Dishes

“You’ll have to wash those by hand,” my mother cautioned as we gazed at the fine Pickard Venetian china I wanted, creamy ivory plates with a matte platinum rim embedded with delicate flowers. In the light, the plates shimmered like mirrors, the soft satin of the porcelain almost sensual. They were simple but for that decoration, a riot of tiny vine-like flowers that seemed both fiery and heart-filled, in constant motion around the perimeter of each dish. The plates perfectly embodied who I wanted to be: simply elegant, shimmering with beauty, unfurled and unleashed in endless decoration.

“I don’t care,” I said, fingering the smooth finish and glossy surface. “I love them. And besides, they’re for our fanciest meals.” I could hand-wash twice a week, after Friday night and Saturday Sabbath lunch.

I wanted a set for twelve: entrée plates and salad plates and tiny dessert plates and bowls with a wide flat lip and fruit bowls that you could hold in the palm of your hand. I wanted it all: the wide oval platter, the two sizes of serving bowls, the sugar and creamer and twelve dainty teacups and saucers. Eager to entertain, believing my marriage would last, I was ready at twenty-eight to be a grown-up and live like one. Never mind that the man I would marry was an out-of-work singer with a beautiful voice who couldn’t tuck in his shirts or dress before noon due to a depression I hadn’t seen in the short time we dated long-distance. Once he moved to Michigan – six weeks before the wedding – I saw it all, but the invitations had been mailed and I didn’t want to prove my parents right that my decision was hasty. I believed I could help him, and besides, at the time, I thought he was my best option.

I met my first husband on a blind date when he was visiting his parents’ home in Detroit. He was living on New York’s Upper West Side amid scores of modern Orthodox singles. Since he had grown up religious, and I was new to that world, I wore a fitted, floor-length brown suede skirt and turtleneck sweater for our first date. Seeing me so covered, beyond the Orthodox modesty mandate which instructs women to wear sleeves past the elbow, skirts below the knee and collars above the clavicle, he thought I was way more religious; I felt like I was posing, tepidly new to a religious lifestyle that I had chosen for its promise of a peaceful weekly Sabbath and a community focused on meaning rather than the superficial.

After dinner at a kosher restaurant, he took me to his parents’ house and sang a song he had written, his voice reaching the ceiling and wrapping around me like a scarf. I couldn’t know then that it was the only song he’d ever write. His beautiful range lifted from the piano, overtaking the room, and me. I liked that he wasn’t the cookie-cutter kind of religious guy in black hat and prayer fringes dangling over his waist. He wore jeans on weekdays and purple suits to synagogue and a crocheted yarmulke in colorful patterns. If I didn’t want to lose myself completely to religion, I could marry a guy who wasn’t the stereotype, and we could be creative together, me the writer, he the musician, the artistic couple that inspired and confused people in our straight-laced community of lawyers, doctors and accountants.

That’s why, after only three months of long-distance dating, I said yes when he asked me to marry him, on a little bridge over a simple stream in the dark of a suburban night. He flew back to New York, and we planned the wedding over the phone, my mother and I registering at Hudson’s, the beloved department store from my childhood.

Instead of silver cutlery that would need polishing, I chose heavy, expensive Christofle flatware that would always shine, and delicate crystal glasses with intricately detailed stems. “No one will buy those for you,” my mother said. “They’re too expensive.” You can imagine my surprise when the full set arrived, purchased by my parents as our wedding gift. But that’s how they were – judging my desires, then fulfilling them for me anyway.

A few years after we married, Hudson’s was acquired by Marshall Fields. It used to be that you could return anything to Hudson’s, after any length of time. They’d find the record of the sale in their computers and smile as they took the merchandise back, no questions asked. That didn’t fly at Marshall Field’s, though I never sought to return the items from my wedding. Their housewares department shrank and the sales staff seemed annoyed by customers wanting assistance. I stopped shopping there long before my marriage ended.

We divorced after eight years, and I kept the china, the silverware, the crystal. I’m not sure what my ex got in exchange. Maybe he didn’t want to be bothered with all the hand-washing. I didn’t either, so I placed the plates on my every-day shelves, started using them for every meal and cleaning them in the dishwasher. I was tired of keeping things I loved in a dark cupboard and only bringing them out for special occasions. Living happily was special enough; why not celebrate every day?

“I get one life,” I figured. “Why not make it beautiful?” I made friends with other strong women who didn’t care if I dressed modestly or whether I separated milk and meat. I was done with all the rules, tired of reserving expensive plates and fancy stemware for celebrations. I hosted a divorce party and invited my parents, who were ecstatic to attend.

