The Kiln Room

I met Vera at twenty-one, in a community ceramics class held in a church basement that smelled like wet clay and old coffee. I was twenty-two when we signed the lease on the apartment above the laundromat. She's twenty-three now. I'll be twenty-four today, which is the whole reason we're walking across town in the rain.

Here is the thing I keep circling. Two years in, and the apartment has started to feel like it was a waiting room. We sit on the couch. We eat the same four dinners. We talk about maybe getting a dog, someday, the way other people talk about the weather in a country they never plan to visit. I love her. I need to be clear about that, or as clear as I get. I love her and I'm scared we've already finished. Like a pot that's been bisqued. You can still paint it. You can't change its shape anymore.

So the birthday feels like a deadline. I can't explain that to anyone without sounding insane. Twenty-four is not a deadline. Twenty-four is nothing. But every year I get one year further from the person who signed up for ceramics on a whim because he was lonely and twenty-one and wanted to make something with his hands. That guy thought life was going to be a beginning. Lately everything feels like an ending. My job doesn't help. I archive the papers of a novelist who hasn't published in eleven years. I spend my days organizing the past of a man who is still alive. Make of that what you will.

Vera sweeps chimneys. Actual chimneys, with actual brushes, and she comes home gray with soot and cheerful about it. She was in that class too, twenty-one then, turning twenty-two that spring. I did the math on this. Two years ago, both of us twenty-one. It checks out. She threw a mug in that class that was so lopsided the teacher kept it as a joke, and I laughed, and she looked at me like I'd passed some kind of test. That was the start. Not romantic. Just funny. Then it was romantic, the way things quietly become things.

***

Tuesday. Early spring, wet, the kind of rain that doesn't commit. Marrowfield in the rain looks like a photograph of itself.

"Happy birthday," Vera said, for the fourth time. She had her hood up and her hands in her coat pockets. "Twenty-four. God. Practically decomposed."

"Thanks. Very kind."

"You want a birthday dinner or a birthday walk?"

"Walk. I want to go to the closing sale."

Curtis Bentley's record store was having its last week. He'd put a sign in the window that said EVERYTHING MUST GO, WHICH IS THE KIND OF THING YOU SAY ABOUT A STORE AND ALSO A LIFE, and underneath, in smaller letters, NO, SERIOUSLY, EVERYTHING. Bentley Records sat in the upper floor of an old textile mill, next to a kiln yard Curtis had rented out to potters for thirty years. Vera and I had gone there maybe every other Saturday for two years. Ritual. We never bought much. We just liked the room.

On the walk over she said something that surprised me.

"I've never actually been in the kiln room," she said. "You know that? Two years of coming here and I've never seen past the steel door."

"Really?"

"It's always shut. I figured it was Curtis's private empire." She shrugged under her hood. "Huh. Never been inside."

I didn't think much of it then. I think about it a lot now, obviously, given everything, but at the time it was just a fact she tossed out on a wet street. We walked. The rain got serious for about ninety seconds, then gave up.

Curtis was behind the counter, fifty-seven years old, white beard, cardigan, looking as though he had already said goodbye to every object in the room. Which he had. The bins were half empty. The walls had pale rectangles where album covers used to hang.

"The birthday boy," he said. Vera had told him once, two years ago, and he'd never forgotten. That's the kind of shopkeeper he was.

"You remembered," I said.

"Course I remembered. Free bin for birthdays. Pick anything in it, it's all garbage, that's the beauty of it." He gestured at a crate near the door. Then he sighed, and the sigh had weight. "You two picked a sad day to be regulars. I signed the papers Monday. Building's sold. Whole mill. Kiln yard included."

Vera made a noise. "The kiln yard too? What happens to the potters?"

"Sixty days. Everyone scatters." He wiped the counter with a rag, out of habit, the counter was already clean. "Thirty years. I bought this place at twenty-seven, practically your age. Feels strange to be the one getting sold."

I didn't know what to say to that, so I said the stupid true thing. "I'm sorry, Curtis."

"Don't be sorry, be useful." He pointed at me. "There's a crate of unsold vinyl I need carried to the back. Heavy thing. Help me out and I'll owe you a favor I can't pay, because in sixty days I won't exist."

So I picked up the crate. It was genuinely heavy, forty pounds of records nobody wanted, which is its own kind of poetry. Curtis led the way past the bins, past the jazz section, which was somehow still fully stocked because nobody buys avant-garde jazz even at ninety percent off, to the back of the store.

And there it was. The steel door. Propped open with a brick.

