We needed a new kitchen table. My husband hated the kitchen table we currently had. It was one of those islands on wheels, high off the ground, a sort of snack bar with two tall chairs that toppled easily, if you leaned the wrong way. Our daughter had leaned the wrong way a time or two, keeling to the ground like a ship filled with wind, only the landing here was hard and made of maple.
I liked our kitchen table because it had storage space. It had a drawer into which I slid my bills, usually unopened, where they remained out of sight and out of mind until the mysterious automated phone messages arrived: “This is an important call for Lauren Slater. Please return the call and cite reference number 5670890325619.” At that point I would open the table’s drawer and pull out my wayward bills, sticky from food that had slid in. I have always liked paying my bills in a state as stained as possible. I like to envision the recipient on the other end opening up the envelope and pulling out a check and an old french fry and feeling . . . what? Sorry for me? Guilty for harassing an overworked mother? All of my tax bills have always carried on them the contents of my kitchen table.
If it is possible for a table to be two-faced, ours was. It was a piece of furniture whose explicit mission was to provide a surface for dining, but whose implicit purpose was to allow an escape from the very domestic burdens it seemed to support. Phone bills, raveled ribbons, single socks, unsigned report cards, life insurance quotes: the table took it all in. A few times, when I’d become especially agitated at the chaos of my life, I’d picture opening the front door and sending the table sailing—swoosh—out over the porch and down the hill we lived on; there it goes. I can see it now. It careens crazily, bonking into cars, getting sucked up by its own speed, smaller and smaller it keeps going, a table with legs, it can run, it goes on and on, and then I’d picture the table swerving off the street and into some fairytale forest, where it would finally come to rest with a soft crash against the sapped trunk of a tree. And there it would live, on an enchanted carpet of pine needles, beneath a fairy-blue sky, in blessed silence and happily ever after.
If I sound disgruntled by domesticity, it’s because I am. I feel, as a forty-two-year-old woman in 2006, almost obligated to say that, while simultaneously knowing that such complaints are stale and smack of other eras. Nevertheless, let me recount the whats: I dislike the dishwasher; I dislike anything having to do with diapers; I dislike car rides with my kids, those cumbersome car seats, the big jammed buckles, the straps always twisted, you bending into the backseat while the winter wind snaps at your exposed legs. I dislike shopping for birthday presents, which I think should be outlawed, all those presents, all those parties, the grown-ups milling aimlessly about, the kids with plastic forks. I dislike the flowers on the birthday cakes, big beveled roses, the sugar so dense you can taste the grit in your teeth, the rickrack of frosting that fringes the cake, which is sometimes green inside. I dislike emptying the trash; I dislike the supermarket, where red wheels of beef are sealed in plastic and pale chicken flesh bleeds pink around its edges.
But there’s another side of the story to tell. I am also delighted by domesticity. For every piece of it I hate, there is a corresponding piece of it I love, and that makes up, in large part, the core of how I wish to live my life. For instance, I love sewing. I love my sewing machine, a Singer 660 with thirty-three stitch options and a translucent spool. I love mechanically winding the thread, looping it through the thises and thats, snapping the empty bobbin into place, pressing the pedal, and watching the thread swell on the spool—so fast—you can see the accumulation of color, the single strand of blue now a bundle of blue, ready to be clicked into the contraption and threaded through the needle. I love fabric. My favorite brand is Moda, which makes, in addition to unusual designs, vintage children prints, prints at once sentimental and haunting: a girl with curly golden hair offers a boy a frog, and Humpty Dumpty sits on his wall while the letter w sprouts wings and flies over the Land of Nod.
But it doesn’t end there. I will try to be brief, although it is difficult to cut a passion short. I also love my red enamel colander, my two very domesticated dogs, my pine and Pergo floors, my slotted spoon, my loomed pastel pot holders, and my salad bowl made of lathed and oiled wood. I love my crochet hook, my knitting needles, my Mod Podge glue, and my stencils. I love my steam cleaner and I can get very happy filling it with water, hearing it hiss as it heats up, and then, cloth in hand, firing at the floor, the loud blast of sound always accompanied by a billow of burning mist that dissolves the dirt faster than you can say Bounty: The quicker picker-upper.
