Hammer Head

by Nina MacLaughlin

  In the day-to-day work with Mary, I didn’t think about the numbers either—the percentage of women doing this work didn’t occur to me. I didn’t chop boards and maneuver sheets of plywood and shoot the framing gun contemplating how few women do this work, fewer still heterosexual women. Here we were, Mary and I, both of us strong, one of us capable, and together we were able to do what needed to be done.

  The fact is, carpentry is men’s work. Which is to say, carpentry is work that is statistically done by men. The U.S. Census Bureau, in its 2011 survey, reports that “construction and extraction occupations” are made up of 97.6 percent men and 2.4 percent women. It is the most gender disbalanced of the occupations they list, more than engineering and architecture, more than farming, fishing, and forestry work, more than firefighting.

  Some estimate an even sharper discrepancy. In an article in Monthly Labor Review called “Gender Differences in Occupational Employment,” Barbara H. Wootton notes that “the most pronounced differences in occupational employment by gender occurred in precision production, craft, and repair occupations—in 1995, for example, only 1 percent each of auto mechanics and carpenters were women.”

  It’s not a statistic that seems to be changing much over the years either. The Washington, D.C.–based think-tank Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR) reports the shifts of women in the workforce in a paper titled “Separate and Not Equal? Gender Segregation in the Labor Market and the Gender Wage Gap.” They tracked the rise of women in the workforce from the early 1970s through 2009. Back in 1972, only 1.9 percent of dentists were women; in 2009, women made up 30.5 percent of the profession. During those same years, the percentage of women mail carriers rose from 6.7 percent to 35 percent. In the trades, though, the numbers haven’t changed much. Female carpenters made up 0.5 percent of the workforce in 1972 and, as of 2009, made up only 1.6 percent. Carpentry also happens to be among the whitest professions. In a November 2013 article, The Atlantic reports that carpenters are 90.9 percent white and notes that trade unions have had a “complicated, and often ugly, history with race that’s helped shut blacks and Hispanics out of these highly coveted lines of work.”

  Susan Eisenberg’s book We’ll Call You If We Need You: Experiences of Women Working Construction documents the experiences women had on jobsites in the late 1970s and 80s. Part oral history, part documentary, the book details the harassment and disrespect that women experienced working in the trades. In it, a woman named MaryAnn Cloherty describes having finished a nine-month pre-apprenticeship program and approaching one of the carpenters’ locals. “A hiring agent said to me, point blank, ‘We had the colored forced down our throats in the 60s and we’ll be damned if we have the chicks forced down our throats in the 70s.’”

  Eisenberg, who herself is a master electrician, also details the pride, passion, and satisfaction these women experienced, as well as some of their generous, patient, and welcoming male colleagues and mentors.

  The IWPR cites the “hostile environment” in many male-dominated trades as a reason why so few women have access to these jobs. “There is considerable research suggesting that occupational choice is often constrained, by socialization, lack of information, or more direct barriers to entry to training or work in occupations where one sex is a small minority of the workforce.” If no other women you’ve known, or even know of, do a certain job, it won’t necessarily feel like an option for you as you take steps to plot out what you might like to pursue in your own life. And I think just as there are certain jobs (nurse, dental hygienist, secretary) that some men might feel would call into question their masculinity, the same goes for women. There are certain jobs that raise questions about femininity. Though I didn’t often reflect on the scarcity of women doing this work in a general sociological sense, I did find the work challenging my own ideas and sense of femininity and sexuality.

  We got noticed. Selecting boards at the lumberyard, or loading up a cart of drywall, or hoisting sacks of cement at Home Depot, surrounded by big construction guys in their coveralls and clomping work boots, the looks we got weren’t just curious. “Got a little project going?” asked one orange-aproned Home Depot checkout clerk, as though we were four-year-olds gluing popsicle sticks to construction paper.

  “Renovating a kitchen,” Mary said matter-of-factly, pulling her credit card out of her wallet. She showed no trace of defensiveness or aggression. I hoped the glare I gave got those things across.

