Chapter 3 run with scissors (2)

Mom put the cigarette in her mouth: "I really don't know." Hope sat up on the sofa. "Answer me, Deldera," said the doctor in a commanding tone, "do you not see that she has sneaked into my room and encroached on my private space, which is the abomination of a bird's nest?" Mom thought for a while and said, "Yeah, I can see what you mean, no one likes their place being taken over, and it's really annoying to have people mess with their stuff without their permission and disgust." "Then, you question her with these words!" the doctor ordered.

I turned away, not wanting to get involved in the matter. "But, I..." "Deldra, speak up and tell her how you feel!" Mom looked at Hope, as if she wanted to say: What should I do?I really have no choice.Then she said, "I don't think it's right...well...that you should be breaking into...well...your father's room without permission." "It's none of your business, Deldera," Hope retorted, her eyes blazing with anger. My mother picked up the cigarette again and took a puff.She asked to leave again: "I really think it's time for me to go, I'd love to go get a glass of orange juice."

The doctor took her by the arm. "Wait a minute, Deldera, are you allowing her to talk to you like this? God, Deldera, are you her servant?" My mother turned quickly. "Of course I'm not Hope's servant, Finch. It's none of my business, she's right. It's between you and your daughter." "Smelly shit!" Dr. Finch yelled, "You're a bloody escape!" "It's certainly not an escape," my mother argued.She threw the cigarette butt on the floor and stomped it out with the thumb of her sandal. "I don't want to get involved in this kind of thing." She flicked off a few tiny fluffs on the round lapel of the black sweater with her hands-those fluffs were actually her subjective imagination, and they didn't actually exist.

Hope said: "Dad, you are too much, you'd better let Deldera leave here, this is between you and me." "You—" Dr. Finch pointed at Hope, "Get out of here immediately, get out of here!" Hope was startled, leaned back, and slumped on the sofa. "What do you think, young man?" The doctor looked at me. "I think you're all nuts," I said. "Okay, have personality." He laughed, and then he turned to Hope: "Go back and answer the phone, make a fresh cup of coffee, do what you should do, you should be a responsible woman. Don't think you are My daughter can be on top of me and sleep all day, like what?"

Hope got off the sofa: "Come with me, Augustine." She led me into the reception room. "What's going on here?" I asked.Hope sat at her reception desk, and I sat at the window sill, looking out the window and watching the traffic go by eight stories below. "My dad just wanted to help your mom," Hope said. "He's not really mad at me." "But it looks like he's mad at you!" "No, he's just trying to help your mom," Hope explained. "He's trying to get her in touch with her anger. Your mom has held back her anger for so long that she's sick."

Our pickup truck was driving down Perry Avenue.My mother and Dr. Finch have made an appointment to meet today at his house.Hope told me that if you visit her house as a guest, you will never regret it. "You'll meet interesting people and you'll meet interesting things." I finally got to see Dr. Finch's mansion, and for me, even visiting the private residence of the great star Joan The second visit was even more exciting—the one I was about to visit was the residence of an American doctor. Today I'm fully dressed, a pair of gray trousers pressed very neatly, a crisp white T-shirt over a navy blue blouse.I usually dress like this for big occasions.And, at the last moment before heading out, I put on a gold-plated ID bracelet with my last name and birthday engraved on it.

There are neat houses on both sides of the street, each more majestic than the other.The fence in front of the gate is neatly trimmed, the fireplace chimney of duplex structure rises from the ground, the tall front gate is painted with shiny black paint, and the street in front of the gate is dotted with fences, which has the style of New England Financial Street, full of wealthy families , imposing. "It's amazing," I said with admiration, "I'm going to be a doctor too." As we drove up and to the right, I saw an isolated house.It is not white and immaculate like other houses, this one is pink and looks a little small and humble.From a distance, it looks lonely, and compared with its neighbors, it is really different. "Surely not here, right?" I asked cautiously.

My mom turned the steering wheel and pulled the car into the curb. "Here it is," she said. "Impossible!" I exclaimed incredulously. "Here it is, Augustine." She turned off the engine and threw the keys into the bag. "Wait a minute," I was very surprised: "This...impossible!" "This is Dr. Finch's house," she said firmly. We got out of the car and I put my hands over my eyes, trying to block the direct sunlight, and looked at the house.The pink paint was peeling, exposing the grain and shape of the wood.All the windows have no shutters, but are covered with thick plastic so that outsiders cannot see inside.And the lawn—at least it used to be a lawn—is really nothing more than a piece of hard dirt, at first glance, it looks like a traffic artery that has been trampled by many people.The deformed car parked on the side of the road next to the corner of the house was an old, gray Buick-Bluebird with the front hubcap missing.

