Hammer Head

by Nina MacLaughlin

  “No problem.”

  I made the measurements. I cut the wood. I fastened the three pieces together with glue and the nail gun. Mary was right: it was a long, thin, three-sided box. It was an easy day for me, especially compared to the hell Mary was in up above. I carried the pipe-hider over my right shoulder like an oar, careful not to knock it against doorframes or cabinets as I moved through the kitchen and down into the dark back stairwell.

  I propped it against the wall. The entrance to the crawl space opened above me, and bits of insulation floated down as Mary shifted. Some stuck to the skin of my arm. A fleck landed on my lip and I tried to spit it off.

  “It’s just newspaper,” Mary said from above.

  I didn’t believe that. I imagined a mix of newspaper shreds, mouse piss, rodent-nest detritus, asbestos residue, and generalized cancer dust. I didn’t want this toxic stuff on my lips, and my attempts to brush it off my damp forearms raised the worry that I was only mashing the poisons deeper into my pores. This was a regular sort of fear—when we mixed cement or sanded or stained and especially when we took down walls, I continued to fret about what was getting inside and the damage it would do.

  “Can you bring me a flathead bit?” Mary called down. I was nurse to her doctor. I crawled up the ladder and shimmied through the hole. The heat of the space pressed in on me as if I’d been slotted into a toaster. Mary worked by the light of a camping lantern that she’d brought from her basement. Dust and insulation coated the skin on her arms and neck and face. I passed her the bit. She had a fearlessness when it came to her corporal self.

  “I’m glad we waited for the hottest day of the year for this,” she said.

  “Sorry there’s not room for both of us.”

  “No you’re not.”

  “Do you want a mask?” I asked, knowing she’d refuse.

  “I can barely breathe as it is.”

  I scrambled down and the duct metal twanged as she bent and attached one section to another. Ben the plumber struggled under the sink. He raised his work-booted foot off the floor to gain leverage. James was banging on pipes with a wrench. A clear ring of a bell clanged up from the basement.

  I stood on the landing and raised the pipe-hider up and walked it back and forth toward the pipes. It covered them with just enough room on either side. I pressed it to get it flush to the wall, but it caught. A three-inch gap ran between the wall and the chase, from stair up to ceiling. Had I mismeasured? Had I gotten the distance wrong between platform and ceiling? I ran the tape up along the sides of the chase: a skosh less than a hundred and ten. I measured against the height of the ceiling. A hundred and ten on the nose. I leaned my weight into the chase. Nothing. It didn’t give. I gave it a kick. It stuck firm.

  Ben and James continued their walkie-talkie back and forth:

  “You find it?”

  “Found it.”

  “Over there by the furnace?”

  “Yeah I found it.”

  “Everything okay?”

  “Besides the fact that I’m sweating my dick off down here? Yeah, everything’s okay.”

  Measure twice, cut once. The carpenter’s proverb reminds us about planning, about accuracy, about the possibility of waste—of time, money, and material—when first steps are made with haste or distraction. “I cut it twice and it’s still too short” was a joke Mary’s old boss used to make, and I’d laughed when I heard it. Life is more forgiving than a two-by-four. Measure twice, measure six thousand times. I crouched and looked at the landing and I saw where my chase was catching. A swell at the seam of two floorboards—so slight—was bump enough to thwart the thing from fitting. Despite kicks, full body heaves, and all-my-weight pushing, the chase wouldn’t move over the bump and press flush to the wall. By then I’d learned that measurement wasn’t always absolute, that sometimes a quick bash rightly placed could nullify parts of inches. The numbers say one thing, the flex and movement of wood another. Some pieces and places offered forgiveness.

  Not here. Sweat dripped from my chin. The base of the chase needed shaving, which meant tugging it out, hoisting it back up on my shoulder, and maneuvering it back out to the deck where the tools were set up.

  Bang. Slam. A knock against the doorframe.

  “Use the sander,” I heard from above.

