Manly Talk

In the various stages of demolition, renovation, and maintenance that we have experienced in this near-hundred year old house, I have gotten to witness lots of communication among tradesmen. It's a world that I'm not really familiar with, partly because I'm a woman and partly because I had almost never seen an actual repairman until I moved here--when I was a kid, my dad fixed pretty much everything himself; then I was a tenant; then I bought a condo, but it was pretty new. Even when I bought my own old house a couple of years before we got married, I mostly just pointed out the problem to whomever the home warranty company sent over, maybe got a "we'll take care of it, little lady" in return, and wrote a check, and all was said and done.

But my relationship with this house and particularly with it as Sam reconstructs it piece by piece has meant that I have gotten to witness much more rhetorically and sociologically complex dealings. I have seen the gleam in the eyes of two handymen, an electrician, assorted assistant craftsmen, and even friends who have stopped by, when we had what seemed to be an indestructible laundry chute that needed to be taken out. Each wanted to try his hand and his own set of tools at the destruction, as if it were some kind of fantasy or video game come true. I have also seen a row of seven tradesmen from different, unrelated companies who happened to be at the house for different, unrelated purposes, as they converged on the ridge by the side of the house to peer up at the chimney and emit guttural, good-natured mutterings that somehow--with no intelligible remarks I could make out--resulted in a plan of action for the masonry team.

For the past week, we have had a drywaller and his assistant with us. They've pulled down the wallpaper in the entryway, stairway, and hallway, which was a job Sam and I had been putting off doing ourselves since buying the house, and they've been working on replacing the ceiling in the basement, which has not been going well. Last night, Sam realized that there was a problem with the tiles, and they were all going to need to be replaced. I was dreading the conversation about it, since we didn't really want to pay more for the job, but a lot of the work was going to have to be redone. I had to break the news to the guy at first because Sam was in the shower, so I went down to the basement, showed him the tiles, and said that we were concerned about how they were fitting into place and thought that we were going to need to get different ones. He understood, but we both just sort of looked glumly at the miserable, poor-fitting tiles for a while, so then I said Sam would be down in a few minutes and made my exit.

Then Sam goes down, and I hear some lively conversation. Not unfriendly. Some back and forth and some "hmmm" and "umm-hmmm" and "ah!" and sounds of things being moved around. Then a burst of laughter and "Okay, man" and then some "I like this solution" and "Well, I really appreciate that." And then Sam comes upstairs and they're both all smiles and not only is the guy going to replace them for us, but he's very cheerful about it.

I feel that I could have achieved approximately the same practical outcome (tiles getting replaced), but I could never have made this fellow feel so happy about it. It's as if by having the conversation with Sam, he gets to feel that he has participated in some shared manly project, whereas if I had had to negotiate him into doing it, he would have just felt backed into a corner. I don't think it's malicious sexism as much as it is a de facto separate world, a world as encoded with subtleties as any female one, perhaps even more so because so much of its communication occurs without language.