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  Mary had me trim the inside of a bedroom closet, an odd trapezoidal shape on an uneven floor against a bowed wall. I puzzled through how to get the correct angle of cut for a piece of baseboard that would line the section that ran from the side of the closet door to the corner on the right. This is a piece you would see if you stood inside the closet facing out into the bedroom. This was not a walk-in closet; it was a regular closet that you’d reach in to grab your button-down or your corduroy dress off the wire hanger. Unless you were hiding in there, there would be no reason ever to see this piece of wood.

  I was trying to make the piece flush against the floor, flush against the wall, and flush against the other piece of trim it bumped into in the corner. These are always the goals with trim. Some days are easier than others.

  I walked from the closet to the garage where we’d set up the saws. Over and over I traveled this path as I cut and re-cut the pieces of trim—across the new hardwood floors, through the kitchen, past the small bathroom under the stairs, and out into the garage. Frustration flared. Who cares how this piece fits? No one will ever see it. Such a waste of time. My motivation faltered—oh, it’s good enough like this, isn’t it, with a gap between the wood and the floor? Leave the wide seam there in the corner, just slop it up with some extra caulk.

  I made half-blade cuts, shaving off pieces of the wood, one angle degree at a time. I took a degree off the lower edge of the right side where it would hit the other piece of trim in the corner. It fit snug and tight. The floor bowed so that the right and left sides of the piece knocked back and forth like a seesaw. I lay on my side, legs out the closet door, and ran my flat fat pencil across the length of the board following the rise and sink of the floor. The line on the wood that resulted showed me where and how much the floor swelled and where I needed to remove the wood. Shave and shave, and finally it fit flat.

  “It takes years to get good at this,” Mary said as I walked past her toward the saws with my piece of trim, shaking my head.

  When two pieces met in a perfect seam, when the pieces followed the bowed swell of the floor just right, gapless, steady, when it pressed in to fit tight and right, I exulted. The simple joy of it!

  Whether Mary was trying to teach me a lesson that day, I don’t know. Part of me thinks she knew it’d be tricky for its bows and angles, and trickier still for its out-of-the-way-ness and won’t-be-seen-ness, a test of technical skill as well as something mental. Or maybe it was just another thing that needed doing, and she had more important projects. She heard me swearing. She saw me walking back and forth. She stayed quiet, let me puzzle my own way through. I got pieces wrong. I’d make one extra slice and take a little too much off and render the piece useless. Our board stretcher was always at the shop.

  But if she had come to the closet, seen the fat gaps and teetering pieces and said, “Yes, to hell with it, it’s a closet, who cares,” I don’t know that I’d have felt much relief. Maybe in the short term—thank god I’m out of that closet—but it’d have been cheating. If you are able to maintain focus and attention for a piece that will not matter, that will rarely, if ever, be seen, if you are able to get that right, the rest of the work—the stuff that does matter, that will be seen—will be elevated.

  During a trip to or from the saws in the garage, something shifted. Impatience changed to purpose, to mission mode. I went from being faced with a tangle and ready to throw it across the room to being able to see both ends and following the strands out of its snarl, slow, patient, precise, until one smooth string could be held and stretched, glowing between two hands. This will be right. I will make this right.

  Were the eventual owner to look inside the closet, I’d bet he or she would not notice if it were done well. Done badly, though, with gaps and slop, it would come into focus and raise questions about the quality of the rest of the work around the house. An uncritical eye learns to see what can be wrong, what’s done sloppily, lazily, without effort.

  Trim on the inside of a closet does matter. It might someday belong to a messy teenager who heaps sweaty shirts from soccer practice, old socks, damp and sandy beach towels, ragged school notebooks, so that piles hide the trim. So what? The pieces will disappear. That’s what’s supposed to happen. It wouldn’t have kept me up at night knowing I left a thick gap that required a smeary spread of caulk to cover up. But the satisfaction, the quiet sense that I got it right, that it mattered, made it worth it. And whether Mary had intended it or not, it made me glad to have done it.

