Running with Scissors (25 page)

My mother roared with laughter and Dorothy sat on the floor next to her, stroking her leg. “Those are dried locust husks. My friend Sonja sent them to me from Texas. You don’t like them?”

Hope made a face. “They’re disgusting. They give me the creeps.”

My mother was fond of such things. She had a cow skull hanging in her bedroom and a rattlesnake skin stretched across the wall above the bookshelf in the dining room. She had bowls of seashells and driftwood and jars filled with bits of fur and feathers. She used many of these things in her writing workshops. “What memory does the bone bring?” she might direct. Or, “Hold the hair between your fingers and describe the sensation.”

Hope leaned forward to peer again into the basket. “I wouldn’t want something like that around the house, they look like roaches.”

“Yes, they certainly do,” my mother agreed with controlled poise.

Hope sat back on the sofa and wore a pleasant expression while Dorothy stayed by my mother’s side on the floor, like a royal subject. My mother stared directly ahead at me.

I didn’t like her eyes at all. They were fierce. I didn’t like that they were trained on me.

Hope said, “Deirdre, are you feeling okay?”

My mother’s head snapped toward Hope. “Of course. How are you, Hope?”

I sat there thinking about all the times I had seen this very show before. For years, since I was nine or ten, my mother had gone mad in the fall. I would start to see that look in her eyes, smell that odd aroma wafting off her skin. And I would know. I would always know before anyone else. I had been born with some kind of sonar that detected mental illness.

The plate nearly hit me in the forehead. Because I ducked to reach my matches, it smashed on the wall behind me instead.

Hope shrieked and leapt from the sofa.

My mother screamed at me, “You are the goddamn Devil,” and she hurled the cup that matched the saucer.

I ducked again and jumped up from the couch. “What the fuck is wrong with you?” I screamed. I was furious and terrified. She was an animal.

My mother rose from her chair, eyes wild. “I didn’t give birth to you,” she growled. “You are a Nazi.”

I ran up the stairs to the bedroom and Hope followed behind me, panting. “Dad couldn’t come. He said for me to check her out and see how she is. Obviously, she’s nuts.”

“We have to do something,” I said.

“We need to—” Hope froze, hearing my mother on the stairs.

“Shit,” I said.

“Goddamn you both to hell,” she screamed.

“Deirdre, calm down,” Dorothy said after her. “Take it easy.”

This got her. My mother stopped and turned around to go back into the living room. “Dorothy, don’t you dare tell me what to do. Not ever. Do you understand me? I will not be stifled by you in my own home.”

Hope picked up the phone next to the bed and punched 9-1-1. “We need help,” she said. “I’m a psychiatrist’s daughter and we have a psychiatric emergency.”

I loved this side of Hope. The side that could, if necessary, give you an intramuscular injection or restart your heart.

Within minutes, police officers were at the door. Hope and I were crouched in my mother’s bedroom looking out the window, and when they arrived, we went downstairs.

My mother was not pleased by the uninvited guests.

“What the hell are you doing here?” she demanded.

Dorothy cried, “Hey, let go of her.”

This was in response to one of the officers restraining my mother when she tried to bite him.

Hope said, “This is Deirdre. She’s a patient of my father and she’s having a psychotic episode.” I knew from reading crime novels that Hope was trying to humanize my mother. The subtext was,
This could be your mother, officer. So treat her with respect
.

It didn’t matter to the cops. What mattered was that the handcuffs were securely fastened and that she didn’t bite them as they dragged her from the house into the waiting cruiser. My mother’s heels bounced off the steps as they pulled her and I felt a horrific sadness watching her stripped of her dignity and her will. I also thought,
Whatever happened to Christina Crawford? I wonder if she’s okay
.

Inside, Dorothy sobbed on the couch and Hope sat down to console her.

I went out the back door into the yard. The crystal stemware was shattered, and glittered in the grass. Light from the kitchen glinted off the sterling forks, knives and spoons that were scattered everywhere. It gave the yard the magical look of a set. And I would not have been at all surprised to see Marie Osmond rise from the ground in a white sequined dress, singing “Paper Roses.”

