On how to see

I am doing an in-person interview because the editor who has hired me to write the piece I’m working on prefers her writers to do in-person interviews. This is important only because while I understand the point—it helps build rapport with someone you are about to ask a bunch of very personal questions—I am thinking of time, and how I don’t have time for this, for shoes and combing my hair and driving into town and hunting for a parking spot.

The magazine is paying me a lot of money so I am making the time. But I don’t have it. I am working on a developmental edit with a tight deadline and teaching a feedback-intensive class and trying to deal with Jessica transitioning from pediatric to adult medical services, which for a lot of people amounts to making a new patient appointment with an internist but not for Jessica. For one thing, I have to deal with a bunch of people who refuse to talk to me, despite my being her legal guardian, because she is eighteen. Apparently Jessica is the only young adult in the world who isn’t fully capable of taking care of herself. Anyway, don’t get me started.

She is living with me full-time now. For a few years she split her time more or less equally between her father and me but now she is living with me. In her idea of the world, she is a grown up and we are roommates.

In my idea of the world, I love her dearly and I would never consider her a burden but she takes so much time.

I have a novel I am trying to finish and I hate the novel but I would like to finish it but I am doing all the paying work because it is available and I like to stack up money in the bank for when the work slows down, which it will, inevitably.

Right now there is no time so I am cramming together the interview with buying some lentils at the grocery store and picking up some of Jessica’s glass from the ceramicist who fires it.

I arrive at the studio and she begins packing the pieces in bubble wrap and placing them in a box. There are a few candleholders that turned out very well and then some trays, and we both frown down at the trays, our hands on our hips.

The glass has bubbled. It looks as if the bubbles you get in a pot of boiling water have hardened, as if this were the glass version of the bubble wrap Melissa is using. I have never seen this happen before and I don’t know why it has. I do know that glass is hideously expensive. All I can see is a hundred and thirty five dollars I might as well have set on fire.

“I wonder if it’s the glue,” Melissa ventures but I shake my head.

“It’s the same glue as always. And she only put a little on the corners to hold the pieces in place, not where the bubbling is.”

I frown. Jessica is trying a new approach, fusing big slabs of glass together, then slumping them into shapes, but something is going wrong in the process. It’s always something. Like with my writing. Just when I think I know what I’m doing, it turns out I don’t have the slightest clue. This is why I hate the novel I’m working on; it has bubbles like this and I don’t know how to fix it.

Jessica doesn’t have the technical knowledge to understand what’s happening; kilns and cones and firing cycles are too complex for her to understand. It is one more thing for me to figure out and I don’t have time. It is an especially difficult challenge when someone else is doing the firing. If I had my own kiln, I would test until I found out but to have my own kiln I would need my own house or at least my own studio; the small rental I live in with Jess has no room for a kiln. Plus imagine trying to explain to the landlord.

So I have to buy a house with a shed out back and hire an electrician to install the commercial 220 volt power I need and so far I haven’t been able to scrounge together a down payment. I don’t know why she couldn’t have found something simpler to love, like horses. Her grandmother has a barn and a pasture. Horses would have been simpler.

But glass is her thing and I respect that and I understand that this is all part of the process; it is like the one million words I’ve written that will never see the light of day because they were the wrong words in the wrong order. But it is an expensive process, costing more time and money than I have.

“I suppose it could be air getting in between the layers,” Melissa says. “These big slabs . . . air might be getting under.”

I nod. “Right, and to secure the pieces so no air gets in, you’d have to use a lot of glue and that much glue will burn.” We’ve had that happen before. Two hundred and fifty dollars of glass with burns on it.

I sigh. I will have to see what I can find out about the problem and how to fix it. Maybe the people who run the glass society I joined a few months ago will know or could recommend a book.

“Thanks,” I say, and carry the box to the car and wonder how I am supposed to keep doing it all, forever, keeping my daughter’s dreams alive and my own, too, while making sure we have a roof over our heads and food on the table. I am fifty-one years old and it should be easier by now; I should know how to do this but somehow I never do.

I am just in time to pick up Jess from school. When we get home, we unpack the glass. I lift one of the candleholders to the light.

“Look at that,” I say. “Gorgeous.”

But she is not looking at the candleholder. She has taken out the trays. She has removed the wrappings and set the pieces on the table. She is running her fingers over them, studying the bubbles with her fingertips. She leans down to look at each tray in turn. The bubbles have formed in different patterns.

“I wonder how that happened,” she says.

“Not sure. I talked to Melissa—”

She looks up at me. “I love the texture. It is like the glass is breathing. It is like it is alive. If you look hard enough you can see it move. I want to do more just like this next time. I will try to get more bubbles in. Mom, aren’t these beautiful?”

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