Fiction: “A Good Table”

MY SISTER DIDN’T WANT to be alone when she sold her furniture to a stranger from the internet. You have to be here so I don’t get murdered, she said when she called me. Get here before ten.

It wasn’t a request; like it or not, I’d be there when “the Craigslist woman” came for her dining set. I didn’t bother arguing. I asked Ryan if he could take the kids to soccer so I could help Melissa with something. Given the past year my sister’s had, Ryan didn’t even ask what she needed help with, he just nodded.

Mel has always been paranoid: a little girl who saw ghosts, a woman who walks to every parking lot with her fist balled up around her keychain, individual keys protruding like knives from her fingers. But she’s not always overreacting. Plenty of things in this life warrant spielkes. Inviting someone you’ve never met
before into your home could spike anyone’s anxiety. Especially if you’re feeling vulnerable, second-guessing everything, and, for the very first time in your forty years of life, living alone.

It’s still strange to pull up to the two-story Evanston colonial Mel and Dave bought thirteen years ago and not see Dave’s little red Mazda in the driveway. My brother-in-law took the train to work every day, so his Mazda was rarely used. In the winter, he covered it fully with a black car tarp and let Mel have the single
attached-garage spot for her Subaru, protecting her from the rain and cold.

Such a gentleman, our mother said. A real mensch.

But now the mensch’s Mazda is gone, leaving a void in the driveway. The little red car is parked instead at an underground garage in the Loop, where Dave now lives with his 25 year-old girlfriend, Fucking Holly.

He’s having an affair, Melissa half-shrieked, half-sobbed earlier this year, gutted and hysterical about her husband’s fresh confession. She paced around my living room like a wild animal, eyes haunted, heart shattered. With fucking Holly, of all people.

It took me a moment to place the name. Holly. Oh, God, no: not that Holly? Holly O’Brien, their next-door-neighbor’s daughter. A graduate student in some sort of hybrid-science program, something intertwining climate and biotech, something that will probably someday save or screw us all. Fucking Holly, a literal
child when Melissa and Dave bought the place; twelve years old. They bought Girl Scout cookies from her. She trick-or-treated at their door. They rarely saw her after she left for college.

Until last year, when Dave ran into her at the gym near his office, which was also near her lab. A coincidence that felt like fate to Dave, evidently in the midst of a midlife crisis, and to Holly, who confessed she’d always had a crush on him. Fucking Holly, who would have been Melissa and Dave’s babysitter if they’d been able to conceive.

“Sorry the place is a mess,” Melissa says by way of greeting when she lets me in.

It isn’t, of course. There’s some unopened mail on the entryway table, and, as I follow Mel deeper into the house, a stray coffee mug on the kitchen counter. Maybe she hasn’t vacuumed recently. But as a mother of two, I have a very different definition of “mess” these days. Motherhood reshaped my perspective on almost everything, clutter included. Not that I can say anything along those lines to my sister without wounding her.

My usually-polished sister is no longer as tidy as her home. She’s thinned out too much these past few months. Her clothes hang from her bony frame, giving her the appearance of a department store mannequin hastily clad in an oversized outfit by a lazy employee. By contrast, my own perimenopausal midsection feels even flabbier. I attempt to suck it in. Can’t. There’s something about this new hormonal fat that just won’t budge.

Melissa’s thick brown hair, the same shade as mine, has new strands of silver, short and wiry, clustered at her temples. Her eyes are red-rimmed, with purplish circles casting shadows beneath her lower lashes. She looks as tired as the mother of a newborn, another thought I’ll keep to myself. God, when did I become someone who thinks with such a parent-brain?

“So, what do we know about this Craigslist woman?” I ask.

“Her name’s Martha,” Mel replies, getting out a second coffee mug and pouring me some, adding milk without needing to ask first. “That’s all I got.”

I glance over at the dining set, trying to view it neutrally. It’s such a nice set. Solid oak, removable leaves, eight matching chairs with ornate carvings in the arms and across the backs. Perfect for dinner parties. For a big family. Our parents gave it to David and Melissa for their wedding, and the presentation of that particular gift landed like a punch to my gut. For Rosh Hashanah, maybe, Mom said to Mel while looking at me. You and David might want to start hosting the dinners.

Melissa beamed, our mother’s words warming her heart and icing me out in the same instant. Mel and David, the true inheritors. The good table for the good daughter. The nice Jewish couple, not like Rachel and that goyishe husband of hers. When Ryan and I got married, three years before Mel and Dave, my parents gave us a coffee maker. They might as well have given us an alarm clock set to go off for whenever it was that they imagined our ill-advised intermarriage might implode. But two kids and almost two decades later, Ryan and I are still together. We’ve had our ups and downs, but we’re solid. Over time, my parents reluctantly came to appreciate Ryan; even to love him. Our children were the center of their universe. When my father passed away a few years ago, Ryan was a pallbearer alongside Dave, and my brother Joseph and his husband Marc. My husband numbered among the sons, in the end.

