“I can’t live with this,” Lenore, my stepmother says. Her hand motions toward this new apartment’s sepia-toned colonial wallpaper, diamond-framed antebellum man on horseback, woman in bonnet clutching a basket headed to market. Choices no doubt made by a family faithed in the lost hope of nostalgia.
My real mother died the year I was born. Dad married three more times, each woman a new stepmother to me, at least briefly. I called them by their names, like he did, and none of them ever called me son or tried to play mother. Now they are all dead except for Lenore, the second wife. “You’re all I have,” she said when she reached out to me, “and I need your help.”
I am nearly forty now, unmarried, and alone. I have not heard from her in thirty years. I agree to help.
“I remember the family that lived in this apartment,” she says, the curious benefit of a one-town life. “They were nice to me.” Her eyes close, she smiles, looking far back at a moment of kindness. Her hand again reaches out, “The walls were roses, all red roses.” Her arm drops, the hand returns to her side, empty. Eyes open, she frowns. “I just want a clean beige wall, nothing fancy.”
She leaves. I am here to provide labor, return these paper-thick walls to plaster. I get to work, lifting the heavy steam hose, rented at my expense, a tool I’ve never used. How hard can it be? Boiling water scalds my arm as steam shoots up across the wall then down into my lungs. Why am I doing this? Paper puckers granting fingerholds of generous excavations. Layers of domestic history slide free like wet bed sheets.
Sweaty, burned, muscle sore, I am no longer a child and know these efforts won’t turn a Cinderella pumpkin into a carriage, won’t atone for the sins of a father, transform a stranger into a mother, yet I keep going as if at some point I will be rewarded, handed whatever it is I seem to want from one of my almost-mothers.
More slosh of wet paper slides free as new patterns of domestic decisions appear. Vertical stripes, floor to ceiling, brown and blue, an earth to sky roadmap dotted in four-leaf clovers, telltale remains from a family eager to escape, yearning for luck.
The day darkens toward evening. The wall puckers and I pull, strips of sticky paper lick the floor, another ghost appears. Geometric squares and circles, gayly painted platters of cookies, crackers and pies, a pattern for a kitchen apron comfortable in stains, a family that feasted against life’s stingy outcomes, shielding themselves in bulk.
Exposed layers pick up speed, reams of history falling easily into forgotten past, age weakening the glue that held it hostage.
At last roses appear, clusters of bouquets hopeful in buds, cabbage-thick scarlet blooms edged in mint green leaves adrift in a background of buttery cream. I stop. The room transforms into a remembered garden. I wait.
Lenore returns.
“Yes, the roses.”
We stand, allowing silence to deepen, hoping for reprieve.
She turns to leave, “Keep going.”
I lift the steaming hose, peeling past roses, knowing I will never be done.
