Running with Scissors (22 page)

My mother would try to suppress her smile and remain dignified and composed. “I don’t know what face you’re talking about.”

Dorothy would scream, “You know exactly which face! Make it, make it, make it!”

My mother would laugh and bare her teeth. “Grrrrrrrrrr,” she would growl, holding her fingers out like bear claws.

Dorothy would bounce up and down on the sofa like a delighted little girl.

It was not uncommon to walk in the door of their home and find my mother sitting on the sofa reading over a manuscript with shampoo horns sculpted into her hair. Anne Sexton’s voice would be blasting from the speakers.

A woman who writes feels too much . . .

Dorothy viewed my mother’s propensity toward madness not as something to be afraid of, but rather as something to look forward to, like a movie or a newly released color of nail polish.

“Your mother is just expressing herself,” Dorothy would tell me when my mother stopped sleeping, started smoking the filters of her cigarettes and began writing backward with a glitter pen.

“No, she’s not,” I would say. “She’s going insane again.”

“Don’t be so mundane,” she would yawn, passing my mother a shoebox filled with cat vertebrae. “She is a brilliant artist. If you want Hamburger Helper, go find some other mother.”

I
did
want Hamburger Helper. And if I knew where to find a mother that could make it, I would have been there in a heartbeat.

Dorothy protected my mother, acting as a loyal guard dog who could also prepare snacks.

“Dorothy, I’m dying of thirst,” my mother might call from her reclined position on the sofa. She would be fanning her face with a copy of her first book of poems, the only one she didn’t have printed herself.

Dorothy would appear a moment later with a tall glass of iced tea, at the bottom of which she had placed a small plastic goat.

My mother would guzzle the tea, her eyes closed, and then succumb to a fit of coughing until she spat the plastic goat into her hand. “What in the
world?
” she would say.

Then they would both explode into a fit of laughter.

Dorothy’s unpredictable nature perfectly suited my mother’s unreliable brain chemistry. She was not only fun, but she acted as a buffer between my mother and me. I didn’t feel that I had to keep as close an eye on my mother’s mental health because Dorothy was looking after her. And when my mother did go psychotic, Dorothy went along for the ride.

On one of their rides, they brought me back a souvenir.

*   *   *

His name was Cesar Mendoza and he looked exactly like a cartoon lumberjack. His arms were as thick around as tree limbs. And his head was as square as an anvil. My mother had met him at the mental hospital where Dr. Finch had committed her.

“I’m not going to any goddamn mental hospital,” my mother raved, her eyes looking like somebody had lit books of matches inside of them.

“It’s just for observation,” Finch told her calmly.

“I will not be observed!” my mother shrieked, hurling her large-framed body against the door, causing it to slam in Finch’s face.

“Deirdre, you have to go,” he said through the door. “Come out now or we’ll have to get the police.”

In the end, my mother didn’t put up a fuss. She allowed herself to be taken to the Brattleboro retreat in Vermont.

She returned from the hospital still slightly mad with a six-foot-two lumberjack in tow. The lumberjack spoke only broken English. “I love you mother,” he said when he met me. “And I be your new father.”

I sat on her sofa, stunned by this development. Not only had my mother failed to recover in the hospital, it seemed to me she had gone even crazier.

“Where is bathroom?” he asked as he shuffled through the house, ducking under the doorjambs.

“It’s in the back,” I told him.

When he returned, he smelled of my mother’s new Avon perfume. “You like?” he said, extending his arm. “I smell pretty now, no?”

Dorothy clung to my mother’s arm, lighting her cigarettes for her and holding them between puffs. She explained the situation to me. “Your mother feels strongly that God has brought them together. And that Cesar is going to be a part of our lives from now on.”

She turned to my mother and looked at her profile with admiration, as if my mother had just announced her diagnosis of cancer and her decision to fight the disease with every bit of strength she had left.

I eyed the lumberjack who was busy sniffing his perfumed arm and smiling, using his free hand to gently rub the bulge in his pants. “What do you know about this man?” I asked.

“Not much,” Dorothy said. “Except that he’s married, he has two kids and the police are looking for him.”

Cesar grinned down at me, exposing the whitest, most perfect teeth. A surprising quality in a crazy person.

“Nice teeth,” I commented.

“You like?” he said, and pulled them out of his mouth.

I winced.

Because it was my mother’s first day home from the mental hospital, she was exhausted. It took all her energy to stand on her own and not use Dorothy or the wall for support. The medication had also made her movements slow and clumsy. “I’m going to bed. Dorothy, come with me.” She licked her cracked lips. “My mouth is so damn dry.” She turned to me. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

Which left me alone with my new father.

