,” I will say to my reflection. “Something isn’t right here.”

LITTLE BOY BLUE NAVY BLAZER

M

Y FONDNESS FOR FORMAL WEAR CAN BE TRACED TO THE
womb. While pregnant with me, my mother blasted opera on her record player while she sat at the kitchen table addressing SASEs to
The New Yorker
. Somehow, on the deepest, most base genetic level, I understood that the massively intense music I heard through her flesh was being sung by fat people dressed in cummerbunds and enormous sequined gowns.

When I was ten, my favorite outfit was a navy blazer, a white shirt and a red clip-on tie. I felt I looked important. Like a young king who had ascended the throne because his mother had been beheaded.

I flatly refused to go to school if my hair was not perfect, if the light didn’t fall across it in a smooth, blond sheet. I wanted my hair to look exactly like the mannequin boys’ at Ann August, where my mother shopped. One stray flyaway was enough to send the hairbrush into the mirror and me running for my room in tears.

And if there was lint on my outfit that my mother couldn’t remove with masking tape, that was a better reason to stay home than strep throat. In fact, the only day of the year I actually liked going to school was the day the school photo was taken. I loved that the photographer gave us combs as parting gifts, like on a game show.

Throughout my childhood, while all the other kids were starting fights, playing ball and getting dirty, I was in my bedroom polishing the gold-tone mood rings I made my mother buy me at Kmart and listening to Barry Manilow, Tony Orlando and Dawn and, inexplicably, Odetta. I preferred
albums
to the more modern
eight tracks
. Albums came with sleeves which reminded me of clean underwear. Plus, the pictures were bigger, making it easier to see each follicle of Tony Orlando’s shiny arm hair.

I would have been an excellent member of the Brady Bunch. I would have been Shaun, the well-behaved blond boy who caused no trouble and helped Alice in the kitchen, then trimmed the split ends off Marcia’s hair. I would have not only washed Tiger, but then conditioned his fur. And I would have cautioned Jan against that tacky bracelet that caused the girls to lose the house-of-cards-building contest.

My mother chain-smoked and wrote confessional poetry around the clock, taking breaks during the day to call her friends and read drafts of her latest poem. Occasionally she would ask for my opinion.

“Augusten, I’ve been working on what I believe could be the poem that finally makes it into
The New Yorker
. I believe it could make me a very famous woman. Would you like to hear it?”

I turned away from the mirror on my closet door and set the hairbrush on my desk. I loved
The New Yorker
because it featured cartoons and ads. Maybe my mother would get her poem published right next to an ad for a Mercury Grand Marquis! “Read it, read it, read it,” I bounced.

She led me into her study, took a seat at her desk and turned off her white Olympia typewriter. Then she quickly checked the cap on her bottle of Wite-Out before clearing her throat and lighting a More cigarette. I sat on the twin bed she had converted into a sofa with throw pillows and an Indian bedspread.

“Ready?” she asked

“Okay.”

She crossed her legs, resting the side of her wrist on her knee as she leaned forward and read from the page. “Childhood is over. My youth. And bonds with people I have loved are broken now. My grief ascends into the clouds. And those tears that fall from the sky build the land anew, even the dead climb from their graves to walk with me and sing. And I . . .”

She read for many pages, her voice perfectly modulated. She practiced reading her poems out loud into a microphone that she kept in the corner of the room on a stand. Sometimes, when she was visiting her friend Lydia or in the living room trimming her spider plants, I would borrow the microphone and stuff it down the front of my pants, examining myself from every angle in the mirror.

When she was finished reading her poem, she looked up at me and said, “Okay, now I need your honest reaction. Did it feel powerful to you? Emotionally charged?”

I knew that the only correct answer to this question was, “Wow. That really does seem like something you’d read in
The New Yorker
.”

She laughed, pleased. “Really? Do you really think so?
The New Yorker
is very selective. They don’t publish just anyone.” She stood and began to pace in front of her desk.

“No, I really think they would publish this. All the stuff about your mother pushing you backwards into the heartshaped goldfish pond in the backyard, the thing with your paralyzed sister, that was great.”

She lit another cigarette and inhaled deeply. “Well, we’ll see. I just got a rejection letter from
The Virginia Quarterly
. So that worries me. Of course, if
The New Yorker
did accept this poem, your grandmother would see it. I can’t imagine what she would say. But I can’t let her reaction stop me from publishing.” Then she stopped pacing, placed one hand on her hip and brought the other one holding the cigarette to her lips. “You know, Augusten. Your mother was meant to be a
very
famous woman.”

“I know,” I said. The idea that someday we might have our own stretch limousine parked in the driveway instead of that awful brown Dodge Aspen station wagon was so thrilling that I almost couldn’t stop myself from screaming. “You
will
be famous,” I told her. “I just know it.” I also knew I wanted tinted windows and a mini-bar in the back.

My father was otherwise occupied in his role of highly functional alcoholic professor of mathematics at the University of Massachusetts. He had psoriasis that covered his entire body and gave him the appearance of a dried mackerel that could stand upright and wear tweed. And he had the loving, affectionate and outgoing personality of petrified wood.

