We Shape Our Lives Like Clay
1520.06.19
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| Written By: Deirdre M. Murphy (Writer) |
| Fleitamelo grounded her daughter for playing on the wharves, then decided it's time for a private conversation with her. |
| Posted: 05/11/10 [No comments yet]
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Characters Featured: Arremina sat rebelliously with her mother, Fleitamelo, in Fleita’s studio. It was a weekend; all of Fleita’s employees were out somewhere, with their families or doing errands or enjoying the beautiful day.
Arremina looked longingly out the window, and Fleita’s heart ached for her. She knew how much joy her daughter got from wandering the city with her friends. And she knew Arremina didn’t understand why her mother had forbidden her to go to the wharfs, or grounded her after she did. How could she?
But this morning, Fleita had not been able to face sitting with her daughter at home; she’d brought her to the studio, where Fleita, at least, would find some comfort, smiling and making an inane comment about mother-daughter time, all the while knowing it all—the events leading to grounding Arremina as well as hiding in the studio—was the result of her own cowardice. When they arrived at the studio, Fleita had given her daughter the best she had—fine clay and a spinning wheel, hoping to cushion her feelings.
Now she watched Arremina fiddle with the clay on the potter’s wheel in front of her, her long blond hair—so unlike Fleita’s black, curly mop—drifting around her shoulders in the breeze from the window. They were so different physically. Fleita was small and dark-skinned, with stunning high cheek bones and flashing black eyes; Arremina had pale skin, almost blond hair, and sparkling brown eyes. At ten, Arremina was already a hand-span taller. And unlike Fleita, she already had to watch how many sweets she ate to avoid looking pudgy.
But most important, Fleitamelo was indifferent to the outdoors, and didn’t enjoy the activities her daughter loved the most—running, jumping, climbing, wrestling, and swimming. Her hands anchored in the clay on her wheel, she opened the nascent vase up as if she were trying to expand her courage.
Halfheartedly, Arremina played with the clay, pulling up a slightly lopsided, tall vase on the wheel. No matter how hard she tried, her most careful efforts never looked half as good as Fleita’s effortless quickies. Angrily, she poked at it, waching it collapse into chaos, a bit of wet clay flying off to smack her mother in the face. “Oops.”
Fleita sighed, and reached for a towel. “At least you missed my vase.” She continued to look at her blonde, big-boned daughter. Even as an infant, Fleita had needed to joke that Arremina took after the unknown traveler who’d sired her. And as she matured, her face grew more heart-shaped, so she looked more and more like—Fleita sighed. She wanted to wait, but her heart said it was time, before the girl grew intractably angry at rules that made no sense to her. “Arremina,”
“No.”
“No?”
“You don’t understand. No amount of clay or pigments or glazes will make me happy to be here.”
“You’re right.”
Arremina raised big, brown eyes to her mother in surprise.
“But that’s not what I was going to say.”
Arremina frowned. “I don’t want to be lectured on the importance of staying in our neighborhood again either.”
Fleita smiled sadly. “That’s not what I was going to say either. Though it’s related.”
“Then I don’t want to hear it.”
Fleita nodded, and returned to her vase, shaping the lip and adding a graceful spiral around it. She cut it loose and carefully set it on a shelf to dry, then started another one. She finished it, cut it loose, and reached for a new lump of clay.
It took time, but inevitably the girl’s curiosity overcame her anger. “What, then?”
Fleita let her wheel spin down to stillness, though the newest vase would crack if she let the clay get dry before she opened it outward into an attractive shape. “I need to tell you,” she paused, uncertain what phrasing to use. “I want to tell you about your birth.”
“Ugh. We learned about that stuff in school. I don’t need any more detail.”
“No, not the biology of it. Something specific to you. And me. And—“
Suddenly eager, Arremina looked up. “My father? Are you finally ready to tell me about my father?” Arremina knew her mother was a very private person, but she was tired of waiting to hear about the man who’d left her mother pregnant.
Fleita shook her head, regretfully. “I really know very little about him.” She should have asked for more information, but it hadn’t seemed important at the time.
“That’s what you always say! But how could you—“ Arremina blushed. “I mean, some people might, but you—you wouldn’t, not unless you knew somebody well enough to trust them. Would you?”
It wasn’t the ideal opening, but she would take what she could get right now. “You’re right. I didn’t.”
“You—“
She saw the dawning horror in her daughter’s eyes, and added quickly, “I never met him.”
“But then, how—?” Arremina looked down at herself, then over at Fleita. “I’m not adopted. If I were, it would be on my license. Like my friend Mlamenai.”
“Your licenses are…not exactly accurate.”
“I have forged licenses?” Arremina gaped at Fleita.
“No, no. There was just…a small irregularity in filling out the forms.”
“A—what small irregularity?”