Ryan earned his place in my family. But I hate that he had to work so hard for it. I still resent that he wasn’t welcomed in the way so many others were. I still carry every painful memory, every cutting remark: What were all those years of Hebrew school and summer camp for? I want my money back!

I disappointed them—and they disappointed me. My choice of husband wasn’t a rejection of anything. The things that made me fall in love with Ryan were the things they taught me to value: integrity, humor, kindness. How could they not see that? Marrying outside the tribe wasn’t the threat to my identity; it was my parents reaction to my choice that almost made me give it all up. It was a long time ago, things got better—but there’s evidence of the past pain everywhere. Including in Melissa and Dave’s dining room, where that elegant table remains a tender scar.

The doorbell rings.

“Shit,” says Melissa, and starts to cry. “Can you just handle—”

She rushes upstairs, leaving me alone to be murdered by the Craigslist woman.

When I open the door, I’m startled. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but it wasn’t this woman. She appears to be Amish—or Mennonite, maybe? Is that the Amish-with-electricity sect? Her long salt-and-pepper hair hangs, waist-length, emerging from the white bonnet tied around her makeup-free face. She’s probably in her fifties, a decade or so older than I am. Her dress is navy blue, long sleeves, long skirt, likely homemade. Behind her, I see a weathered pickup truck in the driveway, dull brown with tan stripes.

“Martha?” I ask.

“Yes,” she says, nodding without smiling. I can’t tell if she’s dour, polite, or nervous. I guess in any Craigslist transaction, there’s always a chance that the seller is the murderer, luring some innocent person in to where they can dismember them in the privacy of the seller’s own home. “Melissa?”

“Oh, no, I’m—Rachel, actually,” I say. “Melissa’s my sister, she’s just—taking care of something, so she asked me to get the door—anyway, come on in.”

“You’ll show me the table?” Martha asks.

“Yeah, this way,” I say, leading her to the dining room. As we approach it, I point unnecessarily to the dining set, which takes up the entirety of the room. I should probably say something about what a lovely piece it is, or something, but I’m a terrible salesperson so all I say is: “This is it.”

Martha nods and pulls back two of the chairs so she can examine the table, not stopping to admire the chairs’ intricate woodwork. I consider telling her that even though there are onlysix chairs around the table, there are another two in the attic.

But Mel probably already told her that. The Craigslist woman runs her hands over the table, pressing down a few times, as if testing it for something. She reaches into the folds of her skirt and pulls out a measuring tape. She measures the width, the length. She frowns.

“Does it expand? The listing said it was longer.”

“Oh! Yeah,” I say, lumbering into action. I slide my fingers under the middle of the table, wincing in anticipation of the pinch as I fumble for the shelf with the leaves. “It pulls apart, and you put these in the middle—”

I manage to extract the inserts with minimal injury to my digits. Together, Martha and I tug the table apart, pulling from each end. She smoothly slides the leaves into place, giving a satisfied nod. She measures the table a second time and looks pleased.

“It’s a good table,” she says. “I’ll take it.”

“Oh, great,” I say, wondering if my sister will make an appearance before the transaction is completed. Am I supposed to collect payment? I don’t even know what Mel was selling it for, but it’s worth a lot.

“Great. I saw your truck outside—there’s another two chairs in the attic, I’m not sure all eight plus the table will fit in one trip, but if you need to come back—”

“I don’t need the chairs. Just the table.”

“You don’t—what?” I say, confused.

This makes no sense. The chairs are a real selling point. Unlike the battered, yogurt-encrusted ones around my second-hand dining table, these chairs are pristine. Solid wood, hand carved. I grip the back of one of the chairs, holding tight to this thing I’d coveted for so long. Mel and Dave never hosted a holiday celebration around this table. Dave was Jewish, but uninterested in religion or social gatherings. My raised-Catholic husband, by contrast, is an extrovert and eager co-host who looks forward to hiding the Afikomen at our annual seder celebrations. We deserved this table, dammit.

“Why don’t you want the chairs?”

I startle at the sound of Melissa’s voice. She’s standing in the archway leading into the dining room, arms wrapped tightly around herself. She doesn’t introduce herself to the Craigslist woman before posing the question. “My family runs our community mortuary,” Martha says, nonplussed. “We don’t do viewings at our home, just burial preparation, so we don’t need chairs. Just another table, for busier weeks. For the bodies.”

She gestures plainly to the table. Indicating where, rather than platters of kugel, there might soon be cadavers.

