Hammer Head Read online

The condo was bright and airy, with dark and detailed woodwork, large windows, and lots of family photographs on shelves and walls. Nieces and nephews of the couple who owned the place, images from their own childhoods, a woman on a horse looking earnest and focused; another with three kids in snow pants on a sled. The back looked out over a low hill with a beautiful garden shared by the three houses on this tiny dead-end street. The new refrigerator had to be craned into the third floor over the deck at the front—there was no way to get it up the twisting flight of stairs. This was exciting, watching the giant box lifted from the ground, dangling three stories above the sidewalk.

  The owners had bought IKEA cabinets, and the whole renovation was being done for about $25k. The job moved along in an orderly way: walls, floors, counters (lovely soapstone, black with streaks of green), and the assembly and installation of those IKEA cabs. It was ten in the morning, we’d been at it for a couple hours, slotting pegs into holes and jamming pieces of smooth laminate together to make cabinet boxes. It was neither boring nor exciting, just something that needed to get done. I moved on to work on a corner cab with a lazy Susan in it. I pieced it together using the wordless directions (sometimes a picture is not worth a thousand words; sometimes the right ten words would really, really help). I’d slotted dowels in the right places, secured the walls, top, and bottom, and was drilling to get the Susan to stay where it was supposed to.

  But the screw wouldn’t spin itself into the material. It wasn’t wood, but some sort of plastic-laminate something, white and smooth and as resistant to my drilling as steel to a termite. One after another, the screws skidded off in ricochet, bouncing off the counter, onto the stove, down to the new tile floor with large cream-colored twelve-by-twelve tiles. The plick-plink of the metal screw bouncing down to the stovetop annoyed me at first, then infuriated me. Again and again I pressed the drill into the screw, pushed into the impenetrable composite material, and swore. I swore ferociously. Mary, nearby, looked up from attaching doors to lower cabs.

  “Try drilling out for it first.”

  I heard her but I didn’t hear her—the advice didn’t register, didn’t make sense. After all, I was trying to drill.

  My face flushed. Another screw went bouncing down. I muttered to myself. My shins were sweating. Twenty-five minutes had passed. Not long in the course of the day, but too long to be wrestling with one stupid screw for one lazy Susan. The edges of the shiny screw head, round and flat, bore into the thumb and forefinger of my left hand as I placed it, again, to the drill-bit tip, as though I’d been gripping it there for days, leaving marks in my finger flesh like a too-tight sock leaves rings around your calf. The little screw shined. Light blinked off the metal, reflected the automatic flashlight function of the drill. It was a malevolent sparkle. These tiny enemies didn’t deserve such shine. My upper arm pressed against the inside of the cabinet as I wedged myself into position again. My skin adhered to the surface, so plastic-slick, so hard and artificial, with sweat and anger. Each time the screw twinkled off to the floor meant I had to reposition and peel myself off the cabinet surface, which made a shameful suction sound, another indignity. The rev of the drill, the screamy buzz—dentist office, bones and gums—echoed against the walls of the small chamber of the cabinet, where my whole head was enclosed. The thunk of the drill bit hitting the cabinet after the screw blasted off punctuated each effort like an insult. The smell was warehouse, dust and plastic, like Saran wrap, sanitized and dead, and the faint whisper of heated metal inside the warming drill. My breathing grew unsteady, quick shallow pants followed by deliberate slow inhales through the nose, eyes closed, the thudding in my chest a reminder that I was here right now and did not want to be. “The perversity of inanimate objects.” It was a phrase my father often said, quoting his grandmother, to describe lids that wouldn’t screw back on when you were in a hurry, screw heads too soft for screwdrivers, moments when the dumbness of things outdoes your ability to calmly deal with them. It surfaced on my mind here, the whole situation taking on the air of the perverse.

  I put the drill down and reviewed the directions again, with the hope that some new clue would be revealed to me.

  “Be smarter than the tools,” Mary said from behind a low bank of cabs on the floor. It was another of her refrains. She used it when the tools or the process or the materials were outsmarting us, weren’t cooperating the way they should, or we were moving too fast, not considering the best or most efficient way to get a thing done. A reminder that we have brains and the ability to reason and the screw is just a screw. A reminder to take a second and think it out. It was usually a helpful thing to hear. It wasn’t now.