YOU ARE NOTHING BUT A SEX OBJECT

T

HERE WAS A NOTE ON THE BACK OF THE
N
ESTLE
’
S
C
RUNCH
bar wrapper. It read:
You are nothing but a sex object.
I bought the candy bar from the vending machine downstairs next to the ice. I bought it for Bookman. He ate half, slipped me the rest and then scrawled the note, passing it to me while my mother lay on the bed in front of us, unconscious in her curly black poodle sweater and covered in Johnson’s baby powder.

I was nearly fifteen, Bookman was thirty-four and we were in the midst of our tumultuous love affair.

We were staying at the Treadway Inn motorlodge in Newport, Rhode Island. Me, Bookman, Hope, Dorothy, and the doctor.

And, of course, my mother.

She was the reason we were all there. She’d gone crazy again. And this time it was really bad.

Instead of committing her to the Brattleboro retreat, Dr. Finch decided to take her to a motel in Newport, where he could treat her around the clock himself. Her therapy involved scrawling the numeral 5 with her lipstick on every smooth surface, raging at everyone who came within sight, and recycling the motel furnishings into kindling. She even scraped some of the popcorn-textured ceiling down with her stubby fingernails and ate it.

We took turns watching her. Hope and the doctor had already spent hours with her and they were asleep in one of the three rooms the doctor had rented. Neil and I were on guard.

Because of the medication the doctor had given her, my mother slept soundly. I was grateful for this because her hysterics terrified me. I’d been awake for three days straight. I just wanted to go to sleep, but I knew that she could hurt herself if we didn’t watch her. So we watched her. And Bookman passed me the note.

I stuck my tongue out at him after I read it.

He smiled. Then he scribbled another note on the rest of the wrapper.
You have the most beautiful eyes I’ve ever seen.

I had my mother’s eyes. Everybody always told me this. And it scared me that I had her eyes because I worried that it meant I had whatever else she had back there that made her believe she could not only speak to the dead, but smoke cigarettes in the bathroom with them.

As I sat there, I thought about what would have happened if I hadn’t decided to go to the mental hospital; if I had decided to just go to school instead. I’d be expected in school the next day. How would that have happened? Even if I had wanted to be in school, there just wasn’t room for it in my world. I wondered what the Cosby bitch would do in my situation, if it were her father on this bed in a poodle sweater. “
No, Daddy, Fat Albert isn’t hiding in the corner with an axe.
You’re
Fat Albert, don’t you understand
?”

I’d tried calling my father collect to tell him what had happened to my mother. I was hoping that maybe he would feel bad and come get me, take me somewhere. On a trip, maybe. But, as usual, he refused to accept the charges. I decided that when we returned, I would send him a dildo in the mail, C.O.D. “What’s this?” he would say in front of the mailman. And then he’d open the box. I would make it a nineinch black dildo.

I sat on the stiff vinyl chair, Bookman sat on the other and I wondered how anything would ever be normal again. What if my mother didn’t get better? What if she couldn’t be pulled back from wherever she was? And more importantly, what would the cheap motel soap do to my hair?

The first time my mother was hospitalized, I was eight. She was gone so long, I forgot what her face looked like. I worried she would never return from the hospital and when she did, it was like not all of her came back. She returned flat, sad. As though an important part of her personality had been surgically removed.

Since she started seeing Finch, she’d gone crazy every fall. It was like her brain went on a Winter Clearance Sale. Sometimes the doctor would take her to a motel room where they would stay for four or five days. They would “work through” the psychotic episode together. Other times, she would be hospitalized. That would usually last for two weeks. It made me sad to visit her in the hospital. Not because she didn’t fit in there with the crazy people, but because she did.

Each time my mother went psychotic, I hoped it would be the last time. Afterward, she would tell me, “I think that was the final episode. I think I had a breakthrough.” And I would believe—for a few months—that it was true. That she was back to stay. Maybe it was like having a rock star mother who was always on the road. Were there Benatar children? Did they sit around and wonder if their mom’s
Hell Is for Children
tour was going to be her
last
tour?

