Running with Scissors (6 page)

“Here,” Vickie said, lifting up the machine.

I picked up the other end and we hoisted it out of the box.

“
What’s wrong with me?
” Natalie, cried louder.

We set the machine on the floor and Vickie kicked the box out of the way. It knocked against the TV. “You’re psychotic,” she said.

Natalie grinned. “Okay, I can be psychotic. I’m a paranoid schizophrenic.” She fluttered her eyelashes. “Just like Dottie Schmitt.

Vickie made a face. “Oh, God. She’s disgusting. Did you know she’s so filthy that Agnes has to peel her bra off for her?”

Natalie gasped. “Where did you hear that?”

“It’s true, Agnes told me herself.”

“Who’s Dottie?” I said.

“And then Agnes has to scrub under her tits with a sponge to get rid of all the scum.” Vickie shrieked, grossing herself out.

They laughed.

“Who is she?” I said again.

“She’s one of Dad’s crazy patients,” Natalie said. “You’ll meet her.”

I will?
I thought.
Why?

This is when Poo Bear ran into the room, naked and shrieking. Poo was about six years old, the son of Vickie and Natalie’s older sister Anne. His small penis jiggled and his laughing mouth was ringed with purple jam.

“Hey, Poo,” Vickie cooed at her little nephew.

“Poo Bear,” Natalie said, sitting up. “What’s a doin’, pooin’?”

He paused in front of the TV and slapped his arms against his side. “I’m a can opener,” he said.

I could smell his feet from across the room.

“You’re a can opener?” Natalie said tenderly. “That is soooooo cute.”

“What’s that?” he said, pointing to the machine.

Vickie said,“That’s Dad’s old shock therapy machine. We’re fooling around with it. Wanna play?”

He smiled shyly and grabbed his little penis with his hand. “I dunno.”

“C’mon, Poo. You’ll have fun. You won’t get hurt, I promise,” Natalie said.

“Yeah, you watch us first, then you can play. Okay? Just watch,” Vickie said.

Natalie lay back on the sofa and closed her eyes. “Ready,” she said.

Vickie then kneeled in front of the sofa. Gently, she picked up a wire and arranged it around Natalie’s head. She placed the end of the wire against Natalie’s ear. She tucked another wire under Natalie’s neck. Then she pretended to plug the machine in by stuffing the cord under the sofa. Next she placed her hand on the dial. “Nurse,” she called.

“Okay,” I said.

“Come here,”

I kneeled down next to her. “What should I do?”

“The patient may scream, so you’ll need to place the bite guard in her mouth.”

“Okay, where’s that?”

“Just use a pencil,” Natalie said, looking up.

“Shhhhh,” Vickie scolded. “You can’t talk.”

Natalie closed her eyes again and opened her mouth.

I reached over to the table beside the sofa and grabbed a pen. “Will this work?”

“Yeah,” Vickie said.

I placed it in Natalie’s mouth and she clamped down on it.

“Okay, Nurse. Are we ready?”

“Yes, Doctor,” I said.

Vickie turned the dial on the machine. “I’m now giving you one million volts.”

Natalie convulsed, her whole body trembling. She opened her eyes and rolled them back in her head. She screamed over the pen.

Vickie laughed. “That’s good, that’s good.” The wire under Natalie’s neck slipped out and Vickie tucked it back in. “Nurse, increase the voltage,” she said.

I reached over and turned the dial. “Okay, it’s all the way up,” I said.

Natalie shook violently.

“She’s repressing a memory,” Vickie said. “We need to go deep into her subconscious mind.”

Natalie screamed louder and the pen flew out. She was shaking with such force that I was worried she’d really hurt herself.

Poo Bear burst into tears and ran from the room.

Natalie stopped.

Vickie laughed.

Poo Bear disappeared down the hall, his cries of terror growing fainter as he ran deeper into the house.

“Woops,” Natalie said. She was sweating and red-faced.

“We better get him,” Vickie said.

They ran out of the room, chasing after Poo.

I glanced at the TV, a commercial for Herbal Essence. And then I ran after them.

Poo Bear was squatting beneath the grand piano in the living room. His eyes were squeezed closed. He was shitting.

I froze.

