My mother began to calm down now that the doctor was here. “Would you like a Sanka?” she offered.
He asked for a bologna sandwich with horseradish.
And then he looked at me and winked. “Don’t worry about your parents, buckaroo. We’ll get this all sorted out.”
“I just pray to God that Norman doesn’t snap. One of these days he’s going to snap and kill us all,” my mother said as she busied herself in the kitchen making a sandwich for the doctor.
“Enough,” Finch said loudly. “That’s not the way to talk around your son. You need to comfort him, not frighten him.”
My mother said, “That’s right, I know. I’m sorry. Augusten, I’m just very upset right now. The doctor and I need to speak.” Then she turned to him and lowered her voice. “But I am worried, Doctor. I do believe our lives are in danger.”
“May I have one of those?” he asked, pointing to a hot dog he glimpsed as my mother opened the refrigerator door to put away the lettuce.
She look puzzled. “Oh. Would you like a hot dog instead of the sandwich I just made?”
He reached into the refrigerator, sliding the raw Oscar Mayer wiener from the pack. He took a bite. “No, just like this. As an appetizer.” He smiled, causing the white whiskers of his mustache to twitch as he chewed.
I liked him. And with his jolly, red-faced cheeks and his easy smile, he really did seem like Santa. Although it was difficult to imagine him being able to fit down a chimney, it was just as hard to imagine him wearing a white jacket. He certainly didn’t seem like a real doctor, the kind of doctor I worshiped. He seemed like he should be in a department store letting kids pee on his lap and whisper brand-name bicycles in his ear.
As my mother saw more and more of Dr. Finch over the year, I needed to be reminded constantly that he was a real doctor. “An M.D. doctor?” I would ask my mother.
“Yes,” she would say with exasperation, “an M.D. doctor. And as I’ve told you a hundred times, he earned his M.D. at Yale.”
I’d even asked her how she found him, imagining her riffling through our outdated Yellow Pages or reading restroom stall walls. “Your own doctor, Dr. Lotier, referred me,” was her tidy reply.
But still I was suspicious. Instead of being gloriously clinical and sanitized, his office was a hodgepodge of rooms on the top floor of an office building in Northampton. The waiting room had pale yellow paint on the walls that was peeling off in sheets, cracked rattan furniture, and an old gray metal file cabinet on top of which was a Mr. Coffee. There were posters of rainbows and balloons on the wall. A thick blanket of dust covered everything. Then there was a middle room that was used for storage of boxes and decade-old magazines. And then an even more inner room where the doctor saw his patients. You had to go through two doors, one right after the other, to get to that inner room. I liked these double doors and wished I had them in my room at home.
Like Santa, Dr. Finch gave me presents. It wasn’t uncommon for him to hand me a glass paperweight etched with the name and logo of a prescription drug. Or a five-dollar bill that I could spend downstairs at the drugstore, which still had a soda fountain. And there was a certain glint in his eye that seemed to promise more, later. It was always as if he had one hand behind his back, something hidden up his sleeve.
Every Saturday, I rode in the brown Dodge Aspen with my parents to Northampton. We would sit in complete silence and my parents would chain-smoke the whole way. Occasionally my mother would comment that there was a smell like manure emanating from my father’s ears. And sometimes he would tell her that she was a fucking bitch. Other than that, not a word was spoken.
They took turns with the doctor. First my father would go in. Then my mother. Then the two of them together. The entire process took all of Saturday and we would usually drive through McDonald’s on the way home, my parents ordering nothing and me ordering two of everything and the two of them watching me eat and saying, “Don’t choke, you’re eating much too fast.”
While they were in with Dr. Finch, I would sit on the rattan love seat and talk to the doctor’s receptionist, Hope. She had high cheekbones that made her look like an Indian princess and incredibly thick, long, straight black hair that she sometimes wore pulled into a ponytail and secured with a leather butterfly barrette. She favored trim black wool slacks and knit tops, even in the summer. She always had on some interesting piece of jewelry—an elephant pin, ladybug earrings, a silver bracelet made of two dogs chasing each other’s tails.
