Running With Scissors_ A Memoir - Augusten Burroughs [33]
“No, Hope. It’s not about you. You think every fucking thing is about you because you’re so pathetic and have no life of your own.”
“Goddamn it, Natalie. Why are you so hostile? What did I do to you? Why do you hate me so much?”
Natalie laughed nastily. “Pure projection. You’re the one who hates me but you won’t admit it, you repressed bitch.”
“I don’t hate you, Natalie,” Hope screamed with hatred.
“Denial,” Natalie snapped back.
My vocabulary had increased dramatically over the past year. Projection, denial, repression, passive-aggressive, Lithium, Melaril.
In addition to calling each other standard names like bitch and whore, the Finches incorporated Freud’s stages of psychosexual development into their arsenal of invectives.
“You’re so oral. You’ll never make it to genital! The most you can ever hope for is to reach anal, you immature, frigid old maid,” Natalie yelled.
“Stop antagonizing me,” Hope shouted. “Just stop transferring all this anger onto me.”
“Your avoidance tactics are not going to work, Miss Hope,” Natalie warned. “I’m not going to let you just slink away from me. You hate me and you have to confront me.”
I glanced over at the grand piano and thought of happier times. Just last week, a chronic schizophrenic patient of the doctor’s named Sue had played show tunes while Natalie, Hope and I stood around the piano singing. “There’s no business like show business, like no business I know . . .” Sue would play for as long as we wanted her to, provided we didn’t use her name. She insisted on being called “Dr. F.”
“You need to talk to Dad, Natalie. Something’s wrong with you. I’m telling you this because I’m your sister and I love you. You’ve got to see Dad. Please make an appointment.”
I heard Natalie stomping and for a moment, I worried she would come into the living room where I was sitting. She would see me and know that I’d been eavesdropping and then somehow pull me into the middle of this thing. But the stomping wasn’t because Natalie was coming into this room. It was because Natalie had wrestled her sister onto the sofa.
“Okay, you bitch, say it.”
“Get off of me,” Hope said, and I could hear she was having a hard time breathing. Natalie was a big girl.
“Admit it!”
“Natalie, get up. I can’t breathe.”
“Then you’re gonna die.”
There was a thick silence and then a strangled-sounding Hope. “Alright, alright, I hate you. There, are you happy now?”
Natalie let out a belchy, “Fuck it.” She stomped out of the room and up the stairs. “This is all such bullshit.” From the top of the stairs she shouted, “You will never have any emotional maturity.”
Hope screamed back. “I’ll get a restraining order placed against you, Natalie. You’re out of control and I’ll do it.”
Natalie slammed her door.
The fight was over.
It had turned out to only be a four. Maybe a four-pointfive on a scale of one through ten; ten meaning police involvement or committal to a psychiatric hospital. The problem was, there was nobody else around to join in. I had encountered an interesting principle: the more people, the better the fight.
Usually, they started with just two people bickering over something small. Like what to watch on TV. Then a third person would enter the room and see two people screaming over the TV and they’d decide to moderate, only they’d end up taking a side. Eventually, someone else would get sucked in.
The most excellent fights involved five or more people. Eventually the fight would be resolved the way all disputes were resolved: Dr. Finch. He would be called at the office or the arguing group would travel en masse to his office, a hostile collective gang, and oust whatever patient he was seeing at the time. “Family emergency,” someone would say. And the patient, whether a potential suicide or somebody suffering from a multiple personality disorder, would be transferred to the waiting room to drink Sanka with Cremora while Finch solved the dispute.
Finch believed that anger was the crux of mental illness. He believed