“Yeah.”
“Sea roaches. That’s what lobsters are. Roaches of the sea.”
“Like tuna, the chicken of the sea.”
“Chicken’s a biological reptile, you know,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that biologically, chicken is a reptile. Instead of scales, they have feathers. But they both come from eggs.”
“That’s disgusting.”
“Shit. I wish I’d remembered to bring my earrings.” She touched her earlobe. “I hate it when I forget something. I don’t ever want to forget anything.”
“Remember it all.”
“Yes,” she said.
* * *
The Lobster Pot was touristy. The sign was a giant plastic red lobster wearing a bib. It was our kind of place.
“You need shoes,” the waitress said when we walked in the door. She had frazzled blond hair with long dark roots. Her lips were wrinkled. She looked twenty going on fifty.
“We lost them,” Natalie said.
I moved behind Natalie slightly. She was better than me at pulverizing her way through normalcy.
“Look guys,” the waitress said, eyes darting across the room to check her tables, “I’m not allowed to serve you without shoes. You have to wear shoes here. It’s like the law or whatever.”
I watched a small boy at one of the tables frown at his father and sulk into the back of the booth. The father pointed at a napkin on the table; the boy shook his head no.
“Look, we’ll just sit down and nobody will notice,” Natalie said. “We’ll give you a big tip.”
The waitress was being mentally tugged away by her tables. People wanted water and butter and extra napkins and their checks. “Okay, fine. Just sit down.”
Natalie turned to me and smiled. “See?”
It was like her McUniform had given her some sort of authority. “It would have been a bummer if they didn’t let us in.”
“No shit,” she said, straightening her shirt.
We had taken our shoes off in the motel and decided not to put them back on. They felt confining.
We took a booth near the door. I slid in first and then Natalie slid in on the same side. “Hey,” I said. “Go sit on the other side.”
“I wanna sit here.” She looked at me and fluttered her eyelashes. “Next to you, my honey.”
I shoved her. “C’mon, Natalie, there’s not enough room. Move.”
She slid up against me and pressed. I hated it when she got like that. She was in her fat mood. When she gets into a fat mood, she just wants to sit on everything. I laughed so that I didn’t give her the satisfaction of knowing she’d pissed me off. “C’mon, move your ass to the other side and let’s order.”
She sighed dramatically. “Fine. Snobby Augusten doesn’t want to sit next to his best friend in the whole world, Piggy Natalie.” She slid out of the booth and sat across from me and I felt relief. Then I felt depressed because she was all the way across the table. “Come back and sit over here.”
She leapt up, smacking the tops of her thighs on the underside of the table, and snuggled in against me. “That’s better,” she said.
When the waitress came over we ordered two lobsters and two Cokes. “And a side of fries,” Natalie added at the last minute.
“What’s going to become of us?” I said.
“We’re going to eat lobster and get fatter and go home and be depressed and wish we could throw it up and . . .”
“No, I mean in the long term, you fool.”
“Ho hum,” she said, pouting. “Why do you always have to drag me back down to reality?”
“We can’t just go on like this forever. I mean, look at us. You’re seventeen, I’m sixteen and we’re barefoot at a lobster place and that’s basically all that’s happening in our lives.”
“I know,” she said. “We have to do something. What do you want to be when you grow up? Are you still going to be a hairdresser to the stars?”
Without knowing why, I answered, “I’m going to run away to New York City and become a writer.”
Natalie looked at me. “You should, you know. You’re the writer in your family.”
I laughed. “Oh, barf. I am not going to be a writer. I’d never even get into college.”
“Sure you would,” Natalie said. And the look on her face told me that she believed this completely and felt slightly sad that I didn’t see it and believe it, too.
“Well, thanks.”
“You underestimate yourself, you know.”
The waitress brought our Cokes and we both slurped them without the straws. “How?”
“Because you’ve always been a writer. For as long as I’ve known you you’ve had that pointy nose of yours tucked into some notebook. You’ve lived with my family and noticed every single thing about us. God, it’s spooky how good you are at imitating people.”
