Fuse Beads, by Amy Hill, Project Director

They didn’t exist, when I was a kid. Tiny, bright-colored cylindrical beads that fit snugly together on a specially-made stand, to create flat shapes dotted with holes. A tiger’s face, a flower, a mandala … We have a drawer full of these essentially useless plastic objects (not counting the few that became refrigerator magnets or keychains), all produced since the pandemic began, by my 10-year-old daughter Fana.

My favorite is light green around the sides, with a yellow and orange interior and a single dot of red in the middle. It’s a necklace of jagged triangles that looks like a crown, or a boat, strung on bright pink thread. My husband has the other half, in different colors; when held together along their widest edges, they make a star.

Fana brought them home last spring, after spending the afternoon with her babysitter, our lockdown savior. From mid-March through mid-June of 2020, she took care of her own daughter, Fana, and one other friend, Monday through Friday, as soon as they got out of what can only loosely be described as online “school.” The girls spent hours working with these fuse beads. We bought gallon jug-sized containers of them and still couldn’t keep up with the demand.

The gentle press of an iron through waxed paper binds the beads and makes the shapes complete, whole, fused. Somehow the idea of these beads– of shapes separated but together– started appearing everywhere, for me. In aerial photos of large circles chalked six feet apart on the grass at Dolores Park in San Francisco, to keep people socially distant … in images of graves being dug on that island in New York, and in the wheels of trucks spraying disinfectant through nighttime streets across the world in Tehran. The beads were mirrored by the round pieces of crunchy rice cereal that for a while was my preferred pandemic stress food. And on my laptop, which, like everyone privileged enough to be working from home, I was spending more time with than ever, the fuse bead circles morphed into Zoom rectangles occupied by people, some I’d known before, some I hadn’t.

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At the end of another afternoon of painstaking fuse bead creation, Fana burst into the house carrying ithe necklace.

I can’t forget the smile on her face when she said, “Look mama, I made this for you.”

She held the half-star fuse bead necklace out to me, and I took it and told her, “It’s so beautiful. Thank you.”

Which it is. How can a star, even bisected, not be? She ran off to give the other half to her dad, who of course has his own stories, too precious and complicated to fit into this one.

My half of the fuse bead necklace hangs on a standing mirror on my dresser, next to a small jewelry box and a photo of Fana when she was about four months old. When it catches my eye, I feel gratitude so deep it makes me catch my breath– for the fact that we’re housed, we’re healthy, we’re employed, we’re together … and also worry– that I’m not available enough, not connected enough – to myself, to her, to everything.

Of course the two parts of the necklace make a whole, but what about its brokenness? What about the anger and the complaining and the chipping away at family harmony, with so much disruption? What about the gradual diminishment of Fana’s interest in her class’s daily online meetings, or the longer and longer cuddling sessions that preface a bedtime that’s gotten later and later, resulting in dark circles under her brown eyes?

A few weeks ago, her dad said, “I can tell she’s hurting, her eyes have lost their sparkle,” and I felt awful to think of it … and like a horrible parent, because he noticed, and I didn’t.

Sometimes I picture the memories I’ll have, in the future. I’ll close my eyes, reach out, and pull open a drawer in a wooden cabinet, kind of like the old-fashioned card catalogs that libraries used to have. Inside, I’ll find carefully labelled and exquisitely detailed fragments– the deep green color and softness of the small jacket I wore when I saw snow for the first time, the particular salty smell of my skin after floating in the waves under a full moon in Santa Barbara, stoned out of my mind ... Years from now, I wonder what I’ll see when I open the drawer holding an echo of my fuse bead necklace. The memory of Fana’s delight, sure, but what else will be nestled in beside it?

Listen to a longer audio version of this story on The Shortest Distance, StoryCenter’s new podcast.