On not buying a table for over a year.
The boxes were unpacked, the bookshelves were up, my parents were on the wall, and there was no table.
I knew exactly which table was not there. Deep brown, red chairs, my mother’s. It organized every room it ever sat in. It went where a lot of things went, and I am not going to write about that part today.
So I did what I do, which is solve the problem in front of me with what is in the apartment.
I stood a bookcase on its side and put a top across it.
For about six weeks we both pretended. It wobbled if you leaned. The food sat at a strange height, slightly too low, so you ate at a small forward angle like a woman at a picnic. Sylvie ate at it without one word of complaint, which is how I knew she was being kind to me.
Then one night she put her fork down and looked at the whole arrangement.
Mama, she said. This is a shelf.
It was a shelf. It was furniture pretending to be other furniture, and I was a woman with a doctorate eating dinner off a bookcase, and we both started laughing and that was the end of it.
The next week I bought a coffee table. Small, square, low. Assembled in forty minutes with the little tool that comes in the bag.
It is the sort of thing you buy instead of choosing. I knew that at the register. I bought it anyway, because we had to eat somewhere, and the somewhere was going to be the couch.
I need to say something about dinner.
I believe dinner is sacred. I believe it happens at a table, facing each other, no screen, because a table is where a family tells itself the day. My mother believed that, and her table proved it every night for thirty years. I was raised on it. Where a family eats is not a small question to me.
And here is where we eat. The couch. Nearly every night. Plates on our knees or balanced on the little square, the show of the week going, her end and my end and a blanket that migrates.
I hate it quietly, in the way you can only hate something you are also glad of.
Because it is also us. The show of the week is its own ritual. Some of the best ordinary hours of this new life have happened at that ugly little square. I would not give a single one of them back, and I still want the table. Both are true at the same time, which is the whole family in one sentence.
It is temporary, I tell myself. I am looking. I have been looking the entire time.
I have been looking for over a year.
I have opinions about tables now that would bore a stranger into a coma. Height. Leaf mechanisms. Whether a round one seats more people than a rectangle, which it does, and which nobody wants to hear about at a party.
What I have worked out, slowly, is that I am not shopping.
Buying a table would mean deciding what the room is. It would mean saying this is the size of my life now, this many chairs, this arrangement, for the foreseeable. And a bookcase on its side commits you to nothing at all, which is exactly why I lived with one for six weeks and did not notice anything strange about it.
I say I need to find a table, some nights, mostly to the room.
And Sylvie, without looking up from the show, says you’ll find the right one soon, mama. Promise.
She says it the way you say something you are certain of, which she has absolutely no grounds to be. I let it hold me anyway. That is a thing I have learned to let her sentences do.
The coffee table is still here.
I looked at one on Sunday, actually. Extendable, seats six, seats ten with the leaf in, which is more people than I currently have.
I did not buy it. I took a picture of it, which I have looked at eleven times, and which I am aware is not the same as buying a table
.