Paul hits the Send button and a confirmation of our order appears on the screen. The elephant will arrive the day after tomorrow. And after that…363 days will pass without the UPS man brightening our door. Even if we shopped without surcease for the next hour and thirty-seven minutes, there is only so much buying we could accomplish.
The frisson turns to a chill.
January
Surplus
VERMONT, NEW YEAR’S DAY
I wake to fresh coffee and a forecast of snow. The wood furnace is hot, the windows frosted. As the sun melts the ice from the glass and the orchard and pond come into view, last night’s chill starts to dissipate.
If anyone can make it through a non-buying year, I figure, Paul and I can. We’re both self-employed and work at home, conducting most of our business by phone and e-mail. We have no office rents, no payroll to meet; our work outfits—pajamas and pajama equivalents—require no dry cleaning. Although we lurch from deadline to deadline, hour by hour we make our own schedules. We’re free to rise before dawn and put in our eight hours before knocking off to ski in the afternoon; we can take two hours to mow the lawn with a low-fuel push mower or simmer a big, cheap soup all day.
Because Paul and I were adults with established lives in two different states when we met, we still spend spring and fall in my Brooklyn apartment and summer and winter in Paul’s house in the rural Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. Besides building the variety of “travel” into our routine, the arrangement allows me to rent the apartment and save a half-year’s housing costs. Paul is a political and energy-efficiency consultant, I am a full-time writer and editor. We are educated, cosmopolitan, self-directing, and childless.
These lives of enviable flexibility are also highly insecure. In the 1990s, when managers created the “mobile workforce,” they rechristened the newly proliferating ranks of temporary workers “free agents.” We made our own choices years earlier, but like more and more American workers, Paul and I never asked to be “free” to starve and freeze. He consults for the deep-pocketed likes of Texas’s low-income advocates and the Vermont legislature. I earn less than the high school graduate in my Brooklyn building who has a union job fixing garbage trucks for the city. We pay our own stripped-down, high-deductible health insurance premiums (with out-of-pocket dental bills, this comes to about $6,000 a year for me). We have no job security, no workers’ compensation or paid vacations, and minuscule savings.
By necessity, we’ve learned to keep the overhead low, the financial view long, and the gratification delayed. Still, we come to the project of buying nothing with a certain urgency. We are both past fifty. When we’re eighty, presuming ordinary human frailty, we will have to work, and spend, less than we do now.
Temperamentally, we are suited to the task. Paul is a non-shopper. A Vermont boy from a penurious family, he’d rather spend a day a month retwisting and soldering the coils of an ancient toaster than purchase a new one with a micro-graduated darkness scale and bagel-size slots. My own shopping enthusiasms are livelier, and my aptitude for brand discernment better honed than Paul’s, but in the scheme of things American I am a desultory and uncommitted consumer at best. When the market researcher calls, I’m an outlier in the sample: “Yes, ma’am, I own a television, yesone television, about twenty-five years old. No, no electric hedge trimmer, no riding mower, no dishwasher, no cappuccino maker. Yes, you heard right: no microwave oven (and no, I am not talking to you through an orange juice can at the end of a string).” I mostly buy what I need, I tell her politely. Other than that, I don’t want much.
And yet somehow Paul and I have managed to amass what can only be described asa lot of shit. This fact will shape our strategy for the year. Besides those few pre-project panic purchases, we have decided not to stock up. We will use whatever we have, and if something runs out, decide if we need more of it.
A logical place to start is an inventory. So with pen and yellow pad in hand, I wander through the house in my slippers.
Start with the clothes closets. These are thick with jackets, their floors a stampede of work boots, snow boots, dress boots, barn boots, and ski boots, as well as winter shoes and summer shoes for business and for play, in dry weather and wet weather, for running, walking, hiking, cross-training, mountain biking, and road biking. In Vermont alone, I have twelve pairs. There are probably twice that many in Brooklyn. Our drawers barely close for all the shirts and underwear mashed into them.
The living room shelves bristle with unread books and barely listened-to CDs (many more in New York), the kitchen cabinets with dishes unused for decades. The bathroom is a cornucopia of vegetable products crushed and gelled into potions to heal and soothe, smooth and sedate, plus a closet full of remedies for ills that usually go away on their own.