“I can’t be a writer,” I said. “I don’t even write. All I do is scribble stuff in notebooks. I don’t even know what a verb is or how to type. And I never read. You have to read, like, Hemingway to be a writer.”
“You don’t have to read Hemingway, he’s just some fat old drunk man,” she said. “You just have to take notes. Like you do already.”
“Well, I don’t know. I’ll probably end up as a male prostitute.”
“You can’t do that,” she laughed. “Your ass is too skinny.”
“Ha, ha. If only I had your ass.”
“If you had my ass, you could rule the world.”
“So what about you? What do you want to be when you grow up?”
“Maybe a psychologist or a singer.”
“A psychologist or a singer?” I said. “How similar.”
“Shut up,” she said, slapping me on the arm. “I’m allowed to be two things. If you get to be a writer and be all those different people, then I get to be at least two things.”
“You should do it, Natalie. Smith would definitely let you in. They’d be lucky to have you, you know.”
“Oh, I don’t know. It’s not that easy.”
“That’s why you have to do it,” I said.
“That’s why you have to do it, too.”
Natalie leaned in and put her elbows on the table. “Don’t you ever just feel like we’re chasing something? Something bigger. I don’t know, it’s like something that only you and I can see. Like we’re running, running, running?”
“Yeah,” I said. “We’re running alright. Running with scissors.”
Our food arrived and we both reached for the same sea roach at once.
“They were right here and now they’re gone. The fucking maid stole my earrings.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m positive,” Natalie said.
She’d already turned the motel room upside down looking for them; the sheets were all off the bed and wadded into a mound on the chair; the cushions of the chair were on the floor, the TV had been moved, all the mini soaps opened.
“Maybe you lost them someplace else.”
“I didn’t,” she said with authority. “I’m absolutely positive that I left them right here next to the phone. I remember setting them down. Right here.” She stabbed at the table next to the phone.
“So what are we gonna do?”
“We’re gonna call the fucking manager and make him get them back.”
I felt sick from the lobster and the fries.
Natalie called the front desk. She explained the situation to the person who answered and was then placed on hold. A new person came on the line and she explained the situation all over again. Then she screamed, “No, motherfucker, I did not lose them. I left them right here. Right next to the phone. My friend and I went on a whale watch and out to dinner and we came back and the room was clean and the earrings are gone. Can you call the maid at home and tell her to bring me my earrings please?”
Then she was listening. And I watched as her face transformed from annoyance to anger to rage to complete calm. Her foot stopped tapping a rhythm on the carpet. She hung up.
“So he says his maid didn’t steal them. He says I lost them.”
“Fuck,” I said. “Oh well.”
“Oh well?” She looked at me with her eyebrows raised. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means, oh well. No more earrings. It sucks, but that’s life.”
Natalie folded her arms across her chest, bunching her uniform under the arms. “You have a very bad attitude,” she told me. “Haven’t you ever heard the phrase, ‘when life gives you lemons, make lemonade’?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Here,” she said bending over and gripping the side of the mattress. “Help me with this thing.”
“Huh?”
“Help me lift this fucking mattress. We’re going to turn a negative situation into a fun situation.”
We were able to ease the mattress into the swimming pool out front without making so much as a splash.
The television set, the chair and both nightstands didn’t make much of a splash either.
“Hey motherfucker,” Natalie screamed toward the front office of the motel. “I did like you said and looked everywhere and I still didn’t find my earrings.”
As the manager opened the door to see what all the shouting was about, Natalie and I tore off into the cool, salty Hyannis night. I grinned as I watched her sprint ahead of me, her long hair whipping behind her. Just your everyday McDonald’s counter girl, on the run.
