Rhapsody in Turquoise

Not long ago, I walked out of a thrift store in north Fargo with $45 worth of vintage Fostoria champagne coupes for $1.50. I liked their shape, their blue-greenish color as they hid behind mismatched clear stemware. The four-stranded stem met the bowl in four delicate petals, broadening out into the bowl of the glass, the kind of shape that brings to mind the flair and bubbles of Roaring 1920s decadence, bright laughter, the brassy slide of a muted trumpet. Only in the right light did the color catch; turn it just a bit and it almost appeared clear, like I'd imagined the color. When I tapped one, it pinged like crystal.It was March, coming in like a lion, and I had bought their sister wine glasses in November, five of them for 50% off 99¢, when Replacements.com priced them at $24.99. I was surprised the three champagne glasses were still there, but what good is an odd number of stemware, especially of a style replaced by the flute decades ago? The etching of “Fostoria” is faint on the base, the color officially “turquoise,” the lightest, faintest blue-green. The pattern is Rhapsody, manufactured between 1955 and 1965. Gershwin's “Rhapsody in Blue” premiered in 1924, but it was Leonard Bernstein in 1955 who wrote: The Rhapsody is not a composition at all. It's a string of separate paragraphs stuck together. The themes are terrific, inspired, God-given. I don't think there has been such an inspired melodist on this earth since Tchaikovsky. But if you want to speak of a composer, that's another matter. Your Rhapsody in Blue is not a real composition in the sense that whatever happens in it must seem inevitable. You can cut parts of it without affecting the whole. You can remove any of these stuck-together sections and the piece still goes on as bravely as before. It can be a five-minute piece or a twelve-minute piece. And in fact, all these things are being done to it every day. And it's still the Rhapsody in Blue.What's in front of me is not a set of anything at all. It is a collection comprised of disparate moments, only called such by the completeness of the thing, not by its arrangement. A wishful connection shimmers in the turquoise iridescence of the crystal, gone when the light shifts. And I wonder what we hear as the ting of crystal evaporates with the bubbles.Ashley Hay, in her essay “Ultramarine,” writes of Australia in terms of “a place that has different shapes, different colours that mark it as special, as what it is, depending on who's telling its story. It's gum-tree shaped, ashy-green. It's desert-open, rich reds. It's inner-city, flat grey pavement. It's opportunity, gold piled up. It's dispossession, black and white.” But the color of her story is blue, the ultramarine of Sydney Harbor. “This blue that I stand and watch and fall into, running up the coast. That I crave when I'm not here. That I guzzle when I come home,” she writes. And the truth is that most liquids I pour into the Fostoria take on the turquoise of the crystal, except for the very darkest, the ginger green tea iced with frozen chunks of pineapple that I once served for brunch, the last of the L'Acadie Blanc wine from Nova Scotia on a spectacularly solo New Year's Eve.I don't drink alcohol very often. I don't like the way it makes me feel. After half a glass of wine, I feel it in the back of my thighs, a loosening of muscle that is vaguely alarming. I come from ancestral alcoholism, so I'm vigilant, probably too careful. The blue inside my Fostoria is more likely to be plain sparkling water, or sparkling water and elderflower cordial, or sparkling water and lemon syrup, than wine, but blue in the way of Hay: “It's this colour—not wide brown or sun burnt or that monotonous khaki that used to be pinned on the eucalypts: it's this colour that holds my place in its shape.” Thinking of color holding a shape, I wonder if that would look like the Rhapsody, if color in its amorphous state like glass and crystal bubbles and waves and cools into solids that hold our shape. I consider the crystal factories around the places I know well in Ireland—the Galway Crystal of the vase in my cupboard, my two Waterford vases, one purchased in Ireland, the other thrifted in Chattanooga, my parents’ twelve-setting collection of Waterford stemware, Lismore pattern—and I consider that crystal is both a color and a variant of glass, and I wonder about the movement held in that color.Once I saw a Russian photographer's work of Lake Baikal, capturing a phenomenon that caused the ice on the lake to fracture, exposing the most incredible shades of turquoise ice I have ever seen. It is the kind of color that can only be found in nature. Humans do not possess the capacity or creativity. I've seen other photographs of the most brilliant blue icebergs I will probably never experience in person, the unique color