Running with Scissors (18 page)

TOLET BOWL READINGS

M

AYBE IT WAS A
P
ATTY
H
EARST THING
. S
TOCKHOLM SYN
drome or whatever it’s called when you’re being held against your will but then you become sucked in and fall in love. Or if not exactly love, you fall into something you can’t see out of.
I can’t shoot a machine gun
becomes,
Hey, this hardly has any kick-back!

Maybe this explains why it didn’t horrify me at the time. Why I just held my Pat Benatar T-shirt up to my nose to block out the smell and stared with mild curiosity at the contents of the toilet bowl.

Hope was so moved, she was on the verge of tears. “Oh my God, this is incredible,” she whispered through her clasped fingers.

Natalie stood back against the wall, arms folded across her chest. She wanted to go to Smith College in two years and this was just not something a Smith girl should be exposed to.

“See?” Finch bellowed, pointing into the bowl at his bowel movement. “Look at the size of that coil!”

Hope leaned in closer, as if inspecting an engagement ring in a jewelry display case.

I peered over Hope’s shoulder.

Agnes came shuffling down the hallway. “What’s all the fuss about? Why are you all crowded into the bathroom?” She shouldered her way into the room and looked at all of us looking into the toilet bowl. Her mouth fell open. “What is this?”

Finch’s face reddened as his excitement grew. “See? See the way the tip of the coil breaks up out of the surface of the water? Holy Father!”

“Yeah, Dad. I see it. It’s pointing straight up out of the bowl,” Hope said, ever the good daughter.

“Exactly,” Finch boomed. “Exactly. The tip is pointing up.” He stood up straight. “Do you know what this means?”

Agnes went to his side and pulled at his arm. “Doctor, please,” she said. “Please calm down.”

“Agnes, go get a spatula,” he ordered.

“Doctor, please,” Agnes said, pulling him harder.

He jerked his arm away and gave her a shove out of the room. “A spatula, Agnes!” he screamed.

She scurried out of the room like Edith Bunker.

“What does it mean, Dad?” Hope asked.

Natalie and I looked at each other, but then looked away because we knew we’d crack up and Finch would yell at us.

“It means our financial situation is turning around, that’s what it means. It means things are looking up. The shit is pointing out of the pot and up toward heaven, to God.”

As if she’d just won the Publisher’s Clearinghouse Sweepstakes, Hope screamed. She screamed and clapped and kissed her father’s cheek.

“There, there, Hope,” Finch said. “That’s my girl.” He looked at me and Natalie. “Can you see how important this is? God has a tremendous sense of humor. He is the funniest man in the universe. And this is His way of saying that things are going to turn around for us now.”

I was mortified but fascinated. Natalie hid her face in her hands and moaned.

When Agnes returned with a spatula, Finch snatched it from her hands before she could even say a word. He immediately handed it to Hope. “I want you to carefully remove this from the water and take it outside to dry. Put it in the sun on the picnic table.”

Hope took the spatula without hesitation.

“Okay, I’m outta here,” Natalie said.

“No wait,” I said, grabbing her arm. “Let’s watch.”

“I am not gonna watch my sister scoop my dad’s shit out of the toilet so she can put it outside to dry,” she said, laughing.

Finch roared with glee. “That’s exactly why Hope is my
best
daughter.”

“See, Natalie?” Hope teased. She stuck out her tongue.

“Good for you, Hope. You’re Dad’s favorite. Scoop away.”

I watched as Hope carefully hoisted the coiled turd out of the toilet and brought it up out of the bowl, dripping. Sitting on the spatula like that, it looked not unlike various food items cooked in the house. I also wondered if maybe it was true. If God really was a comedian and this was his way of saying things would soon improve. The thought was extremely comforting. Maybe I’d be able to attend beauty school after all.

Hope walked out of the bathroom and down the hall, careful of her precious cargo. Zoo had heard the commotion and was standing in the hallway, wagging her tail. She licked up the drops of water as they fell onto the floor. “Natalie or Augusten, one of you get the door,” Hope shouted as she made the turn past the jackets and into the kitchen. “Now!”

I ran ahead and got the door for her.

“Thanks.”

