The café was closed for business while Mary and I worked, which gave some urgency to the job; they needed to get back to pressing panini. After we moved the refrigerator out of the way, we attached two-by-fours to the ceiling and, parallel to them, to the floor. On the right and left edges we attached two more boards that ran vertically between the floor and ceiling planks to form a rectangle. We measured and marked for the studs, the upright boards that form the frame of the wall and support plaster, sheets of drywall, or plywood.
Hanging shelves in a kitchen at another job, I’d watched as Mary knocked on the wall with her knuckles.
“I’m trying to find the stud,” she’d said. “The drywall won’t support the shelf. You want to make sure you’re hitting wood.” Another way to do it is drill holes in the wall until you hit something, feel the resistance against the bit when it hits the wood behind the wall. This technique only works if something will cover that section of Swiss-cheesed wall. Mary rapped along the wall—hollow knock-knocking, and then a duller thud. “Hear that?” She knocked again. “Hear how it’s not so echoey? That’s the stud.” She made a mark with her pencil on the wall and placed the shelf bracket over it to screw into the wood behind the drywall. She stretched her tape, knocked again at around sixteen inches, and heard the same dull thud. X-ray eyes, I thought. “Sixteen on center,” she said. “Typically you’re going to find the studs every sixteen inches. There’s a million reasons why it might not work out that way, but that’s the rule.” You can buy stud finders that beep and light up, or you can knock and listen.
We marked for the studs for the café wall, the center of each one sixteen inches from the center of the last. I held a board up straight as Mary nailed it into the plank on the floor and then the ceiling, driving the three-inch nail in at a diagonal—toenailing is the term for joining vertical and horizontal boards with nails driven obliquely. She nailed three on each side of the stud on the bottom, and three on each side at the top, twelve nails for each stud to make it rigid and secure.
She drove her nails with power and accuracy. Five strong hits, or three, and the nail was in. This is basic, I thought. I have a strong arm, I’d used a hammer before. How hard could it be?
Mary passed me her hammer, the blue rubber handle still warm from her grip. She started chatting with the two women who owned the place.
“If you ever want some catering shifts, let us know,” one of them said to Mary.
“For old times’ sake,” Mary laughed.
“You worked here?” I asked.
“Back in the day. What, ten years ago now? That’s how I got so anal about how long proteins can stay out of the fridge.”
The lunches Mary brought with her to work weren’t rush-packed tuna sandwiches with bags of chips. Great savory smells rose from her Tupperwares—sausage and white beans in garlic and tomato sauce, ribs she’d grilled the night before. She was always talking about pork. She took care with food and liked to eat well.
As they chatted, I gripped the hammer. With my left hand, I pinched the shining three-inch nail, stared hard at its small head, and positioned it on the two-by-four. I aimed the nail at an angle as I’d seen Mary do, so that it would drive through the vertical stud and down into the horizontal plank on the floor. The noise of their talk dissolved behind my concentration. I tried to press the nail tip into the wood to give myself a head start, to find some purchase in its hole before I took a whack. It shifted and I repositioned it, held it tight between my thumb and forefinger.
I raised the hammer and struck down. The nail blasted off, skidded and clinked across the floor.
I grabbed another from the box and tried again. Some purchase, some press of metal into wood. Quick victory. I whacked again. The nail bent to the left. I directed force in the opposite direction to get it to straighten. I swung three more times, bang, bang, bang. It bent more, curving under the impact. I missed the nail fully once.
“A swing and a miss,” Mary said.
This is a disaster, I thought. I used the claw of the hammer to extract it, mangled, from the wood.
Another try, and this time, bang bang bang, it took eight hits, but the metal moved through wood and fastened the two pieces together. My heart pounded from the effort. One down, eleven to go.
What a villain a nail can be. It took on an intelligence, a sinister character—a worm, a non-cooperative enemy. Whacked wrong, the metal seems to alter form, from something strong and firm to something flimsy, crushable, and twisting. An ugly weak thing, a bent nail. But then frustration shifted back to where it belonged: the nail’s not the one with intelligence. My arm and aim became the enemy, my own unskilled self.
