Hammer Head

by Nina MacLaughlin

  A sick heat had settled on the city, and it was only getting hotter. Boston in July is a soup of swelter and summer funk. Thick air makes every hug, every article of clothing, a torture. I pictured temperature degrees as invisible rods in the air, dense packed, heavy with moisture, settling on the skin, pressing as you moved. I sweat and sweat, heat-stunned and dulled.

  On our first day at Alice and Bettina’s we unloaded the van and carried the tools up to the third floor. Our steps were fast and the loads felt light, carried with the excitement and optimism of a new gig.

  “You should see the tiles Alice ordered,” Mary said. She rubbed her fingers together in a way that said pricey. “They’re gorgeous. I always tell people, when they’re trying to design a new kitchen, that they should pick one thing they want to splurge on. Cabs, tiles, new island, whatever.”

  Tiling had been the first thing I’d done with Mary, and it was always one of my favorite parts of a job. The variety appealed—each kind of tile had its own personality and place. Tiny white coins make a good match for the floor of a small bathroom. A grand, high-ceilinged front hall can accommodate massive panels of tile for high heels to echo off of. A kitchen counter tiled with lapis blue brings warmth to the room. Texture varied: shiny smooth, earthen matte, rippled and gently ridged. Color varied: sunset terra-cotta, beach-stone slate, the promise of clarity and clean living of plain pure white.

  Once the tools were upstairs, we surveyed the room. The demo had already been done so the room was blank, stripped of appliances, cabinets, and floor. The fridge was the only thing left in there; we’d need to move it before we started. Mary gave a quick order-of-events rundown and talked through where things would go. Fridge on the wall to the right; sink to its left; oven facing the fridge from the peninsula in the middle of the room, which would jut out between the two windows on the wall opposite us. There would be short cabinet corridors on either side of it. Open shelving would go on the left wall, a slab of marble countertop below the window on the left, and the pantry in an area by the door out to the back deck. I nodded as Mary talked, trying hard to position everything in its right place. It takes practice and imagination to conjure up a full, functioning room out of a blank one. Staring at this emptiness, it seemed near impossible that this would be an actual kitchen again. But I could feel the potential, too.

  “Let’s get the fridge out of the way first,” Mary said.

  I reached around the door of the fridge to get a good grip on it, and accidentally pulled it open. All at once, a potent, terrible smell knocked us both backwards. The sour stench of spoiled milk mixed with the musty stink of raw rot, a stale plastic smell as though electricity itself had decomposed. Mold dusted and slimed all over the shelves and drawers, a creeping black fuzz. Alice and Bettina had gone to Germany for a few weeks to avoid some of the upheaval of the renovation and had unplugged the fridge before they’d left. But they’d forgotten two tubs of yogurt and a block of Emmentaler cheese, and temperatures had hovered around eighty-five degrees since they’d left a few days before. Mary pulled open a drawer to find some now-unidentifiable plant matter, a mucusy vegetal slurry.

  So instead of a quick shift of the fridge and getting on with the framing of the new doorway, Mary and I spent an hour scrubbing every surface of the fridge. “Take the drawers to the tub,” she told me. I washed mold off the plastic with water and Lysol and a green sponge and thought about the stutter steps of a new project. When I tell people I work for a carpenter, no doubt they envision pale curls of wood, the homey Christmas smell of pine, the quiet contemplation of craftwork. But here I was scrubbing mold off a refrigerator’s veggie drawer in a stranger’s bathtub. Often, at the start of the job, the work consists of things we don’t expect, that have little to do with a carpenter’s training or expertise.

  Isn’t this often the case elsewhere, too? When we picture the lives of other people, we imagine the most exciting parts, the ones rich with drama and living. The ER surgeon reattaching a man’s leg after a car accident. The painter finishing off a portrait, paint on her wrist, and getting into bed with her subject. The farmer trundling in from a day of harvest, tossing a dirty sack of fresh carrots or onions on the table. Imagination is the enemy sometimes, in how fully we can bring to life the passion our current love shared with someone else before, in how fire-filled someone else’s existence is compared to our own. But of course, most of us spend our time figuring out what to make for dinner, trying to remember to buy another roll of paper towels. Our romanticizing is perhaps an act of hope, that those sorts of lives are possible to live, that it’s possible to find challenge and satisfaction in our work, to have our bodies lit up with lust, to happen upon those conversations that go deep into the night when voices get quieter and truer things get said. In our imaginings of other people’s experiences exists an ambition to exist in our own in the fullest way. You’re a carpenter, it must be amazing to make things! And it is. Except when it isn’t.

