metamorphosis

pinch pots

Mr. Merrick hates this bus. He can't admit to himself that he hates his job, is sick of watching vases collapse under inexperienced hands, so instead he complains about the commute. The bus is too dirty, he'll often say when he first walks into the dark classroom littered with glazes and almost-perfect pinch pots. The ride is too long, he'll whine on his lunch break to whichever student has stuck around to ask for help. Yet today, Mr. Merrick thinks the ride could not go slowly enough. Today, they seem to be speeding across New York City. Tourists winding down Broadway aren't jaywalking, all the traffic lights are green, and somehow the stop signs have disappeared. He's frightened to get home.

A gift basket, festooned in glimmering purple ribbon, bounces on his anxious knees. Purple was her favorite color. She would cover the kitchen in lilacs every spring until his face was beet-red from sneezing. (Mr. Merrick isn't sure what her favorite color is anymore.) The gift basket suddenly takes a dive for the bus floor and, once he obtains a white-knuckled grip, he attempts to still his jitters. The thought of facing her makes his bones feel like they've been placed in the kiln. She will be sitting behind his apartment door with a vacant smile and eyes of porcelain: smooth, empty, and fragile.

Mr. Merrick hasn't seen his mother since her dementia diagnosis years ago, but he knows enough about the devastating progression of these things that her mind has been crumbling to dust. The bus shutters to a stop, rolling to the familiar green street signs of 18th and 3rd. This is his stop, Mr. Merrick's corner. He shrugs his jacket back on, readjusts a clammy hand on the gift basket handle, and goes to sweep porcelain ashes under the rug.

One, two, three. In through the nose.

One, two, three, four, five, six. Out through the mouth. He opens the door to his apartment.

As he feared, there is a figure directly behind the door, sitting in the tattered armchair which Mr. Merrick complains about but never replaces. Yet the man sitting in the chair isn't the parent who taught him how to calm his anxious mind with deep breaths. His father turns to face him, devastation writ across the face that is usually set in hard glaze. Mr. Merrick tries to make a show of setting down his bag, offering coffee, and plastering on a smile. But death doesn't wait around for pleasantries.

His father tells him that she's gone, tells his son that his mother, who he has avoided for a decade, is gone. His mother, who was tired of being coddled and kept suffocatingly safe from her own deterioration, who wanted to visit her son who she only remembered as a little boy, who was going to come this weekend. He explains to Mr. Merrick that she didn't understand where they were going, why the two of them couldn't pick up their son from daycare instead of driving all the way to New York City to some art college. His father tells him how she became confused and angry, and the stress probably led her to die in her sleep. Mr. Merrick's father tells him that her heart gave out last night, but he can barely hear over the sound of his own heart shattering.

In grade school, Mr. Merrick's friends would startle when he casually referred to his father as "Brick." They would eventually understand when they first glimpsed him. Brick is built like, well, a brick house. His features were chiseled with a blunter, rougher hand than Michelangelo on David, but he holds the same intense expression as one facing down Goliath. And the shock of red hair is the cherry on top. Mr. Merrick didn't inherit any physicality from his father. Rather, he's gangly and elongated, an awkward deviation from his willowy mother. Mr. Merrick did receive a few traits from Brick, particularly the habit of repressing. Ignoring a blatant truth. Denying feelings for those who reach out earnestly, trying to connect. Yet these two stoic men sit in a tiny apartment together, the sounds of Manhattan all around, breaking apart. They let themselves cry. The glaze peels off, they come apart at the seams. One man cries for his wife of thirty years, who he cared for as she declined and became unrecognizable. One man cries for the mother he knew as a young boy, but will never get to know again.

Tissues are produced from a bathroom cupboard, and the two of them laugh through their tears about lilacs and spring allergies. Mr. Merrick brings out the alcohol he saves for finals week, and he drinks with Brick long into the night as they attempt to smother their grief. Forget the vulnerability they shared, the most they've revealed to one another since Brick cried upon his son's birth. The gin burns Mr. Merrick's throat and at some point through the haze, when the night has passed and it's a morning hour, he realizes he has to teach a class tomorrow. Intro to Pottery, his least favorite part of the curriculum. The class where wide-eyed freshmen fumble their way through the tools and, inevitably, break almost everything in the room. Mr. Merrick looks at Brick, sees the new lines carved into his marble. Sees the weariness in the stoop of his shoulders. A new fear grips him as he sets down his shot glass too hard on the table. He knows that genetics and the march of time are a deadly cocktail that one doesn't have a choice in drinking. He may begin to crumble over the years, like his mother. Become a piece of porcelain, ground up and discarded. Mr. Merrick knows he can't control that fate, but he can stop himself from becoming a repressed old man like his father. He can stop himself from dealing with freshmen, day after day, when he knows his ceramic pieces could be in museums. And he can certainly stop himself from taking the same old, nasty bus around the city. He staggers up from the couch while Brick looks on in a drunken stupor. Mr. Merrick grabs the landline and punches in the art college administrative number.

Tomorrow morning, the freshmen will march into class and a nervous substitute will guide them through pinch pots. The secretary will check the voicemail box and listen to a slurred message from their ceramics professor, announcing that he has officially quit. When she listens again, she swears that his voice is choked with tears, yet he's never sounded so sure of himself. Tomorrow morning, Mr. Merrick will be complaining about his hangover, but when he goes for a walk in Central Park with his father they discuss the future. And he feels unfettered, a lump of clay without creative restraints, to be molded and reshaped anew.