Sheetrock

What first attracted me to This Old House was the sound of a saw, or “soar” as Norm Abram says it, which always reminds me of President Kennedy, the way he talked, the long scarves he wore, the way the wind puffed at his hair. I was doing dishes when I heard an electric, hand-held, 7¼-inch blade, circular saw, the kind every carpenter uses. I cocked my head, leaned forward to look through my kitchen window. Up and down the street. Nothing. No one sawing. Just houses, all prefabs like this one, that peter out where the hills begin, and a couple of oil rigs sit like black teeter-totters on an empty playground.

My subdivision sits at the west edge of Minot, North Dakota. No construction has ever gone on here. These houses came on trucks. You’ve seen them on the freeway, half a house on one lowboy trailer, the second half on another trailer behind. The factory staples a big sheet of white plastic over the open middle of each side to keep out road dust and birds, but wind usually tears away the plastic and you can drive alongside and look right into the living rooms, the bedroom. Jim, that’s my husband, says hitchhikers are attracted to prefabs. If the plastic doesn’t tear by itself they’ll cut the sheet, just one razor slit, to get inside and ride. Some prefabs include furniture, like a couch, a kitchen table, a TV-stereo combination, a queen-sized bed. The factory staples the furniture to the floor where they think most people would like it (later, if you want, you can move it) and Jim once saw a bum riding along at sixty miles an hour stretched out sound asleep on the davenport, his hair flapping in the wind. Anyway, when the two sides of a prefab arrive at the job site they’re slid onto a concrete slab, then power-nailed together whacka-whacka-whacka. Houses like this one, there’s nothing to saw.

Still, in my kitchen I kept hearing that faraway whine of a circular saw. I let my hands go quiet in the dishwater. Listened. The sound was like the flip side of a siren. When an ambulance or a fire truck wails by you can bet somebody’s dead or hurt, their house is burning, their luck’s gone bad. When you hear a carpenter’s saw—hear that high, steady calling—you know somebody’s life is on the ups.

Which made me look around my own kitchen. The dark, wood-grain paneling. The bowed, plastic strips of floor molding. The muddy white linoleum split here and there, cuts never stitched, from dropped kitchen knives. The cupboard doors with vinyl peeling at the corners like spiked hair. I didn’t grow up in a house like this one. Our house was nothing fancy but it was all wood and it didn’t come on no trailer.

I grew up in Golden Valley, which is now a part of Minneapolis, on a street with two rows of identical one-story houses all built by Mr. Jenkins. He started with one house, sold that and built another. As soon as the subflooring was down and the plumbing installed he moved his family in. His kids coughed a lot from sheetrock dust, but my father said sheetrock was just chalk and paper, the same they use in school. Every night of the summer Mr. Jenkins’s saw was the last thing I heard before I drifted off to sleep. Once my mother complained about the sawing. “That’s the sound of progress,” my father said, and rattled his newspaper. It was the 1950s then.

I dried my hands and soon enough tracked that faint sawing sound to the den. There the TV was flashing in an empty room. On the screen was a man cutting plywood; another dark-haired fellow held the sheet steady. Big men, with noses and bellies. They wore leather tool belts, jeans and plaid shirts, and scuffed boots that had seen some dust. Two big men working together. Sawhorses, sheets of plywood. A silvery circular saw, its blade eating up the thin red line, the yellow sawdust feathering up behind in a golden drift. I turned up the sound. I sat down. For some reason the scene got to me. Choked me up. There was something about it—the tools, the boots, the wood, the two men working. It was all so real. It was something anyone could believe in. After that, Thursday nights it was Bob, Norm, and me.

T-minus twenty-five minutes.

Bob Vila himself picks each house to be remodeled. He drives around looking for older homes for his next project, and these houses could be anywhere in the United States. Anywhere. Sure, most of the jobs are out East. That’s because Norm and Bob are from out East originally. But they have remodeled houses in Connecticut, Tennessee, California, Colorado, Wisconsin, and more. I know because I keep track.

In our den I have a United States wall map and each red pushpin is a This Old House project. It took some work, I’ll tell you, getting all the sites pinpointed. I had to order the tapes I’d missed, then go through them one by one. But I’m glad I did. Looking at the pins it’s clear to me now that Bob Vila could show up in anyone’s neighborhood.

Once I was driving west in Minot when I saw a shiny blue crew cab Ford pickup, the driver with sunglasses, coming at me from the other way. For a second I froze at the wheel—then I closed my eyes and spun a louie across traffic. Cars honked at me, which was serious because people in North Dakota never use their horns. I made it across the traffic but there were too many cars and I lost him. Afterward I had to pull over. My heart was pounding. I had to catch my breath.

I bowl, and that night at the lanes I told the girls in my league who I just might have seen.

They laughed. Phyllis said, “You sure it wasn’t Elvis?”

Anyway, once Bob picks a house—say it was your house—all the remodeling is free. I have thought and thought about this matter and I believe it to be true. Reason number one, Bob is a wealthy man. He has his television show. He has his videos. He has his books on remodeling. Reason number two, even if Bob wasn’t rich, he is not the kind of guy who would take money from homeowners who are struggling to make life better for themselves and their kids, even if they offered him the money.