Together Paul and I own a federal bureaucracy’s worth of office supplies. These, it is agreed, fall into the Must-Have category. But what about the subcategories? Printer cartridges? Absolutely. Yellow legal pads? Probably. Neon-colored Post-its? And what of the dozen computers lying in state under various desks, their dead mice interred in nests of connector cables? Can’t really throw these out—they have valuable data on them. Never mind that the data are inscribed in forgotten computer languages on obsolete disks.
I put a pot of Arrowhead Mills organic seven-grain cereal on the stove, and while it cooks I open the kitchen pantry and count: eight kinds of rice (short-grain white, long-grain white, short-grain brown, long-grain brown, Thai sweet black, Chinese sweet black, basmati, arborio); six flours, three grades of corn meal, two dozen varieties of beans, peas, and whole grains, and an entire section of organic faro. We also have six oils, six sweeteners, and nine vinegars (balsamic, white, red wine, white wine, rice wine, apple cider, raspberry, champagne, plum). There are condiments to cheer any hungry, homesick member of the U.N. General Assembly who happens by, ranging from dried Chinese black mushrooms to a can of Mexicanhuitlacoche fungus. I am not sure the last is a food.
The top shelf is our liquor cabinet, stocked for a prince’s bar mitzvah.
And on the floor stands a case of prescription cat food for our diabetic cat, Julius, plus a container of low-ash, high-protein, nutrient-rich kibbles specially formulated for a feline of his age, weight, and exercise level. Add in insulin and syringes, blood glucose test strips and lancets, regular veterinary visits and skilled cat-sitting services, Kitty Kaviar, catnip, and an endless supply of jingle balls, and maintaining our companion animal in the style to which he is accustomed costs a minimum of $1,000 a year. Ana, a friend who grew up in Cuba, describes feeling “overwhelmed and a little sick” the first time she walked into an American supermarket at the age of fifteen. “What amazed me most,” she says, “was that animals had their own food.”
JANUARY 6
Our friends are intrigued. Some regard us with the transfixed queasiness of viewers witnessing contestants eating slugs onFear Factor. Others wish us luck, even thank us, communicating an attitude there’s probably a German word for, meaning “admiration for an enterprise you are glad someone else is doing, so you don’t have to.”
Soon, their doubts surface. Rorschach-like, these reveal their own consumer ids—their fantasies and frustrations—as well as their superegos—their ethics and guilt. The clue to the last is the word that keeps recurring:allowed.
“Great idea,” says my agent, Joy, on the phone. She calls back an hour later. “So, okay. Let’s talk about this. Are you allowed to get haircuts?”
“What about hair gel?” inquires my haircutter. To her it goes without saying that haircuts are in the Necessity category (I agree). But she is stymied by the question of whether the hairs at the crown of the head must, necessarily, stick up just so.
The pledge to buy “only” groceries resolves little. Alison, a cartoonist, wants to know if we’re allowed to buy mesclun salad or only “unprocessed” lettuce heads (we nix the mesclun). I serve kale with garlic and olives to Charlie and Kathy. “So, Judith. Olives,” Charlie s
ays, fixing me with narrow prosecutorial eyes. “Would you callolives a necessity?” To those who inquire, Paul and I can offer no reason—no excuse—for their designation, or that of seven-dollar-a-pound organic French roast coffee beans, as essential. We cannot agree on wine. “I’m Italian,” Paul argues. “Wine is like milk to me.” I raise an eyebrow.
Janice, a sociologist, mulls over the scariest proscription of all: movies. Contemplating a whole year without this nourishing pleasure, she mourns with me for a few minutes. Then she brightens, having discovered a possible loophole: “But you can see documentaries, can’t you?”
