Nancy W. Hall

The hour between their arrival this morning and the delivery of the actual flooring was excruciating — the three of us nodding and smiling and making gestural small talk, and me saying every five minutes, “I wonder where that wood is,” and calling the flooring shop every 10 minutes to be told each time: “It’s in transit.”

I mimed and used pidgin English to offer tea, coffee, sodas and bananas (the only food available after a pre-floor-day hiatus from shopping). They politely declined with charming smiles, indicating either “I wish you’d go back to your office and leave us alone” or “Back in Brazil, I was a professor of theoretical mathematics and I’d rather eat nails than put in your stupid floor.”

But it wouldn’t really make any difference where they were from or what they spoke — I don’t do so well in English, either. What do I say after I’ve said, “The pump’s down here. It’s been going chook chook chook when it comes on” or “Do you think you’ll be able to stay within your estimate?”

I come by my ambivalence honestly: I get it from my parents. For Dad, living in the mid-South in an era that straddled the advent of civil rights, the idea of hiring anyone to do your work for you implied that you felt superior to them, an idea that was anathema to him. We got the impression as kids that it would be a disservice to any self-respecting person, especially a black person, to hire him or her to work for us white folks.

But Mom’s hatred of ironing was stronger than Dad’s middle-class guilt, and in the end Martha came once a week to do the ironing. Mom never seemed to know how to treat Martha. She would offer her brown-edged wafers and Cokes and sit at the table making small talk with her as if she were an unexpected guest, but when the little cookie klatch was over, Martha still did the ironing.

I was 3 and loved to sit under the ironing board, enjoying the starchy cooked smell of my daddy’s cotton oxford-cloth shirts as she pressed them, wrapping my naked Barbies in the cotton handkerchiefs waiting to be done and watching the little balls of spit bounce and sizzle on the iron as Martha tested it.

Once I reached out to touch them as they skittered over the iron’s surface, and after I recovered from my burned palm I wasn’t allowed to hang out with Martha anymore. She didn’t stay much longer anyway, not after she expressed her gratitude to Mom one day for continuing to let her come and work even though she had tuberculosis. Mom was pregnant, Martha was history and Dad learned to iron.

My next close encounter with the service industry came when I was 10 and my parents decided to add on to our tiny house. The building contractors were a father-son team we knew as Garry Dean and his dad. The father could be heard throughout the day calling to his son in his Southern accent, “Gurdean! Gurrydean, brang me that hammer!”

The father had a fine, appraising eye for his own work, and never seemed to notice that everything he and his son accomplished was ever so slightly off kilter. Neither Mom nor Dad, however, could bring themselves to ask for corrections. Garry Dean’s dad stood beside my mom one afternoon, showing off the wallpaper they’d put up in the powder room — its stripes a good 3 or 4 degrees off true. “Now that’s a right beautiful paper you picked,” he offered.

“Mom!” I hissed, when he was barely out of earshot. “Why didn’t you make him put it straight?”

“Well, he’s so proud of it, how could I?” she countered.

When I became a homeowner myself, I discovered I’d inherited this uncertainty about how to deal with what can only be called — with what I hope is a generous dose of irony — “the help.” And help is what our 200-year-old farmhouse needed, lots of it. Within six months of moving in, we were on a first-name basis with an electrician, a plumber, a roofer and an odd-jobs man whom we know to this day only as Charlie, a Vietnam vet who could be a poster child for post-traumatic stress disorder, and who does only outdoor repairs, refusing to enter the house even to go to the bathroom.

After years of student life, I was clueless about my role. Beyond being polite, respectful and paying on time, what should I do? Serve coffee? Make their lunch when they stayed all day? Inquire about their home life? Should I just clear out, leaving them to work unmolested by my guilt and ambivalence? Was I their boss? Queen for 45 minutes? Should I tell them if the wallpaper was crooked?

Some of this uncertainty comes from my feelings of protectiveness toward this particular old house, which has been mishandled over the years by owners who clearly would have been better off in a nice new ranch house.

