Running with Scissors (8 page)

For a second, I felt a bottomless sadness. So completely alone. Like one of my stuffed animals at home that I was too old for now, that sat on the shelf in my closet, mashed against the back wall.

And then a thought entered my mind that was too terrifying to contemplate: had Joranne only planned to stay here for a week?

I stopped biting the inside of my mouth and stared straight ahead, my eyes unfocused. What if I was being tricked? What if I ended up staying here not for a week but a
year? Or more?

No, that could never happen, I told myself. Don’t freak out, it’s just a week.

And then I heard something crash down the hall in the kitchen and this made me smile and wonder what new mess had just happened. In a way there was enough confusion and distraction here to keep my mind off the fact that my parents didn’t seem to want me. If I let myself think about that too much, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to climb out. So I held my breath and listened for more sounds. There was nothing.

I glanced down at my slacks and noticed an unsightly stain. It was some sort of grease. It would never come out. I shrugged, got up and ran for the kitchen to see what small disaster had happened.

One day late my mother picked me up from the Finch house. There was no excited knocking on the door, no opening of arms, no smothering with kisses. She simply slid the brown station wagon up alongside the house and sat there waiting. I don’t know how long she’d been sitting there when I finally caught a glimpse of a car parked out front, noticed it was her and ran outside.

“You’re back!” I cried, running barefoot out of the house, over the dirt path to the street, to her window which was rolled all the way up.

She continued to stare straight ahead, even as I banged on the glass.

Exhaust spilled out against the curb, and the car itself seemed weary, the engine sounding ready to fall out onto the street.

I knocked again on the window, and finally she blinked, turned and saw me. She slowly rolled down her window and leaned her head out. “Are you ready to go to Amherst? Do you have your things?” she asked flatly.

I turned back to the house, noticed I’d left the door wide open. Then I realized it didn’t matter, somebody would close it. And I had more shoes in Amherst, anyway. I walked around the front of the car to the passenger side and climbed in.

“Where’d you go? How was it? What happened?” I fired my questions at her as she pulled away from the house and headed for Amherst.

She answered none of my questions. She simply looked straight ahead, though not quite at the road, never checking her rearview mirror, not lighting a single More.

She had come back for me, just like she said she would. Only, where was she?

JUST ADD WATER

A

S
I
SPENT MORE AND MORE TIME WITH THE
F
INCHES DUR
ing that year, I could feel myself changing in profound ways, with stunning speed. I was like a packet of powdered Sea Monkeys and they were like water.

My double-knit slacks were replaced by an old pair of Vickie’s jeans that Natalie found in a pile next to the clothes dryer. “These will look excellent on you.” When I expressed apprehension at wearing the virtually crotchless Levi’s, she said, “Oh, get over it. It’s just a little ventilation.” I stopped trying to force my hair into a smooth, glossy sheet and instead let it run its unruly, curly course. “You look so much better,” Natalie said. “Like you could be a drummer with Blondie.” Inside, I felt I’d aged two years in the space of a few months. I loved it. And there was so much freedom in the house, everyone was so easy-going. They didn’t treat me like a little kid.

But as free and accepting as the Finches were, I worried about their reaction to my deep, dark secret. The fact that I was gay had never been a big deal to me—I’d known all my life. And because I seldom interacted with other kids, I hadn’t really been programmed to believe it was wrong. Anita Bryant on TV talked about how sick and evil gay people were. But I thought she was tacky and classless and this made me have no respect for her. But I wasn’t sure what the Finches would think, partly because they were Catholic and to me Catholic people seemed very white-knuckled and tight-fisted about life in general. I was worried my being gay would push the Finches’ acceptance of me past the breaking point.

“Big deal,” Hope said when I told her.

We were taking a walk around the neighborhood at night and it had taken me twenty minutes to confess. “I figured it out on my own anyway,” she said, glancing at me sideways and smiling.

“You did?” I asked, alarmed. Did I emit a certain gay odor? Or maybe it was my unnatural obsession with cleanliness that clued her in. It was one thing to
be
gay. But it was something else altogether to
seem
gay.

“My adopted brother Neil is gay, too,” she said, stopping to pet a cat.

“He is?” There was a gay Finch?

