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

t’aimes. After a while, she listened to the walls more than to the music, the coaxing sounds made by her scraper. Tinny scratches meant a stubborn spot; sandy whiskings meant a piece that could be lifted and peeled. With the foyer, she had worked from top to bottom, but here in the hall it was easier just to start in the middle and follow the path of least resistance. She began to think of the cleared areas as maps—here a map of Italy, here a map of Spain. I’ll take a break and come back and expand Italy, she told herself. After lunch I’ll double Spain.
    She had thought her attitude might be more relaxed on the second day, but she had to work hard on not regarding the wallpaper as her enemy. To balance this, the walls became increasingly her friends. They were smooth underneath the paper and remarkably unblemished—their linen color was clean and inviting, of an era before cheap ugliness was born. Stripping the paper hurt her fingers, nails, and wrists, but the walls didn’t hurt at all, not by stinging, not by cutting, not by reminding. They were beautifully blank in that respect, therapeutically blank. They were doing exactly what she hoped.
    Of course the walls weren’t perfect in that respect. Just because they carried no memories didn’t mean memories didn’t come. At the worst moments, when her arms started aching and her forehead dripped sweat, she began wishing she had someone to help her, and that naturally led her to think about Cassie who was so good at any kind of work requiring delicacy and patience. Organization, too—she was a great organizer, with assembly lines her specialty. Baking cookies with the Girl Scouts? An assembly line, assigning each of her friends a different task. Puppies needing their baths? Mom to dip, Dan to lather, Cassie to rinse and dry, the squirming puppies passed hand to hand until they were immaculate.
    Cassie would be a pro at wallpapering. During high school she had helped Dan in the summers—she was on her way to becoming a skilled carpenter if she managed to stay interested. In their town, very early, the divide became apparent between young people who would go on to college and those who would work as hairdressers and mechanics. Cassie had friends in both groups, which was hard; she was always trying to find a middle way between futures, and this led her to considering the military. She was too restless to sit in college for four years, at least right away, and she was too ambitious to join the other girls who had already dropped out.
    Two years in the National Guard, she decided—they had gone on a picnic and she was very solemn about breaking the news.
    Dan had been more surprised than she had been—he barely managed to control his grimace. “We’re very proud,” he mumbled.
    Cassie smiled, or tried to. “I’ll fight forest fires and help with floods,” she said. “I’ll do my two years, and then since I love animals I’ll apply to veterinary school at State.”
    She wasn’t the first in the family to be a soldier. Dan’s father fought on Okinawa, then entered Hiroshima three days after the bombing; he and Cassie, in his last years, had grown very close. Her dad, Cassie’s other grandfather, was drafted in the Fifties and sent to Germany. Elvis Presley was in his company, and bought all the men poodles they could give to their girlfriends. That was how his two years had gone—Lowenbrau, frauleins, and fun. He took Russian lessons, but only so he could say the words “I surrender” to the first Soviet soldier he encountered if invasion ever came.
    A joke, his army years. And now, in his granddaughter, the joke had turned serious.
    That was Cassie—organized and efficient. Dan, on the other hand, would be no help whatsoever when it came to stripping. He would storm in, roll his sleeves up, start hacking away at the paper, anxious to get it over with as fast as possible. Leaky pipes, sagging joists, flapping shutters—those were the kinds of repairs