My Dining Room Table

One reason I’ve resisted getting a dining room table is the suspicion that the kids have it all worked out, twenty moves in advance, and a dining room table will be not just a place to eat, play cards or do homework, but the opening move in a broader struggle to deflect me from my course. According to this theory, if I give in and buy a dining room table, even a folding card table like Paul suggested, then I’ll obviously need chairs to go with it, because a dining room table without chairs would be like a computer without a keyboard, a fish without fins. And then, once I have a table and a set of straight-backed chairs in my apartment, what’s to prevent me from also getting an easy chair, a small couch or loveseat, a glass-topped coffee table to place before the couch, picture books to set upon the coffee table, an étagère to hold the steadily expanding bric-a-brac, and so on, until my apartment looks exactly like the house I left six months ago, lacking only Connie and the kids. You might say my mind leaps too quickly ahead to the ultimate disaster, but these things do happen; if you don’t believe me just consider the unruliness of your own domesticity.

Friends have used different words to describe my apartment — “ascetic,” “minimal,” “monkish,” “avant-garde,” and “Spartan” are a few — and there are aspects of truth in each of these adjectives, though none of them scoops all the jacks in one hand. My abovementioned wife called the place a “museum.” Connie was dropping the kids off a few Sundays ago, and when she lingered at the downstairs door I asked her if she would like to come in. I did this because she had made a comment, in couples counseling, that I was cocooning myself in the past. I think this was because the only items she had seen me take from my former residence were relics from my bachelor days — funky old pictures acquired at street stalls in the East Village; a papier-mâché owl given to me by an eccentric former room-mate; two cast iron skillets that go back to my first college apartment, and so on. I wanted Connie to see that, if anything, my apartment is exactly the opposite of the places I lived when I was in my twenties. It’s bright and white, with exposed hardwood floors, and no furniture save a low desk consisting of two table leaves bridged over white blocks, a free-floating futon for sleeping, and a bucket seat from a old car that I use for reading.

She got it. I saw panic in her eyes as her cocooning theory exploded. All she said in the moment was thank you for inviting me in, for sharing your space with me, but it was at our very next couples counseling session that she used the word “museum.” I knew what she meant — that a few very symbolic objéts from my former life have been placed in carefully considered spots. The owl is suspended from monofilament in a corner of the front room. Each old picture has its own wall, and none are centered. There is a small sculpture of a bird given to me twenty years ago by a girlfriend named Pamela. On top of one of the speakers — I do have a stereo — there is even an index-sized card which I liberated from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum which says, “this object has been temporarily removed for restoration”; perhaps that’s where she got the word “museum.”

I did not object to the word when she used it. I even nodded when Dr. Stephens, our counselor, gave me the look he uses to ask each of us to confirm something the other one has said. Sure, I thought “gallery” would have been a better word, because “gallery” suggests creativity and movement in the present, while “museum” implies fixity and the past. But I did not want to start a debate at two dollars a minute about “le mot juste.” In any event, I’m more interested — far more interested — in what the kids think.

Maggie, my eight year old, has a very enthusiastic perspective on my apartment. She notices and appreciates the items Connie overlooked: the black no-stick pots with glass covers, the trendy Italian plates, the colorful speckle rug, even practical items like the digital alarm clock-radio in the bedroom. If I add the smallest item between the kids’ visits Maggie notices it immediately and always comments favorably, even if it wrinkles her nose at first. For example, the rusty tool box I placed in front of the bucket seat. She cocked her head quizzically at this. Was the tool box there because Daddy was fixing something? Was it just one of his special objects? Or — Bingo! — she deduced from its position that the tool box was intended as a foot rest, to compensate for the lack of the rest of the automobile. “That’s a good idea, Daddy!” she exclaimed brightly. She even tried to use it, but of course her little legs couldn’t reach it from the car seat.