I had walked past that door maybe a hundred times and never once seen it open. Steam and heat came out of it. Curtis flipped a switch and the room lit up: cracked green tile on the walls, floor to ceiling. Two electric kilns, big as refrigerators, humming. A wedging table scarred with years of clay. And a shelf along one wall crowded with unclaimed pots. Bowls. Cups. Things that might have been ashtrays or might have been art. All of it abandoned by people who never came back.

"There she is," Curtis said, patting one of the kilns. "Last bisque firing. Load's half in. You can put that crate down anywhere that isn't on the kiln."

The heat hit my face. It was like standing near something alive. Vera came up behind me with two coffees from the place on the corner, and stopped in the doorway, and just looked.

"Oh," she said. "Oh, it's warm in here."

"Told you," Curtis said. "Best room in the building. Everyone fights over the Tuesday slot. Nobody fights over it after today." He took his coffee, thanked her, and looked around the room the way you look at an old dog. "Help me finish loading and I'll consider your birthday favor settled, young man. There's a crate of greenware by the wedging table. Pots from the Tuesday class. They never came to pick them up."

Vera set her coffee down and picked up the first pot. Turned it in her hands. Glanced at me over the rim of it.

"Careful with that," I said. "You'll fall in love. Then you'll have to fire it."

"That's how it works," she said. "That's literally how it works. You fall in love with a wet lump of nothing and then you commit to it at a thousand degrees and either it holds or it explodes."

Curtis snorted from inside the kiln. "She's done this before."

And I stood there in the hot green room, holding a stranger's bowl, twenty-four years old, with my whole chest doing something I couldn't name.

The next pot was a mug with a wonky handle. I set it on the wedging table, and something clinked under my hand. A snow globe. Small, chipped at the base, water gone cloudy. Inside was a tiny church and a lot of glitter that had all settled in one sad drift.

"What is this?" I said.

Curtis came over, looked at it like it owed him money. "Huh. Haven't seen that in years. One of my tenants left it. Fella who had the Tuesday slot before the Tuesday class. He fired a piece once that cracked straight down the middle, took it personal, moved to somewhere flat. Left that behind."

"It's broken," Vera said.

"It's a snow globe, love. They're all broken. That's the pitch." He picked it up, shook it once. The glitter drifted down onto the little church like snow that had given up on weather. "Keep it. I'm not moving a snow globe."

"You're just giving away the inventory now?" I said.

"I'm giving away a cracked snow globe. There's a difference and the difference is I don't care." He set it in Vera's palm and closed her fingers over it, an old man's gesture, surprisingly gentle. "There. Birthday present, sort of. Don't say I never gave you anything."

Vera held it up to the light. The clouded water, the little church, the drift of glitter. "I love it," she said. "It's the worst thing I own."

"That's the spirit." He checked his watch. "Sales floor won't watch itself. Load's yours. Door can stay propped, heat's already paid for, in every sense." And he was gone, back through the steel door, and we heard the murmur of the last customers of Bentley Records.

So it was just us. Two kilns humming. Green tile. A shelf of pots that belonged to nobody. The heat pressed on my face and arms and I took off my jacket and Vera took off hers and for a while we just worked, handing pots from crate to kiln, saying careful and got it and my God, who made this.

The mug with the wonky handle she kept setting aside. "This one's mine," she said.

"It's from the Tuesday class."

"So? Look at it. Someone's going to drink out of this thinking of Tuesday."

"Everyone drinks out of mugs thinking of Tuesday, that's what Tuesdays are."

She laughed, but it came out short. And then the room got quiet in a way rooms don't get quiet when two people are fine.

I shook the snow globe. Set it on the wedging table between us. It sat there looking like an argument neither of us had started yet.

"You've been weird all week," she said.

"Me?"

"You. All week. You've got the face."

"What face?"

"The face you make when you're composing a speech. You use it before you say anything real. You used it when you told me you didn't want a dog. You're using it now."

I picked up a pot just to have something in my hands. It was a bowl, glazed a bad orange, and some stranger had made it and never come back for it, and that felt like a relevant fact about everything.

"Maybe it's the birthday," I said.

"It's not the birthday. You don't get weird about birthdays. You weren't weird about the last one."

"Maybe it's Curtis selling the building."

"Maybe it's you."

And there it was. The thing under the week, under the month, maybe under the whole winter, sitting in the hot green room between us next to a cracked snow globe.

"Okay," I said. "Okay. Here's what I've got." I set the orange bowl down. "Lately our apartment feels as