Hammer Head

by Nina MacLaughlin

  I went to my grandmother’s house in March of that long winter. She no longer lived there—mind fogged and body strong, she lived in an assisted-living place in Bedford, Mass. The house remained in the family, and by that point the walls of the apartment had gotten too familiar, a distorting sort of closing in, strong as a vise and gaining strength with each day. The word escape came to mind, not in the tropical vacation sense, but of the prison break. My grandmother’s house was my favorite place, and I’d gone past the point of not being able to justify something good for myself—for a while I’d felt I didn’t deserve a break, a change of scene, pleasure. That had given way to a desperation, a knowing of the necessity of being away, even for a few days.

  The boards in the attic at my grandmother’s house are wide. Yellow pine, an inch thick, eight and ten feet long, nearly two feet wide. I slept up there in the summers as a kid. Cobwebs dropped with dust from the beams, and the creaks in the night, the sighing and squeaking of wood under weight, those sounds are ghosts. Benevolent ones, but ghosts. A stairway leads up to a hatch in the roof, a heavy trap door out into the sky. I spent hours up there in the evenings as a teenager. The attic smelled like wood and dust, something dry and old and pressing in with its aliveness, a different sort of press than the walls of my apartment.

  Looking at the boards that line the walls and the high peaked roof, the saying They don’t make them like this anymore applies, because they cannot make them like this anymore. For boards this wide you need trees this wide, and we’ve mostly cut down those trees and the new ones haven’t had time to thicken, a ring added with every year. (Imagine if each birthday we were marked in some way, physically scarred, not by creases by the eyes, or softening flesh, but by something you could count and tally.)

  Old photographs of people I never knew the names of, long dead, filled frames. There’s an accumulation of old quilts, suitcases with rusting latches, a trundle bed, busted chairs moved up here from lower parts of the house. It was best in rainstorms, when the rain pattered right on the roof above, a wet and steady hymn of rain on roof like the sound of small wings beating. The house gave loud voice to the wind. I came to know what direction it was blowing based on the pitch of the howl or wail or whisper.

  In a corner of the attic, in a dusty mess of boxes and old suitcases, leaned a section of board just under an inch thick and about three and a half feet long. Sixteen inches wide, this was old growth from a wide tree from a hundred and fifty years ago or more. Scratched slashes marked one side, the slash count for six. I took it with me when I left.

  It brought comments as I walked through town with it under my arm.

  “You going surfing?” one man joked.

  “Now there’s a girl who’s really bored,” punned another guy.

  “What type of wood is that?” asked an older man with a mustache.

  “Pine,” answered his companion before I could answer. He was eagle-nosed, with white strands of hair running over a smoothed dome. He was dressed for the weather. I asked if he knew what the markings were about.

  “Yes,” he said, and he explained that a lot of the old houses were moved from one place to another, and this was a way for the builders to know which pieces went where when they were putting it back together again.

  I took the board home and spent some hours with sand-paper, grinding away the dust and dirt, smoothing out the rough surface. Dust drifted on the breeze and it smelled like the attic. It burned my nostrils as rough gave way to something light and smooth beneath. Rings and waves revealed themselves. Hidden under the rough cut of a crude saw from more than a century ago, dark knots got darker, eyes in the wood. Swirls and waves like ridges on a sandbar seemed to rise from the surface as the sandpaper abraded layers away. Rubbed and rubbed, the wood shifted from dusty dark red-brown to something paler, the whirls and rings and the lines of the grain a salmon color, a living pinkish. After hours with the sandpaper, finer and finer grade, to rub my palm across the wood was to touch velvet, baby skin, a cheek. This transformation surprises me every time, the way wood, under a bit of effort, can be so soft to touch. It’s a miracle of transformation, and it thrills me. How changed it is, and still the same. I smoothed a finish over the wood, a combination of polyurethane and tung oil and linseed oil. It smelled like apple cider, a vinegar sting, with the sharp and singeing smell of turpentine. I smoothed it on the wood with a torn piece of a soft pink tank top I used to wear. The finish looked like honey from the jar. I smoothed it on and the wood drank it in. The color shifted again. The brown-reds re-emerged as though answering a magnetic draw from above, from pale to rich, the color of fall. The eyes, big knots, got black, all pupil, and the swirls and rings became a rich dark orange like a flame against the base color of the wood. I attached iron hairpin legs and it is a table now, this slab of wood from the attic in my grandmother’s house. The slash markings are on the bottom, a secret, a reminder that everything, almost everything, can be put back together again.

