Clay in the Dark

I'm Keira Potter, I'm fifty-four years old, and last Tuesday I accidentally signed up for a pottery class instead of a painting class. That's the kind of thing that happens when you fill out a form at the community center counter while your husband is in the parking lot with the engine running and a man in a reflective vest is telling him he's blocking the fire lane.

So there it was on my receipt. Beginner Wheel Throwing, Wednesdays, seven to nine, The Wheel & The Kiln. Not Watercolor Basics, which is what I thought I'd paid for. I stood at the kitchen counter reading it twice, and then I laughed, a real laugh, the kind that comes up from somewhere you haven't used in a while. Carlo leaned in the doorway and asked what was so funny, and I showed him the paper, and he said, "Well. Wednesdays are open."

He was right. They were. Thirty years of marriage teaches you to hear a door before it opens.

I should back up a little. We moved to this town in March because Carlo retired from the electric company and decided he wanted to build furniture in the garage, and furniture needs a garage, and garages are cheaper here than they were back home. I drive a forklift at the distribution warehouse out by the highway, four days a week, and I like it fine. But there was a stretch of my life, back when I was nineteen and in college for exactly one year, when I thought I'd be an artist. Sculpture, of all things. I gave it up when the money ran out and never went back, and for thirty-five years I have told myself that was just how it went.

The Wheel & The Kiln is a converted storefront two blocks off Main, with dusty shelves of half-finished pots lining the walls and a back room where the actual wheels live. It smelled like wet earth and someone's coffee. The instructor, a wiry woman probably younger than my shoes, had us sit at wheels and told us to watch her first.

"Centering is everything," she said, slapping a lump of clay onto the wheel head. "If your clay isn't centered, nothing else you do will matter. The clay will fight you the whole way up."

She pressed her palms around the spinning lump, steady, elbows tucked against her ribs, and the wobbling mass went still. Not frozen still. Still like a thing that had decided to agree with her. She opened a hole in the middle with her thumbs and pulled the walls up in one motion, and there was a cylinder, tall and even, like it had always existed and she'd just uncovered it.

Then it was our turn, and my lump wobbled around like a cat on a bike. I pressed too hard on one side, then the other, overcorrecting, and the clay listed and slapped and generally made a fool of both of us. The instructor came by and watched for a second. "Breathe out," she said. "Your arms are doing all the work. Let your body lean into it. You're not pushing the clay. You're asking it."

And I don't know what happened, exactly, except that I did what she said. I braced my elbows, exhaled, and leaned my palms in with steady even pressure, and the wobble slowed, and then it stopped. The clay went round under my hands. My hands, the same hands that scan pallets four days a week. It felt like remembering a language I'd been told I'd never spoken. I sat there with a perfectly centered lump of clay and my eyes stinging, which was ridiculous, and I did it again just to check, and it worked again.

The rest of the class was a mix. Most people got a lopsided bowl or a small catastrophe. Mine collapsed twice, and the second time I laughed instead of swearing, and by the end I had a thick little cup with a thumbprint running down one side that the instructor said I should keep. "First one's always honest," she said.

Class ended at nine and everyone cleared out, but I stayed to wash my tools because it seemed rude not to, and because I didn't want to leave yet. That's when Carlo came in.

He didn't call out from the doorway. I heard the bell over the door and then nothing, and when I looked up he was standing between the shelves, watching me scrub the rib tool under the tap. He had his jacket on and the truck keys in his hand and he just stood there.

"What," I said.

"Nothing," he said. "Keep going."

So I kept going, trimming the sponge, wiping the bat, laying the tools back in order, and I could feel him watching my hands. I've been married to this man for thirty years. I know the difference between him waiting and him watching. He was watching.

"You're going to have to explain what I walked in on," he said finally. "You were supposed to come home with a watercolor of a barn."

"I was supposed to, yes." I dried my hands and told him about the form, the fire lane, the whole ridiculous chain of events, and about centering, and how my hands had known what to do before I did. He listened the way he listens, arms crossed, head tilted, and when I got to the part about the clay going still under my palms he nodded slowly, like I'd told him a wire was hot when it looked dead.

"It was nineteen," I said. "College. I did sculpture for one year and then quit and never thought about it again. And tonight it just. Fit."

"Good," he said. "Drive home before they lock you in."

Here is where I admit something, since you've read this far. I hadn't told him everything. I hadn't told him that the whole drive over I'd felt like a woman sneaking out to a life she'd put away in a box, or that when the clay centered I'd felt something in my chest unlock that I'd assumed was rusted shut for good. Some of that came out in the truck, some of it stayed for later.

At home he made tea and I sat at the kitchen table still faintly smelling of the studio, and he set his mug down and looked at me with an expression I couldn't place at first. Then I placed it. It was curiosity. Plain, uncomplicated