Running With Scissors_ A Memoir - Augusten Burroughs [7]
Again, I leaned forward. “Please don’t kill her.”
“Your father isn’t going to kill me,” my mother said, switching on the front burner of the stove, pulling a More from her pack, and leaning over to light it on the heating coil. “He’d rather suffocate me with his horribly oppressive manipulation and then wait for me to cut my own throat.”
“Will you please just shut the hell up, Deirdre?” my father said, weary and drunk.
My mother smiled down at him, blowing smoke through her nostrils. “I will please shut the hell up the day you please drop the hell dead.”
I was seized with panic. “Are you going to cut your own throat?” I asked her.
She smiled and held out her arms. “No, of course not. That’s just a figure of speech.” She kissed the top of my head and scratched my back. “Now, it’s nearly one in the morning; way past your bedtime. You need to go to sleep so you can be ready for school in the morning.”
I walked off to my room, where I selected an outfit for school and carefully arranged it on hangers at the front of the closet. I would wear my favorite polyester tan pants and a blue shirt with the vest cleverly sewn on. If only I had a pair of platform shoes the outfit would be complete.
Still, knowing my clothes were ready gave me a sense of calm. I could control the sharpness of the crease in my doubleknit slacks, even if I couldn’t stop my mother from hurling the Christmas tree off the porch like she did one winter. I could polish my 14k gold-plated signet ring with a Q-tip until the gold plating wore off even if I couldn’t stop my parents from throwing John Updike novels at each other’s heads.
So I became consumed with making sure my jewelry was just as reflective as Donnie Osmond’s and my hair was perfectly smooth, like plastic.
Besides clothing and jewelry, there were two other things I valued in life: medical doctors and celebrities. I valued them for their white jackets and stretch limousines. I knew for sure that I wanted to be either a doctor or a celebrity when I grew up. The ideal would have been to play a doctor on a TV show.
And this is where the fact that we lived in the woods surrounded by pine trees came in handy. Because in desperation, pine trees can become Panavision cameras. Their broken branches, boom mics. This allowed me to walk through the woods or down the dirt road we lived on, imagining that there was always a camera trained on my every move, zooming in close to capture my facial expression.
When I looked up at a bird in the sky, I wondered how the light was falling on my face and if that branch was catching it just right.
Mine was a delusional world filled with tall trees that held long lenses and followed me on dollies. A fallen branch in the woods was not a fallen branch; it was “my mark.”
When I wasn’t “on the set” throwing branches around with my bionic arm or doing a toothpaste commercial in front of a boulder, I was trying to trick my mother into taking me to the doctor.
By the time I was ten, I was having weekly allergy shots—eleven in each arm. I had persistent warts on my fingers that needed to be burned off and my throat was constantly sore due to the dust that I cupped into my hands and inhaled.
A visit to the doctor meant exposure to those crisp, clean white jackets and the glint of a silver stethoscope around the neck. I was also aware that doctors got to park where they wanted and speed without getting tickets, both of which seemed the height of privilege when President Carter had made us all drive forty miles an hour and live in the dark.
I had two doctors that I saw regularly. Dr. Lotier, who had long hairs sprouting from his nose and the backs of his hands, and a dignified Indian allergist