Running With Scissors

by Augusten Burroughs

  “You’re kidding. You fucked the lumberjack?”

  “It gets worse.”

  “Oh, really? How does it get worse than fucking him?”

  “Fucking him for cash.” She held up two crisp twentydollar bills. “Now I can add prostitute to my list of life’s accomplishments.”

  “So now what? Are you two like, dating?”

  “No,” she said. “I had Dad kick him out of the house. He’ll be gone by the time we get back. But to make sure, we should search everywhere, even the crawl space under the barn. I don’t trust that lunatic one bit.”

  We did search the house when we got back and we didn’t find him anywhere. As suddenly as he appeared in my life, he was gone. I chalked him up to a virus my mother had caught at the hospital and then brought back and spread.

  A week later, when my mother’s medication had finally reached its optimum level in her bloodstream and she was back to normal, she had little memory of the father she had brought home for me.

  “I’d rather not talk about that right now. This whole episode has been very intense for me and I don’t have the energy to process everything right away.” She was drained of energy, pale and lifeless. “But I do believe that may have been my last psychotic episode. I think I finally broke through to my creative unconscious.”

  I marveled at my mother’s view of her mental illness. To her, going psychotic was like going to an artist’s retreat.

  When pressed for an explanation of their insane behavior, Dorothy would only say, “It was between your mother and me.”

  Actually, it wasn’t. Because long after Cesar Mendoza left, his yeast infection stayed behind.

  “Oh, I’ve got this awful itch,” my mother announced one evening.

  “Me too. And a cottage-cheese discharge,” said Dorothy.

  Natalie summed it up best. “Jesus Christ. My cunt looks like it’s been brushing its teeth. It’s just foaming at the mouth.”

  INQUIRE WITHIN

  T

  HE MOOD IN THE PINK HOUSE HAD TURNED TO CHARCOAL. A general sense of impending doom hung over our heads like one of Agnes’s bad hats. Several of Dr. Finch’s patients had “abandoned” treatment, meaning fewer dollars. The IRS was becoming more threatening in their move to claim the house as payment for a ten-year-old tax bill. And Finch himself was entering one of his formidable depressions.

  The stress had caused the psoriasis on Hope’s scalp to produce extraordinary quantities of snowy flakes. For hours, she would sit on the couch in the TV room or on her chair next to the stove and read The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson while she scratched slowly and steadily. It was as if she entered some sort of trance, her fingers only leaving her head to briefly turn the page. The flakes would collect on her shoulders and scatter down the front and back of her shirt. This gave her the appearance of an actress taking a break from shooting on the set of a blizzard.

  “That is so disgusting,” Natalie commented one afternoon as she reached into the refrigerator.

  Hope ignored her.

  “I said, you are disgusting sitting there like that and scratching. Christ, Hope. Have you looked at yourself in the mirror?” Natalie said, waving the end of a ham in the air.

  Hope ignored her. She turned the page.

  Natalie bit into the ham end. She walked over to the stove where Hope was sitting. “Look at you,” she said. “You’re like an animal, tearing your flesh off.”

  Hope ignored her.

  Natalie glanced over at me and rolled her eyes in disgust. I had come into the kitchen to get some water and was leaning against the sink.

  “Hope the dope,” Natalie said, taking a final bite from the ham. She dropped the rest of it on Hope’s lap. It smacked in the center of her book.

  “Goddamn it, you bitch,” Hope exploded. She picked up the ham end and threw it across the room toward the phone on the wall, just missing. It landed in the hall below the coats.

  Natalie laughed. “Oooh, prissy Miss Hope has a temper,” she taunted. “Temper, temper, temper.”

  Hope took a deep breath, let it out, and blotted the book using the hem of her shirt. She began to hum “The Impossible Dream.”

  “That’s right, you just ignore me,” Natalie said. Then she reached forward and began scratching Hope’s head vigorously with both hands. A flurry of dried white skin cells rose like dust from Hope’s head.

  “Mmmmmmm” Hope moaned, felinelike. “That feels good.”

