Let’s Talk Over Dinner
Riley Bowen
Late this July, my father drives from Marblehead, MA to Amherst, MA with a disassembled dining room table and four chairs in the back of his SUV. We kneel on the floor together and screw the legs back on. He sips from a plastic water bottle and sighs, “This’ll be good.” I nod. I can recognize something monumental here, or I want to, perhaps it is just a simple exchange, of wood, of water.
My mom bought the table off her Uncle Ray and his wife Terri for $300, before I was born. It is wooden, brown, four legs, with one small drawer just big enough to hold a stack of papers and a placemat or two if you try hard enough.
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Mostly the table is covered, with bits of itself peeking through a mass of figurines, jackets, and pants to return. It cleans up ok for birthdays and Thanksgiving. I run back and forth between rooms, grabbing as much as I can and throwing a month’s worth of mail and assorted junk onto my mother’s bedspread. I always feel real adult around special occasions, standing hands on hips, surveying a freshly windexed tabletop. It is nice to stand with the smell of dried out turkey meat drifting through the doorway, giving the room a restaurant feel; yes, just through those back doors the chef is making something outstanding.
My grandmother can’t keep away from the movement, she hovers here instructing me on utensil etiquette, which way the knife should face. In another hour the guests arrive, this means Pop and Great Uncle Doug. I made nameplates just to be sure I’d get my usual chair. It is Doug’s birthday and Valentine's day, so the tablecloth is pink and we put Happy Birthday napkins in the napkin holder. The floor is all scratched up from the office chair that we should’ve bought a mat to go under but didn’t, so I guess it’s too late to get one now. I’m peeling potatoes into a plastic bag in the sink but they keep slipping out of my hands. Sundays are roast days, and for folding our hands in our laps. My grandfather is mostly deaf and doesn’t want to hear from us anyway, so we listen to him talk about going on a drive with his girlfriend and I swish my new favorite word, gristle, around in my mouth between bites. The tablecloth is plastic lined and feels too good not to rip to shreds, we all know this is true, and it makes everyone embarrassed at the end of the night.
There is a not so slow return to disarray, we love to empty our arms, exasperated, joyous, stacking our day’s work. Our legs are wrapped around the chairs, elbows up, chins resting on the edge. Or we are sleeping into a book, calling out for juice, fruit slices, just a little bit of help. Here there is a haircut and a timeout and a makeover all scrapbooked on top of one another. Finn and I are carving pumpkins. Finn is four years younger, hair spiked and his teeth growing on top of themselves. One of us has spilled hot chocolate and wiped it in a way that has simply spread it around. I am wearing an apron tied in bows and he paints black teeth onto the pumpkin’s mouth. I believe this is childish. I am right and of course wrong, I am wrong in the same ways every time we fight, too rigid and easily angered. Still I cry when he does, after I push too hard. I make amends by helping his sleeves back up for him, when they get dangerously close to pulp and acrylic. After he showers I brush his hair in whirlpool patterns and he almost falls asleep.
I am working on a project with my best friend, a play-doh model of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon with a complex inclined water delivery system. In conversation we rank our favorite teachers we’ve ever had, from first to seventh grade. It’s difficult to sort it all out in our heads so we write their names on the disposable table cloth. Mrs. Erickson makes the cut, top three. She taught third-grade, soft-spoken and well-organized. She read us Sarah, Plain and Tall and warned us that she always cries on the last page, and she did. This was the first time I had seen an adult cry. Sometimes when we got too loud, she had this pained look on her face, as if bracing herself for her own raised voice. Now she is married to my dad. I don’t think my friend realizes this fact and I don’t bring it up. “Yeah, she was pretty cool” but she vacuums too much, and I think she’s scared of me. Her table is a darker brown, with sharper corners, and the cats are not allowed to walk on it. My friend leaves and my mom throws out the table cloth.
