Magical Thinking - Augusten Burroughs [7]
My line had been cut. “Where were you?” my mother asked at the end. “Are you sure that’s the right one?”
Mrs. Ames had hijacked the commercial. Mrs. Ames and Wendy, who, it seemed, was playing the role of Mrs. Ames’s granddaughter. Wendy, so pretty and noncurious lazy, had been the only child in the commercial to speak.
“Where were you?” my mother cried again at the end. “Are you really sure that’s the right commercial?”
“I’m sure,” I mumbled, crushed by my own failure.
My grandmother called from Georgia. My mother answered the phone. “No, Momma, we saw it, too. But I didn’t see Augusten. He says that’s the commercial.”
Depressed, I walked out of the kitchen and down the hall to my bedroom.
“Hey, Mark, where are you going?” I said to my mirror, in a tone of voice so natural and plain I realized at once that this is what the director had wanted all along. He didn’t want passion, interpretation, meaning, and nuance. He wanted an ordinary kid who could say six words.
Fine, I decided, right there on my bed. I won’t be a child actor in television commercials. Instead, I will be the one who thinks up the commercials in the first place. And then I will hire the director myself, and when he can’t make the kid give me a passionate, meaningful, and nuanced performance, I’ll fire him.
I got up from my bed and went into the bathroom to retrieve a tube of Crest. I brought it back into my bedroom. And studied the tube.
What could I ever think of that would make a person want to buy this stuff?
VANDERBILT GENES
W
hen I was ten years old, I realized I’d been kidnapped as a toddler. Of course, I would have to have been a fairly dim child to miss the clues. Great big pink-elephant clues, trumpeting and lumbering and shitting through the house, ignored by everyone except me. Both of my parents spoke with thick Georgia accents and I did not. Both had a fondness for canned green beans and I did not. Both of them and my older brother had straight brown hair, whereas I had a mane of blond curls that my mother’s friends always commented on. “Like an angel,” they cooed. “Like a girl,” the man who installed our new septic system said. Yet there was something else: a primal knowledge. I just had a feeling about it. But it was on a family trip to Newport, Rhode Island, when I learned that I had, in fact, been not merely kidnapped but stolen from the finest family in American history.
My father had decided on a weekend touring the mansions: colossal palaces built on the sea cliffs in the eighteen-hundreds, summer homes for the Rockefellers, the man who invented the paper clip, and yes, the Vanderbilts.
The Vanderbilt estate was called The Breakers. It was the most popular tourist attraction because it was the most astonishingly lavish, a structure that made the White House seem more like a double-wide. The moment I stepped inside the grand foyer, I knew I belonged there. The feeling was similar to what it must be like to be a twin, separated at birth, and then reunited years later on television. I seemed to recognize the lavishly carved ceiling, the gilt mirror, the absence of white shag carpeting, like we had “at home.”
The tour guide was very strict: we had to stay in a neat pack, like crayons. We were not to finger the tapestries, sit on the chairs, or lick the paintings. We were to follow, listen, and be awed by our own smallness.
My first instinct was to inform the appalling tourists and my so-called parents that they must all leave immediately. I wanted to point back to the entrance and announce: “I’m sorry, people. But there has been a mistake. You must now leave my home and return to your busses. The rottweilers are being brought up from the wine cellar.”
An overpowering sixth sense engaged, and I knew what each room would look like without even needing to explore.
How, I wondered, had I been kidnapped by a southern