  Natalie stopped instantly. “You’re pitiful.” She stomped away and went back to the refrigerator. Opening the crisper drawer, she removed a slice of American cheese. It had been left unwrapped and even from across the room, I could see the smooth, plasticlike texture of the firm slice. Natalie bit into it, made a face and spit into her hand. “God, there’s nothing to eat in this house.”

  “Agnes went shopping,” I said.

  “When?” Natalie asked.

  “I don’t know, maybe an hour ago. A few hours ago. I lost track.”

  Natalie walked over to the trash can near the sink where I was leaning. She dropped the cheese into the can and then did a double-take at my head. “What did you do to your hair?”

  I shrugged. “It’s semipermanent. It’ll come out after ten washings.” Out of boredom, I’d dyed it brown with Just For Men. I thought it made me look like a dashing young news anchor.

  “It looks like a wig,” Natalie said.

  “It does sort of look fake,” I agreed, setting my glass in the sink.

  Hope glanced up from her book. “I think it looks good,” she said.

  “Nobody asked you, snowgirl.”

  “Fuck you,” Hope said.

  “Just try it,” said Natalie, “and I’ll stick a meat cleaver up your cunt.”

  Hope slammed her book shut. “Natalie, you are so foulmouthed. What’s the matter with you, hm? All day long you whine about wanting to go to Smith and you can’t say ten words without using the F-word.”

  “That’s right, Hope. I’m just a foulmouthed whore. I’m your little slut sister.”

  “That’s enough,” Hope said.

  “Go fuck yourself,” Natalie gave her the finger. Then she turned to me. “Let’s go to McDonald’s. Let’s get some McNuggets.”

  “Oh, bring me some?” Hope said sweetly.

  Natalie snickered darkly. “We’ll bring you a dead squirrel if we happen to see one on the side of the road.”

  “I don’t even like the McNuggets,” Natalie said. “I just get ’em for the hot mustard sauce.” She licked her fingers, making a sucking noise.

  We were sitting at a red plastic table in McDonalds. We’d had to scrounge around in the pockets of our dirty clothes and in the sofa just to get the measly four dollars we needed to even come here. How much lower would we sink?

  “You know what we need? We need to get jobs, get the fuck out of that crazy house,” Natalie said, dipping a McNugget into her sauce.

  “Yeah, right. Jobs doing what? Our only skills are oral sex and restraining agitated psychotics.”

  She laughed. “How pathetic and true. But seriously, we should walk around today and look for work. I’m just talking about being a clerk or something. I mean how hard is it to run a cash register?”

  Considering I couldn’t even do long division, the idea of running a cash register made me as anxious as running a nuclear reactor. “I don’t know,” I said. “It seems like you have to have experience for everything.”

  “Well,” she said, glancing around the restaurant, “we could always start here.”

  “At McDonald’s?” I dipped into the red barbecue sauce.

  “Yeah. I mean, we could work here for a couple months, get some experience and then get a really good job at like Beyond Words bookstore or Country Comfort or something.”

  “I guess,” I said.

  “C’mon, hurry up and finish. We’ll get a couple applications from the manager. And after we fill them out, we’ll walk around town and look for Help Wanted signs
.”

  I shrugged. Why not? At least it was something to do. “Okay.”

  We emptied our trays into the trash and asked the counter girl for a couple of applications. After filling them out we left. As we walked, Natalie kept scratching her butt.

  “Stop doing that. It makes you look Down’s syndrome-ish.”

  “I can’t help it,” she said.

  “Well, try.”

  We walked into the center of town to the courthouse and sat down on the grass in front of the water fountain. Here we had an excellent view of Main Street and all the shops. Natalie pulled a joint out of her shirt pocket. “We should get a buzz first,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I agreed.

  We passed the joint back and forth. “Do you feel stoned yet?” she asked.

  I exhaled. “Yeah.”

  “This is good stuff. Sense.”

