Hammer Head Read online

  “Mary, Jesus.”

  “It’s fine.”

  I’m not afraid of heights, but I walked over to that window—which was less a window, having had its panes removed, and more a gaping rectangular hole in the wall—and I looked down those three stories to the brick pathway and metal fence below, and my head swirled and my stomach tightened. It became clear how thin walls are, how little separates us from the world below.

  “Grab hold,” Mary said. “I need to lean out and deal with the top corner.” She knocked on the wall with the pry bar to show me where she’d be working.

  I stood on the floor, tried to dig my sneakers into the tile, and grabbed the back of Mary’s belt with both hands.

  “You ready?” she said.

  “Ready.”

  “Hold tight.”

  “Jesus!”

  The leather belt around her waist was black and held up khaki cargo pants with big pockets down the legs. One pocket had a pouch of tobacco and probably a red plastic lighter. Another pocket had a utility knife and a few loose screws. The outside of the belt had a smooth gloss; the underside, a felted softness that might absorb moisture. By that point in the July afternoon, the sun had moved across the sky, leaving the metal fence and brick pathway below in shadow. The buckle on the belt was silver, but I couldn’t see it at the moment. I gripped the back of her belt with both hands as Mary, standing on the counter, leaned her body out the window. My own belt buckle dug into the soft flesh below my bellybutton as I braced myself against the cherry cabinets we’d installed the week before. I felt the weight of her against the leather in my hands, my arms outstretched like Superman in flight. Though being suspended in the air was the last thing I wanted to think about.

  Two fists could fit in the space between Mary’s pants and back, and all but her legs had disappeared out the window as she twisted and cranked on the exterior wall. As a piece of caulk gave way, her body jerked with the give, and made my heart plunge into my stomach. A burning began in my arms, the gradual ignition and spread of heat under the load of her body, like the blinking on and brightening of tiny bulbs beneath my skin. What if she falls out of her pants? What if the leather rips? What if my brain goes haywire and I just let go?

  “You okay in there?”

  “Yep,” I managed. “Hurry up, please.”

  She’s going to die because of me. I started to imagine what I’d say to Emily. “I dropped your wife out the window. I’m so sorry.”

  I leaned my weight back, concentrated on slow breaths. I could feel, with every molecule of my body, what it would be like were Mary to slip from my grip. I’d go flying back, thump down on the floor, she’d drop, I’d hear the sick sound of flesh and bone on brick like a sack of butcher waste. I couldn’t imagine Mary screaming. I think she’d fall in silence. I saw myself leaping up from the floor, leaning out the window, seeing Mary’s smashed body below.

  I heard Alice behind me and turned over my shoulder.

  “What’s going on in here?” she said.

  “The window,” I rasped. I could tell my face was red with effort.

  “Do you want me to hold on to you?” She started toward me, hands out to grab my belt. But I shook my head. “This is the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen,” Alice said, hands up, looking vaguely horrified, backing away. “I can’t watch.”

  “Almost done,” Mary called out, as if she were watering a plant or dusting a shelf.

  “I don’t want to drop you.” I couldn’t hold much longer.

  Finally Mary climbed back in the window. “Em would kill me,” she said, sitting down on the counter, adjusting the waist of her pants, smiling.

  My hands were shaking and I curled and flexed my fingers, stiff from the grip.

  “I used to be a lot braver about heights,” Mary said. “When I was your age I would’ve been hanging out there without someone holding on.”

  Alice returned and stood in the doorway, hands on her hips. “So I’ve got a stuntwoman for a carpenter.” Unlike Bettina, who softened her imposing presence, Alice fluffed her feathers like an angry owl. She puffed herself up and threw her shoulders back. Her direct gaze gave her a force of presence that belied her five-foot-two height. “Let me be clear: I really just want a new kitchen. I do not want bodies falling out of my windows.”

  Mary laughed.

  “You think I’m joking.”

  “That’s nothing,” Mary said.

  I shook my head at Alice to say it wasn’t nothing, that she and I were on the same team on this one.

  “You’re lucky you have such a strong harness,” Alice said. I put my arms up in a joking flex.

  “I’d rather not do that again,” I said to Mary.

  “All right, all right. No more adventures out windows.” She looked down out the window. “That’s a fall you could survive.”

  “You’d need goddamn wings to survive that fall,” Alice said.

  In the familiar myth, Daedalus had wings—he and his doomed son Icarus. Daedalus was an artisan and inventor who fashioned wings of feathers and wax. He warned young Icarus: don’t fly too low or the water from the waves will weight the wings. Don’t fly too high or the sun will melt the wax. Both errors meant a fall. The middle way, like Goldilocks’s porridge, not too hot, not too cold, was the rightest path. Father and son leapt from a cliff and flew like gulls. Intoxicated by flight, Icarus flew up and up. As his father warned, the heat of the sun melted the wax, the feathers fell, and Icarus fell with them. He tumbled through the sky, splashed into the sea, and drowned.

  The less familiar prequel to the flight of Icarus and Daedalus also involves a young man falling. Daedalus took on his young nephew, Perdix, as his apprentice, and knew straightaway the kid was a genius. Pliny the Elder, in his Natural History, credits Daedalus with inventing carpentry. But it was Perdix who invented the saw. As Ovid tells it, when the two were together at the beach one day, Perdix spotted a fish’s spine, bleached and jagged, on the sand. The boy touched the bones, pricked the sharp pieces against his fingertips, and discarded it for the seagulls to pick at, for it to dissolve into sand itself. The natural world supplied him with a vision. When Perdix got back to the workshop that day, he translated the pattern of the spine to an iron blade. He notched teeth into it, sharper than the fish’s bone, and stronger, and so we have the saw, an essential tool for the very craft Daedalus helped create.

  Daedalus, jealous of the child’s gifts, couldn’t endure being outshone. He was meant to be the master, the mentor, not this boy. Driven by envy, Daedalus shoved his nephew off a high wall of the Acropolis. With no wax wings to keep him soaring (and no one there to hold his belt), Perdix fell.

  But not to his death. The goddess Athena, who favored crafts and smarts, had also recognized Perdix’s genius, and she caught the boy mid-fall and turned him into a partridge. That squat bird makes its nests in low brambles and stays low to the ground when it flies because, as Ovid writes, “That bird recalls its ancient fall, and so it shuns the high and always seeks the low.”

  Back on solid ground, it took two days to hang the upper cabinets in Alice’s new kitchen. They were handsome, custom-built maple cabs the color of straw, unadorned in the Shaker style, and modernized with sleek silver rods to open the doors and drawers. I thought installing cabinets would be simple—just screw the things to the wall so they line up. It is exactly that simple, but it is not that easy.

  Mary’s standards for cabinet installation were uncompromising. A pair of Jorgensen clamps, the level, the drill, and some shims were the tools of those cabinet days.

  The shims were flimsy wedge-shaped scraps of wood, thin sticks nine inches long and an inch and a half wide. I could break them in my hands. But they are crucial for leveling cabinets against bowed walls or floors. Usually made of cedar, they looked a little like the pieces of wood that come with a fresh gallon of paint. You slot them underneath and behind the cabs to straighten and level.

  I acted as holder and shifter as Mary made each cabinet
level and flush with the one next to it.

  “Up,” Mary said.

  I’d press the cab up.

  “Skosh more.”

  Another quick press with my shoulder and hand.

  “Tiny bit more.”

  And again. “Too much. Too much. Lower.”

  And so it went until we got it right and Mary clamped it tight with the Jorgensens, checked again with her level, but mostly used her fingertips, rubbing the seam between the two cabs to feel for any bit of ridge where they met. The look and feel of one solid thing instead of two was the goal. Once achieved, we screwed the cabinet into studs behind the wall, and the partner cab beside it.

  I got impatient with the time-consuming meticulousness of it all, the fractional shifting. “It looks fine. No one is ever going to be able to notice that it’s off.”

  “I notice,” Mary said. “Someday you’ll notice. Can’t live with it. Sorry.”

  We were in the midst of it when Mary’s phone rang in her pocket. I was glad to rest my arms.

  “Has it really been four years?” she said into her phone. She shrugged in my direction suggesting she wasn’t sure why this guy was calling. It got clear fast.

  “What sort of health problems?” she asked. “Ah, Kev,” she said. Her face changed. Her voice got lower. “Ah, Kev, that’s bad.” She laughed a little bit, and answered questions about her daughter. “She’s a teenager, can you believe it? She’s starting to act like one, too. That’s the scary part.” More laughter. “That’s one way to do it,” she said. “That’s definitely one way to do it.”

  After a bit more back and forth, she hung up the phone and went to the back porch for a smoke without a word. I stood and looked at the tiles, saw the sawdust I’d need to sweep from the grout lines. The slab of marble countertop looked cold to the touch, smooth white with lines of gray and black that flared and streaked like nerves. The sun glinted off the metal basin of the KitchenAid mixer that sat on the marble by the window.

  “I think he was calling to say goodbye,” Mary said when she came back to the kitchen. She explained he was an older guy, that they’d worked together on the same carpentry crew for years under her old boss, that he lived in Pittsburgh now. Cancer everywhere, tumors everywhere.

  “Not good,” she said.

  Coffins cost four grand, he’d told her. But carpenters know other carpenters. He told her, “I got a buddy who’s going to make me one out of plywood and two-by-fours. Two hundred max.”

  The weeks passed at Alice’s and day by day the space became a room again. I’d noticed it at other jobs, the shorter ones we’d had, but it was especially pronounced here: whenever we worked on a place, it became ours. Once we got in there, got the tools set up, started whatever it was we’d been hired to do, it felt like we owned the place. In his story “The Swimmer,” John Cheever described the ownership a lover feels over his mistress’s property. “He stepped through the gate of the wall that surrounded her pool with nothing so considered as self-confidence. It seemed in a way to be his pool, as the lover, particularly the illicit lover, enjoys the possessions of his mistress with an authority unknown to holy matrimony.”

  Substitute a kitchen for a pool, home ownership for holy matrimony, and a relatively inexperienced carpenter for an illicit lover, and this is the sense of entitlement I felt in the places we worked. With nothing so considered as self-confidence, the kitchen became our kitchen, the hall became our hall, the deck became our deck. The owner, for the duration, would be in some way severed from the place.

  At Alice’s the saws lived on the back porch. The ladders leaned in the dining room. The hallway floors were papered and taped to keep the dust and grime off. And when Alice came into the kitchen to make a sandwich or steam up some dumplings, I’d think to myself: Scram, lady. This is our place right now.

  We’d been there for a little over a month when Alice started to reclaim the space. The pipes had been shifted and the plumbers had moved on to another job. We’d tiled the floor with those lovely gray tiles from Italy. We’d rocked the appliances into place. We’d hung the huge vent over the stove so Alice could grill meat in the house. Mary had made sure the cabinets, upper and lower, were perfect on the wall and on the floor. The pantry was built, with sliding doors on the cabs.

  We came back one morning to find that Alice had put cans on the shelves in the pantry. The next day, cookbooks filled the shelves on the left wall. A drawer had silverware, another had spatulas, graters, and long silver skewers. A teakettle arrived on the stove, a basket of apples on the counter. The room was a functioning place again. We were almost finished.

  One of the final steps involved hanging a monster of an exterior door that led from the porch to the pantry.

  “This door is a beast,” Mary warned. Hanging doors can be a real pain in the ass. Precision is required, or else the door won’t swing on its hinges or click in its latch. It’ll scuff the jamb, stick in the frame, require tugging to open and a hard slam to close.

  Out on the deck, I crouched by the big green door’s base. Mary was on the other side in the pantry. We couldn’t see each other, could only hear each other’s voices. The right corner on the hinged side had to be raised a bit on the sill of the frame. I was trying to lift and push. Mary was ready with shims on the other side, to slot underneath to keep it in place while it was screwed into the frame at the right height. I could not get the door to budge. The distance up I was aiming for: three-sixteenths of an inch. I strained and swore quietly and could get no leverage.

  I pressed, face crimson with effort, and the door remained exactly where it was. There’s no way I’m going to lift this, I thought.

  I repositioned, inhaled, tried again. Nothing.

  I lost patience.

  In desperation and frustration, I opted for brute force. I strained with all I had, every muscle engaged, stoked with frustration, enhanced by anger. A surge of effort and strength. And then—the door lifted! Lurched! A miracle! I’d done it!

  And from the other side of the door I heard, “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

  In going too fast and too hard, I had badly jammed Mary’s thumb.

  I’d seen her bang herself dozens of times. She usually cursed and made light. News that she was bleeding would be relayed with the same nonchalance as she’d announce that we needed more galvanized nails, a simple transmission of fact. I had asked her one morning if she’d ever cried on the job. She’d given me a look that made me wish I hadn’t asked before saying, “No.”

  She wasn’t crying now, but cursing, hard. “Fuck,” she said again. Then she got quiet and began to roll a cigarette.

  I apologized and put my hands over my face. She looked at her thumb, wiggled it, blew on it.

  “You got me that time.” I apologized again. “Probably going to lose it,” she said of her thumbnail. She shrugged. “It’ll grow back.”

  When she recovered and we’d gone back to wrestling with the door, she said from the other side, “Okay, all right, finesse, girlfriend. Lift a little, slowly.”

  I lifted, she pulled, and we got it. The door moved right on its hinges, swept across the threshold, closed with a satisfying swump-puh.

  Two days later, Mary handed me a hammer and her thumb was pure black, as though someone had injected ink underneath her nail.

  “Oh Jesus, Mary. I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s pretty tender,” she said. “But I don’t think it’s going to fall off.”

  It took me a long time to learn that not every problem on the job—in fact, very few of them—could be solved with brute strength. When a piece of trim wouldn’t come out of the window frame, or a cabinet wouldn’t settle to level, or when things seemed jammed or stuck or too thickly glued or caulked or impossible to square or non-cooperative in whatever way, it was my impulse to opt for muscle over mind, to accomplish what needed accomplishing by force of body and will. My reservoir of patience was shallow and quickly drained. Thwarted, my mind got tight and hot, and body reacted in k
ind, fast and dumb.

  In this way, I broke things. I broke drill bits, pieces of trim, glass. I put dents and punctures in walls and floors, and, in one unfortunate slip, the soft meat of my palm where a scar marks the spot.

  “Finesse,” Mary said often. In other words, be gentle, go slow, don’t rip and yank with all your might. Let the materials tell you which way they want to go. Use your mind and listen closely. Allow physics and the tools and patience to get the job done.

  “It’s all about coaxing,” Mary said. “Knowing where to put the pressure.”

  The final days of a job involve lugging and loading. Striking items off a final punch list, cleaning before we leave it for good for the owners to pile their lives in their new, changed space. We would walk through a place, once, twice, three times, to make sure the dust was out from between the tiles, the bit of paint around the light switch got touched up, the small hole in the stair was patched and painted black like the rest. On the last day at Alice’s, we reviewed the punch list, nailed in a few last pieces of trim, slotted the huge chest freezer into the bay we’d built for it in the pantry. We swept, dusted, vacuumed, mopped. Done, and done. All day I couldn’t help but talk about how great everything looked. I went around knocking on the doors of the cabs. I rubbed the smooth white knob on a door in the pantry. I pulled out drawers (“Stop snooping,” said Mary). I felt excited and I felt proud. Mary felt it, too. She didn’t go around yammering about how amazing it all was, but she was smiling. We stood in the corner of the kitchen, the same place we’d stood on the first day there when the room was blank, and took a good look. Mary patted my shoulder. “Nice job,” she said.

  So much work went into this kitchen. So many hours and so much sweat and effort, and we’d never see it again. It was ours—and not ours at all. All that was left to do was hang a screen door from the pantry out to the back porch. It was light and flimsy like a summer dress. We rigged it so it closed with a hush, a quiet tap against the frame. Perfect.