Vickie and Natalie sat on the sofa across from the piano. They sat side by side, hands in their laps, like they were watching him do scales.

“Oh,” I said. “Sorry.”

Poo Bear pinched a turd out on the bright blue wall-to-wall carpeting and Vickie and Natalie clapped.

“Way to go, Poo,” Vickie cheered.

Natalie giggled. She slapped her knees.

Poo Bear opened his eyes and looked at me. He grinned with his grape jelly mouth. “Poo can poo,” he said.

I looked at Vickie and Natalie. “Have you seen my mother?”

“She’s in the kitchen,” Natalie said. I started to leave, but she added warningly, “
With my dad
.”

“Well, I just have to ask her one thing, really quick.”

She watched as Poo brought his finger to his nose and sniffed.

I backed out of the room and walked down the hall. The old Victorian had many rooms and many hallways; two stairways and so many doors that it was easy to get lost. But the kitchen was easy—just straight back at the end of the house.

My mother was sitting at the kitchen table, which was piled high with dirty dishes caked with food. She was smoking a cigarette.

“Mom?”

She turned to me, opening her arms. “Augusten.”

I hugged her. I loved her smell, Chanel No. 5 and nicotine. “How much longer are we gonna stay? I wanna go home.”

She hugged me closer and stroked the back of my head with her hand.

I pulled away. “Are we gonna go soon?”

She picked her cigarette from the rim of a plate on the table and sucked the smoke into her lungs. When she spoke, her words came out smoking. “Dr. Finch is saving our lives, Augusten. It’s important that we be here now.”

In the distance, I heard Poo Bear laugh.

She took another drag from her cigarette, then plopped it into what was left of a glass of milk. “I know this is all new for you and it’s very confusing. But this is a safe place. This is where we need to be. Right here in the doctor’s own home, with his family.”

Her eyes looked different. Wider, somehow. Not her own. They scared me. So did the roaches scrambling across the table, over the dishes, up the arm of a spatula.

“Have you been playing with the doctor’s daughters? With Natalie and Vickie?”

“I guess.”

“And have you been having a good time?”

“No, I wanna leave.” The doctor’s house was not at all what I had expected. It was weird and awful and fascinating and confusing and I wanted to go home to the country and play with a tree.

A toilet flushed down the narrow hallway that led from the kitchen. There was a deep clearing of a throat, a rumble. Followed by the unlocking of a door.

“Augusten, Dr. Finch and I are talking now. You go back and play with the girls.”

My heart pounded. I was seized with panic. I desperately needed to check my hair in a mirror. “Please, can we go? I don’t want to be here anymore. It’s too weird here.”

I looked up and there he was. “Well, well, well,” he boomed, approaching me with his hand extended.

I grabbed it, wondering if he’d hidden something in it. A joy buzzer, maybe, or more balloons.

His eyes widened along with his smile. “What a firm handshake. That is an excellent handshake. A ten-plus on the Great Scale of Handshake Ratings.”

He was short, but seemed much larger. He occupied a lot of space in the room.

“How are you doing, young man?” He smacked me on the shoulder, like a father on TV; like Mike Brady or Ward Cleaver.

“Okay.” I could feel the bottoms of my feet sweat. I couldn’t tell
him
that his own freaky kids and his own filthy house were the source of my distress.

“Take a seat here,” he said, gesturing at a chair.

I moved the roasting pan to the table and sat. He took the chair between my mother and me. I looked back and forth between them and for awhile nobody said anything. My mother lit another cigarette and Dr. Finch scratched the back of his head.

“Your mother is in a state of crisis,” he said finally.

She blew a plume of smoke into the air. “That’s an understatement,” she said under her breath.

“Do you know what that means?” he asked me.

In the distance, somebody began to pound on the piano keys. “I don’t know,” I said.

“What that means is that your mother is in trouble with your father. Your father is very angry with your mother right now.” He elbowed a plate out of the way and placed his hands on the table, clasping his fingers. “Your father may want to hurt your mother.”

I swallowed.
Hurt her
?

“Your father is a very sick man, Augusten. And I believe he is homicidal. Do you know what homicidal means?”

I looked at my mother and she turned away. “It means he wants to kill her?”

