Food was just a pretext.
— Carlos Drummond de Andrade, “The Table”
My estranged husband calls from Paris to tell me that if I were there beside him, I’d be proud of his outfit. Bill actually uses the word outfit, and for some reason, although he doesn’t fish, I picture him in fly-fishing gear. I imagine him casting lures as exquisite as exotic earrings into a cold stream and tell him this.
“No. I look like a Frenchman,” he says.
“I’m glad, honey.”
That “honey” slips out, skitters off my tongue. Although we’ve been separated for more than a year, we keep forgetting not to use such endearments. Bill reports on the weather, sounding as close as the next room. “People are in love all over the place here,” he says before he explains the real reason for his call, which is to tell me my copy of our divorce complaint is on its way to me.
I’m in Philadelphia, and except for this vacation to Paris, he’s still living in our house in New Jersey, which has sold. We’re waiting for the settlement in mid-June before he also moves back into the city. Then, for the first time since we began dating, we will live eight blocks apart from each other, just as we used to, except now we have a history. Whenever we speak we are alternately stunned and sad that what remains — a kind of untarnished affection one reserves for an old friend — is both more and less than we expected after fourteen years. His copy of our divorce complaint arrived without warning just before he left for vacation. “I cried, seeing our names,” he says. “Plaintiff. Defendant.”
My own tears shock me. I know where he was sitting when he read those words, in his usual place at the kitchen table. He always sat in the middle. My daughter always chose to sit at the end near the long window that faced the garden. I sat at the other end, close to the stove and the wall phone.
I have neither the table nor the six unmatched antique Hitchcock chairs I purchased one at a time whenever I found one in fairly decent shape. Little in this current apartment recalls that kitchen, except the black-and-white tile floor. When Bill says the table holds “so many memories,” I’m surprised. Despite the plans we had for communion at that table, in reality he spent very little time in the kitchen, except in the mornings. We did maintain that ritual: cereal and coffee while he read the gossip page of the newspaper aloud to me and my daughter. Sometimes we’d ask to hear our horoscopes; invariably, his and mine would be off by a mile. “Figures,” my daughter would say. “Water and fire.” Then she’d arch one eyebrow, a gesture I envied. He is fire; we, mother and daughter, are moody, mutable water.
After I hang up the phone, I hunt down a poem I’ve recently read again after some years. The poem is called “The Table,” written by Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade and translated by Elizabeth Bishop. My copy is underlined. When had I inked up the pages, taking note of this line: “Around the wide table . . . It was an honest orgy / ending in revelations”? No words I might struggle to string together this morning will resonate more, and no other object we own tells a story quite the way that kitchen table does.
We found the table at an antiques show in a remote south Jersey town whose name I no longer recall, but I do recall my husband wanting something much less primitive, surely less scarred. Nevertheless, when I spotted the nineteenth-century farmhouse table with hand-carved barn-red legs and a modest pine-plank surface, I fell in love. Maybe the writer in me is attracted to damage and flaws, to the paradoxical beauty of ruin, but in less than a minute my desire transformed the battered farmhouse table into a monument of perfect imperfection.
I must have gasped, because Bill touched my elbow with his forefinger. This was our predetermined antique-hunting “caution” signal. I felt his hot breath in my ear. “He’s seen.” He meant the dealer had noticed us. I was then, and still am, quite incapable of concealing strong emotion — favorable or unfavorable. The dealer now knew that I loved the table, which would make bargaining difficult.
“Let’s get a cup of coffee,” my husband said insistently. Slipping off for coffee was a move that I had taught him: you have to be willing to walk away from what you love. Yet I never seemed able to take my own advice. As we edged away from the booth, the dealer began telling us that the table had also served as a barn work table; then, having heard me mention writing, he shifted his voice to a low confidential tone and said, “If I remember correctly, the owner before the man I bought it from was a writer himself.”
“He wrote what?” my husband asked.
The dealer scratched his chin. “Cookbooks, I believe.”
