Running with Scissors (7 page)

Her eyes scared me. They looked radioactive.

I folded my arms across my chest and watched Freud jump onto the stove, stepping around the burners, settling in the center.

“We’ll be okay,” she said.

Then she was gone.

I stood alone in the kitchen, listening to the dim electric buzz of the clock as it secretly counted the seconds, the minutes, the hours. Briefly, I fantasized about slicing my mother’s fingers off with the electric knife that was hanging by its cord from the curtain rod.

THE CLEANING LADY

T

HE NEXT AFTERNOON
I
WAS SITTING IN THE
TV
ROOM
when I heard a strange sound. At first I thought it was a wolf. The doctor’s wife, Agnes, had fallen asleep in the wing chair with her head rolled back and her glasses perched on top of her head, tangled in her violet perm. She was snoring. The television was blaring and rolling its screen like it was frustrated that nobody would watch it. And I was sitting on the sofa alone because Hope had gone into the kitchen. I was sitting there watching Agnes snore when all of a sudden I heard the sound coming from somewhere upstairs.

When I was ten, I had an after-school job helping two local dog trainers teach their black labs to retrieve. One of them also had a wolf hybrid. The whine I heard from upstairs sounded like that dog, only younger.

Did the Finches keep a wolf in the house?

It would make sense, I thought. They seemed to be sort of crazy. They were up at all hours of the night, they didn’t care if you used a coaster on the table under your glass. They didn’t even care if you used a glass.

The wolf moaned again, but this time it also called out a name. “Agnes.”

The sound was coming from the top of the stairs. But it was muffled, like it was behind a door.

“Agnes!” Now it sounded like an old lady. Frail, but insistent.

I was wondering if I should poke Agnes on the shoulder or maybe just slap the coffee table really hard to wake her up, but just then her eyes fluttered and she mumbled. Automatically she reached for her black vinyl purse, an air conditioner-sized accessory that was never more than a foot from her body.

“
Agnes!
” It was almost a howl. I could picture a ghoulish old lady, hands mangled by arthritis, crawling along the floor upstairs.

“Uh, oh. Okay, yes, okay, I’m coming,” Agnes muttered. Somehow she’d heard the old lady in her sleep and now she was standing up and heading for the stairs, as if programmed at birth to do so. “I’m on my way,” she called. Agnes looked weary and fatigued. Her body was like a bag of sand that she was forced to drag around.

“Where’d Agnes go?” Hope asked brightly when she walked back in the room. She was carrying a box of croutons and offered me one.

“Oh, no thanks.”

“You sure? They’re good when they get a little stale.” She shook the box.

“That’s okay, I’m not hungry.” The box looked old and worn, like it had been filled and refilled for many years.

She shrugged and sat on the sofa. “Okay.”

“Who is that lady?” I asked. “The one who was calling for Agnes?”

Hope smiled and then she chuckled, popping a crouton into her mouth. “Oh,” she said, rolling her eyes,“so you heard Joranne.”

“Who?”

“
Joranne,
” Hope said. “She’s one of Dad’s patients. She’s wonderful.”

I waited for more.

“Is that where Agnes went, upstairs?”

I nodded.

“Yeah, so okay. Joranne is really special. She’s one of Dad’s patients and she’s staying in the middle room upstairs.”

I would be living in the same house with a crazy woman? And then I realized I already was living in a house with a crazy woman—my mother.

“She’s a very sick lady,” Hope added, crunching a handful of croutons. Then,“Ouch,” and she spit one into her hand. She smiled up at me. “That one was a little
too
stale.” She brushed it onto the floor.

“What’s wrong with her?”

Hope sighed and set the box of croutons on the coffee table. “Joranne is a very brilliant lady. She’s incredibly wellread and very interesting. She loves Blake.”

“Who?”

“He was a painter,” Hope smiled at me. Her face said,
Oh,
I forgot you’re only twelve. You’re so mature for your age.

“Oh,” I said. I still didn’t get why she was here.

“She’s an obsessive compulsive neurotic,” Hope stated.

“A what?”

She turned sideways on the sofa to face me. “Obsessive compulsive neurotic. That’s the technical term for her condition.”

