Running with Scissors (16 page)

“Hope is just going to die,” Natalie said. “And Dad. He’ll absolutely freak when he sees this. Then he’ll be forced to give us cash to finish it.”

“Yeah. That’ll be good.” I was excited, thinking we could use the cash for McDonald’s and beer along with the drywall. And it would be hilarious to see everyone’s horror.

Or so we thought.

In the morning, the doctor came downstairs in his underwear as usual. He walked into the kitchen as usual. He made his way to the refrigerator for the orange juice as usual. What was not usual was the amount of rubble he had to step over to get there. Also highly unusual was the fact that both Natalie and I were not only awake at 7
A.M
., but also quite busy. Yet he seemed unfazed.

“Good morning,” he said in his deep, morning voice.

“Hey, Dad.”

“Hi,” I said.

“You two have quite the project going on in here,” he said casually, as if Natalie and I were in the middle of an especially ambitious macramé project.

“What do you think?” Natalie asked, as she used the broken legs of Agnes’s ironing board to swat the last bits of plaster away near the door to the barn.

“I think it’s a spectacular mess,” he said. He carried the orange juice over to the cupboard and pulled down a glass. He inspected it for signs of life before filling it with juice.

“That’s all?” Natalie was disappointed. She’d had her heart set on a scene. One that could possibly end with cash.

“Well,” he said, “I would hope that whenever you’re through doing whatever you’re doing that you’ll clean up like adults.”

Natalie said, “We need some money to finish. We’re putting in a new cathedral ceiling and we need money.”

He wanted to know how much. Money was tight then because two patients had quit treatment.

“A couple hundred.”

“A couple hundred dollars!” he bellowed. He added his now empty glass to the mound of plates, pans and empty milk cartons that had been in the sink all week.

Natalie played favorite daughter. “Oh, c’mon, Dad. You’ll love the new kitchen. Please? Won’t you give your youngest, most favorite, most beautiful daughter two hundred dollars?” She fluttered her eyelashes playfully.

This always worked.

He promised us the cash and then went back upstairs to get dressed. Natalie pulled a chair out from the table, shoved the crap off, and sat heavily.

We were filthy and exhausted but not bored.

“That was good,” she said, like we’d just had sex.

“Yeah. But what do we do now?”

There was the problem of the mess. The ceiling and its insulation were now three feet deep on the floor and on top of everything. It would take at least as long to get rid of it as it did to take it down.

She peeled a scab off her knee, revealing a small pink gash. “We’ll shovel it outside, throw it behind the barn.”

“When?”

“Later.”

“What do we do now?”

“Take a nap.”

I woke up that afternoon at about four and groggily walked out of my room, down the hall into the kitchen. Agnes was rinsing a plate under the faucet. She dried it on her apron and placed it in the cupboard. Then she shuffled through the debris to the refrigerator. She opened the door and hunched over to inspect the labels of the condiments. “We never have any relish in this house,” she said. “Who’s eating all the relish?

I couldn’t remember ever seeing relish in the refrigerator. “Maybe Hope ate it.”

“That Hope,” she said. “She should know better.” Agnes took her pocketbook from its position at the top of the mound of plates on the kitchen table. “I’m going to run to the store and pick up a fresh bottle. If anybody needs a clean plate there’s one in the cupboard.” She left through the back door.

I walked upstairs to Natalie’s room and pounded on her door. “Wake up, wake up, wake up.”

She answered the door wearing a sheet toga. “What time is it?” She yawned.

“Late.”

“What’s the kitchen like?”

“Agnes washed a plate,” I said.

She yawned again. “Oh.”

“I guess we should get to work on it,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said. Then she turned around, holding the sheet against her chest and began hunting through the mounds of clothes on her floor for her skirt. Natalie wore the same skirt every day. It was red with golden feathers on it. She’d sewn it herself. The edges were beginning to fray from so many washings. Somehow she was able to slip into both the skirt and a black tank top without ever removing the sheet.

