“What is it?” I had to know. I loved Hope. Even though she was so old—twenty-eight—she was so much fun. She was the only reason I could stand sitting in Dr. Finch’s waiting room for five hours at a time.
Hope’s laughter wound down and she said,“She eats the sink caulking.”
“The what?” The more I heard, the more incredible this creature became. I liked her very much.
“The sink caulking. You know, that stuff around the sink and between the tiles? She peels it away and then just pops it in her mouth.” Hope broke into laughter again.
All I knew was, I had to see this lady. Now. “Can . . . I mean, is there any way . . .” I wasn’t sure how to ask.
“Would you like to meet her?”
“Yes.” I reached for the box of old croutons and took one out.
“We can try. But she usually doesn’t meet new people.”
A door was slammed. Then Agnes came walking down the creaky stairs. “Oh Joranne, Joranne, Joranne,” she was saying under her breath. She came into the TV room where Hope and I were sitting. “That Joranne is going to drive me insane.”
“What is it now?” Hope said.
“She didn’t like her spoon.”
“What’s the matter with her spoon?”
“She said there was a spot on the spoon I brought her for her soup. I took that spoon and I didn’t see any spot. So I wiped it off on my shirt and handed it back to her and she just closed the door in my face.” She wound her index finger around next to her ear; sign language for crazy.
But I believed Joranne. Unlike her, I’d seen the kitchen. And I was sure that any spoon that came from that mess would have at least one stain. If she only knew. This made me want to meet her even more.
“We’ll go talk to her,” Hope said. She got up from the couch.
“Oh, I wouldn’t do that,” Agnes warned before walking away. “She’s in rare form tonight. Got every light in the room burning.”
“Never mind that,” Hope said. “Come on, Augusten. Let’s go see her.”
I followed Hope up the stairs but I didn’t like the idea that we were both on the stairs at once. I let her stay three steps ahead.
At the top of the stairs, I stood back in the hallway and Hope knocked on the tall white door.
Nothing.
Hope knocked again.
Nothing.
She glanced over at me like, see? Then she knocked again and said, “Joranne, come on, open up. It’s me, Hope. And I’ve got a friend here I want you to meet. His name is Augusten. He’s twelve and his mother is a poet and you’ll really love him.”
A moment later, the door opened very slowly.
Hope stood up straighter.
A frail old lady peered out into the hall, squinting against the bare lightbulb that was attached to a fixture on the wall. “Who?” she said, sounding exactly like an owl. It came out more like hoooooooo.
“Augusten,” Hope said. Then she turned to me. “Augusten, this is Joranne.”
I moved forward and stuck out my hand for her to shake but she recoiled. So I quickly tucked my hand back at my side and said, “Hi.”
She said “Hello” with great dignity. There was an elegance about her, a certain sophistication. Like she could be the queen of some Danish country or a professor of literature at Smith.
For a moment, we just stared at each other. I was looking at a real, live crazy person. She was so crazy that she had to live in the psychiatrist’s house. And her room was so bright that it looked like a stage. She was dressed all in white, even a white shawl. And she looked very clean and glowy, like a ghost except not transparent.
“It’s nice to meet you,” she said.
She didn’t seem crazy.
Then she turned to Hope and her voice changed from one of formality back into the wolfish whine. “Agnes brought me a dirty spoon. She’s soiled me!”
Then Joranne burst into tears. She sobbed and pulled a Kleenex out from the cuff of her gown. Her thin veneer of composure began to crack and crumble down all around her. Now she was a crazy lady.
“Oh, Joranne. It’s okay. Agnes didn’t mean it. I’ll get you another spoon.”
“What am I going to do?” she sobbed. I could have sworn that she briefly eyed the white rubber piping along my sneaker bottoms.
When she brought her hands to her face to blot her nose, I noticed her hands were bright red, and etched with cracks. They were raw.
“It’s okay, Joranne. I’ll go downstairs and get you a brand new spoon.”
Joranne continued to cry but she nodded. Then she backed into her room and closed the door.
