Running With Scissors_ A Memoir - Augusten Burroughs [49]
The difference, one difference between us, is that this is her home, her family, whereas I am only borrowing them.
I don’t know which of us is at an advantage.
Somehow, my cigarette had burned down. I lit another and Natalie said, “Pass me that pack,” and I did. I slid it across the table, and crumbs stuck to the cellophane.
Our lives were so small then that we both noticed them, the crumbs on the cellophane wrapper of my cigarettes. Natalie had nails, so she picked them off. She flicked them off. Crumb by crumb.
I had used the last match.
Natalie stuck her fingers out and as if psychic, I knew exactly what she needed. I slipped my cigarette into her fingers and she used it to light her own. She held the smoke in her lungs and glanced at me as if to say thanks. Thanks for knowing exactly what I needed. Thanks for not making me get up to light it on the stove.
Her hair could have caught fire if she’d tried to light her cigarette on the stove. It’d happened before. She lost her bangs once, half of them anyway. She’d dipped her head down low over the blue flame, cigarette protruding, cheeks puffing, smoke rising. And then her bangs caught fire. She’d leapt back and laughed, smashing at her forehead with her hand, dropping the cigarette on the floor. “My fucking hair, oh my God,” but she was laughing, it was hysterical. It broke up the day. Before Natalie lit her hair on fire. After Natalie lit her hair on fire. After was better. Before was only there so After could happen.
“I hate my life,” Natalie said again.
“I hate the ceiling,” I said.
The ceiling was low, much too low for the room, much too low for the old Victorian house. The ceiling wasn’t smooth either; it was bumpy, like the backs of a woman’s legs. The ceiling had cellulite.
“It’s old,” Natalie said, as if this meant I should forgive it.
“It’s horribly depressing.”
The yellow light against the yellow walls against the old wood floor, itself a shade of yellow mixed with brown. The total effect was not cheery. It was crushing. It was yellow coming down on you. It was . . .
“Let’s get rid of it then,” Natalie said suddenly, looking around.
“Rid of what?”
“Let’s take down the ceiling.”
I smirked at the idea. “What would we put in its place?”
And it was as if fresh air passed through the insides of Natalie’s eyes because her whole face changed. “Let’s knock down the ceiling. Let’s open it up to the roof. Let’s have a cathedral ceiling in the kitchen.”
I snuffed my cigarette out on a plate. “You think it’d work?” I said. It was true that from the outside the roof was pretty high and it peaked. Something must be up there. Between this low ceiling and that high roof. But what?
And that’s how it happened that an hour later, sometime after midnight, Natalie and I were beating at the ceiling with rocks we’d pulled from Agnes’s old flower/discarded-kitchen-appliance garden. We stood there with our rocks raised up over our heads and we smacked them against the ceiling and it came down in great chunks. Hairy chunks.
“Horsehair plaster,” Natalie said. “They don’t use this any-more.”
For the next few hours, we worked without speaking, heaving the rocks over our heads, blinking when the plaster rained down on us. There was no need for ladders, because the ceiling itself was low enough to reach with the rocks. To free the debris between the rafters, we threw skillets and small stones. It was exhilarating to breathe the plaster dust; to cough productively and spit on the floor; to look down at our hands and see them covered in white. It was so extraordinarily out of the ordinary.
One minute we were sitting at the lowly kitchen table moaning about the sorry state of our lives and the next we were liberating the architecture with heavy projectiles. This was pure, freedom. Better than sniffing glue.
It didn’t take long to remove the entire ceiling. One firm ka-boom with the rock and the plaster fell not in chips but in broken sheets, large chunks. The insulation tumbled out