Running With Scissors_ A Memoir - Augusten Burroughs [79]
“Of what?”
“Shhhhh,” she said. “I need to listen to my heart.” She ran her fingers across the table, lifting magazines, looking for something. “Are you sitting on my glue stick?”
Dorothy had brought excellent albums into her relationship with my mother and I liked to go to Amherst and listen to Karla Bonoff while I chain-smoked.
But this night, I knew something was wrong the instant I turned onto Dickinson Street. Every light in the house was on and the blinds were up. The street in front of my mother’s house was illuminated like it was noon.
Slowly, feeling a sense of impending doom, I approached the door. It was wide open.
Leonard Cohen was playing loudly from the stereo and I walked through the house to find Dorothy in the kitchen laughing as she squirted mustard on Wheat Thins. “Hi!” she said excitedly, unable to contain her hysterical state of mind. “I’m making a sna—” She was so intoxicated with the hilarity of the mustard/cracker combination that she couldn’t get the words out.
The back door was wide open.
“Where’s my mother?”
“I’m in here,” she sang from the tub in the back bathroom.
Carefully, I slid past Dorothy, who was doubled over in laughter, and peered into the bathroom.
My mother was reclined in the bathtub, which was filled with pink bubbles.
Dorothy came up beside me. “Your mom had a little accident,” she laughed. “She broke a glass in the tub.”
My mother’s laugh was deeper, more sinister. It terrified me. “I’m bleeding,” she said. “But I didn’t break the glass. Dorothy did.”
Calgon, take me away . . .
I walked out of the bathroom to stand in the kitchen. And then I caught a glimpse of something on the lawn. I walked around the corner into the dining room where I noticed the door to the china cabinet was ajar. The cabinet itself was empty. I walked to the open door.
In the light of the porch, I could see a debris field. All the dishes, the television, chairs, books, dishes, forks, spread out over the backyard and glistening in the moonlight.
“What the fuck have you two been up to?” I shouted. I was seized by a feeling of panic. This can’t be happening. Again.
Dorothy came up beside me, still laughing. “We were having some fun.”
Her eyes looked wild, too. And I realized that not only had my mother gone completely mad again, she had taken Dorothy with her.
“You two are out of control,” I said. My heart raced and I wanted to flee. And then I didn’t want to flee, I wanted to kill my mother. My face became like the heating coil on the stove, and I trembled with hatred. And then just as suddenly, I felt absolutely nothing. It was like a door quickly opened, showing me what horrible feelings I had inside, and then slammed shut again so I wouldn’t have to actually face them. In many ways I felt I was living the life of a doctor in the ER. I was learning to block out all emotions in order to deal with the situation. Whether that situation involved a mother who was constantly having nervous breakdowns or the death of the family cat by laundry hamper.
My mother appeared in her robe, dripping with pink bubbles. “Dorothy did it,” she said, lighting a cigarette, and motioning toward the backyard.
Dorothy spun around and slapped my mother on the arm. “I did not, you liar.”
My mother laughed and said in a wise-woman tone of voice, “Oh yes, you did.”
“Liar!” Dorothy squealed gleefully.
I said, “I’m going upstairs. I have to get something.”
“Get what?” Dorothy wanted to know.
“Just something,” I said angrily, as I stormed from the room and up the stairs. Immediately, I phoned Hope. “My mother’s gone crazy again and Dorothy seems crazy too.”
Hope was always excellent in a crisis, like the rest of the Finches. She wasted no time. “I’ll phone Dad. You keep her safe.”
I hung up the phone and went back downstairs. My mother and Dorothy were sitting in the front room of the house, the living room. Dorothy was burning a fifty-dollar bill over the flame of a candle.
“What are you doing?” I said.
My mother answered,