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Alice appeared behind us. “No, no,” she said. “I want it to slam. It reminds me of summer.”

  So we adjusted the spring and Mary and I stood in the pantry and we watched the door swing closed and we both blinked when it slammed like summer.

  Chapter 6

  LEVEL

  On shifting, settling, and shifting again

  After Alice’s kitchen, we spent five weeks on the third floor of an old Victorian place with a turret where we moved walls and put down a hickory floor. The hickory, such hard wood, put up a good fight against the miter-saw blade, and gave off a rancid smell when cut, not sweet hickory-smoked barbecue, but something bile-like with a sour sting, likely from whatever chemical finish was used on the wood (Contains chemicals known to the state of California to cause cancer it read on every box of boards). We did a kitchen at a place outside Harvard Square in Cambridge for a couple who became my favorite of all the people we worked for. They left us lemon cookies on the counter with notes that said “Eat these,” gave us jars of homemade jam from the raspberries and blackberries from their place in Vermont, joined us when we broke for lunch. The transplanted jade plant the woman gave me grows by my living room window. It wasn’t just their generosity: I liked the love the pair had. In their late fifties, early sixties, there was an amused exasperation between them, a sense of patience, an evident, affectionate closeness. “We want you to adopt us,” Mary told them.

  We did a quick deck in Arlington, a historic suburb that edges up against Cambridge, on the route of Paul Revere’s ride. It took four days.

  Somewhere along the way, I became the communicator in our team of two. Mary, besides talk of fleeing human company for Alaska, spoke fluent carpentry but forgot at times that not everyone understood her language. In situations where she outlined some aspect of the work to the client and got slow nods of semi-comprehension in response, I translated, with my beginner’s understanding of the grammar and vocabulary.

  This: “We’re going to sister up the stud and patch the wall. The mud’ll dry overnight and tomorrow we’ll frame the cabs.”

  Became this: “So we’re going to attach another two-by-four to this one here to give it extra support, then close up the hole here in the wall. Mud is drywall compound?” I’d say, to suggest, Maybe you know this? Or maybe this is a weird quirk of Mary’s to call this mud? “. . . And it can take about a day to dry. And we’ll be building the boxes for the bookcases, the outside shell of them”—using my hands to outline a rectangle—“tomorrow.”

  Mary sometimes thanked me.

  “I just think of what I wouldn’t have understood,” I’d say, which was everything. And I’m sure I’ve offended a homeowner in offering up an explanation of something that he or she already had full understanding of. I know what joists are.

  Over these weeks, which piled up quickly to months, my muscles came back. I’d flex in the mirror, glad to see definition again in my arms. And Mary and I found our rhythm again.

  A summer spent in kitchens and turreted third floors, on front porches and in closets lined with cedar, soon gave way to fall. Mary asked if I’d be willing to help on a project in her own house.

  Her place was a work in progress, ever unfinished. The wallpaper up the narrow, twisting back stairs was faded and tearing. Holes in the plaster marked the walls like picked scabs. Plaster crumbs crunched under foot. Trim had been pulled from around the doors in a bathroom; the tub was a mess of old paintbrushes and kitty litter; the floor was battered oak; bits of prickly lath poked through holes in the bathroom wall. In the living room, where the chimney had been removed a couple years before by the wild demo man and his two sons, an ill-fitting piece of plywood covered the hole in the floor. Blue painters’ tape remained stuck to the ceiling from when we’d taped up plastic sheeting to keep brick and soot dust from drifting into the kitchen when the chimney came down.

  The house was full of jobs half-done, and it stood in contrast to the meticulous way Mary tended to her worksites. Her own house was unfinished because paying work called again, and time rushes along. At first the kitchen had trim on only one wall for a few weeks, then a couple months, and then a year had swept by and there was blankness where the trim should be and maybe it had been forgotten, had disappeared into the familiar landscape of the house. Or maybe, with every time she entered, with every soup simmered, with every dish washed, a glance was given to where the trim should be, another reminder, that, too.