Scooter, age twelve, is only interested in how my new life connects with his. When I told the kids I was leaving the house his only question was whether he would still be able to practice his pitching with me, and he arrived for his first visit carrying two gloves and his whitest ball. His brow furrowed as he surveyed the yardlet in the front of the building. “We can walk over to the (Cambridge) Common a bit later,” I said, draping my arm over his shoulder as we climbed the stairs to my apartment. But before I had even finished showing Maggie and Paul the front room, Scooter called out from the back porch. He had not only spotted the parking lot behind the building but had determined that the chain link fence surrounding it would make an ideal backstop for his pitching. And once he had that image in his head there could be no waiting, no waiting at all. Now, all spring, as soon as the kids arrive Scooter immediately asks to go out back and pitch me some balls, or at least set a specific time when we will. Connie says this kind of ritualistic behavior is typical of kids with Attention Deficit Syndrome, which has of course been aggravated by the stress of our marital problems.

But it is Paul, age fifteen, who has led the campaign for a dining room table. Paul has recently drawn within a quarter-inch of my five feet eleven, and his features are beginning to square and darken, like a drawing of a man being charcoaled over the pencil sketch of a boy. When we have dinner at my apartment we sit on the floor, Japanese style, and Paul objected to this from the start, not even mumbling as he usually does but stating his opinion forcefully, as if for all three of them. “You should get a table and put it in this room, Dad. This is the dining room, you know.” I countered that eating on the rug at home had always been a special treat. That was different, Paul explained, because eating on the floor at home meant eating in front of the television, which was a relaxation of the rules. When you don’t have a dining room table, much less an entire dining room, there are no rules to relax, so it doesn’t count as a treat. Paul said that sitting on the hard floor hurt his back, and he does have a mild scoliosis of the spine. I suggested he sit on a pillow while eating his spaghetti. Instead he scrunched himself, knees up, plate in lap, in the bucket seat, with a sullen and dissatisfied look. Connie tells me Paul’s grades have slumped, that he is hanging out with a group of losers, that his girlfriend has been caught smoking marijuana and he admits that he has also tried it. To this list she may want to add that my lack of a dining room table is now aggravating Paul’s scoliosis.

Connie and I had a variety of dining room tables during our twenty years together. The first was a small table of the type you would find set against the wall in a kitchen of the 1940’s, with a scratched white enamel top and a wooden drawer for implements. Later we got a wood-topped model only slightly larger. My young wife painted the top white and the legs milk-chocolate brown, draped a lace tablecloth over it and placed it in the bay of our front room, where it was as lovely as the simplicity of our early days together.

A few years later we purchased an antique drop-leaf with years of character in the walnut. We had three leaves made after the kids were born but they didn’t quite match (the leaves, not the kids). When we bought our last house, which has a large dining room, Connie’s parents were eager to buy us a proper dining room table with matching chairs, but I wouldn’t hear of it; I’d seen too many of those tables in suburban houses, covered with pads to protect the mirror-finish mahogany from nicks and heat stains, preserved in mint condition for the next generation, which never wanted them because the wood was too dark or the legs too heavy. Her mother shot me an evil look about this and maybe she was right; if I had relented and accepted the table perhaps my marriage to her only daughter would have lasted a few years longer, if not forever.

While Scooter pitches me balls, Maggie searches for tiny flowers along the weedy edges of the parking lot and Paul listens to rock ‘n’ roll CD’s up in the apartment. Scooter is gawky, an unnatural athlete, but he works hard at things. Most of his pitches are in or near the strike zone but one occasionally slips free and whanks into the chain link fence, making exactly the same sound as a foul tip hitting the Little League backstop. While Scooter pitches, Maggie picks. We had all manner of flowers in the gardens at home, but I am encouraged to see that the slightest weedy flower in my backyard is a richer treasure for my daughter, perhaps through adversity, and she brings each to me proudly, as proof of her abundant love. When Paul turns the stereo up too loud — and if we can hear it in the parking lot it’s too loud — I call up to him and he somehow hears me through the blare. He does not protest, but I get the message: if we were at home, surrounded by our two and a half acres, this turning down of the stereo would not be necessary. Scooter slap-slaps the ball in his glove, waiting for me to finish admiring Maggie’s latest flower, then reminds me that the count on the imaginary batter is two and two, with a runner at second. While Paul has the type of ADD where you can’t concentrate enough, Scooter apparently has the type where you have to concentrate too much. Looking to finish off this batter — who will be the third out — Scooter puts too much into the two and two pitch and it sails over my head. His blue eyes widen in alarm and a nanosecond later I hear Maggie cry out. The pitch has hit her in the shoulder. She hides her pain by yelling at Scooter. He hides his guilt by calling her a baby and saying the ball barely touched her. There is definitely no blood on it. Paul chooses this exact moment to crank up the volume again. I call up to him and he dutifully lowers the volume for the third time. Now the count is three and two and the imaginary runner has advanced to third on the wild pitch. Another wild pitch and he will score, but one strike and we will be out of the inning. “Just put it in the glove,” I say, slapping the leather, “Just put it in the glove, buddy.” Scooter begins his wind-up. Maggie, still sniffling, shifts her search to a less dangerous area. Paul starts a new CD. These are complicated scenes but I do not shrink from them, I do not, I do not. No matter what Connie says.

