Running with Scissors (3 page)

My father moved away from her. He brought the glass to his lips and took a deep swallow from his drink. Because he’d been drinking all evening, his words were slightly blurry. “Nobody’s trying to kill you, Deirdre. You’re killing yourself.”

“I wish you’d rot in hell,” she spat. “I regret the day I ever married you.”

While they were fighting, I was sitting at the dining-room table fastening and unfastening the lobster claw clasp on the gold chain my mother had bought me in Amherst. I worried constantly that it would fall from my neck. And the only thing that reassured me was to test its dependability over and over again. I glanced up and said, “Can’t you two
stop
fighting? You always fight and I hate it.”

“This is between me and your father,” my mother said coldly.

“
No it’s not
,” I shouted with surprising volume. “It’s not just between you because I’m here too. And I can’t stand it. All you ever do is scream at each other. Can’t you just leave each other alone? Can’t you try?”

My mother replied, “Your father is the one who is making things difficult for us.”

Eventually, the fight moved next door to the kitchen, providing them with better lighting as well as potential weapons.

“Look at your damn face,” my mother said. “You’ve got the face of a man twice your age. Thirty-seven years old going on eighty.”

My father was very drunk by now and the only way he could imagine restoring silence to the house was to stop my mother from breathing.

“Get your damn hands
off
of me,” my mother screamed, struggling against my father’s hands, which had found their way around her neck.

“Shut the hell up, you bitch.” His teeth were clenched.

I had followed them into the kitchen, and was standing in the doorway in my Snoopy pajamas. “Stop!” I screamed. “Stop this!”

In one motion, my mother shoved my drunk father, sending him reeling backward against the kitchen counter. His head hit the dishwasher on the way down and when he made contact with the kitchen floor, he didn’t move. A small pool of blood began to form under his ear and I was sure he was dead.

“He’s not moving,” I said, moving closer.

“This spineless bastard is only playing another one of his pitiful games.” She nudged his bad knee with her red toe. “Get up, Norman. You’re frightening Augusten. Enough of your pranks.”

My father eventually sat up, leaning his head back against the dishwasher.

With disgust, my mother tore a Bounty paper towel from the roll and handed it to him. “I should just let you bleed to death for terrifying our son like that.”

He pressed it against the side of his face to absorb the blood.

Seeing that my father was still alive, I was now worried about my mother. “
Please
don’t hurt her,” I said. “
Please
don’t kill her.” The problem was, my father’s unemotional nature scared me. There was a difference between the calm expression of the man on a jar of Taster’s Choice coffee and the blank expression my father wore. I was afraid he was, like my mother said, Bottled with rage, ready to snap.

Again, I leaned forward. “
Please don’t kill her
.”

“Your father isn’t going to kill me,” my mother said, switching on the front burner of the stove, pulling a More from her pack, and leaning over to light it on the heating coil. “He’d rather suffocate me with his horribly oppressive manipulation and then wait for me to cut my own throat.”

“Will you please just shut the hell up, Deirdre?” my father said, weary and drunk.

My mother smiled down at him, blowing smoke through her nostrils. “I will
please shut the hell up
the day you
please drop the hell dead
.”

I was seized with panic. “Are you going to cut your own throat?” I asked her.

She smiled and held out her arms. “No, of course not. That’s just a figure of speech.” She kissed the top of my head and scratched my back. “Now, it’s nearly one in the morning; way past your bedtime. You need to go to sleep so you can be ready for school in the morning.”

I walked off to my room, where I selected an outfit for school and carefully arranged it on hangers at the front of the closet. I would wear my favorite polyester tan pants and a blue shirt with the vest cleverly sewn on. If only I had a pair of platform shoes the outfit would be complete.

Still, knowing my clothes were ready gave me a sense of calm. I could
control
the sharpness of the crease in my doubleknit slacks, even if I couldn’t stop my mother from hurling the Christmas tree off the porch like she did one winter. I could polish my 14k gold-plated signet ring with a Q-tip until the gold plating wore off even if I couldn’t stop my parents from throwing John Updike novels at each other’s heads.