  Mary was committed to a room on the third floor, a space of peaked ceilings, old dark wood, and small dormer windows. She wanted to make that room her office. It was dim, dusty, and cramped, with wood scraps and a big trash bin and rolls of insulation littering the floor. The two of us bumped into each other as we negotiated the small space, made smaller by the saws and tool buckets.

  The ceiling slanted with the sharp rise of the roof. The house was built in 1886, and the boards were broad and dark. We framed a knee wall, about three feet high, used to support the rafters and named after its approximate height. We ran wires for lights at the top of the room. We shoved candy-pink insulation into the bays between the joists.

  “Not there,” Mary said, as I reached to press another strip into a dark bay. “We’re going to do a skylight.”

  We cut away the wood that ran across the rafters with the Sawzall—splintery old one-by-three—and pulled out old nails. We made the rough frame, cut two-by-tens and ripped them to match the wide rafters. Mary sliced through wood and roof to create the opening. A small flap at first, and there was sky, and light fell onto the floor as though it had been shoved, and cold air spilled in like water. Mary climbed out onto the thin lip of roof and crawled up and cut more of the opening from the outside, crumbs of roof tile rolling into the gutter. More light hit the floor. The room changed. And the same sense I had at the Russians’ house, where bugs had feasted on the wood of their bay window frame, returned: what if we can’t close it up in time? The days were shorter then. What if it rains? But those questions were quieted. We’ve done this before, a piece at a time. We’ll do it again now.

  Mary went about removing the roofing tiles, prying them up without tearing them, pulling up the wide-headed roofing nails. I lifted the window itself out through the hole to Mary’s hands as she knelt on the roof. We placed it, made sure it was centered, shifted it back and forth within the hole, up and down, and Mary hammered in a few nails to keep it in place. It was a cold November day, bright and cloudless, and Mary puffed on her hands and clapped to keep them warm inside her work gloves. She installed the flashing and went about the slow process of re-installing the sheets of roof.

  “I’d never want to be a roofer,” she called out.

  While she was out there on the roof in the cold, I nailed lath to an arched space that led to the other window in the room. She hammered down on the roof. I hammered up into the ceiling. We pounded and pounded. Down and up, putting the room together, changing it and keeping it the same. She climbed back in through the window, pale with cold.

  “All finished out there?”

  “All finished.”

  The sun, which had started at Mary’s back as she worked, beaming into the room, had shifted across the sky, was behind the other side of the house now, and setting. The sky softened to a purple and a few thin twists of cloud like cigarettes side by side rolled high above the horizon.

  “It’s off by half an inch,” Mary said. I was silent and wondered if this meant taking it out, doing it all again. It must have slipped a bit before she nailed it in, she explained. “I should’ve thrown the level on it. You want to go see if we can tell from below?” I dreaded the look.

  “Will it leak?”

  “God, no,” Mary said. “I fucking hope not. I’m just worried it’s going to look crooked.”

  She stopped by the woodstove to warm her hands on our way to the porch on the second floor. We looked up at the roof, at the new window. And what a relief—no evidence of the half-inch offness. It looked as it should.

&n
bsp; Back upstairs, we stood side by side in front of the new window, shoulder to shoulder, and looked out. To the back porches and peaked windows of the houses nearby, lights just beginning to be flicked on, that inviting soft orange-golden glow against the dimming sky. To the Boston skyline three and a half miles away, a purple blur of buildings, rise and fall, above the stretch of Charles River we couldn’t see, and the bridges that spanned it. To new clouds, loose puffs, steady and high.

  Red leaves clung to the tall maple out the window, leaves that would drop in the coming days, not long for this world, leaving the skeleton of the tree against the sky. I’ve always loved November, when the bones start to show.

