Pique Assiette
Catherine MacLeod
They always call after midnight. They always come in a storm. The pot they order is always a present for someone. Nights like this bring out their worst memories, and they’re drawn to me like drowning sailors struggling toward the shore.
Or moths toward the flame, Arden says in the back of my head. She always did speak her mind. These days she sometimes speaks mine, too.
The pot I choose for tonight’s client is squat and nondescript, pale grey, the color of static. I plug in the kettle for tea, apply fresh makeup, fish down a cup and saucer. I prop the door open and switch on the light, a few drops of rain falling on my face like a benediction. You can see the streetlights of Wilmerton from up here. The traffic signals are a pretty blur. It doesn’t take much rain to slick the pavement. Before dawn somebody will probably go off the road at the foot of the hill.
I’m very fond of this town, though I know it better than I’d like. It’s not where I expected to end up. But it was here that I first spun the potter’s wheel. Here that I honed my skills to a sharp edge.
It was here that I first heard the expression pique assiette.
Five years ago, on the first day of tourist season, the mosaic artist Edith Ostler came into the pottery shop and asked, “Do you have any broken pots for sale?”
My boss, Garth, gestured toward the green garbage tub and gave her a cardboard box. “Help yourself.” She filled the box with shards. He refused payment.
It was a slow afternoon. We spent an hour listening to her talk about a folk art called pique assiette— the practice of creating new things out of found objects. She especially liked broken crockery. She left her business card and carried off her carton of precious junk.
“Never heard it called that before,” Garth said when she was gone.
“You’ve heard of it?”
“Making things out of bits and pieces? Sure. People do it all the time.”
I checked out her website at closing time. One of her mosaics covered an entire wall in a Chicago restaurant. It was a garden of shattered plates, exotic blooms bursting from fields of broken tiles. Old china cups formed clouds. Broken medicine bottles made a sparkling lake. I could even see the shapes of fish.
I typed pique assiette into my search engine, and found smashed glasses made into butterflies and impossible birds, and a sundial made of broken dishes. Another page showed a dozen “putty pots,” bowls and jugs spread with layers of putty or plaster, then decorated with personal baubles.
“Hey, I did that when I was a kid,” I said. “One day my aunt gave me a flower pot with a package of stucco and a bag of buttons. I shaped them into a mermaid with her tail wrapped around the pot.”
Garth pulled a chair up to the desk, tired from the illness we didn’t know he had. He said, “That’s the first time you’ve ever talked about your past.”
I looked back at the screen and reminded myself to be careful. There was an envelope of newspaper clippings in my bedroom closet. One of them reminded me that a recent serial killing had taken place less than a thousand miles away. My past wasn’t that far behind me.
We learned that pique assiette translates as scavenger, and is sometimes referred to as memoryware, and that, for most artists, finding the pieces is a big part of the creative process.
“I guess Miss Ostler will be back for more scraps,” I said.
“Good. It’ll save us the trouble of wrapping them so the garbage man doesn’t cut himself.”
Last year I bookmarked a site on the history of the materials used by mosaic artists. I especially enjoy photos of the smashed pots before they use them. Every so often I recognize one of mine. One of the pictures linked to an article on the old funeral tradition of making “mourning vessels,” pots decorated with items recalling the life that had passed.
Some of my pots could be called mourning vessels, too; and they also have much to do with remembrance.
But they have more to do with my clients’ need to forget.
The oldest form of pique assiette involved arranging colored pebbles to make floor mosaics. The oldest form of exorcism involved drawing the demon out through the nostrils. Both forms proved remarkably adaptable.
I rid my clients of their ghosts: the regrets that haunt them. The memories that bedevil them. They come out through the eyes, falling in showers to rival tonight’s.
I tell my clients, “Talk to me.”
They begin as I pour their tea, and don’t notice that I set the saucer in front of them and the cup beside it. They don’t notice that, as their tears fill the saucer, I pour them over the pot on the end of the table. They never notice that the pot changes color.
“Talk to me.” She weeps over her boyfriend’s extracurricular blonde.
“Talk to me.” He’s terrified to sleep because he always dreams of falling.
“Talk to me.” They cry out the memories they can’t live with for one more night— thefts, faithlessness, too many kinds of rape committed and endured. I’ve wondered why some of them don’t just begin their conversation with, “Bless me for I have sinned.” But then, I don’t exactly offer mercy, and them coming to me doesn’t necessarily mean they’re sorry.
One night a man came to me, mad with heartache over his wife’s death. It wasn’t unusual for him to be grieving even after three years, but I thought it odd that he should still hurt that much. The good memories should have been some kind of a comfort.
“I want to forget I ever knew her.”
That was all he’d say. I was in no position to refuse him. But removing that much memory causes irreparable damage— since his wife had bought and furnished their house, he wouldn’t remember where he lived; since she’d been his business partner, he’d forget everything about his job. He wouldn’t remember that he had three sons.
