Running With Scissors_ A Memoir - Augusten Burroughs [70]
But it didn’t take long before they shared the master bedroom and the other was used for storage.
Soon they were inseparable. And, I thought, extremely compatible.
If my mother was odd enough to crave a bubble bath at three in the morning, Dorothy was inventive enough to suggest adding broken glass to the tub. If my mother insisted on listening to West Side Story repeatedly, it was Dorothy who said, “Let’s listen to it on forty-five!”
And when my mother announced that she wanted a fur wrap like Auntie Mame, Dorothy bought her an unstable Norwegian elkhound from a puppy mill.
“Damn it, Dorothy,” my mother cried, “this animal is making me a nervous wreck. You’ve just got to take it back.”
“It’s not an it, it’s a she. And she wouldn’t have shit all over the stairs if you let her outside like I told you to.”
“Shat. And I couldn’t let her outside because she snaps at me whenever I set foot near her.”
“She’s not snapping at you. I told you, she’s epileptic. You have to give her the pills.” She rattled the bottle the vet had given her.
“I do not have time to be giving that damn dog pills. I have enough pills of my own to take. She has to go.”
Dorothy went into the bathroom and returned with a bottle of Vicks NyQuil. “Look, we’ll try this. I bet it’ll settle her down.” She poured a dose of the green NyQuil into the little cup and bent down.
The dog’s tongue slipped into the little cup as Dorothy tipped it backward. “See? She even likes it.”
The NyQuil took effect swiftly and the dog napped in the corner. “That’s more like it,” my mother said, stroking her hind leg with her big toe. “She’s a sweet thing when she sleeps, isn’t she?”
“See?” Dorothy said.
“Okay,” my mother said. “As long as you can manage her.”
“I can manage her. Just like I manage you.”
“Oh, you’re such a good pet,” my mother said, pressing Dorothy’s face between her hands and kissing her lips.
Although my mother teased that Dorothy was her pet, it was Dorothy who acted as if she had a trained bear for a lover. “Make that face!” she would shriek, clapping her hands like a child.
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