The Writing on the Wall A Novel - By W. D. Wetherell Page 0,72

strip shaped like a map of Chile she worked on for three hours. The air was drier in the room, it seemed to have petrified the paper, and she was carving out deep fjords and winding bays and whole estuaries before Chile came off.

Working this hard, it was impossible to remember ever having worked on another task, to the point that teaching, housekeeping, waitressing in college all became memories from a distant life. When she took a break she looked down at her hands and they had become a scraper’s all right, there was no other way to describe them. Palms red and scratchy, veins cord-like on her wrists, the pads on her fingers puckered and cracked. No amount of massaging or stretching could soothe the tightness in her forearms—every tense molecule in her body seemed to have migrated there to hold a convention, party, whoop it up. And yet the odd thing was, when she looked down to examine it, the flesh on her arms, even after all that hard work and tenseness, seemed to have become noticeably looser in her time there, grainy the way wet sand is, slack, so it looked like it would look when she turned sixty.

She understood now that without Beth’s and Dottie’s stories leading her on she would never have had the stamina to do this. Even now, with only one room left to strip, she wouldn’t have been able to finish without this sudden surge of confidence and energy that had come to her in the night. Stripping the other rooms, she had been content just to get the top layers off and ignore the little flecks of paper underneath, but now she needed to clear these off too until the walls were perfect.

Or almost perfect. As bare as she made them, they still weren’t quite ready. Mixed in with the supplies was a package of sandpaper, and she used the finest to scrub away at the rough spots on the plaster, the grainy upsurges, the rice-sized bumps, until her finger could trace a line from the window to the door around to the windows again without hitting anything that wasn’t smooth. It was fussy of her, compulsive, anal—but she trusted the feeling, it was part of her confidence, this overwhelming sense of being ready at last.

It took her two full days to scrape the paper off, then another day to do the sanding, so it wasn’t until the morning of the fourth day that she started writing. With all the supplies Jeannie had left her there was one essential she had missed—pens—and it was only because she found a ballpoint to go along with the roller point in her purse that she didn’t need to drive to town. She had the worst handwriting of any middle school teacher in the country, so she decided to print, to take pains over it, make the words perfectly legible. She wouldn’t start so high that a ladder would be needed and she wouldn’t go so low anyone would ever have to kneel to read, and yet, with four big walls to work on, she should have more than enough room.

She started with the roller pen from her purse, but the plaster sucked the ink in too greedily, so she immediately switched to the ballpoint which worked much better, though she often had to bring it down from the wall and shake the tip. And yet the walls still seemed greedy—no matter how fast she wrote, they constantly demanded more. Always before, writing on paper, she felt the space between words as little obstacles or hurdles, ones she could only jump by writing the most obvious banalities or cliches; now, the needed words seemed sensitive to her pauses and leapt in quickly on their own.

It was hard pressing horizontally, not down—like using a blackboard, though all she ever wrote there were lessons where the chalk skated across the surface on its own. With the walls, she had to position her body just so, slide her fingers down the barrel of the pen from where they went normally, and the difficulty of this made her feel even closer to Beth and Dottie. My fellow contortionists! Their arms had trembled the same way hers did; their shoulders had known the same nagging pain. It was hard, she constantly had to stoop, reach, swivel and twist as she moved along the wall, and yet that other tightness, the bone-deep soreness, the weakness, the weariness of soul, all disappeared