This sounded impossibly exotic and I immediately wished I was one too, whatever it was.

Hope then explained that this meant Joranne could not leave the room upstairs for any reason. In fact, she had not left the room once since she was brought to the house two years ago during a personal crisis in a nor’easter.

“She’s been here for two years?” All I could think was,
wow.

“A little over, yeah.”

What kind of doctor lets a patient live in his house for
two years?
And did she really never come downstairs?

“She’s never been downstairs once. Agnes brings all her meals up to her. And everything has to be wrapped in aluminum foil. She’s afraid of dirt. So nobody can even step into her room. When Agnes brings her a food tray, she has to stand in the doorway. Nobody is ever allowed inside. Her room is really spotless by the way. Too bad the rest of the house doesn’t look like that,” Hope laughed.

If Joranne had never been downstairs, she’d never seen the overturned sofa in the living room, the dog shit under the grand piano or the moving blanket of roaches that covered all the dishes and pots and pans that were piled in the sink and on the kitchen table. She’d never seen the scrappy old burlap that hung from the walls instead of wallpaper. If Joranne had never come downstairs, she didn’t realize that the stairs themselves were tearing away from the wall and that every time somebody climbed them, they looked like they might come crashing down. I said to Hope,“If Joranne saw the downstairs, what would she do?”

Hope howled. “Oh, she’d absolutely die. It would just kill her. Can you imagine?”

I liked that I hadn’t offended Hope about the house. Somehow the fact that she knew it was kind of gross made it okay that she lived here.

Hope told me that Joranne only left her room to walk into the back bathroom and that nobody else in the house was allowed to use it.

“Really?” What an exclusive, mysterious disease. I wanted it.

Hope began to laugh. When I asked her what was so funny, she laughed harder. Her eyes filled with tears.

“What is it?” I had to know. I loved Hope. Even though she was so old—twenty-eight—she was so much fun. She was the only reason I could stand sitting in Dr. Finch’s waiting room for five hours at a time.

Hope’s laughter wound down and she said,“She eats the sink caulking.”

“The what?” The more I heard, the more incredible this creature became. I liked her very much.

“The sink caulking. You know, that stuff around the sink and between the tiles? She peels it away and then just pops it in her mouth.” Hope broke into laughter again.

All I knew was, I had to see this lady. Now. “Can . . . I mean, is there any way . . .” I wasn’t sure how to ask.

“Would you like to meet her?”

“Yes.” I reached for the box of old croutons and took one out.

“We can try. But she usually doesn’t meet new people.”

A door was slammed. Then Agnes came walking down the creaky stairs. “Oh Joranne, Joranne, Joranne,” she was saying under her breath. She came into the TV room where Hope and I were sitting. “That Joranne is going to drive me insane.”

“What is it now?” Hope said.

“She didn’t like her spoon.”

“What’s the matter with her spoon?”

“She said there was a spot on the spoon I brought her for her soup. I took that spoon and I didn’t see any spot. So I wiped it off on my shirt and handed it back to her and she just closed the door in my face.” She wound her index finger around next to her ear; sign language for
crazy
.

But I believed Joranne. Unlike her, I’d seen the kitchen. And I was sure that any spoon that came from that mess would have at least one stain. If she only knew. This made me want to meet her even more.

“We’ll go talk to her,” Hope said. She got up from the couch.

“Oh, I wouldn’t do that,” Agnes warned before walking away. “She’s in rare form tonight. Got every light in the room burning.”

“Never mind that,” Hope said. “Come on, Augusten. Let’s go see her.”

I followed Hope up the stairs but I didn’t like the idea that we were both on the stairs at once. I let her stay three steps ahead.

At the top of the stairs, I stood back in the hallway and Hope knocked on the tall white door.

Nothing.

Hope knocked again.

Nothing.

She glanced over at me like,
see
? Then she knocked again and said, “Joranne, come on, open up. It’s me, Hope. And I’ve got a friend here I want you to meet. His name is Augusten. He’s twelve and his mother is a poet and you’ll really love him.”

A moment later, the door opened very slowly.

Hope stood up straighter.