My mom walked across the filthy lot to the front yard, and I followed closely behind.She rang the doorbell, which made a strange electrical sound that was deafening.I can imagine a wire passing through the wall and sparking, making this sound, which is reminiscent of a chainsaw heard from a distance. No one opened the door.But I could hear someone running in the room, and the footsteps were very clear.There is also the sound of pressing the keys of the piano, followed by a heavy impact, which makes the heart jump. She pressed the doorbell again and put her hand on it without letting go. After a while, the door opened, and a somewhat hunchbacked man appeared.This is a middle-aged woman, her tangled and messy hair is somewhat gray, and it can even be said to be purple.She was holding an electric bottle opener with a long cord that trailed to the ground.

"Hello, Deldera," said the hunchbacked woman, "come in." She turned and waved the bottle opener in the air, beckoning us into the room.Her body is really like a "candy cane", except without the red striped packaging.Her body was leaning forward with her head hanging down to the ground, which made me imagine that before a plane suddenly crashed to the ground, some passengers would inevitably adopt this posture of bowing and shrinking their necks when they were frightened. My mom said, "Thank you, Agnes," and she went inside. I follow behind.The image of this woman reminds me of the protagonist played by Edith Bunker in the movie "Family Battle", but her posture is very ugly.

"Hello," the hunchback said to me, "you must be Augustine. Am I pronouncing your name? Is it Augustine? Am I pronouncing it correctly?" "Correct," I replied with practiced politeness, "nice to meet you." "I'm Dr. Finch's wife. You two come here as if you were at home. Don't be shy. I'll call the doctor right now." She turned and walked along the stairs leading to the second floor. Walk down the narrow, dark corridor. The house smells horrible, like a wet dog.Is there any other smell, is it hard boiled eggs?And the room was so messy, the long carpet I was standing on had its pile polished, showing weaves and holes, and the missing part seemed to be hidden under the wooden floor.I walked around my mother, and I was especially attracted to the layout on the right, where there were tall windows, a huge fireplace, and a large sofa beside it that had been overturned.I walked around the sofa and looked at the opposite room, which was also a mess, with clothes, newspapers and a colorful plastic life buoy piled up in disorder. "No doctor will live here," I whispered to my mother. "Hush——" she lowered her voice and held my arm tightly, "You have to behave yourself." I looked down at the ironed polyester pants and I saw some hairs stuck to it.There was a strange animal hair on my knee, and I pulled it out and threw it away, watching it float to the floor.I looked at the floor and saw more hairs, all over the place!They were scattered on the carpet, and formed into thick little balls, distributed in the corners near the wall. I've never seen such filth and the people who live here are appalling.It is unimaginable that an American doctor would live in this ghost place! "I... I'd better wait for you in the car." I said. "You can't wait for me in the car, it will take at least several hours, and in that case, you are too rude. You have to stay here and get along with the doctor's children." Mom went to see Dr. Finch.After a while, two scruffy girls, both with long, greasy hair and dirty clothes, came down the corridor.One is Vicky and the other is Natalie, I've seen them in the doctor's office before.Natalie is a year older than me, she is thirteen.Vicky is fourteen.Natalie is okay, normal, Vicky is weird, she doesn't even live at home, Natalie told me Vicky lives with a bunch of hippies now. "You're really well dressed," said Vicky, grinning dryly. "Are you going to church?" She giggled. I really hate her.Her denim looks garish, with all the colors of the rainbow embroidered into it, and there's a fake leaf on her knee. "Come and play with us," Vicky said, "we'll keep you busy." Then they dragged me away. Natalie picked up a grocery bag on the couch, pulled out a quart or so of baked potato chips, popped them into her mouth, and chewed noisily, dropping a handful of crumbs onto her striped shorts.She wiped her bare knees with a handkerchief. "It's a nuisance to eat. Damn, I hate Charles Nelson Leary, who does he think he is?" She turned on the TV, glanced at it, and said dismissively.There was a marriage show called Good Guys and Good Girls on TV, and Charles Nelson Leary was a special guest, a movie actor. "He's nothing more than shit," Vicky put in. I stared at the screen and put one hand above my head.I can feel how smooth my hair is under the touch of my palm, which makes me so comfortable.I like to watch the TV show "Good Guys, Good Girls." "Let's just watch this," I suggested. Vicky pulled a chunk of goo from the arm of the couch and slammed it onto the floor. "Bah, this thing is disgusting!" Seeing this, their cat, Floyd, immediately jumped from the bookshelf and threw himself on the pile of goo on the floor. Natalie lifted the grocery bag to her mouth, turned it upside down, and poured the remaining potato chips into her mouth.She tapped the bottom of the grocery bag again, making a snare drum sound.She then threw the bag to Floyd. Floyd