“Do you have a white cap?” I asked her.
She smiled. “What do you mean, a white cap? You mean like a sailor’s cap?”
“No,” I said. “I mean like a regular doctor’s office receptionist. At the hospital I go to in Springfield for shots, they all wear white caps like the nurses.”
Hope laughed. “Oh, God. I’m not that kind of receptionist. We’re a lot more casual here, can’t you tell?” She reached across her desk and straightened the snow globe.
“Do you like working for him?” I asked. Maybe I could pry her for details.
“I love working for Dad.”
“He’s your father?”
“Didn’t you know that?”
“No.”
Hope got up from behind her desk and came to sit next to me on the sofa. “Yeah, Dr. Finch is my father. That’s why I work here. I wouldn’t work for just any doctor.”
I couldn’t imagine working for my father. We could barely take care of the garbage together. “Do you have any brothers or sisters?”
Hope laughed again. “You could say that.” Then she looked up, stuck out her left hand and began counting them off. “There’s Kate, me, Anne, Jeff, Vickie and Natalie. We’re Dad and Agnes’s biological children. Plus Dad’s adopted son, Neil Bookman. So that’s seven of us.”
Instantly, I was consumed with envy. “And you all live together?”
“Not quite. My sister Kate lives around the corner with her daughter and so does my sister Anne and her son. Jeff lives in Boston. Vickie lives with some friends. But Natalie is there a lot. I live there. Plus, we have a dog and a cat. And of course Mom and Dad. There’s always someone over at Sixty-seven.”
“What’s Sixty-seven?”
“Sixty-seven Perry Street. That’s where we live. You should come by sometime with your parents. You’d have a lot of fun there.”
I had to admit, the idea of seeing a real doctor’s house was nothing less than thrilling. I imagined walls hung with exotic and expensive tapestries, polished marble floors, columns that stretched for hundreds of feet. I saw water fountains out front with hedges trimmed into the shapes of zoo animals.
“Hey, do you want a Coke?” Hope asked.
“Okay.”
Hope got her pocketbook from under her desk. She pulled out her wallet and handed me a five-dollar bill. “I’ll buy them if you run downstairs and down the street to O’Brian’s drugstore to get them. You can even get yourself a candy bar.”
When I returned, Hope was sitting behind her desk, typing on a page she’d inserted into her black manual typewriter. “We’ve got to stay on top of these insurance forms,” she said, “if we ever want to get paid. It’s a lot of work running a doctor’s office.”
I felt guilty that I’d taken so much of her time, that I had been keeping her from doing her job. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to bother you so much, asking you all these questions.” I set the paper bag with the Cokes on her desk and handed her the change.
“Don’t be crazy,” she said. “You’re not a bother. Jeepers, I’d much rather talk to you than fill out those dumb insurance forms.” Then she pulled the paper from the carriage and set it on her desk. She reached into the bag for one of the Cokes and popped the top. “I can always do that stuff later.”
The phone rang and Hope answered, using a voice so smooth and professional, you’d think she was wearing a white nurse’s cap. “Dr. Finch’s office,” she said. She listened for a moment. “I’m sorry, the
doctor is in with a patient right now. Shall I have him return your call?” She winked at me.
As we sat on the sofa drinking the Cokes, Hope asked me about my own family. “What’s it like living at your house?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I like to hang out in my room and do stuff there.”
“I like your ring,” she said, pointing to my pinkie.
“Thanks. It’s from Mexico. It’s real silver.”
“It’s very nice.”
“Thanks.”
“I have one almost just like that.”
“You do?”
“Mmm hmm,” she said. Then she showed me the ring on her left hand. “See?”
It was almost exactly like mine, except not very shiny. “You want me to polish it for you?”
“You could do that?”
“Sure.”
She slid the ring off her finger and handed it to me. “Here you go then. You can bring it to me next time your parents come to see Dad.”