  “It’s good,” I said. It was starting already. Whereas pot either made Natalie contemplative or silly, for me it provided a kaleidoscopic view of everything that was wrong with me. I could already feel it opening all the windows in my head, giving me a panoramic view of my flaws.

  “I have such skinny legs,” I said, looking at them stretched out in front of me. “They’re basically deformed.”

  Natalie stretched her own legs out and hiked up her skirt. “At least you’re not fat like me.” She pinched her flesh and shook. “See? Exactly like Jell-O. It’s nauseating. And you know what’s really depressing? It just makes me want to eat.”

  “When I get depressed, I don’t want to eat at all.” When I got depressed, all I wanted to do was sleep. Which is basically what I did for fourteen hours a day.

  Natalie sighed. “Do you think I’ll ever get into Smith? Or am I too fucked up?”

  “I think you can still be fucked up and get into Smith. I mean, think of all the privileged girls that must be suicidal when they first get there. You know, from living this really sheltered, traditional life. All the secret shit that goes on in families. I don’t know what I mean. But you know what I mean?”

  “Yeah,” she said vaguely. “I guess. It’s just that sometimes, I worry I won’t ever be undepressed.”

  I had the same worry that we wouldn’t later be able to undo whatever it was we were doing to ourselves. “We should go. Start looking for work.”

  Natalie tucked the roach back into her pocket and we stood, stretching. Now all I wanted to do was sleep. The pot had made me depressed about my life. But Natalie was right, we needed jobs.

  “Look,” Natalie said as we crossed the street. “Sweeties needs help.” She pointed to the sign in the window of the candy store.

  We stepped inside and asked the guy behind the counter for two applications. He looked us up and down before saying, “Sorry, I should have taken that sign out of the window. We filled that position yesterday.”

  Natalie said, “Sure. No problem.”

  We walked up Main Street toward Smith, checking the windows for Help Wanted signs. We filled out applications at Woolworth’s, Harlow Luggage and The Academy of Music, a grand old movie theater. Then we started hitting the stores without Help Wanted signs, asking if we could fill out applications in case something came up. After an hour and a half, we’d filled out nine applications each.

  “Well, that’s enough for one day. Who knows? Maybe something will come up,” Natalie said with forced optimism.

  “Yeah,” I said brightly. Although what I felt was that nobody would hire us, we didn’t have a chance. And not just because we didn’t have any experience. But because we seemed somehow off. Like Finches.

  “Let’s go to Smith,” Natalie said. “We could use a little Smith right now.”

  Smith College was easily the most beautiful campus in America. I knew this from my extensive television viewing. Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, Berkeley, Northwestern, DePaul. They had all been featured in one made-for-TV movie or another. I seemed to remember Lynn Redgrave in a wrap dress running from a stalker on the grounds of Mt. Holyoke. But I could have this confused with Ali McGraw weeping at Harvard.

  The Smith campus consisted of a hundred and fifty acres of brick and ivy and rolling green hills, dressed for the occasion with hardwood trees and thoughtfully placed benches. There was even a tree swing that overlooked Paradise Pond and the expansive soccer field that lay beyond. Merely being in this glorious environment soothed any personal problems one might be struggling with. I found it more effective than Ativan though not as soothing as Valium.

  Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was filmed in a small white house on campus, just down from the boathouse next to the waterfall. I had seen that movie at the Amherst Cinema and loved it completely because Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton reminded me so much of my parents. It was the closest thing I had to a home movie.

  “Listen to the roar,” Natalie said as we stood next to the falls.

  It reminded me of the sound New York City makes. When I was small my mother had taken me with her to Manhattan a few times to see the museums. And what I loved most about that city was the sound it made.

  “I wish I could just vanish into that sound,” Natalie said, leaning over the railing.

  And then I had an idea. “We could.”

  “Could what?”

  “We could vanish into it. We could walk under it, across. See that ledge?” I pointed to a ledge just behind the curtain of falling water. It ran the entire length of the waterfall and was easily wide enough to walk on. If we were careful.

  Natalie looked at me with her mouth open in disbelief. “You’ve got to be kidding, right?”