Hope looked at me and smiled. She headed downstairs and I followed.
In the kitchen, Hope grabbed a spoon from the pile in the sink and then reached under the cabinet for the Ajax. There was no room to wash the spoon in the sink, so I followed her into the bathroom.
“Did you see her hands?” Hope asked, taking a pair of Agnes’s tattered white underpants out of the standing water in the sink and slinging them over the curtain rod.
“Yeah,” I said. “Why were they so red?”
“They were red,” Hope said as she scoured the spoon under hot water, “because she’s been washing her hands. She gets into this thing—hand me that towel.”
I grabbed the towel off the back of the toilet bowl and handed it to her.
“Anyway, she gets into these, like, mental traps. She can’t stop washing her hands. She’ll do it for hours and hours until Dad makes her stop. He’s the only one who can stop her.”
In some strange way, I understood this concept. When I was a little kid, I would have to bathe with a towel next to the tub to wipe stray drops of water from the insides of the tub. I liked the water to be at one level with no splatters, anywhere, ever.
“The spoon must have set her off.”
I wondered how any doctor could fix a person who could go crazy just because of a spoon. I decided that my mother must be right. Dr. Finch must be a very special doctor, different and better than all the others. A thin layer of trust had formed in my mind, like a scab.
“I’m gonna bring this upstairs to her. You better just wait down here. I’ll meet you back in the TV room in a few minutes.” She paused and lowered her voice. “Dad’s trying to wean her off all of us because he feels she’s nearly ready to live on her own. He’s already found her a nice apartment in the center of town and in a month, she’ll be living there. So it’s good that she met you, she needs to get used to meeting new people.” We left the bathroom with the newly cleaned spoon and headed to the front of the house. Hope smiled at me, mouthing the words, wish me luck. Then she headed up the stairs.
I backed into the hall slowly, listening to see if Joranne screamed when Hope brought her the spoon. I didn’t hear anything. So I walked into the TV room and it was empty. I sat back down on the sofa and glanced at my watch. Five-and-a-half days until my mother came to pick me up. Assuming she hadn’t lied about me only staying here for a week. Before she left with Dr. F she told me that I’d be “spending a lot of time with the Finches in their home.” So I knew it was going to be more than just this one week. It would be a day here, another day there. Maybe even weeks at a time. I could sense that it was getting more and more difficult for her to have me for even a day. And my father didn’t want me at all. He had found himself an apartment in the bottom of a house deep in the woods. I’d only been there once since the divorce.
For a second, I felt a bottomless sadness. So completely alone. Like one of my stuffed animals at home that I was too old for now, that sat on the shelf in my closet, mashed against the back wall.
And then a thought entered my mind that was too terrifying to contemplate: had Joranne only planned to stay here for a week?
I stopped biting the inside of my mouth and stared straight ahead, my eyes unfocused. What if I was being tricked? What if I ended up staying here not for a week but a year? Or more?
No, that could never happ
en, I told myself. Don’t freak out, it’s just a week.
And then I heard something crash down the hall in the kitchen and this made me smile and wonder what new mess had just happened. In a way there was enough confusion and distraction here to keep my mind off the fact that my parents didn’t seem to want me. If I let myself think about that too much, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to climb out. So I held my breath and listened for more sounds. There was nothing.
I glanced down at my slacks and noticed an unsightly stain. It was some sort of grease. It would never come out. I shrugged, got up and ran for the kitchen to see what small disaster had happened.
One day late my mother picked me up from the Finch house. There was no excited knocking on the door, no opening of arms, no smothering with kisses. She simply slid the brown station wagon up alongside the house and sat there waiting. I don’t know how long she’d been sitting there when I finally caught a glimpse of a car parked out front, noticed it was her and ran outside.
“You’re back!” I cried, running barefoot out of the house, over the dirt path to the street, to her window which was rolled all the way up.
She continued to stare straight ahead, even as I banged on the glass.
