Three — What Dinner Tables Taught Me

Three — What Dinner Tables Taught Me

In our house, the dinner table was a court. My father presided. The rest of us — my mother, my younger sister Noor, and I — were in various states of testimony, depending on the evening and the mood that had arrived with him from wherever he had been.

The moods were not unpredictable. This is important to say because the comfortable version of a story like this casts the father as erratic, as a weather system without pattern, and uses the unpredictability as explanation. My father was not erratic. He was entirely consistent. He was consistently withholding. He was consistently precise about the application of the withholding — knowing exactly when a silence would be more effective than a criticism, knowing exactly when a criticism would be more effective than a silence, deploying them with the strategy of a man who has been running this system for so long that it operates below the level of conscious decision.

I learned to read the table the way a naturalist learns to read weather. The angle of his head when he sat down. The speed at which he unfolded his napkin. Whether he looked at my mother when she brought the food or at some middle distance that meant he was still inside whatever had happened during the day. These were the instruments. I read them every evening with the focused attention of a person whose wellbeing depends on accurate forecasting.

The evenings when the forecast was moderate — when he was neither particularly distant nor particularly present — I would sometimes try. I would say something about school, something I had done or learned or thought, and position it in the space between us as carefully as you position an object on an unsteady surface. Sometimes he would pick it up. More often he would leave it there, untouched, and the conversation would move around it the way water moves around a stone, and by the end of dinner it would be gone and it would be as if I had not said it.

The worst evenings were not the ones where he criticized. The worst evenings were the ones where he simply was not there. Physically present, eating the food my mother had cooked, occupying the chair at the head of the table, and entirely absent. On these evenings, speaking to him was like dropping a stone into very deep water. You could hear it go in. You could not hear it land.

Noor handled this better than I did. She had, from an early age, developed the survival strategy of simply not needing his approval — of redirecting the energy she might have spent seeking it toward other sources: her friends, her studies, the self-sufficient interior life of a girl who had assessed the situation accurately and made a sensible decision. She was always more pragmatic than me. I watched her across the dinner table sometimes with something close to envy. She had learned what I was still trying to learn: that you cannot get water from a well that has been sealed.

I kept lowering the bucket anyway. This is the thing I cannot fully explain about myself in those years. I knew the well was sealed. I had known it for as long as I had been aware of the knowing. And I kept lowering the bucket, every dinner, every report card, every small achievement brought to the table like an offering to a god whose rituals I had never been taught correctly. I kept lowering the bucket.

The bucket always came up empty.

I kept lowering it.