I had only meant that I could polish it with my shirt. “You mean you want me to take it and polish it?”
“Well, sure.”
“Okay.” I slipped the ring into my front pocket.
Hope smiled at me. “I can’t wait for it to be as new and shiny looking as yours.”
As time went on, my parents’ relationship became worse, not better. My father grew more hostile and remote, taking a particular liking to metallic objects with serrated edges. And my mother began to go crazy.
Not crazy in a let’s paint the kitchen bright red! sort of way. But crazy in a gas oven, toothpaste sandwich, I am God sort of way. Gone were the days when she would stand on the deck lighting lemon-scented candles without then having to eat the wax.
Gone, too, were the once-a-week therapy sessions. My mother began seeing Dr. Finch nearly every day.
My parents’ divorce was explosive. But as with all things that explode, a clean, flattened area was created. I could see the horizon now. The fights between my parents would be over because they weren’t speaking; the tension in the house would be eased because there was no house. The canvas was now clean.
Now, my mother and I would be on our own, like in the movie Alice Doesnt Live Here Anymore or my favorite show, One Day at a Time.
She would get better in our new Amherst apartment. I would go to my new elementary school, then junior high, then high school, then Princeton and become a doctor or the star of my own highly rated variety show.
And our dog, Cream? She refused to move. We took her to Amherst with us, but she ran all the way back to Leverett to the old house. The new people who lived there said they’d take care of her. So even she would get a new life.
Life would be fabric-softener, tuna-salad-on-white, PTA-meeting normal.
THE MASTURBATORIUM
D
R. FINCH LEANED BACK IN HIS RATTAN SWIVEL CHAIR AND folded his arms behind his head. My mother sat across from him on the floral love seat and I sat in the armchair between them. My mother’s razor-stubbled legs were tightly crossed. She wore leather sandals with thin straps and tapped her foot in the air nervously. She lit her third More.
I was twelve but felt at least fourteen, my parents had been divorced for over a year and my mother was seeing Dr. Finch constantly. Not just every day, but for hours every day. And if not in person, certainly on the phone. Sometimes, like now, I would get sucked into one of their sessions. My mother felt it was important that the doctor and I get to know each other. She felt that maybe he could help me with my school troubles. The trouble being that I refused to go and she felt powerless to force me. I think it may have also distantly bothered her that I didn’t have any friends my age. Or any age, really.
The two friends I had when we lived in the country weren’t my friends anymore. My mother had angered their mothers. So they weren’t allowed to hang around with me. I was never quite sure what my mother did to piss those mothers off. But knowing my mother, it could have been anything. As a result, I was isolated and spent all my time gazing out the window of our rented apartment and dreaming of the day when I turned thirty. Except when I was sitting in Dr. F’s office.
“As spiritually evolved as I may indeed be,” Dr. Finch said, eyes twinkling with playfulness, “I’m still a human being. A male human being. I am still very much a man.”
My mother blew a cloud of smoke over her head. “You are a goddamn sonofabitch,” she said. She used her teasing voice, as opposed to her disturbing let’s go to the mall in blackface voice.
Finch laughed, his face reddening.
“That may be,” he continued. “Men are sons of bitches. That would make you a sonofabitch, Augusten.” He looked over at me.
“And you a bitch,” he said to my mother.
“I’m the biggest bitch in the world,” my mother said, crushing her cigarette out in the soil of the potted jade plant on the coffee table.
“That’s very healthy,” Finch said. “You need to be a bitch.”
My mother’s face tightened with pride and she raised her chin slightly. “Doctor, if being a bitch is healthy, then I am the healthiest damn woman on the face of the earth.”
Finch exploded in laughter, slapping his thighs.
I failed to see the humor in the situation. As far as I was concerned, my mother was a bitch, period. She was a rare psychotic-confessional-poet strain of salmonella.
“Do you actually use it?” I said, changing the subject from my mother and back to what we were talking about, namely the room in the rear of the office.
Finch turned to me. “Absolutely. As I was saying, I am a man and I have needs.”