“You mother tells me you are a gay,” he said, taking a seat on the couch.

I slid away from him. “Yeah.”

He stretched his arms out on the back of the sofa. “I don’t think you a gay. I think you have no man in your life. No father ever. What you need is father. Good, strong father. I be your father.
You
be my son.” His eyes had the same glossy appearance as my mother’s, as if they’d both gone to the same sinister opthamologist and been fitted with identical contact lenses.

I said, “Mmm hmm.”

He brought his arms forward and slapped his knees. “Now, go get your father something to drink. You have beer?”

I told him we didn’t have any beer but I could get him a glass of tap water or there might be some flat Pepsi in the refrigerator. He told me to forget it, and then he popped a handful of pills into his mouth, chewed and swallowed them dry.

Although I was officially living at the Finches, I spent some nights at my mother’s apartment in Amherst. Sometimes Bookman and I would stay there together or sometimes just me alone on the sofa. I told myself that I was like a bicoastal celebrity, moving between Amherst and Northampton at will, when the spirit moved me. But what I truly felt was that neither place was home. In truth, when things got too crazy at the Finches’, I stayed in Amherst. When I felt like my mother and Dorothy couldn’t stand me anymore, I moved back to Northampton. Usually, one night was the most I could stay in Amherst. One night every few weeks.

At just after midnight, I was awakened from a dream that a hard penis was pressing against my ass. It turned out there
was
a hard penis pressing against my ass.

“What the fuck are you doing?” I said, shoving him off.

He was completely naked, even his teeth were out of his mouth. “I only want to try,” he gummed. “I love you, new son.”

“Get
away
from me,” I said.

I locked him out of the living room and went back to sleep on the sofa. My powers of denial were strong even then, and I was able to convince myself that it
didn’t really matter because it didn’t really happen.
When I heard him climbing the stairs to go find Deirdre and Dorothy, I figured he’d finally leave me alone.

Throughout the night, my mother would come downstairs and pass through the living room on her way to the kitchen. She was sweating profusely, looking extremely preoccupied. Whatever she had been doing in her bedroom, it was clear that it didn’t involve sleep. When I asked her what was going on, she said, nearly out of breath, “Dorothy is still a virgin as far as men are concerned.”

Later, I heard Dorothy suddenly start shrieking and then sobbing. This was followed by the muffled sounds of my mother saying something in a soothing tone of voice.

An hour later the lumberjack came downstairs. He sauntered into the living room, thumbs hooked through his belt loops, and winked at me. “She as wet as a dishrag.” He motioned with his head, indicating upstairs.

The next morning, Dorothy appeared smug and pleased, but aloof toward my new father.

“Please give me the man a glass of something to drink.”

“Get your own fucking drink, asshole,” Dorothy replied distantly, as she brushed a fresh coat of polish over her nails. Fuchsia.

My mother, too, seemed ready to dispose of him now. Last night he was a gift from God, a new member of the family, my lumberjack father. But today he was an insect that needed to be crushed with a shoe. The black widows had mated with him and now they needed to destroy him.

“I think it’s time for you to leave, Cesar,” my mother informed him as she stroked Dorothy’s hair. They were sitting at the kitchen table together, with Cesar hovering over them.

“No, I just get here. I stay and be man father.”

“You heard her, asshole. Scram,” Dorothy said, blowing on her pinkie to dry the polish.

The elkhound slept peacefully under the table, as it had for the past six days, moving only occasionally—and then very sluggishly—for a drink from its NyQuil-spiked water bowl.

“Where I should go?” he pleaded. “Have no place?” He glanced at me, but I shrugged and looked away.

Being mentally ill, temporarily homeless and wanted by the law, the only logical place for him to go was to Dr. Finch’s.

“Let me make a phone call,” my mother said finally. After she hung up, she scribbled the Finches’ address down on the inside cover of a book of matches. Then, instead of handing him the matches, she tore off the cover. “Here you go,” she said.

Dorothy snatched up the matches and held them over the candle on the kitchen table where they burst into flames. “Pretty,” she said.

At the Finch house, the lumberjack discovered and fell madly in love with Natalie.

Natalie was repulsed by him at first. “Get the fuck away from me, you missing link,” she said, slapping his hand away with the serrated edge of an aluminum foil box, one of dozens that were in the pantry, left over from the days of Joranne.

But his persistence, which came in the form of endearments like, “Shake that belly for me,” and “I’ll give you a hundred dollars,” finally melted her resistance.

One night while Natalie and I were going for a walk at Smith she turned to me and said, “You’ll never guess what I did.”

I knew that I couldn’t, in fact, ever guess what she had done. So I said, “What?”

“I fucked Cesar Mendoza.”

“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.