I tried to pull away. I didn’t want her mouth on me.
The next thing I knew, Fern was running down the steps, then cutting across the lawn toward her car, her head bowed down in shame like she was ducking rain, her handbag clutched against her breasts.
I thought of her dry-cleaned son, Daniel. I thought of him passing me a basket of rolls at dinner. “My mom’s rolls are magic. Here, have one.”
When I walked back inside, my mother was sitting naked and cross-legged on the couch, smoking a More. Her breasts were large and sacklike, resting in her lap. She exhaled loudly, then brought her cigarette to her lips and sucked on it like a baby. I could not comprehend how anybody would want to do the things to her that Fern was doing. At that moment, it would have been easier for me to spontaneously grasp quantum string theory.
“I wish you enjoyed school more,” she said. “Although I guess it must be very dull compared to your life with me. Would you please hand me my nightgown?”
Her breezy attitude made me mad. She thought of nobody except herself. I yanked her nightgown off the arm of the couch and threw it at her, just missing her cigarette.
“Watch it, Augusten! I’ve got a lit cigarette in my hand.” She glared at me. “Don’t act out in anger. If you’re upset by this, talk to me about it.”
“I just don’t understand you. I mean, why? How could I not know? What?” I stammered. “How long have you and Fern been . . . together?”
My mother slipped the nightgown over her head, then stood to pull it down over her body. “Oh, I’ve loved Fern for a very long time. Our relationship became physical a number of months ago.”
“When we were living next door?”
“Augusten, those are private details from my personal life.” She held her cigarette between her first two fingers and poised her thumb on her temple. “It’s between Fern and I.” My mother always spoke like she was being interviewed by Ladies’ Home Journal. Like she was a celebrity.
So Fern and my mother had been lovers for months. My mother was a lesbian. I’d heard somewhere that being gay might be genetic. Maybe I’d inherited this from her. I worried, what else have I inherited? Would I also be crazy by the time I was thirty-five?
She walked into the kitchen and I followed. I watched her spoon Sanka into a coffee mug and then add hot tap water.
“I worry about you so,” she said, blowing into her cup before taking a loud sip. “I worry about you and school.”
“I can’t stand that place,” I said. “And Finch is always talking about how you can’t make a person do something when they turn thirteen. That when you turn thirteen you’re free.”
“Yes, I know he is. But the law says you have to go to school.”
“Well, fuck that.” I lit one of her cigarettes.
“Please don’t smoke my cigarettes. You have a pack of your own, although I wish you wouldn’t smoke.”
“Well, I do.”
“I know you do. I just said that I wish you wouldn’t.”
“Fine,” I said, crushing it out.
“No, don’t do that. I’ll smoke it,” she said, reaching for it. Then, “Well, I know I can’t force you to go to school. I can’t force you to do anything you don’t want to do. But I do wish you’d reconsider.”
How could she expect me to think about school at a time like this? Furthermore, if I had just stayed in school, look what I would have missed. Fern, the minister’s wife, was not only a card-carrying lesbian, but my mother’s lover.
Fern was a muff-diver. And she was diving on my mother’s muff.
“Does her family know?”
“No,” was my mother’s flat answer. She turned to me and said very seriously, “And it’s important that her husband and her children do not know what’s going on between us.” She said this like I was going to run right over there and say, “Hey, guess what! Guess what your mom is doing while she waits for the bread to rise!”
Then it was as if the lighting changed and a camera slid down a set of rails, zooming into her face. A musical score practically filled the room. She stood in front of the window so that her nightgown filtered the sunlight and her body glowed in silhouette through the fabric.
