You're Down At The End

The Ashcrofts have held the same dinner in the same dining room on the first Sunday of the month for thirty-one years.

I had been to four of them.

I want to start with the seating, because the seating is not a small thing and everybody who has ever been the wrong person at a table already knows that.

There are fourteen chairs. There is a chair at the corner by the window that was Robert's mother's. There is a chair beside Margaret, which is where family sits. And there is the chair at the far end nearest the door to the kitchen, which is on the traffic side, where Elsa comes through with the plates, and where your chair has to be pulled in every time she passes.

I went to sit beside my husband, because we had arrived together and because in four years I had never worked out any rule that would explain it.

"That's not your seat, dear," Margaret said. "You're down at the end."

"I thought David and I were —"

"David's beside me. You're at the end."

I carried my glass down the length of the table and sat by the kitchen door.

I want to be honest about what I felt, which was not outrage. It was relief. From that chair you can look at the tablecloth and nobody expects anything of you, and I had learned that the safest thing to be in that room was furniture.