Hammer Head

by Nina MacLaughlin

  From down on her knees she asked me to pass the pry bar from the bucket of tools.

  “This guy?” I said, lifting a metal tool out of a pouch in the bucket. Cool in my hand, about nine inches long, one end of it flared out like a fish tail, the other bent like a lazy J. It looked like a pryer to me, something to jam underneath and lift.

  “That’s the one.” She made quick work of the threshold. A few quick jabs with the bar underneath the wood and some pressing tugs and the threshold popped up and off. It looked effortless.

  “Toss me the chalk line.”

  I peered into the bucket as though I was leaning into a dark well, and wondered if these requests were part of the test, to see what I knew. If so, I was failing.

  “Gray plastic teardrop-shaped thing with a little tag sticking out of it.”

  I rustled it out and gave it a gentle underhand toss across the bathroom. Mary caught it one-handed. She shook the thing, pulled out the little tag, and a chalky blue string emerged from the holster.

  “Take this,” she said, holding out the gray plastic part, “and pull.”

  I took hold and pulled as Mary held her end with the metal tag on the floor against the wall where she’d made that centerline mark.

  “Now place the line down on the mark in the doorway and pull the string tight,” she said. I crouched and crawled under the tile saw and placed the string down on the mark.

  “Hold tight,” she said. “Ready?”

  “I think so.”

  She lifted the string at a point in between us so it formed a low hill in the middle of the room, and then she released it. The line snapped against the floor. A puff of blue chalk dust plumed, and a thin chalky line stretched across the floor. A friend’s older brother used to play a game with us with a rubber band. We held out our arms and he’d snap the band against our skin, pulling further and further away with each snap, leaving red stinging streaks on our flesh like the blue line just snapped.

  “That’s the centerline of the room,” Mary said, still down on her knees.

  She ripped open a bag of sandy powder like the ripped one in the back of her van and poured some into another orange bucket. Fine dust poured from the top of the bucket as though a Cub Scout at the bottom of the bucket was trying to build a fire with wet wood.

  “Hold your breath.”

  She filled another small bucket with water from the tub, dumped it into the powder, and used the drill with a long metal attachment, twisted at the end like some industrial eggbeater and caked in hard gray something, to mix it.

  “Toothpaste,” she said.

  “Sorry?”

  “You want the mud to be the consistency of toothpaste.”

  Mud! “Okay.”

  Once it was mixed, Mary slopped a pile on the floor. It didn’t look like toothpaste I’d want to use—gloppy and dull gray, it smelled like wet paper. She spread it around with a notched trowel that left grooved tracks. I liked the quiet scritching of the metal trowel teeth against the subfloor, and how it left smooth swirls in the mud. She took a sand-colored tile, about the size of a record sleeve, and placed it just to the left of the centerline we’d chalked. She placed the second tile next to it, to the right of the line. And then the cutting began.

  Mary soaked the fat sponge and squeezed the water into the tray at the base of the saw.

  “What’s the water for?”

  “Tile saws are wet saws.”

  I nodded, figured that was all I needed to know. Maybe the friction of the blade through the tile caused flames.

  She used her pencil and a metal triangle with a lip on one side as a straightedge to draw a dark line down the left side of the tile. She handed it to me.

  It was cold in my hand and heavier than I thought it would be. “Okay,” I said, in that same here-goes-nothing way. I flipped the switch on the saw. With a wet whir, the blade spun into motion, spitting a blast of cold water up into my face. A plastic catch was supposed to lower over the blade to reduce the spray of porcelain dust and water, like a fender over a bicycle wheel, but it was badly bent, attached with duct tape, and useless. The blade spewed a damp mist of water and tile dust that soaked a line between my breasts down to my bellybutton.

  “Go slow,” Mary said, measuring out the next tile. These were the only instructions she gave.

  I lowered the tile on the flat wet surface and aimed the pencil line at the spinning blade, which wasn’t shark-fanged like the saws I knew, but a surface smooth and circular, like a few CDs pressed together. I did not trust that it would cut through this hard tile in my hands.

  It did. When blade touched tile, the saw’s sound shifted. Wet whirring rose to a thudding roar. The blade hit the porcelain, chewing a dark line as tile dust and water sprayed. I guided the tile, hands at corners closest to my body, tried to keep it straight, shifting, moving, steady here, steady. I shifted too much and the tile jammed. The angle of the cut pinched the blade and it came to a shivering halt with a noise that meant wrong. I looked at Mary on the floor, my face a stricken sort of question mark. She turned toward me and without words put her hands out in front of her, miming the guide of the tile, then moved her hands back toward herself, then forward again. Reverse, said the gesture. Back, then forward. I backed it out a bit and the blade sputtered back into a spin. I smoothed the tile forward, steered it right, kept cutting.

