The Writing on the Wall A Novel - By W. D. Wetherell Page 0,6
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