She screamed, “What’s going on in here?” and Neil told her to mind her own business. “Not a goddamn thing,” he told her. He was so angry he was shaking. And when she left, we both stood up and he pressed against me. He pressed so hard, I came in my pants.
I was in the hospital for two weeks. When I left, Dr. Finch contacted the Amherst school board and explained that I’d attempted suicide and that I would be out of school for six months, under his intensive care.
It seemed to work because they stopped calling.
Three days after my return, my mother came into the kitchen where I was smoking and cooking a package of bacon in her cast-iron skillet.
“You’ve been spending a lot of time at the Finches’ house,” she said.
“Mmm hmm,” I said, not feeling the need to remind her that she was the reason I was spending so much time at the Finch house.
“I think it’s good for you to be around a lot of people like that.”
This was true, I supposed. I did like that there was always someone awake at that house; there was always somebody hanging around who was ready for fun.
“And I’m just so emotionally drained right now. Struggling in my own battle to truly find myself, once and for all.”
“Yeah,” I said, flipping the bacon strips with a fork.
“And of course, my relationship with Fern is very stressful and consuming.”
“Can you hand me some paper towels?”
“It’s just very difficult for me to be the parent you need,” she said, handing me a wad of paper towels.
“Mmm hmm.”
“So after discussing this with the doctor, we both feel that this is really the best option.” She flashed a document in front of my face.
“What’s that?”
“It’s good news. The doctor has agreed to become your legal guardian.”
I froze. Then I looked at her. “My what?”
“It’s really the best option right now. He and his family can give you the attention that you need. And he really wants to do this.” She placed her hand on my arm. “Augusten, the doctor is very fond of you. He thinks you have a tremendous passion for life. When we were discussing this he told me, Augusten has a very strong sense of self. He can be anything in life that he chooses.’ ”
“So basically, you’re giving me away to your shrink,” I said.
“No,” she said lovingly. “I’m doing what I think is best for you, best for us. I love you very, very much. And I will always be your parent. And you will always be my son.”
A couple of signatures later and Dr. Finch was no longer just my mother’s psychiatrist.
He was my father.
THE SEVEN-AND-A-HALF-INCH DISASTER
T
HE KITCHEN CEILING WAS TOO LOW. IT WAS CRUSHING US. It was the source of our misery in life. “I hate it,” said Natalie.
“What?” I said, wondering if she meant the ceiling, if she was feeling it too.
“My life,” she said flatly. Not the way teenagers say they hate their lives, their lives suck, they want different lives. She said this with flatness far beyond her fifteen years. The kind of flatness that happens when people, usually much older, shut down. The palm of a hand, open, pills pouring into it. That kind of flat.
I exhaled, blowing Marlboro Light smoke into the air, an opaque cloud that was the only moving thing in the room. It seemed to drift toward the ceiling, moth to bulb. We sat perfectly still, like we were listening for something.
Outside it was dark. Because I was sitting at an angle to the window, I couldn’t see my reflection, just the rest of the kitchen, and this made me feel like a vampire. I was invisible, I was riding in Wonder Woman’s plane.
“Why do you hate your life?” Although I already knew. I knew the answer would be Terrance Maxwell.
“Oh.” This came out soft and drifty, like a small note sung. “Terrance.” Her shoulders slumped when she sighed.
I thought, Here we go again.
Last year, Natalie and Terrance broke up, to borrow a phrase from mainstream society. It was only after they broke up that I learned the full and complete story about Natalie and Terrance, about what their relationship really was. I knew he was forty-one, a former semi-professional tennis player and a patient of the doctor’s. But I never knew why he had sought treatment in the first place: his alcoholic mother burned to death in her easy chair. She was drunk and dropped her cigarette. Oh, and they were lovers, Terrance and his mother. According to Natalie, Terrance could never accept the fact that he wasn’t quite good enough to be a professional tennis player, and his mom was the only person who could console him.
When Doc found out Terrance was a millionaire he put two and two together: his rebellious daughter and the millionaire fuck-up who always ran around in tennis shorts, even in winter.
