Chapter Four
Four
Thanks, Don.
Great to be here, Don.
So let’s jump right in. We were talking, before we went on the air, about this business of lady carpenters, and how it is all the new thing, in part because men are no longer going into the field.
And I found that amazing, because, no offense, my wife doesn’t know the business end of a hammer.
And yet it sounds like, Beth, you have no shortage of work.
More than I can take on, Don.
And so the question is, as a woman, do you think you see things differently when you build a house?
Well, Don, I’m not exactly sure how to answer that. When I look at a house, I’m thinking structure, I’m thinking materials.
The same materials as Jake, for example.
Exactly the same, Don. In fact, we’ve worked together on quite a few projects.
And she’s good, Jake? No complaints?
None, Don.
Incredible. You know, after my producer found you, I went online and looked at your website, and that was really something…You actually made those houses?
I did, Don.
Well, there you go. And, Jake, you were saying this is because you can’t find men to do the work.
That’s not what I said, Don. Beth’s the best; I don’t think any client is hiring her because they can’t find a man to do the job.
You were asking whether our field is facing a general labor crisis, and the answer to that is yes.
It’s ironic, but, with all the second-home buyers, it’s just too expensive for most people in home construction to buy a home themselves.
This is something we have talked about on our “Real Estate Minute.”
Right. Used to be, you could throw a stone in Southern Vermont and hit a carpenter, but nowadays, the average homeowner is gonna have to wait half the season after that pipe bursts in their ski chalet to fix their ceiling.
Well, that’s why I think this show is so popular. Lots of people, men and women, trying it themselves, out of desperation. And what you are seeing is that most of the time people are just making things worse.
You have no idea, Don.
Speaking of which, the calls have already started to come in, and our inbox is overflowing like a DIY septic tank. Let’s dive right in. Bev, in Corbury Junction. You’re on.
Hi, Jake. Hi, Beth.
Hi.
Hiya.
So, my question is about fireplaces. We just started a renovation, and we are replacing the chimney, and the contractor found a skull in the flue.
A skull.
A skull, Don.
Human?
Well, I’ve got my own theory, which depends on whether you think a Bigfoot is human. But it looked human, yes.
Bev, is this a carpentry question?
Well, carpentry, I don’t know. But home improvement, yes.
Got it. And what’s your question, doll?
So my question is whether you have seen anything like this before, and if so, should we be thinking differently about the design…
…
Hello? Hello?
We’re still here, Bev. We’re just puzzling this one over silently by miming to each other. Jake? Beth?
Bev, I’m wondering why you think it might be a Bigfoot.
The thing’s enormous.
Could it be a bear, Bev?
Thought of that, but how did a bear head get in my chimney?
Bev, I’m gonna say that I think you stumped our guests. Good luck with your project! Going now to Todd in Wilmington. Todd’s got a question about a roof. Oh boy.
Hey, Don. So, the issue is with my pool.
Todd, buddy, did you lie to get past the screener?
It’s serious, Don.
Lying is serious, Todd. I told you last week. You call on “Automotive.” You call on “Coins she showed him the roster.
Even better was that Franz Kafka was South Asian.
She’d had many students over the years with literary names—a Ulisses, a Descartes, two Dantes, an Austen, a Bronte—but Franz Kafka!
After class, he had come to ask her a question about the reading, and she couldn’t resist… how, why?
Actually, he said, with a straight face, it was a common name in Kerala.
The odd thing was that he looked a little like his namesake, and for a moment, she imagined a land of Kafkas, earnest, brown-eyed boys like this one, with thick heads of dark hair and angular jaws and angular ears, in neat ties and black functionary jackets, wandering about beneath the tropical sun.
Then Franz smiled. “Gotcha, Professor!” His father was an expert in German literature at Brown.
Kafka was his middle name; his true last name had yet to be pronounced correctly west of the Indus, and in America was known only on the most assiduous bureaucratic forms.
“Well, see you tomorrow,” she said. “If you haven’t turned into an ungeheueres Ungeziefer!”
The boy laughed. His entire life, people had been cracking jokes about Gregor Samsa’s untranslatable, verminous transformation, but this was the first time anyone had done so in German! His face filled with love. “You’ll recognize me by the rotten apple in my carapace!” he said.
“Bye!”
“Bye!”
Natasha, it might be added, wore pajamas, and David’s shirt that day, the first day of class, a day of indelible impressions, showed a rainbow-colored poop emoji smoking a bong.
And yet Natasha threw herself into reading the opening of Paradise Lost with admirable flair, David connected the images of darkness to Milton’s blindness, Franz (Kafka!) kept a tally of astronomical imagery and, after asking permission, jumped up and began to sketch Milton’s schematic of Hell on a whiteboard, and one could hardly begin a sentence before another finished it.
Meanwhile, the enrollment for “Memoirs” had begun its free fall once the students, expecting to be writing about themselves, realized it was a survey of late-seventeenth-century diaries.
—
Miles, at home, had opened RussianFolktalePeasant17.docx four times since his arrival, beginning and abandoning four different chapters, before being interrupted, each time, by exigencies of pet ownership and country life.
In the family, getting distracted was known as “being visited by the Person from Porlock,” a literary reference that softened the self-recrimination that usually accompanied procrastination.
Olive was five when Miles had first explained how Coleridge, one day, awaking after having dreamed the whole of Kubla Khan, had begun to write it down when he was called from his cottage “by a person on business from Porlock,” and detained for an hour.
Upon returning to his writing desk, he found he had lost the train of the poem, a masterpiece that would never be completed.
Since then, “Person from Porlock” had come to mean someone who interrupted the creative process.
In retrospect, this anecdote had been poorly timed, since Olive had just come into Miles/Kate’s shared bedroom/office when he was supposedly writing.
He had thought this might be a gentle (and educational) way of saying that just because the door didn’t lock, this didn’t mean he wasn’t working, even if he was actually reading The New Yorker, but his child, ever bright, ever sensitive, had gone crying to her mother that Daddy had called her a Person from Porlock, she wasn’t a Person from Porlock, she was just a little girl!