Running With Scissors_ A Memoir - Augusten Burroughs [4]
My mother chain-smoked and wrote confessional poetry around the clock, taking breaks during the day to call her friends and read drafts of her latest poem. Occasionally she would ask for my opinion.
“Augusten, I’ve been working on what I believe could be the poem that finally makes it into The New Yorker. I believe it could make me a very famous woman. Would you like to hear it?”
I turned away from the mirror on my closet door and set the hairbrush on my desk. I loved The New Yorker because it featured cartoons and ads. Maybe my mother would get her poem published right next to an ad for a Mercury Grand Marquis! “Read it, read it, read it,” I bounced.
She led me into her study, took a seat at her desk and turned off her white Olympia typewriter. Then she quickly checked the cap on her bottle of Wite-Out before clearing her throat and lighting a More cigarette. I sat on the twin bed she had converted into a sofa with throw pillows and an Indian bedspread.
“Ready?” she asked
“Okay.”
She crossed her legs, resting the side of her wrist on her knee as she leaned forward and read from the page. “Childhood is over. My youth. And bonds with people I have loved are broken now. My grief ascends into the clouds. And those tears that fall from the sky build the land anew, even the dead climb from their graves to walk with me and sing. And I . . .”
She read for many pages, her voice perfectly modulated. She practiced reading her poems out loud into a microphone that she kept in the corner of the room on a stand. Sometimes, when she was visiting her friend Lydia or in the living room trimming her spider plants, I would borrow the microphone and stuff it down the front of my pants, examining myself from every angle in the mirror.
When she was finished reading her poem, she looked up at me and said, “Okay, now I need your honest reaction. Did it feel powerful to you? Emotionally charged?”
I knew that the only correct answer to this question was, “Wow. That really does seem like something you’d read in The New Yorker.”
She laughed, pleased. “Really? Do you really think so? The New Yorker is very selective. They don’t publish just anyone.” She stood and began to pace in front of her desk.
“No, I really think they would publish this. All the stuff about your mother pushing you backwards into the heartshaped goldfish pond in the backyard, the thing with your paralyzed sister, that was great.”
She lit another cigarette and inhaled deeply. “Well, we’ll see. I just got a rejection letter from The Virginia Quarterly. So that worries me. Of course, if The New Yorker did accept this poem, your grandmother would see it. I can’t imagine what she would say. But I can’t let her reaction stop me from publishing.” Then she stopped pacing, placed one hand on her hip and brought the other one holding the cigarette to her lips. “You know, Augusten. Your mother was meant to be a very famous woman.”
“I know,” I said. The idea that someday we might have our own stretch limousine parked in the driveway instead of that awful brown Dodge Aspen station wagon was so thrilling that I almost couldn’t stop myself from screaming. “You will be famous,” I told her. “I just know it.” I also knew I wanted tinted windows and a mini-bar in the back.
My father was otherwise occupied in his role of highly functional alcoholic professor of mathematics at the University of Massachusetts. He had psoriasis that covered his entire body and gave him the appearance of a dried mackerel that could stand upright and wear tweed. And he had the loving, affectionate and outgoing personality of petrified wood.
“Can we play checkers,” I whined, while he sat at the kitchen table grading papers and