Playing House (21 page)

From my six-year-old daughter I am newly aware of how the world is divided up between “boy things” and “girl things.” Color is the most obvious and perhaps the saddest example of this, because blue is the sky, the sea, the eye, the music. A girl should feel she can claim blue and a boy should know that the raw pink of a wound or the hot pink of hilarity is also his. When it comes to crafts, how, I wonder, did the divisions occur? Why did sewing wind up women’s work while wood stayed in the circle of men? Yes, there is the factor of upper-body strength, but that explains only a part of it. After all, wood whittling requires nothing more than a pen knife, and yet I’ve never seen any women wood whittlers. In images of the eighteenth century the wood whittlers seemed to be all boys, shepherds with time to spare or monks carving frivolous images into prayer stalls as a way of alleviating the stern sobriety of their pious lives.

Perhaps the answer to the wood/fabric conundrum lies in the status accorded to the materials in question. Wood has always been a prized commodity. There was purpleheart, coromandel, sandalwood, zebrawood, brazilwood, and the rich, dark wood called bois du roi. In the Middle Ages, wood was precious, its production precarious, its artisans granted, therefore, respect. Later woodworkers were seen as artists, employed by kings and the upper crust, their styles shaping their centuries. There were Grinling Gibbons, Duncan Phyfe, Thomas Chippendale, George Hepplewhite, Thomas Sheraton. The last of these, Sheraton was a bitter, boastful man who loved ingenuity above all else. Furniture made by Sheraton was often fitted with secret, spring-action drawers. He designed a bed disguised as a bookcase, a desk with a rolling top.

Theories are one way to give your work, indeed your life, the kind of context it needs to be nuanced and rich, if not in money, then in meaning. In theories, true or not, I can find a way of elevating and explaining my various pursuits, of giving them an intellectual edge no knife or needle can carve. But in the very end, a theory cannot compete with the tactile. Knowing the physics of heat cannot warm you like a blanket or a house.

It has been three months now since I have completed our kitchen table. It is fully functioning, child-friendly, abundant in storage, and white. I painted it with milk-white paint and then stamped its rim with suns the size of quarters. My husband likes to make fun of the table. “It’s a great table,” he says, “so long as you don’t lean on it too hard.”

“You’re just jealous,” I said to him the other night, and, indeed, I believe he is.

But all in all, woodworking has brought us closer together, and in a marriage strained by various competing demands, I am grateful for this. After the table, I built several other, smaller projects, a rocking horse for my son, a blackboard for my daughter. With my husband, I am able to discuss angles, drafting, support studs, the complexity of a curve in a way I have never been able to before. It seems a kind of conversation has opened up. Last night he showed me how to draft a diamond, which is not as easy as it sounds. There we stood, together, in the basement light, he holding the pencil, making the measurements, each side symmetrical, perfect. I took his diamond drawing and traced it onto a plank of pine. Later on today I will take a jigsaw and cut this solid shape, which will be ours.

And what for? For the headboard of the bed I am making us. A new bed, because the old one is busted.

My husband and I speak often about how to best make our bed. The basement is lit by a single low lamp. It is late, late at night. Together we puzzle out the pieces. Canopies, pencil posts, platforms, there are many possibilities. We could discuss it for a long, long time.

And so we do. We stand in the basement in the night with the mice and the cat and the scent of sawdust, and we discuss the rout, the carving. As for myself, I think I have finally found a craft of which I am unashamed, a craft with all the trappings of masculinity and all the intent of domesticity, for what else does the woodworker build if not shelter, if not a place to put your head? As for my husband, I think he has found just the opposite, a way to enter into domesticity without suffering shame, or boredom. As for both of us, we have used these tools to get to a different place, a place neither male nor female—or both. In the end, carpentry is not about power: carpentry is joinery, bringing the beams together, mating the miters. We are learning: dadoes, dovetails, rabbets, blind splines—tongue and groove.