  Three days into the job and we were ready at last to start on the floor. I’d gotten a call from Mary the night before. “So listen, I’ve got a bunch of running around to do tomorrow. The tiles are getting delivered between nine and ten. They’re going to leave them at the bottom of the stairs. If you just want to be there for the delivery and bring them up, we can call it a day and I’ll see you back there on Thursday.”

  Bring a few boxes of tile upstairs and call it a day? Great.

  I sat on Alice and Bettina’s front porch and waited for the tile guy. A few minutes before ten, he pulled up in his truck, shoulders like cantaloupes and forehead dripping with sweat.

  “Hot enough for you?” he said. He began unloading boxes, two at a time, to the landing at the base of the stairs. “You got some help with these, hon? Or are you bringing all of them upstairs yourself?”

  “Just me.”

  “This building got an elevator?”

  “No.”

  “You got your work cut out for you today. You stay cool.” He climbed back into his truck and roared off toward another delivery.

  Who needs a fucking elevator?

  Twenty-five boxes of these tiles plus two sixty-pound bags of cement sat at the base of the stairs like the beginnings of a fortress. Mary had been right about the tile. Beautiful five-by-five-inch squares, slate gray like smoothed stones and no two alike. Some had bumps and small pits, some had striations of paler gray like a good luck ring around a rock at the beach. Even in the boxes, it was easy to imagine them underneath bare feet as you stood by the stove scrambling eggs on Sunday morning or tip-toed through in the evening to pour a glass of water before bed. I looked at the stacks. Fine. A lot of trips, but I could probably take two boxes at a time like the tile guy.

  I lifted a box—oh, shit—and I put the box down. Then I laughed. I would not be carrying two boxes at a time. I couldn’t believe the weight. A box the size of a loaf of bread, and each one weighed thirty-five pounds. That’s like holding more than four gallons of water, the same as a sack of about twenty-eight-hundred quarters. Thirty stairs rose between me and the third floor. By ten that morning, it was already edging up over eighty-five degrees.

  I got myself into mule mode. One box at a time, up and up, steady steps, then barreling down the stairs for another load. Box in my arms, up we go, then bouncing down. It was hypnotic. I was a body moving up and down, brainless and physical. All I needed was muscle, patience, and the will to get a thing done. It was similar to the task of cleaning the moldy drawers: boring, necessary, underimagined.

  The pile of boxes dwindled at the bottom of the stairs and grew at the top. Ten boxes left, then four, then one, and I realized I should not have left the two bags of cement for last. I climbed eight hundred and ten stairs that day, hauled up nine hundred ninety-five pounds, nearly half a ton. The feeling that resulted from the effort, the satisfaction, was so different from the one I knew putting a final period on a book review or a profile on deadline.

  Finishing a piece of writing, the sen
sation was relief coupled with a spentness, a short temper and depletion, grinchy and hollow. After a deadline, I experienced a pinched feeling behind the eyes, and the next person I’d encounter would get strained smiles and diverted, unfocused attention. The more fully I existed in the world of the writing, the more removed I’d feel from the world as it existed around me, and the transition back, particularly after rare moments of writing flight—when the words come and there is nothing else—would grind. Almost immediately upon finishing a piece of writing, the glow faded, and all I’d see were the flaws.

  Work with Mary was different. I looked back on everything we’d built with satisfaction and pride, even the things that didn’t deserve it. The bookshelves for a rich psychiatrist with a grand piano: without question the best bookshelves that have ever been built. That bamboo floor we installed in a basement to turn it to a bedroom: who cares if the floor was the color of Band-Aids: there has never been a better bamboo floor than that. The deck stairs in Somerville: I could run up and down those stairs for hours, they are exactly what stairs should be.