  In early April I grabbed my phone, resolved to call Mary again, to be firm and tell her if there wasn’t any work in the foreseeable future, I needed to find another job. I faltered as I scrolled to find her number. It was not a call I wanted to make. The possible answer—nope, sorry, nothing doing, you’re on your own—was one I did not want to face. I stared at her name. To summon the courage, I imagined telling her about the table I’d made, and that felt like a good enough reason to call. I pressed her name on the phone.

  “How the hell are ya?” Mary asked without saying hello.

  “Ah, okay, okay. It’s been so long —”

  “I was just going to call you. Got a job in the South End starting Monday. Could be a weird one. Does eight-thirty work for you?”

  Yes, I told her. Yes. Eight-thirty worked for me.

  Chapter 5

  SAW

  On severing a part from the whole

  That Monday morning, we arrived at the place on a tree-lined side street of handsome brick row houses in Boston’s South End, a high-rent neighborhood with a long list of good restaurants and galleries. The condo was a couple blocks removed from the action of Tremont Street, the Boston Center for the Arts, its Cyclorama space and art studios, the Boston Ballet, an oyster joint, a subterranean bar that aims at a bohemian feel, and boutiques of expensive bibelots. The front door was locked and Mary didn’t yet have a key.

  She rang the bell. No answer. She rang again. “This could be a problem,” she said. We were bashful around each other, not having seen each other in almost six months. She pulled out her phone and called the woman. No answer. “We’re on your front steps, hoping to get in, see you soon,” she said to voicemail.

  We stood on the stoop a few more minutes. The morning was cool in a way that gave hint of coming warmth. Winter, which lasts and lasts in Massachusetts, had broken. Buds and greening trees hadn’t started yet, but it wouldn’t be long. A softness in the air whispered at the bloom to come. I pressed the doorbell. We could hear it buzzing up on the second floor. Finally, we heard footsteps down the stairs and the door opened. The woman stood there, hair rumpled, puffed-up pouches below her eyes, in loose pj bottoms and a T-shirt that fell off her shoulder. “Hi, Nidhi,” Mary said. “Sorry to wake you.”

  Without a word, Nidhi turned and climbed the stairs. We followed. She entered her apartment and took a right down the hall. “I’m still sleeping,” she said as she closed her bedroom door.

  We’d been hired by a real estate agent Mary knew to fix up her condo, to repair cabinets and banisters, level slanting built-in shelves, paint over some half-done paint jobs (“I’m thinking manic episode,” Mary said of one section of bright purple paint), redo the bathroom with elbow grease and a new vanity. In general, to gussy up the place before it went on the market. It needed gussying. And it was a good first job to return to—a lot of quick fixes and easy items to scratch off the to-do list, nothing too challenging while we got our feet back under us.

  “You should’ve seen it last week
,” Mary whispered. “There was crap everywhere. You couldn’t move.” I felt the closeness of being in on something together; after months apart, all it took to get that camaraderie back was a listen to this as we lugged and unloaded. Mary filled me in a little more. The woman was working with a professional organizer, and though they’d made some progress, navigating through the place was a challenge. Lamps here, crates there, trash-bag heaps, boxes marked “!!!fragile!!!,” another box labeled “lingerie rarely used,” hair-spray cans, headbands, a basket full of sunglasses, mirrors—multiple mirrors, large ones—leaning at precarious angles, making elongated fun-house reflections. The morning was bright and clear; inside it was dim like the moment before evening gives way to night. The shades were drawn, and over them hung thick, dark towels. Underneath, taped against the windowpane, were old record covers. An early R.E.M. album showed Michael Stipe with glasses and thick wavy hair. The air felt as though it’d been stuck in there, unchanged, for weeks.

