Running With Scissors_ A Memoir - Augusten Burroughs [30]
When I walked back inside, my mother was sitting naked and cross-legged on the couch, smoking a More. Her breasts were large and sacklike, resting in her lap. She exhaled loudly, then brought her cigarette to her lips and sucked on it like a baby. I could not comprehend how anybody would want to do the things to her that Fern was doing. At that moment, it would have been easier for me to spontaneously grasp quantum string theory.
“I wish you enjoyed school more,” she said. “Although I guess it must be very dull compared to your life with me. Would you please hand me my nightgown?”
Her breezy attitude made me mad. She thought of nobody except herself. I yanked her nightgown off the arm of the couch and threw it at her, just missing her cigarette.
“Watch it, Augusten! I’ve got a lit cigarette in my hand.” She glared at me. “Don’t act out in anger. If you’re upset by this, talk to me about it.”
“I just don’t understand you. I mean, why? How could I not know? What?” I stammered. “How long have you and Fern been . . . together?”
My mother slipped the nightgown over her head, then stood to pull it down over her body. “Oh, I’ve loved Fern for a very long time. Our relationship became physical a number of months ago.”
“When we were living next door?”
“Augusten, those are private details from my personal life.” She held her cigarette between her first two fingers and poised her thumb on her temple. “It’s between Fern and I.” My mother always spoke like she was being interviewed by Ladies’ Home Journal. Like she was a celebrity.
So Fern and my mother had been lovers for months. My mother was a lesbian. I’d heard somewhere that being gay might be genetic. Maybe I’d inherited this from her. I worried, what else have I inherited? Would I also be crazy by the time I was thirty-five?
She walked into the kitchen and I followed. I watched her spoon Sanka into a coffee mug and then add hot tap water.
“I worry about you so,” she said, blowing into her cup before taking a loud sip. “I worry about you and school.”
“I can’t stand that place,” I said. “And Finch is always talking about how you can’t make a person do something when they turn thirteen. That when you turn thirteen you’re free.”
“Yes, I know he is. But the law says you have to go to school.”
“Well, fuck that.” I lit one of her cigarettes.
“Please don’t smoke my cigarettes. You have a pack of your own, although I wish you wouldn’t smoke.”
“Well, I do.”
“I know you do. I just said that I wish you wouldn’t.”
“Fine,” I said, crushing it out.
“No, don’t do that. I’ll smoke it,” she said, reaching for it. Then, “Well, I know I can’t force you to go to school. I can’t force you to do anything you don’t want to do. But I do wish you’d reconsider.”
How could she expect me to think about school at a time like this? Furthermore, if I had just stayed in school, look what I would have missed. Fern, the minister’s wife, was not only a card-carrying lesbian, but my mother’s lover.
Fern was a muff-diver. And she was diving on my mother’s muff.
“Does her family know?”
“No,” was my mother’s flat answer. She turned to me and said very seriously, “And it’s important that her husband and her children do not know what’s going on between us.” She said this like I was going to run right over there and say, “Hey, guess what! Guess what your mom is doing while she waits for the bread to rise!”
Then it was as if the lighting changed and a camera slid down a set of rails, zooming into her face. A musical score practically filled the room. She stood in front of the window so that her nightgown filtered the sunlight and her body glowed in silhouette through the fabric.
“All my life, I have been oppressed. And all my life I have worked hard to fight this oppression. When I was a little girl living in Cairo, Georgia, I had a black nanny named Elsa who lived in a shack on the other side of town.” She reached into her pocket and brought a cigarette to her lips, lighting it dramatically and exhaling a plume of smoke into the air. “In those days, black people were