“All my life, I have been oppressed. And all my life I have worked hard to fight this oppression. When I was a little girl living in Cairo, Georgia, I had a black nanny named Elsa who lived in a shack on the other side of town.” She reached into her pocket and brought a cigarette to her lips, lighting it dramatically and exhaling a plume of smoke into the air. “In those days, black people were called niggers. And I knew that the word nigger was a dirty word. And it was a word filled with hatred and anger. And I knew that it was used to describe black people. I also knew that Elsa was no nigger.” She paused to look me straight in the eyes. “I knew it was wrong.” She walked across the room and faced the wall. “It has taken me all my life to find myself as an artist.” She turned to face me. “And to find myself as a woman. I have struggled against the oppression of my mother. And the oppression of your father. And for the first time in my life, I feel I am truly able to claim myself.”
Why listen to a teacher talk about how many quarters Nancy needs to buy six apples if they are four and a half cents each when I could listen to this?
“So Augusten, I hope I have your support in my relationship with Fern. Because at this stage in my life, I do not need and will not accept more oppression. I have spent years, my entire life fighting oppression. I hope I don’t have to fight you, too.” She exhaled, closing her eyes and letting her chin sag down to her chest.
It seemed that I should clap but I didn’t.
Instead I said, “Okay, I don’t care. Can I have five dollars?”
She smiled. “May I have five dollars. And yes, you may, if I have it. Go get my pocketbook and let me take a look.”
PURE PROJECTION
I
T WAS A BRILLIANT SATURDAY AFTERNOON, WITH THIN, wispy clouds high in the sky; the perfect day for a parade. As Hope and I blew up balloons and tied them to colorful ribbons, the doctor walked around the house in his underpants and wingtip shoes singing off-key, “To dreeeeam the impossible dreeeeeeeam . . .”
“Dad?” Hope called.
“TO FIGHT THE UNBEARABLE—”
“Dad! I need to know if you want us to tie balloons to your hat or just your umbrella.”
Finch came into the room. “I want balloons tied onto everything! Today is a day of joy! Balloons everywhere!”
Hope smiled. “Okay.”
I blew up a yellow balloon and handed it to Hope. She tied a red ribbon around it and then looped this through the band that ran around the doctor’s gray felt hat.
“We’ll need some more pink balloons for his hat,” Hope said. “Pink is Dad’s favorite color.”
In the end, we inflated about sixty balloons, tying them to his hat, his umbrella, looping them through the buttonholes of his long black wool coat that he intended to wear despite the heat. We tied balloons around our own waists and we even attached two balloons to Agnes, one over each breast.
“I’m not going out in public like this,” Agnes complained. “Give me more of them, so I can tie some somewhere else. I can’t have just these two.”
Overhearing Agnes’s complaint, the doctor stepped into the room, now dressed in his suit. “No, Agnes,” he boomed. “These are the only balloons you should have. You are the matriarch of the family, the Great Breast-Feeder, and that’s what these balloons symbolize.”
“Oh, phooey,” she said. “I don’t buy it.”
“I said, you will wear only those two balloons! They are your breastloons.”
“Breastloons, that’s funny, Dad. I like that.”
“You do?” he said, his eyebrows twitching. “Then you shall only wear two balloons too.”
Half an hour later, Dr. Finch headed out of his house wearing his balloon-covered coat, holding his balloon-covered rainbow umbrella high above his head. Pink balloons on pink ribbon tra
iled from his hat.
Hope and I followed a few paces behind him carrying a sign that read, UNITE THE FATHERS OF THE WORLD. TODAY IS WORLD FATHER’S DAY!!!!! I was covered with balloons; they were even tied through my belt loops. But Hope had only two balloons, one over each breast.
Hope’s younger sister Anne walked behind us with her young son, Poo. Anne was annoyed that she’d been tricked into being in the parade, and refused to wear the breastloons, but she did carry one. And Poo, of course, had six or seven balloons which were tied to his ankles and dragged on the ground.
Next was Natalie. She’d agreed to the breastloons, but also insisted on wearing sunglasses and a large hat so that nobody she knew would recognize her on the street.
