Running With Scissors_ A Memoir - Augusten Burroughs [93]
N
ATALIE AND I ARE IN THE MANGY TV ROOM WATCHING The Love Boat. We’ve dragged the wing chairs up on either side of the Christmas tree and are reaching over to pick through its branches in pursuit of any candy canes that remain. Most of them have already been eaten. By accident, Natalie stuck a plastic one in her mouth. Why Agnes insists on mixing plastic candy canes in with the real ones is beyond both of us.
I should mention that it’s May.
Most of the needles have fallen off the tree and are now carpeting the floor and have been tracked throughout the house. Everyone has brown, sharp little needles in their beds. The branches are dry and crispy and tend to snap off when you tug at them.
I absently pull at a branch until it snaps. Julie, the cruise director, suggests to a clinically depressed passenger that the aft deck is a fine place to meet new people, recover from a failed love affair, and I let the branch fall on the floor with the others.
Our lives are one endless stretch of misery punctuated by processed fast foods and the occasional crisis or amusing curiosity.
The fact that the Christmas tree is still standing five months after Christmas is extremely disturbing to everyone in the house. But we all feel someone else should be the one to remove it. It is somebody else’s responsibility. And in most everyone’s mind, that somebody is Agnes.
But Agnes has refused to remove the tree. “I’m not your slave,” she has screamed again and again. She will straighten her Virgin Mary candles on the sideboard, sweep the carpets, wash the occasional pot, but she will not touch this tree.
“Personally, I don’t give a fuck if this tree stays here forever. I’m used to it now,” Natalie states as she stares straight ahead at the TV. “I hope it does stay up forever. It’ll teach Agnes a lesson.”
I don’t really care if it stays up forever, either. It fits perfectly with the rest of the house. It’s kind of like dust. There seems to be a certain amount of dust that will collect on the surface of things and then no more. The house is already such a hodgepodge of strangeness that the tree is not out of place.
Besides, I have experience with a misplaced Christmas tree in my past.
* * *
I was ten and all winter my mother and father had been screaming at each other. My brother had moved out of the house to live with members of his rock band, so I was trapped alone with my parents. There was a Christmas calendar on the refrigerator, the kind with little doors that you open one day at a time until the big day, December twenty-fifth. I would sit on the floor in front of the refrigerator opening the doors and wishing I could crawl inside one of those warm, glittering rooms.
“You goddamn son of a bitch,” my mother screamed at the top of her lungs. “You want me to be your damn mother? Well I am not your damn mother. You are in love with that woman, you sick bastard.”
“Jesus Christ, Deirdre. Would you please calm down. You’re hysterical.”
“I most certainly am not hysterical,” my mother screamed, utterly hysterical.
It went on like this all winter. Snow piled on the deck railings outside and the house grew darker as the bows of the pine trees leaned against the windows, heavy with snow.
My father spent as much time as he could downstairs in their bedroom drinking. And my mother channeled her energy into a manic holiday frenzy.
She played one song on one album again and again: “We Need a Little Christmas” from Mame. When the song would end, my mother would set down the bowl of cranberries she was threading for the tree and place the needle back at the beginning.
She set red and green candles out on the teak dining table, and placed the Norwegian nutcracker in the center of a bowl of pecans from her father’s orchard in Georgia. She dragged her Singer sewing machine out of the basement and began making Christmas stockings, angels and reindeer ornaments for the tree.
When I suggested cookies, she baked fourteen batches.
She read me Christmas stories, sketched a Christmas card with pen and ink and had it printed to send to family