The Writing on the Wall: A Novel Read online

  She approached the house from the rear this time, pushing her way through the wild honeysuckle separating it from the meadow, scaring up some robins. There were shabby outbuildings, one filled with soggy black firewood, the other looking like a cross between a chicken coop and a barn. Swallow nests drooped in pendants from the rafters, but they were dry and sterile looking, fit for ghost birds, not live ones. Both buildings, in Jeannie’s plans, were doomed to immediate demolition. A neglected stone wall marked the back of the property, now just a rock pile, nothing crafted, and the frost had long since toppled the upper boulders to the ground.

  Other than these, there wasn’t much to discover. Strands of barbed wire, tarry shingles blown off the roof, a mushy baseball. She stepped on something sharper than a rock, reached down, picked up a wedge-shaped spike scaled in rust. There was a path worn into the ground, with bleached-out grass, and it led right to the wall and not one step farther. Someone had once walked there, walked there often, but had never gone beyond the edge of the property, though the meadow behind it ran for another hundred yards before the forest. This saddened her—the sense of limits, of obedience, of self-imposed circumscription.

  A fence led around toward the front. A picket fence, the slats gray and peeling, only not a picket fence, because the slats were pressed tight together. She struggled to remember the right term. Stockade? A stockade fence? Stockade as in fortress? Stockade as in prison? Again, as always now, she stepped upon the booby trap of words.

  Only one tree grew in back, an enormous box elder. From the thickest branch hung a tire swing that must have dated from the 1940s, so old and petrified was its rubber. Vera, reaching, was surprised to have it actually sway. They had hung a tire swing like that for Cassie from the branch of their plum—the solid remembrance of pushing came into her arms, the moment she saw it. Cassie had been reluctant to climb on that first time, she had an only child’s sense of prudence, but after that it became her favorite plaything for the whole of one summer, especially after sunset when she liked to swing back and forth kicking her legs out at the fireflies that flashed near her face.

  “Higher Mommy!” she would yell—the little girl’s classic plea. “Higher!”

  Good memory? Terrible memory? She wasn’t sure how to tell them apart anymore. Any walk she could find, any path, circled back to facing that.

  In heading toward the back door, swerving sideways to get around a midden heap of rusty cans, she came upon a surprise. Poppies, tall ones, as brilliantly red as it was possible to imagine, their blossoms touching heads. They didn’t grow wild, someone must have once planted them, and she felt comforted by this, the evidence of a loving human presence. And there was better than that, too. Behind the poppies was a cluster of blueberry bushes taller than her head, and around these, as a kind of barrier, thorny blackberries, with so much fruit the vines sagged. She ate some of the plumpest, filled her cupped hands with more, then and only then began to think of breakfast.

  Stone steps led up to the kitchen. It was dark inside—past ten now, and the sun hadn’t penetrated. A huge sink, zinc or cast iron, took up most of one wall, and past it was a gas range that must have been new in 1950. Hotpoint read the raised lettering on front, though both t's were twisted. This was the one room in the house that wasn’t wallpapered, but painted. The wainscoting, running up from the linoleum, looked greasy and dusty at the same time, and above it the walls were the color of raw liver. A piece of stovepipe stuck out from the ceiling like a fat cigar, but there was nothing under it other than a black scar on the linoleum where a woodstove had once rested. The room smelled of something she couldn’t identify, but seemed part shoe polish, part charcoal, part skunk.

  The only thing new was the refrigerator, which Jeannie had insisted on installing ahead of her visit. She had crammed it full of food and then piled even more on top. Half was the junk food they loved as girls, half was the organic that was Jeannie’s new passion; Vera ended up having soy yogurt and a cellophane-wrapped cupcake for breakfast.

  The bathroom was wedged in a corner behind flimsy walls. Vera, despite herself, knocked on the door before she went in— the door with heart-shaped openings cut in the panels to let heat flow through. The wallpaper inside had shiny red and green stripes like Christmas wrapping, but it was peeling and didn’t look like it would be hard to strip. There was no tub or shower, which Jeannie had apologized for a dozen times over, but the hose worked out in the yard, and, if she felt adventurous, there was always the stream across the road for skinny-dipping or splashing.

  The kitchen will be my base camp, Vera decided. I’ll keep it neat and organized and not worry about the chaos everywhere else. Once breakfast was over she started upon an inspection tour of the rest of downstairs. And it was really very simple, at least as regards the basic layout.

  The hall, the central hallway along which she had groped her way the night before, ran all the way from the kitchen to the front entrance. The stairs climbed one wall—they looked even steeper and narrower than they had in the dark, and most of the banister was missing. Three rooms opened off one side of the hall, two off the other side, each reached by its own door. On the west, front to back, was the main parlor, then a sewing room or den, then a smaller back parlor with boarded-up windows. On the east was a foyer with brass pegs, then a narrow closet, then a dining room that was the largest, most pleasant room in the house, with windows that ran all the way up from the floor and an old-fashioned ceiling fan that, upon her entrance, began stiffly spinning, as if showing off what it could do.

  This was the geography, it was easy enough to understand, and on her second inspection she turned her attention to the details. The floors were as beautiful as Jeannie claimed—birds-eye maple that gleamed satin in the morning light. Transom windows were cut in the tops of the doors, and the one in the dining room was stained glass. The windows, old as they were, looked sturdy and formidable, with filigree trim around the sashes that matched the gingerbread outside.

  These were the highlights, the little touches that had convinced Jeannie to buy. “Everything’s horrid after that,” she said on the phone, and she hadn’t been exaggerating. Water stains on the ceilings expanded outwards in urine-colored rings. Plastic sheeting had been tacked to the doors to make up for gaps caused by the house’s settling. A mirror framed by a toilet seat dominated the back parlor, along with a Mickey Mouse clock with the eyes gouged out. The curtains, what were left of them, hung like shrouds. Cobwebs lay thick in the corners, mice droppings littered the floor, and everything seemed possessed by the kind of cold that, having nothing to do with temperature, remained impervious to the sun.

  Fireplaces would have helped, working fireplaces, but the one she found in the front parlor had collapsed into a shapeless mound. Lichen covered the stone—stalked cups, yellow nodules, rosettes of greenish-gray. The grate was still there, but in place of logs was a damp, cradle-shaped slurry where squirrels or chipmunks had once made their nests.

  That left the wallpaper—the wallpaper she had been trying her best not to worry about before examining all the rest. Even with Jeannie’s warning, it was hard to look at without shuddering. The rooms on the left of the hall were covered with a thick brown paper that was meant to imitate pine, complete with knots and grain, while the rooms on the right had a paper that was even thicker, a faded white velvet with red-pink squiggles that suggested frosting. It was hung badly—seams split apart from each other and hardened pimples of glue bubbled up in the cracks. Horizontal strips had been pasted on as patches above the radiators and baseboards, but the bottoms hadn’t been trimmed, so in places the velvet dangled against the floor like a trollop’s dirty skirt.

  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 paper
ed 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.
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  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.