I kept going. The muscle zone above my elbow burned with the effort. A dime-sized blister bloomed on the soft meat of my thumb-palm.
“I suck at this.”
“You don’t suck,” Mary said. “You just need to do it hundreds and hundreds of times.”
“If the blows be violent at first, the nail will be bent or sent astray, as this time it derives very little support from the wood into which it is being hammered.” So begins instructions on how to drive a nail from a woodworking handbook written in 1866. Practice, patience, power, and even then, no guarantee of success. “Sometimes the greatest care will fail to ensure the straight driving of a nail.”
I watched as Mary hammered. She held the hammer lower than I did; I lowered my grip. Her wind-up came from the shoulder instead of the elbow, where I had been pounding from; I altered my swing. Her hits started gentler and built force; I switched from full power straightaway and built strength with each swing.
I counted Mary’s strokes. I counted mine. Bang, bang, bang. Her nail was in and she was on to the next. Double those bangs, add stutters—ba-bang, add coaxing language (come on now, no bending, glide right in there, pal), and such was the sound of my own hammering.
Mary is a small woman. I have two inches and probably twenty pounds on her. Maybe twenty-five. Her wrists are slender, her shoulders narrow. When she started smoking again, and got a big dog named Red that she walked every morning, her pants started to slip off her waist. She used an extension cord as a belt one day. Petite would be a word for her if she didn’t carry herself with the force and presence of someone much larger, if she weren’t able to hoist eighty-pound bags of cement onto her shoulder as though she were lifting a sack of pine needles. Though she does have the girliest sneeze of anyone I’ve ever met—a squeaking atchoo that makes me smile every time it happens.
When we finished framing the wall in the café early that afternoon, it looked like a wooden cage you could walk through. Once the studs were in place, hammered and nailed, we screwed sheets of drywall to them. We covered the screw holes and the seams between the drywall sheets with mesh tape and Mary mudded over it with drywall compound that actually did look like toothpaste, pale and thick. Finish trim work included: baseboard and base cap (the decorative ridge or curved piece that sits atop the baseboard and looks like it’s part of the same piece of wood), and crown molding, uniting wall with ceiling. A couple coats of paint after that, and then, something solid and lasting: a new room.
I couldn’t believe it. When we broke for lunch on the second day, eating food from the café, I gushed. First there was no wall, and now there is, I said, like some stoned teenager, baffled and amazed by the truth of something basic. It seems like magic, but it’s so simple. This is what all these rooms are made up of? I can’t believe it!
“You could build a house,” I said to Mary.
“I’ve never framed an exterior wall.”
“Is it that different?”
“Not really.”
“Do you ever think about it?”
Mary twisted a forkful of pasta. “I think about going to Alaska.” She talked of taking her dog and living in the wilderness. “I could do without all the people.”
After work that afternoon, I walked down my old street in the neighborhood, indulging the urge to see how it felt to walk pa
st my old place without a key in my pocket that would open the front door. It hadn’t changed, and fond memories flowed on a strong current. I felt full of myself, too. Walking past a former neighbor’s house, I thought of the guy who lived there, a corn-fed blondie who rollerbladed everywhere in too-tight khaki pants. My roommate and I would run into him in the neighborhood and he’d say things like, “I’m always seeing you guys coming in or out of bars,” in which he could not disguise his judgment. He doesn’t know how to build a wall, I thought, passing by his apartment, with a self-satisfied pat on my back and toot of my horn despite bending half a dozen nails beyond recognition that day.
A few houses down, another old neighbor came out the door, a tall, bearded middle-aged dad. I remembered seeing him in tears on the sidewalk one summer afternoon a few years ago, a leash in his hand, the day the family’s two-year-old golden retriever had died. “Her heart just stopped,” he said, sniffling.
He recognized me as I walked by. “Long time no see,” he said with a wave. “How’s the newspaper biz?”