  Lifting and hauling those boxes of tile, I couldn’t ignore my own sweating and panting, my muscles flexed and straining. When I placed that last box and final cement bag by the kitchen door, I felt buoyant. My whole self felt more honest, more useful, and more used. There was no grinding back to a different world. I’d been there the whole time. I took off my shirt and wrung the sweat out over the bathroom sink.

  I called Mary. “Finished,” I said.

  “Wooohooo! You must be sweating, girl. Drink some water and try to find someplace to swim this afternoon. I’ll see you bright and early tomorrow.”

  I skipped down the stairs and locked the door behind me. The view felt longer leaving work that day. The air was thick as I walked home, and people’s foreheads were damp with sweat. Dress shirts clung to backs and chests, and the leaves on the trees seemed a more saturated green, benevolent somehow, as though aware of the heat and eager to shade. I smiled at someone across the street and he smiled back. Everything was okay, everything would be okay, the small snarls and woes were just that—they evaporated against a much bigger, much stronger tide of connection to life. Walls come down, the ones that block our view of each other and the leaves and the sky, that divide us from the awareness of being alive.

  And those boxes were fucking heavy and I was glad to be done with them.

  At that point though, I’d graduated from being just a lugger. Instead of just helping Mary with what she was doing, or watching her do what she was doing, I was on my own for certain parts of projects.

  Mary had me build simple birch plywood cabinets to be tucked away in the pantry, a small zone that would serve as a transition from the kitchen to the back porch. Mary and I ripped sheets of three-quarter-inch eight-by-four plywood down to size on the table saw (a rip cut is one made parallel to the grain). I chopped the sides and tops of the cases with the miter saw and attached them together with wood glue and a nail gun, the flinty smell rising after each shot. I set them on the ground so they looked like high walls to a big sandbox and fastened a piece of quarter-inch plywood to the backs of the boxes to keep them from wobbling. The backing piece braced them. If you cut the front and back panels from a box of popsicles, imagine the movement if you then put your hands on the remaining edges and shifted your hands up and down. The same thing happens with the cabinet boxes; the back panels stabilize the shifting.

  The boxes and shelves needed trim to cover the ugly unfinished look of the plywood, which is made of thin sheets of wood glued together cross-grained—the grain of each sheet alternates direction with the sheet before it, which makes it resilient against bending, swelling, shrinking, and splitting. It’s stronger than wood you find in nature and much less expensive than solid wood. Alice had splurged on tile, saved dough on the pantry. For these cabs, which no one would see the sides of, plywood was just the thing to use.

  To cover up the plywood edges, I measured, marked, and cut pieces of one-by-three-inch poplar trim to line the cases, and one-by-two for the shelves. Poplar is a creamy colored wood with swirls of green and sometimes a streak of purple in the grain like a final strip of a winter-sky sunset. It’s an inexpensive hardwood and resistant to the dings and dents of a high-use space like a pantry. Hard- and softwood qualification has to do with how the tree handles reproduction. To raise ghosts from freshman-year biology: angiosperms, the ones that produce seeds with a covering, typically deciduous trees (the ones that lose their leaves), are hardwood trees. Mahogany, walnut, oak, teak, and ash are examples of hardwood. Pine, spruce, cedar, and redwood, coniferous trees, are softwoods, gymnosperms all. Their seeds fly naked in the wind. Softwoods grow fast, and are usually cheaper than hard. Hardwoods are typically denser (balsa wood, of those swooping two-piece airplanes from summer backyards, is an exception).

  I measured, marked, and cut six shelves for each case and attached the trim to the outer edge. That made four boxes, two bases, twenty-four shelves, fifty-eight pieces of trim. A hundred and ten pieces of wood in total for these cabinets. Then came sanding, priming, and painting. From sheets of plywood and planks of poplar came four cabinets, solid things, useful.

  “Hey Mary,” I yelled from the porch. “Check it out.” I stood there beaming next to the cases. Mary came out and smiled and gave me a high five. We didn’t often touch or hug, and our high fives were awkward and sincere. I blushed. The feeling was genuine and unfamiliar—or not entirely unfamiliar, but coaxed from long-gone kid-like pride.