Connie believes I also suffer from a type of Attention Deficit Disorder, which runs in families. She believes it was because of this flaw in my wiring that I became overwhelmed by life at home, and my leaving is a search for refuge and/or naive simplicity. When Dr. Stephens looked to me for confirmation of this theory I said that I didn’t necessarily agree with the ADD part, but there was certainly truth in the overwhelmingness of it all.

Connie has also cautioned me — or perhaps “warned” is a better word — that despite the apparent simplicity of my new furnishings I am only making my life more complicated. There is also some truth in that. For example, I spend many hours driving to and from my visitations with the kids, and to and from couples counseling; there’s the complexity of a relationship with another woman; financially, I now have both a mortgage and rent to pay; and Connie and I haven’t even gotten to the part with the lawyers yet. If my life was truly simpler perhaps I would not be resisting Paul’s request for a dining room table.

It’s spring — late May — and there’s plenty to do when the kids come in. We walk into Harvard Square and have bagels at a particular shop that Paul likes. As the kids watch an indescribable parade of people pass by the shop window I tell myself that this is a benefit of my new arrangement, that they would never experience such diversity in our affluent, white-bread suburb. We go to Store 24 so Maggie can buy a treat with her allowance. Then, while she and I listen to a street musician the boys go off to Card & Comic, where Scooter looks at baseball cards while Paul handles the comics, many of which — Connie would object — do not depict women in their best light. I ask Maggie what color this saxophone number is and she says blue; a minute later she adds that there is some purple in it. The boys return. Scooter is impatient to get home so he can pitch a few before supper. Paul frowns: he feels I do too much with Scooter, that I favor him because he is so needy. We circle back to the apartment where I make Scooter do his homework (after pitching two innings) while I cook spaghetti. After dinner we either play cards or take another walk into a darkening Harvard Square. The time goes by fluidly but I am worried that as the newness fades it will begin to drag, especially when the weather turns colder.

Television would be the perfect filler-inner, and I am surprised that the kids have not attacked the lack of a set, because they watch gobs at home. A few weeks ago I had the idea of getting a cardboard unit like the one I saw in a local furniture store, used to simulate what their furniture will look like with your TV. I sent away for a catalog and saw that this company offers a variety of ersatz appliances, including microwave ovens, computers, even books. My plan was to send for a cardboard TV and a cardboard VCR and then connect them with real cables, but in the end I decided that this would be too campy, even for Cambridge. Worse, the kids might view it as an attack that was unjustified by their behavior.

One of the things that makes it difficult to resist the dining room table is that there is a certain rightness to that claim as well. When I started looking at apartments my plan was to rent either a studio — the minimum survivable space — or just two small rooms. It was thinking about the kids that led me to the idea of three rooms. The third room was to be a place where they could stash their stuff, and where I could lay down mats when they came in for overnights. In retrospect I probably should have gotten a place with a separate bedroom instead of this arrangement, where the middle room lies between the other two and is clearly intended as a dining room, but I liked the openness of this layout, and the way light flows from front to back. And — I confess — it would have been too overwhelming to keep looking and looking.

The kids knew from the beginning that the middle room was theirs. That was where they dropped their backpacks when they first arrived, even before they noticed that it contained their three school pictures, gooped up with blue wall putty. In fact that’s all it contained. A few weeks later I added the bucket seat and the floor lamp to establish it as a reading room but it was already too late. So in a sense their campaign to institute a dining room table in the middle room is simply an attempt to reclaim ground they see as rightfully theirs.