  I did my usual gushing—it’s amazing, look, incredible—astonished again at the work and its power to transform. The room remained unfinished, still a mess of guts and wires and wood, everything exposed, dust everywhere, thistles of insulation in the air. But it would all get done. In weeks or months. Slowly it comes together. The room was different now. It went from dim and cramped to bright-lit and inviting, a good place to sit and get some thinking done as the sun describes its arc across the sky, as the leaves fall off again to end another season and the tree adds another ring.

  Mary nodded. “This changes everything.”

  The maple leaves dropped, the temperature fell, and we slipped into winter. After the skylight, in the slowing of the year, Mary planned to pause the progress on her third-floor office space in favor of redoing a bathroom downstairs, the one with the paintbrushes in the tub and the crumbling walls.

  I swung by her place to pick up the last check she owed me before we took our annual break. She walked me through her bathroom plan.

  “Give me a call if you want some help,” I said.

  “We’ll see if I can afford you. I’m scared shitless about how much the plumbing is going to cost.”

  We parted ways with a hug and Christmas wishes, knowing it might be some months before we paired up again. I didn’t fear the slowing. I knew next season would come.

  Around this time, my father and his girlfriend bought a house together in the woods by a tidal river in southeastern Massachusetts. My father finally collected his belongings out of the storage bay they’d been occupying for six years. To visit his new home was to see the familiar items from our growing up freed from dark boxes in a storage cell. Many boxes stacked in the basement remained to be unpacked, most of them labeled BOOKS.

  During one of the first visits there, we sat near the fireplace, my brothers, father, and I, and our respective romantic partners. Outside the window, the bird feeder was a flurry of action. Tubby morning doves, bright darting cardinals, feathers a duller red than their full-force summer color, a nuthatch, some chickadees, a woodpecker. They fluttered and fed, some pecking at the feeder that sat atop a pole, some on the ground picking at seeds, some at the small cage of white suet that hung from a branch, cow fat white like snow. My father identified each bird. When one swooped in to scope the scene from the branches nearby, he would forecast which feeder the little bird would go to—pole, ground, or suet. He was right every time. He talked about how you could feel the presence of a hawk nearby—the birds would still, then scatter.

  After watching the birds, we turned our attention back inside, toward the fire. Darkness settled, the window out to the feeder reflected the lamps, the stone fireplace, our faces. We chatted and laughed. Finally everyone started toward bed. My father stood, looked at me, and raised his hands toward either side of the fireplace.

  “Bookcases,” he said toward the enormous blank spaces on the wall. I could picture it immediately.

  “Great idea,” I said.

  “I’d like for you to build them.”

  I frowned. The relaxed feeling brought on by an evening of fireside laughs shifted to a storm of doubt. For me to build them? By myself? I could not say out loud that I wasn’t sure I could, that after these years with Mary, I doubted my ability to build cases on my own. I did not want to admit that the thought of it scared me. So I lied. I told him I wasn’t sure what my schedule was with Mary these days. “I don’t know if I’ll have the time.”

  I went to bed that night and thought about the cases. My reaction when he’d asked was immediate and surprising. Could I? I knew how to do this, didn’t I? I went through the steps in my head, the ones I’d learned from Mary and done with her many times. I pieced the cases together mentally, starting with the bases on which they’d sit, moving on to the frames, the shelves, the trim. I’d have them match the height of the window trim, I thought, keep that line consistent around the room. An outlet on one wall would mean notching a hole in the back. These were all things I’d done before, had seen Mary do.

  “Keep me posted on the shelves,” my dad said as we left. “I’d like to start unpacking those books.”

  Back in Cambridge, I kept thinking about the cases. I made them more real in my head, more possible. The floors probably aren’t level, I figured, and reminded myself how to correct for that. I’ll have to alter the trim around the window. In my mind, I knew what to do.

  But when my father called to see if I was up for the project, again I hesitated. The project had been taking shape in my thoughts, but, tools in hand, would I be able to translate what I knew to the wood? Without Mary at the helm, would I come to discover that I’d learned nothing? A terrible thought, it brought a clenching sort of discomfort, the confrontation that I’d been living a lie. I could dress the part, but did it mean I could do the work?

  The feeling was familiar. When I began my job at the newspaper, when I first started filing stories, I’d wake up before work in anguish. How am I going to do this? What if I don’t finish on time? What if I can’t figure out how to say what I want to say? It was a specific, potent fear of failure, of being struck with the inability to express what I knew, or to do so in a way that revealed me for the faker I was.

  The carpentry questions echoed the journalism ones. How am I going to do this? What if they don’t work? What if I can’t figure out how to make them stand? What if I can’t translate what I know to the wood? Doubt crowded my thoughts and delayed any possible start. To begin was to open the possibility of fucking it up.

  The novelist Gabriel García Márquez once told the Paris Review that “ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. . . . Both are very hard work. . . . With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.”

  It’s true that writing and carpentry both require patience and practice, and both revolve around the effort of making something right and good. Both involve getting it wrong over and over, and being able to stay with it until it is right. In both, the best way of understanding something is often by taking it apart. In both, small individual pieces combine and connect to make something larger, total, whole. In both, we start with nothing and end with something.

  But what appealed to me so much about carpentry work is how far it is from words. The zone of my brain that gets activated building bookshelves is a different one than the one that puts together sentences. And what a relief it can be, not having to worry about the right word, not having to think, over and over, is this the best way to say this? The questions carpentry raises are the same, ultimately—will this work? Will this function as it should, be true and strong? But the answers come from different rooms in my head, and it is good to exit the word room in favor of a less-used realm that deals with space, numbers, tools, and materials. Much of what carpentry requires does not come naturally to me. Angles, numbers, basic logic. But with carpentry you have a tape measure, a saw, a pencil, a piece of wood. Concrete, understandable, real in the world, each of these things made for a specific purpose.

  García Márquez admits a few sentences later that he’d never done any carpentry himself. If he had, he’d know that a piece of wood is not the same as words. A wall is real. A piece of baseboard that hides the gap between the wall and the floor, that’s real, too. There’s a sense of completion with carpentry that doesn’t exist wi
th writing. Words are ghosty and mutable. A measurement, a cut, sawdust in my lungs, and the piece of wood slides in to fit tight with a few taps of the hammer. It’s the opposite of abstract. Measure, measure, mark. Cut. Nail in.

  The process of building a writing office in his Connecticut backyard reminded Michael Pollan “just how much of reality slips through the net of our words.” Language becomes less useful when you’re building a bookcase. A certain head-emptying, in the finest moments, takes place. That meditative goal, rising above the words and emotional swamps, being fully awake to the tools and the wood, involves the evacuation of language. What a relief it can be, for words not to matter. The shelf is real, and right now, as I sand it smooth, it’s all there is. To write is to muck around in the space inside your skull. It is to build something, yes—worlds and people, moods and truths—but it is closer to a conjuring. You cannot put your wineglass down on a paragraph, even if that paragraph is perfect.

  Much of what Mary taught me did not involve words. The classic writing dictum applies in carpentry, too: show, don’t tell. It’s hard to explain how to install crown molding. It’s best learned by watching it done, and doing it. Over and over. Her verbal lessons—start rare with meat; finesse; go slow; be smarter than the tools—are all enacted in the way she does her work, the way she moves and uses her tools to solve each problem. You could read books and books on how to build a wall or tile a floor, hear someone speak for hours on the best ways to make a bureau or a bookcase. They could use all the right words, weave the tightest net, but until you grip the hammer in your palm, until you feel two pieces of wood pressed flush against each other before they are fastened, until you stand back from what you’ve made and then walk up to it and kick it or place something on it, you will not know how it’s done. All the language in the world won’t make a bookshelf exist. It takes watching, and doing, and screwing it up, and doing it again and again until it is done.