Twenty-five of us sat around my dining room table with those fine plates before us, and platters of desserts all along the dark mahogany. We toasted to my independence, at 37, and to the daring it takes to imagine a better way forward. I was confident finally, even as the single mother of three young children who needed a solid rock of a parent to help them navigate the choppy waters of divorce – especially when their father was sad and despondent in those first years, forgetting to dress them warmly on fall days or send a sandwich in their school lunches. “Get it together,” I told him when we met with attorneys a year after the divorce. “The kids need you.” But he called me on his weeknight overnight when our daughter wouldn’t stop crying. “Just come get her,” he said, his voice wilting.

Eventually, he grew stronger and more capable of managing single-parenting. “Dad says he can’t believe you use the fancy dishes every day,” my daughter said once. I shrugged. “They’re so pretty,” I said. “Why hide them away?” She nodded as if she understood. My table was elegant, my meals delicious, even when it was macaroni and cheese or breakfast-for-dinner, pancakes stacked high and, yes, the smoky scent of bacon balancing against the sweet of maple syrup. I no longer restricted foods or flavors. I separated nothing. The plates reminded me that I didn’t need to follow someone else’s rules to live well, that I had the final say in what my life looked like.

A year and a half later, I met another man who loved me well, so I married him. While the first husband represented what I thought I wanted, the second reflected that I finally knew who I was and how I wanted to be in the world. Dan has dark curls and smiling eyes and a Hebrew tattoo on his bicep that is both rebellious and traditional – the curling letters spell zachor, remember, to recall the Holocaust and also to signify his archival career. He is tasked with identifying the documents and images worth saving to tell the important stories of human experience.

He and his daughter moved into my house, and we became a family of six, with lots of plates and bowls. When we all ate together, the kitchen table wouldn’t fit us, so we migrated to the dining room, a better place for pretty dishes. We cooked together after long workdays and took our time talking with the kids at dinner. “What was good about your day?” I asked, going around the table as each of us answered. Our kids brought friends home for family dinners. Once, a classmate of my daughter’s went wide-eyed as she took in all the bowls and plates of homemade food, and all of us around the table. “You do this every night?” “Pretty much,” I nodded, and my daughter beamed.

When Dan and I married, we didn’t register for anything, eagerly donating many of our belongings. We were merging houses and families, with duplicate books, too many plates and more blankets and sheets than the cupboards could hold. It was freeing to let so much go.

Besides, I don’t know where we would have registered if we’d wanted to. Marshall Fields didn’t last long in Michigan. Macy’s came in and took it over. It no longer resembled the dreamscape of my youth, where kind salespeople encouraged shoppers to linger over possibilities. By the time I was married again, it was a fluorescent-lit three-story maze of apparel, jewelry, makeup and nothing special on crowded racks and displays. I remembered Hudson’s as carpeted to mute the noise, the sacred conversation of careful planning for how a life might play out. The new store gleamed with hard edges.

Two years after we married, Dan and I and all the kids moved from the house I had shared with my first husband to an old home of our choosing, painting the walls peacock blue, royal purple, sage green. We left the old, tattered couch at the curb for garbage-pickers and purchased a brown tufted couch for our living room. We bought a new bed, soft sheets, fluffy blankets, firm pillows. We packed the dishes carefully between layers of newspaper and carted them to the new house in the dead of winter. They stacked in the cabinet to the right of the sink, above the dishwasher.

We used the big plates the most, and eventually, the metallic decoration started to fade and crack. I’m surprised it didn’t happen sooner. After all, I’d had the dishes since the year 2000, through so many ups and downs. There were unmarred plates on the bottom of the stack that we never got to, so I rotated them to the top, but soon even those showed signs of wear. After more than a decade of marriage and daily cooking, I said to my husband, “I need to let these go.” He nodded as if this were a truth everyone already knew. But he was patient. Understanding.

“I want to replace them with dishes like the ones I bought before my first marriage,” I said. “White with little flowers.” It was a set I had found at an outlet mall, purchased when I was becoming religious and starting to keep kosher on my own. When the first husband came along, he insisted they weren’t kosher enough for him; he believed the porcelain of the plates absorbed whatever sat on its surface, and I hadn’t followed his rules entirely. So I threw them out, sad as I said goodbye to a vision of the person I wanted to be, resigned to fitting into his mold.

I loved those plates. I can still see the simple and elegant design – a pattern my mother would never have chosen, a little Laura Ashley, a little country elegance, colorful flowers but not too many, one in the center of a gleaming white plate then little ones around a scalloped rim. I remember reds and blues and green velvety stems. Chosen at a time when I was starting to live on my own, starting to understand how to build a life and live according to my own choices. Deciding who I wanted to be – a person different from nosy relatives and pushy neighbors. Entirely, coherently me.

That’s a lot for a set of dishes to symbolize. At midlife, it was time for a new unblemished set, something without the stains of the past. One night, I Googled options at Wayfair, Pottery Barn, Williams Sonoma, Overstock, but didn’t find anything I loved. I wondered if I would. Those early dishes meant so much because of their promise of a future I couldn’t see but only dream about. But I was different then – innocent, idealistic, with limited funds and big dreams. Every purchase made a statement about who I might become, how my future might unfold.

At midlife, as my children leave for lives of their own, after all the places I’ve been, the people I’ve known, the incarnations of self I’ve cycled through, I can’t go to an outlet mall with the same eager sense of opportunity. And for decades now, there hasn’t been a place like Hudson’s to wander through and imagine how a life might turn out. Most of the sweet stores of my youth are gone, their buildings echoing with emptiness.

I’ve been with my second husband longer than I’ve ever been with anyone. We’re solid. Content. More passionate and in love in our fifties than we were when we blended homes and attended to young children hungry for attention and a solid foundation to make growing up easier. Where my first marriage was about the appearance of love, this second one is about feeling it in my bones. We laugh a lot. Make love in quiet rooms when the house is empty. Watch a lot of British TV with the captions on, snuggled into a corner of the couch. We live intertwined, and the decorations don’t matter much – it’s the conversation and music on a kitchen speaker while we cook side-by-side – the prep more important than the presentation — that creates the foundation of our love.

The innocence and eagerness of my twenties were stepping-stones to real life. What kind of dishes will take me into old age and the very end? Finding plates and bowls to feed my golden years, a time I’ve never yearned for nor dreamed about, turned out to be a desire to fill my shelves with simplicity.

When I think of the future, I see grandchildren to bake with and read to and snuggle under blankets. I picture my children with significant others I don’t yet know, likely needing way more than twelve settings to feed everyone. I hope for lively holidays with homemade food that I learned to make from people I loved long ago, telling their stories as the matriarch facilitating traditions, conferring meaning.

Recently, I chaperoned a field trip for my sixteen-year-old son’s class to the Detroit Institute of Arts. The tour guide led us to a gallery about French aristocratic art from the 18^th century, which had a section dedicated to dishware. The pattern was similar to the floral design of my first set, and I gazed through the glass at the platters and teapots and gravy boats, all washed by hand back then, by servants, preserved over centuries to tell a story of how life used to be.

The kids shuffled past and scanned the exhibits, bored. They were more interested in the mummies and contemporary paintings. But the place settings told a story of culture and memory, of people connecting over local foods, of serving and being served, sustaining and nourishing and tasting the flavors of a particular way of living. That is worthy of display and preservation. Of all the items that could be exhibited in a museum, there was quite a bit of real estate given to tableware. How people survived, yes, and how they enjoyed life, too. The dishes so precious that families handed them down through generations. We all leave legacies, but today, it’s more about story, recipe and memory.

Finally, I found simple, pale pink plates and bowls with great online reviews. The excitement I’d felt at the prospect of choosing a new set of dishes had waned; I just wanted something that would last.

When a Jewish couple marries, there’s a custom of the mothers of the bride and groom breaking a plate before the wedding. Symbolizing the seriousness of the commitment, breaking a plate cannot be undone, signifying that a marriage is not easily ended. Rabbis urge the mothers to wrap the plate well, so no one gets cut by a shard. Some brides make a necklace of the broken pieces; others give pieces to single friends for good luck in finding their bashert, the person they’re destined to love.

The other day, my mother was visiting. We sipped wine from the delicate crystal stemware she’d warned against so many years ago. “They really are beautiful,” she said. I didn’t remind her of what she’d first said when she warned me away.

We create so many stories of our lives. But really, there are no momentous occasions, only ordinary ones. In my twenties, I thought the items I owned somehow conveyed the value of my life. I know better now. It’s never the stuff, only the moments, the people, the experiences. What goes on the plates – not the plates themselves. I have become content with a sleek bowl of spaghetti swirled in ramp pesto and garlic and a drizzle of olive oil, a homemade meal, forked into my mouth, with all the flavors of the season.