The Dining Room Table I Had To Have

Dining with ghosts and Proust

The inherited dining room table that holds many family memories for writer Anne Ulanov

An eight-foot-long dark brown wood table occupied most of the space in the dining room of our red brick brownstone. My father said he found it in an 18th century French monastery. I always wondered, but oddly never asked, when and how he managed to get it from there to here.

The table’s surface comprised one seven-inch and one eight-inch slab inside six-inch side panes with beveled edges along the long sides and three-inch panels on the short sides. Two-centimeter-sized wormholes dotted the surface as did a few scars from ashes left by my mother’s cigarettes. The top also showed discoloration, presumably from use and cleaning. Curved, vase-like supports framed the underpinnings on each end and in the middle, connected by one long beam. My orange cat enjoyed squeezing himself between the three poles in the middle so I often had a book with me while I sat beside him.

Shortly before dinner (we called it supper), my handsome father—Papa—would arrive home from reviewing a jazz gig or teaching, hang up his sports jacket in his room-size closet, and trade suede loafers for shearling-lined slippers.

My mother—Mommy—would finger-comb her thin brown hair off her pretty, unlined face, pinch her cheeks, and put the tea kettle on. She never wore skirts and blouses because she found then-trendy hobble skirts impossible to walk, sit or even stand in. On the rare occasions when she bought a less than dowdy dress, she’d remove the price tags and labels, burn them in an ashtray, shove the dress into her small closet, then wear it, wrinkled, weeks later. My father would invariably ask, “Is that a new dress you’re wearing?”

“No, no, not at all,” she’d look down and say. “I’ve had it for ages. I haven’t worn it very often. I’m sure it didn’t cost much.”

After I washed my hands, my mother would ask if I wanted to set the table. Remarkably, it didn’t occur to me to say, “No, I don’t want to set the table,” until I’d been to college.

Food, Paris, and arguments surrounded the table. Two Utrillo paintings of Parisian street scenes hung on the wall behind my father. A white brick wall with a utility closet on one side, a fireplace in the middle, and a recess with a rocking chair and a telephone were behind my mother and me. My father sat at the narrow end in front of the Utrillo paintings. My mother sat on his left, and I on her left. We assumed that formation every meal of my childhood.

If the phone rang during dinner, my father would take off his glasses, put them on his placemat, and walk around the table to get to the phone. “Hello?” he would answer with an expectant uplift at the end of the word. We knew it was his sister if his voice lowered right away and he nodded, said, “Uh huh,” and little else. After her husband Leo’s death, she lived alone. I visited her one weekday afternoon and asked about Leo but she changed the subject. Her passions were ballet performances, operas, and knitting the dresses she designed for boutiques and magazines.

My mother prepared precisely three servings for each night’s meal. No leftovers and no second helpings. The largest serving was for my father, of course, and the second largest was for me. She’d put food on designated plates and carry them around the corner into the dining room. We usually ate frozen food or roasts.

Rather than discussing or exchanging ideas, mealtime often degenerated into ugly words. It might start with growls from Papa like, “I can’t believe we’re having Swanson TV dinners again,” after which my mother would sigh and say, “I don’t get home in time to make something more elaborate and you insist on eating precisely at seven.” To which my father would say, “Oh for god’s sake,” and my mother would burst into tears.

During supper, a black-and-white television set on a table against the wall across from the table always had the nightly news on and provided fodder for arguments about public figures and philosophical ideas. Papa would bang his hand on the table and rail about how stupid the Pope and presidents were. Mommy would say they deserved respect. If the argument went on for a while, she would go into the kitchen, gulp a few drags on a cigarette, then douse the stub in a black ceramic ashtray she hid behind the flour canister under the kitchen cabinets.

___________________________________________________________________________

Every Tuesday evening, my parents hosted a group of academics who argued about Catholic theology and dogma, what they should or should not espouse. The attendees would help themselves to mugs of coffee or tea set up on the small television table. My job was to carry a tray to each person and offer milk and sugar.

One of the two woman who came every week, a United Nations administrator, always wore red dresses, brown jackets, and pearl necklaces. She brought yellow flowers to the first meeting each month. Two Jesuit priests arrived together from their residence at a neighborhood Catholic boys’ school, in black gabardine suits and clerical collars. Weightier religious aura came from the German monsignor who swept in late, folded his magenta fascia and laid it on the table beside his tea; he always sat at the opposite end of the table from my father. Together, he and Papa wrote “In Our Age” for the Second Vatican Council, as well as several scholarly books and articles. “Ach,” he would say to me, never with a smile, as he helped himself to milk for his tea, “you are a good girl to attend for us. Danke, mein liebes kleines Mädchen.”

At least thirty people attended each meeting and sat around the table. Sometimes forty or even fifty.

Two decades later, my divorcing mother, moving out of the brownstone, offered me furniture she would otherwise sell. I had spent so much of my life at and under the table that I grabbed it despite worrying that such a huge piece of furniture would overwhelm my dining room. I wanted to have it with me, its memories and the people who lived around it. Running my hand along the wood, I could feel my cat on my feet, hear many voices, remember watching The Counterfeit Traitor with my father, and see my brother playing with his Greyhound bus and my sister with her Charming Chatty doll. I wanted it all.

The table fit in my dining room as if designed for the space.

I spent weeks arranging and rearranging the chairs I bought at a local furniture store, to see how many people I could fit at the table. I tried four on each side and two on each end, although that meant each person would only have room for a plate and a napkin. I never managed to fit more than twelve, not the forty or fifty I would have sworn were at my parents’ meetings.

I spent weeks and months trying to dispel strange emotions. I couldn’t eat without getting a stomachache if I sat where my father used to sit. I moved to the other end. That failed, too. I tried all the other places with the same results. 

I decided to make it my workspace instead of my food place and cheerfully sat down to write a story. No sooner had I written “the end” than I heard my father shout as he decried my grammar. I put my head in my hands only to hear my mother arguing that he should let me write what I wanted, not what he wanted, and that he was a pseudo-intellectual anyway.

The table was there to stay, so I needed to make peace with it. I moved my desk place all around the table, trying to find a place without their voices. When that didn’t work, I tried labeling the places at the table, naming each as characters in my story. Unfortunately, even they failed to banish the noisy visitors of the past. 

My children tagged me for Thanksgiving the next year. One group brought delicious vegan seitan turkey. Another brought shrimp and cocktail sauce. My brother baked a Russian babka. Eighteen of us crowded around the table, using my piano bench on one end so three people could sit there. We greeted my sister’s new boyfriend, toasted family members unable to join us, drank lots of red and white wine, and took lots of pictures. We saluted my parents, saying we missed them and loved their table, and their ghostly selves were welcome any time, but only if they let me work and eat without their interference.

Anne Ulanov is a writer and document specialist. She wanted to write stories and essays starting from her time with Nancy Drew under the blankets with a flashlight, and wrote her first novel at summer camp on Lake Winnipesauke. She has an undergraduate degree in philosophy and literature from Smith College and an MA in sociology from NYU. She reviewed plays and wrote feature pieces for a local newspaper and won several short-short story contests. Now she lives in an exurban town within shouting distance of cooking of all kinds, thanks to the CIA (culinary not spy). She writes a blog, “Just One?”, about the joys and occasional downsides of eating out by oneself.