“Yes. That’s what it means. Some people, when they get angry, become depressed. That’s what depression is, it’s anger turned inward. Other times, they project that anger outside of themselves. And that’s healthier for the person. But you have to be very careful dealing with somebody who is that angry.”

Freud pressed up against my leg, raising his tail. I leaned over and stroked his back. It was sticky. “Oh.”

“So your mother is not safe from your father right now. She needs to be protected. Do you understand?”

I was terrified but also excited. Dr. Finch left every single light in the house on, as opposed to my father who never let us turn any lights on, always saying something about the Middle East being the reason we had to live in the dark. “What do we do?”

“Well.” He leaned back in the chair, folding his arms behind his head. “I’m going to take your mother to a motel. And you’re going to stay here at my house.”

I’m what?

“There’s plenty of room here for you. You’ll be very safe.” He smiled warmly.

Again I looked at my mother, but she still wouldn’t look at me. She was focused on the table. I followed her line of vision and I think she was looking at this one spoon that had a reflection of the ceiling light in it. Almost like you could eat the light if you wanted to, like it was cereal. “I have to stay here?”

He rose from the table. “Deirdre, talk to your son. When you’re finished, I’ll be in the car.”

He patted me on the head firmly, then turned and left.

My mother mashed her cigarette out in the plate. “There’s not much room on this table, is there?” she said.

“What’s going on? Why is my father trying to kill us?”

My mother sighed. As she exhaled she seemed to shrink into the chair. Even her perfume seemed to fade. She looked at her hands, turning them over in front of her face like they were misplaced artifacts she had pulled from the earth. Then she looked at me. She leaned forward and whispered,“Without Dr. Finch, your father will kill us. Dr. Finch is the only person in the world who can save us.”

I glanced at the window, half expecting to see my father clutching a meat cleaver and half expecting to see an elf wearing a stocking cap with a bell on the end waving at me. “Why?”

She turned away. “He has a lot of anger at his mother and he’s projecting it all onto me. Years and years of rage that he’s denied.”

My father had always seemed cold to me. He wasn’t affectionate or loving. He never played with me or touched me on the head like Dr. Finch. Which is maybe why I flinched so much when anybody touched me. But I didn’t realize he was a monster. But maybe that made sense. Maybe that explained why he was so cold.

Then my mother reached out and took my hand. She held it tightly. “God is working through Dr. Finch. The doctor is very spiritually evolved. I believe we’ll be safe with him, and only him.”

How long do I have to stay here? One night? Two? Where will I practice my Barry Manilow lip-syncing?
“Can’t I come to the motel, too?” I loved motels, especially the little soap bars and the paper strip across the toilet bowl.

“No,” she said, quickly. “You stay here.”

“But why?”

“Because the doctor thinks that’s best.”

“
But why?
”

“Augusten, don’t argue with me now. You’ll stay here and be safe.”

I had the sensation of falling, even though I was sitting. I looked up at the clock on the wall, but it had no hands. Somebody had taken the clear plastic cover off the front and taken the hands away. Seeing this caused my eyes to itch, so I pulled at my eyelids.

“For how long? You have to tell me,” I pressed.

My mother stood, looping her bag over her shoulder. She clutched her cigarettes and lighter in the other hand. “Not long. Two days. Maybe a week.”

“A week?!” I said as loud as I could without screaming, even though I wanted to. “I can’t stay here in this house for a week.” I slammed my hand on the table and roaches scattered like a splash of water. “What about school?”

“You hardly go to school as it is,” she said flatly. “A week won’t make any difference.”

She was right about that. From kindergarten I’d been a very poor student, steering clear of the kids and clinging to the teachers, waiting to go home. The only friend I had was Ellen, who peed standing up like a boy, and I only liked her when it was the two of us alone. The rest of the kids hated me, calling me names like
freak
and
faggot.
So in truth, a week away from school wasn’t such a bad thing. Unless it meant staying here in this weird house. My heart started beating really fast as I tried to think of something to say to make my mother change her mind. But I felt too confused to think of anything.

She placed the back of her hand against my cheek. “I’ll visit you in your dreams. Did you know I can do that?”

“Do what?” I said, hating her.

“I can travel in my dreams. Once, I dreamt I went to Mexico. And when I woke up, there were pesos in my hand.”