flung himself at it quickly, clutching it tightly in both paws. Vicky laughed out loud. I let out a long breath.I remember once, in Dr. Finch's office, they actually opened the window and threw several sardines down the street below on the heads of passers-by.They also throw the coffee can out of the window, but Hope stops them. What surprised me even more was my mother's decision to keep me at Dr. Finch's house for a week while she was put into a motel at Dr. Finch's arrangement because my dad might hurt us, exactly. Call it murder.Mom believed that Dr. Finch was the only one who could protect us. I can't imagine staying in such a strange family for a week!I tried my best to change my mother's mind, but it was all in vain.She left me without hesitation and left. I listened to the faint sound of the wall clock on the wall: one second, one minute, one hour... For a moment, a vision appeared in my mind: I picked up the electric knife hanging on the rail of the door curtain, Up and down, click, click.Poor my mother, all her fingers were cut off by me. The next afternoon, I saw Jolanie, a patient at Dr. Finch's house.She howled like a wolf in the house, and Hope told me that she was a typical obsessive-compulsive mental patient. She lived in the doctor's house for two years and never went downstairs.Am I sharing a house with a mentally disturbed woman?Then I realized that I had already shared a house with a mental patient, a lunatic, and that person was my mother. In five and a half days, my mother will come to pick me up.I don't think she would lie, she let me live here for a week at most.When she and the doctor left, she told me that I would have to live with their family for a while, so I think I may actually live here for more than a week.Maybe live here today, but live somewhere else tomorrow!Or live for a few weeks in a row is also unknown.I could sense that it was getting harder and harder for my mom to spend even a day alone with me, and my dad didn't want to be with me either.He found himself a mole-like subterranean apartment under a dwelling deep in the woods.I've only been there once since their divorce. For a few seconds, I suddenly felt a boundless loneliness enveloped me, and I felt so alone.I'm like a stuffed animal in the house.I stuffed other plush toys on the shelf in the cabinet (I consider that I am not too young, I don’t want to stay with them every day), make love every day, and it falls between the wall and the cabinet , alone with the darkness, and I never bothered to take it out. Then an even more dire thought entered my mind: What if Jolanie planned to stay here for at most another week?Everyone else is busy in their own way, and when the time comes, I will be the only one left in this huge and unfamiliar space, so what should I do?I just don't want to think about it. I stopped biting my lips and tongue desperately.My eyes looked straight ahead, a little dull, a little dazed, a little absent-minded.God, what if I was cheated by their partnership?What if I live here not for a week but for a year or more? There's no way this could happen, I told myself.Don't get nervous, it's only been a week. Suddenly, I heard a banging sound from the kitchen, which echoed for a long time in the hall, which made me smile.I'd like to know, what happened there again, what kind of commotion?Is the kitchen more cluttered than ever?In a way, the turmoil in this family was a rare reprieve, at least for me to ignore the fact that neither of my parents seemed to want me anymore.If I let myself think about it too much, there's no guarantee I'll make it through, so I hold my breath and listen intently, expecting to hear more.It's a pity that there is silence and calm over there. I looked down at my pants.I noticed an unsightly stain, it was an oil stain and I'm afraid it won't wash off anymore.I shrugged, stood up, and ran over to the kitchen, I had to see what kind of little disaster had happened there just now. A week passed, and my mother took me back from the doctor's house.She is a day late.At that time, I didn't hear the exciting knock on the door, I didn't enjoy the warmth of a pair of arms hugging me, and I didn't experience the suffocating kiss.She just parked her gray pickup truck next to the house and sat in it waiting for me.I don't know how long she waited here, I just saw a car parked in front.I noticed it was my mother, so I ran out quickly. "You're finally here!" I yelled.I jumped out of the house and ran out barefoot.I ran across the dirty front yard and onto the side of the street.The windows of the pickup truck were kept tightly shut. Her eyes continued to stare ahead, even though I spent half a day banging on the window glass hard. The exhaust from the pickup truck kept splashing onto the curb.It looked dirty and tired, and the engine roared limply, as if at any moment it would fall out of the car and onto the road, dead. I tapped on the window again, and my mom finally blinked and turned to look at me.She rolled down the window slowly and poked her head out. "Do you want to go to Amherst? Don't you want to bring your own things?" Her words were cold. I turned and ran back.I noticed the door was open.I guess it doesn't matter, someone will turn it off.I didn't mind being barefoot either, I had plenty of shoes at the apartment in Amherst anyway.I bypassed the front of the small truck, ran to the co-pilot's seat, and hurriedly