I don’t tell people my ideas on the free remodeling. If you know in your heart that something is the truth, there’s no need to broadcast. Besides, it would only hurt Bob and Norm. Imagine how people would try to get close to them, to be their friends. Imagine the women, the things they would do.

T-minus fifteen minutes. I’m knitting with one eye on the clock when Jim pokes his head into the room. The round top of his head shines.

“Yes?” I say immediately and loudly.

“Have I got something for you,” Jim says. He is a middle-sized man with a round head and one of those soccer-ball bellies that truckers get from the constant jiggling, the continual pounding over seams in the freeway concrete, which over the years weakens the stomach muscles. Jim holds up his new Playboy.

“There’s nothing in that magazine for me,” I say. I check my watch against VCR time, keep my needles moving.

“Not even an interview with Bob Vila?” My yarn snags.

Jim grins and holds out the magazine.

I make a point of unhooking the snag before I set down my wool, my needles. Then I clutch the magazine. It’s heavier than I expect.

I look for the right page, making sure to glance away when the pictures flash up pink. And suddenly there it is, “Twenty Questions with Bob Vila.” A picture, too. Bob is standing beside a low red car that I read is a Ferrari. A Ferrari his wife has given him for his birthday.

“I could sure go for one of them Ferraris on my birthday,” Jim says from behind me. He puts his hands on my shoulders, begins to rub them. I can feel his belly, round and firm, against the back of my head.

“Well we’re not rich, you’re not Bob Vila, and it’s not your birthday,” I say, and hand him the magazine. I check the time on the VCR, then pick up my knitting. I have to focus on my yarn, concentrate, remember the pattern. I crochet newborn caps for the local hospital. Newborn caps are my bowling money.

“My birthday ain’t that far off,” Jim says softly. He is still standing behind my chair. He takes my head into his hands and begins to run his thumbs slowly over the rims and down the sides of my ears.

I keep knitting, which my girlfriends say I could do through a tornado.

“What if I was Bob Vila and came driving up and knocked on the door?” Jim says. His voice has dropped a note, turned husky. He keeps stroking my ears. He knows what that does to me. And I know that his new magazine has got his batteries charged up.

“Piff to that,” I say. It’s a nervous saying I have.

“Piff?” Jim says. “That’s all?” He laughs once.

“Piff,” I say.

Tomorrow morning Jim is leaving for Duluth, Georgia, with a load of durum. When he’s gone I stay pretty much in the house; in winter you shouldn’t leave a house alone, even for the afternoon. Especially this house. When the temperature drops to twenty below and the wind comes in from Montana and ice knocks down a power line somewhere, it’s trouble. Frost grows from the plug-ins, from around the window sills, from the keyhole. It grows like toadstools. I’ve sat there and watched it move. On those days I wear my parka and one of the newborn caps.

“What if?” Jim whispers. He’s leaning down now. His breath is sweet and woody from his Copenhagen, which I’d rather smell than cigarettes.

Summers I stay in, too. I can’t take the heat outside so I stick to the den where we have a window air conditioner. I keep knitting. Sometimes if the shades are drawn and the air conditioner is blowing cold I’ll forget that it’s summer and I’ll put on a jacket and one of those wool caps. The caps feel good any time of year really. I can see why black people wear them. And one size fits all.

Jim leans down, whispers in my ear. For a moment my fingers stop; the needles go silent. I look across the living room, see my reflection in the TV. I am low and round and gray. “I used to be prettier,” I say.

“You’re pretty enough,” he says. He keeps stroking my ears.

“I never weighed this much in my life,” I whisper.

“It’s all the same by me,” Jim says.

I can’t say anything.

“Really,” he says, his voice softer now.

I set down my hooks, my wool, shut my eyes and lean my head back into his belly. Its firmness, heavy as a ripe pumpkin, always surprises me. There are worse things about a man than a belly. When I open my eyes Jim is smiling at me, hopefully, upside down.

“Say I was Bob Vila and it was my birthday besides.”

T-minus three minutes.

In our bedroom Jim is breathing hard. I have my arms around him. “Come on, honey,” I say. My eyes are on the clock.

The headboard is thumping, thumping, thumping against the wall. It’s only half-inch sheetrock. I try to concentrate. “Okay honey!” I call out to him. His eyes are closed; I don’t know if he hears me.

I think of the sheetrock. Sheetrock is really billions of tiny dead fossils ground into powder, then rolled out in wet slurry. Pressed flat. Baked. Papered both sides. Then painted white. I saw the whole process once. Bob and Norm visited the quarry and the factory, which were somewhere along a coast in Canada. From the loading dock there were trucks one after another hauling away the finished product, the 4-by-8-foot sheets that we make rooms with, white rooms, rooms so white we have to hang things on the walls. No one can live with bare sheetrock.

Across from the bed there’s a calendar with a nature picture. A stream with trees and sunlight. There’s no water or trees like that around here; it had to have been taken somewhere else, another state. Below the color picture there is a line of twelve little squares. The months. I can’t read their names, let alone pick out the days.

Thump and thump and thump.

Across the bedroom the digital clock blinks the time. It’s T-minus one. I call out to Jim. He hears me this time and picks up speed. I start to feel something, but it’s too late for me. So much is late for me that I close my eyes and keep them shut. I concentrate on that thudding sound. Jim goes on and on. After awhile it’s like there’s someone pounding, pounding, pounding on the front door.