The Writing on the Wall: A Novel Read Online Free Page A

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.