Running With Scissors_ A Memoir - Augusten Burroughs [76]
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was filmed in a small white house on campus, just down from the boathouse next to the waterfall. I had seen that movie at the Amherst Cinema and loved it completely because Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton reminded me so much of my parents. It was the closest thing I had to a home movie.
“Listen to the roar,” Natalie said as we stood next to the falls.
It reminded me of the sound New York City makes. When I was small my mother had taken me with her to Manhattan a few times to see the museums. And what I loved most about that city was the sound it made.
“I wish I could just vanish into that sound,” Natalie said, leaning over the railing.
And then I had an idea. “We could.”
“Could what?”
“We could vanish into it. We could walk under it, across. See that ledge?” I pointed to a ledge just behind the curtain of falling water. It ran the entire length of the waterfall and was easily wide enough to walk on. If we were careful.
Natalie looked at me with her mouth open in disbelief. “You’ve got to be kidding, right?”
“Well, I don’t know. We’re bored and it’s something to do. At least it’s different.”
“True,” she said.
And this is how we found ourselves hand-in-hand, crossing under the waterfall at Smith College at six in the evening. My hypothesis that we would remain dry due to the fact that the ledge was behind the water proved to be wrong. The water was astonishingly powerful and cold. But Natalie’s hand in mine was still the most powerful thing I felt with my body. If we fell, we would fall together.
The sound was deafening. Looking at an ordinary glass of water, you’d never even imagine that water was capable of making so much noise, no matter how much of it there was. The sound filled my entire body, not just my ears. I could feel my cells vibrating with it.
Natalie screamed the whole way across. Primal, guttural screams and hysterical laughter. And I could barely hear her.
When we got to the other side, we collapsed on the soccer field, completely exhausted and drenched.
“Oh my God,” she said.
I lay back with my arms stretched out and stared at the sky.
I had never felt so free in my entire life.
We made a point to not take the side streets on the walk home. We strolled through the center of town, stopping in any store that was open. We even walked into stores where just an hour ago we had filled out job applications.
“A brownie and a Diet Pepsi,” Natalie told the counter girl at Woolworth’s. Her hair was still plastered to the sides of her face, dripping down her back.
My hair, because of the heavy chemical processing it had endured, was completely dry.
We enjoyed the stares we received on the streets of Northampton. We liked to imagine what the young Jennifers and Mehgans might think when they saw us. “Oh my Gahd, mother. You cannot imagine the creatures I saw in town tonight while I was at the store for a watch battery. They were positively ghastly,” they might say, protracted jaws pressed against the dormitory phone.
When we finally made it back to Sixty-seven, Dr. F was on the sofa snoring as usual and Agnes was in the chair next to him stitching the toe of one of his fifteen-year-old socks. She glanced up when she saw us, then looked back down at her sewing. Then looked back up. “Good Lord, what happened to you two?”
“We walked under the waterfall at Smith,” Natalie said casually, as if we’d gone to the store for milk.
“That’s insane,” she laughed.
We dripped our way down the hall and into the kitchen. Hope was jealous. “Aw, you guys,” she whined. “You never do anything fun like that with me.”
“You wouldn’t have done it anyway,” Natalie said.
Hope closed her bible indignantly. “Yes I would.”
“What is this?” Natalie frowned, lifting the lid off a boiling pot on the stove.
“That’s my special soup.”
I walked over and peered into Hope’s cauldron. I thought I caught a quick glimpse of an unfamiliar-shaped bone and backed away.
“God, it smells awful.