Running With Scissors_ A Memoir - Augusten Burroughs [27]
“This space was meant for me,” she said.
We climbed out of the car and Hope set her rainbow bag on the hood. In addition to the rainbow bag, Hope always carried a canvas PBS bag and usually a plastic shopping bag. “Lock it,” she called.
I locked it, but didn’t see the point. As if there was anything to steal: a World Father’s Day button, a bag of balloons, a blue plastic Goody hairbrush on the dashboard. Then again, there was a box of Valium in the trunk.
Hope reached into her PBS bag and pulled out an electric alarm clock. “Have you got a dime?”
I dug into my pocket, feeling my hip bones, feeling too skinny, and pulled out a dime. “Here,” I said, handing it to her.
Then I noticed there was no parking meter. “Hope, there’s no meter.”
“I know,” she said, as she bent over and placed the dime on the sidewalk in front of the car. “It’s a tithe. I like to thank God when he does something nice for me.”
In Thome’s Market Hope couldn’t decide between a tuna sandwich or a turkey sandwich so, even though there was a line behind her, she pulled out her white bible. She did the dip herself, because she was in a hurry. “Harvest,” she said. “I landed on the word harvest.” She thought for a moment and then said, “Aren’t turkeys grain-fed? They are, I think. So that’s pretty close to a harvest.” Then she smiled at the perplexed girl who was standing behind the counter looking mortified and she said, “I’ll take the turkey. But on multigrain just to make sure.”
At first, I, too, was mortified by all the bible-dipping that went on in this house. But like everything else, I quickly got used to it.
And then I started to do them myself. It was surprising how addictive they could become. When I asked, “Will I like the new Supertramp album?” and landed on the word “starvation,” I knew that the album was a dud and I should save my money. It was like being able to turn to the back of the book and look at the answers.
Or it was like asking a parent.
THE BURNING BUSH
F
ERN STEWART WAS A MINISTER’S WIFE. AND A CLOSE FRIEND of my mother’s. She had a white smile that was usually located just a few inches above a plate of Rocky Road brownies she had baked from scratch just for me. She lived with her family in Amherst, in a warm and comfortable house that sat at the top of a small grassy hill. A clutch of tall white birch trees stood next to the house, their branches just grazing the slateshingled roof.
Fern was a perfect minister’s wife who shopped for teak napkin rings with my mother and enjoyed discussing contemporary poetry and visiting the local galleries. She wore her prematurely gray hair in a blunt-cut bob, held back away from her face with a black velvet hairband. And she spoke with a slight British accent, although it was my understanding she had been raised in Vacaville, California. Fern and her family took ski trips to Stowe. They shopped mail-order from J. Peterman and L. L. Bean. She wore nubuck leather kiltie flats from Talbots and a small gold cross around her neck.
And instead of fuck, Fern Stewart said fiddlesticks.
When my parents divorced, my mother and I had nowhere to live. The house was to be sold; the profits split. But until then, we were homeless.
Fern took us in.
She arranged for us to live in a house just down the street from hers. There was a basement apartment in that house and I was fascinated by the leaded glass windows, the copper plumbing and the wide oak floors. For a few months, I spent part of the time in this small apartment and the other part at the Finch house, in a room near the back bathroom that Hope had cleared out for me.
Many nights, my mother and I had dinner at Fern’s. Her family was genuinely warm and always made me feel like they’d been waiting impatiently all day long for me to show up.
Her four children each had perfectly white, straight smiles. Like Chiclets. Even the girls had clefts in their chins. And they always appeared to have just stepped from a hot shower.
As Fern set a pottery bowl of steaming broccoli with