We spent the rest of the day shoveling debris out of the kitchen and carrying it outside behind the barn. It took dozens of trips. But by evening, the kitchen was free from rubbish.

“Let’s get these dishes washed,” Natalie said.

So we created our own assembly line of two. Natalie washing, me drying. All the commotion had caused the roaches to retreat deep into the walls so Natalie hardly screamed at all.

When we were finished, standing in the now clean kitchen, Natalie commented on the new ceiling. “It’s weird how it seems even darker in here now.”

It was true. Although there was no longer a low ceiling hanging over our heads, the blackness that stretched up was even more depressing.

What we needed was a skylight.

Natalie phoned her dad at the office and he told us he’d give us a hundred dollars to install a skylight. Natalie told him a hundred dollars wasn’t enough; that we’d need at least a hundred and fifty. After ten minutes of pleading, he finally agreed to give us a hundred and twenty-five.

“So we can use a hundred for the window,” she said, “and the rest we can spend on beer.”

This seemed like a good plan to me. “But are you sure we can buy a window for a hundred dollars?”

“We don’t need to buy a window,” she said. “We can take the window out of the pantry and use that. Then we can just block that up with wood. Nobody looks out that window anyway.”

Over the next few days, we worked with uncommon focus on our project. It proved challenging to remove the window from the pantry. It had been installed with surprising accuracy. But by using an axe we found in the barn as well as a hammer and a rock, we were able to free the window from the wall. The hole that remained created a refreshing cross-ventilation that made it easier to breathe in the dusty kitchen.

Far more difficult, however, than removing the window in the pantry was creating the hole in the roof for the new skylight.

“You wouldn’t think it would be so hard,” Natalie said, as she tried to gnaw her way through the shingles with a hacksaw.

We were sitting on top of the roof. The sun was high in the sky and we were both wet with perspiration. I’d applied Hennaluscent conditioner to my hair and combed it straight back. I’d also talked Natalie into letting me henna her hair. I’d applied the pasty mud and then piled her hair on top of her head, securing it with a tight wrapping of aluminum foil. And now she was starting to complain.

“My head is so fucking hot,” she said.

“Well, just try not to think about it. The sun will really help your hair take the color.” The color we’d chosen was red.

“Well, this fucking foil is driving me nuts.” The foil was sliding down her forehead and she was constantly pushing it back up.

“So take it off,” I said.

She slid the foil off her head, balled it up and threw it off the roof. Her hair was mud-caked and slapped against her shoulders. With the motion of the hacksaw, her hair moved as one thick sheet.

Eventually, we were able to saw a nice hole in the roof, between the rafters.

“Hi, Agnes,” I said, sticking my hand down through the hole and waving into the kitchen.

“What in God’s name?” she said, looking up.

Natalie poked her face into the hole. “Can you go to the store and get us some food?” she said.

“What do you want?” Agnes asked.

“I don’t know. Something.”

“You two better fix that,” Agnes said. “We can’t live in a house with a hole.”

As it turned out, we
could
live in a house with a hole.

Because our measurements were approximate and our precision was nonexistent, the window from the pantry was a rough fit into the hole in the roof. We nailed it into place, using scraps of wood to seal around it. Then we added fresh shingles.

But there remained a gap. It was about seven-and-a-half inches between the roof and the top side of the window. We knew the figure, because it was the only thing we measured.

Eight months out of the year, rain fell through this gap and collected in a pot that was permanently placed on the kitchen table. The other four months, the pot collected snow. During the holidays, we took to wearing stocking caps and mittens while we prepared our feasts.

But the skylight, no matter how crude, did flood the kitchen with light.

“I really like it,” Hope commented, emptying the rain-filled pot into the sink. “It’s worth the trouble.”

Dr. F agreed. “It brings a sense of humor to the kitchen.”

Agnes didn’t agree. “It’s a disaster,” she said. Of course, she’d said this after leaving her purse on the kitchen table in the spot where the rain-pan should have been.