of glacial lakes high in the Cascades. When it's winter at home in Minnesota, I love most the way that light behaves when there is snow on the ground, even if the sun is not shining. Snow, nearly blue in the moonlight, makes me think of my ninety-year-old grandmother Phyllis, holding my newborn nephew, reciting the first stanza of James Russell Lowell's “The First Snowfall,” and thinking about the ways that memory refracts in our brains, the way that some things get through and others do not.The first china I bought for myself is plain winter white Noritake Derry, found at my local thrift store for $80. The tablecloth I set today is yellow linen, vintage, with the faded tag still attached when I bought it. My parents are coming for lunch. I could have kept looking, chosen a different china pattern full of color, but I wanted something that was both the absence and sum of all colors, something that would always match the rest of the table, something I could layer with other patterns if I wanted to. Thrifted china is easy enough to come by these days. Nobody wants their mother's china anymore, for many reasons, so her treasured possessions go to Goodwill when she passes away, and I think I'll take care of your memories as I carry it to the counter. Sometimes it feels like an obligation, like I can't leave this here.Maybe it's weird that as a solo, deeply introverted woman, hosting is one of my favorite sources of joy. The construction of my life outside of the cis-het norms means I have actively chosen something incredibly gendered as a hobby, that I can recognize the oddity of collecting tablecloths and egg cups. There's a style of entertaining that disappeared long before I was born, the kind that required the frilly hostess aprons my mother kept in her oven mitt drawer, the kind that required that brides register for formal china in addition to everyday housewares, the kind that was linen napkins and napkin rings. I see this kind of entertaining in the muted colors of the 1950s and 1960s, post-World War II enthusiasm and prosperity of the kind my grandparents would have enjoyed. My grandparents each grew up in Depression-era poverty, lifted from it by World War II and the GI Bill. The California Babines would have done more of this sort of entertaining when my grandfather graduated from dental school, the kind that required bar carts and specifically stocked liquor cabinets for precisely constructed cocktails to be served in very distinctly different types of glasses. They had much more disposable income, compared to today, which meant they had the time and energy for going out, for throwing elaborate dinner parties. The social world was located in the home. I imagine my grandmother Marion, tall and dark-haired and elegant, sweeping around the various clusters of people, making sure their drinks are fresh, that their appetite is teased by a canapé, taking the greatest of pleasure in knowing what her guests need before they know it themselves. There's such deep joy in that moment and I want to know it for myself.I remember the first time stemware became important, at a B&B on the Long Walk in Galway, where my hostess served us freshly squeezed orange juice in a champagne flute, then offered us a yogurt parfait with fruit and granola in a martini glass. I'd never considered using glasses for other than their intended purpose. When I returned Stateside, I made panna cotta in my stemless blue martini glasses, tipped to their side so the cream set firm at an angle, and took delight in the absolute pleasure of it, of having the right tool for my vision. Those blue martini glasses serve yogurt and fruit for breakfast as often as they hold drinks, like prosecco poured over tangerine sorbet for a twist on the mimosa, or the tall blue shot glasses that serve small portions of desserts, or the tall, narrow, cool green-blue footed glasses that most recently served Bailey's root beer floats to friends while we played a raucous game of Cards Against Humanity in my living room. I look at my shelves and wonder why it's the blue and the green that I'm so drawn to.Domestic still seems like a dirty word. Growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, domestic was to be avoided. Girly, too. It was a badge of honor among the second-wave feminists of my mother's generation to be bad at cooking, an understandable reaction to the expectations placed on our mothers and grandmothers. But I also came from a place where it was cheaper to wash the glass luncheon plates with their pretty matching cups than it was to buy paper, where one could not afford to be a bad cook and ruin food. And I keep thinking about how family life is based on the premise of a two-parent household in which one parent works and the other is in charge of the home, because taking care of a house and its occupants is a full-time