“Doesn’t matter. I don’t care if I ever see them again.”
He didn’t. But they saw him once more, when they claimed him at the morgue the next day.
His wife had taught him to drive.
The newspaper write-up didn’t mention anything that might’ve caused him enough pain to come running to me, but I’d seen years’ worth of guilt in his tears. The photo beside it showed his car crumpled like a can among the trees at the bottom of the hill. Pieces of the vase I’d sold him for a thousand dollars were scattered on the ground.
I can’t turn my visitors away. But it’s not graciousness; it’s self-defence. They pay cash for the pots glazed with their memories, then carry them off into the dark, taking with them what they came here to be rid of. They don’t remember being here, only that they were out driving late and got lost in the storm. Some of them will become slightly forgetful. Some will develop a mysterious amnesia.
Some, like the widower, just won’t have the guts to stick a gun in their mouth.
At least my way the family can collect the life insurance.
Now and then my daytime customers ask me to repair their broken china. It’s not my forte, but I try. You hope the seams don’t show too much. There’s an element of luck involved. Sometimes all the pieces fall into place. Sometimes all the pieces just fall. I don’t know what will fall where tonight.
But the weatherman says this is the last rain we’ll get for at least a week.
Thank God, I hear Arden say.
Amen to that.
Aunt Arden asked her clients, “What’s on your mind?”
She had the magic, too. But she was a little more practical about living with it.
“That whole belief about not dirtying the wonder with money? It’s a crock. We have to eat the same as everyone else. The only reason I don’t charge for it is because I can’t say, ‘I just removed the memory of your childhood dog attack, that’ll be fifty dollars.’ You have to dress it up in something you c
an charge them for.”
Arden read cards. Playing cards, not tarot. I never got the hang of it. Some people came to have their fortunes told on a lark. Others came after midnight in the rain.
She always kept a clean handkerchief in her pocket and a pot of coffee on the stove. She was gentle as she coaxed them to talk. They never noticed her mopping their tears out of the saucer, or the handkerchief turning color— angry reds, frightened yellows, lonely blues. They left not remembering they’d ever been there. She always threw the handkerchief in the stove.
“Fire purifies,” she’d say. Sometimes she added, “Poor thing.” Other times, “Son of a bitch.”
“You ever tell them time heals all wounds?” I said.
“No, I don’t think they feel up to the wait.”
I asked her once,” Don’t you ever wonder if it’s … you know … right to take their memories like that?”
It was one of the few times I ever saw Arden angry. “You think they don’t take anything from us? Do you think their money is any kind of compensation?” Then she softened, because I really was too young to know. “I know if I don’t cut out their memories, they’ll do it themselves.” I pictured razor blades and chemical cocktails. She put the cards away and slammed the cupboard door. “And I don’t really have a choice. Once they’re here we’re in danger. Never forget that, Diane. We can’t ever let them remember they were here.”
Too many people were afraid of what they didn’t understand, even if they needed it.
Scared people can hurt you.
But then, there was some hurting involved anyway. Exorcism is a tiring process; it requires a measure of compassion you might not necessarily want to give. But we rarely spoke of the emotional weariness, since there was nothing to be done about it. And even though we ended up knowing the neighbors’ most intimate secrets, we never spoke of those, either. They didn’t need us giving them more grief; and anyway, they wouldn’t have known what we were talking about.
Arden just hid their money in the china cabinet and said, “Let it go.”
Not all the exorcisms were sad. Arden worked days as a practical nurse, and even Dr. Stillman said she had a kind way with her patients. They slept easier after she’d been by.
“The memory of pain is almost as bad as the ache itself,” she told me. She wiped their brows with her handkerchief and left them comfortable.
I didn’t ask if it was right.
But sometimes the parade of the wounded wore on our nerves, and I wished we could run away.
“They’d still find us,” Arden said.
“How?”
“I honestly don’t know. I guess some people are just meant to walk through our door.”
My mother walked through it one stormy April night, in labour and bleeding. I was big and breech, and the doctor was delayed by a tree across the road. He got there just in time to sign the birth and death certificates.
I came to Arden after midnight, crying in the rain.
Her house was full of books. Her dictionary said an exorcist was usually a religious leader; but Arden didn’t lead anything, and believing that the Lord helps those who help themselves was as religious as she got. Mostly she was patient; and, luckily for all of us, not inclined to judge.
Growing up, I never felt she begrudged me her time. She indulged me more than she needed to. But the only time she indulged herself was on Monday night when she took a ceramics class. Once she brought home a plate glazed a wonderful indigo blue. Once she brought three cat-shaped bowls, their tails curled up over the lids to make handles. She made other dishes over the years, but I admired that plate every day.
Arden wore a wedding ring. She didn’t talk about Uncle Robert much, except to say he’d had no patience with her endless string of late visitors. He hadn’t understood why they came to her, only that they wouldn’t stop and he didn’t like being around them. He started staying out late, and then later, until finally he was just gone.
