“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.
On 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 o
f 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.
Spring opened into summer, and Mary and I tumbled from job to job. We made built-in bookcases for a kitchen in Dorchester. We took down a wall, mended cabinets, and patched a ceiling in a just-bought fixer-upper in Jamaica Plain. We installed trim and painted, painted, painted for a southern belle in Cambridge. (“Oh darn, I think I want atrium white instead of linen white. Could y’all do the front hall, spare room, and parlor again?”) And we redid a bathroom for a widowed grandmother who had dozens of giraffe figures decorating her small condo in Somerville. I learned piecemeal, skill by skill as the job required.
I was delighted by the variety of what we were up to, the speed at which we moved from one small job to the next. But Mary was frustrated. She bemoaned the state of the economy—no one had money for big projects, so she was forced to cobble together odd jobs and fix-it gigs instead of the larger and more lucrative renovation carpentry work she loved and was qualified for. A day’s work here, a few days there, ten days, then out and on to the next thing. Here’s your back deck, your new windows, your wall. Mary talked with longing of apartment overhauls, kitchens redone floor to ceiling, work that would keep us at a place for six weeks, a couple months.
During a tedious stretch of days painting, Mary and I sometimes went an hour or two without exchanging a word. It was a comfortable silence that suited both of us—I think we were both grateful not to feel the pressure of filling the time with chatter. She would roll the paint, I would cut in with the brush along baseboard edges, in corners, where ceiling met wall. The phrase Be the work surfaced on my thoughts, some pop-Zen saying picked up somewhere. I tried to lose myself in the spread and flow of atrium white from the paint can where it looked like a tub of vanilla milkshake, to the brush bristles, onto the wall. Wooden paintbrush handle in my hand, the paint spread creamy, thick and slick, a silken gloss that pulse-by-pulse dried to coat the wall.
Other hours we chatted nonstop.
“You know that post I put up on Craigslist? I got three hundred responses. Three hundred.” This was not the first time she’d mentioned it. “Can you believe that? In less than twenty-four hours. I was getting e-mails from guys twenty years in the trades.” She slopped her roller in the tray. “Sign of the times.”
She talked about her daughter Maia, putting tomboyhood behind her and hanging posters of pretty boy bands on her walls.
“It sure makes time go a lot faster, having a kid.”
“How so?”
“It makes you way more aware of how much time you have left.”
Maia is the biological daughter of Mary’s wife Emily and their good friend Henry, who lives downstairs from them with his husband in that big pale yellow two-family in Winter Hill. Four parents, one family, one roof.
“Are there other family arrangements that you know of like this?” I asked.
“Not that I know of.”
“That kid must get a whole lot of love.”
“I can’t imagine how people do it with just two parents,” she said.
All five of them used to live together in a single-family home. When they bought the place they’re in now, divided up and down, Maia referred to it as the divorce.
Mary’s wife Emily is a social worker with a beaming smile and tattoos of cranes and ivy on her shoulders. She teaches fitness classes and competes in triathlons. They’ve been together for more than twenty years, and when they talked on the phone, Mary’s voice rose a pitch, there was sweetness and affection. “Hey, hon. Love you.” It was a good thing to see, this tough broad with paint in her hair and a nail between her teeth being so soft and affectionate even after so many years together.
Mary is thirteen years older than me, a good distance of time—not old enough to feel like a parent, and not close enough in age to feel like a peer. Without trying, without any sort of superiority or condescension, in the natural way she has, she gave the sense you can learn from me. She didn’t have it all figured out, nor did she claim to, and that, too, made her the ideal sort of teacher, someone who is also learning still.
But our conversation often went back to her craving for bigger jobs.
“I want something I can sink my teeth into again,” she said, rolling paint on a back-bedroom wall with a bay window overlooking a narrow Cambridge side street. “All this Mickey Mouse shit”—it was her phrase for amateur stuff—“I’m losing my mind.”
Not me. My mind was consistently being blown.
We spent a week building a back deck on a dead-end street in Somerville. After demoing the existing one, crumbling and rotted, we dug four post holes with a post-hole digger, a dual-sided shovel with two long handles that you plunge into the earth in a two-handed combination of throwing and stabbing. Once it’s in, you pull the handles apart to bring the shovels together to grip the dirt, then lift the load out of the hole and pile it nearby. It took hours and made my shoulders ache. Each hole had to be four feet deep, which is a long way into the earth, a depth that brings coffins to mind. Four feet is regulation depth in the northeast to support a structure like a deck; that’s the depth that reaches below the frost line, Mary explained. In winter, soil freezes from the surface downward. Low temps creep in and down, the way on certain days in February the cold seems to seep below the surface of your skin and deep into your blood and bones. As water in the soil turns to ice, it expands under the earth, and presses in at whatever it comes up against with magnificent force. Tens of thousands of pounds per inch can shift a fence post, a beam, a building. When, come spring, you see a fence post that’s risen from the earth, uneven with its partner posts, heaving is what’s happened. The freeze makes what’s under the surface shift and heave, like a chest rising with a big breath in the lungs, so it’s important to dig fence-post holes below that frost line. I’d known none of this, had never considered dirt and water and cold and their relationship to deck posts, all the action underneath the surface, the stuff we never see.
I started to notice stoops and decks and porches everywhere I went. I looked for the greenish tint of pressure-treated wood. It used to be impregnated with arsenic and other chemicals to repel water and prevent rot. When Mary told me about the arsenic, I started holding my breath as I chopped pieces for our deck. Pressure-treated wood is heavier than regular wood, and has a strange cold dampness to the touch. As I moved about my little world, I saw decks everywhere, with potted geraniums and hanging ferns. Twinkly Christmas lights twisted around railings. Balusters had bikes locked to them and waterproof cushions softened seats. Decks everywhere, each with wood that had been measured and cut by someone, and we were building one.
It was like standing front row at a parade of things I took for granted. Sta
irs, for example. Useful for moving between floors, for reaching your front door, for heading underground to catch a train to another part of the city. Codes regulate height and depth. We all know the feeling of a stair rising higher than the one before it, catching our toe on its lip; or more jarring, in the descent, stepping down with the expectation in your every bone that a solid thing will be there to meet you, to take your weight—and it not being there. Or it comes up too soon and sends a jolt through the ankle, up into the knee, the ugly vibration of impact. We’ve all felt that falling feeling right before sleep, the plunging feeling where we take a step and miss and make a fast thrash in our sheets. Muscle memory is fast formed—our bones know where the next step should come—and it’s important that steps answer those expectations. Rules for stairs go back a long way.
In De architectura, his ten-volume, first-century-BC treatise on architecture—and astronomy and anatomy and mathematics and color (“I shall now begin to speak of purple, which exceeds all the colors that have so far been mentioned both in costliness and in the superiority of its delightful effect”)—Vitruvius proposed, “The rise of steps should, I think, be limited to not more than ten nor less than nine inches; for then the ascent will not be difficult. The treads of the steps ought to be made not less than a foot and a half, and not more than two feet deep.” In the eighteenth century, French architect Jacques-François Blondel suggested in Cours d’architecture that the length of the human pace should dictate the rise-versus-run ratio, the ratio of step height to step depth. American builders closer to our own time subscribed to a useful approximation: that the sum of the rise and the run should total about seventeen and a half inches. Now, a stair tread, where you place your foot, has to be at least nine inches deep. And the riser can be no more than eight and a quarter inches. No space between two steps can vary more than three-eighths of an inch.
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