  The back deck looked out over the backs of houses in the Central Square neighborhood, which had its share of ne’er-do-wells, junkie congregations, piss smells on church doorways. It maintains a distinctly urban feel, a bit more grit and unpredictability compared to the rest of Cambridge, with its yoga studios and yogurt shops. The view showed small back gardens with swaying day lilies and bursts of hydrangeas. The old man next door spent each morning on his deck with the newspaper and a towering glass of orange juice. I waved. He raised his glass my way. He wore shorts and no shirt and the white hair on his chest stood out against his dark skin. A group of kids lived on the third floor across the way. Bikes leaned against their deck railing. They’d strung colored lights along the ceiling and used a milk carton as an ashtray. A girl in a tank top had a cigarette there in the afternoons. When we packed up around five those evenings, there’d be a few of them out there, and the hissing pop of bottle caps off beers made me thirsty for one too. An orange cat stalked around the patios below.

  I sanded the corner of the chase where it hit the bulge, and the rest as well, grinding the wood away, wary of removing too much. Standing in a tub together tiling at some point early in our time together, Mary had said something that stuck in my head. “I look at wood the way I look at meat. You can always cut more off a piece of wood and you can always cook meat a little longer. Start rare with meat. Start long with wood.”

  Whenever I approached the saw, start rare with meat bounced in my brain, a measurement mantra. I cut the sander’s power once a light flurry of sawdust coated the back-deck planks around my feet. I smoothed my fingers along the edges, surprised and pleased at how much like velvet a just-sanded piece of wood can feel. It tempted me to bend and rub my cheek against it, the same way, as a girl, I used to walk up to women in fur coats and rub my face against them. That splintery wood can be made to feel like velvet is a transformation I can’t imagine growing weary of.

  I hefted the thing back up on my shoulder and navigated back through the kitchen.

  “Having fun?” Ben the plumber teased.

  I positioned the chase back in place. I slid it toward the wall. It jammed again. I stood staring at it in silent, angry denial. The scream of a saw cutting through metal screeched up from the basement, then stopped. Ben’s walkie-talkie hissed in the kitchen. What would happen if I just left, I wondered. What would Mary do if she came down from the crawl space and I was gone?

  I tapped at the chase with my foot. I bent at the waist, one hand at the base, the other reaching up, like some awkward defensive football move, and I dug my feet in. With every muscle and all my will, I tried to push the chase over that little goddamn bump in the floor. Nothing. “Fuck!”

  Mary rustled above. “Back it out,” she called down.

  I stood with my hands on my hips. I thought: this should be simpler. This is a simple thing, hiding these pipes with three pieces of wood. What Ben and James were up to, getting gas and water to flow through the house in the right way, or what Mary was doing up on her stomach in dim light, those tasks were challenging and important. My chase was cosmetic and it was chewing up the day.

  Mary emerged from the crawl space and followed me out to the deck where she brushed the dust and insulation off her clothes and wiped her face. She looked like she’d come from a coal mine: dark dust circled her eyes, collected around the corners of her mouth, darkened the creases in the skin on her neck. She bent at the waist and roughed her hands through her short wiry salt-and-pepper hair. The dust moved off her in clouds. “Hold your breath,” I said. She stood and rolled a cigarette.

  I pressed the sander against the base again and she watched while she smoked and I ground the left c
orner so it would slide over the bump and fit against the wall. I lifted it to my shoulder as I had before, and Mary followed, holding the back to keep it from hitting the walls.

  She stood at the top of the stairs as I placed the chase down again, raised it up, and slid it toward the wall. And, finally, it slipped in flush against the wall, tight up to it, up and down. The pipes disappeared. They’d been noticeable before, their thickness and color, and they invited one to wonder what was traveling through them: water, gas, or shit. It’s surprising how thoroughly this wooden column camouflaged them. The chase vanished against the wall and wouldn’t be given a second thought as Alice and Bettina headed down to the basement to fetch sweaters or a tennis racquet.

