You can tell I am the carpenter’s daughter because I have nails tucked between my lips and saw dust sprinkled in my long coarse hair. My hands are shaped by the tools I use, my fingertips bruised and nicked, my palms padded by calluses years-old by now. I gaze fondly at wood I fashion by purpose or caprice; I know the ringing tunes of every nail I drive, or every screw that hums as it fills the space it sinks its heart into with ambition. The world, for me, just as it was for my father, is a world in constant creation, resolute innovation, a world of need and fulfillment in turn. I am the carpenter’s daughter, an initiate in a vocation I would quickly embrace even had I had the choice to make. My father used to say learn how to do this. You might marry a stupid man who doesn’t know how to swing a hammer.
My playground was my father’s garage, a wonderland of exotic objects with mystical names and resounding ingenuity. A square that is shaped like an L, a block plane that looks like a steel sled, a spoke shaver that looks like a propeller, a crow bar that doesn’t look anything like a bird. My first encounter with a hammer was at the receiving end of a blow to my forehead, a curious anointing at the hands of my baby sister who, motioning as though she had a great secret to impart, urged me to bend my head closer to her as she swung the hammer with her tiny hands. I often think it marked the moment of my calling by squarely acquiring the cell in my brain as its intended target, and setting into motion a steady division of more cells that would reinforce my destiny.
My father used to marvel at my sheer preoccupation with pounding nails in his wooden saw horses, a wonder which manifested in various displays of frustration when his circular saw blade would make that pinging spark-noise every time it hit one of my embedded nails. The saw horse, you understand, is a particular creature in the world of the carpenter. It has slightly splayed legs, vertical and four in number, of course, and a flat spine, horizontal in disposition and fastened at the withers by joints held together with glue and nails. There are many varieties of saw horses—some are bulky, but most, symmetrical; some are thick because they are built of the standard two inch by four inch lumber. Nowadays they are chic plastique—sissy horses, I call them. My father’s horses, however, were organic and rather svelte. The legs were one by five and three-eighths boards, and the spine was two inch by six inch. This gave them a lithe quality combined with remarkable strength, so that when he wasn’t using them to hold other boards or sheets of lumber, I would throw a scatter rug across its back and ride it wherever my imagination wanted to go. I also drove two nails in the end for the bridle, which was a beige-colored mason’s line. This amused my father because he was an immigrant, and cowboys were something of a novelty to him. He used to draw pictures of Gene Autry with one of those rectangular pencils that could be sharpened only with a pocket knife, the same pocket knife that he used to remove splinters from my fingers. Yes, with remarkable precision.
The spine of the saw horses had, as part of their function, many cross-cuts that resulted from the circular saw cutting into it, usually unintentionally. This explained why the horses looked scored from as far back as I can remember as though lashed by whips. I have known other carpenters with blond saw horses made of pale wood and little character, with not so much as a blemish on them on account of meticulous cutting with a circular saw. I do not trust carpenters who have immaculate horses because it means to me that they are more concerned with the appearance of being a craftsman, rather than celebrating the craft. My father’s saw horses signified honesty. Years after the saw horses should have been put down, when they were grey and porous, wobbly and no longer able to hold the nails in place, so that they began to loosen from their joints, I cut the spine out and made a fire out of the rest. The section of saw horse with cross-cuts and empty holes from rusted nails sits on my window sill by my desk. On top of it are free arrangements of stones I gather from different places for different reasons (but this is another story); it is one of my most treasured possessions. One thousand years from now, someone will conjecture that it must be a pagan shrine. This makes me smile, because I am also the deacon’s daughter, and stones too are holy.
My father was born in a region of Romania called Bucovina, in the village of Stanesti de Jos. He was one of five children, and he used to say they were so poor that they had had but one soup dish, and the youngest brother, Vasile, who died before I was born, would blow his nose into the soup so that no one would eat after him. This offends many people, but if you’ve ever known hunger, it makes perfect sense. Their father had left them years before for Canada, eventually sending for them when my own father was sixteen. The voyage by boat took six months and they eventually settled in Windsor. My father’s father, whom we called moşu Pete, was a rough character who abandoned his family twice—once in Bucovina and again in Windsor. Nobody liked him; he was a chronic smoker so he had a gurgly breath and wheezed instead of laughed. Every time we got together he would provoke an argument. My father’s mother, whom we called Bunsa, was a small woman with a strange vocabulary that included odd sounds, perhaps specific to her region and dialect, that made my sisters and brother and I shun her company. She would make this growling sound and clasp her hands together when she saw us. The unfortunate effect was that we were terrified of that noise. She made scatter rugs out of old nylon stockings on a loom in her basement, that looked like an instrument of torture. One time she asked my baby brother if he wanted some toast, and when he said yes, she opened a drawer and handed him a dried piece of toast. But my father always reminded us that she was his mother, and therefore, we must respect her. So we did.