Natalie and I stood in the doorway watching her pad across the lawn with the spatula and then gently ease the turd onto the weathered picnic table.

“My family is so fucking insane,” Natalie said. “How will I ever get into Smith?”

“You will,” I said, though I didn’t know how. Not without changing her last name and undergoing a complete brainwashing.

Natalie turned to me. “At least you understand.”

“Can you imagine if the neighbors knew what went on in this house?” I said.

She laughed darkly. “Oh my God, they’d throw my father in an insane asylum and burn the house to the ground. It would be exactly like
Frankenstein
.”

I looked at all the houses on the block, the other old Victorians. Only they had lace curtains in the windows, manicured bushes out front, actual flowers in bloom. We only had plastic tulips stuck into the dirt, blossom-first, and there wasn’t a curtain or shade in the place. It wasn’t hard to imagine that one of the neighbors—a Smith Admissions Coordinator perhaps—was peering out her curtain at this exact moment.

Natalie absently fingered a long strand of her hair.

I couldn’t help but think it would look so much better platinum. “We should bleach you,” I said.

“Huh?”

“It’d be fun. It would look really good. Bring out your eyes.”

She shrugged. “Maybe later.”

Outside, Hope gave the turd a nudge with the spatula, making sure the coil was tight.

Agnes began mindlessly sweeping the carpet in the living room. This was always her first response to stress. It was not uncommon to be awakened in the middle of the night to the fshhh, fshhh, fshhh sound of Agnes sweeping the hallway runner, the living room rug or the walls themselves. The sweeping had the effect of spreading the animal hairs out thinner and moving crumbs and toenail clippings into the corners.

“Knock it off, Agnes,” Natalie shouted.

“You mind your own beeswax,” Agnes shouted back. As she continued to sweep, she leaned heavily on the broom. Without it, I doubted she could remain standing. She would just sag onto the floor and stay there like a load of laundry.

Finch came into the room, drying his hands on his shirt-tails. He peered outside. “Excellent,” he commented. Then he shouted to Hope. “Good work.”

Hope turned back, beaming.

Finch said, “You two just wait. Things are really gonna turn around for us now. It’s a sign from God.”

“Can we have twenty bucks?” Natalie asked, hand outstretched.

Finch reached into his back pocket for his wallet. “I only have ten.”

Natalie took that and pulled me by the arm. “Let’s go for a walk.”

The first sign that things were, in fact, turning around came in the form of a frozen Butterball turkey. Hope won it from a radio station by being the first caller to correctly identify a Pat Boone song. It didn’t fit in the freezer, so she placed it in the bathtub to thaw. But there were only two bathrooms in the house and Hope had placed the turkey in the downstairs bathroom—the one with the shower. So instead of removing the poultry to take a shower, we all just showered with it at our feet.

When Finch received a windfall in the amount of one thousand dollars from the insurance company, he took this as a definite sign that the turd had, in fact, been a direct piece of communication from The Heavenly Father.

As a result, he scrutinized each of his bowel movements. And, because God could just as easily speak through any one of us, insisted on seeing ours before we flushed.

“No fucking way,” Natalie snapped, as she flushed the toilet, despite her father’s incessant pounding on the bathroom door.

“Okay, Dad,” called Hope, as she sprayed Glade in the air.

After inspecting a number of Hope’s turds and one of his wife’s (which he deemed inferior), he decided that only his turds were acting as messengers from heaven. So each morning, he called Hope into the bathroom to remove the waste and set it outside on the picnic table with the others.

Together, he believed, the bowel movements would tell a more complete picture of our future.

Would I get into beauty school? The answer was many small, broken stools. “Chop, chop, chop, like scissors. I’d say that’s a yes,” the doctor said with a smile.

Would the IRS seize the house? “Diarrhea means they’ll mess the records up. The house is ours!”

What about Hope; would she ever get married? “See all that corn? Hope’s going to marry a farmer.”

The doctor recorded these events on paper. Complete with illustrations of each turd, along with an accompanying interpretation. This essay went into the monthly newsletter, which he mailed to all his patients.

For weeks that summer, it seemed nothing could be done; no action taken, no decision made, unless the contents of the doctor’s lower colon agreed.

