My mothers family is full of people who don't know what to do. No one ever told them. My grandmother was a nurse who acquiesced and supported her taciturn, alcoholic husband, a seller of insurance. He didn't dream of selling insurance; nor did he fully embrace it as a way of life. He didn't know what to do because no one ever instructed him of the avenues a man must pass through to achieve happiness. He crunched beer cans into little circles, hiding them in the garage. When he grew old and demented, my grandmother resuscitated him multiple times, adminstering CPR, keeping his heart going until help arrived.
My grandmother's father, rumor had it, belonged to the Columbus Ohio Klu Klux Klan. My great grandmother read Emily Dickinson poems. Dickinson and the Klan only make sense within a certain context. Outside of a very particular environment, they don't correlate. They were Methodist hay seeds who did not blossom under the pressure of poverty, nor wilt under the dog star of excess. They simply subsided, year in and year out, back to their British Isles origins. Obscure religious impulses drove them to immigrate to America wherein they continued to enact the quiet and strange drama of subsistance. Methodists, insurance salesmen, secret Klansmen.
When my parents divorced, whatever harmony they once had totally annihilated. Not an ounce of friendship remained. All was enmity. Like atoms smashing. My mother was left with several of the few positions their marriage had accrued. A walnut shaker table purchased in a furniture store by my father's parents, remained.
The table was designed to last. It was pretty and varnished and as tasteful a product of New England religious mania could be. It was a real piece of furniture. We ate at it, all of us, for the years my mother dated David, the great anti-Israel Jew whose every shirt bore a political slogan -- Leonard Peltier, Big Mountain, Chernobyl -- who liked to decorate the house with sage smoke fanned by seagull feathers from an abalone shell. We sat at the table with David who had signed on with the Palestinians thereby perhaps de Jewifying himself or at least signing on with the ranks of the good hippy Jews. That, and he was an electrician and lived in California, pulled it all together.
He was an energetic man of sensitive nervous temperament. He taped the entire Iran Contra hearings using two VHS recorders stacked on top of each other. As he watched the hearings, he tssked and muttered. This is all true, mind you. After his vegetarian meal, usually consisting of spaghetti smothered in Kraft Parmesan cheese, he had one cigarette out on the balcony. One magnificent smoke a day.
We all sat around the beautiful table, his little girls, my brother and I, my mother. We held silent contests to keep from getting on David's nerves. We ate spaghetti with salads, sometimes chicken. My mother lived and breathed 80s red meat anxiety, so we had none of that. There was copious broccoli. There was green spaghetti, presumably reaping some of the nutritional content out of spinach.
David more or less had the direction and the charisma and the slightly annoying self-belief men named David usually possess. Little David, king of Palestine. Although he bemoaned the plight of the rock throwing Palestinians who, along with Yasser Arafat, clamored for a return of the land seized during the war along with an end to the great worldwide Jewish conspiracy.
The table, during this time, was like a remnant of my parents' marriage. In my mind, it was our one chief possession. It was clearly the best thing in the entire house. It may have been around this time my mother began discussing the table's sale. Or perhaps it was later, after David had moved to Berkeley never to be heard or seen again. (We only learned of his death years later. He passed of a heart attack during a second flowering wherein he had begun playing in a blues band and kayaking in frothing and dangerous waters).
We packed up everything, including the table, and moved away from California to Bellingham Washington. Here, discussion of the table's sale began in earnest. My mother showed the table to some glassy eyed people selling Amway. The table was not sold. Now, we sat the three of us around the table. On the weekend, with the visitation of Mark, there were four.
Mark wasn't like David. For one thing, he didn't have the dietary peccadilloes of David. Like David, he seemed uncomfortable with being Jewish. Perhaps his love of pork chops was an expression of this, although to be frank, he was raised by secular and successful Alaskans, one of whom wasn't Jewish at all.
By now, we no longer cared to try to preserve the shape of the table. We did things to it that one ordinarily wouldn't do to a prized table. Scratched its surface, gaveled forks, etc. My mother seemed to take delight in degrading the table, our only article of furniture. We put the silverware and plates directly on the table. Who cared? She often discussed selling it and downsizing in general, moving out of the small half duplex into a place even smaller. She discussed the idea of getting rid of everything.
For me, these were occasions of arguing counterpoint. I didn't want to get rid of everything. I was worried about what we would do without a table to sit at. The table was like an anchor. It was permanence. Plus it was a beautiful table, a legitimately nice thing. I didn't understand why my mother insisted on deriding it.
We sat around the table. With the vanishing of David, thus ideology more or less vacated. This was pleasant because it meant I didn't have to weather evenings with the McNeil Lehrer PBS News Hour on in the background broadcasting scary information about nuclear warheads and AIDS. Mark was strictly a-political, although once to his credit he argued the Israeli side. More than anything, he liked trashy mystery novels.
"He's read all the good stuff too," my mom said.
I was impressed that he had read all the good stuff. The literary canon loomed large before me. I was such a slow reader, I didn't see how I would get through it. Mark was a fast reader. Sometimes, we'd go to the bookstore where he would turn in a grocery bag full of cheap paperbacks for a selection of new cheap paperbacks. Mark made bathroom fixtures in a shop in Ballard where he lived and slept. Above his desk he displayed a full body plaster cast of my mother. He was better looking than David, taller. He was the kind of man you somehow think as a little kid you are destined to become. He was a ski instructor in Alaska, if that gives you any idea of anything. He was friends with a family in Portland OR. Fellow Alaskans. We occasionally went down to visit them. Down in Portland, he showed an effluviance of emotion he didn't show around us, around the table. I don't know if effluviance is a real word or not.
Then, I went off to college. I didn't know what to do. Like my forefathers, no one had ever told me what was going on in any sense. All my rhetorical positions were counterpoint. I majored in English. I never knew what to say about the books they made us read. What was I supposed to say about Mourning Becomes Electra or Shakespeare for that matter or Hilda Doolittle?
Whenever I returned home, I expected the table would at last be gone, but it wasn't. It was still there. Half its space was now covered with things. Mark had left and so the table now only seated one. Although its surface was scratched and wax covered in areas, it was still a beautiful piece of furniture.
