580 Split

In the Shed

by Jamey Genna

I’d had trouble sleeping the night before, so I waited until my husband went to work at the bakery at two in the morning and then I’d watched an old Woody Allen movie. Now I was in the shed applying dry wall compound, paste, into the corner where the ceiling met the wall. My husband and I had purchased a prefab shed and we were making it into a studio where I could write and he could paint. I’d been in the shed off and on all day.

I was trying to get the shed done. Wanting it to be done. All this work. It isn’t how I had planned to spend my summer. In a shed, applying mud to the walls. To get it right, I had to apply three coats of compound.

I’d taken a couple of hours off during the day to take Jackey, my nine year old daughter, swimming. The guilt of having her parked in front of the TV all day was too much for me, and I remembered when we had remodeled the basement. Jackey was much younger then and didn’t seem to mind, but this wasn’t how she’d planned to spend her summer either

After I’d come home from the pool, and I’d eaten a quick hamburger from the local drive-through, I’d gotten back up on the ladder with my red trough, my two different sized trowels—spackling tools, and a rag.

And I went back at it. I had only the upper half of one wall left, the middle ceiling joint, and the two long rows where the angles of the ceiling met each other.

I was pushing the paste onto the wall, working it. I knew I was breaking the rules of joint compounding, but I used my finger on the seam because I could never get a smooth line without it. I’d done one long flat strip and was starting another when momentarily, my balance was off. I caught the top of the ladder, and I continued. I reminded myself to slow down.

But I kept pushing myself to finish the last wall, and I was scraping the joint, pushing paste into it, and then scraping and rescraping it. I’d discovered that if I let the compound dry just a few minutes, the lines came off more easily. I was taking lines out, when I had the strangest feeling, as if I was a kid again, as if my body was moving inside myself, as if my mind was shifting slightly to the right. It’s a hard feeling to describe, but I’ve had it before. It’s like there’s a rock sitting inside of me.

I knew I was too tired—that I should stop. I found myself thinking about my dad—about how he worked in packing plants all his life, went to work at two/three in the morning and came home from work after ten-twelve hour days, and then stopped at home for a while, then went out to the field to work. Depending on the season, he might be planting, baling hay, or cultivating. He must’ve been exhausted all the time. I found myself identifying with my father in a way I had never done before.

He must’ve pushed himself to get out of his chair and walk back out the door, feeling bleak. Yet, I still found the old resentments around his going to bars and not coming home til two rising to the surface. My mind blended this image, how he worked and worked, then drank, or worked and then went to the field, came in, and went back to work on very little sleep. I found it odd how my mind combined all the history into one time period. It was my elementary years when my dad was home, but not home. At the same time, my mind could feel the years when he was only working at the packing plant in town, not farming, and I recalled that he played Monopoly with us, checkers, monster with the littler kids, chasing my baby sister around chairs and behind the couch. I recalled his taking us to the county fair or the older kids fishing, or over to grandma’s house in Canton, South Dakota, on Sundays.

While I was drywalling, I had to stop and move the ladder, further out so I could reach higher on the angled ceiling. But I was stuck in the corner, trying to get the mud to spread even and flat as I reached upward. It was my third coat and then I’d be done. My wrist, my fingers on both hands were aching. I could put the trough down on top of the ladder, but it was easier just to hold it below the spackling tool, whip the flat blade into it and against the metal edge, make a sweep on the wall, then cut the excess paste off on the blade of the trough. Drywalling—after you’d done it for a while, all you could dream about when you closed your eyes were lines and white and sweep and scraping. I kept getting this odd feeling while I worked, like I was hallucinating, like I was in prison, that feeling I used to have when I was a kid, when my parents disappeared for a while. Not knowing what time my parents would come home—that was a torture. I had escaped that feeling a long time ago.

Now my body was sore in spots that would never go away, a lower back pain that I’d basically acquired from years of overuse teaching high impact aerobics, and from one momentary wrong twist getting into the car. I had to worry now that the pain in my hands might not go away, too. I felt aggravated and disoriented. Why was this wall taking so long? I thought about my dad and my mother. My mom worked hard, too. A job away from home, but for some reason, I didn’t have the sympathy for her that I had for my father. Maybe because we were both women, or maybe, I think, because of her lack of affection for me when I was young, thinking that being a mom was her job. It isn’t that my mother doesn’t hug me or express love now, but then, I was as small as Jackey. I don’t recall my mother tucking me in at night. But these were only tired thoughts born out of being tired. I’d managed to deal with all this, this childhood sadness.

Why was I thinking of it again, repeating it now as my hand pulls and pulls against the past, which is getting dryer and crumbly. I only explain to explain. It was her joylessness with us that made me unsympathetic. It perhaps was easier for my dad, not having to be around us all the time. And he could always stop at the bar after work and have a few. Again, another fact that I have no feelings around anymore, but on my ladder, I am feeling heavy and empty in my mind. I am feeling joyless and enslaved. I still have a half of a wall to go and there is still enough light to finish, but I stop. I put the tools back into the remaining mud, climb down from the ladder.

I empty the mud back into the drywall bucket, go into the house, clean up, clean the tools and myself. I sit down with Jackey and watch TV for a while. Then, when it’s time for bed, which is quite late in the summer time, we read a book together.

We’re reading the Little House books, still. We’ve been reading them for over a year and we are planning, eventually, to go back to Iowa and visit all the home sites of Laura Ingalls Wilder. The books are nothing close to the famous television series where the sympathies expressed are always corny. I was missing the first book, so recently my daughter and I went to the public library and got The Little House in the Big Woods. We come to the chapter where Laura is very little—she doesn’t have a doll, she has a corncob for a doll.

“Wait a minute,” Jackey says, “She had a corncob for a doll? That’s terrible!” And then we start laughing.

I read, “But Susan couldn’t help it that she was a corncob,” and we are pealing in laughter. Joy erupting into every corner when I say it to her, over and over again—Susan couldn’t help it that she was a corncob.

Jamey Genna teaches writing in the bay area of San Francisco. She graduated from the masters in writing program at the University of San Francisco. Her short fiction appears in many fine literary journals such as The Iowa Review, The Georgetown Review, Cutthroat, Dislocate, and Storyglossia. This is her first creative nonfiction published. You can also read her blog on writing