Running With Scissors_ A Memoir - Augusten Burroughs [3]
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