Running with Scissors (29 page)

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 and friends, and she even let the dog sleep on the sofa during the day.

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 says. “And fat.”

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 not today.”

Today, we happened to be on a whale watch, off the coast of Cape Cod. I was in cutoff jeans and a Fruit of the Loom T-shirt and Natalie was in her uniform because it was the only thing besides her bathing suit that she packed. “Aren’t you hot in that thing?”

Natalie wiped her arm across her forehead. Her hair was pasted to the sides of her face with sweat. “Yeah, it’s pretty hot. But it gets hotter at the restaurant, take my word for it.”

I
had
to take her word for it, because I
didn’t
work at McDonald’s. And it wasn’t fair. We’d been applying for the same jobs together forever, and neither of us had any experience. So why, finally, would they chose one and not the other? “Maybe they didn’t like your sneaky eyes,” was Natalie’s in-depth analysis.

As a result, I had no money as usual, except a twenty Hope loaned me, and Natalie had a hundred and seventy-five dollars because she’d just received her first paycheck. So she was footing the bill for our little trip.

“Is that a whale?” Natalie said, squinting and pointing out to sea.

“It’s just a lousy old garbage bag,” the lady next to us offered. “I saw that five minutes ago. Took four goddamn pictures of it too, before I realized. Four perfectly good pictures, down the toilet. What am I going to do with four pictures of a trash bag? If we keep cruising through garbage, I won’t have any film left when one of those fishes finally does show up.”

We slid down the railing away from her. “Crazy old bitch,” Natalie muttered under her breath.

“God, I hate old people,” I said. “They’re so senile. Why isn’t she locked away in a nursing home?”

“She should be. I hope she falls overboard.”

Natalie scanned the surface of the water looking for a whale. “I wish I had sunglasses. I left them in the room with my stupid earrings. I feel naked without my earrings.”

“You look fine. I mean, nobody’s going to notice that you’re not wearing earrings. When you’re wearing a McDonald’s uniform.”

“You know something? I hated this uniform at first, but now I like it.” She did a deep knee bend. “It’s the only thing I own that fits. I’m always ragging on Agnes for wearing polyester, but I have to say”—she did another knee bend and then a kick—“there’s really something to be said for being able to move. I don’t think I can go back to wearing jeans.”

“Yeah, but you can’t just wear that uniform everywhere. I mean, people will think you’re a freak.”

“No they won’t,” she snorted. “They’ll think I’m a career girl who just got off from work.”

“And decided to go on a whale watch?”

“Oh, these people don’t even notice. They’re all looking out there trying to see whales which are never gonna show up.”

I reached into my back pocket and pulled out my pack of Marlboro Lights. I tried lighting a cigarette, but the wind kept blowing the match out. “Here, stand in front of me,” I said. “Block the wind.”

Natalie moved sideways, and I learned in close and struck a match.

“Hey, watch it,” she said. “This uniform is flammable.”

There was nothing better than fresh air, sunshine and a cigarette. “It’s great out here. How come we don’t take trips more often?”

“Because we never have any money. Besides, there’s always some crisis or something back at the house that stops us.”

“Yeah.”

For awhile, we stared out at the ocean, not talking, just looking. If there were whales out there, they sure weren’t coming to visit our boat.

“Do you think they’d serve us beer?” Natalie asked.

“You mean inside?”

“Yeah.”

“No.”

“Why not? We look eighteen. It’s worth a shot. There’s nothing to do out here, that’s for sure.”

We walked inside and felt immediate relief to be out of the sun. There was a line at the snack bar, so we joined it.

“I could go for a hot dog,” Natalie said.

“That’s a good idea. Test the limits of your uniform.”

“Fuck you.”

“You wish.”

“May I help you?” the girl at the counter asked. Then she took a double-take at Natalie’s
Introducing Chicken McNuggets!
button and smirked.

“Two beers, whatever you have on tap.”

The girl eyed us suspiciously, then turned around and poured our beers. “Four dollars,” she said.

Natalie gave her a five and I felt consumed with envy. She had so many more fives than I did. The balance had shifted. She was more powerful now.

“Here,” Natalie said as we walked away.

We sat on a blue plastic bench near the window, watching the people who were looking for whales.

“Look at that old man,” Natalie said, motioning with her head. “Isn’t that sad?”

“What’s sad about him?”

“Well, you know, just some old man all alone. God, I hope I don’t end up alone like that. Some pathetic old woman with nobody to go on a whale watch with.”

“Oh, you won’t,” I said, swallowing. “You’ll marry some Smith professor.”

“Yeah, right,” Natalie said. “If I’m lucky I’ll marry a Smith janitor.”

The boat heaved from side to side, something I hadn’t noticed when we were standing outside. But now the sea was framed by the windows and the earth outside looked like it was drunk. “Do you ever get seasick?” I said.

Natalie belched. “Oh my God, excuse me,” she giggled, still capable of finding burps and farts hysterical. A charming quality in a way.

“Do you?”

“Do I what? Get seasick? No. I don’t think so. Just bored.”

“You’re bored?”

“Kind of. There’s nothing to do out here. When we get back to shore, you wanna get lobsters?”