We headed for the coffee concession. Over weak coffee served in styrofoam cups, my husband said, “I thought you wanted a round table.” He had me there. The kitchen in our newly acquired eighteenth-century house was narrow and long, aesthetically better suited to a round table. But I had also learned, through trial and a few costly errors in furnishing our previous two houses, that there is no such thing as too big or too small or “wrong” when an object is cherished. I ticked off the list of our beloved pieces of furniture: Hadn’t his grandmother’s rosewood desk fit into the most unlikely spaces? And the club chair that I’d dragged with me from my first marriage — hadn’t that always found its place?
He didn’t argue. Either he was tired that day or — now that I think about it from this distance of the estranged wife — he was already settling into some private resignation, one as insidious as my private disenchantment. So we would buy the table. We finished drinking our coffee, decided on an acceptable price, and made our way back through the crowds. As we neared the corner booth, the dealer was enthusiastically talking up the table to another couple. I was relieved when I heard the woman proclaim with conviction, “It’s too long,” before she tugged her husband away.
We examined it again. It was pockmarked and scratched, and initials had been carved into it. Who were “D.H.” and “C.A.”? What boldness or recklessness had led them to make their marks here rather than on the trunk of a tree? As I ran my hand along its surface, I was delighted to discover a smooth depression in the left corner; the palm of my hand slipped snugly into that worn section, where, I decided, many other hands must have rested, gripped, slammed, and pounded the surface while negotiating the everyday struggles of family life. Surely it would serve us as well, humble us with its simplicity, and provide the setting for forming connections. This would be the table at which I could keep an eye on my daughter and stay in touch with her and her friends. This would be the table where Bill (who claimed to need and love and miss sitting in the kitchen) would linger with me in the mornings before going off to work, and where we’d find each other again late at night to talk. And, given its general appearance and long history, I had faith that any human accident — spilled juice, a hot dish that might leave a mark, a harsh word spoken carelessly — would be forgiven here.
I’ve always been as serious about creating a life with meaning as I am about creating a work that lives. What I wanted, what I believed we wanted and needed as a family, was a house where, as the architect Christopher Alexander puts it, “you can feel the weight of your own heart.” That year, Bill’s heart was under wraps. He had suffered three losses: his best friend, then his father, then his mother. I had committed to good times and bad, and in this crisis I wanted to provide comfort: Come to me. I want you to come to me and rest here. Here is home. But he never spoke of these deaths, which left me bereft of a way to reach him. Maybe it was naive of me, but I sunk a lot of hope into that table as a stage for intimacy and believed that after taking its place in the kitchen with the black-and-white tile floor, it would be our house’s heart.
We brought the table home, and after a few days Bill warmed up to it. Rarely spontaneous, now he dug out his penknife and announced he was putting the knife in a kitchen drawer for brave and well-loved guests to use to carve their initials in the table, too. My parents were our first dinner guests, and my mother thought we’d lost our minds when we proffered the knife. A child of the Depression and a believer in lemon oil and glass-smooth surfaces, she likes her furniture unmarred, matched, polished. Patina is not in her lexicon. “You need to sand and paint it, not write on it,” she said.
Her words struck a nerve. Not writing was what I had been doing for more years than I cared to admit, and I blamed everything outside of myself for this artistic crisis: not enough time, the wrong town, no office space, the wrong house — and no kitchen table. I actually said that at a faculty party when the host asked me how the writing was going. He was incredulous. No kitchen table? What kind of cockeyed excuse was that? I would have agreed, except that kitchen tables have always mattered to me. Tables. My life has revolved around them.
Throughout my childhood, I reveled in Sunday visits to my paternal grandmother’s house, where dinner was served at one in the afternoon. My mother would dress my siblings and me in our best clothes, and we’d usually arrive by late morning. Before I even entered the vestibule, I could taste the raw dough for handmade ravioli, and I knew Little Grandmom had gone to early Mass at Saint Calista’s Church, that on her way home she’d bought the ricotta cheese at Mancuso’s, and that she was already in the kitchen rolling the dough flat on a bed of pure white flour.
