Hammer Head: The Making of a Carpenter (5 page)

We packed up the tools, reloaded the van, and I shivered a bit on the ride back. I wondered if I’d botched too many tiles, if my lugging had impressed, if she’d noticed the time I’d gotten out of her light.

“You freezing?” Mary asked.

“A little chilled.”

She blasted the heat and the windshield wipers swept across the glass.

When we got back to her driveway I thanked her and she laughed. “Thank you,” she said, and handed me seventy bucks in cash. That was ten bucks an hour and it seemed like a lot of money for what I’d done. “Go take a hot shower. Get that tile dust out of your hair.” I rubbed my palm across my head. Damp and gritty, crumbs of tile dust had adhered to my hair. I thanked her again.

“Take care,” she said.

These were final parting words, words you say to someone you don’t know and won’t see again. I headed home cold and low, a fatigue in my bones from standing all day and a recognition, in those two words, that she would hire someone else.
Take care
. I went to bed early and all the bad thoughts returned as the wind picked up and rain lashed: regret, work, money, health insurance, loneliness, missed trains, and empty calendars.

The next morning, gray but no rain, Mary called. She told me the job was mine if I wanted it. I told her that I did.

Chapter 2

HAMMER

On the force of the blow

T
he day after Mary gave me the job, I arrived at her basement workshop. “Welcome to the wunderhovel,” she said. A ping-pong table doubled as a work space; its surface was cratered and paint-splattered, pocked with nurdles of wood glue. Paint and stain cans, many rusted shut, stood stacked in towers below a small window that lit up the dust in the cobwebs that laced the paint-can handles. Power cords looped from pipes and beams above. Under mugs that held puffs of white mold on forgotten coffee, packages of sandpaper circles, old boxes of drywall screws, and an empty case for a saw I didn’t know the name of, there was a workbench. Tools, rarely used, or so the layer of dust on handles and blades suggested, hung on a pegboard alongside hacksaws, long screwdrivers, and a roll of blue painter’s tape. Strange clamps, with wood pressers separated by metal rods, dangled from the corner of the pegboard. A bare bulb hanging from the ceiling had a motion-detector system that flicked off the light after a moment of stillness. We stood like fools, waving our arms to make the light come back on.

Amid the mess, so much potential, so much possibility—all these tools, each with its own name and use, each with its specific strength. How powerful! We’d build walls, houses, whole worlds! Clear away the coffee mugs, spread out on the ping-pong table, take these tools in our hands, and
build
!

“You ever grouted before?” Mary asked as she rustled through a bin.

“Nope.”

“Get ready to grout.”

The buzz and bang of work continued at the architect’s house. Mary poured dark brown grout powder from the big-milk-box container into a clean bucket. She didn’t tell me to hold my breath this time, but I did anyway. She added some water and mixed.

“Grout can be a little thinner than mud,” she said, pulling the mixer out of the goop and looking at it fall, the same way you’d pull egg whites up with the beater to see if they peak. She passed me a tool with a plastic handle and a flat base, like a scrub brush with a smooth white rubber base where bristles would be. Mary called it a float. What a lovely name for a tool, I thought. It conjured images of waves and small boats and surrendering my weight to water. It hooked some long-gone memory of my father taking my brother Will and me surf fishing—was part of a lure called a float? My father would fling the rod so the hook flew out over the waves and then reel as fast as he could so the bright lure whippled through the waves quick like a fish to catch the attention of the bluefish. “Some people go their whole lives without seeing the ocean,” I remember him telling us as we packed up the fishing gear on the beach one evening, putting the hooks back into his neat tackle box with the bright-colored lures with feathery, sparkly tails and such sharp hooks.

“You understand the basic concept, right?” Mary asked.

“I think so.”

“Get the grout between the tiles.”

We slopped grout onto the floor and began to move and spread it in the spaces between with the floats. Mary moved with fluidity. She pressed the float across the gullies between the tiles, coming at the diagonal, first one direction, then the other. I felt clumsy, trying to herd the grout into the space with the edge of my float.

“Going back and forth makes it more even,” she said. I tried to adopt her technique. “You don’t want any bubbles. And the more grout you leave on the tile, the more we have to clean up.”

How finished the tiles looked with the spaces between them filled in, the lines even like a map of a city grid.

“I used to be able to do this without kneepads,” Mary said. “Is it bothering you?”

It wasn’t.

“I’m getting old.” She talked of housewife’s knee—I hadn’t heard the phrase before. Otherwise known as housemaid’s knee or prepatellar bursitis, it’s a condition in which the fluid-filled sac in front of the kneecap gets inflamed, plaguing people who spend a lot of time kneeling, Cinderellas and floor scrubbers and grouters.

We finished the floor, buffed it clean with T-shirt rags, and Mary passed me the crowbar. “Take up the stair treads down to the basement.”

Crowbar in hand, I stood at the top of the basement stairs. Cave-cool air rose from below with that cellar smell, damp and stony. I hoped that what I was about to do was what Mary had in mind. I jammed the bar, thicker and longer than the little pry bar Mary had used to remove the threshold, underneath the tread of the top stair. I pressed up, heaved and ho’d, and felt the board peel up and pop under my efforts with a wailing sound of nail releasing its hold on wood. I couldn’t believe the force of the bar. I popped off the top of one stair, then another, ratty pieces of dark wood, faded gray and splintery where feet have landed and landed, up and down. I grunted and sweat. Halfway done, and proud of the quick work, I looked around at the basement below. A long workbench lined a far wall with an old red vise attached to the end.