While I was picking my child up from school recently, Rosemary, one of the other mothers, and I began talking. Many of the mothers who are there for pick-up work in corporate jobs. That day, Rosemary, the CEO of a company, was telling me of her neighbor, an old lady gifted in almost every “domestic art.” “We don’t do domestic arts in our house,” Rosemary said, “so my kids are curious about her.”
Domestic arts. That’s the term Rosemary used. She didn’t say it condescendingly, but it is impossible for a woman to use that phrase in a neutral way while standing in a business suit. “I can’t cook,” Rosemary said. “I can’t even thread a needle,” she added, laughing, and I wondered what she would think if I said I could, and often did, in lieu of paying work. The sewing, perhaps I could tell her about the sewing, but the decoupage I knew would remain a deep, deep secret, as would the crocheting, the appliquéing, the stenciling, and the steamer.
What am I hiding, and why? My domestic life is not dumb. It holds within it my writing and rugosa roses, tadpoles as thick as thumbs swimming in the fishbowl on the white windowsill of my daughter’s room. Often she and I will go out walking. Now that it is fall, the weather is perfect for this, the sunshine slanting, the air cool. My daughter is six. We pass Colonials, Victorians, vinyl-sided pastiches that tilt and probably leak. I teach her about mansards and hipped roofs and gambrels. This to me is not idle knowledge. If you know what to call a house, from which style it springs, the materials that make up its shape, you know something about how to design and inhabit a life.
And yet too often, late at night, when I find myself involved in a domestic task while my husband reads his chemistry book, I become angry. “Here I am,” I think, “pushing the vacuum around and around while he sits with his fat feet up on the table.” A thought like this leads me lockstep to a cascade of other thoughts and images—images of men and their dirty underwear on the floor, images of me paying the bills, doing the doctor’s appointments, walking the dogs, picking up poop, scooping the coiled mound of excrement into a produce bag. When my husband offers to help in any of these chores (except poop pickup, for which he has never offered help), I say no. Traditional interpretation: I am trying to maintain control, protect my female turf. But, in fact, it’s both more and less complex than that. I say no because, even though I feel angry over the fact that I am vacuuming, I also really like my vacuum. It’s an Electrolux Harmony with a HEPA filter and an impressively quiet motor. The crevice tool locks into corners and cracks you never even knew existed and sucks out the detritus with a crackling sound as the stuff swirls in the vacuum’s lungs, coming to rest at last in the bag bloated with filth. I even like the bag; I like holding in my hands the exact cubic volume of scum and hair packed into one place, one lobe, heavy, somehow significant. “See,” I always say to my husband, holding out the bag before I toss it, “see what we live in?” and I have to say, he always looks impressed, and vaguely disturbed.
It is a night in early October. The day shuts down quickly now, shutters banging across the blue, darkness drawn in. The children are asleep, as are the dogs. My Electrolux Harmony purrs from room to room while my husband reads, thoughtfully chewing a pen. And even though I’m having a grand old time, I do what I often do when I look up and see him oblivious to this work. I abruptly switch off the motor and stand staring at him as he sits in the dining room, his fat feet up, my arms akimbo.
“What?” he says.
“Do you realize this is the third time I’ve vacuumed this week?” I say.
“Um . . . no,” he says.
“And today I took Clara to the dentist, plus I got her socks and underwear, plus I made her a new skirt, plus I patched the wallpaper in the bathroom.”
He doesn’t say anything. He never does. What should he say? What can he say? I know his real thoughts on the subject; he has expressed them to me many times. “So don’t vacuum,” he’ll say. “Did I ask you to vacuum? Do I care whether the wallpaper is patched?” For god’s sake, he has told me over and over again, he is a modern man; he asks none of this from me; he would rather me grow hair on my legs and smoke dope all day while writing my own version of “Kubla Khan,” better that than, for god’s sake, a wife. With a steamer she holds like a gun.
