Chapter 3
A WEEK AFTER HAMBURGER HILL WITH HENRY and the other cater-waiters, we had Friday off school for a teacher in-service day.
I slept until eight-thirty, then pulled a sweatshirt on over my pajamas and headed out to the hot shop to fire up the furnace.
Things had grown nice and toasty a few hours later, and by noon, the glass was ready for me to work.
Some people might say glassblowing was a niche art form, and they weren’t wrong… but if you really thought about it, glass was all around us. The glasses we drank out of, the vases my mother arranged flowers in, and even ornaments on a Christmas tree. It was everywhere.
My eyes had been opened three years ago, when my family had moved from Philadelphia to Vienna for my dad’s job.
After school one day, I’d been exploring, not ready to face my mom at home yet, and stumbled upon a glasswork gallery.
And I just felt this tug; before I knew it, I’d seemingly teleported inside and was admiring a sculpture of a bird about to take flight from its nest. It was robin’s-egg blue with silver-gold-tipped wings and shiny ebony eyes, both beautiful and whimsical, and I resisted the urge to touch the nest. How could the thin twigs and dried grass be glass? They were so lifelike.
“Kann ich Ihnen helfen?” someone said, and I turned to see a woman standing behind me. Streaks of silver shot through her curly brown hair and she had what looked like an oversized pair of tweezers tattooed on her arm.
“Es tut mir Leid.” I winced at my pronunciation. I was getting better at reading German, but my conversational skills were terrible. “Ich spreche… kein Deutsch.”
“Ah.” She waved her hand in a no-worries manner. “May I help you with anything?” she asked again, this time in accented English.
“Oh, no, not really.” I shook my head and smiled. “Just curious.”
Bemused, she tilted her head. “About?”
I pointed at the bird. “It’s incredible.”
“Thank you,” she said. “Although I disagree.” She chuckled. “I worked very hard, but it’s not my best.”
“No way.” I gawked. “How… ?”
The artist gestured to the far side of the gallery. “My hot shop is back there. Would you like to see?”
And there was that strong pull again. I found myself nodding and stepping forward before fully computing the question.
Emilia, glassblower extraordinaire, became my mentor for the next nine months.
She taught me how to gather glass from the furnace with a long blowpipe by dipping it into the molten mixture and swirling until the tip was coated enough that it looked like a glowing honeycomb.
She taught me how to blow into the hollow pipe, to create the bubble I’d sculpt with various tools.
I quickly realized her forearm tattoo was a pair of jacks, steel tongs used to both warp and control the shape of the glass.
“Play with it for a moment,” Emilia said after I’d blown my first small bubble, and as I poked, prodded, twisted, and stretched the glass with the jacks, I couldn’t believe how much it felt like taffy.
Emilia’s sculptures were considered conceptual, but my education was strictly production glasswork.
To strengthen my lungs, I blew bubble after bubble until I had a collection of marbles, and eventually, after blowing ornaments, Emilia promoted me to cups.
“This will teach you how to use all the tools and perfect many techniques,” she’d said after my shoulders slumped (at the time, all I wanted to do was sculpt pretty birds like hers).
Ironically, I fell in love with production glasswork.
Emilia had been right: It involved both technique and repetition—or, more accurately, repetition that improved my technique.
Cups fascinated me. No matter how simple they seemed or how many I made, each one presented a challenge.
I felt like each and every one of my brain cells dialed in whenever I blew one, ready and eager to hone my skills.
Emilia and I shared photos of our work and kept in touch via WhatsApp, and I’d stopped by her hot shop when I visited Vienna for Christmas. But I missed spending hours there after school. Saturdays with Nico in Brooklyn weren’t the same.
I wanted to be in the thick of it again. It was the only way I was going to get where I wanted to go.
Today I felt scatterbrained, anxious about my parents jetting off for France, so I decided to center myself by blowing a cup.
The tuition deadline for the Blue Ridge fellowship was looming (as in, the day after tomorrow), so I needed to talk to my parents about my Master Plan, and I couldn’t be all over the place when I did.
My dream for the future was too important to express through word vomit.
By now, the repetition of glassblowing almost felt like a form of meditation.
First, I heated my blowpipe until its tip turned a dull cherry red, and then I quickly moved to quench it in a nearby bucket of water.