“I certainly wouldn’t get my hopes up about taking some job outside the house,” the doctor told Agnes. “It’s just not in the cards, so to speak,” he said, pointing into the toilet.

The mood changed dramatically, however, when the doctor became constipated. “I haven’t had a bowel movement for a day and a half,” he said ominously from his seat in front of the television. “And I’m not sure what that means.”

The constipation sent Hope straight to her room where she performed a barrage of bible-dips:
Will dad have a B.M.? Will the IRS take the house? Will more patients quit therapy? Have you stopped speaking to Dad through the toilet?

To Natalie and me, it was as if everyone in the house had sipped tainted water. Except us. But instead of seeing it as a brazen form of neurological pathology, we thought it was funny. “Can you believe my father holds a medical degree from one of the most prestigious universities in America?”

“If
he
can be a doctor,” I said, “
I
should be able to get into beauty school.”

My fixation on beauty school intensified during times of stress. I also wrote in my journal more. Writing was the only thing that made me feel content. I could escape into the page, into the words, into the spaces between the words. Even if all I was doing was practicing signing my autograph.

“Why don’t you be a writer?” Natalie suggested one afternoon. “I bet you’d be a funny writer.”

My journals were not funny. They were tragic. “I don’t want to be a writer,” I said automatically. “Look at my mother.”

Natalie laughed. “But not all writers are crazy like your mother.”

“Yeah, but if I inherited the gene to write, I’m sure I got her crazy genes, too.”

“Well, I just don’t think you’re going to be happy . . . cutting hair.”

This infuriated me. I wasn’t going to cut hair. I was going to own a
beauty empire
. “You don’t understand the plan,” I said. “You don’t listen.”

“I still think you’d hate it. Standing around all day long sticking your fingers in people’s dirty hair. Yuck.”

I had no intention of sticking my fingers in anyone’s hair, just approving packaging designs from behind a glass desk. A beauty empire was my only way out. I loved the Vidal Sassoon commercials that promised,
If you don’t look good, we don’t look good
. That expressed, perfectly, my refined ability to put others first.

By the third day, after still no bowel movement, the doctor instructed Agnes to give him an enema. The enema was successful, but the doctor believed the contents of his bowel had been too compressed, and then too destroyed by water, to make an accurate reading. “I’m afraid that this sudden freezing of the bowels,” he said to us as we were gathered in the living room, “signals that God has chosen to no longer communicate in this way.”

Hope was deeply distraught.

At that moment, the oldest Finch daughter, Kate, walked into the house, making a rare appearance. Surprised by the gathering, she said, “Hey, what’s everybody doing in here?”

She smelled like perfume. Her makeup was flawless.

Natalie snickered. “Take a seat, Kate. You’ve missed some good stuff.”

Kate smiled. “Oh, yeah? What’d I miss?” She brushed off the surface of a chair and sat on the edge.

The doctor explained the past few days to his daughter, offering to take her out back to the picnic table so she could inspect the messages from God herself.

After Kate slammed her car door and drove away, Natalie leaned forward. “You really should write all this stuff down.”

I said, “Even if I did, nobody would believe it.”

“That’s true,” she said. “Maybe it’s better to just forget it.”

PHLEGMED BEFORE A LIVE AUDIENCE

A

LTHOUGH BOTH
N
ATALIE AND
I
LACKED THE ABILITY TO
play piano, we were gifted at manipulating others into playing for us so we could sing. Three of Finch’s patients played well enough to follow the sheet music we placed in front of them. Of these three, Karen was the best because she was tireless. Whether this quality was innate or caused by improper dosage of her medication, she would happily play the theme from
Endless Love
five times in a row and then move without fuss into a rousing rendition of “Somewhere.” When Karen would begin to complain that her fingers were getting tired, Natalie would pull a Snickers bar or a joint out of the patch pocket on the front of her skirt. This would usually keep Karen playing, but sometimes she would just become very stubborn after an hour and a half of steady keyboard work. In these cases, Natalie would resort to bribery. “You know,” she would say temptingly, “I could call my dad and see if he could see you later this afternoon. I’m sure he would.” Pause. “
If I asked him
.” This usually got at least another medley out of her.