climbed up. "Where did you go? How did it turn out? What happened?" I hurled questions at my mother as she drove away from Dr. Finch's house toward Amherst. She didn't answer any of my questions, just stared straight ahead.Her attention wasn't on the road ahead, though, nor was she looking in the rearview mirror of her pickup truck or lighting her favorite Moore.So why is she so silent and what is she thinking? She finally came back to pick me up, just like she promised me. But where has she been these days? In the past year, the more I have been with Dr. Finch's family, the more I have felt the change in myself, and the speed has been amazing.I'm like a pack of instant coffee, and they're like hot water. Instead of double knit pants, I put on a pair of Vicki's well-worn jeans that Natalie found in a pile of stuff next to the clothes dryer.Instead of trying various paints to make my hair smooth and flat, I instead let it look a little crooked and messy. "You look better like this," Natalie said. "You really look like the drummer in the blondie band. You're so cool." It's only been a few months, but I feel like I've grown up two years. Love the change.There is so much freedom in this family, and everyone is so tolerant and easy-going.They didn't treat me like I was treated by a young child. But the more generous and tolerant their family was, the more I worried about how they would react to my deepest secrets.I don't know from which day, I began to suspect that I have homosexual tendencies.I suspect that I am gay because I seldom interact with girls and avoid them in fear. On the contrary, some boys with chic temperament and sexy body make me feel admiration.I wrote down all my feelings in the diary, and almost every word and sentence was their shadow. I felt panic and confusion at first, but gradually I became calm, and firmly believed that I was doomed to miss women in love in this life. Once, I saw the largest gay parade in the world in San Francisco, which was an eye-opener.That day, Market Street was besieged, with three floors inside and three floors outside, and I was excited to drill among the crowd.Homosexuals from all over the country perform various performances along the street, some women dress up as men, and some men dress up as women.Their appearance is so lifelike that it is difficult to see flaws at first glance.They kept throwing papers, badges, necklaces, whatever, at the crowd.Those colorful necklaces are a signature adornment of gays and lesbians, and many wear them regularly.After "grabbing" two necklaces and hanging them around my neck, I happily joined the parade and "registered" as a gay member.I remember when the parade lasted for three hours, the gays were excited, and the audience seemed even more excited, although I can't figure out why they were excited too.In the procession, some people held up the sign saying "God is Gay", and some councilors also came to participate in the parade in order to run for the mayor. Of course, while I myself never thought it was wrong, someone was telling it over and over on TV how sick and horrible gay people were.I'm referring to that famous TV presenter, Anita Bryant.I think her ideas are too extreme, too arbitrary, and too tasteless.I don't have any affection for her anymore.I'm not sure what the Doc's family thought, partly because they were Catholics, and it seemed to me that Catholics generally had a conservative and strict attitude towards life.I was worried that being gay would make them feel like a bolt from the blue, and they would soon be overwhelmed and keep me at arm's length. However, when I told Hope about it, she actually said, "Great!" This was much beyond my expectation. One night we were walking around her house and chatting.I hesitated for twenty minutes before timidly revealing the secret. "Actually, I guessed it a long time ago." She blurted out.She turned her head and smiled at me. "Really?" I was taken aback.Do I smell like a gay man?Or was my obsession with excessive or even abnormal cleanliness giving her strong hints?It's one thing to be gay, but quite another to look gay. "My god-brother Neil, he's gay too," Hope said.She stopped and stroked a cat on the side of the road with her hand. "Really?" That is to say, there is another gay in Dr. Finch's family? "Yes, Neil Bookman. He used to be one of Papa's patients, and now he's Papa's godson." "How old is he?" I wondered, maybe he was about my age, maybe a year older? "Thirty-three," Hope said. Hehe, such a big person can be adopted! "where does he live?" "Well," Hope explained as we walked on, "he used to live in the storage room, but he moved out a few months ago in a fit of rage because Dad didn't give him a better room. Married women live together. The storage room remains, in a way, like a makeshift home for him.” My heart was beating violently, it couldn't be faster.It never occurred to me that there was another gay in Dr. Finch's family, and he had just moved out. "He comes here a lot. I can call him if you want. You two might get on well, and I think you'll like each other." Except for that parade in San Francisco, I've never seen real, live gays in person before.I usually just see it on TV.I wonder if the word "homosexual" is written on the forehead of a homosexual. A week later, Hope called to tell me that Bookman would be here in the afternoon.Immediately I took the bus from my apartment in Amherst.