“Can we play checkers,” I whined, while he sat at the kitchen table grading papers and drinking vodka from a tumbler.

“No, son. I’ve got too much work to do.”

“Later can we play checkers?”

My father continued to scan the page with his red pen, making a note in the margin. “No, son. I told you, I’ve got a lot of work to do and later I’ll be tired. You go out and play with the dog.”

“But I’m sick of the dog. All she wants to do is sleep. Can’t you play
one game
?”

Finally he looked at me. “No, son, I can’t. I’ve got a lot of work to do, I’m tired, and my knee is acting up.”

My father had a bad knee. Arthritis caused it to swell, so he would have to go to his doctor and have it drained with a needle. He limped and wore a constant pained expression on his face. “I wish I could just sit in a wheelchair,” he used to say. “It would be so much easier to get around.”

The one activity my father and I
did
do together was take the garbage to the dump. “Augusten,” he called from downstairs in the basement. “If you load the car up, I’ll take you for a ride to the dump.”

I slipped on a mood ring and ran downstairs to the basement. He was wearing a red-and-black checkered field coat, hoisting two green plastic bags over his shoulders as he winced in pain. “Make sure the top is closed,” he warned. “You don’t want that bag breaking open and spilling garbage all over the floor. That would just be a nightmare to clean up.”

I dragged one of the bags across the floor toward the door.

“Jesus, son. Now, don’t drag that bag. You’ll tear the bottom and we’ll have garbage all over the place. I just warned you about that.”

“You said check the tops,” I said.

“Yes, but it should go without saying that you can’t drag a garbage bag across the floor.”

He was wrong. I’d seen the commercials for Hefty garbage bags on TV “They won’t break,” I corrected him, dragging.

“Now, Augusten. You’ve got to
carry
that bag. If you can’t behave and carry that bag, I won’t let you come to the dump.”

I sighed deeply and carried the bag outside to the Aspen, then returned to the basement for another. We tended to let garbage collect for weeks, so there were always at least twenty bags.

When the car was filled, I squeezed into the front seat between my father and one of the trash bags. The sour smell of old milk cartons, egg shells and emptied ashtrays filled me with pleasure. My father, too, enjoyed the aroma. “I rather like that smell,” he commented as we made the six-mile trip to the public dump. “I wouldn’t mind living next to a landfill one bit.”

At the dump, my father and I opened the rear hatch of the station wagon and all of the doors. Perched on the ledge overlooking the pit where we threw the bags, the car looked poised for flight. Its doors were like wings and the grille in front seemed to be smiling. Here, I was free to pull out a bag, drag it across the ground and then hurl it out.

Afterward, we drove past the gray cinder block recycling building where people left the remains of their broken baby strollers, rusty stoves and unwanted dollhouses.

“Please, can I take it home?” I whined upon seeing a chrome coffee table with a chipped, smoked-glass top.

“No, we’re not taking any of that stuff home. You don’t know where any of this garbage has been.”

“But it’s still good.” I knew I could hide the chip by fanning a display of magazines on the surface, like in a doctor’s office. And it certainly wouldn’t be dirty after I polished it with Windex for three hours.

“No, son. Now stop touching that filthy thing and get back in the car. And don’t touch your face now that you’ve got those coffee table germs all over your fingers.”

My mood ring went black. “Why can’t I have it?
Why
?”

My father sighed, exasperated. “I told you,” he said through clenched teeth, “we don’t know who that dirty thing belonged to. We just finished taking trash
out
of the house. We don’t need to be bringing more trash
in
.”

I sat pressed against the unlocked door, miserable. It was my secret hope that the door would fly open on the highway and I would tumble from the car, rolling onto the highway where I would be crushed beneath the tires of the Barstow onion truck behind us. Then my father would be sorry he wouldn’t let me have the coffee table.

Unfortunately, my parents loathed each other and the life they had built together. Because I was the product of their genetic fusion, well, it’s not surprising I liked to boil my change on the stove and then shine it with metal polish.

“You infantile tyrant,” my mother shouted from her position on the sofa, legs folded up beneath her. “You goddamn bastard. You’d like nothing more than to see me slit my wrists.” She absently twisted the tassel on her long crocheted vest.

This was Cream’s cue and she tucked her tail between her legs and slipped from the room, heading downstairs to sleep next to the boiler.

My father’s face grew red as he added a splash of tonic water to his glass. “Deirdre, will you just settle down. You’re hysterical, just hysterical.” Because he was a professor, he was in the habit of repeating himself.

She stood up from the sofa and walked slowly across the white shag carpeting, as if finding her mark on a soundstage. “I’m hysterical?” she asked in a smooth, low voice. “You think
this
is hysterical?” She laughed theatrically, throwing her head back. “Oh, you poor bastard. You lousy excuse for a man.” She stood next to him, leaning her back against the teak bookcase. “You’re so repressed you mistake creative passion for hysterics. And don’t you see? This is how you’re killing me.” She closed her eyes and made her Edith Piaf face.