She saved the best part for me: spooning onto the dough dollops of ricotta cheese that she had blended with whole eggs, sharp Parmesan grated by hand, parsley, and — her secret ingredient — the tiniest smidgen of nutmeg. With her skinny fingers riding mine, we folded the dough over carefully and then dipped the mouth of a clear, wide drinking glass in flour before pressing it down over the bumps to make cheese-filled rounds. We repeated the process until the table was covered in rows of swollen, fleshy coins. While she and my mother put the finishing touches on the ravioli, sealing the edges with fork tines, I licked leftover streaks of cheese from the pressed-glass mixing bowl. By then, the steam from the salted boiling water on the stove fogged the lone kitchen window, clouding the view of the enormous snowball bush in the yard. Little Grandmom, who wore dresses on all occasions and her fancy voile apron on Sundays, would pull the short white step stool from under the formica table and place it close to the stove. She patted the top step: “OK, Den. Bring the oil.” It was my job to stand on the stool to add “just a little bit” of the earthy-smelling olive oil to the pot.
But the food was only part of the fun. In that steamy kitchen I listened to stories: my grandmother’s unvarnished disapproval of her soon-to-be son-in-law, “the gambler”; what was happening to poor Antoinette across the street (“The louse left her nothing”); Grandmom’s visit to Aunt Lena around the corner; did I want to go “up the street” and visit Aunt Annie and Uncle Nick after dinner? Life’s important moments were about people: about feeding them, loving them, forgiving them, and — as I learned too soon — losing them.
In 1965 Big Grandmom, my mother’s mother, as buxom and broad as Little Grandmom was petite and wiry, came to live with us. But no matter whose house we were in, the Italian traditions remained the same. Now my mother and I made the ravioli on our round, rock-maple kitchen table, and the relatives came to us to pay their respects, to keep their ever-hopeful eyes on my grandmother, whose body was slowly being ravaged by colon cancer. Although eating such a rich meal was impossible for her, we devoured the tender meatballs. Our eyes smarted when the peppery sausage hit our tongues, and we smiled when she said to my grandfather, “Joe, dip this in the gravy. I just want a taste.” She’d tear off the heel of the crusty Italian bread, and he’d sop up the gravy with it, then feed it to her as if he were a groom feeding his new bride the first piece of wedding cake.
Those Sundays came to an abrupt halt two days into the new year in January 1966. How fitting the brutal gray skies and white snow seem now. The night the paramedics took her from the twin bed in the bedroom she shared with me, the hard-packed snow glistened under the streetlamp. Our cul-de-sac, always the last to be plowed in our subdivision, was riven with icy tire tracks. After the commotion, on my way back to bed, I passed the bathroom and noticed her denture container — a thin, pearly pink plastic — still on the sink. Without thinking, I grabbed it and ran outside in nothing but my blue nightgown, howling at the ambulance’s red taillights, “You forgot her teeth!”
Afterward, my grandmother’s absence became the most palpable presence in the house. I saw her in my mother’s restlessness and her sorrow, which burst out at the oddest times: while my mother was baking a cake or cleaning the living room. I’d see my mother polishing the wooden arms of the chair my grandmother often sat in, and before I knew it, she’d be polishing with lemon oil and tears. I started sneaking into the kitchen late at night. First I would reheat any leftover coffee in the pot; then I’d sit down at the kitchen table and write in my black-and-white marbled composition book, inventing people to fill the silent empty space.
A year of secret nights passed before I began writing a series of Michael-and-Jennifer stories. In every story it was always August, and it was always hot. Jennifer, a long, tall blonde, often felt compelled to leave Michael despite a love affliction for him so silly and serious it could have been a Motown song. Although she never left him for another man, nevertheless, she left. She left to tend lepers in a colony, like a character in a Graham Greene novel; she left to become a brain surgeon; she left to heed her political call, her bohemian call, her healing call, but she did not stay behind for Michael’s call — no matter what.
