My parents always meant to get a bigger dining room table. Ours is far too cramped for all of us to sit around, and when we do, elbows bump, chairs clatter together and fights sometimes ensue. The table itself has seen better days.
Much of my life has centered around that 3×6 foot piece of wood, a modest piece my parents purchased for their first house on Somerton Road. Agnes Egan, their elderly next-door neighbor was headed for the nursing home, and looking for a little cash. She sold my parents a dining set of dark cherry mahogany, including the table, six chairs and a buffet table for a bargain price. My parents’ possessions tripled with the purchase, though the dining set was only the first in a long line of my mother’s infamous second-hand furniture acquisitions. her antiquing habit still terrifies my father.
1987 marked the first year that the well-worn wood operated at full capacity. My January arrival home from the hospital meant that eight Malones would now dine together around its edges. I joined the fray in my white high-chair, a perilous seat that had the tendency to fall apart was what safety experts today would deem a “death trap.”
I have very little recollection of those early dinners, though I am quite certain I enjoyed the food; every photograph taken of me up until the age of three depicts massive amounts of peanut butter and lasagna smeared across my perpetually grinning face. I was the classic example of fat and happy. The table was enormous in my toddler’s mind, a vast expanse packed with people and covered in peas.
During those early years, my parents used dinner as an opportunity to mold us into polished individuals with manners worthy of White House State dinners. The table suffered considerably from my father’s frequent fist-pounding at the sight of impolite behavior. He went so far as to purchase texts on etiquette, including Miss Manner’s Guide, as well as a pamphlet written by a young George Washington on the rules of proper social interaction. He often referenced the handbooks during dinner, accompanying his reading with demonstrations of how to daintily retrieve soup from a bowl.
When we tired of grown-up talk, my sister and I would slip under the table and tickle people’s feet, a fun game until we inevitably got kicked in the face. The belly of the table was even more fascinating than its top. If you looked closely, you could see faint marks that someone had long ago made with a pen. I soon acquired the habit of scraping the finish off the legs, and was so delighted by my results, that I began to do the same to the chairs. My mother eventually caught wind of my fun game and put an end to it, though the table will be forever marked by the gouges from my six-year old fingernails.
In my third grade year, my oldest brother left for college. And so began the era of the shrinking dining room table. I had dreaded his departure from the age of four, and I had been telling him for years, rather precociously, that he should attend the local university a few blocks from the house. After Sean’s exodus, the dinner table remained reasonably full, though talk now centered on the dramas of middle school and high school. During those angst-ridden years, the table weathered more than a few battle scars, gaining character from adolescent short-tempers, swift kicks and hurled hairbrushes. It also came to serve as a communal work station, where my father attempted to instill the rudiments of algebra in his decidedly literary children and my mother sewed intricate Halloween costumes, including one banner year when the youngest Malone sisters masqueraded as a buffalo, an Indian and a penguin.
Year after year, though, the seats at the table continued to empty. People went off to college, to law school, to little apartments and new dining rooms in cities far away. We grew up.
Our dining room table has been the focal point of engagement parties and funeral receptions. It can be a place for people to sit and talk, or a silent seat where one may take refuge from life behind the pages of the morning paper. It has reached a sedate old age, but when we all come back, the dynamic of its youth is restored. We slip into our old habits, ribbing each other, stealing extra helpings of mashed potatoes, arguing a little bit, just for the fun of it, just like we never left at all.
