![]() ![]() When he looked up from the page, I pounced. It was the first piece of writing I ever showed my father and I watched him read it like a dog watches dinner. Yes, I was heavily inspired by Edgar Allen Poe and yes, the story lacked plot but still I thought it was terribly clever. There was no door, only two eye-like windows through which the main and only character gazed mournfully at the world while he went slowly nutso. One of the first short stories I ever wrote was set in a one-roomed house that was supposed to represent a head. Sometimes, when I’m slipping into some old rabbit hole of thought, standing on that worn spot on the floor in front of the kitchen sink washing a dish I’ve washed countless times before, I close my eyes and remember how she crept around and around in fast-forward, eyes swallowed in black and her left shoulder stained yellow from rubbing against the wall, and I step away from the sink: step away. ![]() The Yellow Wallpaper is stuck fast in my imagination and when I read it again after I’d had kids and my own bout of postpartum despair, I perceived a whole new dimension. As she slips into psychosis, she imagines women creeping around behind those bars, women trapped like her: shaking, rattling, desperate to escape. All she has is that oppressive wallpaper, “one of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin.” There’s nothing for her to do but study the walls and in their design she begins to see fungus, bloated faces, an endless parade of mushrooming forms, and the bars of a cage. I must have been in high school when I first read about the nameless narrator in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s pre-feminism allegory about the woman whose patronizing doctor-husband confines her to an attic nursery as a cure for her postpartum depression, even though she’s desperate for activity and distraction. Whenever I see wallpaper, I think of the famous gothic story, The Yellow Wallpaper. ![]() “At least it’s not wallpaper.” I turned to face the weird wall mottled with plaster warts and squeezed his hand. This ability to see through surface flaws and fissures to an inner solidity is a large part of why we’re together. ![]() This is something I love about my man: We’re standing there in a house that’s been on the market for over a year with no takers, a half-finished, one-bedroom dive reeking of mildew and cat piss, and he’s willing play what-if with me, he’s willing to give it a try. What do you think?” We turned to survey the room: subfloor mended with patches of linoleum, windows tinted with reflective film, exposed beams splattered with plaster. “But since they ran out of money before they painted, it’s not sealed. He reached out and ran his hand over the jagged wall. We didn’t have much money but were unwilling to take on a lot of debt so we were looking at the the smallest, shabbiest dumps on the market, trying to figure out how little we could live with. It was 1998 in Berkeley, California, a year after we’d married. We’d been working and saving hard to buy a house and the process felt heavy, loaded with psychological and financial bombshells, a huge decision for neophytes like us. “It’s not… nice.” I turned to see if he agreed. Someone intentionally sprayed chunks of plaster on the wall.” On the home tour, John and I stood holding hands, looking at a wall covered in splotches and splatters of plaster so thick and knubby it cast shadows in the late afternoon light. ![]()
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