I tested my apprentice fiction on my mother while she stood at the kitchen sink washing dishes. I was supposed to be drying, but I ignored the plates piling up on the drainboard and read aloud instead. Though I was searching for a way to distract and entertain her, my mother regularly wept, her tears trickling into the sudsy water. Often she wept before I could get to the sad parts. One night she said, “Enough.”
“What?”
“Can’t she just marry him? Just once. Stop sending her to Africa.”
“But she has this thing. Here,” I said, pointing to my heart. “She has to go.”
Looking back on those nights, I see that although my mother never doubted I would become a writer, she wanted me to do it under the umbrella of convention. And since I was a good girl to a fault, an acutely responsible firstborn, I bypassed adolescent rebellion entirely. I was a coward with an operatic mind, lacking the gumption for actual bad behavior. So I wrote. Early on then, the tension between the women I’d grown up loving (wives and mothers to the exclusion of all else) and the gypsy locked inside me was taking root.
It’s no surprise that I continued writing at the kitchen table in my first apartment after I married my high-school sweetheart, and then at the kitchen table in our first house with my daughter playing on the floor beside me — domesticating my muse no doubt, satisfying both my desire for the “normal” family and my work.
The night before Bill and I moved to the eighteenth-century house with the eat-in kitchen, I sat down to write a farewell journal entry to the house we were leaving; instead I wrote a prophetic passage heralding the future I could not imagine then: “If you don’t write in this new place, you’re going to have to face the fact that it’s not the house or what is or isn’t in it; it’s something else.”
The divorce complaint arrives in a bulging white envelope. Because I’ve been warned of its arrival, I don’t expect to come unglued. On it, I see our names and note that I never took Bill’s last name. Oh, we claimed it had everything to do with hating hyphenation and the fact that I had already published two novels as Denise Gess. But the simple truth is we didn’t like his last name with mine; it sounded strange to our ears and in our mouths, as ill-fitting and temporary as braces.
We worked on our house until it was stunning enough to be part of our town’s annual Christmas house tour. Fifteen hundred people walked through our home during the course of one long, cold day in December 1995. Why was it then, as I stood sentry in my dining room, that I felt my heart winding down like an old clock?
What sticks in my mind is a comment made by one of the tour-takers, a heavyset woman in a blood red wool coat. When she stepped into the dining room, she gasped at the Christmas tree, one of three in the house. “Oh, it’s so right,” she said. It was, down to its cinnamon sticks and popcorn strings and dried slices of orange and lime: appropriate, perfect, approved.
From the room behind her, I heard my husband telling ghost stories in a confident, booming, tour-guide voice. His pride bordered on hubris. I suddenly felt frightened rather than pleased by what we had created. I had fulfilled my mother’s dream: a fine and secure life, albeit with a collection of country antiques instead of matched pieces from Ethan Allen. My grandparents, my links to everything old-world Italian, were gone, leaving me with only one question: Whose life have I been living?
As I’d hoped they would, love and children finally flocked to that table. Because of them — or, rather, because of what they opened up in me — the words began flowing. There was a man whose teenage son and my daughter were each other’s “first loves.” Since I worked at home, our children were often with me. The man’s office was nearby, making his initial impromptu visits at lunchtime seem natural. We sat at the kitchen table, of course. The first time he saw the table, he laid his hand in the deep groove. “I love this,” he said.
After a while our conversations veered from the safe topic of our children to ourselves. He openly admitted to hating his own home, especially the kitchen, where no one ate together. Their refrigerator was a wasteland of condiments. And he admitted to feeling lonely and dissatisfied. “I feel I haven’t made anything,” he said. “You, though — you make something from nothing.”