“You were—“ Fleita knew it would be hard to say, but it was worse than she expected. “You were carried by another woman.”
“Putting the wrong mother’s name on the forms is not a small irregularity!” Arremina started spinning the wheel in front of her with her foot, and reached for the clay, wanting something besides her mother’s—Fleitamelo’s—face to look at. She was too stunned to fidget, and the clay developed a perfectly symmetrical shape.
Fleita kept talking, desperately wanting her daughter to understand what she’d—they’d—done. “I was married, back then, for five years, with a license for a child the whole time, but didn’t have a child, only miscarriages—seven in five years. I was terribly sad, and exhausted. Nlalanuti blamed me, and had our marriage license dissolved. But I still had the child license, and some money. Just no friends, no husband, and no children.
"I took sail on a ship as a passenger, right after the divorce, hoping that the change of scenery would cheer me up. I didn’t know I was pregnant again; the waves made me horribly sick. Then a storm blew us off course. When the ship found land, it only was a small island populated by purists, weeks of travel from any civilized port. But I couldn’t even keep water down, and the captain feared for my life if I attempted to continue to travel while pregnant. He insisted I stay on the island until the infant was old enough to travel, and promised to return for me. I begged not to be left alone with the strange purists, and a young woman in the crew volunteered to stay with me, though it would be half a year at least, and she would have to find a new berth afterward.
“I didn’t know her, then. She’s a sailor, and very good at it. She was a Junior in the Cartage Guild, and was hired onto a ship whose first mate didn’t like women. Or rather, he liked women, but just as joy partners, not as co-workers. Her career was stalled, and making the sacrifice to care for me would look good on her record while freeing her to find a ship where her skills could be better appreciated. After the ship had sailed, I learned that she was also pregnant, though she had no licenses for it.”
While she spoke, she watched Arremina’s hands on the clay. The girl hardly moved, except to kick her foot against the pedal nervously, and, very slowly, a bowl was taking shape.
Fleita continued. “We became friends then, the only two civilized, licensed people on the whole island. She’d become pregnant despite taking precautions. It happens sometimes, and the woman has to pay fines or terminate the pregnancy. But there was no one on the island to provide proper medical care, so she couldn’t terminate. She laughed, said she was just as glad—here, her child could at least have some kind of life.
“We went into labor together, and her child was born, a healthy girl. More than a day later, my child was born dead. I—I don’t remember the next few days. What I remember is waking up one beautiful sunny day with a baby suckling, and staring up into my face with love in her beautiful brown eyes.”
Arremina looked up. “Me?”
Fleita smiled, remembering that first joyous moment. “Yes, you. Her ship was due soon, and Ir—your birth mother—could not still be producing milk when that happened. If it became known that she had born a child without the proper licenses, she feared it would give those on her former ship an excuse to make a complaint, and she would lose her sailing license. She loved the sea, and was very good at her profession. On a different ship, one with a mate that didn’t undercut her, she might have made Senior already.”
Fleita started her wheel turning again, and wet her hands, not yet trying to shape the vase in front of her, just getting it wet again. “And the purist women thought a babe would heal my heart.”
Arremina looked up. “It worked, didn’t it?” Her voice was softer.
Fleita nodded, not trusting her voice. “I—I called you Arre, after a fruit we both ate on the island, before you were born. But then—when she’d been hired by the ship that came for us, month later than expected, and not the same ship as the one that left us there—I went alone to the licensing office to get you licensed as my own child, and formally named you Arremina, to honor her.” She pressed her fingers against the clay, starting to shape it.
“You mean I’m not licensed?”
“Of course you are! I told you, I had a child license, from before Nlalanuti divorced me for infertility. It hadn’t expired. And I paid the fines for being unmarried and for listing the father as unknown.” And lost Nlal’s friendship for being able to have a child with someone else. But that wasn’t the girl’s burden. “There’s just the one tiny irregularity. And so long as no one knows—“
“You mean I could end up in an orphanage?”
“No. At least, I’m pretty sure not. All of your fees were paid, even if they were paid by the wrong person. I didn’t actually lie to them, you know. I told them I’d been pregnant, had a hard labor, and woke up with you in my arms.”
“So—I’m safe?”
“If you looked like me, no one would ever question. But the older you get, the more you look like her. Your hair is blond, but only a shade paler than the sun streaks in her hair. You have the same eyes, the same dimple in your cheeks when you smile, the same bold way of walking and staring strangers in the face. And, thanks to my foolishness, almost the same name. She stopped visiting when you were a toddler, because so many people mistook you for her child even then. And now she’s a captain. All the port officials know her. And she has rivals in the guild, who would love an excuse to get her in trouble.”