Until my baby brother was born I was the middle child, with all the particular attributes of the second born. My older sister, by two years, Mary Ann, was named after one of my father’s favorite Romanian songs. He and my mother would sing it together in harmony: o Mariana, micǎ dulce Mariana…te-aştept ne-seara la rendevu. When I came along he decided to name me after Doris Day because she was one of the first American celebrities he admired; she had a beautiful singing voice, he would say. My older sister was accorded a violin, because my father always dreamed of playing one himself. In fact, he used to admire violins in shop windows and eventually bought one when he had saved enough money. He went on to collect a number of violins after that, though we used to giggle when he played them. Still, he played them with such love and passion that it was clear he had a natural talent for the instrument. When my sister resisted taking anymore lessons, she took up the piano, like my mother. My mother was also the child of immigrants who could not afford a piano when she was young, but she took lessons anyway and used to practice on a sheet of paper with the keys drawn in pencil. She too had a natural proclivity for music and could play beautifully. I used to envy my sister when she practiced, and wished I could study piano as well, but my father had other ideas. He had seen Connie Francis playing the accordion on the Lawrence Welk Show one time, after which she was discovered (according to my father). I remember strapping on that weird contraption for the first time and thinking it was another instrument of torture. I attribute my strength and survival skills to the years I spent playing the accordion. For one thing, it’s heavy. You have to hold it, carry on your chest, pump the bellows to make it say something, move your right hand vertically on the one side with the keys, like a sideways piano, and feel for the buttons on the left side like those candy sugar dots on adding machine tape. I think it’s the only instrument whose one whole half you never get to see when you play it. Plus your left hand must move vertically, while the fingers move perpendicularly for the various chords. Just describing the way it works sounds insane. But as a middle child I was hungry for approval and praise, so when I saw my father’s eyes light up each time I took the accordion in my awkward arms, I was determined to make it mine. It must have done the trick because my younger sister, by two years was allowed to follow piano studies. She’s the one who hit me with the hammer.
It soon fell to me to become my father’s apprentice in the trade. He took me along to jobs where I would bring him tools, hold the end of a board while he cut, sweep up the sawdust and shake out the giant canvas drop cloth with him, and pull nails out of lumber. I learned how to build cabinets, lay block, rip sheets of plywood and birch with a table saw and circular saw, snap a chalk line and shingle roofs. I was able to anticipate which tool he would need next, and never once demurred when he told me to nail this thing, or cut that thing. He would say with certain pride and delight, "atta girl." It was all the affirmation I would ever need.
One day we went off to work at a fish market. He had a blue Chevy truck with an aluminum box he had built to cover the bed. On the sides he had painted his name in white letters and underneath his name it said "remodeling and modernization." This was the plan for the fish market—to remodel and modernize. I had helped him unload the materials, which included sheets of plywood, 2 x 4’s, molding and the nails we bought from a hardware store. I used to like digging my hand in the metal bin of loose nails, piling them onto a metal scale, and watching the needle move. Then I carried the heavy brown paper bag that seemed to defy the sharp-pointed nails and put it behind his toolbox. The nails always got put behind the toolbox, next to the plastic mustard bottle he filled with glue. One time he shook the mustard bottle of glue that seemed kind of light, and when nothing came out, he held it to his ear to listen for air coming out, I suppose. Instead he filled his ear with glue. I thought that was pretty funny. And some of those brown paper bags with old nails are still around, wrinkled and soft.