It quickly became easy to tell between the tradesmen who really love old houses and those who find them eccentric, even slightly creepy. “Lady,” said one electrician, emerging from the cavelike cellar under the kitchen, after our antique electric service proved unequal to handling two computers and a microwave on the same circuit. “Lady, if I were you, here’s what I’d do. I’d move out and I’d set this place up as a wiring museum.” He fixed the immediate problem and refused thereafter to take our calls. Frank the furnace guy came up from below one day, clearly spooked. “I think there’s something alive down there,” he confided. He never returned, either.

But our plumber, whose children I’m putting through college, one foot of copper pipe at a time, loves this place. Tommy considers it a challenge to keep us free of leaks, drips, dribbles, seepage, frozen pipes, hazardous materials in our water and even mice that nibble away at our insulation.

With Tommy I have a history. When he called to me from across the coffee shop downtown one day, “Hey, I can fix that sink today if you’re going to be home later,” and I called back, “You can go on up there anytime — door’s unlocked,” I knew we’d reached a new level in our relationship.

I still don’t know what to do when he’s working here and I’m working at home. I shuffle ineffectually between my office and wherever he happens to be on his knees with a wrench and a shop light, offering iced tea on hot days and coffee on cold, neither of which he ever accepts, intent on getting done and getting to the next job. Should I watch him work? Check what he’s done before he goes? Should I offer to help? Why do I feel so guilty that I’m paying this man a handsome sum to do a job of skilled labor I wouldn’t begin to know how to do?

Whatever the reason, I’m pleased to say that we may have nipped this thing in the bud before it passes to a new generation. The last time Tommy was here — his baby-blue truck with the blue toilet seat on the hood parked in front of the house — my 5-year-old stood shyly behind me, whispering urgently, “Mama, I have something for Tommy.”

She crept up to where he was working and, as he looked up, pressed into his hand a shiny red floor tile she’d found on the school playground, one of her treasures. We had an errand to do then, and left Tommy hard at work.

When we got back, there was a message for Meg, written in block letters on the box from the faucet Tommy had finished installing, a penciled drawing of his truck at the bottom.

“Dear Meg,” he’d written. “Thank you for the beautiful tile. I’ve glued it to the toilet seat on my truck.” Meg was as thrilled as if she’d had a letter from Santa. Now, whenever we see the little blue truck (with the little red tile on the blue toilet seat) around town, she waves gleefully. “Mom,” she asks, “when can Tommy come and visit us again?”

My husband and kids are still trying to figure this out. Hell, I’m still trying to figure this out. I’m the family peacemaker. I’m the one who forbids our son and daughter to have toy guns and Power Ranger figures, or to watch Angry Beaver cartoons on television. I’m the one who thinks football is too violent, who won’t let even the 11-year-old watch “Batman” and who refused to make toast for a week after the kids nibbled it into gun shapes to shoot at our two cats.

So they aren’t sure what to make of it when they see me lovingly pack my boxing gloves into my backpack when it’s time for sparring class, or watch as I carefully dry and air them, their inner padding impressively sweat-soaked, when I get back home from kickboxing.

In the kitchen after a class, I execute a quick right hook for my son while I whisk salad dressing for dinner and do a couple of fast side kicks before I put the rolls in the oven.

“That’s really good, Mom,” he says.

He looks embarrassed for me. I think he must wonder why his mom can’t put on a nice leotard and do yoga or aerobics, like the other moms. Sometimes I wonder the same things myself.

I’ve decided to chalk it up to my granny. That’s right, my tiny Southern grandmother, who died almost 20 years ago.

Granny was a fight fan. On Saturdays she tidied her house, fed her French poodle and laid out her Bible and her hymnal for church the next day. She swept her yard so clean that grass didn’t dare grow in it, put on a flowered shirtdress, dabbed White Shoulders cologne behind her ears and stocked her capacious handbag with a lace-edged handkerchief, a cardboard fan with a funeral home ad on one side and a picture of an airbrushed, blue-eyed Jesus on the other side, and a pack of unfiltered Marlboro cigarettes.