  “Well, I don’t know. We’re bored and it’s something to do. At least it’s different.”

  “True,” she said.

  And this is how we found ourselves hand-in-hand, crossing under the waterfall at Smith College at six in the evening. My hypothesis that we would remain dry due to the fact that the ledge was behind the water proved to be wrong. The water was astonishingly powerful and cold. But Natalie’s hand in mine was still the most powerful thing I felt with my body. If we fell, we would fall together.

  The sound was deafening. Looking at an ordinary glass of water, you’d never even imagine that water was capable of making so much noise, no matter how much of it there was. The sound filled my entire body, not just my ears. I could feel my cells vibrating with it.

  Natalie screamed the whole way across. Primal, guttural screams and hysterical laughter. And I could barely hear her.

  When we got to the other side, we collapsed on the soccer field, completely exhausted and drenched.

  “Oh my God,” she said.

  I lay back with my arms stretched out and stared at the sky.

  I had never felt so free in my entire life.

  We made a point to not take the side streets on the walk home. We strolled through the center of town, stopping in any store that was open. We even walked into stores where just an hour ago we had filled out job applications.

  “A brownie and a Diet Pepsi,” Natalie told the counter girl at Woolworth’s. Her hair was still plastered to the sides of her face, dripping down her back.

  My hair, because of the heavy chemical processing it had endured, was completely dry.

  We enjoyed the stares we received on the streets of Northampton. We liked to imagine what the young Jennifers and Mehgans might think when they saw us. “Oh my Gahd, mother. You cannot imagine the creatures I saw in town tonight while I was at the store for a watch battery. They were positively ghastly,” they might say, protracted jaws pressed against the dormitory phone.

  When we finally made it back to Sixty-seven, Dr. F was on the sofa snoring as usual and Agnes was in the chair next to him stitching the toe of one of his fifteen-year-old socks. She glanced up when she saw us, then looked back down at her sewing. Then looked back up. “Good Lord, what happened to you two?”

  “We walked under the waterfall at Smith,” Natalie said casually, as if we’d gone to the store for milk.
/>   “That’s insane,” she laughed.

  We dripped our way down the hall and into the kitchen. Hope was jealous. “Aw, you guys,” she whined. “You never do anything fun like that with me.”

  “You wouldn’t have done it anyway,” Natalie said.

  Hope closed her bible indignantly. “Yes I would.”

  “What is this?” Natalie frowned, lifting the lid off a boiling pot on the stove.

  “That’s my special soup.”

  I walked over and peered into Hope’s cauldron. I thought I caught a quick glimpse of an unfamiliar-shaped bone and backed away.

  “God, it smells awful. What did you put in it?” Natalie said.

  Hope smiled secretively and rolled her eyes up toward the ceiling. “Things,” she said.

  “What things?” I asked.

  She made the gesture of buttoning her lip and tossing aside the key. She shrugged her shoulders.

  “Ick. Well, I’m not having any of it,” Natalie said.

  “That’s too bad for you then,” she said. “You won’t get to appreciate my secret ingredient.”

  Natalie slid her eyes toward Hope. “What secret ingredient?” She fanned her shirt out from her skin to shake off some of the water.

  “Well, I went outside and dug Freud up. So she’s in there.”

  Natalie shrieked and recoiled instantly from the stove. She slapped her hands across her legs, her arms and her chest as if trying to brush away a swarm of locusts. “Oh my God, you fucking lunatic, I knew you were fucking insane,” she screamed.

  Hope smiled triumphantly. “I’m only kidding, jerks! Ha, ha, got you back.”

  When Natalie regained her composure and stopped laughing, she said, “Got me back for what?”

  “I got you back for not getting me anything at McDonald’s when you guys went there today.”

  “I’m sorry about that,” Natalie said. “We really should have brought you back something.”

  “Yeah, Hope. I’m sorry too.”

  “That’s okay,” Hope said. “At least we all got some anger out.” She smiled warmly at both of us and extended her arms. “Group hug.”