Summer Light
Jimmy Kindree
Summer 1995, I quit my job. No prospects, my bit of savings dwindling. Doubt on doubt had worn the contours of the world paper-thin, until bald emptiness stared blank at me from the reflective surfaces.
I hemorrhaged three hundred dollars on a summer pottery class. Back in college it had been something I loved. Slice up logs of clay and throw throw throw. The wheel circled like my mind, and in that spinning, the self faded. Six nights a week I went in for open studio and I threw bowl on bowl, trying to make the perfect curve that could return me to some kind of conviction.
There was another woman vying with me for the most time at the wheel. Susan was a coroner and loved to bitch. She threw enormous lanterns for her garden—bulbous lidded vases that she opened into lace with a scalpel she had nicked from work. She planned to wire twenty-five of them spaced out in her yard, glowing in the black dark like weak stars.
Sometimes Susan and I packed up our clay, threw plastic over everything so it wouldn’t dry. Nine o’clock sunsets, we wandered down the road to an ice cream stand. A girl served us spiraled soft-serve cones, and the internally-consistent world told me, this is good, but good was based on human happiness and so was arbitrary, and I watched the feeling fade. Susan liked women too. We held hands, had sex in her car in the parking lot. I lived outside myself and watched the world playing through on a stage.
One after another, the lanterns came back from the glaze kiln cracked. So tall and skeletal, they started bringing others’ pots down with them into crystal heaps until the studio techs refused to fire any more. I said, “They were always going to break.” She swore at me and smashed a few of my bowls.
She didn’t come back for a week and the world started to tug at me. I wanted Susan’s project not to end in shards. I wanted happiness for her. With anxious hands I felt the curves of my seventy unfired bowls. I found two that might be as perfect as I thought I could achieve, that I could slip and score together lip to lip and make a coreless earth to carve with windows, but they had long since grown too dry.
Susan showed up and started throwing again. We didn’t go for soft-serve or sneak into her car, but she sat by me and pulled another lantern up from mud. She said, “I know why you said that. You’re so caught up in your own head.” I had told it all to her so many times over those weeks, and she had sometimes stroked my arm and sometimes laughed. “But I’ll tell you, people are as real as summer is. Summer’s just a set of things the earth and the plants do, and people named it.” Then I did feel something steady in me.