“Yeah, Neil Bookman. He used to be a patient of Dad’s, but now he’s Dad’s adopted son.”

“How old is he?” I wondered. Was he my age? A year older?

“Thirty-three,” Hope said.

That seemed pretty old to be adopted. “Where does he live?”

“Well,” Hope began as we continued walking, “he used to live out back in the barn. But then he got mad that Dad wouldn’t give him a room inside, so a few months ago he moved to Easthampton, into some house with a divorced woman. But he still keeps his room in the barn. Kinda like a pied-a-terre.”

My timing couldn’t have been worse. Here I was, just starting to basically live with the Finches, and the only gay one had just moved out.

“He visits a lot. I can call him if you like. You two should get together. I think you’d really like each other.”

I’d never seen a real, live gay man in person before; only on the
Donahue
show. I wondered what it would be like to see one without the title “Admitted Homosexual” floating in blocky type beneath his head.

A week later, Hope called me in Amherst to tell me that Bookman would be over that afternoon. I was on the next bus.

Agnes was on the sofa in the TV room, eating out of a bag of Purina Dog Chow. When she saw me walk into the room, she laughed. “It’s not as bad as it looks. It’s actually quite good. Would you like to try some?”

“Uh, no thanks,” I said.

She said, “You don’t know what you’re missing,” and popped another brown nugget into her mouth.

“She’s right. They actually are pretty good,” said a low voice behind me.

I turned around and saw a tall, thin man with short black hair and a black mustache. He had friendly brown eyes. “Hi, Augusten. Remember me? Bookman? God, the last time I saw you, you were like this tall.” He lowered his hand to waist height.

“Hi,” I said trying not to sound electrified with excitement. “I sort of remember you. A little. I think you came over to our house sometimes when I was a kid.”

“Yeah, that’s right. I visited your mom.”

“So,” I said, stuffing my hands in my pockets, trying to look casual.

“So Hope said you wanted to meet me. I’m flattered. I feel famous.” He smiled.

“Yeah, well. You know, now that I’m staying here all the time, I wanted to get to know everybody.”

His eyes flashed and his warm smile vanished. “You’re staying here? You have a room here?”

I remembered about the barn, how the doctor made him stay in a barn and not a room. I backtracked. “Well, not exactly. I mean, I’m hanging around here a lot. I don’t have a room or anything.”

He seemed relieved. “Oh,” he said. “Okay.”

Hope walked into the hallway and put her arm around Bookman. “Hey big brother,” she said. “I see you two found each other.”

“That we did,” Bookman said. “Not so tight, Hope, Jesus. I’m not a dog.”

“Oh, poor baby,” Hope said, releasing her arm. “I forget how fragile you are.”

“Is that Hope?” Agnes called out from the TV room. “Tell her she owes me four dollars.”

“I’m right here Agnes, you can tell me yourself.”

“Oh, uh, okay,” she stammered, “that was you. I thought I heard you. You owe me four dollars.”

Hope leaned her head into the room. “I know I do and I’ll get it to—holy cow, Agnes. Are you eating dog food?”

“Why does everybody make such a fuss? It’s just a little kibble.”

“
Oh, Mom,
” Hope said, grimacing. “That stuff’s not clean, it’s made for dogs.”

“It’s pretty good,” Bookman said, playfully licking his lips.

She spun around. “Don’t tell me you’re eating it, too.”

“Just a little. You should try it.”

“No way am I eating dog food.”

Agnes said, “Oh, you’re such a fussbudget. Always afraid to try something new. Ever since you were a little girl you’ve been afraid of new things.”

“I’m not afraid to try new things,” Hope said. “But I draw the line at dog food.”

“I don’t want to try it either,” I said.

Bookman placed his hand on my shoulder and it was like my entire body warmed five degrees, instantly. “Try a little.”

I had to now. “I’ll try it if Hope does.”

Hope looked at me and rolled her eyes. “Gee, thanks a lot. That means I’m the coward. Okay, fine. Gimme that bag.”

Agnes held the bag up and Hope and I reached in and removed one nugget each. Then we looked at each other and popped them into our mouths.

It was surprisingly tasty. Nutty, slightly sweet with a satisfying crunch. I could immediately see how the little pellets could become quite addictive. “They’re not awful,” I said.

