Hammer Head: The Making of a Carpenter (18 page)

Lifting and hauling those boxes of tile, I couldn’t ignore my own sweating and panting, my muscles flexed and straining. When I placed that last box and final cement bag by the kitchen door, I felt buoyant. My whole self felt more honest, more useful, and more used. There was no grinding back to a different world. I’d been there the whole time. I took off my shirt and wrung the sweat out over the bathroom sink.

I called Mary. “Finished,” I said.

“Wooohooo! You must be sweating, girl. Drink some water and try to find someplace to swim this afternoon. I’ll see you bright and early tomorrow.”

I skipped down the stairs and locked the door behind me. The view felt longer leaving work that day. The air was thick as I walked home, and people’s foreheads were damp with sweat. Dress shirts clung to backs and chests, and the leaves on the trees seemed a more saturated green, benevolent somehow, as though aware of the heat and eager to shade. I smiled at someone across the street and he smiled back. Everything was okay, everything would be okay, the small snarls and woes were just that—they evaporated against a much bigger, much stronger tide of connection to life. Walls come down, the ones that block our view of each other and the leaves and the sky, that divide us from the awareness of being alive.

And those boxes were fucking heavy and I was glad to be done with them.

A
t that point though, I’d graduated from being just a lugger. Instead of just helping Mary with what she was doing, or watching her do what she was doing, I was on my own for certain parts of projects.

Mary had me build simple birch plywood cabinets to be tucked away in the pantry, a small zone that would serve as a transition from the kitchen to the back porch. Mary and I ripped sheets of three-quarter-inch eight-by-four plywood down to size on the table saw (a rip cut is one made parallel to the grain). I chopped the sides and tops of the cases with the miter saw and attached them together with wood glue and a nail gun, the flinty smell rising after each shot. I set them on the ground so they looked like high walls to a big sandbox and fastened a piece of quarter-inch plywood to the backs of the boxes to keep them from wobbling. The backing piece braced them. If you cut the front and back panels from a box of popsicles, imagine the movement if you then put your hands on the remaining edges and shifted your hands up and down. The same thing happens with the cabinet boxes; the back panels stabilize the shifting.

The boxes and shelves needed trim to cover the ugly unfinished look of the plywood, which is made of thin sheets of wood glued together cross-grained—the grain of each sheet alternates direction with the sheet before it, which makes it resilient against bending, swelling, shrinking, and splitting. It’s stronger than wood you find in nature and much less expensive than solid wood. Alice had splurged on tile, saved dough on the pantry. For these cabs, which no one would see the sides of, plywood was just the thing to use.

To cover up the plywood edges, I measured, marked, and cut pieces of one-by-three-inch poplar trim to line the cases, and one-by-two for the shelves. Poplar is a creamy colored wood with swirls of green and sometimes a streak of purple in the grain like a final strip of a winter-sky sunset. It’s an inexpensive hardwood and resistant to the dings and dents of a high-use space like a pantry. Hard- and softwood qualification has to do with how the tree handles reproduction. To raise ghosts from freshman-year biology: angiosperms, the ones that produce seeds with a covering, typically deciduous trees (the ones that lose their leaves), are hardwood trees. Mahogany, walnut, oak, teak, and ash are examples of hardwood. Pine, spruce, cedar, and redwood, coniferous trees, are softwoods, gymnosperms all. Their seeds fly naked in the wind. Softwoods grow fast, and are usually cheaper than hard. Hardwoods are typically denser (balsa wood, of those swooping two-piece airplanes from summer backyards, is an exception).

I measured, marked, and cut six shelves for each case and attached the trim to the outer edge. That made four boxes, two bases, twenty-four shelves, fifty-eight pieces of trim. A hundred and ten pieces of wood in total for these cabinets. Then came sanding, priming, and painting. From sheets of plywood and planks of poplar came four cabinets, solid things, useful.

“Hey Mary,” I yelled from the porch. “Check it out.” I stood there beaming next to the cases. Mary came out and smiled and gave me a high five. We didn’t often touch or hug, and our high fives were awkward and sincere. I blushed. The feeling was genuine and unfamiliar—or not entirely unfamiliar, but coaxed from long-gone kid-like pride.

