Running With Scissors_ A Memoir - Augusten Burroughs [31]
Why listen to a teacher talk about how many quarters Nancy needs to buy six apples if they are four and a half cents each when I could listen to this?
“So Augusten, I hope I have your support in my relationship with Fern. Because at this stage in my life, I do not need and will not accept more oppression. I have spent years, my entire life fighting oppression. I hope I don’t have to fight you, too.” She exhaled, closing her eyes and letting her chin sag down to her chest.
It seemed that I should clap but I didn’t.
Instead I said, “Okay, I don’t care. Can I have five dollars?”
She smiled. “May I have five dollars. And yes, you may, if I have it. Go get my pocketbook and let me take a look.”
PURE PROJECTION
I
T WAS A BRILLIANT SATURDAY AFTERNOON, WITH THIN, wispy clouds high in the sky; the perfect day for a parade. As Hope and I blew up balloons and tied them to colorful ribbons, the doctor walked around the house in his underpants and wingtip shoes singing off-key, “To dreeeeam the impossible dreeeeeeeam . . .”
“Dad?” Hope called.
“TO FIGHT THE UNBEARABLE—”
“Dad! I need to know if you want us to tie balloons to your hat or just your umbrella.”
Finch came into the room. “I want balloons tied onto everything! Today is a day of joy! Balloons everywhere!”
Hope smiled. “Okay.”
I blew up a yellow balloon and handed it to Hope. She tied a red ribbon around it and then looped this through the band that ran around the doctor’s gray felt hat.
“We’ll need some more pink balloons for his hat,” Hope said. “Pink is Dad’s favorite color.”
In the end, we inflated about sixty balloons, tying them to his hat, his umbrella, looping them through the buttonholes of his long black wool coat that he intended to wear despite the heat. We tied balloons around our own waists and we even attached two balloons to Agnes, one over each breast.
“I’m not going out in public like this,” Agnes complained. “Give me more of them, so I can tie some somewhere else. I can’t have just these two.”
Overhearing Agnes’s complaint, the doctor stepped into the room, now dressed in his suit. “No, Agnes,” he boomed. “These are the only balloons you should have. You are the matriarch of the family, the Great Breast-Feeder, and that’s what these balloons symbolize.”
“Oh, phooey,” she said. “I don’t buy it.”
“I said, you will wear only those two balloons! They are your breastloons.”
“Breastloons, that’s funny, Dad. I like that.”
“You do?” he said, his eyebrows twitching. “Then you shall only wear two balloons too.”
Half an hour later, Dr. Finch headed out of his house wearing his balloon-covered coat, holding his balloon-covered rainbow umbrella high above his head. Pink balloons on pink ribbon trailed from his hat.
Hope and I followed a few paces behind him carrying a sign that read, UNITE THE FATHERS OF THE WORLD. TODAY IS WORLD FATHER’S DAY!!!!! I was covered with balloons; they were even tied through my belt loops. But Hope had only two balloons, one over each breast.
Hope’s younger sister Anne walked behind us with her young son, Poo. Anne was annoyed that she’d been tricked into being in the parade, and refused to wear the breastloons, but she did carry one. And Poo, of course, had six or seven balloons which were tied to his ankles and dragged on the ground.
Next was Natalie. She’d agreed to the breastloons, but also insisted on wearing sunglasses and a large hat so that nobody she knew would recognize her on the street.
My mother was at the