job. Since most families need both parents to work, the division of labor at home doesn't change, still largely the woman's responsibility to complete, and if not, then to ask the husband to help. It's the same concept as child care—and few things make my brother in law angrier than somebody quipping that he's babysitting his own kids. No, he says sharply, it's called parenting. So why would anyone joyfully take on a second job that's unappreciated? Ironing tablecloths, hand-washing silver? No wonder cooking became such a chore. No wonder setting a table became something unnecessary. And yet, as a solo person, labor is not divided in my house and dishes often pile up on the counter. I go a long time between dustings. If I don't do it, it doesn't get done. For too many women in relationships, they could say the same.Formality, too, seems to invite its own backlash, a suspicion of it as cold, old-fashioned, alienating, something that requires inside knowledge and fussy details that don't mean anything important in the larger scheme, the way we watch Downton Abbey or The Crown and marvel at the opulence of the tables, the luxury, the sparkle of tiaras and crystal we have no experience with. Who cares where the fork goes? Is it true that when the queen is done eating, everybody is done? And what's with the ladies and gentlemen separating after dinner? I have dreams of hosting meals and referring to the Noritake and the Fostoria by name, as if they are guests at the table, and there are the simple pleasures of setting the table and friends walking in the door after being separated by the pandemic for a year and saying, “Oh, good, I hoped you'd do this!”I like the combinations of Fostoria turquoise against the Noritake white, the contrast or texture of the linens. I like how the choice can either be soothing and calm, or bright and energetic.Who cares about the fancy and the expensive and the rarified when what matters is that we're together?The answer is that I don't know. I'm past forty now, intentionally solo and childfree, and somehow I've been constructing my home life with someone else's history, because the history I'm constructing in my own life is not communal, not shared by anyone. I sleep on my grandparents’ bedroom set from 1948, I eat at the table given to them when they married. I play my mother's piano. I eat on dishes with provenance I don't know, cast iron that I don't imagine someone gave up willingly. I hung up vintage botanical prints in the bathroom last week. On the back of one of them, it says Mother's Day 1943, something I intend never to experience myself.There's such a stigma of selfishness and avarice to acquisition and accumulation, something about minimalism somehow making our Puritan ancestors proud. But what's wrong with beauty? Comfort? What am I doing here in my home, drinking something lovely out of the Fostoria, surrounding myself in ancestral memories, even if they're not mine? Is that enough?Marion's Blue Chip Stamp glasses are clear, a long etched swirl around the bowl of the glasses with marquise-shaped etchings as punctuation to the story of scraping and collecting Blue Chip Stamps to buy something pretty in the midst of small children, a husband in dental school, and Marion herself as the sole breadwinner. Marion had standards, passed down from her father's English family, but in the early years of her marriage, she couldn't afford any of the things that, to her, made not just a home, but a life—and the right kind of life. And how do you make that kind of life when you don't have the money for it? I had ten dollars to spend on pretty turquoise crystal that day in Fargo—and I remember the story of my great-grandmother Florence, who, during the Depression, bought five kitchen chairs for their kitchen table at an auction one day and this nearly caused a divorce because they didn't have five dollars for chairs, as the story goes. I think about this as I pull out one of those chairs and pour myself a cup of tea at that table. I may pull up eBay to check to see if any Fostoria comes up that I can afford to fill out my set, and though I know that I can't justify the expense right now, I still look.My two younger sisters and I divided the family china when were still teenagers, so there would be no fighting whenever the time came. We were annoyingly practical children. Ownership was not the term we liked; guardianship seemed more appropriate. There are three sets of family china and three of us, so it made sense at the time. We each got our first choice. Kristi wanted Gram's, the pattern so floral and 1940s. Kim wanted Mom's German set, the pink roses of the Ostfriesland Rose bright and cheerful. I wanted Mom's blue-flowered Noritake Marywood, sedate in its elegant blue flowers around the rim of the plate. And yet I bought my own white Noritake not too