Hammer Head

by Nina MacLaughlin

  In a poem called “The Summer Day,” Mary Oliver writes of strolling through fields and kneeling in the grass, of being “idle and blessed.” “Tell me, what else should I have done? / Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?”

  She wrote the poem in 1990, before most of us had cell phones. A couple decades later, in our frenzy of scramble and dash, who has the time to be “idle and blessed”? Who but poets fall down in the grass? Strolling the field may seem lazy, but think again, Oliver says. Who knows what might happen in the stillness? Who can guess what you will come to know eye level with the grasshopper? And she gives us the most crucial reminder: “Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?” That’s the grass. That’s the grasshopper and the fox and the flower. That’s you, too, and me.

  We can’t clutch every moment, but it is good to step back and consider our plans. To kneel in the fields, to laugh with pals at the bar, to look at the swirling grain of the floorboards. This is not original advice. But for those fallow periods to feel both purposeful and luxurious, they need to be bookended by accomplishment, by doing and producing.

  But this pause in carpentry was not a fallow period. It did not have that fertile feel. The ability to spend nine days on something that should’ve taken two, or one day on something that should’ve taken three-quarters of an hour, provoked a feeling of uselessness. It dredged the question, again and again, what now? I did not know when work would come again, if work would come again, and I allowed the fear to keep me from translating this quiet time into something productive or worthwhile.

  The more you do, the more you get done. I don’t remember when I learned the adage itself, but I know when I learned the truth of it. My dad lost his job in 2001, a few months after I graduated from college. I no longer lived at home, but my young brother relayed what the scene of this sudden unemployment looked like. My father, at the computer, logging hour over hour playing backgammon and solitaire, reading online fishing forums, scrolling idly. A constant clicking from the office, which in the evenings was punctuated with ice cubes plinking against the glass as he took another swallow of Scotch.

  There were efforts at first. Résumés dusted, updated, sent off, lunches and coffees with old friends. Eventually those efforts waned. Determination seemed to evaporate. Perhaps finding a suitable job at age fifty-five seemed hopeless, perhaps the initial lack of response signaled that it wasn’t worth trying. From my twenty-two-year-old vantage, it didn’t register as hopeless in my father. It looked like settling in, and it was strange and frightening to see. If shame and fear existed—motivators both—they’d been pitched into a deep hole in the dirt far below the frost line and buried there under dark earth so that any evidence of either was darkly gone, worm-chewed and composting, inaccessible even to him.

  “What are you up to today, Dad?” we’d ask.

  “I’ve got a dentist appointment at three,” he’d say, and we’d wait for more. With nothing else to do, a teeth cleaning was a day’s duty. He put on a suit for his appointment, carried his leather briefcase with him, let the world know he was a man who wore an eighty-five-dollar tie. At the time, it struck me as a lie. He tricked other people in the waiting room, crinkling through dated issues of Time. He tricked the hygienist and the dentist as they flossed him, had him rinse and spit. He tricked the driver stopped at the light next to him on the drive back from the appointment. I knew the truth, or thought I did, with the indignation and confidence of someone who’d been paying her own rent for less than a year. The tie, the briefcase, these were dishonesties meant to make people believe that this successful man of business was headed straight back to the office after his teeth cleaning.

  There’s so much I didn’t know then. It wasn’t until after I left my job at the newspaper that I realized how significant a part of my identity working there had become; it was how I understood myself and made myself understood to other people. What am I now? I wondered, jobless. And that was after less than a decade. My dad’s working life had spanned more than thirty years—that’s a hard habit, and a hard self-conception, to break overnight. I couldn’t imagine the terror of losing your job (and part of your understanding of yourself) at that age. No wonder he did what he could to maintain it. No wonder he put on a suit and carried his briefcase and selected from the hanger a favorite tie. Maybe it wasn’t a lie after all, not a trick, but a continuation of how he understood himself, and wanted to be understood.

  Months passed. My father still wasn’t working. My mother said quietly to me over the phone: “He’s always around, he never leaves the house.” She started waking up at four-thirty in the morning to have time to herself in the house alone before going to work. Picturing her in the predawn darkness, showered and dressed, alone with her coffee, puts a sadness in me I don’t have words for. “It’s the best part of the day,” she said.