QUEEN HELENE CHOLESTEROL

K

ATE WASN
’
T LIKE THE OTHER
F
INCHES
. S
HE WAS SLIM
,
SO
phisticated and listened to Laura Nyro and fusion jazz. She dated handsome black men and her spotless apartment was decorated with Oriental rugs and African fertility icons. She sent her daughter Brenda to ballet school. And when she divorced, she kept his name. Kate was the cLosest thing the Finches had to a royal family member.

Oh, the others didn’t think so. “Snob,” they called her. “Stuck-up cunt.” But I was in awe of her and was thrilled when—between boyfriends—she would ask me to wash her car or take down her storm windows.

When Kate stopped by the house, I changed my clothes as if going on a date. I was as charming and well behaved as possible. I pretended not to know the other members of the family.

My awe of her was based on the fact that she had exactly what I wanted in life. She was a professional licensed cosmetologist. Or, to use a name I loathed,
hairdresser.

Kate was planning to someday open her own shop and I felt this was a bond between us, because I was planning to open my own
chain
of shops around the world and also have my own line of haircare products. I even wanted to have a line of products marketed exclusively to the trade because I was convinced that the perms on the market were too damaging to the hair shaft. I didn’t know how to make them any
less
damaging, but I did have some packaging ideas that would give the impression of harmlessness.

Kate had been generous enough to give me her old cosmetology school textbook. It was a hardcover with no jacket and the catchy title was printed across the pink front in swashy script:
HANDBOOK OF COSMETOLOGY
. Inside were black-and-white line illustrations of the many procedures that the cosmetology students had to master before earning their license to practice. It was all in there—from pin curls to permanent waves—and I was determined to memorize the book before I attended beauty school. I could not take the chance that I would flunk, so I felt my best option was to already know everything in the book. Even if some of the procedures were no longer practiced or perhaps even illegal. For example, a “cold wave” appeared to involve wires attached to the head, electricity and water.

“Working with hair” was the only thing I could think of to do with myself professionally. Becoming a doctor seemed unlikely to me now. I had nearly outgrown my desire to be a talk-show host. And even though I spent many hours each day hunched over a notebook writing in my journal because I felt that if I didn’t write at least four hours a day I might as well not exist, the idea of being a writer never entered my mind. My mother was
a writer
but she was also crazy. And the only people who read her poems were the depressed women in the writing classes she held at her house in the summers or friends she called on the phone. She had had one book of poems published many years before and nothing since. I knew then that I could never live like that: no money and even less fame. I craved fan letters and expensive watches. “I’ll be able to get a great boyfriend,” I reasoned, “once I’m the next Vidal Sassoon.” I even thought I might end up with a hair model in the end.

As preparation for my future as a world-class cosmetologist, I tricked members of the house and certain patients into letting me cut their hair. As it turned out, I had an actual knack for it.

But there was a problem. And the problem was finger waves.

No matter how many times I tried, I could not comb a successful finger wave into straight or even moderately wavy hair.

“Do they really make you learn this? Do they actually test you on this?” I asked Kate.

“They really do, yeah,” she laughed. “I know it’s really old fashioned, I mean nobody does finger waves anymore. But that’s hairdressing school for you. It goes by the book. Unfortunately, the book was written thirty years ago.”

My fingers were too large to make finger waves, I worried. Or I lacked the ability to contort my fingers in the required way.

This one thing, seemingly small, signaled to me the possible destruction of my dream. And I obsessed about it constantly. In the middle of the night when the rest of the house was asleep and couldn’t bother me, I lay in bed with my journal and wrote feverishly about it until my hand cramped and I fell asleep from emotional exhaustion.

One night I was particularly upset. The finger wave issue was becoming larger for me ever since I had asked Fern’s friend Julian Christopher, who owned The Kindest Cut Salon in Amherst, about it. He told me the same thing Kate did, that I’d have to master them. It was an especially sweltering summer night and all the fans in the house were already hogged by other people, so I applied an Alberto VO5 Hot Oil Treatment to my hair, wrapped my head in Saran wrap and lay on my bed to try and write my anxiety away: