by Susan Gloss
“The workshop has been there for over a hundred years,” Walt said. “It will still be there the next time we come down here. It had better be, anyway, after the size of the donation you made.”
“I told the other board members I’d visit,” Betsy said. “They’re expecting me to come home with some pieces of pottery and pictures of the artists and facility.”
“I’m sure they’ll understand.” Walt straightened his tie. “We’ll go check it out in a couple of years, I promise. Hopefully by then things will be more stable.”
Betsy shook her head. “I’m going today. I already cleared it with Enrique. He said he can drop you off downtown and then take me to Puebla.”
Enrique was the driver-slash-security guard Walt had hired when they arrived. He rarely smiled or said a word.
Walt let out a sigh, but Betsy could tell she’d won. “I should know better than to argue with you,” he said. “Just make sure the car’s got plenty of gas so you don’t need to stop.”
Betsy got up and hugged her husband around the middle, which had grown thick from a steady diet of restaurant dinners and catered lunches.
Walt looked down at her, kissed the top of her head, and then patted his belly. “Maybe I’m the one who should be making tennis dates,” he said.
It was late morning by the time Betsy arrived in Puebla, and the spring sun blazed uninhibited in a cloudless sky. The ceramics workshop was located on a historic street lined with baroque buildings in shades of lemon and coral. The entire block looked as if it had been crafted by the hand of a master pastry chef, applying ornamentation to the windows and rooflines like the piping on a cake. The architecture of the workshop itself, though, was fairly modest—just a white stucco rectangle that looked squat and plain next to the three-story confections on either side of it.
Once Betsy entered the courtyard, though, she drew in her breath. The cool, quiet space was shaded by palms in large white pots painted with colorful swirls and blooms in blue, yellow, and green hues. Tiled murals in the same color scheme covered the walls, sometimes incorporating the other traditional Talavera colors of red, brown, and black. A fountain babbled in the middle of the space, and the sound washed over Betsy like a wave of peace, the level of which she hadn’t felt even within the locked gates of their neighborhood in Mexico City.
She rang the bell and waited for what seemed like a long time. She rang it a second time, with still no answer. She looked over her shoulder to where Enrique had parked the car and gone into a café across the street. It had taken her months to finally make it here, and she wasn’t about to give up yet. She knocked, then tried the door handle. It turned and she pushed the door open a crack.
“Hello?” She stepped inside a small front room that looked like it served as a combination office and retail shop. Beautiful pots like the ones she’d seen outside were lined up on the floor, and hand-painted dishes and vases were displayed on shelves. From somewhere deeper inside the building, she could hear a mechanical hum. She waited until the sound stopped, then called out, “Buenos días.”
Footsteps thumped on the terra-cotta floors, and then a young woman appeared, smiling and wiping her hands on her jeans. She apologized and asked Betsy if she’d been waiting long.
Betsy replied, in slow Spanish, that it had been only a few minutes.
“You must be Betsy,” the woman said in English. “I’m Gabriela. I was in the back mixing some clay so I didn’t hear the bell. I’m the only one here today.” She turned on the lights in the room and glanced sheepishly at a desk piled with papers. “We weren’t sure if you’d be coming, or I would have cleaned up a bit more.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Betsy said, feeling guilty for the previous visits she’d canceled. “Please don’t feel like you need to do anything differently because I’m here. I just wanted to see the workshop and learn a little about how you do things.”
“A lot of it has been done the same way since the sixteenth century,” Gabriela said. “That’s part of why our pottery is famous. But we’ve had a few improvements to make things easier, in part because of the grant your group gave us. Come with me, I’ll show you.”
Gabriela led Betsy down a hall and into a large workroom. She pointed to a shiny, stainless steel trough filled with milky water. “That’s what we bought with the money you sent. It mixes together the white and brown sand used to make the clay, then drains the water through a filter. In the past we had to use three different pieces of equipment to do it. The new machine has made the process a lot easier.”
“Probably a little cleaner, too,” Betsy said. She took out her camera and snapped a photo of the massive piece of equipment to show to the other board members back home.
“Maybe a little. But we still get pretty dirty.” Gabriela smiled and gestured toward her head. Bits of white dust powdered her shiny black hair, held back by a bandanna. She pointed, too, at her feet, which Betsy noticed for the first time were bare and stained orange. “Before you got here, I was kneading out some clay, like this.” She walked across the room to where a circle of red-brown clay, five feet in diameter, was stuck to the ground. Gabriela sat down on a wood bench. She cleaned her feet in a bucket of water and dried them before stepping onto the slab of clay. Then she hopped from one foot to the other in a slow, delicate dance, flattening out the lumps beneath her.
Betsy rolled up the bottoms of her linen pants, sat down on the bench, and submerged her own feet in the bucket of cool water. She dried them with a rag, just as Gabriela had done, then looked down at the circle of clay. “May I?” she asked.
Gabriela raised her eyebrows. “Of course. You’ll get dirty, though. It’s hard to get the color out of your skin, and sometimes it rubs off on your clothes even after you’ve washed up.”
Betsy shrugged. “They’re just clothes. This is art.” She stepped into the middle of the circle, closing her eyes to focus on the feel of the cool, malleable clay beneath her toes.
After they’d finished kneading the clay, Gabriela showed Betsy the rest of the workshop: the pottery wheels and molds for shaping the clay into its final form, the kiln for firing the pieces and setting the glaze, the paints made from natural, native pigments. At the end of the tour, Betsy selected half a dozen pottery pieces to ship back home. Gabriela offered her a discount, but Betsy insisted on paying full price.
“At least let me send you off with a special gift, then,” Gabriela said. She took an oval-shaped platter from a high shelf and handed it to Betsy.
“Thank you,” Betsy said, running her hand along the floral pattern in the center of the plate. “It’s gorgeous. It actually reminds me of something my mother used to have from Poland.”
Gabriela’s eyes brightened. “Yes. Lately I’ve been studying Eastern European pottery, and I find it so interesting because it looks very similar to what we do, with the colors and the floral designs, yet the process is different. Here, I borrowed a Polish technique of sponge stamping the patterns onto the glaze instead of painting them.”
Betsy hugged the platter to her chest. “You can’t know how much this means to me,” she said. “It brings back a bit of my childhood.”
She could still picture the pieces of treasured Bolesławiec pottery her mother always used to bring out for holidays. A saltshaker, a small bowl, and a teacup were the last remnants of the half-dozen dishes her parents had received as gifts at their wedding and then, less than a year later, packed inside the single trunk they brought with them from Poland to America. Betsy’s mother loved to tell the story.
“Your tata said to me, ‘Why take up space with things that will only be broken by the time we arrive?’” At this point, she would always pause and ask her husband, “How many were broken when we opened up the trunk in New York?”
Betsy’s father would hold up a closed fist. “Zero.”
But while the transatlantic voyage did not destroy any of the dishes, family life eventually did. Betsy would never forget the Christmas Eve when her younge
r brother knocked over the largest piece of pottery, an oblong tray, while reaching for a cookie. Even though she’d only been about ten at the time, Betsy could still picture, with photographic clarity, the tray slipping from the kitchen table. In her memory, the tray fell in slow motion, then shattered as it hit the floor. Her father offered to try gluing it, as he’d glued the handle back onto one of the teacups that experienced a similar fate, but warned that there were so many pieces, it was unlikely to hold together. But her mother simply brushed a tear from her eye, got up, and swept the pieces into a dustpan.
Just before her mother tossed the bits of glass into the wastebasket, Betsy stopped her. “Wait,” she said. “Give the pieces to me.”
Her mother put a hand on her hip. “You heard your father. There’s probably no point in gluing it.”
“Please just give it to me. I have another idea.”
Her mother gave Betsy a dubious look, but handed over the dustpan.
