The Writing on the Wall: A Novel (3 page)

Jeannie had no information whatsoever about the former owners. The house had been empty for years before the town stepped in, squatters had apparently lived there before that, and like every abandoned home along the border it was said to have been a hiding place for drugs.

“So we’re back in the Sixties, whoever papered it,” Jeannie had said. “I picture her in—what were those awful slippers called? Mules? I picture her in purple mules, her hair up in curlers, reading women’s magazines about the suburbs and how knotty pine was all the rage. That’s half of her. The other half is someone who never had a fancy wedding and hung the velvet in revenge.”

Vera wasn’t sure Jeannie’s profile was right. It wasn’t a frustrated housewife she sensed, but someone brassier, bolder, a woman trying to break out. Maybe the walls had been falling apart, and the paper had been meant as a desperate cover-up or glue. Maybe she had known how ugly the paper was, hung it anyway as a mordant joke. Maybe a man had done the knotty pine, a woman the wedding cake, and after long hours of arguing the wallpaper represented a compromise, the house split in half.

She finished her inspection tour in the dining room. Approaching the window, noticing a two-inch piece of paper that curled away from the wall like a wilted leaf, she reached up and pulled as hard as she could on its edge. This happened fast, impulsively, and yet for a second her fingers imagined the strip peeling off all the way down to the bottom of the wall, lifting the strip next to it, then the one beside that, then the rest of the paper in the room, and then the other rooms, too—imagined, in her foolishness, that with one mighty, satisfying, god-like tug all the paper in the house would come off in her hand.

This is not what happened. The little rind of paper immediately ripped, taking a chunk of wall plaster with it, so, on that first touch, she had already damaged what she had pledged to protect.

Slower. She took a deep breath. Slower! She nodded to herself, then, frowning, to the wall. This couldn’t be rushed, shouldn’t be rushed, wouldn’t be rushed. The task would determine the speed, she wouldn’t dictate, and in any case, the slower the job the better for her.

As for supplies, the tools she needed to work with, Jeannie had gone a little nuts. The hardware store in town had been contacted, a delivery arranged, and everything that could possibly be of use in separating wallpaper from walls had been deposited in the front parlor in a massive pile. Stepladders, scrapers, putty knives, work gloves, buckets, sponges, mops and brooms, cotton rags, bristled brushes. This was low-tech stuff, easy to identify once she began picking through the pile, but there were also chemical things to use for stripping, powders packed in cartons and liquids in plastic jugs. In one box, once she tugged the padding out, was something that looked like a leaf-blower with a stubby snout. A steamer? She wasn’t sure, but it looked dangerous and cranky; she closed the box and shoved it to the side.

There was more. A huge radio, the kind you might see at a construction site, armored in yellow rubber. A first-aid kit, with extra bandages. Yardsticks and rulers. A page torn from the local phone book with the names and numbers of contractors to call in case she needed help.

In a separate, neater pile, stacked on end like the pipes of an organ, were the rolls of wallpaper Jeannie had ordered online. There seemed to be a huge number of these—she wondered if Tom had made a mistake in his calculations. The wrapping made it hard to see what was inside, but the exposed edges revealed that it was indeed the soft peach color Jeannie had described.

She decided to start by stripping the foyer—the smallest room in the house. Finish there and she would have a minor victory to build on. After that she could tackle the front parlor, the room with the most sun, come out again to do the hall, zigzag to the sewing room and back parlor, then finish with the dining room.

No reason to delay. She went around opening the windows first, or at least trying to, their sashes were so old and swollen. The radio she propped up on the remains of the fireplace, fiddling with the dial until she came upon a station from Canada playing French music—easy listening, since she didn’t understand a word. From the supply pile she selected a five-inch-wide putty knife, deciding she would start with the simplest tool and see how far she got with that.

A good part of the foyer was taken up by the front door. To its left, the wall was only one strip wide—a perfect place to start. The putty knife, with its fat grip, felt awkward in her hand, and she kept twisting it around trying to find the right balance. Dan was the artist with tools; she had always been helpless with them, and even the simple labs she did with her eighth-graders offered her all kinds of opportunities to mess up.

Did the wallpaper sense that? Did it know her weakness? In school, she made up for her clumsiness with humor, but the wallpaper would not be charmed by smiles or corny jokes.

It was the knotty pine paper—it looked as thick and unpeelable as wood—but there was a weak spot where the strip met the door frame and overlapped like a loose flap of skin. The one tip Dan had given her was to always start at the top near the ceiling and work down, so gravity helped with the peeling and the strips fell to the floor of their own weight. She reached—the edge was just wide enough she could get her fingers around it. As a girl, shopping with her mother, the butcher would lean over the counter and hand her a slice of bologna as a treat, and she would go off by herself to the produce section and carefully peel off the rind. Pulling the first strip of paper was like that, easy and satisfying, though it was disappointing that only the overlapped edge came off, not the paper that was glued.

She went to fetch the stepladder, picked a spot where the wall met the ceiling in a shallow crevice. The putty knife was sharp— she held it edgewise and sawed until there was a spot where the blade could gain purchase and lift. She did this gently, but at an angle that was far too acute, so the blade dug into the plaster. The trick seemed to be holding it at a flatter angle to the wall, more like a spatula than a knife. By doing so, she was able to get under the edge and pry, but, after a second’s worth of tension, only a nickel-sized piece of paper broke away. She watched it flutter down past the ladder to the floor, feeling both triumph and despair.

The good news was that the sliver of paper, in dropping, had created a slightly larger edge, a slightly larger vulnerability. She flattened the scraper to the plaster, twisted her wrist sideways as far as it would go, pushed to the left, then, when there was enough tension against the blade, lifted firmly outward. This time a bigger piece came off, a quarter instead of a nickel, but again she had gouged the plaster and she was still very far from getting the knack.

“It’s either going to be easy or fucking impossible,” Dan told her, and it was obvious now that it wasn’t going to be easy. Whoever had originally glued the paper had spread it on thick, and the decades had made it even tougher, more resin-like, so the paper clung to the wall for dear life. By concentrating, sawing to get an edge, scraping to get underneath, using her fingernails, she could lift off nickels and sometimes quarters and occasionally a silver dollar, but the pieces fell off individually, they couldn’t persuade adjoining pieces to follow them, let alone entire strips.

The top third she did on the ladder, the middle standing close to the wall, the bottom third on her knees. She cut her wrist, dust watered up her eyes, and the muscles in her forearms felt tight as cord. Still, she had done it, her first strip—its woodsy looking duff lay at her feet. Thirty minutes for one narrow strip. To do the rest of the house would take thirty years.

But just having that one strip off seemed a huge improvement—the plaster was a soft linen color, and having it exposed was like adding a strip of daylight to the gloom. The next strip she tackled, on the left side of the door, was even harder, but she tried not to take it personally—the maddeningly stubborn malevolence of certain impossibly hateful bits. She would be edging the scraper along, making real progress, getting under an inch, an inch and a half, even two inches, when suddenly the blade would skip off a hardened bubble of glue or an unusually tough corner, and nothing would come off, so instead of scraping she would have to use the putty knife as a chisel. Even then some spots resisted. The parts of the paper that were meant to resemble knots turned out to be knotty, as if whoever had manufactured the paper had stirred in bark, and she quickly grew to hate these petrified dark spots most of all.

Even with this she managed to clear the strip off in twenty-three minutes, improvement enough for a ludicrous moment of pride. She noticed something this time she had missed earlier— traces of old wallpaper that the last person to strip the walls, the Sixties woman responsible for the knotty pine, hadn’t completely scraped off. Small as these pieces were, they were layered three thick, and wondering about them made her feel like an archeologist. The bottom layer was surely the original wallpaper pasted on in 1919 when the house was new. Whoever had bought the house next, instead of scraping off the original wallpaper, had just papered over it, and then some years later, a new owner, equally lazy, had pasted over that, so the walls must have been looking thick and lumpy by the time the Sixties owner—who was beginning to seem like a real hero to her—took the bull by the horns and scraped off everything down to bare plaster, or at least everything but these leftover, layered pieces.

