Running with Scissors (21 page)

“Are you saying my relationship with Augusten isn’t love?”

“I’m saying your ’relationship’ with Augusten, who is fourteen by the way, is not a mature love, no.”

“Bullshit,” he screamed. “Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.”

I hated being caught in the midst of their sibling rivalry. And they weren’t even real siblings.

I had been having a good time sitting on the couch next to Neil, just talking. I liked feeling his grown-up arm against my skinny one. And I liked that he didn’t seem interested in anything except me. But when he got intense like this, when he got crazy, shaking like he was now, I didn’t like him. It was like there were two Bookmans. The one I liked and the other one that was hidden.

“No, it’s not bullshit, Neil. It’s the truth. And if you’re not man enough to take the truth, you have no business being with a child.”

“I’m not a child, Hope,” I snapped. “I’m fourteen.”

“I’m sorry, Augusten. I know you’re not. I didn’t mean it like that. You’re very mature. I just meant that, well, it’s different when you’re older. Love is different. More mature.”

Neil burst into a riot of malicious laughter. “And what do you, Miss Iceberg, know about mature love? When was the last time you had anything in your twat besides a tampon?”

“That’s enough, Bookman,” Hope shouted. “I’m not going to listen to you when you’re talking like a teenage boy—and acting like one.” She stormed from the room, fuming.

Neil leaned back against the couch and put on a fake smile. “That shook her up. She’s such a prude.”

“Yeah, she can be,” I said. “But I like her. She’s pretty normal and everything.”

“You think Hope’s normal?”

“Well, yeah. Pretty much.”

“She’s thirty. She lives at home. She works for her father. And she hasn’t had a boyfriend since she was twenty-two. You think that’s normal?”

Well, when he put it like that.

But I wasn’t talking about those things. I meant, she had a good heart and she wasn’t insane. The not being insane part, that was a lot around here. “I like her,” I said.

“I like her too. She’s my spiritual sister for crying out loud. But she pisses me off. She really gets under my skin.” Then he faced me and his eyes softened, pupils dilating. “I don’t like anybody saying my love for you is anything less than miraculous.”

I liked his attention. But I also felt like there was something sick and wrong about it. Like it might make me sick later. I thought of my grandmother, my father’s mother. How when I used to visit her in Georgia she would always let me eat all the cookies and frozen egg rolls I wanted. “Go ahead, sweetheart, there’s more,” she would say. And it seemed okay because she was a grown-up, and I wanted all the Chips Ahoy! cookies in the bag. But I always ended up feeling extremely sick afterward. I looked at Bookman, his eyes swollen with emotion. “Thanks, that’s sweet.”

“It’s not sweet, my man. It’s the truth. The love I have for you is every bit as valid and as powerful and as healthy as the love any man would feel for any other man.”

“Yeah,” I said, not quite believing him, but also not wanting to question him because I didn’t want him to fly into a rage.

“Did you read my letter?”

He was talking about the sixteen-page letter he’d slipped under my door last night. I’d read the first page, then skipped to the end. It went on and on and on about how profound this thing between us is, how it’s “blindingly intense” and “allconsuming” and how “nothing else matters so much as the fire of life behind your eyes and between your legs.” I mean, I liked that he felt so strongly about me. But I worried he felt too strongly about me. I guess it scared me in some way. I was a little afraid of things when they got too intense because my mother was one of those things that got too intense and then she exploded.

“I read it, yeah. Thanks. You said a lot of great things.” I hoped he didn’t quiz me on specifics.

“Oh, come here, you,” he said and pulled me up against him. Bookman held me so hard that sometimes I felt he’d mash my internal organs together and bruise something. It wasn’t like he was holding me so much as trying to hold onto something.

*   *   *

That night when the house was asleep, Bookman sneaked down to my room. I was already in bed but I wasn’t asleep because I knew he’d come. I liked it when we met at night, after everyone else went to sleep.

“Did that feel good?” he asked as we lay side by side, naked on my twin bed, bought secondhand from Hope. My own bed was in my mother’s apartment with throw pillows on it, a place where she could sit and read over a stanza. Or where I could sleep when I was staying with her.