My self-satisfaction was blown away like a pile of sawdust in a wind. I fumbled and stuttered. “Oh, you know, I actually left my job at the paper. I’m still freelancing, but I’m working as an assistant to a carpenter, and we were just working around the corner, building this wall over at the café, and so it’s sort of this new life and—” Blood pressed against the skin of my cheeks as I somersaulted through a hands-in-the-air explanation, as though I didn’t quite believe what I was saying myself. I could sense his amusement.
“Well that’s pretty cool. Where’s your tool belt?”
His wife came out then, too, pretty in a northern California way, no makeup, thick hair, smooth skin, athletic sandals. She had a voice that reminded me of quilts.
“Our old neighbor is banging nails for a living now,” he told her.
I laughed nervously. “Well, sort of.”
We talked on the sidewalk by a ginkgo tree for a few more minutes before I excused myself. I continued down my old road, past the apartment building that looked like a ship, past the small playground, past the house that always had a bunch of bikes tangled in a heap by the porch, past my old apartment where our landlady had planted some flowers in the mulchy space next to the stoop. I’d left the café thinking, Look at that, we did that! But walking down my old street, I was reminded again of what I was and wasn’t. It felt like a nervous charade. Hearing myself talk to my neighbor, I sounded unconvinced of any of it, even to myself.
So I went back to peek inside the café, to remind myself that the wall was real—and that we had built it. It was still standing. I wanted to go in and tap on it, to give it a little kick. Building it was steadying. The sense of permanence, strength, and control it gave was unexpected and welcome, especially against the shifting and question marks taking place in my own life. There was space; we divided it.
I looked at the café’s website not long after we’d finished up. They’d posted photographs of the progress of the work. People left comments. “Better before the wall.” “I understand why they did it, but I wish they hadn’t.” “Food’s the same, who cares about the wall?”
There were other walls to care about. A few weeks later, a job took us to a big house in Brookline, a rich suburb west of Boston. The couple who owned the place were Russian and had a young son. I didn’t meet the husband, but the wife was thin in a nervous way, and their son had a grayish pallor. And though their house was large, the rooms were almost empty: a couch and a table in one room, a lone chair in another in what might’ve been a dining room. Our voices and hammerbangs echoed off the floors. We were there to repair a rotting bay window at the back of the house.
I stood on the backyard grass and watched as Mary, up on a ladder, about fifteen feet off the ground, pried pieces of shingle and molding off the house with a big blue crowbar. In these first months I spent a lot of time this way, watching Mary work. I fetched, chopped, lugged, and watched. And there was always cleaning up to do. Despite the mess in Mary’s basement workshop and the chaotic state of her van, she was a relentless tidier of her jobsites. We spent half an hour or more at the end of every day, after the last cut had been made, the last nail hammered in, sweeping, vacuuming, organizing, loading tools, making neat stacks of wood if we were returning the next day, leaving things cleaner than when we started if we weren’t.
At the Russians’, I stood by as Mary worked her way around the rim of the window, exposing what was underneath. Two-by-fours rose along the side of the window, framing it, running from the window base into the header, the heavy beam that extended across the rough opening. Mary’s lean forearms flexed as she pried.
She knocked on the header with the crowbar and glanced over her shoulder back at me.
“This keeps the weight of the wall from resting on the actual window frame.”
I collected the pieces of house that Mary tossed down on the grass. The cavity around the window looked like a wound.
At the lower left corner she paused and shook her head.
“Not good.”
“What’s up?” I said.
“This is not good.”
I did not like the way the house looked gouged, and Mary’s voice spoke something ominous.
“Bugs.”
Behind the paint and drywall, wood is rotting. Slowly, maybe. Bugs gnaw at the beams that hold up a house, moisture gets in, fungi make feasts, softening the cellulose and lignin of the wood. The skeleton of a room unsettles because we cannot peel back our own skin. Time and moisture stalk. We’re all of us decaying, every moment less of what we were before. We can’t pry open a section of ourselves to look for leaks and rot. Seeing what’s behind a wall proves a stark and immediate reminder of this fact. Doctors opened up my uncle, diagnosed with lung cancer, to remove half of one lung. When they peeled back his flesh and looked inside, they found the cancer had spread in and around both lungs: inoperable. So they sewed him closed again—nothing to be done. Epicurus wrote: “It is possible to provide security against other ills, but as far as death is concerned, we men live in a city without walls.” You can build a coffin. You cannot build a wall against death.
