Coffee? In the bathroom? I sound even to myself like Niles Crane, but I call the publicist and ask them if they could never book me into a Marriott again; find me a Canadian hotel, an old Canadian Pacific hotel, now known as Fairmont since they bought the American Fairmont chain. Two years later, the Fairmonts, including all the big Canadian railway station hotels, are sold to an Arab prince and an American speculator. No one raises an eyebrow.
I imagine we will all be making our coffee in the toilet now. This sounds too much like Harold Nicolson’s remark to his wife Vita Sackville-West after the release of the post-war Berridge Report that aimed at bringing health and cleanliness to the 90 percent of Britons who weren’t upper-class. I suppose we shall all shop at Woolworth’s now, he said. For years I hated him for saying this.
Now I see his point. I suppose we shall all stay in Marriotts now, would be my version. Put me up against a wall and shoot me.
I’d like it to be in the courtyard of the Oberoi Grand, if you would grant me a last request. By the pool, please, with those lovely teak chaises longues with the backs that kept sliding slightly to the left until I collapsed on the tiles and had to be put aright by the attendant. Oh, how we laughed.
Because it was so funny, you see.
Specimen Day
Just fill the little bottle, please
I suspect a great many people have stopped writing in their diaries since the reelection of Georgie in 2004. There’s nothing happy to say. And it wasn’t as if they insisted on recording only happy events back then; if they had, their diaries would be as smooth and empty as the freshly ironed Cuddledown fitted sheet I place on my bed every Friday morning. Like my diaries.
My diaries were never intended to record events anyway. Who wants to recall them in all their feckiness? Reading them years later makes me wince. But I did use them to recall my state of mind, whatever I happened to be thinking about at the time. Like Virginia Woolf’s diaries except seventeen thousand times less able and of no conceivable interest to any human in the future.
But I thought I should shove in a Specimen Day, by which I mean a day plucked at random, a sampling of whatever was irritating my epidermis. On June 20 of 2006, say.
Woke up feeling slightly better than usual. Since I mirror my husband’s insomnia, I wake up three times a night, which would not be so bad, but really the last wake-up, hours before any sane person is conscious, is so 4:48 psychosis, thank you, playwright Sarah Kane, and I’m sorry you’re dead although you were clearly determined to die, no one manages it with a shoelace while under suicide watch in a mental hospital unless they really really want to be done with it.
So I pop a pill, which my husband does not do because he believes it’s the easy way out. He is British, therefore will take the hard way out, with Gravol, thus feeling dopey all the next day. Take a quarter of a Gravol for nausea, no more, I say. Gravol is a bad drug. All the worst drugs are over-the-counter. Why don’t you go to the doctor, tell him you are going mad (or I am) from lack of sleep and get something that works for chrissakes, but he won’t. He’d rather moan about it. So I have this trick now. He moans and I say, “That’s awful, my love,” and he feels comforted and I hear no more.
I do mean it, but I admit the “my love” is a bit formulaic at this point.
A welcome change in my life since I left my last job is that I no longer wake up after this pre-dawn pill in the throes of a bad dream. For sixteen years, I would dream of being unable to escape a building.
This morning I awoke from a protracted dream in which I was being given oral sex by some guy. This is a euphemism, of course. The man had his entire head inside my vagina and was working away obligingly (although this is anatomically wrong of course) and it was pleasurable. I could not reach orgasm so when he finally took his head out after much dedicated work, he was pale, wizened and wet, looking almost like a tadpole, a sea creature. He’d done without oxygen and all that salty juice had made him something of a SpongeBob, with human eyes turning vaguely fishlike.
It was a change at least.
