Don't Sing at the Table Read Free Page A

young family from Pennsylvania to Big Stone Gap, Virginia, she said, “I could never live in a place where they don’t make cheese.”
    After dessert, she served digestifs (bitters, Fernet Branca, Amaretto, or Fra Angelico) from a standard 1950s rolling liquor cart with two shelves. There was always a large carved wooden bowl filled with nuts and studded with silver nutcrackers and matching picks to remove the meat from the nuts, placed on the table after dessert. Viola even had a fancy table-size silver-handled whisk broom and dustpan to sweep up the shells.
    After dinner and dishes, there was usually a card game, and sometimes there was just conversation, but I remember feeling content after one of her dinner parties, hoping the night would never end. We laughed a lot. Viola played records on the hi-fi before and after dinner, stacking the LPs of Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, One Thousand and One Strings, and other instrumentals. The hi-fi still works because none of her sixteen grandchildren was ever allowed to play it.
    I once asked her how she knew how to throw dinner parties. After all, her own mother had died so young, and all Viola knew was life on the farm. She did not have exposure to fancy restaurants or grand parties, yet she knew how to prepare elegant dishes and entertain with style. Viola admitted she studied how people entertained in the movies (“the show”) and learned how to create a dinner party from a small series of books she received when she married.
    The Woman’s Library was created by Social Culture Publications in New York City in the 1920s as a series of advice books for young ladies who aspired to be proper hostesses, entertain like the upper classes, and present themselves with good manners. With or without these books, I doubt the queen of England herself entertained her guests better than my grandmother. And I’ll bet the cooks at Buckingham Palace couldn’t top her polenta.
    Everything I Ever Wanted
    Long summer days were workdays for Viola, as they were loaded with light, perfect for hanging laundry on the clothesline, baking, and cleaning. Viola rose early, and often started her day berry picking.
    One summer morning, before daybreak, Viola drove her station wagon, the back loaded with empty baskets, on a winding road through Flicksville with walls of green corn on either side. She was on her way to a commercial farm loaded with strawberry fields, where you could pick your own and pay for them. Her baby sister, Lavinia, had the same idea. She too rose early, drove to the farm, grabbed a stack of empty baskets from her car trunk, and waited for the flatbed truck to take her up the hill to the fields filled with the ripest berries.
    As the sun came up over the mountain, Lavinia saw the truck coming down the dirt road toward her. As it appeared in the distance, she saw a lone rider with her legs dangling over the side of the flatbed, surrounded by baskets filled with fresh picked strawberries. It was my grandmother, well into her seventies, wearing cutoff jean shorts, a vibrant polyester blouse, and a sun hat. When she saw her baby sister, she said, “You’re late.”
    Viola’s routine was to return to her kitchen with the fresh-picked berries and commence making pies, crust first. Viola’s fruit pies were works of art, sweet fruit in a delicate, lacy crust. I never remember a slice left over, they were eaten the day they were baked. She loathed sleeping late, didn’t understand it, never did it, and thought it a terrible waste of time. “I don’t understand why anybody would waste the morning,” she’d say. To this day, as a result of her example (and insistence), I can’t sleep late. I still get a vision of my grandmother’s face, much like Saint Thomas Aquinas had when he saw the face of God promising eternal life in exchange for a purposeful life. Once I’ve seen The Face, I have to get up. And, like Viola, I