  Isn’t this a problem? I worried. Shouldn’t he be working? I asked my mother: Do you ever say, hey, hi there, you need to work? She didn’t want to nag him, she told me. She said if she asked him once, she wouldn’t be able to help herself but ask everyday. This seemed like an error to me. Even with what little I knew then about relationships, joblessness, I knew enough to sense that this was the wrong approach. Why not summon enough willpower to ask once, and then ask again sometime later? Not nagging seemed like a good impulse, but doesn’t someone who spends the hours of his day shifting backgammon pieces across a board on a screen deserve a bit of a nudge? And what if you exchanged the word nag with its connotations of henpeckery and the worst of tiresome wifehood, with a word like challenge, or even the neutral ask? She never asked him how his job hunt was going, or if he was having any luck, or if he’d considered this or that. There was neither encouragement nor pressure. Neither I’m rooting for you nor Figure your shit out fast. He took her silence as a lack of interest, and his voice was pinched with blame when he talked to me about how if only Mom had asked me about it.

  At age twenty-two I recognized, with the deep sadness that accompanies seeing your parents as fallible, that this was a failure. Of course my mother should’ve asked him and it should have had a note of urgency. And of course my father should have been able to motivate himself to look for work regardless of what my mom was or was not asking.

  He went through a scone-making period. A carton of buttermilk, thick and sour smelling in its cardboard container, was a constant for a time in the door of the fridge. And in the morning, a batch of warm dough triangles—ginger lemon, blueberry, raisin, orange zest—cooled on a cookie sheet. Besides the batch just pulled from the oven, on the counter three dozen more from previous batches were heaped like throw pillows in plastic zip-lock bags. They were good to eat. Not the dry, bland saliva-suckers that bad scones can be, but flaky, gentle-flavored, delicate, and hearty. There were just so many of them. And I can see how making a batch of scones could feel more productive than sixty hours a week at an empty job. The results are quantifiable, concrete in the world, useful. Dough is an essential thing. But is it enough? Perhaps for him, for a time, it was. “We’re ensconced,” my brother joked, gesturing at the bags on the counter beneath the kitchen window.

  That winter in Cambridge, waiting for Mary to call, when I wasn’t working and didn’t know when work would come again, I felt a lack of purpose. I wanted to be useful, to contribute to the world. Building a set of bookshelves or laying down a floor wouldn’t reverse global warming, but it was better than what I was doing, heaping myself on the couch, wrapped in a blanket, staring blankly and absorbing nothing while the opinions and pictures, the news and noise rolled slowly up the computer screen and disappeared over the top edge, as though it all tumbled off some invisible cliff behind the machine and fell into the nothing. The hours went with it.

  My father refused to consider taking jobs he felt were beneath him, even in lines of work that interested him. A lifelong and dedicated reader, he scoffed at the idea of working in a bookstore. A serious gardener, he scoffed at the idea of getting a job at
a nursery. Such suggestions, offered up by my brothers and me, were insults to him. Pride kept him from recognizing the value in being part of something bigger than himself, that there was honor in helping someone find just the right book or in showing someone how to make their hydrangeas thrive. He was too good for work like that. So instead, he did nothing.

  When tomorrow is always an option, an empty place, the rush to get things done does not press in. Things go undone and undone, days curling off and falling to the floor like wood curls chiseled off a piece of useless pine, swept up into the dustpan and thrown away.

  Visiting home one weekend, I passed through the office where my father looked at the Internet. He said something about bluefish. I went on my way, confused by the terrible new mix of feelings this provoked, pity and frustration, disappointment and an awful ache. Later that afternoon, I saw my father out the window in the backyard with his fly-fishing rod, standing on the grass as dusk cast a blush on the sky. He stood, rod across his right shoulder, and with a quick flip of the wrist, practiced and precise, whipped the rod through the air, right arm flung out in front, aiming his lure at some imaginary river. Again and again, he flicked and flung. I watched as my dad cast on the grass toward a wooden fence, heard the whistle of the rod as it whipped through the early evening air.