A frail old lady peered out into the hall, squinting against the bare lightbulb that was attached to a fixture on the wall. “Who?” she said, sounding exactly like an owl. It came out more like
hoooooooo
.

“Augusten,” Hope said. Then she turned to me. “Augusten, this is Joranne.”

I moved forward and stuck out my hand for her to shake but she recoiled. So I quickly tucked my hand back at my side and said, “Hi.”

She said “Hello” with great dignity. There was an elegance about her, a certain sophistication. Like she could be the queen of some Danish country or a professor of literature at Smith.

For a moment, we just stared at each other. I was looking at a real, live crazy person. She was so crazy that she had to live in the psychiatrist’s house. And her room was so bright that it looked like a stage. She was dressed all in white, even a white shawl. And she looked very clean and glowy, like a ghost except not transparent.

“It’s nice to meet you,” she said.

She didn’t seem crazy.

Then she turned to Hope and her voice changed from one of formality back into the wolfish whine. “Agnes brought me a dirty spoon.
She’s soiled me
!”

Then Joranne burst into tears. She sobbed and pulled a Kleenex out from the cuff of her gown. Her thin veneer of composure began to crack and crumble down all around her. Now she was a crazy lady.

“Oh, Joranne. It’s okay. Agnes didn’t mean it. I’ll get you another spoon.”

“What am I going to do?” she sobbed. I could have sworn that she briefly eyed the white rubber piping along my sneaker bottoms.

When she brought her hands to her face to blot her nose, I noticed her hands were bright red, and etched with cracks. They were raw.

“It’s okay, Joranne. I’ll go downstairs and get you a brand new spoon.”

Joranne continued to cry but she nodded. Then she backed into her room and closed the door.

Hope looked at me and smiled. She headed downstairs and I followed.

In the kitchen, Hope grabbed a spoon from the pile in the sink and then reached under the cabinet for the Ajax. There was no room to wash the spoon in the sink, so I followed her into the bathroom.

“Did you see her hands?” Hope asked, taking a pair of Agnes’s tattered white underpants out of the standing water in the sink and slinging them over the curtain rod.

“Yeah,” I said. “Why were they so red?”

“They were red,” Hope said as she scoured the spoon under hot water, “because she’s been washing her hands. She gets into this thing—hand me that towel.”

I grabbed the towel off the back of the toilet bowl and handed it to her.

“Anyway, she gets into these, like, mental traps. She can’t stop washing her hands. She’ll do it for hours and hours until Dad makes her stop. He’s the only one who can stop her.”

In some strange way, I understood this concept. When I was a little kid, I would have to bathe with a towel next to the tub to wipe stray drops of water from the insides of the tub. I liked the water to be at one level with no splatters, anywhere, ever.

“The spoon must have set her off.”

I wondered how any doctor could fix a person who could go crazy just because of a spoon. I decided that my mother must be right. Dr. Finch must be a very special doctor, different and better than all the others. A thin layer of trust had formed in my mind, like a scab.

“I’m gonna bring this upstairs to her. You better just wait down here. I’ll meet you back in the TV room in a few minutes.” She paused and lowered her voice. “Dad’s trying to wean her off all of us because he feels she’s nearly ready to live on her own. He’s already found her a nice apartment in the center of town and in a month, she’ll be living there. So it’s good that she met you, she needs to get used to meeting new people.” We left the bathroom with the newly cleaned spoon and headed to the front of the house. Hope smiled at me, mouthing the words,
wish me luck
. Then she headed up the stairs.

I backed into the hall slowly, listening to see if Joranne screamed when Hope brought her the spoon. I didn’t hear anything. So I walked into the TV room and it was empty. I sat back down on the sofa and glanced at my watch. Five-and-a-half days until my mother came to pick me up. Assuming she hadn’t lied about me only staying here for a week. Before she left with Dr. F she told me that I’d be “spending a lot of time with the Finches in their home.” So I knew it was going to be more than just this one week. It would be a day here, another day there. Maybe even weeks at a time. I could sense that it was getting more and more difficult for her to have me for even a day. And my father didn’t want me at all. He had found himself an apartment in the bottom of a house deep in the woods. I’d only been there once since the divorce.