So I became consumed with making sure my jewelry was just as reflective as Donnie Osmond’s and my hair was perfectly smooth, like plastic.

Besides clothing and jewelry, there were two other things I valued in life: medical doctors and celebrities. I valued them for their white jackets and stretch limousines. I knew for sure that I wanted to be either a doctor or a celebrity when I grew up. The ideal would have been to play a doctor on a TV show.

And this is where the fact that we lived in the woods surrounded by pine trees came in handy. Because in desperation, pine trees can become Panavision cameras. Their broken branches, boom mics. This allowed me to walk through the woods or down the dirt road we lived on, imagining that there was always a camera trained on my every move, zooming in close to capture my facial expression.

When I looked up at a bird in the sky, I wondered how the light was falling on my face and if that branch was catching it just right.

Mine was a delusional world filled with tall trees that held long lenses and followed me on dollies. A fallen branch in the woods was not a fallen branch; it was “my mark.”

When I wasn’t “on the set” throwing branches around with my bionic arm or doing a toothpaste commercial in front of a boulder, I was trying to trick my mother into taking me to the doctor.

By the time I was ten, I was having weekly allergy shots—eleven in each arm. I had persistent warts on my fingers that needed to be burned off and my throat was constantly sore due to the dust that I cupped into my hands and inhaled.

A visit to the doctor meant exposure to those crisp, clean white jackets and the glint of a silver stethoscope around the neck. I was also aware that doctors got to park where they wanted and speed without getting tickets, both of which seemed the height of privilege when President Carter had made us all drive forty miles an hour and live in the dark.

I had two doctors that I saw regularly. Dr. Lotier, who had long hairs sprouting from his nose and the backs of his hands, and a dignified Indian allergist named Dr. Nupal. Dr. Nupal drove a white Mercedes (I asked him) and smelled like freshly washed hands with subtle undertones of Aqua Velva.

Just thinking of my doctors filled me with soothing images of overhead fluorescent lighting, shiny new needles and shoes so polished they inspired in me a sense of awe unequalled by anything except the dazzling sets of the Academy Award shows.

And then there was Dr. Finch.

As the mood in my home changed from one of mere hatred to one of potential double homicide, my parents sought help from a psychiatrist. Dr. Finch looked exactly like Santa Claus. He had a shock of thick white hair, a full white beard and eyebrows that resembled toothbrush bristles. Instead of wearing a red suit trimmed with white fur, he wore brown polyester slacks and a short-sleeved button-down white shirt. He did, however, sometimes wear a Santa hat.

The first time I ever saw him he appeared at our house in the middle of the night, following an especially bad fight between my parents. As my mother hyperventilated on the sofa, smoking cigarette after cigarette, the doorbell rang. “Oh, thank God,” she said, quickly getting up from the couch to answer the door.

He was carrying a balloon and there was a button on his jacket lapel that read, “World Father’s Organization.” He peered over my mother’s shoulder and looked directly at me. “Hello there.”

I moved back, unsure.

“Please, come in,” my mother said, motioning him inside. “I’ve just been a frantic wreck waiting for you to get here.”

The doctor said, “It’s okay now, Deirdre.” Then he reached in his pocket and handed me a button, identical to the one on his lapel. “Would you like one of these? As a gift?”

“Thanks,” I said, taking the button and inspecting it.

Then he reached in his pocket again and withdrew a handful of balloons. “And these,” he said.

“Okay,” I said again. The colorful balloons seemed out of context, given my mother’s mood, but I liked them anyway. I could blow them up, tie them into a bunch and then attach them to Cream’s collar or tail.

The doctor turned to my mother. “Where’s Norman?”

She bit the nail of her thumb, her brow creased with worry. She’d gnawed off all the polish and the nail itself was chewed down to the quick. “He’s downstairs. Drunk.”

“I see,” he said, removing his heavy black coat and draping it over the chair in the front hall.

“I was afraid for my life tonight,” she said. “I thought for sure he was going to kill me. That this would finally be the night.”

Earlier in the evening, my parents had been screaming at each other. The screaming escalated until my father was chasing my mother through the house with a Danish fondue pot held high above his head.

