The Good Tablecloth

The good tablecloth came out four times a year, and each time it came out, someone in the Esposito family argued about where it had come from.

Nonna Carmela maintained, with the serenity of a woman who had long ago decided that being right was more important than being liked, that the tablecloth had been a wedding gift from her own mother, carried from Avellino in 1962 inside a cardboard suitcase that smelled of camphor and dried figs. Her daughter-in-law Rossana maintained, with equal serenity and considerably more edge, that she had bought it herself at a market in Caserta in 1991, and she still had the receipt somewhere, she was almost certain, she just needed to find the right drawer. Carmela's son Enzo, who was sixty-one and had learned decades ago that agreeing with both women simultaneously was the only survivable position, maintained that it was a beautiful tablecloth and that what mattered was family, not provenance, and he said this while carefully looking at the centerpiece.

The tablecloth was white, broderie anglaise along the edges, slightly yellow at one corner from an incident involving moscato that nobody officially remembered. It was large enough for the extended table — two folding sections added for Christmas, Easter, Ferragosto, and the occasional funeral lunch — and it had, over fifty or sixty years (depending on whose version you accepted), absorbed a remarkable quantity of Esposito family history into its fibers. Red wine from Enzo and Rossana's engagement dinner. Wax from the candles at little Federica's First Communion. A long, faint stain near the center that the children had always called the Boot because it looked like Italy, which Carmela considered patriotic and Rossana considered an eyesore.

This particular Sunday was Easter, and the occasion of the tablecloth's emergence had also become the occasion of a new complication: Federica, now twenty-eight and living in Milan, had brought home a boyfriend. His name was Andrea, he was from Bergamo, and he had the haunted expression of a man who had been told that Sunday lunch would be "just family, very relaxed" and had arrived to find seventeen people and four courses already underway by one o'clock.

He made the mistake, somewhere between the pasta and the lamb, of admiring the tablecloth.

"It's beautiful," he said. "Very old?"

The table went briefly quiet in the way that tables go quiet when a question has accidentally pulled the pin from a grenade.

Nonna Carmela set down her fork. "It belonged to my mother."

"It belonged to nobody's mother," said Rossana, pleasantly, refilling her own wine glass. "I bought it in Caserta. I remember perfectly."

"You remember what you choose to remember."

"As do we all, Carmela."

Enzo said, "More lamb, Andrea?"

Federica, who had witnessed this particular argument across her entire conscious life, watched Andrea's face cycle through confusion, alarm, and a dawning comprehension that he was not witnessing a fight so much as a liturgy — something performed not to resolve anything but to keep a certain shape in the world. She had stopped finding it embarrassing around age twenty-two. Now she mostly found it interesting, the way you find interesting a river that has worn its own channel so deep it could never go anywhere else.

What she had not told Andrea, because she was not sure how to say it in a way that wouldn't sound strange, was that she had once asked her grandmother — alone, in the kitchen, while ostensibly helping with the coffee — which version was true. Carmela had looked at her for a moment with those eyes that had seen Avellino and a cardboard suitcase and sixty years of Sunday lunches, and had said: "Does it matter? It is ours now."

Federica had thought about that sentence for six years. She was still thinking about it.

At the end of the meal, as always, the tablecloth was cleared and then folded with a specific ceremony that involved Carmela holding two corners and Rossana holding the other two, and both of them stepping toward each other in small, synchronized movements until the thing was reduced to a neat rectangle. They had been doing this together for thirty years. They did it without speaking, without looking at each other, with the practiced efficiency of people who disagree about everything except the importance of folding the tablecloth correctly.

Andrea watched this and said nothing, which was, Federica decided, a promising sign.

The tablecloth went back into the linen cupboard, between the napkins and the spare duvet, in the dark, where it would spend the next three months quietly being whatever it was.

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