  “Nice,” Mary said. “Third time’s a charm.”

  I was relieved to be finished. “It should’ve been a lot easier.”

  “You remembered to fire-stop the pipes?”

  I closed my eyes. The little bottle of foam with its thin straw nozzle perched on a stair two feet away from me, where it had been all morning. Blood rose to my cheeks and my heart made its presence known in my chest, pounding in a way that said, Get out of here, run. It was too hot and the wick of my patience had already been burned from both ends.

  “Son of a bitch,” I said to the floor.

  I hadn’t remembered. I hadn’t remembered despite Mary saying that it was the first thing I should do. I’d ignored the suggestion for two stupid reasons. One, I was eager to get on to the wood, to the more interesting part. Two, I hadn’t felt like carrying the ladder to the stairwell and reaching up and spraying foam way up where the pipes met the ceiling. I’d wanted to get the wood done first, then fire-stop before installing the chase. Because of my laziness and childishness, I now wanted to take the chase and send it flying down the stairs. I wanted to kick the wall and crack the wood. I wanted to ask if maybe it’d be okay if no fire-thwarting measures were taken, just right here. I felt like a fool and I wanted the day to be done.

  Mary laughed. For the heat and the frustration, the crawl space and the stairwell, for being covered in dust and sweat, for not getting it right, but for not fucking it up all the way either.

  “Some days,” she said.

  And she was right. I was hot and sweaty and mad, but at least I hadn’t spent the day rolling around in mouse shit, sucking newspaper bits into my lungs in a hundred-and-fifteen-degree heat.

  This was one of Mary’s greatest attributes. Mistakes weren’t cause for scolding. Instead she used the fuck-ups (which were legion) to teach lessons. I envied her patience and often wished I could summon her calm and perseverance in the face of a stripped screw or a section of baseboard that couldn’t be coaxed off the wall. Her wick of patience, especially when faced with the specific challenges of non-cooperation by inanimate objects, was miles long, could burn hours without going out. Some days you get it wrong, was the way she saw it, and let’s see if we can figure out how to get it right.

  The plumbers laughed when we reappeared in the kitchen. Mary was filthy; I’d soaked through my T-shirt, and scowled.

  “Great weather,” Ben joked. The two men wore work pants and sturdy lace-up boots and leather belts and long-sleeve button-downs with the company logo embroidered on the breast pocket. Their shirts were damp, too. There were challenges at every stage, Ben explained. They’d be back tomorrow.

  “How much?” Mary asked.

  Ben frowned, shook his hand give-or-take. “Twenty-two.”

  I didn’t know much about plumbing except that it was expensive. Twenty-two hundred bucks seemed like a real deal considering all the surgery they’d had to do with rerouting the pipes in this old three-family place. “Not bad,” I said.

  Mary looked at me and said quietly, “Thousand.”

  My face showed shock and Ben gave me a wink.

  Mary changed the subject. She joked about the hell she’d been in above the kitchen, and the guys wondered why Alice couldn’t provide us with a fan. I wiped sweat off my face and tried to brush the sawdust off my calves. It clung to my skin like sand.

  James with the belly and the mischievous eyes gave me a quick slap on the shoulder.

  “Sure beats a desk,” he said.

  It did. But that didn’t mean there weren’t plenty of other days that made me want to scream the way the saws do, each with its own specific pitch.

  The miter saw, also known as the chop saw, is the highest pitched. It makes a frantic, panicked, piercing sound. As the spinning blade is lowered into the wood, its desperate wail hurts my ears, even with the squishy orange plugs that we squeeze the tips of and twist into our ears. Of the saws we use, the miter seems most dangerous. It might be because the plastic guard that covers the blade as it spins has broken off so there is no protection between soft flesh and mean, spinning blade. Perhaps it’s because it’s the one we use most, the one I’ve gotten most comfortable with, and therefore the one I’m most likely to be careless with. A momentary lapse in concentration could mean a finger on the floor, blood soaking into the sawdust. I try to remember this whenever I put my hand on the handle to squeeze the trigger to bring the blade into its spin.

