He has told me, also, of refusing a holiday turkey offered to him by the owner of a mansion by the lake, a rich man who demanded that he wade through deep snow to deliver packages to the service entrance at the back of the house.The former owners of our house, who were white, made extra money by allowing the house to be used as a set for commercials. Waste! But then the contract was revised, and revised again. These houses were built by brothers, both dead now. Nobody needs one. It provides security for the privileged class—covering the expenses of education, illness, and old age—in a country that lacks public investment in security. My mother was upset when she learned that I had abandoned it.
They had more than they’d ever had before, in one sense, and less in every other.Two artists can have all this? All we have to do is leave the house for three days and two nights and we will earn eight thousand dollars.The commercial is going to be for Walmart, the corporation that produced the fortunes of three of the twenty richest people in this country. Or we would need a German cabinetmaker to move in with us.Our house is a brick bungalow, nearly identical to the house next door.
I think of Toni Morrison and the women she lived among in Queens in the seventies. I don’t want any of this. I wanted a stereo but I needed food.I’m upset about the gravy boat.
Nothing, John told me. He had just visited a warehouse full of furniture made out of unfinished pine. When I could pass as permanent I bought a house.Bill and I were temp workers, years ago, at the same publishing company in New York. But usury, officially forbidden by the medieval Church, was still practiced, particularly by monks.I’m doubly entangled in moneylending, as I have both a mortgage and a retirement account. And the roasting pan, and the coasters, and the platters, and the cheese plate. The money for the stereo was a gift from my father, who had told me that he would pay for my college tuition and nothing else, ever. And then we were married again years later, for health insurance, in a courthouse with forms and fees. All those dollars were hours banked, to be spent on writing, not working. It seemed like a waste to spend time on property. Some relatives of his are in prison and all his extra money goes to supporting their families. She was confused. I pay interest on a loan that allows me to live in a house, itself an investment, while I invest my excess income in the stock market, breeding money for future use. See this, she said, showing me the thin ring of pumpkin I’d left in the bottom of a can.
The commercial, they tell us, is going to feature an African-American grandmother serving a holiday turkey.Bill and I are reading the same book and we’ve both marked the same passage: “Modernization was supposed to fill the world—both communist and capitalist—with jobs, and not just any jobs but ‘standard employment’ with stable wages and benefits. We’re on our way home from a furniture store, again. This was after the cabinetmaker went to a nursing home and his furniture went away, too. I wanted to know what he would trade me for my agreement to buy it.
Sometimes two of the same catalogue arrive on the same day. Then the Restoration Hardware catalogue arrives, like a parody of the whole problem, in two volumes, each the size of a telephone book.
They weren’t wizards, just gamblers who could tolerate major losses.I think of my time in New York, when I was so often lost.
My boyfriend, who kept his clothes in a large cardboard box, suggested that we make all of our furniture out of cardboard boxes.