My mother was at the tail end of the parade, looking extremely nervous and distracted. She held one small white balloon in her right hand and her More in the other. She kept enough of a distance so that it appeared she’d just been an average woman, out on an average walk, who just happened to come upon a small white balloon which she decided to pick up. I wasn’t sure if she was ashamed to be in the parade, or if she just needed to have her meds adjusted.
“I’m not feeling all that well today,” she’d told me earlier. “I’m in the middle of a new poem and it’s extremely draining.”
The parade marched down Perry Street, across Hawley and up Main Street, right through the center of town.
To attract attention, the doctor played songs from Man of La Mancha on his red kazoo.
Children shrieked with delight at the sight of him and the doctor always stopped for them saying, “Ho, ho, ho,” and handing their parents a mimeographed newsletter that read, “How Emotionally Immature Fathers Are Failing Their Children and Society in General, by B. S. Finch, M.D.”
The parents would smile politely, looking slightly worried, and then when we walked by, they would throw the fliers into the trash. I saw more than one mother inspect her child’s hand, to make sure nothing had been slipped into their fingers.
To me, the entire parade thing was so far beyond humiliating that it was okay. I suppose I was just comfortable with the concept of excess.
“Help my father educate the fathers of America,” Hope cried earnestly to people as we walked by. “Join The World Fathers’ Organization and together we can mend society.”
Occasionally we would pass a gaggle of five or six Smith freshmen who would back against a building, whispering and giggling as we walked by.
“You young girls, you innocent maidens, how many of you have strong, mature, potent fathers? Which one of you would like to explore my testicles?” the doctor asked, playfully.
Their smiles would instantly vanish and I could see true fear in their eyes. Obviously, they had been warned of many things in life. But not this.
The doctor would then walk on, whistling.
Once or twice, we were stopped by police. But when Dr. Finch presented them with his driver’s license showing he was an M.D., we were allowed to continue. It was amazing to me what you could get away with just by being in the medical community.
My mother lagged behind, pausing to browse in bookstore windows, stopping once to run into a shoe store and try on a pair of sandals.
“What’s the matter with you?” I asked her.
“I’m having a difficult time with Fern,” she said. “I love her very much, but her sanctimonious crap just really gets on my nerves. Fern is a very controlling woman.”
“I’m sorry she’s turned out to be such a bitch,” I said.
“Well,” my mother said heavily, “it’s her husband, Ed, too. He’s not at all supportive of Fern’s relationship with me. And that just creates additional stress. Fern refuses to leave her family. Even though they’re all old enough to take care of themselves. I mean, her youngest daughter is almost your age.”
“Well, Deirdre, I hope you work it out.” My mother had told me not to call her Mom, to call her by her first name instead. She liked to think of us more as friends than as mother and son. It was healthier and more mature, she claimed.
“Thank you,” she said. “I hope so too.” Then she brightened. “Did I tell you that I had a poem accepted by Yankee Magazine?”
Life with the Finches wasn’t all parades.
I’d been in the spare bedroom listening to Donna Summer and indulging my obsession with my hair by conditioning it with KMS Repair when I’d first become aware of the argument. The shouting was muffled and distant, coming from the other side of the house, but I could clearly make out certain words rising above “Faster and Faster to Nowhere.”
“Cunt!” This came from Natalie.
Then, “Fucking cunt!” from Hope.
At once, I picked the needle up off the record and headed out of my room. I would need to sneak down the hallway and then lurk. If I’d heard this fight over Donna Summer—it was not to be missed.
Fights were the essence of 67 Perry Street. We were a vineyard and fights were our special reserve.
“No, Hope. It’s not about you. You think every fucking thing is about you because you’re so pathetic and have no life of your own.”
“Goddamn it, Natalie. Why are you so hostile? What did I do to you? Why do you hate me so much?”
Natalie laughed nastily. “Pure projection. You’re the one who hates me but you won’t admit it, you repressed bitch.”
“I don’t hate you, Natalie,” Hope screamed with hatred.