It made me leery, seeing how it could be. Apparently I came from a long line of women whose men didn’t stick around.
The doctor once confided, “Your uncle wasn’t a man anyone tangled with. He had a temper. But I don’t believe he ever turned it on her.”
Arden was a pretty woman, dark-haired and light on her feet, but I never knew her to go out on a date. She never took off her ring, except maybe during ceramics class.
I didn’t go to the class with her. Most Monday nights I worked late at the grocer’s so I could chip in a little money, even though she said I didn’t need to. It seemed a responsible thing to do. I wanted to be the one thing she didn’t have to worry about.
I did okay until my sixteenth birthday.
That night’s client had just left. His saucer still had a few tears in it. I swiped it with the dish towel.
The cloth changed color.
“It’s easy to lose track of time when you do this,” Arden once told me.
She was right. And, truth be told, that had always been a problem for me.
Not anymore.
Memoryware. Memory wears. I know exactly how long I’ve been waiting.
“After they leave,” she said, “I want you to tell me what you saw.” She spoke in the same voice she used on visitors and strange dogs, the one that calmed both. “Don’t just listen, see.”
And I could. I saw their tears like glass beads, each containing a detail, a fragment of memory. I saw flashes of car wrecks and dead loves and fists coming down. I saw the betrayals they couldn’t take back and the words they shouldn’t have said.
She had me practice seeing for a while. Then one night she said, “When he starts talking, reach in and help draw the memory out.”
Being a nurse, she probably thought of it like delivering a baby. Being accident-prone, I thought of it as removing slivers. But I looked into the man’s eyes and saw the tears welling, looked past them to find the pieces that hurt the most, and a part of me reached in and teased them through.
It’s surgery of a kind. You draw the memory to the surface, a black pain, a malignance infecting the recollections around it. You’re careful to get it all. You snip, stitch around the emptiness, wait to see if it bleeds. Arden taught me to work with a delicacy that might’ve impressed even Dr. Stillman.
I wondered how they lived with that gap in their mind, that missing piece of the jigsaw. Surely they felt the loss somehow— even people who’ve had amputations sometimes have phantom pain. What did they think when they came across things they couldn’t remember acquiring? With no memory for them to trigger, did the objects lose all value?
Arden said again, “Let it go.”
We discussed control and finesse, but didn’t talk much about the how of it. That was okay, though— I could drive a car, and didn’t really understand how that worked, either. She said the same thing about my driver’s license and talent for exorcism.
“Try not to kill anyone.”
Now and then I practiced on her visitors while she hovered behind me. Finally she told me, “This visitor is yours.”
“I’m still not good at reading the cards.”
“But that’s not what they’re really coming for, is it? Anyway, they won’t remember if you’re good or not.”
When they’d gone she said, “You did fine. I’m done teaching you.” Just like that. Then she frowned at the dishtowel I’d used. “You might consider finding another vessel, though. A towel is what you’re used to, but something else might work better. You’ll have to figure that out for yourself. Your mother used to let the tears fall in their coffee, then dump the whole thing down the sink.”
All the times Arden talked about my mother, she’d hardly ever mentioned her having the magic. I think now that wasn’t how she wanted to remember her. But back then I wanted to ask her, is that why my father le
ft, too? Did all the Martell women get the power? Who trained them? Why does every conversation with you bring up more questions?
I had so many I didn’t know which to ask first.
But Arden wouldn’t have time to answer any of them.
My work has shown up in some strange places. A client whose bowl holds the memory of years of parental abuse uses it for a cookie jar. One whose father died of lung cancer uses hers as an ashtray.
Last year I saw news coverage of a recent client’s funeral. His wife had placed his ashes in an urn glazed with the memory of Hiroshima.
Edith Ostler made a birdbath from pieces of a pot glazed with the drowning of two-year-old twins.
I don’t know what kind of vessel would hold my worst memory. A lachrymatory, perhaps, a small vial traditionally used to hold tears. Maybe its inventor had the magic. Mine would hold Arden’s last scream as her attacker made his fourth cut, and my first as he peeled up her face, dripping, all of a piece.
It would hold her killer’s lopsided smile as he drawled, “What are you, the companion piece?” and swung at me. I remember how my face burned as his knife sliced me temple to chin. I remember the kitchen door ajar, and Arden sprawled half-in, half-out.
But I don’t recall reaching for the dishtowel on the sideboard, or winding it up and snapping it at him. Nobody would ever have thought it was a fair fight.
Except that he looked… confused for a moment, as it hit him in the face. Then he swung a second time, and I ducked under his arm and snapped him again. Third time he just dropped the knife and used his fist. I bounced off the edge of the table and went down.
He yanked me over on my back. His fingers gouged into my face.
I shoved the dishtowel against his and pulled.
Tesseracts Seventeen Page 24