Exhaust spilled out against the curb, and the car itself seemed weary, the engine sounding ready to fall out onto the street.
I knocked again on the window, and finally she blinked, turned and saw me. She slowly rolled down her window and leaned her head out. “Are you ready to go to Amherst? Do you have your things?” she asked flatly.
I turned back to the house, noticed I’d left the door wide open. Then I realized it didn’t matter, somebody would close it. And I had more shoes in Amherst, anyway. I walked around the front of the car to the passenger side and climbed in.
“Where’d you go? How was it? What happened?” I fired my questions at her as she pulled away from the house and headed for Amherst.
She answered none of my questions. She simply looked straight ahead, though not quite at the road, never checking her rearview mirror, not lighting a single More.
She had come back for me, just like she said she would. Only, where was she?
JUST ADD WATER
A
S I SPENT MORE AND MORE TIME WITH THE FINCHES DURing that year, I could feel myself changing in profound ways, with stunning speed. I was like a packet of powdered Sea Monkeys and they were like water.
My double-knit slacks were replaced by an old pair of Vickie’s jeans that Natalie found in a pile next to the clothes dryer. “These will look excellent on you.” When I expressed apprehension at wearing the virtually crotchless Levi’s, she said, “Oh, get over it. It’s just a little ventilation.” I stopped trying to force my hair into a smooth, glossy sheet and instead let it run its unruly, curly course. “You look so much better,” Natalie said. “Like you could be a drummer with Blondie.” Inside, I felt I’d aged two years in the space of a few months. I loved it. And there was so much freedom in the house, everyone was so easy-going. They didn’t treat me like a little kid.
But as free and accepting as the Finches were, I worried about their reaction to my deep, dark secret. The fact that I was gay had never been a big deal to me—I’d known all my life. And because I seldom interacted with other kids, I hadn’t really been programmed to believe it was wrong. Anita Bryant on TV talked about how sick and evil gay people were. But I thought she was tacky and classless and this made me have no respect for her. But I wasn’t sure what the Finches would think, partly because they were Catholic and to me Catholic people seemed very white-knuckled and tight-fisted about life in general. I was worried my being gay would push the Finches’ acceptance of me past the breaking point.
“Big deal,” Hope said when I told her.
We were taking a walk around the neighborhood at night and it had taken me twenty minutes to confess. “I figured it out on my own anyway,” she said, glancing at me sideways and smiling.
“You did?” I asked, alarmed. Did I emit a certain gay odor? Or maybe it was my unnatural obsession with cleanliness that clued her in. It was one thing to be gay. But it was something else altogether to seem gay.
“My adopted brother Neil is gay, too,” she said, stopping to pet a cat.
“He is?” There was a gay Finch?
“Yeah, Neil Bookman. He used to be a patient of Dad’s, but now he’s Dad’s adopted son.”
“How old is he?” I wondered. Was he my age? A year older?
“Thirty-three,” Hope said.
That seemed pretty old to be adopted. “Where does he live?”
“Well,” Hope began as we continued walking, “he used to live out back in the barn. But then he got mad that Dad wouldn’t give him a room inside, so a few months ago he moved to Easthampton, into some house with a divorced woman. But he still keeps his room in the barn. Kinda like a pied-a-terre.”
My timing couldn’t have been worse. Here I was, just starting to basically live with the Finches, and the only gay one had just moved out.
“He visits a lot. I can call him if you like. You two should get together. I think you’d really like each other.”
I’d never seen a real, live gay man in person before; only on the Donahue show. I wondered what it would be like to see one without the title “Admitted Homosexual” floating in blocky type beneath his head.
A week later, Hope called me in Amherst to tell me that Bookman would be over that afternoon. I was on the next bus.
Agnes was on the sofa in the TV room, eating out of a bag of Purina Dog Chow. When she saw me walk into the room, she laughed. “It’s not as bad as it looks. It’s actually quite good. Would you like to try some?”
“Uh, no thanks,” I said.
She said, “You don’t know what you’re missing,” and popped another brown nugget into her mouth.
