Family Geometry

The table is our first geometry: square, circle, rectangle, or the pecan oval of my childhood where I am a fixed point beside my sister, across from my brother, with our parents at the head and foot. I did not always sit there. In a photo taken on my second birthday, I am sitting in a highchair, beating my hands on the metal tray smeared with cake, wearing a chocolate frosting grin. I am tangential to the family table and the picture shows me straining to get out of my highchair to attain a place at the bigger, better table. In a later photo I am consoled with the dregs of someone's wine glass. At two, I already understand something: the party is at the other table, the table I am not seated at, the table a short distance from my highchair or across the room in the restaurant or across the room of memory.

When I was in first grade in Belgium my best friend was Julie—small, dark-haired, dark-eyed. Julie possessed everything I wanted: long hair, a mother with long hair, a pair of miniature stuffed mice wearing tiny taffeta crinolines that poofed out from their soft white bodies. I coveted the mice whenever I held them, stroking their whiskers, their skirts, their white fur. Finally Julie invited me to spend the night. Her family lived in an old two-story farmhouse surrounded by fields of sugar beet. I was enchanted by the gleaming marvel of the walnut stairway and mezzanine, the final swoop of the banister where we leapt off before crashing into the carved newel post. I stood on the threshold of her parents' room with its four-poster bed, the bentwood rocker with an afghan thrown over the arm, the cool light spilling through the northern windows, awed. My envy was complete when I saw Julie's room with its canopy bed sugared with lace, the immense mahogany wardrobe with the silver key, and finally, the mouse house, a miniature world of antique furniture, peaceful and still as the house where she lived.

We ate dinner that evening in the warm light of September at a battered harvest table in the kitchen. Julie's mother dandled the baby on her lap while she heaped food on our plates, wild rice, flank steak, green beans. It was the first meal I remember enjoying. No father at the head of the table to worry us. Laughter. I touched the bare wood on the underside of the table, trying to understand its charm: solid, rectangular, the wood marred and worn by generations, the kitchen snug around us. I hungered for the ease with which Julie's family ate their meal and I knew I would want a table like this, a kitchen like this, a life like this.

Twenty years later I was in Salerno, Italy, at an eight-foot walnut Shaker table laden with antipasti: the best prosciutto, four different cheeses including fresh, butter-soft mozzarella made from water buffalo milk, black and green olives, sparkling wine, red wine, mineral water, fruit, bread. Our host, Gaetano, concocted a divine pasta sauce while his wife, Maria, assisted.

"Do you like this wine?" Gaetano asked.

"I love the wine, the food, everything," I said as I tore a paper-thin piece of prosciutto in half and ate it.

From my seat at the table I watched the meal unfold. As he juggled dishes, Gaetano explained the virtues of garlic, the character of the olive oil from Maria's family orchard, and the secret of the can of tomatoes in his hand, "These are the best tomatoes. The ash from Vesuvius, you know Vesuvius? makes a special kind of soil, and only on this plain below Vesuvius, outside of Napoli is this soil." Cooking had never been this communal, instructive, and entertaining in my mother's kitchen. Here was a method I could use.

At the oval table of my childhood dining was serious. My...