It was something more than that, too. Not just a look-what-I-did glee, but a truer satisfaction. By the end of the workday, I’d built four big cabinets, sturdy and square. Mary and I stood there together, both of us sweating. The sun sat heavy in the west, seeming to swell before it went about setting in earnest, and there was the feeling that something had happened that was right. First there was nothing, then there were cabinets. And these shelves would be used—for boxes of cereal and cans of beans, for cake tins and paper towels, for oatmeal, molasses, jars of spices. Mary smiled when we took a break on the back deck in the thick heat of late afternoon, and I told her that I loved those boxes. She laughed. “They look like double-wide coffins,” she said.

T
he heat wave reached its peak a few days later, and the plumbers were swearing. The older one, Ben, with huge shoulders and a round, bald head, lay on the floor on his back, a thick forearm stretched beneath the kitchen sink. Sweat beads jeweled the skin of his skull. He closed his eyes as he felt for the pipes and the bolts, this large grown man on the floor with his eyes closed, sweat dripping off the smooth skin of his scalp. He closed his eyes to feel things better, and it made me think that maybe that’s why we close our eyes when we kiss. When he lifted himself up, the dampness of his back darkened the slate tile, a shadow of sweat that dried quickly, like rocks on the beach in the sun.

The younger plumber, James, was in the basement shouting about water lines through a hissing walkie-talkie. Mary was in a crawl space above the kitchen. On her belly, she was working to align ducting that ran from the industrial-size oven vent over the stove up through the ceiling, across ten and a half feet of lightless crawl space, and out the exterior wall. When she flipped the switch to turn on the fan that would suck smoke and greasy fat bubbles up and away from the stove, it sounded like a jet taking off. Mary rustled above and dealt with the metal. When the plumbers weren’t talking and the drills weren’t screaming, and the hammerbangs halted, you could hear Mary humming.

The day began with talk of pigs.

“How’re things on the farm?” Mary asked James.

“I’ve got a couple pigs now that weigh in over three hundred pounds. They’re not much good for eating when they get much bigger than that.” He talked of taking them to the slaughterhouse to get sausage back in one-pound bags. “You would not believe all the one-pound bags we’ve got. Freezers all over the place are filled with these one-pound bags.” He doesn’t name his animals, except his Saint Bernard. He had a cow named Meadow, and the Meadow burgers were delicious, “but it was a little sad,” he said.

“Didn’t you used to have some wild pig?”

“You mean that boar? Yeah, that mean thing.” He had to bang it with a two-by-four once to keep it from attacking him. This was easy to picture: this big plumber with his bulging eyes and belly, whacking a wiry-haired wild-eyed beast with a club of wood. There’s something wild-eyed about him, too, something impatient and sad. I liked hearing about his pigs.

“You still thinking about moving out to the country?” he asked Mary.

“I’ve been trying to persuade Emily we should buy a farm somewhere out Route 2.”

“You should do it.”

“That or Alaska.”

We went about setting up the tools for the day, and the heat, even at nine a.m., felt like an opponent.

“There will be much swearing,” Mary had said that morning as she opened the crawl-space hatch. It was one of her refrains. And it was an accurate forecast for that day.

I was in the back stairwell and my back was wet with sweat. Mary had given me a straightforward task: build a chase to cover up the pipes from the stair landing up to the ceiling.

“Chase?” I’d asked when she told me.

“Basically a column to hide the pipes. A tall, narrow, three-sided box.” I looked at her blankly. “A pipe-hider.” We stood on the back stairs and looked at the pipes, four of them, thick and thin, one of them cased in a foamy plastic cover. The guts of the house were peeking out, and a chase would make them disappear. “It’s a chase when it runs vertical and a soffit when it hides pipes or ducts along ceilings,” she explained. “First thing is to fire-stop the pipes,” which meant spraying a toxic orange foam that swelled up like a burnt marshmallow around the holes in the ceiling and the floor where the pipes passed through. It came from a canister that looked like it might spray silly string. The foam hardens after it swells, and slows a fire’s path as it burns through another story.

“No problem.”

I made the measurements. I cut the wood. I fastened the three pieces together with glue and the nail gun. Mary was right: it was a long, thin, three-sided box. It was an easy day for me, especially compared to the hell Mary was in up above. I carried the pipe-hider over my right shoulder like an oar, careful not to knock it against doorframes or cabinets as I moved through the kitchen and down into the dark back stairwell.