Natalie and Terrance were lovers from the first week they met. He was forty-one and she was thirteen. Soon after, she moved into his house.
Terrance became Natalie’s legal guardian. So as far as everyone was concerned, they were father and daughter. And everyone believed this. Or at least acted like they did.
Except the doctor. He knew they were lovers. He, of course, believed that at thirteen, a person was free.
But when Terrance gave Natalie a black eye and she came running home at sixteen, people asked questions. And it all came out. All the black eyes, all the drunken brawls, all the smacking Natalie around and calling her horrible names.
In a whirlwind of family peer pressure, Natalie pressed charges.
Natalie and Terrance went to court.
Terrance lost.
Natalie had won. But what had she won? Aside from seventy-five thousand dollars in a civil case, which went straight to her father, what had Natalie won? Freedom from her abuser, I guess.
“I miss him,” she said now, raking crumbs off the table with the edge of her hand, spilling them onto the floor and then dusting her hands across her jeans. “I know it’s sick, but I really loved him.”
“I know.”
“It’s hard,” she said. “Sometimes it’s just really hard. I wonder what he’s doing?”
I knew she was picturing her old life in her head. The old life that included the Bang & Olufson stereo, the 1965 Rothschild wine, the burnt-orange Saab, the Martin guitar. Conveniently absent from her memory was the fact that she was his dirty little secret.
“You’re so dirty,” he used to tell her. “Filthy. Those disgusting bare feet. Can’t you clean yourself up?”
But she did love him. I believe it. I know exactly how that is. To love somebody who doesn’t deserve it. Because they are all you have. Because any attention is better than no attention.
For exactly the same reason, it is sometimes satisfying to cut yourself and bleed. On those gray days where eight in the morning looks no different from noon and nothing has happened and nothing is going to happen and you are washing a glass in the sink and it breaks—accidentally—and punctures your skin. And then there is this shocking red, the brightest thing in the day, so vibrant it buzzes, this blood of yours. That is okay sometimes because at least you know you’re alive.
I was probably thinking this way because of all the foreign films I was seeing at the Pleasant Street Theater. Instead of going to school and drawing happy faces in my notebook or hunkering over a joint on the soccer field, I was seeing black-and-white films by Lina Wertmuller, French movies where first cousins fall in love and then stab each other as a weeping clown appears, representing the loss of innocence. These esoteric and maybe very bad films were highly inspiring to me.
So there is a love like that and that’s what Natalie had with Terrance and that’s what I had with Bookman.
This is what bonds us, Natalie and me. We are living in the same madhouse and have gone through the same mad thing and have our bad, ugly loves.
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 or was extracted by our powdery hands. It looked like hair, the insulation. In fact, the whole ceiling seemed to be made of organic materials; horsehair, human hair, bits of bone. It was like some mummified, mutant creature.
By dawn we were knee-deep in debris. The kitchen table, the top of the refrigerator, the stove, the sink—everything—was covered.
People would be surprised when they woke up and sleepily walked into the kitchen for a glass of water or some orange juice.
“Hope is just going to die,” Natalie said. “And Dad. He’ll absolutely freak when he sees this. Then he’ll be forced to give us cash to finish it.”
“Yeah. That’ll be good.” I was excited, thinking we could use the cash for McDonald’s and beer along with the drywall. And it would be hilarious to see everyone’s horror.
Or so we thought.
In the morning, the doctor came downstairs in his underwear as usual. He walked into the kitchen as usual. He made his way to the refrigerator for the orange juice as usual. What was not usual was the amount of rubble he had to step over to get there. Also highly unusual was the fact that both Natalie and I were not only awake at 7 A.M., but also quite busy. Yet he seemed unfazed.
“Good morning,” he said in his deep, morning voice.
“Hey, Dad.”
“Hi,” I said.
“You two have quite the project going on in here,” he said casually, as if Natalie and I were in the middle of an especially ambitious macramé project.