  The saw roared. But I didn’t notice the noise. I didn’t notice the spray or the dust or that the front of my shirt was getting soaked. All I knew was the pencil line and the corners of the tile against my fingertips and keeping that cut on the line. I realized at one point that I’d been neglecting to breathe. I pushed the tile slowly, halfway across. Time dilated. Time lasted miles. The section broke off, dripping wet with a tiny chip on the corner. I turned off the saw and handed the cut tile back to Mary, my hands wet now, and cold.

  “I chipped the corner.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Mary said. “It’ll get hidden under the baseboard.” The relief made me think of doing my first Q&A for the newspaper—my editor told me the questions could go in any order I liked, that the interview didn’t have to follow the way I’d asked the questions in the interview itself. How literal-minded we are when new to work. How pleasing to learn that there’s slack in the toil, room for error and for play.

  Mary placed the tile on the floor with the cut side against the wall. She pressed it into the grooved mud. She marked another, handed it to me. I flipped the saw switch again and wiped the first splash out of my eyes.

  So we went. I took too much off one. Mary placed it, eyed the gap, said “Too small,” put the tile aside and marked another one. Too big and she’d hand it back. “Just a skosh more.” A sloppy and uneven cut she held up for me to see. A wobbled jagged edge, nothing straight or clean about it. I cringed.

  “Sorry. I lost control of that one.”

  For the curved line around the toilet base, she demonstrated a piano-key technique to get the arc that the tile saw wouldn’t allow. She showed me how to cut slices every half inch or so along the curve so the pieces look like long teeth in a wide smile. Then tap each piece with a hammer, or extra bit of tile or whatever you have on hand, to break off the teeth and achieve the curve. Any jagged bits can be smoothed down with a file. I liked this trick. It was tidy, quick, and commonsensical. The tile pieces made such a satisfying tinck when they broke off.

  Then she handed me a tile that had no mark on it, no dark pencil line to show me where to cut.

  “Four and eleven-sixteenths,” she said. I fumbled through the bucket for a tape measure and one of the flat pencils I’d seen Mary using. I repeated the number in my head. Four and eleven-sixteenths. It was as foreign a number as I’d ever heard. Ghosts from high-school math class—geometry proofs, variables in algebraic equations—streaked around my head. Four and eleven-sixteenths. It made less sense every time I repeated it, the syllables dissolving into the damp and gritty slurry of tile dust and water.

  I hooked t
he metal lip over the edge of the sand-colored tile, and stretched the tape across it. Mary, still down on her knees, turned her back to me to press another tile into the mortar on the floor. While her back was turned, I used my thumbnail to count the tiny lines as fast as I could. One-sixteenth, two-, three-. I got to nine.

  “Are you counting?” she asked, her back still to me.

  My face flushed. This is the point where I don’t get the job, I thought. This is where my carpentry career starts and ends. This is the point where she smacks her head and says, Girl doesn’t even know how to read a damn tape! It felt like getting caught cheating.

  Using a handsaw, hammering a nail, pushing a tile against a blade that spun through a shallow bath of water, these actions would require practice. I knew this from the start, reminded myself that morning on the drive, and as I pushed the tile against the blade. I couldn’t expect—or be expected—to make the tools or materials do what I wanted them to do right away. The tape measure, though . . . I hadn’t thought it, of all the tools, would pose the steepest challenge.

  These holster tapes are ubiquitous now in tool buckets and junk drawers. I played with one that lived in a kitchen drawer when I was a kid, clipping it to a chair leg, extending it across the floor, then jiggling it so it would come whipping back across the floor to make the holster jump and flip with the momentum of its entry.

  The first patent for the spring tape measure, the kind that zips back into the holster, was granted to a New Havener named Alvin J. Fellows in 1868. His main contribution to the tool was the mechanism that allowed the measurer to lock the tape at any distance. A useful improvement, being able to stop the tape in place so it doesn’t come whipping back before you’ve had the chance to make the measure.

  But the holster tape didn’t catch on until the 1940s. Until then, carpenters used folding wooden rulers instead. We had one that lived on the workbench in the garage. I got my fingers pinched in its hinges and still remember the hurt.

