Running With Scissors_ A Memoir - Augusten Burroughs [78]
We all liked the setup so much, we decided to remove all the price tags and move outside for the summer.
The appliances—including the blender, the toaster oven, the electric knife and the crock pot—were all powered by an extension cord we ran from inside the living room, through the window and onto the lawn.
The large Oriental carpet we’d placed on the grass kept our feet clean and dry, thereby reducing the risk of death by electrocution.
Cars that drove past the house tended to slow to a crawl. Sometimes, a window would slide down and a camera would be raised. The flashing made us feel like celebrities.
“I feel just like the Queen Mother,” Agnes blushed, bringing her hand to her hair, which had been freshly permed.
Even the doctor took to life in the great outdoors. Now after work, he would walk down Perry Street and instead of pulling his keys out of his pocket, unlocking the door and going inside, he would simply cut across the lawn and sit in his barcalounger. “This is a hell of a lot more comfortable than that sofa inside,” he said. “Don’t accept any offer less than five hundred dollars.”
He even saw a couple of patients outdoors, shielding them from the prying eyes of the passing cars with Agnes’s old needlepoint folding screen. He kept his prescription pad in the drawer of Vickie’s old nightstand, which was arranged conveniently next to the love seat.
Only the rains drove us inside.
Meanwhile in Amherst, my mother was having her own experiment with outdoor living. But hers would end with a police cruiser and heavy medication.
All summer I’d taken the PVTA bus back and forth between my mother’s house in Amherst and my room in Northampton. I liked being able to freely move between the two locations. When I was annoyed with my mother and her girlfriend, Dorothy, I would stay in Northampton. When Neil and I wanted to spend quality time together, we’d both go to Amherst. My mother was more accepting of my relationship than any of the Finches. Agnes, especially, did not approve of what was going on between me and Neil.
So for weeks, I’d been hanging out at my mother’s, sometimes sitting in on the writing workshop she held for lesbians in her living room. I liked sitting on the shag carpeting, drinking Celestial Seasonings and hearing overweight women with crew cuts read poems about wounds that never stop bleeding, fertility and full moons.
My mother, meanwhile, was working feverishly on a new poem. It was entitled, “I Dreamed I Saw the Figure Five in Gold.” At first she worked on the poem during the day and spent the evening with her girlfriend eating cucumber sandwiches on Roman meal bread and gossiping about various Finches or patients.
But then I began to notice a change in my mother’s eyes. The pupils seemed to dilate, making them appear darker.
I had even gone so far as to warn the doctor. “I think my mother’s going to have another psychotic break.” But he’d told me I was being overly sensitive, that he did not think my mother was going psychotic again.
Like a sheep or a dog that can predict an earthquake, I had always been able to sense when my mother was about to go crazy. Her speech quickened, she stopped sleeping and she developed a craving for peculiar foods, like candle wax.
My first clue that summer that she was losing her grip was when she started listening to the same song over and over again on the record player. It was Frankie Lane’s “You’re Breaking My Heart ’Cause You’re Leaving.” This coincided with her sudden need to decoupage the kitchen table with magazine clippings. “I want my home to be a creative outlet,” she said, her red-ringed eyes wild. “Hand me that Atlantic Monthly.”
I tried to get her to sleep but she only slapped me away. “I need to do this,” she said. “These are the images I need to be surrounded by for my writing.”
“But it’s just a bunch of cigarette ads,” I said.
She clipped a picture of Merit Ultra Light