YOU’RE GONNA MAKE IT AFTER ALL
W
HEN
I
WAS SEVENTEEN AND
N
ATALIE WAS EIGHTEEN, WE
moved into our own small apartment in South Hadley, Massachusetts. Natalie had enrolled in Holyoke Community College and the apartment was close to school. Inspired by her, I took—and passed—my GED exam. This wasn’t difficult, as the questions were things like “Spell
cat
.” Then I, too, enrolled in the community college.
As a pre-med student.
To pay my way, I applied for and received a slew of student loans and a Pell grant. Most of which I spent on new clothes and a 1972 Volkswagen Fastback that I chose not for mechanical soundness but because it didn’t have any scratches and was showroom-shiny.
The best part about being a pre-med student was that my laminated student I.D. stated my major: pre-med. I carried it in the front pocket of my jeans so that I could remove it throughout the day and gaze at it, reminding myself why I was there. When overwhelmed by a tedious microbiology lecture, I would simply pull out my I.D. card, look at my picture along with the words “Pre-med” and imagine myself at a future point in time double-parking my Saab convertible.
Natalie worked very hard, studying well past midnight each night. She was taking more advanced classes than I, so we didn’t study for the same courses together. This meant that I was forced to study alone. Instead, I sat in my small bedroom and typed short stories on my manual typewriter for English class.
English 101 was mostly about the technicalities of language—verbs, adverbs, what’s a split infinitive, what’s a double negative. I found all of this mind-numbing, so instead, believing my professor would be thrilled, I wrote ten-page essays on such topics as
My Trip to the Depressing Mountain Farms Mall, Why Are There So Many Brands of Hair Conditioner?
and My
Childhood Was More Screwed Up Than Yours
.
By midterms, it seemed I was going to fail English class. As well as chemistry, anatomy, physiology, microbiology and even choral.
The only bright spot was that my English professor routinely wrote notes on my essays. “
Wonderful and strange, but this was not an assignment. If you could focus on the core materials in the course, I believe it would help your creative writing. You do show a flair
.”
My anatomy professor also took pity on me and called me into her office one afternoon after an exam.
“Close the door,” she said, sliding off her faux tortoiseshell bifocals and resting them on top of her desk. She was a mannish woman—handsome, with a fierce intelligence. In fact, she wrote the published textbook from which the class was taught.
I was certain she was going to inform me that I had a gift for science unlike any she’d ever seen. Perhaps she would tell me that I could skip community college and go straight to Harvard Medical School.
Instead, she picked up my exam from the pile of papers in front of her and read from it. “Augusten. On the test a question was asked: Identify the structure A. And you wrote, ‘I believe this is a tibial tuberocity. But it could also be one of the foramans that I failed to memorize. Thank God for malpractice insurance, huh?’”
I smiled at my witty answer.
She said, “Do you really want to be a doctor? Or do you want to play a doctor on a soap opera?”
At first, I thought this was a terrible insult. But then I saw her face, saw that she was not being nasty, merely asking an honest question. I said, “I really want the respect of a doctor. And I want the white jacket. And I want the title.
But
. . . I guess I really would like to have my own time slot opposite a game show.”
“You seem to me,” she said, leaning back in her swivel chair, “to have a very creative side. Why not
major
in something creative? English? Or maybe theater?”
My shoulders slumped and my throat went dry. I felt defeated. I explained that I was failing English. “I
would
like the writing part of English, but there’s no writing in it. Except for the stuff I do on my own. It’s all things I don’t need. Like memorizing prepositional phrases. I don’t need to memorize prepositional phrases. You’d think English would be about writing. But it’s not.”
“You have to learn a lot of things you may not want to learn, may not feel you need to know. Before English Composition there is English 101. It’s a building process, you establish a foundation and then you build and build and build.”
“I guess,” I said. I knew she was right. And I knew that I was not cut out for school, even college. Ironically, I had been excited to go to college, but in order to be able to do it, I really needed study habits and knowledge I would have learned in high school.
Oops
.
So I withdrew from school before the semester was out.
And a week after I withdrew, one evening when Natalie and I were in our little apartment, my mother called.
She said she needed to see me. That she would be over in an hour to pick me up.