After we spread a giant canvas drop cloth over the work site, we began the job. I had noticed out of the corner of my eye, that behind the sheets of plywood leaning against the fish market wall, a tiny mouse had stuck his head out. I soon became obsessed with capturing the little creature at all costs, without attracting my father’s attention. We lived in Detroit, and while the neighborhood was immaculate, including the alleys where we burned trash in big wire baskets, before the garbage trucks rolled through to collect the non-combustible trash, mice and even rats were not so rare. Mice were cute, rats were ugly. We called them sewer rats because they were always wet and greasy. Hours passed as I studied the mouse popping out his head, withdrawing behind the leaning plywood, and emerging nervously anew. When it came time to break for lunch and my father left to buy corned beef sandwiches from a nearby deli, I devised my plan. I found a piece of cotton mason’s line and made a slip knot. Confidant I would be victorious, I emptied a small baby food jar in which my father kept some small finish nails, poked some holes in the metal top, and then quietly meandered over to the plywood. I dangled the string with the noose from the top of the sheets to the dusty floor and waited. When my father returned and called me to sit on the tailgate so we could eat our sandwiches, he noticed I was distracted. The rest of the afternoon I left his side at every chance to check my prey and when my father at last realized what I was up to, he got a kick out of it. I don’t think he ever thought I could catch the rodent, so he let me hunt it. That was something I always loved about him—he got such a kick out of the sheer act of trying something. He’d see something on TV that was really remarkable, or remarkably stupid, and he would say look at that guy, look at him, look. Or watch that guy, watch him. Actually he didn’t like mice at all. If he caught one in a trap he would start heaving just carrying it out to the garbage can. And one time he had the idea to flush out mice from under the garage by jamming a hose connected to hot water. It seemed like a plan, with my mother and grandma at the ready with rakes and shovels when all of a sudden the mice came streaking out. One of them crossed right over my father’s shoe and my grandma hit him in the foot with the rake. I remember they were brown shoes. Meanwhile, at the fish market, with minutes to spare before it was time to clean up and head home, I saw the mouse poke his head exactly through the clumsy noose I had fashioned. Instinctively I jerked the other end of the string quickly and to my surprise, I had snagged the mouse.
Surreptitiously I fumbled to open the baby food jar, and dropped the dangling little mouse into it, then capped the jar. I hid it behind the toolbox. I could hardly contain myself the whole ride home, though my father wouldn’t find out until later that night precisely what I had accomplished with a simple piece of string. I had decided to bring the mouse into my grandmother’s bedroom. We lived with my mother’s mother—the only one I called grandma—at the time, so her bedroom was a sacred place. I placed the jar with the tiny mouse on her dresser, right next to the big black clock that ticked like a bomb. I kept stealing away into her room to check on my captive and soon thought I should feed him. So I brought in some grass from the back yard. It occurred to me that mouse was extremely intelligent and trainable, for he had not so much as attempted an escape when I opened the jar to put the grass in. This was a horrible miscalculation on my part. As I marveled at the mouse my grandma entered the room and was promptly horrified at what I had brought home—this time. Once I brought home a stray beagle and named him Castro, but I had to give him to the humane society. I tried to explain to her that the mouse was special—he was very smart, I insisted, and demonstrated how he obeyed me to stay put when I removed the lid. I had my grandma nearly convinced that the mouse was obeying me, when to my surprise, the mouse saw his opportunity and sprang out of his jar, causing my grandma to shriek and swear in Romanian all over the room. Of course, in no time my father and mother appeared to see what the commotion was and general havoc ensued. My grandma reappeared with a broom and chased the terrified little creature along the baseboards, under the bed, under the bureau, and finally trapped him behind the door. Lucky for all it wasn’t a rake.
I felt utterly defeated when I had to take the jar with the little mouse into the alley behind our house and set it free. I put the jar on the ground and opened the lid. "I hope you’re happy," I said to the furry grey rodent. "Go on, now. Run away."
The mouse looked at me with a dumb yet innocent expression, as if he could not fathom I would turn him loose, not now, not after all we had gone through together. I was angry. I didn’t know the word at the time, but looking back I felt as if he was mocking me. I kicked the jar lightly with the tip of my beat-up tennis shoe and sent the mouse tumbling out. He stayed there for a long time, like a statue. I did not realize that he had no idea where he was now, so why should he run off half-cocked? I left him there and went inside where everyone was still agitated that I would bring a ferocious animal into our home like that, except my father, who seemed less upset than the others. As a matter of fact, he chuckled when he didn’t think I was looking at him. To me it sounded like "atta girl."