The wall that becomes two rooms

Load bearing walls do not move once framed. The vinyl clad partition between the fellowship hall and the nursery moves twice most Sundays, folding into a closet built expressly to receive it, an accordion of hinged panels riding a track bolted to the drop ceiling above. Each panel is two inches of particleboard core wrapped in vinyl in a noncommittal tan, chosen decades ago to match a carpet that has since been replaced twice over without anyone revisiting the wall's finish to match it. A rubber gasket runs the length of each panel's edge, meant to dampen sound between rooms, and does so imperfectly; a fussy infant in the nursery is audible in the fellowship hall at roughly the same volume as a fussy infant one room over with no wall at all, a fact several long serving volunteers have independently measured by ear. The track requires the panels leave in the same order they arrived, first in, last out, a rule enforced less by mechanical necessity than by the singular volunteer who understands how the leading panel's floor pin seats into its receiver and has, so far, never written the sequence down for anyone else to follow. Municipal fire code requires the folded stack leave a clear exit path of at least thirty six inches, measured and confirmed annually by a clipboard inspection that has, in eleven years of record, never once found the fellowship hall out of compliance. When open, the wall makes two rooms of one; when folded, it makes one room slightly smaller than it used to be, the missing width absorbed permanently into the closet built to hold the thing that creates it.

Arthur Pell