“Look, please just call her Rose. She didn’t really like the Portland part.”
“Yes, well, I see. I already have the information about the origin of her name.” He flips the pages of his notebook. “I talked to some former customers of her father’s restaurant.” He takes a sip of his bottled water.
“Sure you don’t want something to eat?” I nudge the plate with half of my Chick’s Special on it. “Try some.”
Henry S eyes the open-faced sandwich laden with juicy meatballs and thick, red sauce. “No, thank you,” he says. “I’m vegan.”
“Pardon? You’re Norwegian?”
“Not Norwegian. Vegan. It’s a kind of vegetarianism.” He looks back down at his sheet of questions. “How often would you say you and Rose”--he emphasizes the single name--“had contact?”
“Oh, at first, two-three times a week. After she graduated and went to work for the railroad, I didn’t see her very often. Then I moved away and didn’t see her for a few years at a time.”
“But you still kept in touch?”
“No. Yeah. Neither one of us was a very good letter writer. Thing about it though, we could always pick right up where we left off.”
Like the time I picked up the ‘phone, and Rose’s voice said, “It’s a girl. I want to name her Tamsin, after my mother. What do you think?” and I hadn’t even known she was pregnant.
Like the time I picked up the ‘phone, and Rose’s voice said, “It’s a girl. I want to name her Tamsin, after my mother. What do you think?” and I hadn’t even known she was pregnant.
“That motorcycle guy?”
“Yeah. We’ve been gettin’ along pretty well.”
“Evidently. Hey, I wanna be god mother.”
“That’s why I called. See you soon?”
Or one night when I was working late in the ceramics studio, trying to pull a tall jar the way Tony had been showing us in class, only I kept making the walls of the jar too thin, and my fingers would pop right through the clay, and I’d have to squash it all down and begin again. I could make tall stuff in class, when Tony was there helping me. He was flirting with me, though, not just helping, because he’d lean in close behind me, putting his arms around me, holding my hands on the jar with his big hands. He’d probably say how else could he show me? but I noticed that he never helped the guys in class the same way he helped the women.
Or one night when I was working late in the ceramics studio, trying to pull a tall jar the way Tony had been showing us in class, only I kept making the walls of the jar too thin, and my fingers would pop right through the clay, and I’d have to squash it all down and begin again. I could make tall stuff in class, when Tony was there helping me. He was flirting with me, though, not just helping, because he’d lean in close behind me, putting his arms around me, holding my hands on the jar with his big hands. He’d probably say how else could he show me? but I noticed that he never helped the guys in class the same way he helped the women.
I kept trying and trying, but my clay kept collapsing, so I decided to take a break and call Rose, who I hadn’t seen in about three months. As soon as she picked up the ‘phone, I asked her to meet me at Buddy’s. She said give her fifteen minutes. She’d just gotten off work, and she sounded tired, but by the time I’d cleaned the clay off my hands and walked the eight blocks or so to the restaurant, she was there. Without even bothering to ask Rose how she’d been doing, I launched into a tirade about my frustration with the clay. She must have just come off a full shift at work--it was about 9 p.m.--but she said, “Let’s go,” and we got our Chick Specials to go and went back to the studio.
Under Rose’s tutelage, I was pulling up tall, graceful jars within an hour. True, she used Tony's “hands on” technique at first, but hers were the arms of an encouraging mother--no need to breathe heavily on my neck--and as soon as she could feel that I was in charge of the clay, she let go. When I was finally working all on my own, Rose wandered around the studio examining the stuff that my classmates had made. She peered into a half-loaded oven in the kiln room, and without hesitating, she was able to pick out the pieces I had done.
She pointed at a thick bowl that had been placed adjacent to one of mine in the kiln. “That’s going to blow,” she said.
“D’you think so?”
“Positive. Look how much clay’s left in the bottom. It’s sure to have a big air bubble in there. I’d move my piece, if I were you. Whose bowl is that, anyway?”
“This guy in my class. He’s new.”
“Well, his stuff oughta be on a shelf by itself,” she said. She lifted the heavy bowl gingerly and set it to one side, then carefully rearranged the tiers of pieces waiting to be fired. “No sense ruining everyone else’s stuff.”
“As I remember, some of your best work was made of stuff that got blown up.”
“Well, yes, but that was before I learned to avoid it. I never intentionally broke things. If I said I did, that was just a way to cover the mistakes I made.”
“Rose, I’m disappointed! Here I thought you were this big reconstructionist, this great collage artist.”
Rose made a sound like she had something stuck in the back of her throat. “You were pretty easy to impress in those days,” she said.
When we had the kiln reloaded, Rose pulled a small chunk from a block of wet clay in a plastic bag on a nearby shelf. She sat down on a stool near the kiln and worked the clay between her fingers, kneading and shaping it with sharp twisting motions. I went back to my work in the main studio and successfully threw three pieces, one after another. When I finally sat up to stretch my cramped back and shoulders, it was very late. Rose wasn’t in the studio, and I looked for her in the kiln room. At first the room seemed empty, but then I spotted Rose, asleep on a pile of newspapers and straw near the raku kiln. Her hands were folded under her cheek as if in prayer, and her knees were drawn up toward her chest.
I started to wake her, but my eye was caught by something hanging on the side of the nearest kiln, the one we had reloaded. On the top of the kiln crouched a new god, a little woman about five inches high. The woman had a round fat face and belly and little round breasts. Her legs and arms were fat, too, but the fat was twisted into spirals that dwindled away into points instead of feet and hands. Her hair, too, began as thick clumps that sprouted from her head and twisted off at wild angles, drooping finally down her back and the sides of her face. The little god’s mouth was open, as if to scream or command, and her eyes were tiny diamond-shaped dots of clay set into deep-pit sockets in her plump face.
Anchored by the squatting kiln god’s fat buttocks, was a strip of coarse, grey paper which I recognized as a length of hand towel torn from the roll in the women’s bathroom. Rose had written something on the paper towel in black ink. It was a poem, a prayer to the kiln god, and the words of the poem were shaped like a flame sitting in a saucer. I leaned closer to the paper and read:
To
put
it in
the fire
--that's the
hardest thing.
I struggled for this
pot. Centered, lifted
it up, up between strong
fingers. My back shaped it
with every ache. Sweat dripped
from my brow, sponged into the
clay, and we were one. But you
would take it from me and test it
in the flame. Kiln god, please
be merciful! Scorch it, bake
it, bend it to your whim.
Just don't blow it or
its neighbor
to bits.
When your mercy is fused, your anger cooled, may I recognize it
Waiting with the others for our reunion.