Consider this a kind of consumer report. I am not a car gal; I have little interest in vehicles, and the ones that I have owned I’ve owned until their grisly deaths—burst gas lines, generator poof-outs, whole-engine cardiac arrests requiring that the massive mechanical muscle be lifted from its steel cavity and dropped into a junkyard heap. It’s not easy, by the way, to dispose of a dead car. It is easier to dispose of a dead body. Where humans are involved there are also coroners, but when a machine is in question, especially a two-ton one, it is hard to get it off your hands, or out of your yard.

In my case, my little white Hyundai died at seventy-five thousand miles, died beyond repair or resuscitation. I paid a few hundred dollars to get a replacement title and have the car hauled off to the junkyard on a sunny autumn day, the crisp, clear kind when the light is so bright the scrap metal glitters and the gutted tires give off the smell of heated rubber. I watched them finish off my car in that junkyard. The crane took what seemed to be only one small swift bite and it all came crashing down, came down as dust and seat stuffing and shattered glass and rainbow streaks of oil dripping from the pile. I was sad to see the vehicle go. I had bought that car brand new twelve years before for four thousand dollars. That car had carried me through my thirties and into my early forties. With it went a lot of time, a lot of books dreamed up behind its sticky wheel, a lot of babies crying and hauled wood and late-night conversations with my sister, who has since moved to Japan.

I miss my sister. I never envisioned she would spend her midlife years in Osaka, eating seaweed and teaching ESL. When I first bought my car, my sister was in her twenties, with beautiful long, brown hair and a whole career in front of her. Her plan: to get her PhD and teach gender studies in some suave city like Boston, where she could occasionally contribute smart, iconoclastic essays to smart, iconoclastic academic reviews, like
Agni
. She did get her PhD, but she didn’t get the college teaching job she’d hoped for. In that she is very much like the rest of us. She has achieved some of what she wanted, and in other ways, she has missed her mark. Her boyfriend’s name is Turu. She met him last summer when she was teaching in Osaka. Turu is a businessman. He works for Sony and, as is common in his culture, he foresees a lifelong allegiance to the corporation. That my sister will marry a man so wedded to bureaucracy seems sad to me, almost as sad as the death of my car, which is also from another part of the world and inspired by an Asian spirit.

When my sister first told me of her decision to marry Turu and live in Osaka, she started to cry. This was maybe six months ago, when my car still had some vim, some vigor. She told me of her choice while we were seated in it. The engine was running. It was a soft, new spring night with dew glittering on the ground. “You know what I’m most afraid of?” she said.

“What?” I said.

“I’m most afraid of being buried on another continent. I can’t believe the whole family, all you guys, will be buried here, in Boston, and I’ll probably be buried in Japan, with Turu and his family.”

“Well,” I said, “I guess you could have your body shipped back to Boston for burial. That’s not out of the question, is it?”

“But then I would be buried in America, and I’d be so far from Turu!” she said, and she started to cry harder. This all seemed a little absurd to me but, at the same time, absolutely apt.

“Well,” I said, trying again, “why don’t you have Turu agree to be buried in Boston, with you and your family. I mean,” I said, “it’s the least he could do. You’re agreeing to live your life in his fucking country. He could agree to do his death in yours.”

“I guess so,” she said.

“Let’s go,” I said.

“Where to?” she said.

We were idling in front of her apartment building. “Blue Shirt,” I said, which is a great café near Harvard Square, every wall a different color: mango, melon, grape, avocado. The place pulses. The foods are fresh. With every bite of a Blue Shirt meal, you feel yourself slip into youthfulness.