I tried to understand. “Do you use it, when? Between patients?”
Finch laughed again. “Between patients. After patients. Sometimes if a patient is particularly tedious, I will excuse myself to the Masturbatorium.” He picked up a copy of The New York Times from the low glass-topped rattan table in front of his chair. “This morning I have been reading about Golda Meier. An incredible woman. Highly evolved. Spiritually, she is the woman who should be my wife.” His face flushed slightly and he adjusted his belt buckle. “So reading about her, well, it always has a powerful effect on my libido. Just five minutes before you came in here I was admiring her picture in the paper. As a result, I will need to relieve myself after the two of you leave.”
I looked at the closed door, could picture the ratty couch in the room behind it; the bookcases filled with drug samples; the ancient copies of The New England Journal of Medicine. I could picture the Penthouse magazines, columns of them, next to the sofa. The thought of fat Dr. Finch ditching a patient to go jerk off in the back room while he looked at pictures of airbrushed vaginas—or worse, Golda Meier—was disturbing.
“Would you like a tour?” he asked.
“Of what?” I said.
My mother coughed.
“Of the Masturbatorium, of course,” he roared.
I rolled my eyes. I did sort of want a tour, but it seemed sick to actually be excited. I looked at the poster of Einstein on the wall behind his head. It read: Boredom is an affliction of youth. “No, I’m bored. I have to go.”
“Well, alright. But it’s your loss,” he said. “You don’t know what you’re missing.”
Actually, I did know because Hope had already shown me the room months ago. Although it seemed like I probably shouldn’t let him know I’d seen it already. “Okay, let’s go on a tour.”
With great effort, he rose from his chair.
“May I bring my cigarette into your Masturbatorium, or do I need to put it out?” my mother asked.
“Smoking is a great privilege in my sanctuary. But for you, Deirdre, I will allow it.”
My mother bowed. “Thank you.”
But opening the door to the Masturbatorium revealed a surprise. Hope had left her post as receptionist and was napping on the seedy couch.
“What is this?” Finch bellowed. “Hope!” he boomed.
Hope startled awak
e. “Jesus, Dad. You scared the shit out of me.” She blinked against the light. “Oh my God, what’s the matter with you?”
Finch was furious. “Hope, you have no business being in here. This is my Masturbatorium and you’re using my blanket.” He pointed at the colorful crocheted throw Hope had wrapped around herself.
The tassels along the edge were stuck together.
“Dad, I was just taking a nap.”
“This is not the place for naps,” he bellowed.
My mother turned around to leave. “I think I’ll get a fresh cup of Sanka.”
“Wait a minute, Deirdre,” Finch said.
My mother froze. “Yes?”
“Do you see how Hope’s behavior is wrong?” he asked.
My mother brought her cigarette to her mouth. “Well, I really don’t know.”
Hope sat up on the couch.
“Deirdre, answer me,” Finch demanded. “Do you see how Hope’s sneaking in here and invading my private space is wrong?”
After a moment of thinking about it, my mother said, “Well, I can understand not liking one’s space invaded. I can understand how it would be upsetting to have somebody messing with your things without asking.”
“Then confront her!” Finch directed.
I stood back, not wanting to get sucked in.
“Well, I . . .”
“Deirdre, speak up! Tell Hope what you feel.”
My mother looked at Hope as if to say, What can I do? Then she said, “Hope, I don’t think it’s right for you to disturb your father’s space without asking.”
“This is none of your business, Deirdre,” Hope said. Her eyes were squinty with anger.
My mother took another drag from her cigarette and tried to leave again. “I really think I’ll just get another cup of Sanka.”
Finch grabbed her arm. “Just a minute there, Deirdre. Are you going to let Hope walk all over you like that? Jesus Christ, Deirdre. Are you going to be Hope’s doormat?”
My mother turned sharply to Finch. “I’m not Hope’s goddamned doormat, Finch. This just isn’t any of my business; she’s right. It’s between you and your daughter.”