Fleita slowed the wheel and trailed her fingers up the vase, marking it in an irregular vine-like pattern. She picked up a tool and started the intricate process of drawing leaves into the clay. It gave her an excuse not to look her daughter in the eye. “There’s money in an account in your name. I think there’s enough to pay any fees you might incur, and to provide for your upkeep until you would be allowed to support yourself, if people ever found out.”
“If—“ Arremina looked at her mother in dawning horror. “But what about you?”
Fleita waved a hand vaguely, then picked up a lump of clay and started to knead it nervously. The rest of her money was in the studio, and their home. “I could get in big trouble for providing false information to the licensing bureau. And my friend too. At the very least, there would be fines. Big ones. It’s possible we could lose all our licenses. And you’re not old enough to live on your own, yet.”
“You could—they could make you a purist? Mom, you could lose everything!”
Fleita nodded. “I—I think I’d have died there, on that island, without you.”
“Of a broken heart?” Arremina scoffed.
Fleita only nodded again.
Arremina hit the bowl she’d made, destroying its symmetry. “You had no right!” The clay slumped gracefully downward.
“No right to do what?”
“No right to mess up my life like that.”
“No right to keep you from being raised as a purist on a lonely island? Or did you mean no right to keep you with me, instead of being placed in an orphanage as an infant, knowing we’d never see each other again?” Fleita laid down the unformed clay and stepped over to her daughter’s spinning wheel, where she very carefully cut the collapsed bowl loose and set it on the drying rack.
“That bowl’s no good.”
“It was the best bowl you ever made, until you reshaped it with an angry gesture.” She picked up another ball of clay and put it on the wheel. “Our lives are like this clay.”
“That’s dumb!”
Fleita ignored her, and kept working the clay. “When all goes well, you can follow the rules and have a perfectly symmetrical life.” With a lightning move, she poked a hole in the vase she was working on. The vase collapsed into a shapeless blob. “But one flaw in the material, or one mistake, and then what?”
She pushed the blob into a ball, and started shaping a new vase. “You’re right, our lives are not like clay. With clay, you can start over. With life—you live with the results of your mistakes all your life. I don’t blame you for being angry. I didn’t—there are so many things I didn’t understand until after I’d become a mother. If you want to get rid of me, you can go to any license official and complain. Being the complaining victim and having money should protect you from the worst consequences of telling people.”
“But I’d lose you!” Arremina wailed.
Fleita opened her arms. “I’m not going anywhere, unless you want me to.”
Arremina hugged herself, frowning, and Fleita turned back to the vase on her daughter’s wheel. Suddenly, Arremina hugged her from behind. She turned and hugged her back. After a while, the girl sighed. “I guess I should stay away from the wharves.”
She sounded so sad.
Fleita ran her hand down the long, straight hair. “If you—if you want to explore, or need to explore, just go inland. Away from the sea.”
“I—I understand now.” Arremina fiddled with the foot pedal, then raised her hand and touched a fingernail to the pot Fleita had made there, adding an irregular, wave-like pattern where it was widest. The sea was beautiful and deadly and called to Arremina like a song in her blood. But if the sea was beautiful, so were the mountains. “Mom, you know that rock climbing class I mentioned last week?”
“But rock climbing is so dangerous!”
“It’s also an hour’s rail ride inland.”
Slowly, Fleita nodded, but she clutched the girl tight, not ready to let go.
“Ow?”
Fleita loosened her grip. “Sorry. Get me the information about the class, we’ll fill out any license applications needed, and I’ll pay the fees. If—If you want to go play now, that’s all right too.”
Arremina smiled, and Fleita felt her spirits lift. “I—can I try to do another perfect bowl first? Before I hit it, it was amazing. And I hardly moved my hands while it was spinning. Is that the trick?”
Fleita thought about the first things she’d made, decades ago, and how much more slowly she’d had to do things to get a decent result. “It’s the first one, anyway.”
She cut the vase from the wheel and handed her daughter a new lump of wet clay. Then she returned to her own wheel.
They were silent for a while, Fleita carving more intricate leaves into the surface of her vase and Arremina very, very slowly making a bowl. After a time, Arremina pulled her hands away and let the wheel spin down. “I can do it on purpose!” she said, something like awe in her voice.
“It’s beautiful.” Fleita smiled, blinking back tears.
“I’ll go play now, if that’s all right. And I’ll get the papers for that class!”
Smiling, Fleitamelo watched her daughter run nimbly between the tables, shelves, and potters’ wheels and out into the sunshine, then grabbed a clean rag to wipe the tears out of her eyes.
The door swung open again and Arremina popped her head into the studio again. “Mom, what do you think I’d look like if I dyed my hair black?” View/Add/Edit CommentsAuthor's NotesThis was inspired by two of Ellen's prompts during the third Muse Fusion; she wanted a story that shows what it's like to be a southern child and also to see more of Iremina. In response, I wrote a story where we see a bit of both through the eyes of my protagonist. See also:
Licensing in the Empire
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