  I wondered if he ever went fishing.

  Sometime in those months, which stretched into years, my mother came home from teaching children at the preschool she directed and my father came downstairs from the computer and into the kitchen and said to her, “We’re out of milk.” My parents got divorced.

  My sleep became increasingly fragile. Hours of fret dissolved into fluttery sleep. What will I do tomorrow? How will I pay rent? What are the lead paint, asbestos, wood-dust particles doing inside me? I had time and I looked in, peered down inside myself, and what I saw was nothing. The darkness was total and I wondered, in there, where I was.

  I had saved money diligently when I worked at the newspaper, living cheaply and amassing what I considered a small fortune. But I was nearing the end of it. My confidence dipped with the number on my bank statements. How is this where I ended up?

  And I missed the work. I missed Mary. I missed the way a one-by-four plank of Brazilian walnut felt in my hands. I missed coming home, muscles weary, hungry and dirty. I missed the feeling of a fatigue well earned. I missed the satisfaction of something being further along at the end of the day than it was at the start. I wanted to go back to making things. I wanted to make a living.

  Question marks and idle time framed the wall of a persistent anxiety, of self-doubt, of true slump. My savings were almost gone when I heard through the grapevine that my old newspaper had a staff-writer position open. To go back, to return to the place I left—the thought of it brought a tight feeling, a quiet shame. But the pull of a paycheck, health insurance, and the feeling of being part of something again was a tide stronger than the shame. And maybe I could still do some carpentry on the side. I called my old boss, feeling defeated and sad, and told him, Yes, I’m really so interested. I’d love to come back. And he said, with some teasing satisfaction in his voice, “The carpentry work didn’t do it for you?” I was standing on a street corner in Beacon Hill, next to a luxury SUV the size of a hippo, watching strollers and fancy moms and small dogs slide up and down Charles Street. I clenched my jaw when he said it, closed my eyes. Carpentry work was doing it for me. Hard, dirty, and possibly toxic at times, it was work I’d come to love; it was just that there wasn’t enough work. Standing on that sidewalk, phone to my ear, I realized how much I’d rather pull up carpet in a damp basement than return to where I’d left. But the urgent need of cash and health insurance, the urgency to fill up my days with purpose, outweighed my pride. “I’d like to come back,” I said.

  “Well, we’d love to have you back,” said my old boss. He told me they’d have things sorted in a few days.

  I shivered on the sidewalk. Down a narrow alley barely wide enough for a single car, lanterns lit up, fake flames for streetlights, and the effect was back-in-time, lamplight flickering off brick, and couldn’t it just be 1850? The mothers in their pearls and the baby carriages and the small dogs passed by. The cold air made my eyes water.

  On the walk home toward Cambridge, I tried to convince myself that this was what I wanted. I made myself remember the shitty jobs and the times I hated carpentry work. Think about working at the Haitian sisters’ house, I told myself, where they kept the heat at eighty-seven, and one of their sons had a stomach flu and there was puke on the floor in the hall and all over the bathroom sink. Think about how down in their basement, before we installed the bamboo floor, we had to pull up dirty old carpet, and how the basement was as warm as the rest of the house, and the carpet gave the room a moldy stink. Think about how Mary worked on making new stair treads for the basement while you ripped up the rug, and how you envied her, with her tape measure and her wood, as you yanked and tugged on that mustard-colored carpet. Think about the bits of grit and dust and how they seemed to have a magnetic attraction to your face, and how sweat slid down your temples as you used a blade to carve through the shag and base of the carpet, like skinning a Muppet. Remember the way the staples chewed at your arms like a thousand demon bites. Remember how much you hated that day.

  And I tried to think fond thoughts about the newspaper I’d left behind—that people I liked and respected still worked there, a few of them anyway, that I’d be writing all the time. I’d get to walk to work again over the smoot-measured Mass Ave Bridge. (This, of all things, held the most appeal.) I thought of the regular paycheck, of being able to put money back in my savings account. Yes, this was the right path, it’s okay to go back. It’s no failure. (Failure, my brain kept saying.)