  I was drilling where the directions told me to drill. I was sure of it. The screw belongs here, I thought. This is what I’m supposed to be doing. What’s wrong with the Susan? What’s wrong with me? Why doesn’t this work? Fuck this screw. Fuck this drill. Fuck this Susan. Fuck IKEA. Fuck me.

  Swearing ceased. I was accessing some pre-articulate part of my brain. Huffs, grunts.

  “Breathe,” Mary said.

  I shot her a dark look through the back of my skull. Breathe? I hated Mary and her advice. I hated the cabinet. I hated the tools. I hated the decision to quit my job where I clicked and tapped and got coffee with people I liked. I hated that I wasn’t smarter than the tools. That I hadn’t learned anything in a year and a half. That my life now involved peeling my sweaty arm flesh off a surface with a vaguely sexual sound. And I hated cheap Scandinavian design.

  I repositioned myself again, pressed the drill with all of my body. The screw flipped away and spun to the back corner of the cab, spinning and spinning like an ice skater. I put my head in the cabinet as though it was an oven because I did not want Mary to see that tears had welled up in my eyes.

  She passed me a sharp thin drill bit. “Drill out for it,” she said quietly. “Make a pilot hole.”

  And I recognized then what she’d said before. Don’t try to get the screw to go straight into the material, make a hole for it first, then drill the screw into that. I took the Phillips head bit off the drill and replaced it with the one Mary handed me. I bored a small starter hole into the Susan. I switched the bit back to the Phillips head and placed the screw onto the tip and pressed the screw into the hole and squeezed the trigger again. The screw plunged down and in and the lazy Susan was secured.

  I went outside and looked at the lilies in the garden.

  Anger had cleaned me out. The hangover from it, the aftermath of all that frustration and embarrassment, left me feeling unfamiliar with myself. I hated Mary a few minutes ago. I regretted every decision I’d made a few minutes ago. What a potent intoxicant, anger. This wasn’t the truth, was it? The hangover came with the desire to be alone to reconcile what the anger provoked and what the truth was outside of anger. In Wanderlust, Rebecca Solnit quotes Lucy Lippard writing of an Eskimo custom in which an angry person walks his or her anger off: “The point at which the anger is conquered is marked with a stick, bearing witness to the strength or length of the rage.” I have wondered how far anger might take me.

  What’s to be found at the end of that walk when you plunge your stick into the earth? Anger dissolved in the steps behind you, you return to who you know you are, and turn around to face a new view. So many times with Mary, I would’ve brushed my hands on my pants and walked away from whatever mistake had been made, given up, resigned to failure with no hope or interest in trying to rectify what had gone so wrong. Board’s too short? Might as well call it quits on the whole project. Subfloor’s rotted where the dishwasher leaked for years? Let’s get out of here. Mary showed me, over and over again, how a little time and effort, a little care and thought, can correct almost every ill. It’s a lesson that translates to love, of course. How many times, after a lapse in judgment, a bad fight, a stretch of boredom, a miscommunication that seemed to signal a total lack of knowing the other person, how many times had I brushed my hands on my pants, checked out, and walked away. It ju
st wasn’t working. It just wasn’t right. I hadn’t learned yet to give it—love—the time and effort it demanded. I hadn’t met the person worth the effort. Patience, a little finesse, the ability to stay with something that periodically bored or frustrated you, that periodically drove you to the edge of madness, these were skills necessary too for sharing a life with someone. I do not think it a coincidence that the deepest, strongest love I’ve experienced began after I started this work. Swearing, yelling, moments desperate with frustration and anger—a break to walk with a stick, to look at the lilies, and I return, again, to get at the truth, to try to make it better. Oh I have been slow to learn. That morning in Jamaica Plain, I could walk no farther than the garden, and I had no stick to witness the strength of my rage. But what I saw when I turned again to face the house, from that view, what I knew, was that I would go back into that kitchen and try again.

  “Try again. Fail again. Fail better,” as Samuel Beckett put it. It’s easier to say screw it. It’s always easier to walk away. Screw up, and again, try to get it right, and again. Screw up better.