Vanalyne, a video artist, e-mails me from Chicago: “Maud wants to know if you’re allowed to buy paper towels or whether you have to use a sponge.” She and her co–faculty member at the School of the Art Institute have become obsessed with our project. Her question is a slight variation on the discussion Paul and I have been having about Kleenex versus toilet paper. Paul (who is turning out to be more of a materialist than I’d expected) says nose-blowing requires a ready box on the desk or beside the bed. Walk into the bathroom, say I. When I consult with Alison, she suggests cloth handkerchiefs. Hmm, can snot aversion be considered sufficient reason to use paper? I’d tend to rule in the affirmative. But, for the sake of argument, suppose we do buy facial tissues. Must they be the high-quality, anti-scratch variety, or can we make do during ordinary non-cold periods with the stiff, cheap stuff? And while we’re discussing paper goods, do we have to purchase the premium Scott toilet paper? Or could we settle for the store brand, which, while cheap, is scratchy. Why not use newspaper? quips Paul. Or leaves? America’s embarrassment of consumer products and experiences is producing an embarrassing surfeit of trivial decisions.
JANUARY 7
Paul is in front of the shed, lying on his back in the snow, readying his multiply pre-owned 1983 Chevy S10 pickup for inspection. A few days ago, the guy at Gates Salvage Yard cut the parts he needed off a dead vehicle; Paul paid $60 and got to work. We’re recycling and repairing, harvesting local resources. Life is good.
“Let’s get rid of my car,” I suggest casually as I watch him untwist a coil and weld a joint. We’ve vowed to cut down on gasoline, and all those hiking boots, running shoes, and walking shoes are at the ready along with a fleet of human-powered conveyances including five bicycles, seven pairs of skis, two pairs of snowshoes, a canoe, and a Windsurfer.
“Wish we could,” Paul answers without conviction. We’ve outlined the conundrum too many times. We have three motorized vehicles. Besides the Chevy pickup, which takes us into the woods and hauls lumber, trash, and manure for the gardens, Paul owns a 1999 Subaru Legacy sedan and I, a 1995 Honda Civic. The truck isn’t reliable enough for long-distance driving. The Subaru, which is reliable, is not fuel efficient, since it has all-wheel drive. The Honda is efficient and reliable and it’s a hatchback, which makes it a great car for trips between Vermont and New York, loaded with stuff, including Julius in his box.
But the Honda doesn’t have all-wheel drive, so it’s a hazard on Vermont’s snowy or muddy roads and can’t make it up our driveway in snow, slush, or mud. We use the Subaru during moist seasons. If I have to drive the Honda in these conditions and it gets stuck in the driveway, Paul hitches it to the truck and drags it to the house. The trinity of vehicles seems indivisible.
The situation is more than expensive, it’s embarrassing. Two avowed environmentalists who spend six months a year in the most ecologically efficient city in the country, we are doing our part in making America a country where four-wheeled residents outnumber the two-legged ones with drivers’ licenses.
JANUARY 15
The rules are shaping up, and we are starting to adjust. No processed or prepared foods except the most basic, bread. No cookies or crackers, then. For hors d’oeuvres, we toast bread and cut it into small pieces. No restaurants, we tell our friends. Come to dinner, they reply. No movies or video rentals. We pull the unread books from the shelf and each week I take my green paper borrower’s card up the road to Greensboro, whose patrician summer residents have kept the white clapboard Free Library well stocked. I’m reading a book every three or four days.
What I want is what I’ve got—more than once in the last two weeks I’ve found myself singing Sarah McLachlan’s lyric to myself.
Still, dilemmas are presenting themselves. We are invited to a blues jam at the Town House, a nonprofit arts center in Hardwick, $5 suggested donation. Should we go? Should we purchase no entertainment or just no commercially produced entertainment? The five bucks covers the heat and upkeep of the space, so that neighbors can play music or see an old movie together. How is this cash donation any different from a casserole brought to a potluck supper? Maybe by going to the blues jam, we’d actually be supporting the anticonsumer culture, I suggest to Paul. Then why not go to the Film Forum or La Mama Theater in New York, he counters—they’re nonprofits, too. It occurs to me that by partaking only of homemade spectacles, we might be accomplishing nothing more than condemning ourselves to a year of third-rate entertainment. Since I’m not a blues fan, we opt not to go. But the question remains.