After her younger brother was in bed that night, Betsy went down to the basement and found a square sheet of wood left over from when her father and his brothers had built the house, putting it together according to plans they ordered from a catalog.
First, Betsy found some sandpaper and smoothed out the surface of the wood, making it soft and even. Then she sat down on the floor and arranged the pieces of ceramic on the board in a swirled pattern, gluing each one down until she’d constructed a colorful mosaic from the jagged shards. When she finished, she sat back on her heels and inspected her work. It wasn’t perfect, but it was pretty. Certainly a better option than just throwing away these slivers of her parents’ old life.
Seeing the patterns disjointed and rearranged made Betsy notice things she hadn’t been able to see when she looked at the dish as a whole. The way the cobalt blue glaze was light in some places and dark in others. The delicate veins on the flower petals, a spotted bug painted at the base of a stem.
Betsy lifted up the board and carried it upstairs, being careful to keep it level so the pieces wouldn’t slide around in the wet glue. The house was quiet. She went into the front room, where the air was still smoky from the Christmas tree candles, now extinguished. She lay the mosaic beneath the tree, between packages wrapped in newsprint. She couldn’t change what had happened, nor could she replace what her mother had lost. But she could pick up the pieces and create something new.
Chapter Eleven
Paige
PIECE: Antique map of the City of Madison, 1867.
The idea of a mandatory monthly dinner at the Colony reminded Paige of when her parents used to drag her to her grandparents’ place every Sunday. They’d eat dry baked chicken in the kitchen of their trailer, where the heat was always turned up high and everything took on a yellow tinge from years of cigarette smoke filling the home.
Paige tried to sneak out the back door on the afternoon before the first communal dinner at the mansion, hoping she could stay away and skip it altogether. But Nell saw her, from the kitchen window, when Paige was crossing the snowy lawn. Nell pushed up the sash and said, “Don’t forget dinner tonight!” Paige resented feeling like a kid who’d been caught breaking curfew, but she came back that evening in time for the meal.
Fortunately, there were no ashtrays or baked chicken in sight at that first dinner. The food actually looked really good. Paige didn’t know much about Spanish food, but she noticed a bowl of meatballs among the many small dishes lined up on the side table. Meatballs were always a good idea.
Paige’s trepidation about the meal returned quickly, though, when Nell asked her to turn her phone off, saying something about the dining room being a “device-free zone” during dinner. Paige stared at her for a few moments. Nell might as well have asked her to sit down at the table and eat naked. But Paige did what she was told, stashing the phone in a drawer in the kitchen so as not to be tempted to try to look at it under the table. A few times during the meal, she found herself patting at the back pocket of her jeans or looking down at her hands, seeking out a digital escape.
For the first Sunday dinner in January, the sky outside had already been pitch-black for an hour by the time the group sat down to eat. By the next month’s dinner in mid-February, a Middle Eastern–themed meal, the sun lingered a little longer. They watched it set in sherbet shades of orange and pink while they ate. Still, though, the artists stayed at the table conversing until long after darkness fell.
Paige didn’t contribute much to the conversations at those first couple of dinners. Compared with the others, she didn’t feel like she’d been anywhere or done anything. But Annie had lived a lot, and talked a lot, too. Paige loved hearing about her life in New York, especially the stories about Greenwich Village in the seventies.
“The guy in the next apartment was an actor,” Annie said as she sipped some tea. “Not like the movie stars who’ve got pieds-à-terre there now, but the struggling kind. In the summer, when everyone had their windows open, I’d fall asleep to him reciting lines. If he was trying out for a Shakespeare play, it could be quite soothing, with all that rhythmic verse. But a couple of times he must have been trying out for cop dramas and soap operas or something, because I’d doze off only to be woken up by someone saying, ‘Put your hands up.’” Annie laughed and shook her head. “Half the time I didn’t know if it was coming from my neighbor’s place or from down on the sidewalk. The cops were always busting things up on the corner of my block because it was a known spot for solicitation.”