“Yeah, that felt great,” I said. Sometimes I still couldn’t get over the fact that I didn’t have to use
Playgirl
magazine to jerk off with anymore. I had my own real, live, adult man pet. It felt like I was one of those lottery winners with so much money the plunger ball in the back of the toilet was made of solid gold.

It was like an extravagance.

I could say,
sit like this,
and he’d sit like that. Or,
what if we try this?
And we’d try that. He was like this fantastic, twenty-four-hour-a-day vessel available for my exploration.

“If you left me, I’d kill myself,” he said.

Except when he said things like that and I hated him again.

“No you wouldn’t,” I tried to tell him. “Don’t say that.”

“But God.” He broke down, crying softly. “It’s so true. Don’t you see, Augusten? You’re everything to me.”

Bookman was everything to me, too. But not in the same way. He was the only thing. Nobody else paid me attention like Bookman did. Nobody else told me I was smart and funny and sweet. Nobody else made me come three times in one day. But I knew I liked him, even loved him, despite the fact of him.

Despite his personality, I guess.

He was like
Playgirl’s
Mr. October come to life. But I think I would have been happier if the only thing that came out of his mouth was the sound of a turning page.

By morning, Bookman was still in my room.

And we were still talking about how much he loved me and needed me. I wanted to kick him out; tell him he had to leave because I had to sleep. But I couldn’t. I had to listen because, after all, it was all about me.

And then I got an idea. Maybe I could still spend quality time with him
and
practice for beauty school. “Can I do something to your hair?” I said.

“What do you want to do?”

I eyed the box—unopened—of Clairol Nice ’N Easy Ash Blonde that was on my bookshelf next to one of the doctor’s old stuffed owls. “Just brighten it up a little.”

He smiled. “You mean warmer like yours?” And he buried his face in my curls.

“Yeah,” I said. “Like that, sort of.”

He splayed his arms out on the bed. “I’m all yours, sir. Do with me what you may.”

“Okay, good. Get up.” I pulled him up by the arms and made him sit on the bed. “Now wait right here.” I went into the bathroom to grab some towels and then I came back in the room.

“You sure you have enough towels there, fella?” he said.

I tossed them on the bed except for one that I draped over his neck like I’d seen in one of the illustrations in Kate’s book.

I opened the box, which I had been saving for a crisis at the house, and applied the mixture to his head.

He ran his hands up and down my bare legs the entire time but I didn’t mind because I’d never colored anyone before and I was very interested to see the results. The box said to leave it on for twenty minutes, but because his hair was black, I decided to leave it on for longer.

I wrapped his head in Saran wrap and then, an hour later, brought him into the bathroom to rinse his head in the sink.

Next to the sink was a free-standing plastic shelf unit. Agnes’s cosmetics were on one of the shelves. I picked up one of the tubes. Max Factor mascara. Vintage. Probably from the first batch Max Factor himself ever mixed together. I tossed it back on the shelf and turned my attention back to Bookman.

“Is it out yet?” he said with his face in the sink, water running across the back of his head and his nape.

The difference was startling.

“Yeah, it’s out. You can raise your head up but don’t look.” He stood, his head dripping, and had a big smile on his face. The change of activity had already done him good.

I towel-dried his hair.

It was a greenish-shade of brown. And it felt exactly like steel wool, except straight.

“How does it look?” he asked.

I led him out of the bathroom. “It’s a new look. It’s good.”

“I wanna see. Hand me a mirror.”

I handed him one of my mirrors. Unfortunately, I had many. “Holy shit.”

“See?” I said. “Completely different.”

“It’s green.”

“It’s not green. It’s ash blonde.”

“It’s green,” he said louder. It made his face look even paler.

“It’s the lighting.”

He handed the mirror back to me. “And it feels absolutely awful. Are you sure you wanna do this for a living?”

“It’ll feel better when it grows out. Yes, I’m sure. What else is there for me to do? Besides, I don’t care about the actual hair part. I’m only really interested in the product lines that can carry my name.”

“Well you’re not gonna get very far with the product lines if you don’t care a little more about the hair part.”

