Running With Scissors_ A Memoir - Augusten Burroughs [73]
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.
Hope ignored her. She turned the page.
Natalie bit into the ham end. She walked over to the stove where Hope was sitting. “Look at you,” she said. “You’re like an animal, tearing your flesh off.”
Hope ignored her.
Natalie glanced over at me and rolled her eyes in disgust. I had come into the kitchen to get some water and was leaning against the sink.
“Hope the dope,” Natalie said, taking a final bite from the ham. She dropped the rest of it on Hope’s lap. It smacked in the center of her book.
“Goddamn it, you bitch,” Hope exploded.