Eula Biss - Having and Being Had

On Immunity: An Inoculation

Notes from No Mans Land: American Essays

The Balloonists

Were on our way home from a furniture store, again. What does it say about capitalism, John asks, that we have money and want to spend it but we cant find anything worth buying? We almost bought something called a credenza, but then John opened the drawers and discovered that it wasnt made to last.

I think there are limits, I say, to what mass production can produce.

We just bought a house but we dont have furniture yet. Weve been eating on our back stoop for three months. Last week a Mexican woman with four children rang our doorbell and asked if our front room was for rent. Im sorry, I said awkwardly, we live here. She was confused. But, she said, its empty.

It is empty. I hang curtains to hide the emptiness, but it remains empty. There wasnt any furniture in the house where I grew up until a German cabinetmaker moved in with us. He arrived in a truck so heavy that it made a dent in the driveway. He filled our dining room with his furniture and then he made tiny replicas of that furniture with the machines he brought in the truck. I still have the tiny corner cabinet with lattice doors, the tiny hutch with brass knobs, and the tiny dining room table with expertly turned legs. Theyre in the basement, wrapped in newspaper. The tiny dresser sits atop my dresser, which is from IKEA.

The apartment we just left was furnished with shelves that John made out of cheap pine. Theyre in the basement now, reduced to lumber. The ammunition box that I found on the curb and made into a coffee table is in the backyard, planted full of marigolds. I hate furniture, my father once murmured. He had just visited a warehouse full of furniture made of unfinished pine. This was after the cabinetmaker went to a nursing home and his furniture went away too. As a child, I burned a hole in the dining room table. The cabinetmaker, who smoked a pipe, supplied me with matches. I loved to burn things, but I felt remorse over the table, which I also loved.

The lyric I burned a hole in the dining room table is tethered, in my mind, to the liner notes of a Billie Holiday album that I borrowed from the library in college. She was singing songs written by someone else, the notes explained, but she rewrote them with the way she sang. Her delivery transformed a banal portrait of moneyed life into a wry critique of that moneyed life.

In the furniture stores we visit, Im filled with a strange unspecific desire. I want everything and nothing. The soft colors of the rugs, the warm wood grains, the brass and glass of the lamps all seem to suggest that the stores are filled with beautiful things, but when I look at any one thing I dont find it beautiful. The desire to consume is a kind of lust, Lewis Hyde writes. But consumer goods merely bait this lust, they do not satisfy it. The consumer of commodities is invited to a meal without passion, a consumption that leads to neither satiation nor fire.

In the end, all the furniture we buy will feel like lyrics written for someone elses song, except the dining room table made by the Amish. This table will be solid cherry, a beautiful wood. It will be well made, but not quite as well made as the table I grew up with, the table I burned. To get a table like that, we would need to spend much more money. Or we would need a German cabinetmaker to move in with us.

I once had a girl / Or I should say, she once had me, the car radio sings. John and I both fall silent. Its been a long time since Ive heard this song. And I dont know if Ive ever really listened to the ending. What happened there, I wonder. Did he make a fire in the fireplace while the girl was at work? No, John tells me, he burned her place down. He is sure of this, but I am not so sure.

I cant stop thinking about it. Norwegian wood. It bothers me. Soon Im reading interviews with the Beatles. It was pine really, cheap pine, McCartney said about the wood paneling that inspired the title. About the ending, he said, It could have meant I lit a fire to keep myself warm, and wasnt the dcor of her house wonderful? But it didnt, it meant I burned the fucking place down.