Needing a baby could not come at a worse time. She was finally making money. And not just a little money. But “good money”, as her boyfriend called it. Reba’s signature plates were always in demand, those with a drip or two of accidental color. In her North Loop studio she taped requests to shelves like short order slips in a diner. The kiln awaited a half-dozen vases. Special orders from collectors, once an unheard-of honor, were sketched and ready.
Between throwing pots, glazing, ordering supplies, directing her new assistant, Li-Li, and snatching a few hours to sleep, eat and pursue her love affair with Walt, there was little time for anything else. Reba wanted no part of a baby, except for the baby.
She called Walt, the first working day of the New Year, her voice filled with exasperation. “I need help!” she cried.
“What is it?”
“You know that pitcher I showed you? The one with the long handle?”
“Now that, Reba, is a vase.”
“I can’t find it!”
She was a unique creature, one of impulse, even confusion. The bottom of vases bore her stamp, a half-bird in flight and her studio name, Rebel Pots. And indeed she was a rebel.
She refused to go to school. She had never attended a workshop, instead apprenticing with a fussy and distracted older potter in the small town of Lawfield, Minnesota. Buying clay and booking orders, finishing his work and glazing his pots, she learned little, other than never to fire a pot you had no faith in, and not turn your back on an older male potter at the end of the day.
After a year she returned to Minneapolis. She joined a cooperative of women artists in their rent-adjusted warehouse. Her fellow artists, painters and poets, were almost stunningly untalented. They lived bohemian lives made possible by indulgent families or the forbearance of well-off husbands. Reba, on the other hand, had to work hard. And work fast. Often living in her studio, she literally starved for her art, eating for weeks nothing but bananas and Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. She made thousands of mistakes. The amount of broken pottery could have roofed a large Mediterranean-style home.
And she lost things. A habit that persisted from her earliest days potting.
Hanging up the phone she continued searching. Her studio comprised a quarter floor in a repurposed northeast warehouse. Terra-cotta pots, bowls, pitchers, and planters lay everywhere. Touching pots as though half-blind, she searched under and over what amounted to a maze of tables and freestanding wood shelves.
She stopped, breathing hard. In a corner were hundreds of discards, some broken. Could she have tossed the pitcher there? Was she going crazy?
Walt appeared, pushing aside huge caster-mounted doors. Reba was close to tears. “Oh, Walt,” she wailed. “We can’t have a baby.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Look at this place. I’d only lose it.”
He joined in the search. A minute later he held up a pot. “Is this it?”
“Oh thank God.”
It was the first place he looked, on the long table by the doors.
Reba would glaze it in simple white, inside and out. From the fluted lip would flow red, red wine into crystal glasses. When the hostess placed it on her wide dining table all eyes would follow. The hostess wore an Armani dress, with sequins, bought for the occasion. She will frown, upstaged by the slender, curving vase.
Richard Donnelly lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Classic flyover land. Which makes us feel just a little… superior. He publishes a weekly column of essays on the writing life at richarddonnelly.substack.com