  Two weeks passed with no word back from my old boss. Then I heard that they’d hired someone else.

  In my dark and muddled state, the disappointment and anger came not from getting passed over for the job, but from not being told. It wasn’t so much that I wasn’t good enough for it—it was worse: I’d been forgotten.

  Awake at night, to steer my mind away from the thoughts that clamored louder in the dark, the ones that sent my heart pounding, the ones that clawed, I thought about a house I would build for myself. I’d lie in bed and lay out floor plans, erect walls, design tile floors and bookshelves and bedroom windows, kitchen cabinets, counters, and pantries, consider thresholds, light, and warmth. I’d been in so many homes with Mary, and I took what I knew from them. I’d flip through the jobs in my head, the ones I’d liked and not. I’d start at the frame, see the skeleton, see the joists running across the floor. I’d cover them with plywood, subfloor, hardwood, cherry maybe, or rustic reclaimed wide old pine. I’d feel the mallet in my hand and imagine the board-by-board effort. I pictured the pneumatic floor nailer, powered by compressed air, and the thump-pop of striking the rubber button on the nailer with the rubber-headed mallet. The nail clunking through the wood is as satisfying a sound and action as there is. Putting floors in gratifies. A room is transformed when it goes from cement or subfloor—guts, unfinished and dirty—to smooth finished wood with knots and swirls that lap like waves. Color will deepen with time. Scratches and dents will scar the wood, life will make its mark, wear on it.

  In my mind, at night, I’d position walls and windows, frame them first with two-by-fours, hammer and nails, with windows across a whole wide wall, thick header atop to spread the weight of the wall. After the framing, drywall, taping, mudding, and paint. I’d see where the door to the kitchen would go, cut pieces of trim in my mind, fill the nail holes with putty. I’d picture a fireplace and figure I’d have to hire a mason. I put a skylight over the tub on the second floor like I’d seen at a place where we’d built big built-in bookshelves. I imagined moving from room to room to find the right flow. I wanted rooms, doorways and walls, space divided by function, not a kitchen that bled into a dining room that bled into a living room. I’d make the porch in the back out of B
razilian walnut and watch it fade from its syrupy cinnamon color to worn gray like the clapboard shingles of houses on the coast.

  Thinking this way bathed my brain in calm late at night.

  In her essay “On Coming Home,” Joan Didion writes about returning to her childhood home. “Paralyzed by the neurotic lassitude engendered by meeting one’s past at every turn, around every corner, inside every cupboard, I go aimlessly from room to room. I decide to meet it head-on and clean out a drawer, and I spread the contents on the bed. A bathing suit I wore the summer I was seventeen. A letter of rejection from The Nation, an aerial photograph of the site for a shopping center my father did not build in 1954.”

  When my parents split, my mother took an apartment in a small town in mid-coast Maine. She has all the photo albums. When I visit, I look through them after she goes to bed, like Didion cleaning out an old drawer.

  My father rented in a town on the southern coast of Massachusetts. He’d put all his possessions in storage. The house he lived in was furnished. Maybe it felt like home to him after a time, using a stranger’s spoons. It never did to me.

  My grandmother’s house became the one place that did feel like home, that held within its walls all the stages of my life, the whole show. And not just mine, but the lives of my whole family—my mother, and my parents together, and my brothers, and, to a lesser extent, my cousins, aunts, and uncles, a family extending and extending, everyone bound up in this one place. Whenever I visited, I wandered room to room. I opened all the drawers, seeking treasures, memory triggers, connections. A framed photograph tucked at the back of a desk shelf shows my mother and her four siblings and their spouses, all just starting out with their own lives, before kids came. They’re gathered for Christmas with my grandmother, the plates of a big meal haven’t been cleared off the table. My grandmother is in the middle of the photograph, looking slimmer, taller, and tense. Were the photograph to be taken now, four out of the five spouses would be absent: one dead, three divorced. Blood works as a kind of clamp. It presses us together, erasing distance, even when so badly we want it, with a claustrophobic feeling—too close, too close—and that visceral constriction of hunger, a squeezing sort of lack. It binds us so no matter what, we always share an edge.