  It was something more than that, too. Not just a look-what-I-did glee, but a truer satisfaction. By the end of the workday, I’d built four big cabinets, sturdy and square. Mary and I stood there together, both of us sweating. The sun sat heavy in the west, seeming to swell before it went about setting in earnest, and there was the feeling that something had happened that was right. First there was nothing, then there were cabinets. And these shelves would be used—for boxes of cereal and cans of beans, for cake tins and paper towels, for oatmeal, molasses, jars of spices. Mary smiled when we took a break on the back deck in the thick heat of late afternoon, and I told her that I loved those boxes. She laughed. “They look like double-wide coffins,” she said.

  The heat wave reached its peak a few days later, and the plumbers were swearing. The older one, Ben, with huge shoulders and a round, bald head, lay on the floor on his back, a thick forearm stretched beneath the kitchen sink. Sweat beads jeweled the skin of his skull. He closed his eyes as he felt for the pipes and the bolts, this large grown man on the floor with his eyes closed, sweat dripping off the smooth skin of his scalp. He closed his eyes to feel things better, and it made me think that maybe that’s why we close our eyes when we kiss. When he lifted himself up, the dampness of his back darkened the slate tile, a shadow of sweat that dried quickly, like rocks on the beach in the sun.

  The younger plumber, James, was in the basement shouting about water lines through a hissing walkie-talkie. Mary was in a crawl space above the kitchen. On her belly, she was working to align ducting that ran from the industrial-size oven vent over the stove up through the ceiling, across ten and a half feet of lightless crawl space, and out the exterior wall. When she flipped the switch to turn on the fan that would suck smoke and greasy fat bubbles up and away from the stove, it sounded like a jet taking off. Mary rustled above and dealt with the metal. When the plumbers weren’t talking and the drills weren’t screaming, and the hammerbangs halted, you could hear Mary humming.

  The day began with talk of pigs.

  “How’re things on the farm?” Mary asked James.

  “I’ve got a couple pigs now that weigh in over three hundred pounds. They’re not much good for eating when they get much bigger than that.” He talked of taking them to the slaughterhouse to get sausage back in one-pound bags. “You would not believe all the one-pound bags we’ve got. Freezers all over the place are filled with these one-pound bags.” He doesn’t name his animals, except his Saint Bern
ard. He had a cow named Meadow, and the Meadow burgers were delicious, “but it was a little sad,” he said.

  “Didn’t you used to have some wild pig?”

  “You mean that boar? Yeah, that mean thing.” He had to bang it with a two-by-four once to keep it from attacking him. This was easy to picture: this big plumber with his bulging eyes and belly, whacking a wiry-haired wild-eyed beast with a club of wood. There’s something wild-eyed about him, too, something impatient and sad. I liked hearing about his pigs.

  “You still thinking about moving out to the country?” he asked Mary.

  “I’ve been trying to persuade Emily we should buy a farm somewhere out Route 2.”

  “You should do it.”

  “That or Alaska.”

  We went about setting up the tools for the day, and the heat, even at nine a.m., felt like an opponent.

  “There will be much swearing,” Mary had said that morning as she opened the crawl-space hatch. It was one of her refrains. And it was an accurate forecast for that day.

  I was in the back stairwell and my back was wet with sweat. Mary had given me a straightforward task: build a chase to cover up the pipes from the stair landing up to the ceiling.

  “Chase?” I’d asked when she told me.

  “Basically a column to hide the pipes. A tall, narrow, three-sided box.” I looked at her blankly. “A pipe-hider.” We stood on the back stairs and looked at the pipes, four of them, thick and thin, one of them cased in a foamy plastic cover. The guts of the house were peeking out, and a chase would make them disappear. “It’s a chase when it runs vertical and a soffit when it hides pipes or ducts along ceilings,” she explained. “First thing is to fire-stop the pipes,” which meant spraying a toxic orange foam that swelled up like a burnt marshmallow around the holes in the ceiling and the floor where the pipes passed through. It came from a canister that looked like it might spray silly string. The foam hardens after it swells, and slows a fire’s path as it burns through another story.