  The table saw has a lower, steadier roar. It’s a saw made for longer cuts, for shearing the width of something long, like an eight-by-four-foot sheet of plywood. And when a piece of wood is run across it, the buzz is like the white-noise summer hum of walking in a field with lots of bugs making their warm-weather drone, a bug song in the heat. It’s less menacing, calmer. That it’s braced to the floor, steady on four legs, makes it less threatening. But every time we set it up, every time we crank the wheel to raise the blade so it emerges above the table, it brings to mind a torture device, a prisoner strapped nearby, gagged and thrashing, witnessing the blade rise. Scarier still is the image that comes when I’m standing in front of the saw, pushing wood across the surface of the table, and I imagine the blade dislodging itself from the piece on which it spins, flying out of its slot in the table and spinning at me, slicing me through, guts and spine, out the back of me, then rolling like a wheel across the grass, severing worm heads from worm tails, the remains left squirming in the dirt.

  We use the table saw to cope, a process of carving out a section of crown molding, for example, so that it will press tight against another piece where the two meet in a corner. Because the table-saw blade is round and because the piece of wood has been sliced at an angle, the front of the piece of molding stays the way it is, and the blade chews back behind it so that the carved-out part follows the curve of the existing piece and fits snug against it, the way one hand cups around another hand’s fist. With small, gentle movements, I press the piece of wood back and forth against the blade, and the saw takes something once solid and whole and firm and turns it to something multiple, divided and light enough to ride the air. I go slow.

  I don’t always cope well. Sometimes the blade chews a jagged bit on the outer edge, corrupting the smoothness of the curve, a mistake you can see from the floor, to be filled in and concealed with wood putty. Sometimes it’s all going well, the movements are slow and smooth and right, and vision is locked in on the wood disappearing against the blade, and every other thing disappears except the line of the curve and the spinning blade and the sawdust rising, and then it gets away from me, the way a word, repeated too many times, turns to nonsense, its meaning lost. The line blurs, too much gets taken off, there’s a nick in the part that’s supposed to be smooth. I give myself extra inches so there is room to slice off errors and start again. Start rare with meat.

  The jigsaw, handheld, its small thin blade rising up and down, is made for curved cuts. It delivers a thuddier sound, like someone trying to talk while running. It reminds me of a sewing machine, the saw blade thumping up and down through the wood like a needle through fabric. The Sawzall is a little like holding a machine gun with a blade on the end. When the blade hits wood, if your hold isn’t firm, it bucks and jolts, and it takes strength to hold and press hard and pull the trigger-thro
ttle to get the blade going at full speed. I don’t like the wild-horse feel of it, the risk of buck and kick. Mary is able to tame it. For the ducting of Alice’s giant oven vent, Mary had me hold and brace a long stretch of metal ducting with my hands and knees while she sawed through with the Sawzall. My whole body vibrated. My fingers tingled afterwards. I felt it in my elbows, this strange current, an energy transferred from blade to metal to my muscles and bones, a little like getting gently electrocuted, that strange bad buzz and tingle that makes you swipe your hand away from the power source.

  The saws didn’t pose the only risks on jobs. Mary had to do some repair to one of the kitchen windows before Alice’s slab of marble countertop could be installed underneath it.

  “Holy shit,” I said when I came into the kitchen. There was Mary, the bottom half of her anyway. She was on her stomach on the makeshift countertop, her legs sticking in from the third-floor window toward the kitchen, with the front half of her pitched down out the window. She yanked at thick caulk and pried away a bit of trim from the exterior wall. She’d hooked her thigh against the wall and was angled headfirst toward the ground.

  “Do you want me to do something here?”

  She shimmied back inside and stood up on the countertop. “I’m going to need your help,” she said. “I need you to come over here and grab onto my belt.”