JANUARY 16
My lack of a hedge trimmer or a microwave oven may qualify me as an enemy combatant in George W. Bush’s book, but as I start to read about income, spending, and debt, I learn that I am Jane Q. Consumer, the typical American. I earn about the median income for a New Yorker (a bit under $45,000 before taxes and business expenses); my perennially unpaid credit card balance (about $7,500) is average, too. Even my attitudes about spending are normal. Research shows that just about everyone thinks she needs the things she buys and considers almost everything she wants a necessity. A life of “reasonable comfort” appears, always, just a little out of reach. Surveyed in any given year, people peg the resources necessary for such an existence at one to two thousand dollars above the median income for that year. Half of Americans—not just poor ones—say they can’t afford all their “needs.”
We’re not greedy, we say. It’severyone else who is acquiring useless stuff. In one study conducted by Juliet Schor, the economic sociologist and author ofThe Overworked American andThe Overspent American, 78 percent of respondents stated that most Americans are “very materialistic.” Only 8 percent considered themselves very materialistic. Typical of this attitude is a couple of Texans profiled inTrading Up: The New American Luxury, by the Boston Consulting Group’s Michael Silverstein and Neil Fiske. The husband, a real estate developer named Charles, owns a BMW 325 and a Jaguar X-Type. His wife, Judith, bought a Thermador six-burner range and other “premium appliances” when they renovated their kitchen. Nevertheless, Charles and Judith say “they don’t like to overspend and don’t believe in status buying.” For instance, “Charles scoffs at the idea of buying a fancy watch.”
I don’t consider myself materialistic, either. Like Charles and Judith, I don’t like to overspend and don’t believe in status buying. I’m a vegetarian; I eat at the “low end of the food chain,” as the enviros say. I sneer at theNew York Times travel section piece about retreats where people sleep on cots, rise at five, eat some gruel, an apple, and three almonds, and pay $4,000 a week for the privilege. I buy generic tampons and three-dollar shampoo.
And yet…I think nothing of forking over ten bucks to view any obscure French avant-garde feminist film that passes through New York or $15 for an hour and a quarter of yoga instruction, half of which time I do little more than breathe. I buy the no-name tampons, yet I unswervingly maintain that the 200 milligrams of pure ibuprofen in an Advil capsule cures my headache faster than a 200-milligram capsule of pure ibuprofen in the bottle labeled Ibuprofen, which costs half as much.
In the pantry, Paul and I have three kinds of salt.
JANUARY 20
What I want is what I’ve got.Unfortunately, what Paul’s got, I don’t want.
Reader, it is time for a confession. Paul and I have two homes, my small but ample apartment in Brooklyn and his house, cellar,
shed, and forty acres in northeastern Vermont. In addition, I’ve got a cabin in a birch grove a hundred yards from the house, the Platonic writer’s space, built from salvage materials six years ago. Together, we have literally acres of space.
And yet we did not have enough of it. What Paul’s got was spreading across our bedroom, down the stairs to the kitchen, a glacier of stuff carving out its own indoor geology: buttes of newspaper, sedimentary layers of credit card receipts, archipelagos of boxes, fliers, spreadsheets, and every While You Were Out memo that has entered his life in the last two decades (“See you Thursday”). The landscape was so mature that it had spawned an ecosystem. Spider webs knit together leaves of disintegrating paper, flies swarmed on window sills inaccessible to swatters. The spiders ate the flies, the paper turned to dust; the fly carcasses collected on the sills and fossilized.
We fought. Paul called his stuff need, I called his inability to part with it desire—neurotic desire. We had been fighting about it since we started living together, fourteen years ago.
At first it seemed a room with a door would solve the problem. All I wanted to do was open the door, toss the stuff into the room, and close the door. If the door became impossible to close, Paul could rent a backhoe and shovel the stuff out. It would no longer be my problem—our relationship’s problem.
But as we measured and sketched, sketched and measured, there was no place for a room in our house’s long narrow layout. The impossibility of a small change morphed into the possibility of a big one. Possibility transformed into desirability and, as these things go, to necessity, which became inevitability. I “needed” a winter office (my cabin is cold in the winter months, so I work in the hall). Our guests “needed” a private place to sleep (not the living room couch) and a bathroom of their own. Our boots were piled behind the kitchen door, our skis were waxed while balanced between a sawhorse and a plastic garbage can on the subfreezing back porch; we needed a mudroom. And since Freud himself could not make of Paul’s neurotic hoarding a case of ordinary untidiness, besides an office for him we needed, desperately needed, more closets.
Not Buying It Page 2