Carpenter ants had made their meal of part of the window frame. I couldn’t see how bad it was, but I could see the wound in this woman’s house, and Mary stood on the ladder, shaking her head.
“It’s pulp,” she said. She grabbed a fistful and let it drop to the ground like wet snow.
I looked at the hole around the window and thought, What have we done? Let’s patch it up, seal it closed, and run away. How will we ever fix this before nightfall? How will we close this up so that at night raccoons don’t climb in and kidnap that grayish boy, or wolves, or spiders? What if it rains?
Mary shouted measurements and I cut pieces of two-by-fours for her to slot in, to support the wood that was already there and to replace the part of the frame that had been gnawed away. I jogged between the backyard and the driveway where the saws were set up on their stands. Sawdust spewed and dusted down onto the pavement, resting in craters in the cement, and the smell of pine moved with it, bright and clean, the smell of Christmas, renewal. The miter saw screamed through the wood, and I hoped the little boy wasn’t napping. Mary, on the ladder, leaned into the hole she’d made and sprayed a heavy toxin to annihilate the wood chewers. I held my breath and hoped she had, too.
The words for measurement were fluid, when we weren’t talking exact numbers. Take a blade off this, she’d say, passing me a piece of two-by-four. The kerf of the miter-saw blade—the width of the groove made while cutting—is an eighth of an inch. Half a blade means a sixteenth, but it’s an eyeball job: leave the tape clipped to your pants. Less than half a blade means almost sanding as opposed to slicing, using just a fraction of the teeth to chew off the wood. Skosh is the measurement she used most of all. Just a skosh more, she’d say. I usually took that to mean not quite a full blade, but more than half. When Mary wanted the scantest part removed, she narro
wed her eyes and held up her thumb and index finger so that almost no light got through the space between and she’d say, “a millisecond, take a millisecond off this.” I loved it when she talked about distance in terms of time. A millisecond meant barely anything at all because you can’t see a second, or that’s what I took it to mean. Builders use the phrase cunt hair, or CH, as an unofficial term of measure. “Take a red CH off that board.” It’s a thirty-second of an inch. Mary did not use the phrase cunt hair.
When the Russian woman came out to the back porch with her son to get a look at our progress, Mary suggested she be careful of the wasps’ nest in the gutter above their heads. A volley of Slavic syllables and the woman hurried her son back into the kitchen.
“How are we going to get this done?” I asked over lunch.
“Like we always do. One piece at a time.”
I still didn’t buy it, and had visions of creatures moving through the wall during the night.
Watching Mary work, I tried to file everything I was learning into a cabinet in my brain. I found myself experiencing bolts of superiority. Walking down Mass Ave in Harvard Square, in the cereal aisle of the grocery store, sizing up passersby, I’d think: I bet he doesn’t know how to dismantle a window frame; I bet she doesn’t know that kitchens and bathrooms require drywall that’s green and more resistant to moisture and weighs more than the regular kind.
In “The Student,” a short story by Anton Chekhov, a young man walks through the woods on a grim cold spring evening, discouraged and pessimistic. He muses that “the same leaky thatched roofs, ignorance and anguish, the same surrounding emptiness and darkness, the sense of oppression—all these horrors had been, and were, and would be, and when another thousand years had passed, life would be no better. And he did not want to go home.”
He stops at the home of two widows, a mother and a daughter, to warm himself by their fire. It’s Good Friday, and he gives them a summary of the Gospels, the moment when Peter betrays Jesus. The older widow weeps; the younger looks as though she’s trying “to suppress extreme pain.” The student leaves the women and it occurs to him: if these women were so moved, “something that had taken place nineteen centuries ago had a relation to the present—to both women, and probably to this desolate village, to himself, to all people.” And what joy he feels. “The past, he thought, is connected with the present in an unbroken chain of events flowing one out of the other. And it seemed to him that he had just seen both ends of the chain: he touched one end, and the other moved.” An “unknown, mysterious happiness” overtakes him.
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