long ago, because it would be decades before the Marywood would come to me. My aunt offered Marion's wedding china with its overblown roses and they were so beyond my own taste that even though I should want to inherit them, I turned them down. But they certainly suited my grandmother. The day Google told me that china manufactured after 1979 could go in the dishwasher was a beautiful day.Since Kristi had Gram's china, she also took Gram's fragile glass stemware. Kim took the Waterford. Nobody ever used Marion's stemware, so our family inherited it long before she died, and so I took them. I also inherited her Blue Stamp glasses, which included the squat glasses, the tiny cordial glasses, and the water glasses, simple and wonderful and very useful. They're sturdy enough for the kids to handle, and dishwasher safe, so they're what we pull from the shelf for occasions that require a bit more attention than the everyday. At Christmas, Kim fills them with our choice of her cranberry-lime-bourbon punch or Bloody Mary for us to drink while we open presents.It's too fragile, we say, though neither of my grandmothers would have advocated saving such things for special occasions, to collect dust. If they break, that means you are using them as they are meant to be used. We use the china, but we ignore the crystal, which is stronger than the glasses we use for everyday. Now, in my house, Marion's stemware and Blue Stamp glasses sit next to the Rhapsody, the green and maroon glasses I bought in Rothenburg, the sturdy glass Williams Sonoma Vert that I can toss in the dishwasher. We tend to equate strength with size, with heft. And we are often wrong.But it makes me wonder about pleasure, how we construct and value pleasure, and how have we become suspicious of the pleasure that comes from the fineness of things? It makes me wonder about private versus communal pleasure, this question of whether I, as an intentionally solo woman, can justify all these dishes, all this glassware, the tablecloths, the napkin rings, and the dust they're going to collect, the family they're not going to feed or the holiday traditions they're not going to set, if the only person who uses them is me? I remember my grandmother Phyllis losing her teaching job in 1948 when she married, because it wasn't fair for her to take away the salary a man could use to support his family. Is afternoon tea in any of my great-grandmother's teacups any less valid for not being shared? So much of the concept of dishware, of china, of entertaining, is based outward, to present an image of oneself to the world, to others, as a validation of a particular kind of adulthood. Of being raised right. As a solo woman, I don't get the automatic societal ascension to being an adult that comes with Clarke's Trumpet Voluntary. Even in my thirties, I was still placed at the kids’ table when we visited the California Grandparents.There's a material reward for permanent partnership, from registries to tax breaks, and I wonder about all this beautiful dishware I find at Goodwill, the remnants of relationship models set by people who couldn't split due to the era, religion, money, or threat. There was no registry for adulthood for me, no milestone gifts from family-strangers, as if people who don't marry don't have milestones worth celebrating in such a fashion, so my parents and sisters decided to treat my PhD as the same; they bought me a cobalt blue Kitchenaid mixer.In my mother's china hutch, the Amish oak stained natural-gold enough to glow when the morning sun hits it right, bought for their 25th anniversary, she displays her blue-flowered Noritake wedding china and the pink Ostfriesland Rose that comes from Germany. The Waterford Lismore stemware that Kim will inherit one day fractures the light into a thousand unnamable colors.After Kim bought her first house, I told her that it looked like a grandparents’ house. She looked at me out of changeable blue-green eyes that matched my own, shared by Kristi, a greener color than the true sapphire of our mother's eyes, and asked, in a very careful tone, what I meant by that, her inflection not sure if it was an insult, and I said that it looked lived in, like it had a history to it, like there was a story already here that she was simply stepping into. It's her space and it's new, but it feels like I have always known it. It's the kind of house I could imagine hosted the boss and his wife for dinner in 1955, bright cocktail parties with friends to ring in the New Year 1962, the ting of crystal and the echo of laughter.When I bought my first home, my dad walked in, looked around and told me, oh, yeah. This is Karen's house. That simple sentence brought me more pleasure than I anticipated.At some point, I realized I was tired of being surrounded by things that reminded me that my life was temporary, that