Running With Scissors_ A Memoir - Augusten Burroughs [95]
Poo comes into the room. He goes to the tree looking for a snack. The tree has become the new refrigerator. Miraculously, he finds a chocolate Santa head in the back. How did it escape? He peels away the foil and pops it in his mouth. “What’s up?” he says.
“Nothing,” Natalie says, staring straight ahead at the TV.
Julie cracks a joke on TV and several of the passengers laugh.
Poo says, “You guys are boring,” and goes away.
Hope comes back into the room, angry. “You know,” she begins, “since you guys spend the most time in here, I really think you should take care of this tree problem.”
We both turn and stare at her.
“Well, I do,” she says.
Natalie says, “You want the Christmas tree out of here?”
“Yes. It’s May, for crying out loud.”
Natalie stands and reaches for the base of the tree. In one swift motion she yanks and the tree falls. Wordlessly, she drags the tree through the doorway down the hall and crams it into Hope’s bedroom.
“Don’t you dare do that, Natalie,” Hope shouts.
But Natalie has done it. “Now it’s your fucking problem.”
As Natalie heads up the stairs Hope shouts after her, “If that’s how you feel, maybe we shouldn’t even have a Christmas this year. Maybe we should just cancel it.”
I walk into the living room and sit at the piano to play the single song I know: “The Theme from The Exorcist.”
That evening, the tree has found its way into the dining room. It is on its side beneath the bay window. Agnes is in the dining room with her broom, hunched over sweeping. She sweeps around the tree. She sweeps for hours. She sweeps until at sometime after midnight Hope comes into the room, groggy. “Jesus, Agnes. I’m trying to sleep. Do you have to make such a racket?”
“Somebody’s got to stay on top of things in this house,” she says. “I’m just trying to hold it all together.”
“Well, would you mind holding it all together in the morning? I need to be at Dad’s office early.”
“Just go back to sleep. I’m hardly making any noise at all.”
“It’s all your humming,” Hope says. “At least stop that.”
“I’m not humming.”
“Yes you are, Agnes. I can hear you clean through the wall into my room. You’re humming that damn ‘Jingle Bells.’ Jeepers, it’s not even Christmas.” Hope turns and goes back to her room.
Agnes resumes sweeping. “I wasn’t humming,” she mutters to herself. “These crazy kids.”
The next morning as I look at the discarded tree, I am reminded of a turkey carcass. For some reason, Christmas trees and poultry bones have a difficult time finding their way out of this house.
Preparation for Thanksgiving may be an intense and focused event at this house, but cleanup is not. It’s interesting that Natalie will go without sleep for two days straight; she will clean the entire house with a scrub brush; she will single-handedly prepare a feast for twenty; she will do this all without a murmur of complaint. But afterward, the dishes and pots and pans will remain unwashed for weeks. The turkey itself, now just a cage of bones, will be passed from room to room. It is not uncommon to see the turkey bones sitting on top of the television set one day and in the bathroom under the sink another. But never, ever will you see it in the trash.
I have found wishbones in that house that predate the Nixon administration. And drumsticks that could quite possibly be of interest to archaeologists.
Eventually, the pans will be washed, the glasses returned to their roach-infested cabinets, and the silverware scrubbed free of debris. But Christmas trees and turkey bones tend to stay awhile.
RUNNING WITH SCISSORS
N
ATALIE HAD BEEN OUT OF CLEAN CLOTHES AND TOO DYS-functional to wash a load, saying, “Oh, why bother? They’ll just get dirty again.” So for the third day in a row, she was wearing her polyester McDonald’s counter girl uniform.
“Are you sure it’s not illegal?” I asked her. If it was a crime to impersonate a police officer, couldn’t it be a crime to walk around in public as a representative from the world’s favorite fast food restaurant?
“It’s perfectly legal. I do work there. Just