Susan Eisenberg

Everything you thought you knew must be relearned overnight. How to walk. Walk, not trip, over cords, 2x4s, used coffee cups, concrete cores. Walk, 40 pounds on your shoulder, across rebar or a wood plank; glide, not wobble, not look like the bounce beneath each bootstep scares you. How to dress yourself to work outdoors all day midwinter and keep warm, keep working, fingers moving; or midsummer, with no hint of breasts. How to climb ladders– not a stepstool or a 4-footer– ladders that stretch up two stories where someone’s impatient for that bundle of pipe. How to get coffee– hot and how they like it–to a crew spread out 10 floors; to carry muffins three blocks in a paper sack through sheets of rain. How to look. To never go back empty-handed when you’re told,Grab me a This/That from the gangbox, if all you’ve done is move things around, poke here and there; if you haven’t emptied out the full contents so the journeyman won’t shame you by finding This/That in a quick minute, after you’ve said,We don’t have any. How to be dependable but not predictable-provokable. Not the lunch break entertainment. How to read blueprints, delivery orders, the mood on the job; how long it’s okay to sit down for coffee; how early you can start rolling up cords. How to do well in school from the back row of a seats-assigned-Jim-Crow classroom How to learn tricks-of-the-trade from someone who does not like you. How to listen, to act-don’t-ask. To duck when someone motions,Duck! Or when someone tells you,Don’t talk to Zeke, to know what they mean so you don’t even look at Zeke, the ironworker who’s always first out, last in, standing there, so four times a day– start, lunch, quit–all the workers walk past him, like a sandbar, waves washing back and forth, that catches debris. How to pick up the phone and call your friend, the only one of the women not at class the night the apprenticeship director met you all at the door carrying the nervous rumor that one of the women had been raped and you all look at each other and it wasn’t any of you five. How to respond–within protocol– when someone takes your ladder or tools, imitates your voices on the loudspeaker, spraypaints Cunt on your Baker staging, urinates in your hardhat, drives to your home where you live alone with your daughter and keys your truck parked in your own driveway. Later, you’ll need the advanced skills: how–without dislodging the keystone– to humiliate a person, how to threaten a person. Deftly. So no one’s certain for absolute that’s what happened. Not even you.

Her sister was shot, and hers found bludgeoned dead in her car trunk;her mother was alcoholic, and hers a suicide;her daughter killed by an uncle, and hers stayed alive thanks to prison. Before the term,date-raped, she was. Before domestic violence, love punched her face. We wanted the career. Not just skills and money, but structure, focus, printed plans, the rowdy order of raising buildings that years later would still stand right where you left them. We joined a tradition, expected a well-marked path and a welcome. The earnest ads never mentioned we’d be human minesweepers steering around barricades, sinkholes, lethal instructions, We learned Solidarity was a corporation privately held. Some left in shock. Some were maimed. Some went missing. A few found gold. Those with talent for sifting real threat from bluff, or detecting hair-triggers before the blast, fared best, We taught ourselves to disarm booby traps, shared hand-drawn maps, and prepared for a long winter. We lied on postcards home.