Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs Page A

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.
     
    Although his peacockian displays of anger and his high decibel baritone voice prevented most people from directly confronting him, there were times when the doctor himself was the target of someone’s “healthy expression.” Usually Agnes’s.
    The doctor and Agnes had been married for what seemed like hundreds of years. When she’d met him, he was a handsome, promising young medical student. She was an attractive and traditional Catholic girl. Surely, she could have had no idea what she was getting herself into.
    She reminded me of a scatterbrained old Cadillac that had been driven into the ground but somehow kept on starting, without fuss. Normally, Agnes was just there in the background, wordlessly agreeing, endlessly sweeping, making herself invisible and generally staying on the sidelines.
    So it was especially exciting when Agnes flew into a rage. And all her rages were directed at the doctor.
    The problem was that the doctor had a mistress. Actually, he had three of them, and he called each his wife. He was fond of saying, “Agnes is only my wife in the legal sense. Emotionally and spiritually we are not married to each other.”
    Agnes didn’t seem to mind this except when the doctor threw it in her face. And when he threw it in her face it was always with his favorite wife, Geraldine Payne.
    Geraldine was the female equivalent of a diesel Mercedes