Hammer Head: The Making of a Carpenter (17 page)

“I know,” she said. “Don’t look.”

I didn’t want to look. Of course I wanted to look. I wanted some clues as to what this woman suffered. What were these pills—so many pills—used to fix?

I fixed the drawer. It closed smooth, right on its rails, with face attached and handle screwed tight.

Spending time in other people’s homes was one of the best pleasures of the carpentry work, and I felt especially grateful for it now after so long inside my own apartment. To see what cereal other people ate, how they brewed their coffee, what pictures hung on their walls, what books filled their shelves. The bookshelves always drew me first. Whenever Mary was outside having a smoke, and sometimes when I should’ve been installing a threshold, I’d look to see what lined the shelves in people’s homes. And I’d look at whatever was open on the desk—Post-it notes with phone numbers, a photograph of the couple looking younger, an obituary clipped from the newspaper. “Stop snooping,” Mary would say. Are there cats? Kids? Is the bed made? Would I want to live here? Would I want to live like this?

Is it every human’s impulse to peer into other people’s windows? What a small specific pleasure it is, to see someone in a moment of their living, a glimpse of someone standing at the stove over a steaming pan, pulling sheet corners over the mattress, brushing teeth, taking off a sweater. Carpentry allowed this glimpse into other people’s lives, not in fast glances through lit windows, but through the front door and into their rooms.

Taped to the frame of the door into the kitchen at Nidhi’s place, a hot-pink Post-it note read: “How can you be so judgmental?”

It was a judgment itself, self-turned. An unkind reminder: what gives you the right, who do you think you are? And it made me nervous, too, that just as we were in her private space and coming to know her, she was watching us. If you need to write a note to yourself reminding yourself not to be so judgmental, chances are you haven’t broken the habit yet. It made me more aware of how I was with her, how Mary was with her. Working in someone else’s home, one enters into the private space of a stranger, and a strange intimacy occurs.

Nidhi caught me looking at a photograph on her fridge: a beautiful woman with bright eyes and thick hair sitting on the railing of a deck by a hedge. The woman in the picture wasn’t smiling, but she looked happy and the light looked like almost evening light.

“That’s my mother. Isn’t she beautiful?”

“She really is.”

“She never seems to get old. My dad looks young, too. He jogs eight miles a day. I’ve got good genes. Guess how old I am?”

I suspected late thirties, but feared her puffed eyes and tired mouth were the result of the drawer of pills, that they had aged her beyond her years. I took a few years off.

“Thirty-three?”

“Ha!” she laughed. “Ha, I told you. Good genes. I’m forty-four.” She seemed well pleased, and I got the feeling that this was a game she played with a lot of people.

In the hall that led to the bedroom, scrawled on the wall in crayon, letters eight inches high: “6 hours earlier in Lulu!!!” Her sister lived in Hawaii, she mentioned at some point. Did she keep calling her too early in the morning?

We painted over it on a Tuesday.

A week or so after we finished up there, I thought I saw Nidhi on the street, wearing huge sunglasses and walking a big black dog. It felt odd to see her out of the context of her home, and I felt too nervous to say hello. I looked at my feet and crossed the road. I don’t know if she saw me. I don’t know if it was her.

S
o started a season that rocketed along. Later that summer, we were hired to do a total renovation of a kitchen. Nothing would go unchanged in this lovely third-floor Cambridge condo kitchen. New floors and cabinets. New countertops. New appliances. A doorway would be moved. A pantry would be built. The stove and sink were shifting from one side of the room to the other, which meant pipes had to be realigned. It was a big job, and Mary’s excitement was contagious.

Two women in their early fifties owned the place, Alice and Bettina. Bettina, from somewhere in the Black Forest, was large in a big-boned Teutonic way, and spoke with a gentle German accent. She’d tilt her chin toward her chest when speaking, which gave the effect, despite her height, that she was looking up at you. She gave an impression of forgiveness, which softened her imposing presence and likely suited her students at the university where she taught. Alice was large in a short, round way and her thick breasts hung braless like sacks of coins. The kitchen, it was clear from the start, was hers. She had designed it, and she would be the one to grill meat on the restaurant-grade stove and to roll delicate pastry dough on the marble counter. She also worked from home, so we’d be seeing a lot of her.