The table edge has gone sticky with time or from forcing syrup caps open. Teeth marks, beer bottle gouges, running my fingers back and forth in between rounds of pancakes. In this memory my father still lives here, but outside in the snow, a curved spine shoveling a clean path. I deliver cups of water and a tomato grilled cheese, and scream when my socks get wet. This is before I understand how you can be hot and cold at the same time. The cat and I sit on warm grates in the floor, and when nobody is looking, I drop toys inside, and don’t realize yet that I can’t get them back. At the window Finn writes his name in my breath, and my father is defrosting the car.
My mom buys a mass-produced ocean painting to hang in the blank spot above the table. The waves are raised off of the canvas, huge globs of paint that are just abstract enough to make a person feel sophisticated. “But it makes me happy” is her justification in the checkout line and I agree, that’s enough. A few years later we paint the walls blue to match, because we have come to the conclusion that too many of the rooms in this house are yellow. The yellow was too sickly, too good at holding stains, too far away from our favorite colors. I have stopped sitting at the table on inbetween days, the ones that aren’t birthdays or roast days. When Great Uncle Doug comes for Friday night dinner, it is on couches and armchairs in front of movies with captions for the hard of hearing. We refuse to admit that we have run out of things to say.
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For the first month there is no table, we eat on couches, or standing up, or the rug upstairs. Isabel keeps talking about how she’ll do her homework at the dining room table, just like kids do. Jon says no table, more room to dance. Jon is overruled 3 to 1 and my father plans the delivery. We are cleaner than my mom, we don’t have two kids and three cats. There is an air-fryer and a blue lamp Rudy bought and held in his lap, with both hands, the whole way home. Some mail not addressed to us, a product of frequent tenant turnover (Where does this go anyway?) Then a package, an Ebay t-shirt or bike light I’d guess. The jackets have begun to rotate around the chairs and there are already more backpacks than people.
The air has just begun to cool, and it’s getting easier to sleep. I am pulling sweaters from the back of the closet. We spent all afternoon dangling our limbs off every soft thing we own. Later unpacking our groceries, we Sharpie names onto egg cartons, unaccustomed to sharing. Now, after all the last minute calls, the muffins are done and the apples are ready for slicing. We trade knives and licked fingers, to build a tower of fall flavored foods for the people. It is accidentally monochrome, good thing we all love brown.
Bottles open themselves on six different multi tools and gather on the countertops. I gave a new friend my favorite mug for a test-run. The night is sweet and sticky with citrus. On the balcony a boy drops a muffin into the gutter, he has never been so apologetic. We are gathering. Each chair is turned outward, a person in every one, others collecting at their feet, legs knocking into each other. There is a race to play the silliest voicemail, I ask to know what everyone’s grandparents sound like.
After they’ve gone and I have given the last parking lot kiss, we depend on table and chairs to remove our sweaters and shoes. It is quiet now, just the hum of the fridge light, four hands in one bag of chips. We are saving our thoughts for the morning, we are waiting for our turn in the bathroom. I press my cheek against the wood, at the end of my nose is a paint flake I practice bringing in and out of focus.
“You okay?”
“mmm” The table is eating my not-words.
I flip through an old flier, mailed in by the local parks and rec. group. There’s not a whole lot left to do but occupy my eyes and hands, leaking on the table.
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Tonight we spilled into the kitchen after an all too tense meeting. Now it is an argument where we are all on one side. Jon is taking his index finger and jabbing into the wood in a way that looks like it hurts, but his face suggests otherwise. All of the voices rise into squeaks, wrestling with each other to make the same point.
“I didn’t even know how to respond so–”
“Because it was a nothing comment!!”
“What if I met with him and–”
Someone has gotten up to boil water while we talk ourselves in circles. Soon we will talk ourselves down into one strongly worded email to a coworker, then proofread, round table. The night settles in and we unzip all our bags. I am working on an assignment which “I don’t have a clue” about, but really I don’t want to bore anyone. This favor is not returned when I ask about the lecture Rudy is watching. That’s ok, he doesn’t expect me to listen. This is all affection.