“What do you think?” Natalie asked, as she used the broken legs of Agnes’s ironing board to swat the last bits of plaster away near the door to the barn.
“I think it’s a spectacular mess,” he said. He carried the orange juice over to the cupboard and pulled down a glass. He inspected it for signs of life before filling it with juice.
“That’s all?” Natalie was disappointed. She’d had her heart set on a scene. One that could possibly end with cash.
“Well,” he said, “I would hope that whenever you’re through doing whatever you’re doing that you’ll clean up like adults.”
Natalie said, “We need some money to finish. We’re putting in a new cathedral ceiling and we need money.”
He wanted to know how much. Money was tight then because two patients had quit treatment.
“A couple hundred.”
“A couple hundred dollars!” he bellowed. He added his now empty glass to the mound of plates, pans and empty milk cartons that had been in the sink all week.
Natalie played favorite daughter. “Oh, c’mon, Dad. You’ll love the new kitchen. Please? Won’t you give your youngest, most favorite, most beautiful daughter two hundred dollars?” She fluttered her eyelashes playfully.
This always worked.
He promised us the cash and then went back upstairs to get dressed. Natalie pulled a chair out from the table, shoved the crap off, and sat heavily.
We were filthy and exhausted but not bored.
“That was good,” she said, like we’d just had sex.
“Yeah. But what do we do now?”
There was the problem of the mess. The ceiling and its insulation were now three feet deep on the floor and on top of everything. It would take at least as long to get rid of it as it did to take it down.
She peeled a scab off her knee, revealing a small pink gash. “We’ll shovel it outside, throw it behind the barn.”
“When?”
“Later.”
“What do we do now?”
“Take a nap.”
I woke up that afternoon at about four and groggily walked out of my room, down the hall into the kitchen. Agnes was rinsing a plate under the faucet. She dried it on her apron and placed it in the cupboard. Then she shuffled through the debris to the refrigerator. She opened the door and hunched over to inspect the labels of the condiments. “We never have any relish in this house,” she said. “Who’s eating all the relish?
I couldn’t remember ever seeing relish in the refrigerator. “Maybe Hope ate it.”
“That Hope,” she said. “She should know better.” Agnes took her p
ocketbook from its position at the top of the mound of plates on the kitchen table. “I’m going to run to the store and pick up a fresh bottle. If anybody needs a clean plate there’s one in the cupboard.” She left through the back door.
I walked upstairs to Natalie’s room and pounded on her door. “Wake up, wake up, wake up.”
She answered the door wearing a sheet toga. “What time is it?” She yawned.
“Late.”
“What’s the kitchen like?”
“Agnes washed a plate,” I said.
She yawned again. “Oh.”
“I guess we should get to work on it,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said. Then she turned around, holding the sheet against her chest and began hunting through the mounds of clothes on her floor for her skirt. Natalie wore the same skirt every day. It was red with golden feathers on it. She’d sewn it herself. The edges were beginning to fray from so many washings. Somehow she was able to slip into both the skirt and a black tank top without ever removing the sheet.
We spent the rest of the day shoveling debris out of the kitchen and carrying it outside behind the barn. It took dozens of trips. But by evening, the kitchen was free from rubbish.
“Let’s get these dishes washed,” Natalie said.
So we created our own assembly line of two. Natalie washing, me drying. All the commotion had caused the roaches to retreat deep into the walls so Natalie hardly screamed at all.
When we were finished, standing in the now clean kitchen, Natalie commented on the new ceiling. “It’s weird how it seems even darker in here now.”
It was true. Although there was no longer a low ceiling hanging over our heads, the blackness that stretched up was even more depressing.
What we needed was a skylight.
Natalie phoned her dad at the office and he told us he’d give us a hundred dollars to install a skylight. Natalie told him a hundred dollars wasn’t enough; that we’d need at least a hundred and fifty. After ten minutes of pleading, he finally agreed to give us a hundred and twenty-five.
“So we can use a hundred for the window,” she said, “and the rest we can spend on beer.”
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