  “Finished,” I said to Mary, who was framing windows in the main room.

  I didn’t notice when she put her tools down and walked into the bedroom where I’d been. But when she came out a few moments later, she gave me a thumbs-up and nodded her head. She walked back to her tools and said, “You want to start trimming the dining room?”

  I made my way with the tape to a corner by a window that overlooked the graveyard.

  There’s no backspace key in carpentry, no control+Z. You cannot refresh a miscut piece of wood. I took for granted the undo-ability of labor in my old job. A couple quick clicks and anything could be fixed. Correcting for the errors in carpentry involved a new set of brain skills, ones that do not come naturally to me, and ones I was so grateful to be gaining.

  I botched a simple chiseling job working on the same carriage house. I needed to carve out the space in a door where the hinge would go. I’d traced the outline of the hardware on the side of the door and began digging in with the chisel, aiming for an even one-eighth-inch depth. The wood curled off like ribbon underneath the press of the chisel edge, paper thin, and fell to the floor without a sound. I liked those curls so much, I kept going. Mary came in as I straddled the door between my legs, pressing off another shaving of wood.

  She placed the hinge against the space I made and shook her head. It sat too deep by an extra eighth.

  “This isn’t going to work,” she said. And she gave me a container of gray-brown wood filler to smooth into the space I’d hashed so I could start again and try to get it right.

  But look at those curls, I wanted to say. Look at how right they are.

  Smearing the gunk into the notch felt like a corruption, like I was defiling the pure wood with something chemical and artificial. The goop dripped and stuck and stank. It did not cooperate. I smeared it this way, back, diagonal across the small space where the hinge was meant to go. Mary came back in and leaned over my shoulder.

  “It’s not icing,” she said. “You’re not working with cake.”

  I said okay, and as she walked away she said, “Sometimes the most important thing is knowing when to stop.”

  Chapter 4

  CLAMP

  On the necessity of pressure

  Mary and I slipped into our third year together. Jobs presented themselves—bathrooms, kit-chens, decks, bookshelves—and we took the work. The rhythm of the days felt natural now, the rhythm of the jobs, familiar. Fall inched toward winter, and the heap of job debris in Mary’s backyard showed the history of our months and months of work. Every time we finished a job, we unloaded bags and bags of trash from her van onto this pile on the side of her yard by the fence. It was now the size of a subway car.

  “I’ve got to get rid of this before it snows,” Mary said.

  She called the demo guys, the same ones who took down her chimney, to come remove the pile.

  On a morning in November, the three men arrived, dad and his two sons, thudding out of their truck. They stood by and assessed the pile: metal pipes, strips of drywall and cement board, a box spring, a pallet, two-by-fours, two-by-tens, wire backing to an old tile wall, wood scraps of varied length and thickness.

  “We’re looking at five tons here,” said the leader, smiling under his thick mustache. Five tons struck me as an impossible weight for three men alone to load in a day. The blonde son, the lean one with the empty eyes, climbed on top of the pile. He stood there, hands on narrow hips, king of this trash mountain. He bent, picked up a g
roup of long boards, thick nails spiking out, and tossed the wood into the back of the dump truck with a metallic clamor. And so it began. Once they started moving, they did not stop. Wood thunked on the bed of the truck. Drywall pieces broke in dusty fragments. Trash bags flew like feather pillows.

  The father once again let his sons do most of the hefting and heaving. They shouldered and tossed while the boss discussed his loading system, practiced and refined over years of experience. Flat and wide go first into the deep bed of his truck, long planks next. Stack them neatly, one direction. Metal in another corner; it doesn’t go to the dump—there’s big money in scrap metal. The odd stuff and strange shapes go after that, with heavy bags on top to keep it all in place on the road. When one of his sons placed a bag of lath, dusty and full of rusty nails, upright, the boss chided him. “Hey, hey. No,” he said. And he explained where it should go and why. He said it without anger or impatience. He just wanted it right and wanted his son to know why it was right.

