The Writing on the Wall A Novel - By W. D. Wetherell Page 0,7
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,