Connie called me the other day to let me know that Scooter is having more trouble at school, something about calling another kid an idiot and then calling the teacher who reprimanded him an idiot. He calls everyone idiots because he fears that he is one himself, because of his learning difficulties. Connie went in to see the Acting Principal and all he talked about was how, instead of apologizing or acting contrite when confronted with his misbehavior, my son had a big grin. Connie tried to explain to the AP that when Scooter grins like that it doesn’t mean he’s laughing at you; it means he’s emotionally overwhelmed. If you look into his huge and vulnerable eyes you can see that he’s panicked, but his mouth somehow goes the other way.

I think that when I confessed to Connie that I was seeing another woman I also grinned in this way. I tried to paper it over with a look of remorse, contrition and/or guilt, but the evil grin shone through, I know it did. I think Connie was too upset to see it in the moment but, looking back, she must have remembered the grin, or at least suspected it from similar moments in our history together. And now that I think of it I may have had a similar look on my face when I showed her my apartment, which would explain the disdain with which she pronounced the word “museum.”

A few weeks ago instead of walking into the Square we played cards, because of the rain. Maggie won the poker game, though Paul and I, sitting on either side of her, had to help her with her discards and then play as if we didn’t know what she had. When we switched to blackjack Paul drifted out of the game and listened to music. At first Scooter kept hitting high counts in an attempt to get twenty-one exactly, then he figured out the strategy and at the end he made several perfectly timed all-or-nothing bets that wiped out the bank. We played again the next week even though the skies were clear. Scooter was impatient to be done with the poker and get on to blackjack, where he once again wiped out the bank. Paul, annoyed at Scooter’s success, went for a walk into the Square. Later he commented that he didn’t play cards because playing cards on the floor also hurt his back. That was when he said that perhaps I should get a folding card table, and folding chairs. He showed me how everything would fit in the front closet. Maggie added if we had such a table she could put her flowers on it when we had dinner. She looked up at Paul as she said this, leading me to think that he had planted this idea in her cute little head. Scooter stayed out of the discussion: he was in the front room sorting his new baseball cards into teams.

The woman I am seeing also brings me flowers from time to time, and two weeks ago I purchased a cobalt blue vase for them. I put the vase and the flowers away when the kids come because they don’t know about Nan, but yesterday I bought a matching bud vase for Maggie’s nosegays. She doesn’t know what it matches but I do, and sooner or later I will have to tell them about this woman. So now I am wondering … if I already have room in my heart for two flower vases would it be too much to also have a dining room table to place them on?

Of all Paul’s arguments, the most persuasive was when he said that a dining room table would be an idea spot for him to do his homework. The kids are supposed to do their homework while I am cooking dinner. Scooter resists but always does it, because he knows that I won’t play baseball until he has finished his work. Also because he knows he has learning disabilities and sees that he has to work at it, in the same way that he works so hard at baseball.

Paul, on the other hand, is on his own about homework, and he makes a point of not doing any when he visits. He’s on his own because the more we tried to help him the more he resisted. We made him study in a quiet place, as the ADD books recommend, instead of at the kitchen table. We told him he could not listen to listen to loud music while he was working, for similar reasons. We also told him that he had to schedule his longer term projects and then stay on schedule or else lose privileges. None of this worked. Finally Connie and I agreed to try a new approach — to offer him help but not to force it. Paul’s grades continued to sink but there are signs that he is turning it around — a B+ on a recent Social Studies paper, for example. Now Paul is implying that if I get a dining room table it will be easier for him to do his homework. “Does that mean you would actually do your homework?” I asked. He shot me a dark look. “I thought you weren’t going to bug me about that, Dad.”

A few minutes later Paul added that I could also use the table as a desk. For my writing. I told him that I prefer writing in the front room, because the light is better, and it hasn’t bothered my back to sit cross legged before the cinder block arrangement, like Gandhi. But as I was explaining this to Paul I realized that I was reacting to him in the same way that he reacted to Connie and I when we tried to tell him how to study. So perhaps I should get the damn table. Perhaps I should also listen to loud music while I write.

I think I must have both the kind of ADD where you concentrate too much and the kind where you can’t concentrate enough. For example, I get my best ideas for stories when I am not concentrating at all, but when I go to write them I concentrate too much, so they feel forced. And then, when I go to edit what I’ve written, I make such major revisions that I have to go back to the beginning, so I never really finish. Perhaps I should ask Maggie for advice. She writes one or two stories a week, complete and illustrated. She must have the kind of ADD that doesn’t show up until you are ten and a half.