  Whether an old-fashioned folding wooden ruler or a newfangled holster type, the problem was the same: All my lugging skills wouldn’t undo this failing, this basic lack. I knew nothing about carpentry. I knew even less than I thought.

  Mary got up from the floor and stood next to me. She took the tape from my hand.

  “Here,” she said, pointing, “what’s this?”

  “Two and a half.”

  “What’s this?”

  “Two and three-quarters.”

  “This?”

  “Two and a quarter.”

  She moved her thumb again. Some mortar had dried and cracked on her knuckle. Her fingers were long, feminine, strong.

  “Two and an eighth?”

  She shook her head. “Guess again.” I leaned in closer to get a better look. I could smell the cigarettes on her.

  “Two and —” The lines blurred up and my brain went blank. I touched the damp spot of my shirt on my upper chest. Mary let a little more time go by.

  “Show me two and four-eighths,” she said, rescuing me. I pointed to it with my thumbnail.

  “Now, what’s this?” She moved her thumb back to the place it had been.

  “Three-eighths,” I said. “Two and three-eighths.”

  “All right!” she laughed.

  She let the tape retreat back into its case. “What’s twelve-sixteenths?” she asked.

  That I remembered how to reduce fractions came as a surprise. “Three-fourths!” Here I was answering questions that a fourth-grader could get, with ill-earned pride. I felt like an idiot. But not because of Mary—her questioning was patient, never patronizing, as though she wanted to make me understand, not show me how much I didn’t know, the mark of a good teacher.

  “Three-fourths. Right. And if you remember that twelve-sixteenths is three-quarters, then you know where thirteen-sixteenths is, and eleven- and nine-.” And she told me about her old boss Buzz, a grade-A perfectionist and skilled builder who wanted things exact to a thirty-second of an inch. “I counted, too,” she said. “Practice,” she said. “It comes with practice.”

  I practiced. We repeated the process that day. Concrete actions: first this, then this. Measure, mark, cut. The sounds of the saw, the spray, the cold dry tile, the wet cut tile, my body positioned in front of the saw, eyes locked on the line, everything else—time and language—evaporated in the concentration, in the physical act of doing.

  The newspaper taught me what rote was. Sitting at my desk in the newsroom, fingertips tip-tapping, click-clicking, the dull glow of the screen reflecting off the pale skin of my cheeks, my glazed eyes, I’d felt a brain-dulled mechanization, action without thought, action without meaning or purpose. But here, with the tiles, each one had its place, part of the whole, each measurement had a purpose, each cut. There was no slumped semi-consciousness. It was repetitive, yes, but somehow not boring. The sense I was getting on this try-out day was that even if you cut thousands of tiles, even if you spent a year at the tile saw, you’d still have to pay attention. Every time. You’d get faster. You’d get better—straighter cuts, less jamming of the blade—but you’d still have to focus. The repetition with the tiles provoked presence, a specific physical hereness.

  “Smoke break,” Mary announced and headed out for a cigarette in the rain. “Don’t tell my wife.” I looked at the section of floor we’d completed so far. Rain hit the window and pattered on the roof above. Footsteps on the stairs and an old man appeared—he looked a hundred years old, with a long white beard and long white hair tied back in a ponytail that hung between his shoulder blades, like the tail of something that belonged in snows. He wore light hammer-looped, paint-splattered pants and a white T-shirt that hung from his shoulders like a sheet. He carried a paint can and a brush, a dull canvas drop cloth under his arm. He set himself up on the opposite side of the room by one of the dormer windows.

  “Good to see women on the job.”

  I didn’t know what to say. It would be clumsy to explain that I wasn’t really on the job, just trying out, had only been on the job for a couple hours, that I didn’t know how to read a tape measure. It would be clumsy to say it was good to see a hundred-year-old wizard on the job, too.

  “Thanks. It’s good to be on the job.”

  When Mary returned from her smoke, we kept working without much talk and finished laying the tile. They needed a night to set before they could be grouted, so we were done for the day. The combination of concentration, newness, of not knowing the rhythm of the day, made the minutes swift. Three-to-four on a Tuesday afternoon at your desk when all you’re doing is murdering the minutes—it feels like torture because in the back of our brains, what we know is these hours are our only ones. They are finite and will be finished. A girl I knew once went around to all the guests at a party and told them, one by one, “This is your real life, you know. This is your real life.” What a thing to be reminded of—and how easy to forget. I liked how the tiles looked on that floor.

  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

  The 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!