The Button Under the Rug

Added: 2026-05-10

[00:00:00]Under the dining room table in my grandmother's house, there was a bump in the rug. A small one. It was easy to miss. Uh, it sat right in front of where my grandmother sat. And if you pressed it with your foot, a bell rang in the kitchen, and a waiter appeared. When I was eight, my grandmother let me sit next to her and press it when she nodded at me to do so. And this was an honor.

[00:00:20]My brother and sister noticed, and they had every reason to be jealous. My grandmother's house was about 30,000 square ft. Seven master bedrooms, a kitchen the size of most houses, seven full-time staff who lived in bedrooms, and a wing above the kitchen. A chauffeur who lived above the garage with his wife and kids. This was the 1960s and 70s. Most people had shag carpet and avocado refrigerators. At my grandparents house, we were eating seven course dinners that were served by waiters in white jackets. In the summers, the family migrated north. My grandparents had a summer house on Lake Masawippi, which was in the eastern townships of Quebec, Canada, in a village called North Hatley. Big shingled uh lake houses, old money, mostly American. My grandmother called it her reduced staff up there, only two or three people instead of seven. Every morning at Massa Whippy, my grandfather and I took a walk, and we'd pass the big houses along the lake road, and he would nod at one and say, "That's Mrs. got rocks as in got rocks diamonds. Don't overthink it. And he had jokes for all of the neighbors making fun of their wealth. I was 8 years old and I thought, you know, he was the funniest man alive.

[00:01:34]It took me years to understand that the man making up the names for his neighbors was also one of the names that he was in some quiet way refusing to take any of it as seriously as it took itself. He kept a small fleet at the lake, a rowboat, a canoe, a sunfish, a luxurious motorboat, and the Sadi, which was a big racing sailboat. And he sailed in the regatas that were put on by the club during the summer. And he raced in a coat and tie always. The other men, they wore deck shoes and shorts. My grandfather was in a blazer and a knotted tie, and it would not have occurred to him to dress any other way.

[00:02:18]Well, when I was 10 years old, he started letting me crew for him, and I I worked the jib. One race, we were attacking back and forth near the start line, the way that you do, trying to time it so that you cross just as the starting gun is fired. And he had his pocket watch on a chain out, and he kept checking it. He was standing there with his watch in hand when the wind shifted and the boom swung across the deck before he could duck and it caught him square. Bang! He had knocked him over the side and into the lake.

[00:02:49]>> Then the starting gun fired while he was in the water. He had kept a hold of a sheet, a rope on the way down. So hand overhand, he, you know, soaked through and through. 60some years old. He hauled himself back up under the deck while I held the boat up into the wind the way he had shown me to do. He straightened his tie and we played catchup on the whole race. We we finished fourth. He never mentioned it again. Not at dinner that night, not the next day, not ever.

[00:03:17]And that was the other thing about that world. Some things happened and some things you talked about and the overlap was smaller than you'd think. Back in New York at the big house when I was very small, we kids ate downstairs in the kitchen in the servants's dining room. We children were to be seen and not heard in those days and pre preferably not even seen either, at least not during cocktails. Millie was my grandparents cook. this large black woman from the south and her food was better than anything in any restaurant.

[00:03:48]When my grandparents were away, Millie could sometimes be persuaded to sit at the grand piano in the big living room and play ragtime. And she played real thumping rag time. She was good. The whole house just changed when she played. Suddenly, it was looser. It was warmer like it had been holding its breath and finally let out when Millie sat down at that piano. And that was my first lesson. though I didn't know it yet that there there was the house my grandparents lived in and there was a different house of people like Millie alongside it and the people who lived in both they knew which was which.

[00:04:25]Around second grade I got promoted. I was allowed to eat dinner in the big dining room with the adults and it was like Downtown Abbey. There was coats and ties for the men. That's what we wore.

[00:04:36]The women dressed for dinner as well.

[00:04:38]You sat quietly. You didn't mention anything that had happened in the kitchen or the servants wing. My grandmother had place cards at every meal. She always put me next to her because here's what came with the seat next to granny. She would catch my eye during dinner, give me a small nod. I'd stretch out my leg and press the button under the rug with my foot. There was a distant bell. A door opened. A waiter appeared to clear or serve or pour. I was 8 years old and I had a small remote control for the universe there. My brother and sister and I used to sneak into the dining room when it was empty and press the button just to watch someone from the kitchen come in and find nobody there. Millie and the others, they knew exactly what we were doing. They never really minded. But there was something I understood in that house without ever being told. You didn't talk to the staff at dinner. You thanked them when a plate was taken, but that was it. You didn't ask about their lives. you didn't know their last names.

[00:05:34]And if you did, you pretended you didn't. You didn't go back to the kitchen to the servants's dining room after you had been promoted upstairs to the big table, even if you missed it or missed them. And you never under any circumstances pressed the button under the rug unless granny had nodded. Nobody ever said any of this. We just, you know, you learned it. I learned those rules so well that I didn't notice I was learning them. And that's how those rules work. By the time you can name them, they're already inside you. And it would take me decades to figure out which ones to keep and which ones to throw out. And the woman who taught me the button, my granny, I would only really learn the rest of who she was after she was gone. In 1980, when I was 25 and living in Los Angeles, my grandmother died. And I flew east for the funeral. And in the three days that I spent in the house, my mother gave me something she had been wanting to give me for 25 years.

[00:06:31]and we'll talk about that in the next episode. Thanks for watching.