A fictional account based on real stories told to me by the people who lived them. Previously published in the US1 Newspaper’s Summer Fiction Issue. ©2003 Noreen Braman
The house is silent, so silent; not at all as it was on that day forty years ago when the Schwartz Furniture Company delivered my mother’s dining room set. All morning she paced the house, swatting the already immaculate room with a dust rag, picking invisible lint out of the soft, dark carpeting. The chandelier she had brought with her from Poland as a young bride was polished and shining brightly. Now, after so many years, a table would reflect its sparkling glow.
I was 12 and old enough to sense my mother’s excitement. For years we had heard the stories of her family’s magnificent dining table, and the way her parents and sisters and aunts and uncles and cousins had sat around it time after time, laughing in joy or crying in sorrow. My mother talked wistfully about the delicately embroidered linens that her own grandmother had done in her youth, and how the openwork lace allowed the shiny surface of the table top to show through.
It seemed, from my mother’s stories, that everything of importance was discussed at that table, and that if it could speak, it would relate the history of at least four generations of her family.