The hissing steam was so satisfying. “What are you doing?” Ellie had sputtered the first time she saw me quench, and I’d explained that the water rid the pipe of any surface bubbles.
Henry, naturally, had deduced that on his own.
“I like to think of it as sanitizing a needle with alcohol,” he’d said.
Next came the first gather, the first layer of glass.
I rested my pipe on the yoke—the V-shaped apparatus in front of the furnace—and spun until I had enough liquid glass for a bubble.
Right next to the furnace was the marver, which helped shape glass.
Instead of a professional one, mine was totally DIY: an old restaurant cart that I’d salvaged by refurbishing the top with a flat slab of steel.
I rolled the glowing honeycomb against the cool metal, rounding it out.
The movement was mesmerizing—almost soothing.
But before I could grow too zen, I raised the pipe to my lips and blew.
“Not your best, not your worst,” I murmured to myself as I covered the blowhole with my thumb after my first puff. Capping the pipe provided enough pressure for the air to shoot to the front. Once the bubble inflated, I removed my finger so it didn’t get too big.
The next step was to move to what Henry referred to as the cockpit, but which was universally known in hot shops as the bench.
My uncle had helped me build the workstation; we’d attached two metal rails to the front of an old vanity table stool for my pipes to ride on while I sat and worked.
I used my jacks to carefully reshape the bubble’s walls while rolling it on the bench’s rails.
Everything needed to be evened out before adding another coat of glass.
My bubble was currently red orange, which meant I needed to let it cool a bit.
If I gathered again now, the bubble would collapse.
Emilia had let me learn that the hard way.
Glassblowing demands speed, she once said, but it also requires patience.
Waiting, I grabbed my phone to queue up Spotify.
Griff had created a playlist for the hot shop while I worked on his grandmother’s vase, and its astronomical energy level boosted my productivity.
It was mostly Coachella bangers from the 2010s; by the time I dipped my pipe back into the furnace, I was bopping along to Calvin Harris’s “This Is What You Came For.”
I harmonized with Rihanna while I let the pipe hang down to stretch the glass.
Hot glass was spellbinding, and any intrusive thoughts that snuck into my head were quickly banished.
For example, why hadn’t I been able to muster the courage to bring up Blue Ridge with my parents earlier?
Why had I saved it until the very last minute?
I wanted to kick myself; maybe they would’ve warmed to the idea of me sidestepping college if I’d mentioned my fellowship acceptance more than once—if I truly acted like it was an achievement. I wasn’t just doing this on a whim.
Not to mention, I was going on a date with Henry tonight. Everything had been normal between us this week, but my stomach stirred whenever I thought of him today.
Those were issues for Future Audrey. She could handle them.
Glassblowing was athletic, like a dance. I alternated between the bench and the furnace, using tools from my arsenal to continually shape my cup and flash it to keep the glass malleable. Otherwise it would cool and crack, and no one wanted that.
“You’ve got this, Audrey,” I muttered, resting my blowpipe, with the tumbler still attached to one end, on the bench’s rails so I could grab a long metal rod, called a punty, from my stash.
Henry usually helped me with the punty, but alas, it was all up to me right now.
After heating it for a few minutes, I gathered a little glass and quickly shaped it on the marver.
All I wanted was enough for a point of contact.
Using a pair of tweezers to guide the punty, I gently pressed it against the bottom of my tumbler.
Was it a perfect bull’s-eye? No, but it was still centered.
With the cup now attached to the rod, I tapped the tweezers against my blowpipe.
The cup broke off cleanly.
From there, the dance resumed. Furnace, bench, furnace, bench, again and again.
Sweat trickled down my back as I rolled my punty on the bench’s rails, the cup rotating as my shears snipped away at the top.
The glass cut like taffy and, punty still spinning, I alternated between my tweezers and jacks to form the mouth.
The piece was really looking like a rocks glass.
I flashed it in the furnace again, and after a few more finishing touches, the final step was to transfer the cup to the annealer; the kiln would slowly cool the glass to prevent it from cracking.
I pulled open the oven’s lid before carefully knocking the glass off the punty rod and onto a flat paddle.
It was still hot, but over the next sixteen hours, my tumbler would cool to room temperature.