Melissa cuts her gaze over to me, and I have no idea what to do with my face. I fear I’ll burst into wild, terrified laughter. And what if my jumpy sister passes out? I widen my eyes, hoping to convey levity. To make this all funny rather than horrific. My sister’s mouth twitches, but then she grows somber.

She looks toward the table. I can’t interpret her expression as she gazes at the thing she was initially delighted to receive. I wonder how she felt when David proved uninterested in hosting dinner parties around it; how Mel wanted to fill every chair with children but never did, not even after years of IVF and expensive interventions. The table arrived with such pomp and promise, only to remain perpetually empty. Mel and Dave ate most of their meals at the kitchen island. Dave eventually disappeared altogether.

Oh, I think. Oh.

I wasn’t the only one drowning in disappointment, flailing in a merciless sea of failed expectations. Maybe I even had the easier journey. I subverted all those familial expectations by popping that balloon early on, easing the long-term pressure by doing things “wrong” from the get-go. From there on out, anything I did right was a pleasant surprise. I disappointed my parents with my life choices, but my sister was the one who was disappointed with her life. I wanted the table. She got it. And for both of us, it hurt.

“Are home mortuaries legal in Illinois?” Melissa asks, her voice weirdly normal.

“We don’t live in Illinois,” says Martha, shrugging. “We’re in Indiana.”

Ah, I think, inadvertently nodding. Indiana. That tracks.

“Okay,” says Melissa. “We’d said two hundred for the set. How much are you willing to pay for just the table?”

Two hundred bucks for this multi-thousand-dollar-set, Jesus, I can’t take it, I think, feeling faint, but I keep my shit together.

“I’ll still pay two hundred, if your husband helps me load it into my truck.”

Your husband.

At this, I’m instantly defensive, worried these two little words will shatter my sister. I want to snap back, ask the Craigslist woman where her husband is, why she’s here alone. But maybe her husband’s dead. Or ill. Maybe she’s a spinster, running the creepy family enterprise. Maybe she’s a small business owner making a reasonable assumption based on looking this address up in the White Pages (to minimize the risk of her own potential Craigslist murder) and seeing Melissa and David Silverstein listed as the homeowners.

Melissa doesn’t flinch.

“My sister and I will help you with the table,” she says.

Fifteen minutes later, the old truck pulls out of the driveway, the table rumbling off toward its new role in an Indiana home mortuary where the Craigslist woman will place corpses upon it. My sister and I return to the dining room. It seems vast now, the carpet a massive fabric expanse, the ornate chairs staring at each other across the distance.

“Coffee before you go?” Mel asks.

When she hands me my microwaved mug, we each sit in one of the dining chairs. Mel mimes setting her mug on the ghost table in front of her. I smile, at this sign that my little sister’s goofiness might still be intact. Relieved that instead of stricken, she simply seems baffled.

“Did that really just happen?” I ask.

“Do you mean, did I really sell the good table to a mortician? I think I did, yes.”

“It’s gonna have dead bodies on it. Like, human bodies.”

“Will they line it with something? Is it sanitary to use oak for… bodies?”

“It’s not like anyone’s going to eat on it ever again.”

“God forbid,” Mel says, sounding just like Mom.

It feels good, sitting there in the big open room. My sister and I have always allowed things to create distance between us. Petty sibling rivalries. Infants. Infertility. A table. Always, always something. But I can see her now, this strong woman who’s fighting for herself. Who is selling her furniture to strangers on the internet and starting anew. My chest tightens with admiration, with recognition. I don’t just want to be her sister. I want to be her friend. I want to tell her this, but instead I ask a stupid question.

“What are you going to do with all these chairs?”

“There are two more in the attic,” she reminds me.

“So many chairs.”

“I don’t know yet,” Mel says simply, shrugging. Then I see something pass across her face, something guilty, like this question is something she should have asked me much earlier:

“Do you need them?”

I picture my own crusty chairs around my battered old table. My kids and husband sitting in them, sharing stories of their day. I’ll invite Mel over for dinner tonight, or soon, I think, the idea warming me. There’s a place for her with us, around the secondhand dining set I settled for that became the backdrop for all my favorite memories. Besides, now Mel’s chairs won’t just remind me of family tensions. They’ll make me think of the matching table we sold to the Craigslist woman and what—or who, God help us—might be on it.

“Get rid of ‘em,” I tell my sister, who smiles just a little when I add: “We’re good.”

Beth Kander is a playwright and novelist, among other things; she lives in the Midwest with her husband and their children.

ART: © TALIA LEVITT, COURTESY THE ARTIST. ACRYLIC ON CANVAS 50.8 X 40.6 CM, 20 X 16 IN