  Now and then, a lumberyard employee would address her as sir. “Help you find something, sir?” I’ve been tempted to shout “You mean ma’am?”, defensive on her behalf. I haven’t said it—Mary can fight her own fights. But I’m not sure she considers it a fight at all. “All set,” she’ll say, unfazed. In third grade, I got a short haircut. In school the next day, I held a door for a teacher, and she said “Thank you, sir.” I was silenced, reeling. Sir? She clicked past in her high heels, and I felt shaken, chaos in my head. What am I? Am I not what I thought I was? The teacher’s comment stripped me of my understanding of myself. I can still feel my small self standing in that doorway, can still conjure the confusion and the fear. Every time Mary gets mistaken for a sir, I am holding the door in third grade, tipped upside down by being mistaken. For Mary, it seems not to matter. She’s less interested in belonging in a feminine category. And I am more attached to my femininity than I’d known.

  Another morning at the lumberyard, I saw two young guys in thick Carhartt jackets as we loaded planks of one-by-four Ipe onto a cart for a deck job. One gestured at us with his chin and said something to his buddy in a whisper, and they laughed like middle-school girls. I don’t care to imagine what was said. My initial red-cheeked impulse was to grab a plank of ironwood and whack them across the shins. Instead, as we passed by them, I said, “Hey, boys,” in a purring tone and raised a provocative eyebrow.

  When we were out in the world, I was on alert for skeptical glances and condescending remarks. In more generous moods, I’d remind myself that not all these big contractors with the pick-ups and muscles were assholes, that it was unusual to see two women loading lumber. The guys Mary hired knew her, they’d worked with her for years, they were used to being on a job with a woman. Not many men are. So, yes, you want to stare: go ahead. I figured our presence there, loading the cart, pulling sheets of plywood off the pile, stacking up pressure-treated four-by-fours, lifting sacks of cement, might open one or two of them, even for a moment, to the possibility that women do this work too.

  There were two moments I can think of when we prevailed upon bigger, stronger men to provide some extra muscle. One was getting a hand to move a sliding glass door up to a third floor. Mary’s old boss was working down the block at the time, so he and one of his guys played big strong men for us. Had there been two women around, with strong muscles and good spatial sense, that would’ve worked, too.

  The other time, we were rightly thwarted. Building a big new deck for a house on a hill in Jamaica Plain, we spent a day digging the footer holes, each one two feet wide and four feet deep to reach below the Massachusetts frost line. We dug and dug, took turns with the post-hole digger. We sweat and dug, and the sun, on this south-facing house, creamed us all day long.

  It smelled like onions when we dug. We excavated bulbs and with our shovels charged through roots and small clusters of chives. Lemon drifted from a small patch of lemon balm that we had to stomp over, right in our path to and from the van in the driveway. Our footfalls broke the leaves and oils leaked and the smell—lemonade, citrus fresh, a soapy soothing—spread. Lemon balm is said to improve mood and mental performance. Whether that is true, I don’t know, but it was a welcome alternative to the smell of dirt and sweat and suntan lotion, the closest odors always on those hot days. I learned those weeks that drinking is one cure for confusion and fear, a temporary relief from what feels impossible to face. Digging holes in the dirt with the smell of onions is another. I was grateful to go to work those days and lose myself in the labor.<
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  It was a Friday morning, and the heat was something to move through. We were about two and a half feet deep into the earth when we hit a rock. We’d hit rocks before. We’d keep digging around it until we got it out. We dug around this guy, but it was large and crammed in and we couldn’t find its edges. We used a crowbar, a shovel, a winch, a sledgehammer. We used all of our muscles. We tried the canvas straps that Mary used to tie her canoe to the roof of the van. We couldn’t budge the rock. We toiled and we cursed.

  “It’s just one big rock,” Mary said again and again, to console us, maybe, to assure us that we weren’t the weaklings here, that we’d encountered something in the earth bigger than we could deal with.