I have tracked my maturation by my car-repair schedule. Every three thousand miles, when it is time to change the oil, I have also regularly scheduled a teeth cleaning. At thirty thousand miles, when it was time to replace the clutch, I figured I had better go see the eye doctor. When the car hit fifty thousand miles, I hit thirty-five and got my first bone-density test, because my bones have always been thin and brittle. The bone-density test came back with bad news. I needed calcium like a car needed gas: keep it coming. Now that my car is gone, dead, I wonder what is next on my health-maintenance schedule. Lately I have been seeing a lot of TV ads for caskets. Perhaps I should buy one. I am forty-two. My sister now lives in Osaka, a wide, windy continent away, a place as seemingly distant from me as death itself, a place that feels lonely, Osaka. I wish she would come home; I wish I could wake up one night and see her coming home, over the clouds, propelled by my shining white Hyundai, mysteriously resurrected, puff puffing across the enormous blank and black expanse of sky.

I junked my Hyundai two weeks ago. And because I have always calibrated my life to my car’s life, I also looked into burial plots for myself. According to my sister, with whom I spoke in Osaka, our family does have its own burial plot somewhere in Brookline, Massachusetts, just outside Boston. I vaguely remember that my grandmother, who lived to the ripe old age of ninety-six, was buried there a few years ago. I drove out there—not in the Hyundai, of course, but in my husband’s red Jeep, which is astonishingly, aggressively healthy, what with its four-wheel drive and humongous tires and hemoglobin color. The graveyard was surrounded by a wrought-iron fence and had a wispy, rusted Star of David perched on a pole by the entry gate. I found my grandmother’s grave. It was winter then, charcoal coming in by five o’clock, the sun sinking into a flaming slit and gone in four seconds flat, the world yanked back into desolate darkness. And I stood there in the desolate late-day northeast winter darkness, by my grandmother’s grave, and sure enough, just as my sister had said, there was a bulging apron of unused land around her headstone, room enough for half a dozen coffins, my mother and father, my two sisters, my brother, me. But what about my husband, my children? There wasn’t room for them. And did I really want to be buried next to my mother? We don’t get along that well. I decided I would find an alternative.

Still, I lay on the ground in the space I imagined had been reserved for me. This is as morbid as it gets. The ground was hard and freezing. Up above, the moon hung like a yellow earring fastened to the side of the sky. Because it was cold, the air was clear, and the galaxies glimmered, the light millions of years old. I lay not in my grave but on my grave, and I was surprised by how unremarkable it seemed. I had always envisioned death—and the transition into it—as fraught and florescent, the last moments, whether they came in a flaming airplane or in an oncology ward, soap opera–ish in their import, saturated with significance, good-bye. Good-bye. But it occurred to me that when I am lying on my death bed I might find the process banal, as much a part of ordinary life as leaving for overnight camp, a trip taken, ultimately manageable, far more dreaded than dreadful. Someday I will die, just like my car. Maybe I will go to heaven and be reunited with my car. I doubt it. I don’t doubt I will die, but it just might be that the passage is unremarkable, a train taken, a candle blown, my very last nanosecond spent thinking, “This isn’t nearly as scary as I thought. I wish I’d worried less.”

Yes.

Rest your head.

Of course I have no way of knowing, and when the time comes, during which I will be availed of that information, I will have no way of reporting back to you, I’m sorry to say. I would like most of all to write an essay about how it is to die. This would surely win me the Pulitzer for, among other things, reporting. But my skills extend only so far. How far? I will never win the Pulitzer. I will never crawl my way into the canon, where Virginia Woolf lives. Midlife has its revelations, and this is one of them—not what you will do but what you won’t do; not how far you will go but how far you can go, and no further. Once I hoped to be brilliant. I hoped to be a female Faulkner. Once, the fact that I was not a female Faulkner was agonizing to me. Now, in middle age, I accept this; I take what I can get. I cherish my oil changes; I am grateful for brakes that work, a brain that works; I respect that I may not be a brilliant novelist but that I have become, after a lot of hard work, a writer, capable of chugging along, capable of crafting a story with a well-made engine, I write Ford or Pontiac paragraphs; they are decent, smart enough, but they are not Mercedes-Benz, Rolls Royce, Cadillac kinds of paragraphs, not top of the line. Not even close.