  All the screwing up got me wondering about the tool and the word. I knew the hammer was as old as tools get, and figured the screwdriver followed not long after. Not so. Not so at all. The famous Phillips head screw wasn’t patented until the 1930s by an Oregonian named Henry Phillips. Something so simple and ubiquitous—I thought it had been around for centuries. It’s easy to picture peasants slotting big screwdriver-type tools into that crosshatch shape in a Brueghel painting. The crisscross image is so familiar—Swiss Army, Red Cross, Band-Aid, Jesus. But medieval peasants weren’t screwing with ye olde Phillips head.

  Screwdrivers have been twisted for much less time than hammers have been swung. Witold Rybczynski, author, urban planner, and builder of his own house by hand, wrote a whole book on the humble screwdriver, a tool he named as the most important of the millennium. In One Good Turn, he reveals evidence of screwdriver use from back in the 1580s. But before the industrial revolution it was difficult to produce the metal thread that wraps around the shaft of the screw like a helix. When tools to make the screw were improved—the turret lathe in the 1840s and the screw machines that resulted in the 1870s—screws and their drivers became more widespread.

  The Phillips head came about with the rise of power tools. Since the driver tip centered itself in the crosshead slot, you didn’t need hands or eyes to align it. In other words, it was good for assembly lines, which is where the Phillips head took off, fastening Cadillacs together on the floor of a factory in Detroit. The stripping of a screw underneath the tip of a screwdriver comes with a thudding, halting sound of error, like you’re driving along the highway, smooth and fast, and cement gives way to stones and all your tires go flat.

  The word screw first appeared as a verb in 1605, coming from the mouth of Lady Macbeth. She urges her husband to summon the toughness to kill King Duncan. “Screw your courage to the sticking place, / And we’ll not fail,” she says by way of pep talk. The gist is clear, but the precise meaning is not. The Oxford English Dictionary believes it to be a reference to tuning pegs on a musical instrument—turn the peg to the sticking place where the right note is found.

  The word itself descends from fifteenth-century France. The word escroue meant nut, cylindrical socket, screw hole. Escroue might be an offspring of the Latin scrofa, which means sow, particularly a female pig in the breeding stage. That those two words are linked, scrofa and escroue, comes down to a wildness of nature: the shape of a swine’s penis resembles a corkscrew, twirling at the tip. Photographs show boar cocks thin and spiraling, and the female’s cervix is ribboned the same spiral way to lock the penis into place when mating. When pigs are inseminated artificially with pig sperm, the tool often used is called a spirette, a long thin rod that spirals at the end to mimic the swine penis shape, and inseminators twist it in counterclockwise. In Iceland, the word for screw is skrúfa, and also means to fuck.

  Pig private parts feature in other etymologies. Cowrie shells, egg-shaped and white smooth, have a rounded back and an opening slit on the front. They were called porcelaine in French, porcellana in Italian, the diminutive for the young and fertile sow. The shape of the shell is said to have called to mind pig vaginas, and so it got its name in Italy and France. Porcelain—chinaware—resembled the shells in its smoothness, and so got its name, too.

  Cops are called pigs, and in mid-1850s England, screw was a slang term for a prison guard. Two theories exist as to why. One: screw was another word for key, and any image of a prison guard involves a jangling ring of keys hanging at the hip off a belt, or being slapped ominously against the hand like a tambourine, the clanging rattle a reminder of who has the power to lock and unlock shackles and cell doors. Two: jails in mid-nineteenth-century England were places of punishment, one of which involved prisoners cranking on a handle that turned nothing but a counter. Turning the handle ten thousand times in eight hours was a common penalty, and as the cranking continued, the prison guard would tighten a screw to increase the resistance, making it harder for the prisoner to rotate the apparatus. It could also be reference to the guards torturing inmates with thumbscrews, known nursery-rhymishly as pilliwinks, which were simple vises that were clamped and tightened to crush someone’s thumb, finger, or toe.

  To get screwed—cheated, hornswoggled, taken advantage of—might be an offshoot of the prison-guard slang, developing in the criminal underworld and making its way to the street. In French today, écrouer means to imprison. Levée d’écrou is the release of a prisoner, literally translated, the lifting of the screw.

