Dry_ A Memoir - Augusten Burroughs [70]
Is this punishment?
It just feels too difficult to find the stamp, make out the check and mail it off. Like when you have a dream where you’re trying to run underwater. I’m not committed to my mother. I treat her with the same regularity I feel she treated me.
Sometimes I fantasize about having a mother who wears a pleated navy skirt, crisp white shirt and a pale blue sweater draped casually across her shoulders. Her tan leather bag doesn’t rattle with prescription bottles when she tosses it on the seat of the car. And this version of my mother can be made happy with something from the Macy’s catalogue instead of the Physician’s Desk Reference. She would have a shoulder-length bob.
“Would you mind helping me with these bottles?” she would ask. My mother would have been to a farmer’s market in Hadley. She would take long baths in goat milk. “I just love what it does for my skin.”
When I hand her my report card, all A-’s, she would say, “You know, it might not seem like much, but that extra effort, that extra ten percent, could mean the difference between Princeton and Bennington.” Then she would smile at me in a way that suggested a private in-joke. “Bennington, darling. Think about it. Lesbians.”
Even in my fantasy, I would hate my mother sometimes. I would think she was petty and materialistic. I would complain. “You’ve already had your eyes done once.”
And she would reply, “No. That’s not accurate. They weren’t done correctly, so this counts as the first time.”
My mother would date men who own franchises.
“But you’ve always loved a Blimpie,” she would say, trying to convince me.
“He’s a pig, mom. He scratches his butt and then smells his fingers. I’ve seen him do it. Plus, his fingers are hairy.”
She would go on monthly pilgrimages to New York City where she would return loaded with bags from all the shops on Fifth Avenue. I would, from a distance, come to view Manhattan as a mall without a roof. I would not romanticize it. I would make a mental note to avoid it forever.
So when I turned eighteen, I would apply to USC. My mother would be aghast. “Good God, you can’t be serious. The University of Southern California? Have you been smoking pot? What can you be thinking? What are you going to major in, fast food preparation technologies? Surfing?”
I would say, “No, mother. Entomology.”
She would hate that I used this word because she wouldn’t know what it meant and would feel I was only using it to be showy (I would be a bookworm). “Well, if you want to be a doctor, I don’t know why you wouldn’t stay out East.”
“Entomology is bugs, mom. It’s the study of insects.”
She would freeze, nail polish brush midair. “What?”
I would look at her. Then I would shrug. “What?”
“Bugs?”
“Yeah. Entomology. Bugs.”
She would replace the brush into the bottle and screw it tightly. She would blow on her nails and her eyes would meet mine. “How can I phrase this so I don’t hurt your feelings, damage your youthful enthusiasm? Hmmm. Okay, I’ve got it. NO.”
I would tell her it wasn’t her choice, it was mine.
She would remind me it was her money.
I would say I’d get my own money.
She would ask how.
I’d say from getting a job and saving.
She’d say that I must be out of my mind and that she was going to take me to a therapist. She’d say, “If you don’t agree to see a therapist, I’ll cut you off without a dime.”
I would not agree. I would storm out of the house, furious.
We wouldn’t speak for a week.
And in the end, I would go to Princeton. Because in so many ways, my mother would have been right. And it would make her so much happier, could make life so much better if I just agreed. So I would agree. And because the future of bugs isn’t exactly promising, I would