“Of drugs or sex?” Paige asked. She was pretty sure she’d never even seen a prostitute. There were no street corners or back alleys where she grew up. Just a lone stoplight on the main highway through town and, past that, houses set back on acres of fields or woods.
Annie shrugged. “Either one. Both. Heroin was at what I thought was its heyday back then. But overdose deaths are way back up again, thanks in part to prescription opioids and Big Pharma.” Annie sighed and pushed food around her plate with her utensils. “Sorry to bring the conversation down.”
Everyone fell silent for a moment. Paige thought about a boy a couple of classes ahead of her from high school whom she heard had just been admitted to rehab after almost dying from a fentanyl overdose. Apparently, despite the fact that her hometown seemed like a place where nothing ever happened, it wasn’t exempt from the rest of the world’s problems.
Annie held up a ball of falafel she’d stabbed with her fork. “Did you make this, Nell? It’s fantastic.” Her voice had a forced brightness to it.
“I wish I could take credit, but I ordered it,” Nell said. “I’m forbidden from frying anything since I singed off part of my eyebrow once.”
“Well, whoever did the frying, I haven’t had falafel this good since my kibbutz days,” Annie said.
“I didn’t know you were Jewish,” Odin said, taking a sip from his beer.
“I’m not,” Annie said. “But when I was in my twenties, a friend was going to Israel to do volunteer work and invited me along, so I figured, why not?”
“Seems like you’ve been everywhere,” Paige said. “Up until I went to Providence over winter break for that RISD class, I’d never been to a state that didn’t border Wisconsin.”
“You’re still so young,” Annie said. “You have plenty of time to remedy that if you start soon.”
As if it were that simple, Paige thought. Of course she would love to travel. Wouldn’t most people? But with what money? Even with student loans, she could hardly afford to get by, which was why the residency at the Colony had been such a godsend.
“If it makes you feel better, I haven’t been many places, either,” Odin said. “I’ve been fishing in Canada, but other than that, I’ve never been outside the country.”
Odin didn’t usually say much about how he ended up in Madison. He didn’t work inside the house. His tools were too loud and his projects created all kinds of dust and fumes. The communal dinners were the only way Paige started to learn a little bit about him. He talked some
times about a girlfriend, maybe an ex-girlfriend? Paige wasn’t sure what had happened, and she certainly wasn’t about to ask him.
Relationships were not Paige’s strong suit. She didn’t understand what made people stay together, month after month, year after year, without getting bored. Her maternal grandparents, the consistent producers of dry baked chicken, often said they stayed together out of stubbornness. Her dad’s parents were another story. They still held hands and called each other sweetie and honey. They’d met in high school—Paige wouldn’t be surprised if it was at a soda counter or a goddamn sock hop or whatever people did back then—and they’d been together ever since. The very thought of it made Paige itchy. She could hardly stay with someone more than a couple of months, let alone a lifetime.
At least her own parents had a healthy amount of disdain for each other. They drove each other crazy half the time, between her dad disappearing for deer hunting on major holidays and her mom with her knitting group. As far as Paige could tell, there wasn’t a whole lot of stitching that went on at her mom’s Stitch ’n Bitch meetings. Mostly it seemed like the members drank boxed wine and complained about their husbands, while maybe passing around a half-finished scarf or two.
Her parents’ relationship wasn’t exactly something Paige aspired to, but at least she understood it. When they weren’t driving each other crazy, they laughed a lot. Their marriage seemed to have just the right amount of dysfunction to be functional, year after year.
Paige guessed Nell knew a thing or two about marriage, seeing as she was the only married one of the group. Her husband, Josh, had come to the first meal, and went around offering people seconds of the Spanish food piled onto platters. He didn’t show up to the second dinner, though. When Annie had asked earlier in the evening where the other “token male” was, winking at Odin, Nell had just said, flatly, “He’s working,” and changed the topic.