“Oh shut up. You’ll get used to it.”

Then he softened. “I’m just teasing. I kind of like it. And I love that you did it to me. I’m yours. You can do anything you want to me.”

I thought,
There’s that lotto feeling again
.

A FAMILY AFFAIR

B

ECAUSE THE MINISTER
’
S WIFE REFUSED TO LEAVE THE MIN
ister, and because my mother required a worshipful companion, she was forced to break up with Fern and secure herself a new mate. As luck would have it, Dr. Finch had recently begun seeing a suicidal eighteen-year-old African-American girl who had taken a leave of absence from the Rhode Island School of Design.

Her name was Dorothy.

And she was destined to spend many of her early adult years as my mother’s girlfriend.

Dorothy’s reddish-black hair tumbled down her shoulders in kinky loops. She had large brown eyes, an expressive mouth and a nose that resembled the dorsal fin of a salmon. Instead of being called “pretty” one might have described her as having “character.” I thought she looked like a young witch.

She was an excitable girl who seemed to be starved for chaos. The way other people seek comfort and security, Dorothy sought extremes. And she found this with my mother.

One of the things I liked about her was that she had long fingernails that she would carefully manicure and paint to fit her mood. If she were in a happy mood, her nails would be bright red. If she were feeling like she wanted to eviscerate her mother she would paint her nails burgundy. And when Dorothy was in one of her withdrawn, sullen moods, her nails would be neutral.

But to me, her best quality was her trust fund. It had been established by her father whom she loathed because when she was younger he showed her his penis on a rowboat. The trust fund was large enough that she was able to live off the interest alone.

And like a bottom-feeding catfish, I was able to live off the scraps.

“Here’s fifty,” she’d say. “Now get lost.”

When I officially moved into the Finch house, I assumed my mother would keep my old room for me in Amherst. The way mothers on primetime television do. But this was not the case.

Instead, Dorothy moved from her parent’s house in Buckland into my old bedroom. At least that was the arrangement at first. My mother was going to be a mentor to the troubled girl. “
I’ve always wanted a daughter
.”

But it didn’t take long before they shared the master bedroom and the other was used for storage.

Soon they were inseparable. And, I thought, extremely compatible.

If my mother was odd enough to crave a bubble bath at three in the morning, Dorothy was inventive enough to suggest adding broken glass to the tub. If my mother insisted on listening to
West Side Story
repeatedly, it was Dorothy who said, “Let’s listen to it on forty-five!”

And when my mother announced that she wanted a fur wrap like Auntie Mame, Dorothy bought her an unstable Norwegian elkhound from a puppy mill.

“Damn it, Dorothy,” my mother cried, “this animal is making me a nervous wreck. You’ve just got to take it back.”

“It’s not an it, it’s a
she.
And she wouldn’t have shit all over the stairs if you let her outside like I told you to.”

“
Shat
. And I couldn’t let her outside because she snaps at me whenever I set foot near her.”

“She’s not snapping at you. I told you, she’s epileptic. You have to give her the pills.” She rattled the bottle the vet had given her.

“I do not have time to be giving that damn dog pills. I have enough pills of my own to take. She has to go.”

Dorothy went into the bathroom and returned with a bottle of Vicks NyQuil. “Look, we’ll try this. I bet it’ll settle her down.” She poured a dose of the green NyQuil into the little cup and bent down.

The dog’s tongue slipped into the little cup as Dorothy tipped it backward. “See? She even likes it.”

The NyQuil took effect swiftly and the dog napped in the corner. “That’s more like it,” my mother said, stroking her hind leg with her big toe. “She’s a sweet thing when she sleeps, isn’t she?”

“See?” Dorothy said.

“Okay,” my mother said. “As long as you can manage her.”

“I can manage her. Just like I manage you.”

“Oh,
you’re
such a good pet,” my mother said, pressing Dorothy’s face between her hands and kissing her lips.

Although my mother teased that Dorothy was her
pet,
it was Dorothy who acted as if she had a trained bear for a lover. “Make that face!” she would shriek, clapping her hands like a child.