Running With Scissors_ A Memoir - Augusten Burroughs [2]
I smile back at her.
I don’t want her to leave.
Cream is sleeping by the door. She knows my mother is leaving and she doesn’t want her to go, either. Sometimes, I wrap aluminum foil around Cream’s middle, around her legs and her tail and then I walk her through the house on a leash. I like it when she’s shiny, like a star, like a guest on the Donny & Marie show.
Cream opens her eyes and watches my mother, her ears twitching, then she closes her eyes again and exhales heavily. She’s seven, but in dog years that makes her forty-nine. Cream is an old lady dog, so she’s tired and just wants to sleep.
In the kitchen my mother takes her keys off the table and throws them into her leather bag. I love her bag. Inside are papers and her wallet and cigarettes and at the bottom, where she never looks, there is loose change, loose mints, specs of tobacco from her cigarettes. Sometimes I bring the bag to my face, open it and inhale as deeply as I can.
“You’ll be long asleep by the time I come home,” she tells me. “So good night and I’ll see you in the morning.”
“Where are you going?” I ask her for the zillionth time.
“I’m going to give a reading in Northampton,” she tells me. “It’s a poetry reading at the Broadside Bookstore.”
My mother is a star. She is just like that lady on TV, Maude. She yells like Maude, she wears wildly colored gowns and long crocheted vests like Maude. She is just like Maude except my mother doesn’t have all those chins under her chins, all those loose expressions hanging off her face. My mother cackles when Maude is on. “I love Maude,” she says. My mother is a star like Maude.
“Will you sign autographs?”
She laughs. “I may sign some books.”
My mother is from Cairo, Georgia. This makes everything she says sound like it went through a curling iron. Other people sound flat to my ear; their words just hang in the air. But when my mother says something, the ends curl.
Where is my father?
“Where is your father?” my mother says, checking her watch. It’s a Timex, silver with a black leather strap. The face is small and round. There is no date. It ticks so loud that if the house is quiet, you can hear it.
The house is quiet. I can hear the ticking of my mother’s watch.
Outside, the trees are dark and tall, they lean in toward the house, I imagine because the house is bright inside and the trees crave the light, like bugs.
We live in the woods, in a glass house surrounded by trees; tall pine trees, birch trees, ironwoods.
The deck extends from the house into the trees. You can stand on it and reach and you might be able to pull a leaf off a tree, or a sprig of pine.
My mother is pacing. She is walking through the living room, behind the sofa to look out the large sliding glass door down to the driveway; she is walking around the dining-room table. She straightens the cubed glass salt and pepper shakers. She is walking through the kitchen and out the other door of the kitchen. Our house is very open. The ceilings are very high. There is plenty of room here. “I need high ceilings,” my mother always says. She says this now. “I need high ceilings.” She looks up.
There is the sound of gravel crackling beneath tires. Then, lights on the wall, spreading to the ceiling, sliding through the room like a living thing.
“Finally,” my mother says.
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