A sick heat had settled on the city, and it was only getting hotter. Boston in July is a soup of swelter and summer funk. Thick air makes every hug, every article of clothing, a torture. I pictured temperature degrees as invisible rods in the air, dense packed, heavy with moisture, settling on the skin, pressing as you moved. I sweat and sweat, heat-stunned and dulled.

On our first day at Alice and Bettina’s we unloaded the van and carried the tools up to the third floor. Our steps were fast and the loads felt light, carried with the excitement and optimism of a new gig.

“You should see the tiles Alice ordered,” Mary said. She rubbed her fingers together in a way that said
pricey
. “They’re gorgeous. I always tell people, when they’re trying to design a new kitchen, that they should pick one thing they want to splurge on. Cabs, tiles, new island, whatever.”

Tiling had been the first thing I’d done with Mary, and it was always one of my favorite parts of a job. The variety appealed—each kind of tile had its own personality and place. Tiny white coins make a good match for the floor of a small bathroom. A grand, high-ceilinged front hall can accommodate massive panels of tile for high heels to echo off of. A kitchen counter tiled with lapis blue brings warmth to the room. Texture varied: shiny smooth, earthen matte, rippled and gently ridged. Color varied: sunset terra-cotta, beach-stone slate, the promise of clarity and clean living of plain pure white.

Once the tools were upstairs, we surveyed the room. The demo had already been done so the room was blank, stripped of appliances, cabinets, and floor. The fridge was the only thing left in there; we’d need to move it before we started. Mary gave a quick order-of-events rundown and talked through where things would go. Fridge on the wall to the right; sink to its left; oven facing the fridge from the peninsula in the middle of the room, which would jut out between the two windows on the wall opposite us. There would be short cabinet corridors on either side of it. Open shelving would go on the left wall, a slab of marble countertop below the window on the left, and the pantry in an area by the door out to the back deck. I nodded as Mary talked, trying hard to position everything in its right place. It takes practice and imagination to conjure up a full, functioning room out of a blank one. Staring at this emptiness, it seemed near impossible that this would be an actual kitchen again. But I could feel the potential, too.

“Let’s get the fridge out of the way first,” Mary said.

I reached around the door of the fridge to get a good grip on it, and accidentally pulled it open. All at once, a potent, terrible smell knocked us both backwards. The sour stench of spoiled milk mixed with the musty stink of raw rot, a stale plastic smell as though electricity itself had decomposed. Mold dusted and slimed all over the shelves and drawers, a creeping black fuzz. Alice and Bettina had gone to Germany for a few weeks to avoid some of the upheaval of the renovation and had unplugged the fridge before they’d left. But they’d forgotten two tubs of yogurt and a block of Emmentaler cheese, and temperatures had hovered around eighty-five degrees since they’d left a few days before. Mary pulled open a drawer to find some now-unidentifiable plant matter, a mucusy vegetal slurry.

So instead of a quick shift of the fridge and getting on with the framing of the new doorway, Mary and I spent an hour scrubbing every surface of the fridge. “Take the drawers to the tub,” she told me. I washed mold off the plastic with water and Lysol and a green sponge and thought about the stutter steps of a new project. When I tell people I work for a carpenter, no doubt they envision pale curls of wood, the homey Christmas smell of pine, the quiet contemplation of craftwork. But here I was scrubbing mold off a refrigerator’s veggie drawer in a stranger’s bathtub. Often, at the start of the job, the work consists of things we don’t expect, that have little to do with a carpenter’s training or expertise.

Isn’t this often the case elsewhere, too? When we picture the lives of other people, we imagine the most exciting parts, the ones rich with drama and
living
. The ER surgeon reattaching a man’s leg after a car accident. The painter finishing off a portrait, paint on her wrist, and getting into bed with her subject. The farmer trundling in from a day of harvest, tossing a dirty sack of fresh carrots or onions on the table. Imagination is the enemy sometimes, in how fully we can bring to life the passion our current love shared with someone else before, in how fire-filled someone else’s existence is compared to our own. But of course, most of us spend our time figuring out what to make for dinner, trying to remember to buy another roll of paper towels. Our romanticizing is perhaps an act of hope, that those sorts of lives are possible to live, that it’s possible to find challenge and satisfaction in our work, to have our bodies lit up with lust, to happen upon those conversations that go deep into the night when voices get quieter and truer things get said. In our imaginings of other people’s experiences exists an ambition to exist in our own in the fullest way.
You’re a carpenter, it must be amazing to make things
! And it is. Except when it isn’t.