  After detailing his loading process, he talked about the merits and drawbacks of area dumps.

  “The place over there, you don’t want to go there. You know why? Because they don’t care. There’s going to be nails on the driveway. Do you know what I mean? That place, I’m telling you, it’s a mess, and what you do is you risk a flat, you risk a puncture every time you roll in there. You don’t want to go there.”

  Another place nearby takes anything, he told me.

  “For them, it’s all about the weight. They’ll take it all,” he said. “Anything. I’m talking about dead bodies.”

  “Come on,” I said.

  He looked at me and his face was grave. “You think that doesn’t happen? You think that doesn’t happen? It happens.”

  Five tons did not turn out to be an impossible weight for three men to load in a day. In less than an hour, every board and bag had been loaded onto the truck, Mary’s backyard emptied, the earth raw underneath.

  The boss waved his arms at the load.

  “You see all that? Tomorrow it’ll be five hundred feet underground in Bangor, Maine.”

  It felt like I was being let in on a secret I didn’t want to know. Trash in a grave, dead bodies at the dump, the remains of our jobs under the ground, decomposing, leaching into the earth, doing damage impossible to see, the same damage it does to our bodies as we work. A familiar feeling of unease returned.

  As the jobs grew familiar, so did the fears that rolled in before I fell asleep—about the dust and spores and toxins we were exposing ourselves to in the work. Eyes closed before sleep, the last things I often saw in the darkness behind my eyelids were dust particles, shifting in the light, dancing in the air in a way that spoke illness and menace. When I coughed I’d think, Here is the first sign of the tumors growing on my lungs.

  Mary thought of me as a worrywart and teased me gently about my nerves. That was fair. She told me to take a look at the guys we worked with who never wore masks either. She also indulged my fears, which was a great kindness. When we worked at her basement workshop, we’d sand outside if it wasn’t raining. She’d often mix mortar for tiles because she knew how I hated the dust. No doubt she wished that she worked with someone less fearful, because precautions can slow things down. I worried for her, too.

  She made the argument, half jokingly, that smoking protected her lungs from worse poisons. She rarely wore a mask. “Nothing’s going to get in there,” she’d say. “Why do you think I’ve smoked for all these years?”

  Part of me bought this magical thinking.

  I envisioned her lungs coated with something black, shiny, cratered, firm to touch. And in microscopic vision, I imagined particles sucked in, tiny pricks of fiberglass, arsenic bits from the pressure-treated wood, formaldehyde from the plywood glue, mites of cement that start to cure when mixed with water. I saw these bits float into her blackened lungs, drift around, and bounce off the black, entry denied.

  No protection is gained from the tacky tar in her hand-rolled cigarettes. Despite knowing this, it made me feel like my own pink lungs were even more vulnerable, lacking that black shield.

  I had the habit of reading warning labels on all the products and materials. Somewhere in the safety section of almost every label were the words: Contains chemicals known to the state of California to cause cancer.

  “Good thing we’re in Massachusetts,” Mary would say.

  She talked of doing some insulating on a small project. She said she was going to break down and get a respirator. “I can’t do it anymore, with the insulation. It gives this prickly rash around my mouth.” She joked about getting me a hazmat suit and I told her I would like that very much.

  “See? You don’t need to worry,” she said. “I get a rash now. Your body has a way of telling you when there’s something wrong.”

  I didn’t say anything about the body’s ability to keep dark secrets, too.

  Once, on a late summer afternoon, a few months before the November morning of the demo men, we sat and watched birds dip and wing in the garden of a client’s backyard during the break. Celine, the owner, joined us outside. She remarked how I always wore a mask and Mary never did.

  “You’re being exposed to so much. You can’t even know what you’re being exposed to,” she said. She made her own yogurt so she could store it in glass containers instead of the store-bought plastic tubs that leached chemicals.

