moments, Ted sputtered, indignant and confused. Then he snatched up his suitcase and walked away. I was close on his heels, my stomach fizzing like freshly poured soda. I had that slightly sick feeling I got whenever an Experiment went on, but I was giddy, too. Ted would not be leaving.
“You can interview me if you want,” I chirped from behind him. “I saw the whole thing.”
He turned to look at me right before we reached the door of the house. Our house.
“Hmm,” he considered. “That’s not what I wanted, but—I suppose that might work. Tell me, Fern, were you scared? When I said I was leaving? When Mara threw the pottery?”
I took stock of my feelings for the first time since he made his suitcase confession. The specific things he mentioned—they hadn’t surprised me. Ted was temporary. Mara had a flare for the dramatic (“Artists!” Ted always complained). But if I peeled back my lack of surprise, looked under its calm veneer, did I see something dark and swirling? Maybe. Maybe. Yes. If Ted left, there’d be no one to notice me anymore. I’d slip unseen into the fabric of the house. Become only wallpaper or furniture. Something that Mara forgot was there until she bumped right into it. Oh. Excuse me, dear. I didn’t see you.
When Ted spoke to me, when he asked me question after question, typing up my answers with his long, jabbing fingers, I knew I was real. The spindles of the interview chair hurt my back, left vertical impressions on my skin, but the pain did what pain does: it let me know I was alive.
“Yes,” I told him. “I was so scared.”
Ted’s eyes glittered. Like Mara’s had as she looked at her pottery on the floor. “Excellent,” he said. “You’re a very good girl. You know that, Fern?”
I smiled up at him. Shrugged.
I was a good girl. Not furniture. Not wallpaper. But girl.
* * *
I’ve only been packing up Mara’s photographs for a minute when I pause to flip through them. They’re all a part of the same series: Exquisite Fragments. The end result of Mara’s Break Room rage.
After that first time, she retreated into her Break Room whenever Ted made her angry. She smashed up some of her pottery. Glued down pieces where they landed. Even the tiny shards. Then she photographed the room from different angles, focusing on the scattered patterns, the random mix of colors, always finding new ways to explore and exploit the brokenness all around her.
The photos turned out beautiful. In the one I’m holding, there are fragments glued onto other fragments. A close-up of glossy cobalt over a deep matte red. The concrete beneath is barely visible, and there’s a splotch of something on the shining blue that looks like dried blood. I’m not surprised to see it. Mara always worked barefoot. The floor became jagged and sharp.
The series received just local attention at first. But then a man from a New York gallery saw the photos while on a “quaint New Hampshire vacation” and he signed her on for two shows in the city, in back-to-back seasons. He told her what he was offering her was unheard of, but that what she’d created was extraordinary. He raised a fist in the air to emphasize the word. He wore an orange suit. “Artists,” Ted grumbled.
The New York shows didn’t catapult Mara to stardom, but they did enough to sell her work and guarantee her a spot, in perpetuity, in any New Hampshire gallery—which is all she wanted in the first place.
“What are those?” Ted asks. He’s just come out of Mara’s closet-sized darkroom, carrying a box. He juts his chin toward the photographs.
“Exquisite Fragments,” I say.
“Oh. Did you want a trash bag for those?”
I ignore the comment. Ted hates that Mara channeled her emotions into smashing and gluing. Hates that she closed the Break Room door and kept her explosions private. I could have worked with that, I heard him tell her once. Think of the research you’ve deprived me of. Just beneath anger is fear, Mara. You know this. Beneath every single feeling is fear!
“Hey, look,” he says to me. “Now these I liked.”
He’s opened a drawer beneath the work counter and is holding a yellow bowl. I recognize it instantly. Part of a pottery series in which all the pieces could be used as instruments. Mara rimmed each one with bronze, and when you struck it, a distinctive sound rang out, halfway between a ping