But I had not, and suddenly I wanted to for the first time in years. Within the span of a few months this new extended family began tracking through our back door. We always ended up in the kitchen, gathered around the table, reconnecting me to the tables of my youth, to a time when I felt safest and most loved, and to the part of myself that had gone underground.
These dual loves — our children’s (sanctioned and expected) and ours (unsanctioned and unexpected) — existed within the fragile bubble of “friendship between families.” Though he and I had enough sense not to sleep with each other, the error of finally declaring our feelings and two regrettable kisses forced us to make a choice: this could be a beginning or an ending.
We ended where we’d begun, a final lunch at the kitchen table. I told him: “There’s this reckless, breakneck, bad-girl part of me, and you’ve brought it out.”
“That’s convenient,” he said. “If not for the bad boy, the good girl would remain good? At least I can look you in the eye and tell you I’m not so nice.” He wasn’t. And neither, I realized, was I. His self-deception (which he called “sublimation”) suited him, but I wanted to shuck off mine. My own words circled back to me: You have to be willing to walk away from what you love. But I was tramping across a landscape of minefields. Where was there to go now?
I scolded myself: Make something. So I returned to the table late at night.
No one approved of my leaving Bill; indeed, I didn’t approve. Yet once my hidden heart had revealed itself, I couldn’t fathom locking it away again. “What do you think you’ll find out there alone?” friends asked. I honestly didn’t know. But writing demands the ability to continue to entertain possibilities, to take risks. It’s what I love; apart from it, nothing — not even my daughter, who would soon go off to live her life, as she should — was truly mine.
Perhaps if I’d given myself time alone and not become a bride at twenty, I wouldn’t have needed so much solitude at forty-six. What can I say? I am a slow learner. My best guess is that I must have been more fearful when I was younger. Watching my grandmother’s slow death in my home, then living in the wake of my mother’s tenacious grief, led me to cling to familial attachment in life, while my heroines risked adventures in my fiction. Now, in middle age, I wanted to silence fear.
Closing day on the house is fraught with delays and problems — the buyer’s, not ours. We spend five hours in an airless room, sitting around a standard-issue conference table, drinking coffee.
Later that afternoon, home sale complete, Bill pulls up outside my apartment building in a van loaded with furniture, which we’ve divided between us. He’s brought me the Hitchcock chairs. “I wanted you to take the table,” he says, “but I didn’t think it would fit in your kitchen.”
A few days later, I call him. “I’ll find a place for the table. Shall I buy it from you?”
He laughs.“No, no,” he says. “The truth is I never wanted it.” His relief is unmistakable. “You love it.”
“I do.”
“Now you are reunited,” Carlos Drummond writes, “in a wedding ring much greater / than the simple ring of earth, / together at this table / of wood more lawful than any / law of the republic.”
This morning I sit at the table preparing to pay monthly bills — a task that makes me shudder these days. My daughter is away at college. I am alone for the first time in my adult life. Nothing is certain or secure. Whenever I visit her in New York City, I marvel at her poise as she whisks me through turnstiles with her Metro card. “My day job’s going to be a psychologist,” she says. Then travel. Then marriage.
One night on our way to a poetry reading, crossing Broadway at West 107th, I asked her if I had disappointed her, made her life too difficult by divorcing twice.
She didn’t answer right away. When I looked at her face, she was smiling. “Mom? What did you want most in the world? More than anything else?”
My answer was easy. “You and a book.”
“See?” she said.
Still, sometimes, when I’m least expecting her, the little girl in her blue nightgown who stood howling in the snow rages through these rooms — a little ghost, a little warrior trying to stave off inexorable loss, waving her grandmother’s teeth against the frozen sky. Come now and calm yourself here at this table. Let me tell you a story. I push the bills aside and lay my hand in that warm, worn depression. What rises up into my palm is a small miracle: not one body, not one kiss, not one sorrow — but all flesh, all kisses, all sorrows of the spirits who have gathered around it. I consider Drummond’s phrase “lawful wood.” Hardwood. Enduring.