  “I don’t know if I’d call her a hoarder,” Mary whispered as we climbed the stairs with tool buckets, drop cloths, and a couple gallons of paint. But I bet that’s because the hoarders we see on TV have cat carcasses rotting under piles of cracked china and fabric swatches and old dolls. The place didn’t horrify, but it was evident that this was more than the chaos of an impending move.

  “I started smoking again,” Nidhi said when she emerged from her room around noon, still in pj’s, hair no longer a storm around her head. “Because of the move. I quit ten years ago.” She was moving to Pennsylvania, to be closer to her mom. “I’ve lived in this place thirteen years,” she said. “Time to spread my wings.” It sounded practiced, the way she said it, as though she was still trying to convince herself, or repeating someone else’s words.

  I felt clumsy with the tools, out of practice, and my heart beat hard in my chest and my breath came fast carrying saws and tool buckets up the stairs. But it felt familiar, too, like returning to a recipe you haven’t made for a while—you remember the knife and when to add the salt, but there is hesitation, a stuttered second-guessing, is this right, does this come next? Digging through the bucket for a screwdriver, chopping a piece of two-by-four with the clean smell of pine filling the room, I thought, Of course. I remember this. And I got a small smile on my face. I also got a splinter.

  Mary had me try to deal with some collapsing bookcases in the bedroom. Tacked to the front of them was a list of questions. In the neat and optimistic handwriting that would belong to someone who helped people organize for a living, it listed criteria for sorting and keeping:

  Is it current? Is it of good quality, accurate, or reliable?

  Have I worn it in the last year?

  Can I wear it with at least three outfits that I have?

  How many items like this do I already have? Choose the best and limit the number I keep.

  Is it unique?

  Does it represent who I am and do I feel comfortable in it?

  Does it fit in a flattering way?

  I imagined Nidhi picking up a necklace with a broken clasp, an old shower caddy, a thrift-store cardigan with buttons loose, and reading through the list. Keep or toss. Treasure or trash. Stay or go.

  It brought to mind an image in Moving Out, a book of photographs by Robert Frank. A mostly blurred black-and-white picture shows a rock with some snow on it in the foreground. Two telephone poles flank the shot; fuzzed power lines stretch across the horizon. The white of the snow on the rock is a sharp glowy shape against the middle gray of the rest of the image. It’s less a landscape and more an abstract, a mood. The atmosphere is grim, like a muted Sunday afternoon in February when it seems like winter will go on forever. Scrawled on the print with a brush or a fingertip are the words HOLD STILL Keep going. The letters look as though they were written in blood.

  “The sunlight is jarring,” Nidhi said.

  Mary was gentle. “We’ve got to take the towels and tapestries down to paint.”

  “Mornings are difficult for me. You might’ve noticed.” She laughed. She was likable, a little nervous, and gracious. She thanked us for making her home look better. She offered opinions on paint color, said she wasn’t sure about the beige in the hall.

  “I should just stay here now.”

  “She’s got to start thinking of this as not her home anymore,” Mary said later as we sat on the front steps eating lunch.

  She and I hadn’t found our rhythm yet, were still easing back in. It felt like moving through a once familiar house at night, a vague sense of where the sofa was, and how to avoid knocking against the corner of the table there, but a bumbling feeling too, a hand out in front to make sure you didn’t walk into a wall.

  “Dusting off the cobwebs,” Mary said. “We got to get your muscles back.”

  In Nidhi’s kitchen, a sticky black grime coated the counter by the fridge. Mouse droppings dotted pans on the stove and piled up in the dark corners on the counters. Open soda cans, half-drunk, filled a cabinet. The face of a small drawer next to the oven hung loose, its handle dangling off it. When I opened the drawer to fix it, I saw fifteen, twenty orange prescription bottles, some pill-filled, others close to empty. Mary was up on the ladder, leveling upper cabinet doors above the fridge. I looked up at her.

  “I know,” she said. “Don’t look.”

  I didn’t want to look. Of course I wanted to look. I wanted some clues as to what this woman suffered. What were these pills—so many pills—used to fix?

