At The Dining Table

        APRIL 22, 2025 

        I want to believe that I can build my dining table. Building furniture is sexy, and woodworking is hot. I have had entire crushes emerge from the sawdust of wood paneling. If I possessed the skills to build my furniture, I imagine all of my problems could be solved, and old flings would even call me up.

        I could build a shelf that fits just right in my entryway. I could build three-legged little platforms, one for my coffee, one for my feet, one for an ashtray. I could construct a bedframe and that’s how I’d really impress my old flings when they come back. If I possessed the skills, I could build my dining table. Because as I’ve quickly learned, they don’t make the kind of dining tables that I want.

        This year marks the first time since moving to Manhattan five years ago that I have enough space for a six-seater and it is all because I have relocated to lovely Brooklyn, New York. I can get a six-seater, but that doesn’t mean I will. I’m open to a four-seater, it would surely save space, but a two-seater is out of the question. I have convinced myself that anything less than six seats will be a physical limitation on my life.

        The first and last table I loved was the B&B Italia “Athos” table. We had two in my childhood home. One white and one brown in Walnut. The white served as a dining table for our family of four for fifteen years. The classic Athos is extendable, seating twelve comfortably. It was rarely ever necessary in our home to extend to twelve seats, and I know it won’t be necessary in my Brooklyn apartment, but it does sound nice to have the option.

        When I was eleven, I began signing the underside of our white Athos table with my name and the date, “Bella 00/00/00.” I kept this up for years because once I had permission in pencil, and then in Sharpie, I couldn't stop. I have always been far too sentimental. Dinner conversation would take a turn, tutoring would bore me, and so I would slide down and out and underneath, to mark the occasion.

        When I was sixteen, I moved into my first apartment, and the white table was taken out of storage. Now, it was my dining table. It rarely saw dinners and never saw family. The boys I was dating would roll blunts on it. My friends would sometimes dance on its top or sit on its edge if the couch was full. It was an incredible table for beer pong, extending to ‘12 for the challenge. I gave this table a new life, a life it would have never known had my parents stayed together, or had our storage unit bill run unpaid.

        The only tradition that remained was the signing of its underbelly. A cup of pens sat nearby and I would instruct my guests, “Sign your name, or leave a drawing, but don’t go near anything dated before 2015.” It was the best table in the world, and it only got better with each signature.

        Like all fine furniture from my childhood, I had no perception of its value. Not to say I destroyed it, but I certainly took it for granted and tanked its value. When I began my dining table search as an adult and discovered the $3,400.00 retail value the Athos table possessed, I was appalled that my parents allowed me to begin that tradition at all, let alone to the extent it had reached.

        When I moved to New York, the last thing on my mind was the dining table, but I assumed, from the West Village, that it would go back in the storage unit and remain an heirloom. It was the last thing from my childhood that I could call mine. It was one of the only things from my childhood that still had tangible and ever-growing importance to me in my young adult years. It carried years worth of sentiment.

        When I found my Brooklyn apartment, I called my Dad, elated, hoping he would ship it over. He gave the table away, to a co-worker or the Goodwill or the curb. He couldn’t even remember. I’m not ashamed to say I cried over lacquered wood and metal legs. I cried like my childhood dog had been hit by a car in front of my very eyes.

        The brown table is still in our home in Palm Springs. It’s not an outdoor table, but it has sat in the sideyard for years, peeling in the sun, losing color and meaning alike. The brown one never meant much, to begin with, but tableless and without $3,400.00 to give B&B Italia, I am not in a position to prioritize sentiment now. It would cost about the same to ship it from California to New York, with its brown wood peeling, and the smell of desert air lingering.

        The White “Athos'' table is the only table I want in my apartment. The one with my memories of family fights, and blunts rolled, and friends sat, and the drawings and the signatures. I have tried to consider other tables like one would try to consider a new dog after your last one was struck.

        I was willing to settle for something in the style of Elsa Perretti’s work/dining table from the Beauty: All-Out Vogue story. A pine slab with a chrome underframe. That is what I want to believe I can build. I would buy a slab of pine, a few legs, and a finish, this sounds easy enough. But I’m met with fear for its infrastructure. I know with almost complete certainty that Elsa Perretti didn't build that table, and still, it looks terribly flimsy in every Horst photo I have seen.

        Decorating my apartment has sent me on a complete downward spiral. I want rugs, and more sculptures, and stainless steel pots and pans, and a credenza, and an eclectic assortment of lamps, and a desk. I want the Giraffe head sculpture that my parents hung on the wall in their wardrobe. I want our old Bang and Olufsen record player. I want the bearskin rug, and the chandelier, and the orange vinyl couch, but I need a dining room table.

        I’m sure furnishing an apartment would be fun if I still lived in Seattle, or Palm Springs, or Oregon; somewhere in middle America, or even Los Angeles. These are places where I could pick up trinkets and stop by Goodwill on my way home. Places where gathering home goods is as easy as grocery shopping. New Yorkers understand how much stuff is worth, they have dare I say great taste, and most competitively, New Yorkers have money to keep the curated furniture market afloat. I want to believe that I could build a dining table, because it sounds like I will have to build a dining table, and because building furniture is sexy, or at least I’m selling it to myself as so.