“Denial,” Natalie snapped back.
My vocabulary had increased dramatically over the past year. Projection, denial, repression, passive-aggressive, Lithium, Melaril.
In addition to calling each other standard names like bitch and whore, the Finches incorporated Freud’s stages of psychosexual development into their arsenal of invectives.
“You’re so oral. You’ll never make it to genital! The most you can ever hope for is to reach anal, you immature, frigid old maid,” Natalie yelled.
“Stop antagonizing me,” Hope shouted. “Just stop transferring all this anger onto me.”
“Your avoidance tactics are not going to work, Miss Hope,” Natalie warned. “I’m not going to let you just slink away from me. You hate me and you have to confront me.”
I glanced over at the grand piano and thought of happier times. Just last week, a chronic schizophrenic patient of the doctor’s named Sue had played show tunes while Natalie, Hope and I stood around the piano singing. “There’s no business like show business, like no business I know . . .” Sue would play for as long as we wanted her to, provided we didn’t use her name. She insisted on being called “Dr. F.”
“You need to talk to Dad, Natalie. Something’s wrong with you. I’m telling you this because I’m your sister and I love you. You’ve got to see Dad. Please make an appointment.”
I heard Natalie stomping and for a moment, I worried she would come into the living room where I was sitting. She would see me and know that I’d been eavesdropping and then somehow pull me into the middle of this thing. But the stomping wasn’t because Natalie was coming into this room. It was because Natalie had wrestled her sister onto the sofa.
“Okay, you bitch, say it.”
“Get off of me,” Hope said, and I could hear she was having a hard time breathing. Natalie was a big girl.
“Admit it!”
“Natalie, get up. I can’t breathe.”
“Then you’re gonna die.”
There was a thick silence and then a strangled-sounding Hope. “Alright, alright, I hate you. There, are you happy now?”
Natalie let out a belchy, “Fuck it.” She stomped out of the room and up the stairs. “This is all such bullshit.” From the top of the stairs she shouted, “You will never have any emotional maturity.”
Hope screamed back. “I’ll get a restraining order placed against you, Natalie. You’re out of control and I’ll do it.”
Natalie slammed her door.
The fight was over.
It had turned out to only be a four.
Maybe a four-pointfive on a scale of one through ten; ten meaning police involvement or committal to a psychiatric hospital. The problem was, there was nobody else around to join in. I had encountered an interesting principle: the more people, the better the fight.
Usually, they started with just two people bickering over something small. Like what to watch on TV. Then a third person would enter the room and see two people screaming over the TV and they’d decide to moderate, only they’d end up taking a side. Eventually, someone else would get sucked in.
The most excellent fights involved five or more people. Eventually the fight would be resolved the way all disputes were resolved: Dr. Finch. He would be called at the office or the arguing group would travel en masse to his office, a hostile collective gang, and oust whatever patient he was seeing at the time. “Family emergency,” someone would say. And the patient, whether a potential suicide or somebody suffering from a multiple personality disorder, would be transferred to the waiting room to drink Sanka with Cremora while Finch solved the dispute.
Finch believed that anger was the crux of mental illness. He believed that anger, unless it was expressed freely, would destroy a person. This explained the constant fighting in the house. Since they were tiny, the Finch children had been encouraged not just to sing, dance and jump rope but also to vent.
Anger was like the ground hamburger of our existence. Its versatility was inspiring. There was Anger Turned Inward, Repressed Anger, Misguided Anger. There were Acts Made in Anger, Things Said in Anger and people who might very well die if they didn’t Face Their Anger.
So we screamed at each other constantly. It was like a competition and the prize was mental health. Every so often Finch would say, “Hope has been expressing a lot of healthy anger lately. I truly believe she’s moved up to the next level in the stages of her emotional development. She’s leaving the anal and moving into the phallic.” So then everybody hated Hope because she walked around being so smug and emotionally mature.