Stumble downstairs to read paper, ingest boxed cereal poured into a bowl, shower, inspect garden, then tackle the usual round of tasks that astound me as an adult. They’re mainly paperwork: tax instalments, bill payments, forms to fill in, e-mails to answer or postpone answering, a phone call to make to an editor who wants me to write about the Photoshopping of the female face on magazine covers (thus ensuring that we never look like our pictures and thus never feel human), her unexpected yes to a price per word that I’d hoped would repel her, magazines to read out of duty, packages of books from Waterstones, online shopping for Roman blinds so I don’t have to sew any more out of bloody white sailcloth for the porch that bakes in the afternoon sun and fades the black wicker furniture to white, $150 worth of Poudre T. LeClerc face powder to order from California because it is only available in person in Paris and I’m running out and you don’t want to see my un-matted face …
What upsets me is the time and trouble it takes to grind through each task. I clearly remember not doing this sort of thing when I was young. And it isn’t all to do with the fact that I rented an apartment then. Home ownership brings paperwork, but not this much. True, I didn’t pay taxes then. I was poor. I didn’t wear face powder either. My skin was young. I had no porch and little money to buy books, certainly none for magazines. I saw my friends or I wrote and phoned them. It was no hardship not to have e-mail.
I have spent hours on things that don’t matter, although I know from the testimony of those who suffer from depression that the anguish of not doing these things far outweighs the boredom of doing them. They’re like flea bites. Hundreds of flea bites.
Read Virginia Woolf’s Moments of Being, her collection of essays read aloud to the Memoir Club set up in the forties or thereabouts by Molly McCarthy, married to the impossibly ill-focused and random-minded Desmond McCarthy. There is a coziness to this. Over the years I have tried to buy everything by and about Woolf worth purchasing, with the aim in mind that one day I shall retreat to my bed (or chaise longue. “Vita brevis, chaise longue,” as my friend Joey says), read Woolf and occasionally dine on toast and jam and various hot drinks. Really, I would be perfectly content.
This may be the only link between my youth and these troubled years: I always wanted it to be just me and Virginia. Lord, how I want that Blair man to be gone so that we can plod around the south of England visiting all the houses Woolf did. A new book has just uncovered a series of holiday homes. Clearly they need me in the Home Counties. And I might even go to the much-deteriorated St. Ives in Cornwall again—the century has not been kind to that town—and try to see its good points. Point.
The computer man visits. After the last $800 bill, S. feels we are owed a free visit from Firesnacks, since the program that stores this book in complete safety has once again failed to function. Andrew attaches a lolling plug. The program springs into action. I urge him to send me a bill for driving to my home to straighten a plug.
Since the house is being eaten by squirrels, and they are squirrels of particular malevolence, I feel, I Google a firm that sells outdoor hardware gear type stuff and for $150 a “Transonic PRO Pest Repeller.” It is intended to repel all animals from my garden, from mice to raccoons to deer. The noise it emits is apparently silent to humans, but deeply irritating to animals. Genius, I thought, I’ll kill me some squirrels.
The black box arrives. After studying the chart on the back and the little icons that refer to the animals to be repelled, I realize that the sound the box emits to repel anything larger than a sow bug is deeply irritating to humans. It sounds like a giant woodchuck a thousand feet high clicking its teeth. I had been thinking more of a piercing sound, that ring tone they’ve developed that can be heard by teenagers but is inaudible to anyone over forty-five. I tested it on the Internet, and it was true. I couldn’t hear this sound at 15,000 decibels.
What I have now is a device plugged into the mains on my deck that wi
ll repel earwigs from the area around my kitchen window. Anything else will laugh at my sound system, now turned down, which sound likes a tiny woman tapping the nail of her index finger on the bar as she waits for her date to arrive.
No, I won’t take it back. I can’t be arsed. At least my purchase has enabled me to keep the kitchen safe from earwigs. Not that I have ever been troubled by earwigs. But it won’t be a problem to come.
Nighttime is a puzzle. Air conditioning? So wrong. Windows open? Yes. Fan? Not sure? Two blankets or one blanket? Can’t decide. Have we PVRed Stewart and Colbert? Is the perimeter secured with the Protectron alarming device? Ground-floor windows closed? Lampe Berger sealed? Dehumidifier in basement emptied?
It is a specimen day, so unlike the specimen days of my youth which encompassed one or two things. It is not an improvement. Or is it an improvement? Discuss.
