The dining room in my house on Edwards Lane is like one of the still, soundless interiors in the “period rooms” of the Metropolitan Museum of Art: It hasn’t changed much since the 1930s, when my apple-cheeked, redheaded father and his dark-haired, almond-eyed siblings were small.
In old pictures, fading and sepia, the only difference seems to be the wallpaper. We used to have my absolute favorite wallpaper in there, a chinoiserie toile in shades of green and nut-brown on a cream background, with a repeating pattern of Chinese pagodas and weeping willows. This wallpaper got old and stained — brown spots appearing where, presumably, gravy had somehow spattered, and brushstrokes of brown emerging at the seams where the paper-hangers had applied the paste during the Great Depression — and at some point in the 1990s my mother replaced it with a perfectly nice new wallpaper in a similarly Asiatic pattern, dahlias and chrysanthemums on a grayer ground.
We don’t use the dining room much in these years. I fold my laundry on top of the highly varnished surface of the big dining table (the leaf for which we somehow managed to lose in the 1990s, as well); otherwise, it’s only a throughway between the living room and the kitchen. One of the wooden floorboards bends under your foot each time you step in from the living room. It’s been too long since our floors were polished (an operation that used to be performed by men with buffing machines), much less stripped and stained, but I’ve grown accustomed to the springboard underfoot in the sagging old dining room and no longer worry it is going to actually give way. It’s like bouncing off a little diving board. If it hasn’t broken yet, it won’t break.
There used to be eight delicate dining chairs in this dining room, with rush seats and slender limbs, but now we only have six. The original set was made up of six matching side chairs — dating to before 1900, I think, when the average American was slimmer — and one matcher on either end with thin arms. One of these armchairs disappeared in the 1990s, too. Someone sat on it and it broke in ways that couldn’t be repaired and my mother didn’t tell me because she knew I’d be unreasonably mad (even though the sitter, obviously, couldn’t be blamed for an impractical antique giving way). The rush seat of one the uprights, meanwhile, was more recently torn up by the rear end of my son, who spent the winter nights of his freshman year of high school playing Roblox games on a ginormous “gaming computer” he put together himself from components ordered off Amazon and set up on the dining room table: He would thrash around excitedly in his seat while playing the game — shouting encouragements and imprecations at his buddies over a headset — and the movements of his hind quarters ended up tearing the strands of rush! Ha, ha!
Anyway, the dining room is a reminder of how much things have changed in our family habits since the old century. We actually ate most days in the dining room in my childhood, and by today’s standards these were quite formal meals, looking back. We sat upright, put our napkins in our lapkins (they were paper, but the thick, nice ones from a brand called Chinet), and used the knife and fork in the American manner, fork held palm-up in the left hand, tines up, and knife in the right.
Most of our habits were formal and antiquated by 2026 standards. We never spoke about bodily functions in our household. If someone farted, it was ignored so completely that it almost didn’t even register as having happened. Frankly, although I certainly understand why this sort of prudery is mocked, and it’s better to speak frankly about bodies, et cetera, I think that was better: Why amplify farts? I don’t actually even like to use the word “fart” to this day, and when my own children were small would reference Pumbaa, the flatulent warthog from “The Lion King,” if mention needed to be made of a bad smell. One of my brothers (oppositional-defiant) was prone to cursing and trying to upset people with obscenities, and even scratched the words “let’s have sex” with a knife into the shiny varnished surface of the breakfast table on our sun porch — the words are still there — but we were not a sh!t-talking family. My father, who had a hot temper, shouted “Christ on a crutch!” when he was angry.
I’d seen a teacher lick her forefinger to lift a sheet of paper from a stack, or lick it to turn the page of a book being read aloud to the class (“The Witch Next Door” or “Otto and the Magic Potatoes”) but I would never have done such a thing. I also observed that some people’s families pointed with their thumb, sticking up their thumb and pumping it over their shoulder, this-a-way. No one told me not to point with my thumb; we just didn’t use our thumbs like that.
It’s interesting to consider how fully my mother — who grew up in Bayonne, N.J., in a row house, in a lower-middle class household, the daughter of a very jovial insurance salesman (who was always posing riddles and singing joke songs, like, “I never saw a purple cow and never hope to see one”) and a refugee who had fled on foot from a pogrom in Bessarabia — assimilated to the Yankee manners of my father’s family here in East Hampton, which must have seemed a bit grim and frosty. My mother was very intelligent and very talented, I can see, gazing backwards in the mirror (facing another mirror, the mirrors reflecting smaller and smaller images until infinity). Other than pronouncing one or two words in ways that made me, a monster of boarding school snobbery, wince, she had no New Jersey accent. She said the word “cognac” funny (cognac! this word came up not infrequently in conversation because we all cooked a lot), and I’d attempt to correct her, but otherwise she spoke exactly like the other East Hampton moms.
She had a fine ear, and she acclimated amazingly — I can see now — to the expectations of her mother-in-law’s house, my East Hampton grandmother, who stood only 5 foot 9 but appeared taller due to her regal bearing and the two or three inches of carefully dressed silver-and-chestnut hair that sat above her rather mischievous face like the turban of a snake charmer. My grandmother wore face powder, and body powder applied with a puff, and red lipstick from a golden tube, and a scent called Damask Rose. The good silver and the old Copeland Spode china (an Edwardian set in the India Tree pattern) came out of the glass-front white-painted dining-room cabinet only for holidays, but we ate nightly on china in the green-and-white Early English Ivy pattern from Crown Ducal.
As I’ve mentioned here before, I lost my good table manners when I went to boarding school at 15 and started eating among the teenage barbarians, hunching over the plate, leaving the napkin on the table. I can revert — code switch — back to good manners when in company, but I’m aware of it requiring a certain extra expending of energy. I’ve successfully imparted to my children at least the ability to use cutlery without holding either a knife or fork in their balled fist. Now that I’ve been working as an office administrator this last year and a half and have to handle so many documents — bulletins, correspondence, filing, invoices, get-well cards — I find myself wanting one of those rubber thimbles, called a “finger cot,” I think, that office clerks used in the last century to assist in separating sheets of paper. Otherwise, I must admit, if you peered through the glass of my office door, you might catch me licking my forefinger. Needs must.