Running With Scissors_ A Memoir - Augusten Burroughs [100]
“Close the door,” she said, sliding off her faux tortoiseshell bifocals and resting them on top of her desk. She was a mannish woman—handsome, with a fierce intelligence. In fact, she wrote the published textbook from which the class was taught.
I was certain she was going to inform me that I had a gift for science unlike any she’d ever seen. Perhaps she would tell me that I could skip community college and go straight to Harvard Medical School.
Instead, she picked up my exam from the pile of papers in front of her and read from it. “Augusten. On the test a question was asked: Identify the structure A. And you wrote, ‘I believe this is a tibial tuberocity. But it could also be one of the foramans that I failed to memorize. Thank God for malpractice insurance, huh?’”
I smiled at my witty answer.
She said, “Do you really want to be a doctor? Or do you want to play a doctor on a soap opera?”
At first, I thought this was a terrible insult. But then I saw her face, saw that she was not being nasty, merely asking an honest question. I said, “I really want the respect of a doctor. And I want the white jacket. And I want the title. But . . . I guess I really would like to have my own time slot opposite a game show.”
“You seem to me,” she said, leaning back in her swivel chair, “to have a very creative side. Why not major in something creative? English? Or maybe theater?”
My shoulders slumped and my throat went dry. I felt defeated. I explained that I was failing English. “I would like the writing part of English, but there’s no writing in it. Except for the stuff I do on my own. It’s all things I don’t need. Like memorizing prepositional phrases. I don’t need to memorize prepositional phrases. You’d think English would be about writing. But it’s not.”
“You have to learn a lot of things you may not want to learn, may not feel you need to know. Before English Composition there is English 101. It’s a building process, you establish a foundation and then you build and build and build.”
“I guess,” I said. I knew she was right. And I knew that I was not cut out for school, even college. Ironically, I had been excited to go to college, but in order to be able to do it, I really needed study habits and knowledge I would have learned in high school.
Oops.
So I withdrew from school before the semester was out.
And a week after I withdrew, one evening when Natalie and I were in our little apartment, my mother called.
She said she needed to see me. That she would be over in an hour to pick me up.
“What? What’s this about?” I asked.
“I’ll tell you in person when I see you.”
In the same way that a tornado rips the roof off a double-wide trailer, leaving the occupants dazed and staring at the clouds from the splinters of what used to be their living room, it was over.
“I am no longer going to have anything to do with Dr. Finch or any member of the Finch family.” We were sitting in her car, the old brown Aspen station wagon. She was smoking a More and I was smoking a Marlboro Light. She looked calm, almost flat. And she didn’t seem crazy.
“What are you talking about?” I noticed a suitcase on the backseat and next to it her straw wide-brim hat.
“This has been building for many years, Augusten. There’s much you don’t know or understand about my relationship with Dr. Finch. But for years, he has been medicating me in a way that I have come to see as unhealthy and, well, very wrong.”
“What?”
“And years ago, when I had that psychotic episode in Newport, do you remember?”
I nodded slowly, as if underwater. This was moving too fast and everything she was saying was a complete blur.
“He raped me in that motel room.”
“What!?”
“The doctor has been controlling me, manipulating me emotionally and with drugs. He’s a very sick man and I’m just now seeing this.” She tossed her burned-down cigarette out the window and lit another. “I know this must come as a shock to you, but it’s been building. I need to go away now, on my own, to do some thinking. He’s very, very angry with me. I need to get away for awhile.”
I felt deeply