What do I want from him? Sometimes I want help. More often I want just a certain kind of comprehension, an understanding that, like any other pursuit, the domestic arts are a combination of mindless tasks and mindful executions. Have you ever tried to design a really first-rate quilt? It boggles the brain. It takes a brain. Two years ago I was a Knight Science Journalism fellow at MIT. A part of my research appointment involved going to twice-weekly seminars where I heard researchers speak on topics that ranged from dark matter to the fate of Venice in an era of global warming. Halfway through the year, as the weather got cold, I began to bring my knitting. I knew this would be, at MIT, an act more radical than freeing a pathogen from a locked lab. I did it anyway, with equal parts fear and a desire to get the baby blanket done. On this particular day, Craig Venter was speaking about the genome. The director of the fellowship glared at me as I removed my materials and began to very quietly click away. This was definitely not okay. It was okay for fellows to fool with their wi-fi while listening to a lecture, to IM a colleague across town, to doodle intricate overlapping hexagons on graph paper, but for me to purl in such a situation? Never.
But I digress. Our kitchen table: Twice my daughter fell from the high chair needed to reach its surface. Then, when my son turned one and a half, he discovered the table had wheels, and we came home from work one day to find he had made a sort of sleigh out of it, tying the table to the dogs with ribbon and getting them to pull it like reindeer around our house. This was not a good situation for our dogs, who are old and have hip dysplasia. It presented other dangers as well. I won’t get into those here. My husband and I agreed that the table, despite its spectacular storage space and its ability to diminish bills, had to go.
His requirement: that the replacement table be of normal height and have no wheels. My requirement: that the replacement table have built into it both a drawer—the drawer of denial, I call it—and a cabinet in which to store the crock-pot. Such a table, I soon learned, does not exist. Why not, then, build one? I can sew, I can stencil, I can knit. I know flour and grease, stripper and stencils. I know wool, so why not wood? I can use scissors, so why not a saw? In the hardware store I found a circular saw and lifted it up. Its heft was substantial, its teeth bared.
Home Depot is a fine place, especially late at night. The big lights blaze in the warehouse while below thousands of nails twinkle in their assorted bins. I began to go there after I’d put my son to bed. I bought my material: four hefty legs, pre-primed planks of pine wood. It took weeks to assemble everything, and over those weeks, I slowly got to know the immense store. Home Depot has its own code of etiquette. It’s okay to stop someone in an aisle and ask whether or not he thinks a shank or a dowel would do a better joinery job. You can discuss for at least half an hour the merits of a brad-point bit versus a blunt-point bit. You can talk about toothless chucks and collets, chamfered dowels and dovetails. It was exhilarating, all these new and mysterious words, as good as pig Latin, a secret society. I bought myself a leather toolbelt and wore it slung low around my hips. Like a secret cross-dresser, I never actually wore it out; I tried it on over and over again behind closed doors, angling myself this way and that in front of the mirror, thinking, “Hmmmm.”
I remember one night in particular. It was raining, and the rain made a clattering sound on the tin-topped roof of the store. I thought I might need a table saw in order to make this kitchen table, which was still in the planning stages. And as I stood there with the salesperson discussing the pros and cons of different table-saw brands, an entire group of late-night contractors formed around us, offering their own opinions: “Porter-Cable ten-inch with the rip fence just isn’t going to last you.” . . . “A Bosch is superior.” . . . “Without a dado blade the saw is useless.” . . . “What about beveled cuts? Only a Delta can do that.” Around and around the men went, discussing the merits of their tools with such genuine feeling I was charmed. They didn’t sound dumb or parodically male at all. They sounded thoughtful. The language of their lives rolled off their tongues, as curvaceous as any French. “So which one do you want?” the salesman finally asked me.
I shrugged, scrubbed my eyes with the palms of my hand. “Decisions, decisions,” I said.
“You look tired,” one of the men said.
“All day with the kids,” I said. Somehow, I expected this comment would drive some sort of wedge between me and the men, but it didn’t.
“I’ve got seven myself,” the salesman said.
“Your wife work?” I asked.
“Don’t have a wife,” he said.
“Oh,” I said.
He smiled at me. “I think I have the perfect table saw for you out back,” he said. “Sit,” he said, gesturing towards the orange cart used to haul around lumber. I sat and he hauled me to the back of the store, to the saw he thought I should see. He was my very own workhorse, my coach, my carriage, my prince; I was being treated just like a woman and just like a man at the same time. This, I discovered, was nice.
In woodworking, you have to cut a corner in order to make one. You have to measure out a perfect forty-five degree angle, slice sideways with a hand as steady as a surgeon’s, and then mate one mitered corner to another. If you do it wrong, the corner edges will gape and wobble; if you do it right, then you experience something akin to relief, even joy, as the two pieces kiss and click.