Meet the Brookstones
How to bankrupt yourself in solitary confinement
Ah, the new Brookstone catalogue is here and all is well. It makes me feel smart and superior, as well I should. For the Brookstone catalogue would lift the spirits of Polyfilla. I may be inert, I may harden and be painted over, says the spackle, but at least I don’t sell $125 2-metre-long radio-controlled sharks that glide through the water, “bringing drama and excitement to your backyard pool.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s a toy shark.”
“What does it do?”
“It brings drama and excitement to my backyard pool.”
That’s the Brookstoner for you. They are a simple, hopeful people, hungry for novelty and easy to thrill, owners of mall-sized warehouses of crap gadgets that look good for four seconds until you think, Why? Or in the case of Red State Americans who are the Brookstone heartland clientele, Why not?
I have a history with Brookstone. I once ordered one of their gadgets over the phone, a Tranquil Moments sound machine for nighttime, and you can tell from how I write this how soothed I am today. It reached me months later and broke fairly promptly, but that wasn’t the problem. It was the call from the bank that operates my credit card. A man on the other end sighed. “If you’re Heather Mallick at your home number, you haven’t just spent $12,000 in a New Jersey mall, have you.”
No, I said. Please kill that card but good.
He did so, saying that someone had been given the number and had reproduced a false version of my card. The last purchase that had gone through was a Coach bag that I had actually yearned for but refused to buy as I was too poor in those days for Coach bags. That hurt. What shameless blowsy creature using my name was walking around New Jersey with something as understated and expensive as a Coach bag? The only possible link between me and New Jersey was my cross-border Brookstone transaction, so I phoned and told them that someone had hooked into our phone deal. I imagined this woman’s vast call hall. I imagined the numbing of her brain that was necessary to deal with people who wanted to know if the pool shark was real. In a broad Southern accent, she told me that she had no idea what I was calling about and I should talk to her supervisor on Monday, and she said this in a voice that conveyed how little she cared about my credit card and New Jersey and twelve grand and the Coach bag snatched from my figurative Canadian hand, compared to her crap life.
Years after that, I am in a mall in San Diego, a city that is eerily soothing in its perfect weather and lack of anything to do. It’s like a rest home for people who weren’t much excited to begin with or a mental hospital the size of a city, with ocean breezes pleasant enough to calm you but yet not enough to flutter your cocktail napkin. It’s as if they have set a Brookstone wind gadget to “puff.” You try to find a decent restaurant or a good bookstore. There is none. You don’t care. You order more wine. Time moves glacially in the way it did before we began hastily melting the glaciers. The waves come, the waves go.
A Brookstone representative in the mall offers to demonstrate a top-of-the-line back massager. It looks like a huge black padded electric hammer. That is what it feels like. He hits me on the back, thudding my flesh, my bones. I brace myself against a wall. He hits me again and again. I shout at him to stop, and turn and look at him with shock. Stop hitting me with a huge black padded electric hammer! It isn’t normal. It isn’t nice. This is a public space, not a motel room. I wander off, muttering. Brookstone.
A decade later, they’re still trying to make a sale. That is so American. I admire that quality, being a person of no persistence myself. But then I goggle at the audacity, not the endless drive to sell, but the endless drive to sell this. Really, my mouth falls open and my eyeballs bulge. Who buys this stuff?
A third of Americans are obese and you just know Associated Press doesn’t tell you how many are morbidly obese because it’s too horrible and secretly shriekingly funny, even to Brookstone. Because Brookstone customers are either amazingly fat or they’re headed that way. Something tells me they’re Blue Staters growing into Red Staters, or Red Staters who have faced facts. Brookstone stuff is really expensive, even for madly stupid stuff.
Pools are very important to Brookstone. Most people swim in pools, you’d think, but in the Brookstone world view, pools are reasons for white people to float on massive loungers (“easily supports hundreds of pounds”) accompanied by a Snack Buoy, a round red floating tray with five cup holders and a central compartment containing what appear to be thick slabs of Spam. The loungers also come with speakers in the headrest, controls on the armrest and an extra cup holder in the other armrest lest the Snack Buoy float out of reach. One lounger is motorized, with two handles and propellers under your ass. Another takes two people side by side, facing each other. “Now couples can enjoy a chat without straining their necks to talk.” Yeah, I hate having to move my neck. My husband and I almost never bother to speak because of it.