“See?” Bookman said.

“I told you. What did you think? I wouldn’t eat them if they didn’t taste good,” Agnes said, bringing a whole handful to her mouth and tossing them back. She crunched loudly and turned her attention back to a soap opera.

“Well, I gotta go,” Hope said. “Dad needs me at the office. We’re behind on the insurance forms. See you guys later?”

“Yup. Catch you later,” Bookman said.

Hope opened the front door to leave. “Bye, Augusten. Have fun.”

“Okay, see ya.”

After she left, Bookman said, “So. Do you want to take a walk?”

We walked into the center of town, up to the Smith College campus, then beyond all the way to Cooley Dickinson Hospital. The whole way I was dying to tell him about me. I felt like we had so much in common—being gay, being stuck at this house, being without our own parents. And in a house full of girls, we were two guys. But still I couldn’t tell him. I told him everything else—about how my parents’ fights had gotten really bad, about their divorce, about how my mother had started to get a little weird, about how she was seeing Dr. Finch all the time now and I was basically living there because she couldn’t handle me.

“It’s tough to have a sick mom,” he said. “My mom couldn’t handle me either. Neither could my dad.”

“Yeah, mine too. He never wants to see me. And my mother, she’s just so caught up in her own stuff. I guess she’s been through some really bad things and she needs to focus on herself right now.”

“And where does that leave you?” he said.

“Yeah.”

“Yeah,” Neil said. “Exactly. Here at the crazy house of the even crazier Dr. Finch.”

“Do you think he’s crazy?”

“In a good way. I think he’s a genius. I know he saved my life.” And then out of the blue he said, “He was the first person I told I was gay.”

“Really?” I said. He’d finally said it. All this time I was beginning to wonder if Hope had been wrong. He seemed so normal, like a regular guy. He didn’t have an earring or talk with a lisp and judging by his brown shoes and pale blue polyester slacks, he certainly wasn’t gifted with color.

“Me too,” I said.

“What?” asked Bookman, pausing on the sidewalk.

“I’m gay.”

Somehow, this took him completely by surprise. He gasped, inhaling sharply and his eyes widened. “What? Are you serious?”

“Yeah,” I said, feeling embarrassed. “I thought you knew, I thought Hope told you.”

“Holy Mary mother of God,” he said. “So that’s what this was about.”

“What?”

“Nothing. So you’re gay?” he asked again.

“Yeah,” I said.

We continued walking but then he stopped again. “Are you sure you’re gay? I mean, how long have you felt like this?”

I told him all my life.

“That’s pretty sure.” He chuckled.

*   *   *

As we walked down Main Street past the closed stores, Neil said to me, “I just want you to know, I’m here for you whenever you need to talk. I mean, night or day. You can talk to me about anything, this or anything else.”

I glanced at him and thought he looked so handsome, bathed in the artificial yellow glow of the street lamp. “Thanks,” I said.

“And don’t ever worry,” he said firmly. “I will never take advantage of you.”

“Okay,” I said, reaching in my pocket for a Marlboro Light.

“You smoke?”

“Yeah,” I admitted. It was a habit I’d picked up from Natalie. At first, I was worried that Agnes or the doctor would be furious and not allow it. But they didn’t mind as long as “you don’t burn down the house.”

Neil pulled a lighter from his pocket and lit my cigarette.

“Thanks,” I said. Smoking had become my favorite thing in the world to do. It was like having instant comfort, no matter where or when. No wonder my parents smoked, I thought. The part of me that used to polish my jewelry for hours and comb my hair until my scalp was deeply scratched was now lighting cigarettes every other minute and then carefully stomping them out. It turned out I had always been a smoker. I just hadn’t had any cigarettes.

“It was great talking with you,” Bookman told me when we were back at the house.

“Thanks for everything,” I said.

“Thank
you
,” he said and smiled warmly, eyes moist.

He left, climbing into his wreck of a car and I sank into the TV-room sofa. I felt mildly intoxicated, like I’d just taken a big swallow of Vicks 44. Then I saw a stray Purina Dog Chow Agnes had dropped on the seat cushion. Without hesitation, I picked it up and popped it into my mouth. No longer would I be afraid of trying new things.