Running With Scissors_ A Memoir - Augusten Burroughs [81]
The plate nearly hit me in the forehead. Because I ducked to reach my matches, it smashed on the wall behind me instead.
Hope shrieked and leapt from the sofa.
My mother screamed at me, “You are the goddamn Devil,” and she hurled the cup that matched the saucer.
I ducked again and jumped up from the couch. “What the fuck is wrong with you?” I screamed. I was furious and terrified. She was an animal.
My mother rose from her chair, eyes wild. “I didn’t give birth to you,” she growled. “You are a Nazi.”
I ran up the stairs to the bedroom and Hope followed behind me, panting. “Dad couldn’t come. He said for me to check her out and see how she is. Obviously, she’s nuts.”
“We have to do something,” I said.
“We need to—” Hope froze, hearing my mother on the stairs.
“Shit,” I said.
“Goddamn you both to hell,” she screamed.
“Deirdre, calm down,” Dorothy said after her. “Take it easy.”
This got her. My mother stopped and turned around to go back into the living room. “Dorothy, don’t you dare tell me what to do. Not ever. Do you understand me? I will not be stifled by you in my own home.”
Hope picked up the phone next to the bed and punched 9-1-1. “We need help,” she said. “I’m a psychiatrist’s daughter and we have a psychiatric emergency.”
I loved this side of Hope. The side that could, if necessary, give you an intramuscular injection or restart your heart.
Within minutes, police officers were at the door. Hope and I were crouched in my mother’s bedroom looking out the window, and when they arrived, we went downstairs.
My mother was not pleased by the uninvited guests.
“What the hell are you doing here?” she demanded.
Dorothy cried, “Hey, let go of her.”
This was in response to one of the officers restraining my mother when she tried to bite him.
Hope said, “This is Deirdre. She’s a patient of my father and she’s having a psychotic episode.” I knew from reading crime novels that Hope was trying to humanize my mother. The subtext was, This could be your mother, officer. So treat her with respect.
It didn’t matter to the cops. What mattered was that the handcuffs were securely fastened and that she didn’t bite them as they dragged her from the house into the waiting cruiser. My mother’s heels bounced off the steps as they pulled her and I felt a horrific sadness watching her stripped of her dignity and her will. I also thought, Whatever happened to Christina Crawford? I wonder if she’s okay.
Inside, Dorothy sobbed on the couch and Hope sat down to console her.
I went out the back door into the yard. The crystal stemware was shattered, and glittered in the grass. Light from the kitchen glinted off the sterling forks, knives and spoons that were scattered everywhere. It gave the yard the magical look of a set. And I would not have been at all surprised to see Marie Osmond rise from the ground in a white sequined dress, singing “Paper Roses.”
YOU ARE NOTHING BUT A SEX OBJECT
T
HERE WAS A NOTE ON THE BACK OF THE NESTLE’S CRUNCH bar wrapper. It read: You are nothing but a sex object. I bought the candy bar from the vending machine downstairs next to the ice. I bought it for Bookman. He ate half, slipped me the rest and then scrawled the note, passing it to me while my mother lay on the bed in front of us, unconscious in her curly black poodle sweater and covered in Johnson’s baby powder.
I was nearly fifteen, Bookman was thirty-four and we were in the midst of our tumultuous love affair.
We were staying at the Treadway Inn motorlodge in Newport, Rhode Island. Me, Bookman, Hope, Dorothy, and the doctor.
And, of course, my mother.
She was the reason we were all there. She’d gone crazy again. And this time it was really bad.
Instead of committing her to the Brattleboro retreat, Dr. Finch decided to take her to a motel in Newport, where he could treat her around the clock himself. Her therapy involved scrawling the numeral 5 with her lipstick on every smooth surface, raging at everyone who came within sight, and recycling the motel furnishings into kindling. She