I propped it against the wall. The entrance to the crawl space opened above me, and bits of insulation floated down as Mary shifted. Some stuck to the skin of my arm. A fleck landed on my lip and I tried to spit it off.

“It’s just newspaper,” Mary said from above.

I didn’t believe that. I imagined a mix of newspaper shreds, mouse piss, rodent-nest detritus, asbestos residue, and generalized cancer dust. I didn’t want this toxic stuff on my lips, and my attempts to brush it off my damp forearms raised the worry that I was only mashing the poisons deeper into my pores. This was a regular sort of fear—when we mixed cement or sanded or stained and especially when we took down walls, I continued to fret about what was getting inside and the damage it would do.

“Can you bring me a flathead bit?” Mary called down. I was nurse to her doctor. I crawled up the ladder and shimmied through the hole. The heat of the space pressed in on me as if I’d been slotted into a toaster. Mary worked by the light of a camping lantern that she’d brought from her basement. Dust and insulation coated the skin on her arms and neck and face. I passed her the bit. She had a fearlessness when it came to her corporal self.

“I’m glad we waited for the hottest day of the year for this,” she said.

“Sorry there’s not room for both of us.”

“No you’re not.”

“Do you want a mask?” I asked, knowing she’d refuse.

“I can barely breathe as it is.”

I scrambled down and the duct metal twanged as she bent and attached one section to another. Ben the plumber struggled under the sink. He raised his work-booted foot off the floor to gain leverage. James was banging on pipes with a wrench. A clear ring of a bell clanged up from the basement.

I stood on the landing and raised the pipe-hider up and walked it back and forth toward the pipes. It covered them with just enough room on either side. I pressed it to get it flush to the wall, but it caught. A three-inch gap ran between the wall and the chase, from stair up to ceiling. Had I mismeasured? Had I gotten the distance wrong between platform and ceiling? I ran the tape up along the sides of the chase: a skosh less than a hundred and ten. I measured against the height of the ceiling. A hundred and ten on the nose. I leaned my weight into the chase. Nothing. It didn’t give. I gave it a kick. It stuck firm.

Ben and James continued their walkie-talkie back and forth:

“You find it?”

“Found it.”

“Over there by the furnace?”

“Yeah I found it.”

“Everything okay?”

“Besides the fact that I’m sweating my dick off down here? Yeah, everything’s okay.”

Measure twice, cut once. The carpenter’s proverb reminds us about planning, about accuracy, about the possibility of waste—of time, money, and material—when first steps are made with haste or distraction. “I cut it twice and it’s still too short” was a joke Mary’s old boss used to make, and I’d laughed when I heard it. Life is more forgiving than a two-by-four. Measure twice, measure six thousand times. I crouched and looked at the landing and I saw where my chase was catching. A swell at the seam of two floorboards—so slight—was bump enough to thwart the thing from fitting. Despite kicks, full body heaves, and all-my-weight pushing, the chase wouldn’t move over the bump and press flush to the wall. By then I’d learned that measurement wasn’t always absolute, that sometimes a quick bash rightly placed could nullify parts of inches. The numbers say one thing, the flex and movement of wood another. Some pieces and places offered forgiveness.

Not here. Sweat dripped from my chin. The base of the chase needed shaving, which meant tugging it out, hoisting it back up on my shoulder, and maneuvering it back out to the deck where the tools were set up.

Bang. Slam. A knock against the doorframe.

“Use the sander,” I heard from above.

The back deck looked out over the backs of houses in the Central Square neighborhood, which had its share of ne’er-do-wells, junkie congregations, piss smells on church doorways. It maintains a distinctly urban feel, a bit more grit and unpredictability compared to the rest of Cambridge, with its yoga studios and yogurt shops. The view showed small back gardens with swaying day lilies and bursts of hydrangeas. The old man next door spent each morning on his deck with the newspaper and a towering glass of orange juice. I waved. He raised his glass my way. He wore shorts and no shirt and the white hair on his chest stood out against his dark skin. A group of kids lived on the third floor across the way. Bikes leaned against their deck railing. They’d strung colored lights along the ceiling and used a milk carton as an ashtray. A girl in a tank top had a cigarette there in the afternoons. When we packed up around five those evenings, there’d be a few of them out there, and the hissing pop of bottle caps off beers made me thirsty for one too. An orange cat stalked around the patios below.