It reminded me of my father’s basement workshop growing up. He carved decoys down there, and the place was filled with tools. A table saw, a band saw, handsaws. Files, chisels, rasps. A mean, sharp-bladed thing that looked like a small-scale scythe. Most I didn’t know the names of. With wooden-handled tools, he carved birds (piping plovers, sandpipers, wood ducks, shorebirds with long arced beaks on spindly legs). He painted them, some detailed, some crude in the folk-art tradition. He glued lifelike glass eyes into the wood. They stood on dowel legs mounted to driftwood bases he’d combed off beaches. The ducks were hollow-bodied and would float if you put them on the lake or the river to attract real ducks to shoot. The ones he made were never used in hunting. The birds he’s made are beautiful, the curved shapes of their bodies and beaks, their sparkling eyes, the feathers, some dun and speckled, some green so dark it’s almost black.

When I was young, I never gave much thought to the process of the making, of how a block of wood, right-angled and raw, was turned to something else. He’d go down there to the basement, and eventually emerge with a pair of plovers or a duck. They were given as gifts—weddings, birthdays. Some stayed at our house, on mantels and bookshelves. I have a small blue heron, about six inches high, unpainted, which sits on a high shelf near a window in the small apartment I share with my boyfriend Jonah in Cambridge not far from the Charles River. My father gave it to me years ago with the promise of a full-size heron someday. The only tool I was interested in down there in his workshop was a branding pencil—it heated up so hot you could burn letters into wood in dark char. I put my initials on his workbench and on scrap wood. When he and my mom split up, all his tools went into storage.

I turned back to the stairs I was in the process of dismantling and looked up to see that Connie, the owner of the house, the architect herself, forty-something in tidy clothes and an angular haircut, stood at the top of the stairs looking down at me, notebook in her hand, pencil behind her ear.

“Hi,” she said, with a tone that said
Should I know you?

I looked up at the stairs, her stairs to her basement, stripped of their treads, just the frame and dark hollows left, making descent difficult, and a flash of second-guess panic surged. Are these actually the treads? Did I just dismantle the wrong part of these stairs? Does she need to get down here? Here I was, a crowbar-wielding stranger in her home doing damage. I looked up and gave her a pained smile. “I’m just—”

“It’s okay.” She glanced to her right into the kitchen and something snagged her attention. “Hang on,” she said to someone in there. “Whoa, hey, hang on, watch the cabinets.” And she moved away from the top of the stairs, boot heels on the hardwood like bangs on a tight drum.

I took a few breaths, waited to see if she’d return. She didn’t, and I continued to destroy her stairs, step by step. Mary arrived as I was nearly at the bottom, piling the cracked boards by the basement door. She looked down and nodded.

“The crowbar’s amazing,” I said, not letting on my doubt about the definition of tread. “I feel like a superhero.”

“Good for you,” Mary said. “Next time, start at the bottom and work your way up.”

I looked up and realized I’d have to somehow scamper up the now treadless stairs.

O
n the drive over on the third day, Mary mentioned that Connie the architect had asked about me. Mary explained that I’d been a journalist and had just started on with her. The architect had said, “I thought so.” I wondered how she knew.

That afternoon, Mary and I were in the master bathroom. I was perched on the side of the tub watching as Mary, crouched and bending over the shower bed, demonstrated what pitching a shower meant. She’d poured cement into the base of the shower and was smoothing it with a trowel. Thick mud, no bumps or bubbles, angled in just the right way so the water would slip drainward from all directions. She smoothed the tool over the slickness of the wet cement, a steady skim. Stroke by stroke she glossed across the surface of cement to coat the basin. It was mesmerizing. It made me think of the pleasure of watching my closest friend cook when we lived together in our mid-twenties, the way she chopped and stirred, maneuvered between countertop and stove. There is pleasure in watching someone who knows how to use tools, in witnessing skill and nonchalance with basic things. I followed Mary’s movements with my eyes, spellbound.

Connie the architect appeared in the doorway.

“I found out about your secret life.”

I bristled, blushed, drawn out of my trance. The sentence had a note of accusation, the unspoken charge: you are guilty of pretending. “It’s not really a secret.”

“Did you have a particular beat?”

“I wrote about books mostly.”

She raised an eyebrow in a way that spoke surprise and approval. I was aware of the tool bucket at my feet, of the dirty jeans I was wearing for the third day in a row, of Mary crouching and smoothing cement.

“Fiction or non-?” she asked, and asked for any recent highlights. I listed off a few books, started to tell her what I’d liked about them. “There’s a new debut collection of stories that’s amazing—the author blends real and fantastical in this seamless way, so you’re reading about this sad couple leading the sort of lives we all lead, and then Big Foot becomes a force in the story, or the Loch Ness Monster. Really lyrical and excellent and —”

“Pass me the sponge,” Mary said.

I stopped, face red and heart pounding, and rummaged through the bucket. Whether Mary was trying to remind me where my attention ought to be, or just needed the sponge, I don’t know. But the point was taken. I passed it to her and I went back to watching her in silence. The architect slipped away toward another set of workers in another part of the house, and I went back to perching on the edge of a tub learning how to make water move toward a drain.