  “Something’s going to get me,” Mary said. She shrugged off the issue with her usual no-nonsense nonchalance. But I sensed a deeper sort of resignation. She was acknowledging that yes, someday I’ll die, I do not know how or when, but there was something dismissive, too—perhaps a polar bear will eat me, or a man-eating slug. She pinched the burning tip off her cigarette and mashed the ash with her foot. “As long as it’s not my lungs. That’s the one thing I don’t want.”

  What? I wanted to shake her. You don’t want it to be your lungs? Be smarter. Smoke if you want to smoke, but wear a goddamn mask! A shyness followed my initial disbelief and frustration—it was an honest, vulnerable thing to say, and it surprised me.

  I wondered if the dust clouds ever appeared to her in those moments before sleep. I wondered if she worried about her cough. Wood and mortar dust and fibers and smoke and tar, these were Mary’s pursuants, the things that will catch up with her, the things that will get her in the end. She takes them in. Maybe it’s not a death wish, but something closer to the sensibility Joseph Conrad captures in “The Secret Sharer.” A man throws himself overboard and escapes the ship; his crew think it suicide. “Let them think what they liked, but I didn’t mean to drown myself. I meant to swim till I sank—but that’s not the same thing.”

  The demo guys left that morning, and the empty space and the raw earth in Mary’s yard marked the unofficial end of the season. From mid-November until the end of the year, work slowed to a halt. People do not want chaos and mess in a time of chaos and mess; hammerbangs do not make the best accompaniment to Thanksgiving feasts or Christmas cheer. Mary and I tied up a few things in her basement, tucked tools away, slotted boxes of screws into bins, swept and neatened. We stood chatting and I held the Jorgensen wood screw clamps, tightening them and loosening them as we talked, pedaling my hands to make the wood tips press together, tighter, tighter, then release. Made of maple and steel, the clamps are tightened by cranking on the handles as though pedaling a bike with your hands. They are powerful, able to eliminate even the smallest space between two pieces of wood when tightened. The power of them, how they erased space, came as another surprise—so simple yet so strong.

  “Nothing lined up for the next little bit,” Mary said.

  I pedaled the clamps, tightening again. “Call me when you need me.” I hung the clamps on the pegboard wall, let them dangle with the rest of the tools. The word comes from the ancient German word klam, which meant to press or squeeze, and the tight-closed shells of the bivalve, like hard lips locked in silence, got its name from there.

  I anticipate
d the slowing, the early winter hiatus. It was a pause for breath, with a quick odd job here or there, until things started up again in earnest in the new year.

  We parted ways that day, wished each other happy Thanksgiving and good luck for handling holiday mania, and said we’d talk before Christmas.

  That winter brought huge snows to Boston, more inches every week. The new year arrived and I waited to hear from Mary about the next big gig. But no call came. I left messages on her voicemail: Hey Mary, just checking in, seeing what’s cooking these next couple weeks. Give me a call.

  I got no word back.

  The days were short and full of snow. High snow banks narrowed streets, and great battles for parking spots flared across the city. Traffic cones and folding chairs marked saved and shoveled spots.

  I read and wrote and took long walks in the snows—there are worse ways to spend the days. I stayed out late, said sure, I’d love another beer. I had nothing to get up early for, after all, didn’t need my body to be rested or my head clear.

  I languished, got softer. Muscles strong from carrying saws and swinging a hammer and pressing on a drill weakened, got slack from lack of use. Days disintegrated.

  Fallow periods are something to savor. Times of low productivity can be one of life’s luxuries. Though there might be no outward proof of action or making—nothing written, nothing built—such time is hardly wasted; puzzles are explored and problems solved in the head. And these quiet times give me a chance to scrape off the emotional muck that accumulates and coats my brain over time. Fields are left fallow, after all, to make the earth fertile in future seasons. Just because we can’t see the cornstalks or the swaying wheat doesn’t mean that nothing valuable is happening there underneath the surface.