T
hree days into the job and we were ready at last to start on the floor. I’d gotten a call from Mary the night before. “So listen, I’ve got a bunch of running around to do tomorrow. The tiles are getting delivered between nine and ten. They’re going to leave them at the bottom of the stairs. If you just want to be there for the delivery and bring them up, we can call it a day and I’ll see you back there on Thursday.”

Bring a few boxes of tile upstairs and call it a day? Great.

I sat on Alice and Bettina’s front porch and waited for the tile guy. A few minutes before ten, he pulled up in his truck, shoulders like cantaloupes and forehead dripping with sweat.

“Hot enough for you?” he said. He began unloading boxes, two at a time, to the landing at the base of the stairs. “You got some help with these, hon? Or are you bringing all of them upstairs yourself?”

“Just me.”

“This building got an elevator?”

“No.”

“You got your work cut out for you today. You stay cool.” He climbed back into his truck and roared off toward another delivery.

Who needs a fucking elevator?

Twenty-five boxes of these tiles plus two sixty-pound bags of cement sat at the base of the stairs like the beginnings of a fortress. Mary had been right about the tile. Beautiful five-by-five-inch squares, slate gray like smoothed stones and no two alike. Some had bumps and small pits, some had striations of paler gray like a good luck ring around a rock at the beach. Even in the boxes, it was easy to imagine them underneath bare feet as you stood by the stove scrambling eggs on Sunday morning or tip-toed through in the evening to pour a glass of water before bed. I looked at the stacks. Fine. A lot of trips, but I could probably take two boxes at a time like the tile guy.

I lifted a box—
oh, shit
—and I put the box down. Then I laughed. I would not be carrying two boxes at a time. I couldn’t believe the weight. A box the size of a loaf of bread, and each one weighed thirty-five pounds. That’s like holding more than four gallons of water, the same as a sack of about twenty-eight-hundred quarters. Thirty stairs rose between me and the third floor. By ten that morning, it was already edging up over eighty-five degrees.

I got myself into mule mode. One box at a time, up and up, steady steps, then barreling down the stairs for another load. Box in my arms, up we go, then bouncing down. It was hypnotic. I was a body moving up and down, brainless and physical. All I needed was muscle, patience, and the will to get a thing done. It was similar to the task of cleaning the moldy drawers: boring, necessary, underimagined.

The pile of boxes dwindled at the bottom of the stairs and grew at the top. Ten boxes left, then four, then one, and I realized I should not have left the two bags of cement for last. I climbed eight hundred and ten stairs that day, hauled up nine hundred ninety-five pounds, nearly half a ton. The feeling that resulted from the effort, the satisfaction, was so different from the one I knew putting a final period on a book review or a profile on deadline.

Finishing a piece of writing, the sensation was relief coupled with a spentness, a short temper and depletion, grinchy and hollow. After a deadline, I experienced a pinched feeling behind the eyes, and the next person I’d encounter would get strained smiles and diverted, unfocused attention. The more fully I existed in the world of the writing, the more removed I’d feel from the world as it existed around me, and the transition back, particularly after rare moments of writing flight—when the words come and there is nothing else—would grind. Almost immediately upon finishing a piece of writing, the glow faded, and all I’d see were the flaws.

Work with Mary was different. I looked back on everything we’d built with satisfaction and pride, even the things that didn’t deserve it. The bookshelves for a rich psychiatrist with a grand piano: without question the best bookshelves that have ever been built. That bamboo floor we installed in a basement to turn it to a bedroom: who cares if the floor was the color of Band-Aids: there has never been a better bamboo floor than that. The deck stairs in Somerville: I could run up and down those stairs for hours, they are exactly what stairs should be.