  As we dug and shook our heads and tried to bash the rock to pieces, three men in hardhats and work boots excavated the sidewalk and the street nearby to repair a pipeline below the cement about a hundred feet from where we were working. They used an excavator to rip up a strip of the road, clawing through the cement, pushing debris into the loader. The trucks roared and the noise made the air feel hotter. Mary made a comment to the guy driving the big machine, something about lending a hand with our rock. He shrugged in a way that said no-can-do.

  So Mary decided the only way to deal with the situation was to rent a jackhammer for an hour and break the rock that way. I did not like this idea at all. I pictured big men on work crews, their arm flesh jiggling, their teeth rattling in their jaws, riding the jackhammer like a bucking donkey. I did not want to try this.

  “First time for everything,” Mary said out the window as she drove off in the van.

  I started digging another footer when one of the construction guys came over to me. He had thick freckled arms and the hair on his big shoulders was starting to whiten. His jaw was scruffed with white-blonde stubble, and he wore his orange mesh work vest with nothing underneath. I could smell his sweat and I liked it. He asked about the progress and told me I should drink water. I laughed and told him he should drink water, too. I told him about the rock and pointed into the hole.

  “That’s a big one,” he said. We stood in the sun and looked into the hole, both of us dirty and sweaty, hands on our hips, and I made a decision. Sometimes big strong men want to feel like big strong men and I said something that I didn’t want to say but I said it anyway.

  “I guess we’re just not strong enough.”

  And he looked at me and said, “We’ll help you get that rock out.”

  He walked away and pointed up at me to the man driving the excavator machine. The excavator machine rolled up toward me, I jumped out of the way, and the shovel bucket went clawing into the earth and scooped up our giant rock just like that, a boulder, two hundred pounds or more. I thanked the guys and they seemed happy, too.

  I called Mary to tell her we didn’t need the jackhammer. When she got back, I told her what happened and she laughed and thanked me for showing a little leg.

  The next part of the project underlined our toughness. Once the holes were dug, we sank the footer tubes, which look like enlarged versions of the cardboard tubes we roll posters into, into the holes, and filled in the sides with lose dirt. Then came the cement. Each footer tube needed to be filled, as did the pad at the base of the stair.

  We ripped open the bags, held our breaths, shook the rocky dust and sand into a big plastic tray, and used the hose to wet it. Each of us with a shovel, on either side of the tray, we mixed the cement, bag by bag. We pushed it, churned it with the shovel edges, heaved it back and forth, wetting it evenly, not too much, not too little. I wore a mask; Mary didn’t. Neither of us thought we’d get through it in one day. Work sometimes had the feel of summer camp; it felt simpler, and more like play. Whether the obscuring of sexuality contributed to this summer-camp feeling or was caused by it, I don’t know. But at times it felt like a traveling back to a time before I had breasts.

  We’d finished the four footers, and the sun hadn’t yet even reached the trees by the driveway that signaled the three p.m. shade. We had some hours left in the day.

  “What do you think?” Mary said.

  I took my mask off, used my shirt to wipe sweat and grime off my face, spit on the sidewalk and said, “Let’s keep going.”

  “Hell yes,” Mary said.

  So we pressed our shovels back and forth, and light made rainbows off the spray of the hose. The gravelly sound of rocks and sand being pushed around the tray sounded like rocks getting rolled under waves at the beach, and shifted to a wetter slop as Mary added more water. “How many bags do you think it’ll take to fill the pad?” she asked.

  “Six?”

  “I’d say double that.”

  We mixed and poured, mixed and poured. A blister blossomed inside my work gloves, ripped, and leaked a sticky warmth into my palm. The stair base started to fill. When it finally reached the top of the wooden box, some slicking down the sides in slim rivers of gray, Mary and I high-fived. All told that day we loaded, unloaded, and mixed two thousand five hundred sixty pounds of cement. One and a quarter tons.

  “Unreal!” I said, exhausted.

