Stone Diaries, The - Carol Shields [92]
Not that I feared the witchlike configuration, good Christ no—I knew perfectly well that such anthropomorphizing is fanciful and solipsistic; I also knew that other people, happier people, might see a river instead of a diseased spine, or a map of a buried subcontinent or, with a little imagination, a mountain topped by a Chinese pagoda, in turn topped by a knob of whipped cream. We see what we want to see. Our perceptions fly straight out of our deepest needs, this much you learn in Introductory Psych, a required course at my college. No, what I dreaded about the ceiling crack was its persistence. That it was always there. Determined to accompany me. To be a part of me.
I dragged the stepladder up from the basement, hoping it would reach. (The ceilings in that old house of ours were ridiculously high.) On a shelf in the garden shed I found a box of plasterer’s putty and mixed myself up a large sticky batch which I spread the length of the ceiling crack, using a spatula from the kitchen drawer, and moving the ladder forward foot by foot. I’d never done this kind of work before, but I read the directions on the box carefully and made a neat job of it. I’ve always been exceptionally neat.
"Very neat presentation" was what my professors wrote on the bottoms of my term papers, also "well focused" and "full of verve."
In half an hour the plaster was dry, and I sanded it smooth, letting the fine grains drift down on top of my head and into my face, breathing in the chalky dust, tasting it on my tongue. I did not find the sensation disagreeable, quite the contrary. By four o’clock that afternoon I had painted the entire ceiling, using a roller attached to an extension handle, and just before going to bed that night I gave the whole thing a second coat.
Then I lay down in the dark, possibly a little drunk from the heavy latex fumes that swirled downward and converged in midair with a mad proleptic wafting up of happiness. Sleep came quickly; I welcomed it; I was eager for morning; I wanted to wake up to the early light and observe, freshly, the transformation I had brought about.
This really happened. This event, this revelation! Not one of the various members of my family raised the least objection to my determination to repair and paint my bedroom ceiling. No one even challenged me as to why I needed the ladder, why I was scrounging around in the shed for a paint roller, whether this act of mine was a momentary whim or a charged metaphoric gesture. This surprised me, the general air of permission. My mother, of course, was preoccupied with the weekly gardening column she was writing for the local newspaper (Mrs. Green Thumb was the byline she used). My younger brother and sister looked on with interest, perhaps even a tincture of envy—why hadn’t they thought of improving their ceilings!—and Cousin Beverly, who had moved in with us a year earlier, gave me a hand spreading newspapers on the carpet and some useful advice about how to reach into the difficult corner angles. As for my father, had he still been alive, he might have discouraged me from assigning myself a dull and messy task, particularly on my first day home, though I can’t help thinking he would have understood the impulse driving me forward.
In one day I had altered my life: my life, therefore, was alterable.
This simple axiom did not cry out for exegesis; no, it entered my bloodstream directly, as powerful as heroin; I could feel its pump and surge, the way it brightened my veins to a kind of glass. I had wakened that morning to narrowness and predestination, and now I was falling asleep in the storm of my own will. My eyes would open in the morning to a smooth white field of possibility.