I began my work. I moved all the lumber into our dining room and started to figure things out. This, I discovered, was not so easy. Problems I’d never anticipated immediately arose. Wood warps when you clamp it, for one. A straight line is exceedingly hard to create. Most baffling of all, How do you join one board to another? The miter is one way. But as I soon learned, there are also rabbet joints, butt joints, biscuit-joined joints, dowel joints, slot joints, finger joints, and dovetails. This, to me, had philosophical as well as practical implications. Woodworking seemed to be in part an optimistic pursuit, a pursuit that took its cues from E. M. Forster, or perhaps vice versa: connect. Only connect.
What I learned was that woodworking is intensely lyrical, and thus I came to love it. At the same time, it secretes its own power. It’s impossible to feel anything but tough when holding a reciprocating saw and wearing a tool belt. The day I bought the reciprocating saw I took my six-year-old out into the backyard with me. The leaves littered the ground like Chanukah gelt, all gold and wet. “What are we going to do?” she asked. “It’s a surprise,” I said.
I took her over to a tree that had grown so large its branches cast shade over half our yard, turning what was once a perennial garden into a thicket of weeds. “Watch this,” I said, and with comic-book flair I held the saw up like a sword, flicked its “on” switch, and brought the roaring machine down to the tree’s trunk. It made a jagged quick bite and spun sawdust into the air. The interior of the trunk was pale, and this somehow made me sad. I kept going. As the tree began to tip I told her: “Run!” That was just the beginning. There were other trees to clear. There was other work to do. I bought six-inch screws and sunk them deep into the table’s legs. Slowly, like a foal struggling to stand, the table eventually found its footing.
The built-in drawer and cabinet were definite challenges. For these I needed a router, a machine that dervished across a plank of wood, its bit bearing down creating a neat groove into which you can slide shelves. I went early one morning to Rockler, a high-end construction store, where a sales assistant named Woody with an actual wooden leg discussed with me the differences between router bits and bases. “The most important thing,” said Woody, “whether you’re gang routing, plunging, using jigs, or just doing dadoes, the most important thing is how you use your clamps.” I nodded solemnly. “I’ve been doing this for thirty-five years,” said Woody, “and I’ve always said of all the power tools out there, the human machine’s the most dangerous of them all.”
My husband began to get seriously impressed when I brought the router home and showed him how to use it. “Why,” I asked, “are you so impressed with this but not with my sewing machine?”
My husband likes to theorize about many things, whether he is familiar with them or not. Lately he has theorized about avian flu, Naloxone, and learning disabilities. His theorizing often sets off a fight: How can he know so much about something he has never really researched? “I can have opinions,” he says.
But about the router/sewing machine conundrum he had no opinions. He seemed genuinely stumped, as was I. “A sewing machine is just as cool as a router,” I said.
“I know, I know,” he said.
“But a router has more status, because it’s associated with men’s work.”
“I’m sure that’s true,” he said. “But it doesn’t really have to be men’s work anymore. Now that there are all these power tools, you don’t need the same kind of upper-body strength to do it.”
“Well, then,” I said, “why aren’t there more women doing it?”
Later on I called Home Depot. The marketing department told me that indeed there are more women getting involved in woodworking. “Ten years ago, our customer base was almost exclusively male. Now it’s fifty-fifty,” a representative told me. Similarly, a marketing representative at Lowe’s, Home Depot’s main competition, says their store was designed specifically to attract the female customer. Is this the result of women’s changing status, their rise to power, their willingness to enter into and master male-dominated activities? That would be the obvious interpretation. My guess is a little bit different. As my husband, Benjamin, said, power tools have made it so that carpentry does not require the same kind of physical strength it used to. We associate power tools with ultimate machismo, but the reality may be that at a deeper level these ultramasculine tools have feminized and will continue to feminize the craft so that in two decades, three decades’ time, a woman with a circular saw will be as common as a woman with a Singer. Even at their most substantial, hand-held power tools do not weigh much more than five pounds, which is less than the satchels stuffed with groceries I must lug up the long stone steps of my house. My son weighed ten pounds when he was born. I carried him around for months, and I didn’t even have to use my hands.
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.