The pool theme appears to have little to do with water. All the devices have one aim: to make even the smallest movement unnecessary. It seems odd, as you could just as easily do this (by this, I mean nothing) on the grass. At no point does Brookstone expect your body to touch water. A pool as a weight-gaining device. Interesting idea.
Next comes six pages of poolside hammocks for people who want that floaty sensation and the sight of water while having nothing to do with the nasty stuff. And you can buy gear like a personalized Coast Guard–approved lifeboat ring (“Griswold Family Pool”) in case someone falls in by accident and has to be fished out and dried off. It doesn’t say if it comes with a cup holder.
Then there’s sporty stuff for people who play competitive group games, alone. There’s a lone baseball containing an electronic device that measures the speed of your pitch, and a personal digital golf game with a little strip of AstroTurf and a screen that tells you all the stats for the shot you would have made had you been at an actual golf course losing some of that weight. This item cannot be shipped to California, Brookstone notes, but provides no explanation.
What? Yes, there is a drink caddy for golfers that shoots your prepared drink out of a dispenser disguised as an actual golf club. Fill with hot or cold beverages. They must be making this up.
This is how I measure everything: Would you sleep with someone who drank out of his golf club?
Next come exercise machines—treadmills, cardio steppers, exercise bikes and something called a Fold-A-Way Elliptical Strider, which I think is a machine that makes you walk. To nowhere. I have a pure horror of pointless labour. To me, if you walk or ride a bike, you should get somewhere. So why not go outside instead of spending six hundred bucks to stay inside with the machine you’re not going to use? Or burn some calories cleaning something. Cleaning’s the sport for me.
My dislike of stationary exercise, especially if it doesn’t even aid the power grid, comes from a passage in Margaret Drabble’s novel The Realms of Gold (yes, I can find a literary reference for Brookstone. Did you think I couldn’t?), where her citified heroine, long distant from her childhood rural life, is horrified to come upon a crowd
of adults in a field “turning” stones. It unfolds that they are clearing the stones for a children’s playground. Later, in a rural museum, she sees an eel stang used for “turning” eels. Of course, she misread it. It’s for trapping eels.
Why would you turn an eel? And why would you build a pool whose water you won’t touch and why not go for a walk instead of walking in place indoors to nowhere? It’s the equivalent of harvesting rocks and spinning eels of an afternoon. But my objections would mystify the Brookstones, even stripped of the Drabble observations. It’s gear, it’s stuff, buy it, Brookstone urges.
Next comes comfort. Mattress pads, slippers, neck pillows, mattresses, and that most hideous thing, the massage chair. They cost about five grand. They look like giant black lumps in your living room, like Darth Vader in Star Wars if he sat down and you sat on him and his whole body quivered until you shook and shivered. It comes with a CD player in the headrest.
On the American sitcom Frasier, the sturdy and sensible Marty Crane once sat on one of these massage chairs that had Daphne and everyone else cooing. A horrified look appeared on Marty’s face as he registered the sensation of the chair beneath him. “That’s disgusting!” he shouted.
And it is, because it is suitable for someone who knows they will never again be embraced by another human being. You sit in the chair and the rollers hum up and down your back and your calves are squeezed and your feet rumbled and every part of your body is stroked and vibrated and quivered and oh it is wonderful wonderful and then you realize that your moaning has everyone in the high-end stereo shop staring at you with … understanding.
These are the socially acceptable black leather La-Z-Boy equivalents of blow-up sex dolls with skin that feels real and a vagina and anus that heat up. Call it what you like, Brookstone, but a massage chair is an admission of defeat. The whole catalogue is an homage to failure, but Brookstone doesn’t care to see it that way. The stuff sells.
Cake or Death Page 5