I was waiting for something, and I don't mean whether I lived in an apartment or house or my parents’ basement. My everyday plates and bowls came from Target fifteen years ago and I didn't like them very much—I bought them because I had my first job and I could afford new things, the first time I chose a thing for myself. But the Fostoria is a moment where I finally wanted to invest in a future and it was a moment where the pieces of my constructed life I had been collecting started to come together in my mind. Just because I wasn't married and didn't intend to be didn't mean I couldn't have the nice things married people did. I didn't have to settle. When I needed to replace my terrible stove, I bought the one with all the bells and whistles after arguing with myself about buying the cheapest option, because my soul seems forged in the Great Depression. Buy it once and buy it right, I could hear my grandparents say. I could use the money I'd saved to have a thing that would bring me joy. I didn't have to be unhappy with something I didn't want, that wouldn't bake the things I wanted to bake. That was more revolutionary than it should have been, because pleasure remains complicated for solo people.The Fostoria Rhapsody—and later all the rest of the thrifted blue that came to bring color to my home—played into that. I can't afford these things if I find them new, and I can't afford to replace them if they break, but hunt a thrift store long enough, and things appear. Sometimes I'm looking for them, and sometimes a set of 1940s Homer Laughlin, Marcia pattern, will stop me in my tracks, the dusty blue glaze, the white flowers and elaborate absolute perfection. I will leave it on the shelf, regret it, come back, and it's gone. Or the deep teal-blue-green of the Royal Doulton Vista, manufactured between 1955 and 1959, three place settings for $12.99, and they have some nice heft, and I don't feel like I'm going to snap them in half. I bring them home, make Raspberry Zinger in my white McCoy teapot and used the teal teacup for afternoon tea, the pink of the tea dramatic against the blue-green, a lovely complement to the Art Deco shape of the McCoy. The afternoon is dark with impending rain and I like the sturdy feel of the cup in my hand, the smoothness of the rim against my lip. There's something about this that feels absolutely timeless, but perfectly midcentury, perfectly at home here in my house in this moment. I'm making memories, but nobody shares them, and maybe that's part of the appeal, the trappings of adulthood that mattered to my mother and grandmothers, the permanence of things meant to last generations, and I wonder about creating those memories that stop with me.Then came the bright day I filled out the rest of the Fostoria. I audibly gasped, loud enough for the woman standing next to me to laugh.That's a good sound!It was. I stared at the shelf. This is my crystal, I said, deeply awed. It's $25 a stem on Replacements, but it's really rare.She grinned at me, that kind of knowing between people who thrift.Twelve wine glasses, twelve coupe glasses, twelve cordial glasses. Each 99¢. I gasped again, my blood filling with bubbles that went beyond delight straight into glee. I drove home, making a mental note to tell my family that if something ever happened to me, they should sell my dishes, not to thrift them. I had $500 worth of crystal in my back seat.My mother, in her last months of cancer, lay on the couch and let me have my delight. What do you do with the tiny glasses? I asked her. She shook her head. She'd never seen them used.A few weeks later, my friend gave me apples from his in-law's antique orchard, Chestnut Crabs and Sweet 16s and Luscious Pears that lived up to their exalted name. The Chestnut Crabs were headed toward wormy, deeply bruised, so I decided to cider them with a borrowed juicer. My mother's parents managed an apple orchard in the 1960s, so apples were a part of my mother's childhood memories, and mine of making apple pies with my grandmother. There wasn't much that Phyllis didn't know about apples and I wish I could have shared these with her. The cider that the Chestnut Crabs produced was deep, deep brown and because I didn't have many apples, there wasn't much of it, so I poured it into two of the Fostoria cordial glasses and brought one to my mother.My mother closed her eyes and inhaled delicately, then took a dainty sip. “It tastes like Jefferson Street,” my mother said quietly, “like the laundry room in the basement and the chest freezer filled with half gallon containers that my mother got from the local dairy, filled with all that juice from the cider squeezing party at the orchard in the fall.”“It doesn't even taste like apples,” I said, lifting the small glass to the afternoon sun.“No,” my mother said. “It tastes like something else entirely.”