CUT DIAMONDS / JILL VEADER
i. clarity
When a diamond is cut perfectly, the light will travel through it without any refraction, leaving only a sparkling, pure carbon gem. Most diamonds—in your earrings, your wedding band, a tennis bracelet—are flawed in some way; small imperfections that only a trained eye is able to notice. My father is one of those trained eyes, somebody that can spot a flaw in a gemstone a mile away. No matter how beautiful it appears, the stone will be devalued, the price lowered. A truly perfect diamond is among the most rare and expensive gemstones in the world.
As a child, I accompanied my father to work at his jewelry store every chance I got. I used foaming glass cleaner and a rag to polish the showcases; I vacuumed and swept the showroom; as I got older, he taught me how to change a watch battery, using small tweezers and showing me which gears were the most delicate, and not to be touched. I played endless games of operation, not with a board game, but with Timex and Seiko.
Sometimes, customers would joke with my father. “She’s taking over the family business, Rich?” Most times he would just laugh—hopefully, he said, but you never know. She needs to find her own path.
ii. fruit
My junior year of college, I dated a boy whose parents owned a wine shop. I frequented his house which was less than five minutes from mine, if I took the side streets. Ian’s house was different from my own—it felt more lived-in, unlike my own house which sometimes felt more like a museum personally curated by my mother. There was also drinking; not like the drinking I’d heard about—the kind that destroyed much of my mother’s family—but a kind that was merry and social. As I fell in love with Ian, I also fell in love with wine.
Ian’s father John began teaching me about where the grapes were grown, how they were fermented, and about the wineries they came from, many of which he’d visited. “Remember, drinking is fun,” he’d say, “but tasting is work.” Almost every night that summer, I was at his house, tasting three and four and five different wines a night. Eventually, when I began to show the slightest hint of promise, they offered me a job, and I eagerly left my position at the local grocery store to work quietly in the little shop nearby.
I became submerged in learning, like a foreign language student plopped into a new country. I remembered regular customers and their preferences, and made sales to new ones; I kept inventory and priced beers and wines as they came in; soon, I opened the store in the morning and ran it, alone, until the afternoon when John would come in. Some days he’d arrive with fifty munchkins in tow—just chocolate and glazed—and once in a while he’d treat us with a greasy, delicious grilled cheese from Starbucks that we would split down the middle and wash down with a huge iced coffee. Every morning, we sat silently and did the crossword puzzle—me with a pencil, John with black ink.
I hardly spoke to my own father. By now he was worn down from years of fighting with my mother, switching between lives with her and without her. He was no longer the handsome, sharp, witty man that raised me. He became withered, depressed, taking less and less interest in his own business and more in his television set and armchair. I began sacrificing time at my own dinner table, often quiet and judgmental, the sounds of scraping knives across glass plates louder than any conversation, for the merriment and safety of Ian’s.
iii. color
What makes a wine great is not its price tag—it’s the genuine care that a winemaker puts into it. Grapes are plants, which can either be grown in massive, impersonal quantities like soybeans and corn, or like roses, tended to and fussed over to the point of insanity. Sometimes, it’s in a rose’s best interest to cut off her vines; the rose, lacking wisdom, fights back with its thorns, but never prevails.
The Wine Business, I began to learn, is not at all too different from the Jewelry Business. A customer walks in cold, and you know nothing—whether they’re looking for an engagement ring, or champagne, or a watch band, or what they’re having for dinner. The aim, I learned, is to match each customer to something they will believe was made especially for them, suited to their specific tastes and needs like a tailored suit made to order. I matched people with wine like my father could pick a gemstone out of a pile of one hundred—just by looking at someone, really paying attention to them, for a few minutes. The match is instantaneous, and trust is built.
My father keeps giving my mother the same thing for her birthday every year—New Year’s Eve. It’s always beautiful—a gorgeous tennis bracelet, a diamond earring, a gold necklace. But none of it, I saw, was like what she wore every day. None of it matched her. She always wore it, but it never shined, like a crisp white wine paired with a bloody steak.
iv. tannin
Once, I piled in the car with Ian’s parents to attend a show Ian was playing with his music program at UMass. I sat in the backseat of the car. The sun was setting, and the car sang its highway hum as we went up I-495 toward Lowell. We chatted quietly, and as we drove, I began receding into a child I’d forgotten; a child I’d known; a child I never thought I could be again. I did not feel carsick.
My father is good at many things. He has a black belt in karate; he used to scuba dive, everywhere from Rockport to Aruba; he can fish, garden, and fix things; he taught me how to play the guitar. He is also very good at seeing the worst in everything—the car, the lawn, his customers, his wife.
My mother is a diamond. She is expertly cut, shines with clarity and brilliance, filled with the carbon and fire of the core of the earth. She is flawed. My father, an appraiser, loop in hand, pen in the other. She will only be seen with what she lacks—bad weather in the harvest season, tannins with no fruit.
JILL VEADER / NORTH READING, MA
Jill Veader is a recent graduate of the nine-to-five machine and is terrified of order, The Man, and her own mind, particularly at night, when she has the most ideas and the least energy. Nothingness is the only satiation for the Everythingness of life. Her ego is fed only with the knowledge that when she is dust in the wind, somebody may accidentally stumble upon a surviving line or two and think, she must’ve been kind of a weirdo.