the welcome table

I found our first kitchen table on the street in Jamaica Plain in the summer of 2006, and I made Tom jam it into his car. He was still driving the Maxima, which was the first car he ever bought, and it was so shiny and always smelled like seat-cleaner and in the cupholder was always Orbit gum and the puka shells I brought him from Hawaii, where I went in 2002 before we started dating but after he kissed me in the elevator of an apartment complex in Yonkers, New York.

“That table is a giant POS,” he warned me, but he wedged it in the backseat anyway, because he always does.

We were still living with the boys then, and we didn’t need a table, so it leaned against the wall in pieces in the lobby of our building for a long time, next to a stack of phone books and a five gallon bucket of rock salt and the mail bin that Quack added my name to after I moved in, the last roommate and the only girl. I felt weird and out of sorts and like I didn’t belong there, but Quack put my name on the mailbox, and that was where I lived.

When Tom and I moved to this apartment in 2008 (right after my birthday, right after my parents, the summer I cried every day and didn’t read any books) and DID need a table, we didn’t have any chairs to go with it, so I found two of them on the street on garbage night (things that are always on the curb on garbage night in Southie: chairs, toilets, empty cases of Bud Light) and painted them a clayish gray that was in the messup bin at Home Depot for a dollar. Marissa gave us two more when she moved home to Ohio after she quit law school to become a baker.

I am pretty sure this is the story of all of us learning to be grownups.

It was too big for the kitchen, this table, and the chairs were too big to push in, but we made it work the way you make things work when you’re too poor to buy things like a new table when you have one that works just fine, when you are using this table as a desk and an ironing board and a stepstool to change light bulbs and a flat surface on which to chop peppers for chili at the same time as you seal letters to magazines that will reject you more times than they say yes. I threw a hundred haphazard dinner parties on that table. I made one million egg sandwiches. I put my head down on it and laughed and sobbed and cleared beer bottles and studied Spanish index cards (la mesa) and iChatted and baked birthday cakes and no matter how many times I wiped it down it never looked entirely clean. Once I spilled some water over a stack of papers and didn’t bother wiping it all up and when I went to move them later the ink from the magazine on the bottom had come off on the laminate.

Boston, it said on the table, only backwards.

All of this is to say that on Saturday, after talking about it forever, we went to Ikea and bought a new table and four matching chairs, a sweet little set that fits the space and makes the kitchen look rather lovely and trim, like it belongs in a house where people have their shit together. “You like it?” Tom asked about a thousand times yesterday morning, while he drank a giant iced coffee and put the thing together. “You’re sure?”

“I like it,” I promised. I like it very much.

Haney came with us to Ikea. She needed drawer fronts for her entertainment unit. Haney was in the car that night after the kiss in the elevator at the apartment complex in Yonkers, New York. She lived with her mom in a studio apartment and we used to hang out there whenever we could, because her mom worked nights and wasn’t home to know if we strolled in a few minutes late or talked incessantly about boys until four in the morning, which we occasionally (usually) did.  We bought denim skirts and magazines. We were sixteen years old.

When they dropped me off at my parents’ house that night, at home, I wandered into the kitchen, where the legs of our kitchen table and all four chairs had been throughly and systematically gnawed by our golden retriever, Eloise, when she was a puppy and teething. She’d come up and whine while you ate your dinner, rest her heavy head in your lap.