Eventually, I dozed off. And Bookman must have carried me, because when I woke up, I was in bed, under the sheets. I was wearing my shirt, but my pants had been stripped off.

“You feeling better?” he asked, sitting on the other bed smoking a cigarette.

I felt heavy, like I had slept for months. “I don’t know. How long was I asleep?”

“An hour maybe,” he said.

“Oh. How’s my mother?”

“Still asleep.”

I wanted to go back to sleep. But I couldn’t stop replaying the conversation I had with her before she went to bed.

“Are you alright?” she asked me.

“Yes.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I am.”

“I don’t think you’re alright.”

It went on for twenty minutes. If she’d just asked once, it might have made me feel better, like she was still my mother and that she cared. But because she was like a broken record, because she couldn’t stop asking, it made me feel she was truly insane.

Finch said the reason my mother went psychotic was because she was in love with him and afraid to admit it. He said her repressed emotions for him made her sick.

“I need to talk to you,” Neil said.

I realized I was staring blindly at the floor and looked up at him. “Yeah?”

“I’m going through my own crisis here,” he said. “Over you.”

I didn’t want to hear anything he said. I wanted him to go away; to go back to Rhode Island and wait for me. “What do you mean?”

“I mean that my feelings for you are so huge, I don’t think I can contain them. Sometimes I want to hold you so tight it scares me. Like I want to hold you until the life is gone, so you can’t ever vanish.”

This sounded alarmingly like something you’d hear on an episode of
Charlie’s Angels
; a final episode where the Angels are taken to a warehouse and doused with gasoline, firecrackers stuffed in their pockets. “You’re not going crazy too, are you?” I said. Was everybody going to go insane now? Was it contagious, like the flu?

“I may very well be going insane,” Bookman said. He was trembling. His lit cigarette making a zigzag of light in the darkened room.

“Can we talk about this later? I just can’t deal with anything else right now.”

“But I can’t deal with my emotions, with what you’ve done to me. You have a power over me.”

I hated it when he talked about the power I had over him. He was like one of those people who sit in the hallway and bang their head against the wall over and over. He just wouldn’t stop. “Later,” I snapped.

He reclined on the bed, staring straight ahead.

I’d pissed him off. I went over to him, put my arms around him. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I just feel like I’m gonna explode.”

“Don’t you see,” he said, “that’s exactly how I feel.”

For two days my mother was like a grizzly bear. In fact, she seemed to increase in mass and sprout fur. Her body gave off a repulsive odor that was both sweet and metallic. And no matter how much medication the doctor gave her, she didn’t seem to be getting any better. I began wishing she would throw herself out the window so that life could go back to normal. Nothing, it seemed, would fix her.

Until Winnie Pye came along.

Winnie was a sassy waitress at a coffee shop down the street. My mother had insisted that she wanted a grilled cheese and tomato sandwich and when the doctor said he’d send Hope or me off to get it, she screamed, “I will go and get my own goddamned sandwich.” Finch had told her she wasn’t well enough to be out in public. And she’d taken his Brill Cream and sprayed him in the face with it. “If I’m well enough to aim, I’m well enough to get my own damn sandwich.”

So Finch had gone with her to the little diner on the corner. Like a bodyguard, I followed, lagging slightly behind.

Winnie had been their waitress.

She had tall, teased blonde hair and tan, leathery skin with tiny wrinkles surrounding her mouth. Bright pink lipstick bled into the corners. Her eyelids were painted sky blue and she wore gold heart earrings that were the size of onion rings.

My mother loved her instantly.

“I’m being held hostage by this crazy man,” my wild-eyed mother said when they sat at the counter.

“Are you now, honey. You two lovebirds having a little fun with the baby powder?” she teased with a wink.

“You don’t understand.” My mother leaned in. “
He’s
the crazy one, not me.”

“Hey, sugar. I don’t make no judgments about no one. To each his own. Now, what can I getcha?” She licked the tip of her pencil and poised it over her order pad.

My mother ordered her sandwich, the doctor ordered a slice of Boston cream pie.