A Table For All Ages

My kitchen table is not the most beautiful or distinctive one you might ever see. The wooden legs taper down and angle out oddly, a chair is missing and a cigarette burn the size of a finger scars the white Formica top. In my more critical moments, I think I should glue religious cards to it and cover it with glass, but I never do. In fact, the white Formica has been a bone of contention for as long as I have known the table, which has been more than 30 years.

It first belonged to the family of my best friend Hope, in Connecticut, and was made at the turn of the century from oak. Hope’s father was an artist who tried to make his wife happy by modernizing the table. He attached Formica to the top and edged it with a wood border, stained avocado. I thought the table was sleek and cool. Hope’s mother was contemptuous and wanted something new and yellow, with ladderback chairs.

After dinner, Hope and I would sit at the table and listen to her mother curse as she scrubbed it with cleanser and complained about how hard it was to swipe crumbs past the border. Then she would have a Scotch and light a cigarette. “Don’t ever marry,” she’d lecture. “Men are big babies. Stay single.”

“You’re crazy,” Hope would say, looking at me and faking a laugh.

“You’ll see,” her mother shot back, dangling her ivory cigarette holder.

She wore turquoise eye shadow and drank with her girlfriends around the table on Friday nights. My mother complained about my father plenty, but never to his face, and she only drank coffee. I respected Hope’s mother’s style.

Yet I didn’t take her advice. I got pregnant at 17 and married the baby’s father. Hope did the same thing six months later, but it took us a few years to decide that her mother had been right about men. In 1971, we both divorced our husbands.

After that, Hope moved into my place with her 2 1/2-year-old daughter, bringing the infamous table with her. We dreamed about moving to California to live in a commune. But mostly we spent hours in the kitchen drinking coffee, leaning our elbows on the table, worrying about what would happen to us and our kids. “We’re losers,” we’d mutter, surprising ourselves every time we said it. Our children would run in and out between meals of Lipton chicken soup and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. They served themselves Lucky Charms in the morning and spilled the cereal all over the table, the chairs and themselves. Play-Doh got stuck in a crack down the middle, and sometimes we let the kids scribble on the Formica with pencils.

The day Hope left for Missouri to live with her new boyfriend, I put my head on the table, my hot cheek cooled by the Formica, and wept. She had left the table, knowing that my son, Jason, and I would have had nothing to eat on. I stretched my arms across the top, grabbed the sides and knew that if I could hold onto Hope’s table, everything would be all right.

My life did improve. After I got a scholarship to Wesleyan University at age 25 and graduated three years later, my son and I moved to New York so I could do what I’d always wanted to do--become a writer. Meanwhile, I supported myself at very odd and low-paying jobs, such as collecting money at Persian rug auctions in a hangar at Kennedy International Airport. The table, with its legs now painted purple, sat in our East Village apartment under windows that faced Avenue A. We not only used it for eating, but I wrote on it and Jason did his homework there.

When friends came to dinner, I served lemon meringue pie or apple crisp for dessert, and once we were finished, we would stare across the rooftops to the billowing smokestacks of Con Ed. Buses groaned under the window, and exhaust from traffic left a layer of soot on the Formica. If I didn’t wipe it for a few days, the soot became so thick you could write your name in it. It was during one of those periods of eating takeout on the sofa, of not writing, of dirt on the table, that my 13-year-old son broke down and yelled: “Why can’t you be a secretary? We’d have money. We could move to Stuyvesant Town. We’d have an elevator. We’d live like normal people.”

“I don’t want to be normal,” I yelled back. I wanted to be a writer. He slapped a chair into the table and stomped to his room. He was right. We had been in New York for five years and still lived like moles. The only furniture we owned were our beds, a futon in the living room and the table, which had been left as charity.

Yet I kept writing. My son grew in inches and years; by high school, he didn’t do his homework at the table anymore but at a bar down the avenue, where he swore he drank only Cokes. Maybe he wasn’t lying because he eventually got a scholarship to Wesleyan, too.

A year after he entered college, I received an advance to write a book about having been a teenage mother, so I sublet my apartment and lived for a while in New Hampshire. When I returned to New York, I found that cigarette burn on the table and discovered the sixth chair was gone. A few months after that, I sold my book to the movies. Suddenly it seemed time to dump the poor table and move on. I thought about carting it down to the street and leaving it on the sidewalk for somebody else to take. But I couldn’t do it. That’s when I knew that giving up on the table would be the same as giving up on myself.

I moved around some more--to Mexico and later Vermont. The table was buried in storage in Brooklyn and then upstate New York, until I ended up in a lovely old house with a view of the bay on Long Island. I painted the table’s legs pumpkin and it fit in beautifully in my big sunny kitchen. I covered the seats with an imitation-straw material and collected gorgeous tablecloths to hide the cigarette burn. I filled the house with my friends and my son’s friends, who inevitably ended up in the kitchen, chopping garlic at the table and, after dinner, drinking till the sky lightened. Some nights pasta was served with tomatoes and spices I grew in my garden. Some mornings we cooked pancakes made with a dash of rye flour and berries from the local produce stand. Over the years, I realized that not all men were big babies. Still, on occasion, I drank Scotch on a Friday night with other women and complained about guys, but never, like Hope’s mother, about the table.

I finally did move to California--into a furnished house in Santa Monica. The table is in storage again, with boxes of books stacked on top. I miss it and hate to think of it unused and sitting in the dark, but I will rescue it one day. I’ll take out the Ajax. I’ll scrub and I’ll curse. I’ll make it white again.