My mother began to calm down now that the doctor was here. “Would you like a Sanka?” she offered.

He asked for a bologna sandwich with horseradish.

And then he looked at me and winked. “Don’t worry about your parents, buckaroo. We’ll get this all sorted out.”

“I just pray to God that Norman doesn’t snap. One of these days he’s going to snap and kill us all,” my mother said as she busied herself in the kitchen making a sandwich for the doctor.

“Enough,” Finch said loudly. “That’s not the way to talk around your son. You need to comfort him, not frighten him.”

My mother said, “That’s right, I know. I’m sorry. Augusten, I’m just very upset right now. The doctor and I need to speak.” Then she turned to him and lowered her voice. “But I am worried, Doctor. I do believe our lives are in danger.”

“May I have one of those?” he asked, pointing to a hot dog he glimpsed as my mother opened the refrigerator door to put away the lettuce.

She look puzzled. “Oh. Would you like a hot dog instead of the sandwich I just made?”

He reached into the refrigerator, sliding the raw Oscar Mayer wiener from the pack. He took a bite. “No, just like this. As an appetizer.” He smiled, causing the white whiskers of his mustache to twitch as he chewed.

I liked him. And with his jolly, red-faced cheeks and his easy smile, he really did seem like Santa. Although it was difficult to imagine him being able to fit down a chimney, it was just as hard to imagine him wearing a white jacket. He certainly didn’t seem like a real doctor, the kind of doctor I worshiped. He seemed like he should be in a department store letting kids pee on his lap and whisper brand-name bicycles in his ear.

As my mother saw more and more of Dr. Finch over the year, I needed to be reminded constantly that he was a real doctor. “An M.D. doctor?” I would ask my mother.

“
Yes
,” she would say with exasperation, “
an M.D. doctor
. And as I’ve told you a hundred times, he earned his M.D. at Yale.”

I’d even asked her how she found him, imagining her riffling through our outdated Yellow Pages or reading restroom stall walls. “Your own doctor, Dr. Lotier, referred me,” was her tidy reply.

But still I was suspicious. Instead of being gloriously clinical and sanitized, his office was a hodgepodge of rooms on the top floor of an office building in Northampton. The waiting room had pale yellow paint on the walls that was peeling off in sheets, cracked rattan furniture, and an old gray metal file cabinet on top of which was a Mr. Coffee. There were posters of rainbows and balloons on the wall. A thick blanket of dust covered everything. Then there was a middle room that was used for storage of boxes and decade-old magazines. And then an even more inner room where the doctor saw his patients. You had to go through two doors, one right after the other, to get to that inner room. I liked these double doors and wished I had them in my room at home.

Like Santa, Dr. Finch gave me presents. It wasn’t uncommon for him to hand me a glass paperweight etched with the name and logo of a prescription drug. Or a five-dollar bill that I could spend downstairs at the drugstore, which still had a soda fountain. And there was a certain glint in his eye that seemed to promise more, later. It was always as if he had one hand behind his back, something hidden up his sleeve.

Every Saturday, I rode in the brown Dodge Aspen with my parents to Northampton. We would sit in complete silence and my parents would chain-smoke the whole way. Occasionally my mother would comment that there was a smell like manure emanating from my father’s ears. And sometimes he would tell her that she was a fucking bitch. Other than that, not a word was spoken.

They took turns with the doctor. First my father would go in. Then my mother. Then the two of them together. The entire process took all of Saturday and we would usually drive through McDonald’s on the way home, my parents ordering nothing and me ordering two of everything and the two of them watching me eat and saying, “Don’t choke, you’re eating much too fast.”

While they were in with Dr. Finch, I would sit on the rattan love seat and talk to the doctor’s receptionist, Hope. She had high cheekbones that made her look like an Indian princess and incredibly thick, long, straight black hair that she sometimes wore pulled into a ponytail and secured with a leather butterfly barrette. She favored trim black wool slacks and knit tops, even in the summer. She always had on some interesting piece of jewelry—an elephant pin, ladybug earrings, a silver bracelet made of two dogs chasing each other’s tails.