  I fixed the drawer. It closed smooth, right on its rails, with face attached and handle screwed tight.

  Spending time in other people’s homes was one of the best pleasures of the carpentry work, and I felt especially grateful for it now after so long inside my own apartment. To see what cereal other people ate, how they brewed their coffee, what pictures hung on their walls, what books filled their shelves. The bookshelves always drew me first. Whenever Mary was outside having a smoke, and sometimes when I should’ve been installing a threshold, I’d look to see what lined the shelves in people’s homes. And I’d look at whatever was open on the desk—Post-it notes with phone numbers, a photograph of the couple looking younger, an obituary clipped from the newspaper. “Stop snooping,” Mary would say. Are there cats? Kids? Is the bed made? Would I want to live here? Would I want to live like this?

  Is it every human’s impulse to peer into other people’s windows? What a small specific pleasure it is, to see someone in a moment of their living, a glimpse of someone standing at the stove over a steaming pan, pulling sheet corners over the mattress, brushing teeth, taking off a sweater. Carpentry allowed this glimpse into other people’s lives, not in fast glances through lit windows, but through the front door and into their rooms.

  Taped to the frame of the door into the kitchen at Nidhi’s place, a hot-pink Post-it note read: “How can you be so judgmental?”

  It was a judgment itself, self-turned. An unkind reminder: what gives you the right, who do you think you are? And it made me nervous, too, that just as we were in her private space and coming to know her, she was watching us. If you need to write a note to yourself reminding yourself not to be so judgmental, chances are you haven’t broken the habit yet. It made me more aware of how I was with her, how Mary was with her. Working in someone else’s home, one enters into the private space of a stranger, and a strange intimacy occurs.

  Nidhi caught me looking at a photograph on her fridge: a beautiful woman with bright eyes and thick hair sitting on the railing of a deck by a hedge. The woman in the picture wasn’t smiling, but she looked happy and the light looked like almost evening light.

  “That’s my mother. Isn’t she beautiful?”

  “She really is.”

  “She never seems to get old. My dad looks young, too. He jogs eight miles a day. I’ve got good genes. Guess how old I am?”

  I suspected late thirties, but feared her puffed eyes and tired mouth were the result of the drawer of pills, that they had aged her beyond her y
ears. I took a few years off.

  “Thirty-three?”

  “Ha!” she laughed. “Ha, I told you. Good genes. I’m forty-four.” She seemed well pleased, and I got the feeling that this was a game she played with a lot of people.

  In the hall that led to the bedroom, scrawled on the wall in crayon, letters eight inches high: “6 hours earlier in Lulu!!!” Her sister lived in Hawaii, she mentioned at some point. Did she keep calling her too early in the morning?

  We painted over it on a Tuesday.

  A week or so after we finished up there, I thought I saw Nidhi on the street, wearing huge sunglasses and walking a big black dog. It felt odd to see her out of the context of her home, and I felt too nervous to say hello. I looked at my feet and crossed the road. I don’t know if she saw me. I don’t know if it was her.

  So started a season that rocketed along. Later that summer, we were hired to do a total renovation of a kitchen. Nothing would go unchanged in this lovely third-floor Cambridge condo kitchen. New floors and cabinets. New countertops. New appliances. A doorway would be moved. A pantry would be built. The stove and sink were shifting from one side of the room to the other, which meant pipes had to be realigned. It was a big job, and Mary’s excitement was contagious.

  Two women in their early fifties owned the place, Alice and Bettina. Bettina, from somewhere in the Black Forest, was large in a big-boned Teutonic way, and spoke with a gentle German accent. She’d tilt her chin toward her chest when speaking, which gave the effect, despite her height, that she was looking up at you. She gave an impression of forgiveness, which softened her imposing presence and likely suited her students at the university where she taught. Alice was large in a short, round way and her thick breasts hung braless like sacks of coins. The kitchen, it was clear from the start, was hers. She had designed it, and she would be the one to grill meat on the restaurant-grade stove and to roll delicate pastry dough on the marble counter. She also worked from home, so we’d be seeing a lot of her.