• • •
Another day: I enter the bedroom. I don’t see her at first; I think I’m alone. Well: I have often been alone, in her company. Then, movement—her blond head, white shoulders. She is kneeling; the bed is between us. Her body is obscured. But I can tell what she’s doing: she’s shoving something under the bed, something heavy. Before I can see what it is, she says, Out! Out! Go find your father!
So I do.
• • •
He’s in the shed, working. That’s usual. He’s always in the shed. That is where I find him. Here he is, my father, in the shed, in the dark, or rather in the not-quite-dark, it isn’t as absolute as that, so: in the semidark I find him, here he is, sitting at his bench. Light does come in, but randomly, through chinks in the walls (there are plenty of those), bright random motes and beams, alive with galaxies of dust; pencil-thin rays fall around my father like shooting stars, spatter his shoulders, his hair, fall uselessly to the floor around his feet; then, too, there is his own light, my father’s special light, that is to say, the light of the lamp. So though it is dark, it is not absolutely so. In the semidark, then, my father, hunching over the lamp (this, too, is usual), holding a rod of glass in the flame. I who have slipped in, between the motes, stand silently, watching, as he turns the rod in the flame, turns it, turns it, nipping here or there with his special tools, which gleam wickedly even in this obscure light; then he pulls, and suddenly the rod expands, a bulb appears, elongates, flattens, grows ovoid, gravid, shrinks, twirls, expands, rises—this is my father’s magic, this is what he does, the glass responds to his touches, to his teasing pokes and prods, in a sort of dance, a call and response from which shapes emerge, mysterious shapes; undefined things; insinuations; bodies of glass; fleshly glassine enigmas. What is my father making? On this day, it is impossible to tell. With a single, swift blow of the pliers he severs the rod so that the body, whatever it is, falls into the crucible. He does it with a slight, shielding movement of his arm, protecting whatever it is he has made, hiding it. Only then does he turn to me.
• • •
From this it may be seen that he, too, has his secrets.
But his secrets are different from my mother’s. They shimmer, glassily, are refractive, harder, and yet, at the same time, are vaguely apologetic, suffer from uncertainty, and perhaps, even: from shame. Unlike my mother, he does not always shut me out; rather, he shuts me out and takes me in, simultaneously, because he knows that shutting me out is wrong. Nodding at the honeycomb of cubbies where the rods of glass reside (packed tight between and among the stacked remains of my grandfather’s collection—though these have been moved, more and more, into the house, at my mother’s insistence), he says, gravely, The blue one—. Gravely says it; stretches out his hand. It is a severe hand, severely offered. Where has it come from, this severity? My father is not usually severe; only when making glass; then he is severe, as his father was severe, too, carving jet. The severity is my cue: I know if I am not quick enough he will snap his fingers once, twice; and then I might panic, hand him a rod of the wrong color, or even fumble, and drop it. This must not happen, for the glass is precious—precious as living things are precious—therefore the rod must not break. I understand this; and usually it is all right. As it is this time: all right. I hand my father the glittering blue cylinder of glass, and stand at attention in my too-small dress, my hair a complexity of knots and mats and frizzes and curls because no one can be bothered to comb it, feet aching in too-tight shoes because nobody can be bothered to buy me new, watching my father work. I take very seriously my role as assistant. But he isn’t noticing me; not anymore; because it has begun again, his dance. Undistracted, he bends over the lamp, stretching out from the narrow rod of glass the beginnings of whatever he might be making, coaxing from his low flame the first blue, tonguelike extension of some mysterious object; he works with such slow, minute seriousness, eyes narrowed, shoulders hunched, what little movement there is concentrated in his hands only, hands moving gently in the darkness. There he is, in his apron and goggles, turning and turning the delicate bit of liquid glass, creating, from its hot, malleable heaviness, something that will, when it hardens, become, paradoxically, light as air, and infinitely more breakable. Stained with enamel. Chromate of potash. Sugar of lead. Gold chloride. Copper oxide. Bone ash. Arsenic. Oxide of manganese. Saltpeter. From these hard things beautiful colors are made. Hard things, ground up, melted together, then, inside the oven, in a clay crucible. Which I must not touch. Which I will not.