Running With Scissors_ A Memoir - Augusten Burroughs [94]
Her sudden and feverish intensity of cheer transferred onto me. And I became obsessed with decorating my room in the spirit of Christmas. Specifically, I wanted my room to look like one of the displays at the mall. While my mother was tasteful and restrained, I filled my room with multiple strands of cheap blinking lights. They hung from the ceiling and dripped from my window and walls. I wrapped thick ropes of gaudy silver garland around my desk lamp, my bookshelf and around my mirror. I spent my allowance on two blinking stars that I hung on either side of my closet door. It was as if I had become infected with a virus of bad taste.
My mother insisted on the largest tree we could find at the Christmas tree farm. It had to be removed from the ground with a chain saw and then carried to the car by two burly men. When they roped it to the top of the Aspen, the car sank.
At home, the tree nearly reached the top of our seventeen-foot ceiling. And it was nearly as wide as the sofa.
My mother had it completely decorated in a matter of hours. There were balls nestled deep in the branches, silver bells placed above gold ribbons. It had everything, including popcorn and cranberry garlands she had hand-strung while watching The Jeffersons.
“Isn’t this festive?” she asked, sweating profusely.
I nodded.
“We’re going to make this a special Christmas. Even if your goddamn sonofabitch father can’t bring himself to do anything but raise a glass to his lips.”
She began to sing along with Angela Lansbury’s warbling about dragging out the holly and throwing up the tree before my mood crashes and I want to kill myself, or however it went.
Two days before Christmas my brother came home. He was his usual, sullen self and when my mother asked him if he planned on staying for Christmas, he grunted and replied, “I don’t know.”
I, myself, had my own doubts about the coming holiday. Although there were already dozens of presents beneath the tree, I had not noticed a single one in the shape of the gift I most wanted: Tony Orlando and Dawn’s Tie a Yellow Ribbon ’Round the Old Oak Tree. If I did not get this album, I had no reason to live. And yet there was nothing flat and square under the tree. There were plenty of puffy things—sweaters, shirts with built-in vests, the bell-bottom polyester slacks I loved, maybe a pair of platform shoes—but without that record, there might as well be no Christmas.
My mother must have sensed my feelings.
Because that evening, when my father came upstairs and made a comment about all the pine needles stuck in the carpet, my mother’s brain chemistry mutated.
“Well, if that’s the way everybody feels,” she screamed, running into the living room, her blue Marimekko caftan flowing behind her, “then we’ll just call the whole damn thing off.”
I was astonished by her physical strength. What had taken two large men many minutes of concentrated effort to hoist on top of our brown station wagon, my mother was able to topple in a matter of seconds.
Tinsel, shattered Christmas balls and lights were smeared across the floor as she dragged the thing through the living room, out the deck door and straight over the edge.
I’d never seen such a display of physical strength from her before and I was impressed.
My brother snickered. “What’s the matter with her?”
My father was angry. “Your damn mother’s crazy is what’s the matter.”
My mother stormed back inside the house and swiped the needle off the record. She leaned over and began rummaging through the wooden captain’s trunk where she kept her albums. When she found the record she was looking for, she placed it on the stereo, turned the volume up full blast and set the needle down.
I am woman hear me roar in numbers too big to ignore . . .
Hope comes into the TV room. “There anything left?” she says, pointing to the tree, meaning food.
“No,” Natalie says, stuffing the bend of a candy cane in her mouth. “This is the last one.”
“It figures,” she says and walks away.
“I’m depressed now,” Natalie