It took extra effort, scraping these off. The upper layer, the one that must have gone on in the Forties, was a drab green color, and the layer under that, probably from the Thirties, was a cheap Depression mustard, but the one beneath that, the original 1919 paper, was a faded, feminine and very delicate peach color not all that different than what Jeannie had picked out for her restoration. There wasn’t much left of this, just those bottommost traces, but it was enough to convince her that, go back far enough, someone had loved the house after all. Certainly, of the four papers ever hung there, it clung tightest, most faithfully to the walls.

She worked for another hour, this time on the wall opposite the door, then, with her arms aching, decided it was time to allow herself a break. Jeannie had stocked the refrigerator with vitamin waters, organic lemonade and soy chocolate milk, but she ignored these and boiled tea water on the stove. She took the mug back to the parlor, cleared a spot amid the supplies, rummaged until she found the box she was looking for, sat herself down to read.

Even with the improvement it was going to take forever to strip the walls. In the box was a powdered remover you mixed with water and applied to the wallpaper with rags or a sponge. The directions said to begin by “scoring” the paper, which she was reasonably sure meant scratching x’s that would allow the solution to penetrate. It must have been extraordinarily strong stuff, because the directions suggested wearing rubber gloves during application and covering your eyes. There were darker warnings below that—birth defects, in using this product, were known to occur, at least in California.

Any combination of words and phrases could trip her up now, it didn’t take something as stark as “birth defects.” And what kind of defects were they talking about anyway? Physical defects? Mental defects? Moral defects? There was more than one kind, why didn’t they spell them out? Use this product and your baby might be born without arms. Use this product and your son might develop Asperger’s. Use this product, use it repeatedly, and your daughter might grow up not knowing right from wrong.

She could blame herself for a lot of things, but not that— nineteen years ago she had not been stripping wallpaper with poison powders. Even now she was reluctant to use it. She went back out to the kitchen, filled a bucket, came back, shook some powder in, sloshed it around with a rag, then, after making a small x with her putty knife, wiped the slurry white of it across a small section of foyer wall. The directions said to wait fifteen minutes before scraping, so she worked along the ceiling first, then climbed back down the ladder to see if the stuff actually helped.

It did and it didn’t. The treated paper was much softer, easier to scrape, only the smell was horrible, enough to make her gag. Dan had warned her that in the old days they used horsehair in plaster, and wetting it would bring out the smell—only there seemed to be goat hair mixed in, too, goat droppings, goat piss. The strips that came off were a soggy mess that immediately stuck to the floor, so she would end up having to scrape that, too, doubling the work.

No shortcuts then—every inch she would peel by hand. She worked the rest of the afternoon, determined to finish the foyer before quitting, though it was late into the evening before the final strip came off. The scraps formed a dusty pyramid she kicked toward the door, too tired to do anything more. Her fingers and wrists were numb—her knuckles looked worked on by a grater. She went outside to the yard, found the hose Jeannie had told her about, took off her clothes, turned the faucet on full strength, then, bracing herself for the cold, blasted off the papery bits caught in her hair.

Once she toweled off and dressed again, she walked back through the yard to the old stone wall. She was too late for the sunset—there wasn’t much left now except a purple-edged cloud. A cloud like that back in the Rockies would mean a thunderstorm—and soon, but here the air seemed too soft to support anything that flashy. To the south toward the village arced a pinkish seam that may have come from streetlights, but back the other way, toward the neighboring house and Canada, there were no lights showing whatsoever.

She fixed hot dogs and corn muffins for dinner. The electricity worked now, but she found a kerosene lantern in the pantry and it felt more appropriate to use that. She busied herself upstairs arranging her clothes on the bedroom floor in some semblance of order, then slid the mattress farther away from the window so the moonlight wouldn’t wake her again. The layout of the rooms upstairs was even simpler than downstairs—two bedrooms and a small bathroom grouped around the lopsided craziness of the hall.