“She’s right. They actually are pretty good,” said a low voice behind me.
I turned around and saw a tall, thin man with short black hair and a black mustache. He had friendly brown eyes. “Hi, Augusten. Remember me? Bookman? God, the last time I saw you, you were like this tall.” He lowered his hand to waist height.
“Hi,” I said trying not to sound electrified with excitement. “I sort of remember you. A little. I think you came over to our house sometimes when I was a kid.”
“Yeah, that’s right. I visited your mom.”
“So,” I said, stuffing my hands in my pockets, trying to look casual.
“So Hope said you wanted to meet me. I’m flattered. I feel famous.” He smiled.
“Yeah, well. You know, now that I’m staying here all the time, I wanted to get to know everybody.”
His eyes flashed and his warm smile vanished. “You’re staying here? You have a room here?”
I remembered about the barn, how the doctor made him stay in a barn and not a room. I backtracked. “Well, not exactly. I mean, I’m hanging around here a lot. I don’t have a room or anything.”
He seemed relieved. “Oh,” he said. “Okay.”
Hope walked into the hallway and put her arm around Bookman. “Hey big brother,” she said. “I see you two found each other.”
“That we did,” Bookman said. “Not so tight, Hope, Jesus. I’m not a dog.”
“Oh, poor baby,” Hope said, releasing her arm. “I forget how fragile you are.”
“Is that Hope?” Agnes called out from the TV room. “Tell her she owes me four dollars.”
“I’m right here Agnes, you can tell me yourself.”
“Oh, uh, okay,” she stammered, “that was you. I thought I heard you. You owe me four dollars.”
Hope leaned her head into the room. “I know I do and I’ll get it to—holy cow, Agnes. Are you eating dog food?”
“Why does everybody make such a fuss? It’s just a little kibble.”
“Oh, Mom,” Hope said, grimacing. “That stuff’s not clean, it’s made for dogs.”
“It’s pretty good,” Bookman said, playfully licking his
lips.
She spun around. “Don’t tell me you’re eating it, too.”
“Just a little. You should try it.”
“No way am I eating dog food.”
Agnes said, “Oh, you’re such a fussbudget. Always afraid to try something new. Ever since you were a little girl you’ve been afraid of new things.”
“I’m not afraid to try new things,” Hope said. “But I draw the line at dog food.”
“I don’t want to try it either,” I said.
Bookman placed his hand on my shoulder and it was like my entire body warmed five degrees, instantly. “Try a little.”
I had to now. “I’ll try it if Hope does.”
Hope looked at me and rolled her eyes. “Gee, thanks a lot. That means I’m the coward. Okay, fine. Gimme that bag.”
Agnes held the bag up and Hope and I reached in and removed one nugget each. Then we looked at each other and popped them into our mouths.
It was surprisingly tasty. Nutty, slightly sweet with a satisfying crunch. I could immediately see how the little pellets could become quite addictive. “They’re not awful,” I said.
“See?” Bookman said.
“I told you. What did you think? I wouldn’t eat them if they didn’t taste good,” Agnes said, bringing a whole handful to her mouth and tossing them back. She crunched loudly and turned her attention back to a soap opera.
“Well, I gotta go,” Hope said. “Dad needs me at the office. We’re behind on the insurance forms. See you guys later?”
“Yup. Catch you later,” Bookman said.
Hope opened the front door to leave. “Bye, Augusten. Have fun.”
“Okay, see ya.”
After she left, Bookman said, “So. Do you want to take a walk?”
We walked into the center of town, up to the Smith College campus, then beyond all the way to Cooley Dickinson Hospital. The whole way I was dying to tell him about me. I felt like we had so much in common—being gay, being stuck at this house, being without our own parents. And in a house full of girls, we were two guys. But still I couldn’t tell him. I told him everything else—about how my parents’ fights had gotten really bad, about their divorce, about how my mother had started to get a little weird, about how she was seeing Dr. Finch all the time now and I was basically living there because she couldn’t handle me.