Then Granny would wait on the porch swing in the cooling air of the summer evening for her cousin Brown to pull up in his car and take her to the fights in Knoxville. Once there, they would watch a variety of men in boxer shorts pound each other into salsa for three hours. Then Brown would bring her home again, walk her to the door and make sure she latched her door safely before he left.

Her friends were not so much horrified by this weekly ritual as they were simply confused. They couldn’t make this fit with their picture of their friend May. It didn’t go with the Sunday school lessons she taught every week, with the flower arranging she enjoyed, with collecting the tiny, girlish treasures she stowed in a special drawer for my sister and me to find when we visited. And that, I think, was the attraction for her.

Living alone in a tiny town in east Tennessee, where everyone had known her for 65 years, Granny bristled against being pigeonholed and railed against being thought of as just another little old lady.

I, too, live in a pretty conservative small town, one in which we tend to compartmentalize and stereotype one another. And I don’t always like that part of living here.

It would never occur to me to arrange flowers, to collect porcelain whatnots, or — let’s face it — to go to church. Nevertheless, like Granny, I lead a quiet, unassuming life.

But when the town’s recreation department flier arrived one day, offering beginning kickboxing classes, I found the idea strangely appealing. Perhaps this was because it was the last thing on earth anyone — me included — would expect me to do. I was the first one to sign up and I showed up 10 minutes early on the night of the first class.

Twenty minutes later I decided I was out of my cotton-picking mind.

Too many years of sitting in my desk chair had taken their toll. The first night of class I couldn’t do a push-up. Not one. Couldn’t even do a jumping jack.

After 10 minutes of kicking and punching at myself in the studio mirror I had serious doubts about the teacher’s judgment in choosing “Don’t Fear the Reaper” as workout music. Playing a song with the line: “Another 40,000 going every day” to a group of middle-aged women who were looking like poster children for an apoplexy foundation seemed ill-advised at best. I tried to calculate how long it would take paramedics to arrive at the gym.

But I made it.

The next day I hurt in places where I hadn’t known I had places. But two nights later I was back — bobbing and weaving, swaying and sweating, swinging at the reflection of my own flabby jawline in the mirror as I uppercut and hammer-punched my image. A month later I could do real jumping jacks. Two months later I could do a whole set of 40 or 50. And by the end of the first three-month session I could do 30 push-ups — not the girl kind, propped on my knees — but realio-trulio hands-and-toes pushups.

I started going three times a week. I dropped three sizes and lost 20 pounds without dieting.

A few months later, the kickboxing instructor announced that he was putting together a weekly sparring class. “You should come,” he said. “It’s a much better workout and it’s a lot of fun. You’re ready for a new challenge.”

Maybe I was. But hitting people? And getting hit? I had literally never hit anyone in my entire life.

“Give it a shot,” he coaxed. “You can try three classes before you have to buy your own gear.”

What would my family say when I, the knee-jerk peacenik, announced that — although they still couldn’t have any plastic swords — I was going to put on boxing gloves and the kind of helmet usually reserved for psychotic, head-banging children, then go hit people for an hour once a week?

I could say it was good exercise. This would have been true. But it wouldn’t have been the whole truth. The whole truth was that it sounded like a blast. And that I wanted to see whether I was up to the challenge of something totally outside my usual domain, something that no one expected someone like me to be good at.

Turns out it is. Turns out I am.

There’s nothing quite like the feeling of landing a really well-placed punch. I feel competent and invincible. I feel tough — despite the fact that more well-placed punches are landed on me than I land on others.

And my family?

I didn’t fool them for a moment. “It’s OK, Mom,” the kids said. “We never really believed you were all that peaceful anyway.”

So this one — right right left left hammer hammer — is for the kids. Here’s hoping that they’ll turn out as tough as their mother, and still be able to keep the peace. And this one — upper upper hook hook kick kick — is for you, Granny. Thanks, girlfriend.