A Loud House
A story about the table that was finally full
I had imagined turning sixty in a hundred different ways over the past year, the way you turn a thought over and over when you have too much quiet in your life and your mind fills the silence with projections. I had imagined a small dinner, just me and Mark, my oldest, at the Italian restaurant on Burnside where they make their pasta by hand and the lighting is low and forgiving and you feel, sitting there, like someone who is being taken care of. I had imagined my daughter Sarah calling from wherever she was living now, Colorado or New Mexico, she had mentioned both at different times and I had lost track, calling to sing happy birthday through the speaker in that flat, cheerfully tuneless way she had always sung, immune to embarrassment in the specific way of people who genuinely do not care.
I had imagined my husband, if he had been here, which he was not and had not been for five years, standing behind me in the kitchen and putting his hand on the small of my back and squeezing once, the way he used to do when we were young and the house was new and we could not quite believe we had made this life together out of nothing but intention and stubbornness. Mostly, though, I had imagined a house full of noise. When David and I got married, in a small ceremony in his parents’ backyard in June of 1988, he told me he wanted a big family.
Not in the abstract way that young people sometimes say things like that, meaning vaguely more than one, meaning the idea of children rather than the specific reality of them. He meant it specifically and enthusiastically, the way he meant most things when he was young and certain. “A loud house,” he used to say, pulling me toward him in the one-bedroom apartment we lived in before the children came, the apartment where the kitchen table also served as the desk and the dining room and the place where we did our taxes.
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