  The addition of “up,” William Safire explained in a 1990 New York Times column, came out of a World War II lingo heavy with euphemism for botch jobs and errors: gum up, foul up, mess up, and screw up. The latter appeared for the first time in Yank, a weekly magazine put out by the United States Army from 1942 to 1945. Safire made the claim that Holden Caulfield had a hand in popularizing the phrase in J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. “You know what the trouble with me is? I can never get really sexy—I mean really sexy—with a girl I don’t like a lot. I mean I have to like her a lot. If I don’t, I sort of lose my goddamn desire for her and all. Boy, it really screws up my sex life something awful. My sex life stinks.”

  My sex life didn’t stink, but I was finding that the carpentry work was altering it. The work I was doing didn’t make me less of a woman, but it felt like that, in a profound and surprising way.

  It’s odd to admit, and I feel small for doing so. I started noticing something shifting as I got dressed in the morning. I slid my legs into paint-stained jeans, crusty patches around the pockets where I’d wiped glue from my fingers. I tangled into a sports bra, pressed breasts, pulled on a tank top, a T-shirt, a long-sleeve shirt, weather depending. My sneakers were worn, with gray-white dried cement caked on the toes, paint blotches, more glue. I tied my long hair back into a bun, made sure I had my earplugs, and headed out into the day.

  I looked grubby and thick. I looked like someone doing manual labor. I felt like a boy.

  I am not a small woman. I am sturdy and curved. I feel lucky to have avoided the body image demons that skew reflections and make some women loathe their flesh. I like that I am strong. I like the muscles in my legs, quads and calves, and that my legs can run for miles. I flex my biceps in the mirror and feel proud of the bulge and the strength it suggests. I love having tits. I like the combination of firm—legs, shoulders, back—and soft—breasts and belly. I like the blurring, the strength and softness. As Virginia Woolf wrote, “It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly.” This feels deeply true to me, an abiding desire to have both sexes mingled in one body and one mind, a mental fertility.

  But dressed in work clothes, breasts bound in a sports bra, spending the days doing work with my body and hands, holding tools, tape measures, hammers, using saws to slice wood, using nail guns and drills, it shifted my sense of myself,
my sexual self, my self as a woman. I hate admitting this. I hate that dirty jeans and using a drill were enough to disrupt my sense of my own self as a woman. I felt desexualized.

  In this way, I moved through the world without projecting that spark of possibility. In being dressed in work clothes that obscured curves, absent was that energy I gave off and got returned from men around me, absent was the sense within myself of sexual desire. I noticed not noticing. And I noticed not being noticed. The newsroom where I’d worked had sizzled with flirtation, crushes galore. I’d worn jeans and tight turtlenecks and had not worn makeup.

  I started wearing mascara and eyeliner when I was thirty, some months after I’d signed on with Mary. I didn’t realize it then, but it was balancing. There were some days I longed to come home, lean in to kiss my boyfriend smelling of perfume instead of sawdust and sweat. In my non-work hours, in an effort to even out the feelings I was having inside myself from the clothes and the work, I’d get home, shower the sawdust off my skin and hair, put on tight jeans, a lace bra, a low-cut shirt, and brush mascara on my lashes and rim the lids with liner. I’d always loved watching women put on makeup in public-bathroom mirrors, and found myself enjoying the practice of it, learning how to do this at thirty instead of thirteen.

  With the sexual switch turned off in work clothes, I tried to turn it on in non-work hours, upping the feminine in ways I hadn’t before. I found that femininity and my sexuality were tied together in ways I did not expect. I was jarred that outward signifiers altered something inner. I found myself, when the plumbers and electricians were around, mentioning boyfriends, past and present, making them know, deliberately, that I was a woman who was into men. It felt forced, and I wonder if they felt that, too.

  In the off hours, I imagined the plumbers on top of me. I thought about their big arms, their rough thick fingertips. I hadn’t tried to flirt. During work, it was as though I was nine years old, a return to a time before I was animated by sex. But after work, there they were in my thoughts. I imagined the weight of them, how the strength of their hands and arms would translate to flesh. I’d see the older one we worked with, the bald-headed one, tall and strong, the length of him outstretched on a kitchen floor, reaching up under a sink, gripping a wrench—during the day, it was a fact of the job, his specific task, sexual as a pack of shims. Later, at home, away from work, the thoughts turned close and humid. At the job the next day, it was back to the chasteness of childhood, as though the imaginings from the evening before hadn’t existed.