  “Not bad for two chicks.”

  “Not bad for two anything.”

  An encounter on a kitchen job did, finally, inject sex into the work. The job was in Framingham, a town twenty-three miles southwest of Boston, farther afield than we typically traveled, but work was work despite the forty-minute ride to and from. The house sat nondescript at the end of a suburban cul-de-sac. Each house looked the same; paint color, shutter style, and choice of front-yard shrubbage were the only distinguishing features. We went through the usual process: tiled the floor, installed the cabs, and wrestled with crown molding. Much of the work was done when a handsome granite countertop guy named Pete arrived in his truck to take measurements and make templates for the piece of stone he’d be cutting for the counter.

  He had dark curly hair and an easy smile. When he leaned over the counter to make a measure, his shirt settled into the runnel his muscles made along his spine. He had arms like a discus thrower in a Greek statue. I had broken my wrist earlier that season, doored by a young woman in a BMW as I rode my bike home from work one afternoon. This was my first job back after the cast had come off, and I wore a black brace on my wrist as I worked. Pete asked about it. He talked about ripping his Achilles not long ago, and bragged.

  “The doctors told me it’d take eight months to a year to heal,” he said as he pulled the tape across the top of the cabinets. “You know how long it took? Three months. I was back in three months. If you know your body, you will heal. You will get through. You have to know your body.”

  I liked that we were talking about bodies, about knowing them, something immediately physical and intimate. I repeated something my wrist doctor had told me about pain, how it can be a good thing sometimes. He let his tape whip back into its holster as though I’d said something he’d been waiting to hear. And he stood with his back to me, that strong back, and said, “It shows you’re alive.” He turned to face me, looked me in the eye and said, “We need to know that sometimes.”

  And then he winked before turning again to measure where the sink would go, and it was too much and too smooth, but I smiled despite myself and my stomach dropped into my hips in that warm pulse, and I looked forward to him coming back with the granite slabs. How far these tiny moments of heat can go, a flash of the eyes, an elevation of the atmosphere, these brief pulses of shared intimacy, of energy passed back and forth. Nothing more than a conversation, less than a minute of talk. I wasn’t going to fuck this man on the smooth cold granite stone he’d bring, but I thought about it.

  The next week, granite cut and ready to be slid into place, he came back to the kitchen. I flashed eyes and a smile at him like I’d done a thousand times at bars, to boys and men, friends and strangers. And he aimed it right back and said good to see you. It was nothing, the most basic interaction with another human, but the energy was there, that flash back and forth. And in that moment, I came to know t
he flash was just as strong, that power and its return. All it required was accessing the energy I had when I wasn’t in ragged sneakers with a chisel in my hand. He might’ve flashed eyes at anyone, likely did, this curly-haired countertop man, but it did the job of showing me that even in work mode, I could aim the energy and have it returned. And some sense of fullness returned, an embodiment—physically and mentally—of Woolf’s conception of woman-manly.

  There is screwing, and there is screwing up. I did so much of it. Mistake after mistake. After the kitchen job with the countertop guy, we moved on to a job in Lexington, where the crosswalks are strictly enforced and tour guides in minutemen costumes lead history buffs around important historical sites. We were there to redo the first floor of an old carriage house—new floors, walls, kitchen, bathroom, some new windows, lots of doors and trim. It was a big job. The place edged up against an old graveyard filled with tiny headstones from the 1700s. One section of wobbly graves described an almost perfect circle, which created an additional layer of haunt and gloom. Every hour, one of the minutemen came around and showed his tour group a grave right by a big window where we were slamming in new floors. He wore full colonial-militiaman regalia. The thought of these guys climbing into their cars at the end of the day, placing their triangular hats on the seat beside them, made me feel sad. There’s something lonely about existing in two times. One damp afternoon, the tour guide was holding a can of Mountain Dew. What struck me wasn’t the anachronistic clash. It was more a sense, out of nowhere, that you shouldn’t drink soda in graveyards.