I assumed from the beginning that the separation would be horrible for the kids but so far I have seen no signs of that. They love me as much as always, perhaps more, and except for their campaign to institute a dining room table they have been very supportive. Connie says I’m just not seeing all the horrible effects. She says the parent with custody always gets the grief — she may have even said the “blame” — and that break-ups are most devastating for the children, who are the real victims. I don’t know how they’ll react when they learn that I am seeing Nan, or when Connie and I formally announce that we are divorcing, but it is not necessarily true that they will be devastated. Not necessarily.

Nan says that the kids are fine because they know I love them, and that’s all that really matters, that the chaos and clutter of the world are secondary. So perhaps I am being foolish about the dining room table. Perhaps I should just break down and get one. If I got it tonight it would be here waiting for them when they next arrive at noon tomorrow. Even better, perhaps I should let the kids pick the table. They would probably not choose the modern, clean lined model that I see when I allow myself to envision a table in that room. I think they’d choose something very conventional, perhaps even a model exactly like the mahogany battleship Connie’s mother tried to foist upon us. It would be too big for the middle room — we’d have to edge past its huge darkness, which would also interrupt the flow of light through the apartment — but there would be room on it for all our activities, for cards, homework, dinner, my writing, and whatever else lies ahead.

I imagine myself at this table with them, having spaghetti, which is one of the few things I can cook. Scooter is across from me at the long end of the table. Maggie is on my left and Paul on my right. In the middle is a basket of bread, glasses of milk, and the vase with Maggie’s flowers. Scooter is opening a pack of Fleer Ultra’s he bought earlier in the day. I’m tempted to warn him to not get spaghetti sauce on the cards but I hold back. Paul is drumming his fingers on the edge of the table, in time to one of his CD’s, which is playing at a respectable level. Maggie is adding a few words to her homework assignment, which is to make a list of everyday adjectives. “Tasty,” she says. “The spaghetti sauce is tasty.” As she writes down “tasty” I sneak a glance at Paul. He is still drumming, his eyes lowered, but I know that he knows what I am thinking, which is that I have not yet seen him doing any homework on our new table. But I do not say this. Scooter comes to a Jerry Rice card worth $75 in the latest Fleer catalog. This is Paul’s cue to tell him that you can’t get those prices in the real world, that it’s a big gyp, but he says nothing, either. Maggie erupts with the word “delicate.” “Like the petals on the flowers,” she says with an enormous smile. There is more commotion at the table than Connie would be happy with, and more than her mother would allow, but I find it wonderful. Even if there are a few spats — and there will be, as we career into the future together — it will be wonderful. For lack of a better word.

After dinner the kids clear their plates as they are supposed to, and pack their books, and I drive them home. When I return to the apartment my footsteps echo, in contrast to the carpeted hallway, and the apartment feels as cold and empty as the owl’s glass eyes. I stand silently in the doorway, wondering whether it is time to cry. But then a gum wrapper rescues me. The kids are supposed to put their candy wrappers in the trash — or we won’t have any next time, that’s the rule — but this one escaped detection by hiding under a radiator. Fruit-striped gum, it must be Scooter’s. Next my eyes notice that the rug between me and the radiator is askew. There’s a CD out of its case on top of the stereo. The case is on top of the museum card. And under the rocker — which is in this room now because it will no longer fit in the middle room — is one of Scooter’s gloves. I wonder, how can anyone forget just one glove? Then I spot the other beneath the dining room table. The floor around it is spotted with white flecks of French bread. There’s also a glop of red spaghetti sauce, like Godzilla blood, by Paul’s chair. After dinner the kids put their plates in the dishwasher and wiped off the top of the table with a wet rag, as I requested. But now that their wipes have dried I see that they did a slapdash job: each stroke is outlined in what must be dried milk, and there is more sauce at the corners, sticky to the touch. There’s also a white heat mark in the wood — this is my fault — left by the pot with the spaghetti sauce. But now I smile to think that all of this, and the many parts I have yet to mention, frame perfectly, the blue vase in the center of the table. And even better if I turn the stereo up a bit too loud.

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