A house is not a home book

What does it say about capitalism, John asks, that we have money and want to spend it but can’t find anything worth buying? We’re on our way home from a furniture store, again. We almost bought something called a credenza, but then John opened the drawers and discovered that it wasn’t made to last.

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

We just bought a house but we don’t have furniture yet. We’ve 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. I’m sorry, I said awkwardly, we live here. She was confused. But, she said, it’s empty.

It is empty. I hang curtains to hide the emptiness, but it remains empty. There wasn’t 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. They’re 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. They’re 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 back yard, planted full of marigolds. I hate furniture, my father once murmured. He had just visited a warehouse full of furniture made out 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.

I burned a hole in the dining-room table. The lyric 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, I’m 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 don’t 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 else’s 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.

Our house is a brick bungalow, nearly identical to the house next door. These houses were built by brothers, both dead now. I learn this from my neighbor, who lives in the other brother’s house. He’s a retired postal worker and a saxophone player who still practices every day, though his health is too poor now for him to perform. The interiors of our houses are the same, he tells me, except for my attic, which the former owners of our house renovated. He would like to renovate his attic, too, but he doesn’t have the money. Some relatives of his are in prison and all his extra money goes to supporting their families. I guess God, he says, doesn’t want me to have money. I’m not sure, but I think he’s joking about God.

He has told me, already, about attending the same elementary school my son attends, and of being beaten on the playground. He has told me that he couldn’t, in those days, risk a conversation with a woman like me. He had to keep his head down when he passed a white woman on the sidewalk, he said, and just respond Yes, ma’am if she spoke to him. 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. John discovers this when he gets a call from a casting agent who wants to know if the house is available. It’s not available—we live here. But then we learn how much we will be paid. 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. Walmart couldn’t build stores in Chicago for years, but they’re here now, despite ongoing protests over low wages, and they want their commercial set in a classic Chicago bungalow. We don’t own anything from Walmart, but this doesn’t matter because Walmart furniture is moved into the house, Walmart curtains are put up, and some Walmart prints are hung on the walls in Walmart frames. A white set designer and a white director work to create an authentic African-American interior. 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. Such jobs are now quite rare; most people depend on much more irregular livelihoods. The irony of our times, then, is that everyone depends on capitalism but almost no one has what we used to call a ‘regular job.’ ”

I never had a regular job until now. In my twenties, I left job after job, working until I had enough money to write and then writing until I needed money again. I didn’t know of any other way to live as an artist. Even the job I have now, my regular job, was temporary at first. I was an “artist in residence,” and the contract required that I leave after four years. My residence was not permanent. But then the contract was revised, and revised again. 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. I worked for the editor of “Stock Market Wizards,” which was the sequel to “The New Market Wizards,” which was the sequel to “Market Wizards.” The purpose of this third book, the editor explained to me, was mainly to capitalize on the success of the first two books. “Stock Market Wizards” featured interviews with traders who made millions during “the glory days of the internet boom,” and nearly all of them told stories about losing everything before they made it big. They lost houses, they lost life savings lent to them by relatives, and they lost marriages. They weren’t wizards, just gamblers who could tolerate major losses.

The book Bill and I are reading now is “The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins.” I’ve marked every passage about precarity. “What if, as I’m suggesting, precarity is the condition of our time—or, to put it another way, what if our time is ripe for sensing precarity?” And, “Precarity is the condition of being vulnerable to others.”

I think of my time in New York, when I was so often lost. I was at the end of the line in Far Rockaway, looking for an address that didn’t exist. I was walking sixty blocks down Madison Avenue, stopping at every store and restaurant to ask for a job. Not having money is time-consuming. There are hours spent at laundromats, hours at bus stops, hours at free clinics, hours at thrift stores, hours on the phone with the bank or the credit-card company or the phone company over some fee, some little charge, some mistake.

One of my first jobs in New York was visiting empty lots for the parks department. The city wanted to sell these lots, which had increased in value over the decades since they were abandoned. But the lots had been registered with the parks department as gardens. I took Polaroids through chain-link fences to make a record for the city that there were gardens there, and gardeners who would chain themselves to concrete blocks in the ground when the bulldozers came. The gardeners had cleared those lots of bricks and needles, and they had planted roses. They had invested in zero-value property.

Maybe I need more precarity in my life, I tell Bill. Maybe I’ve become too comfortable. No, he reminds me, precarity has a price. And a person can be too vulnerable. After a pause, Bill admits that he doesn’t really know what capitalism is. In trying to explain it, I realize that I don’t know, either.

The catalogues keep coming. I don’t know how they find us, or how to make them stop. Sometimes two of the same catalogue arrive on the same day. They accumulate in piles, outdoing each other with heavier paper and richer colors. Then the Restoration Hardware catalogue arrives, like a parody of the whole problem, in two volumes, each the size of a telephone book. They are bigger and heavier than my grandfather’s two volumes of “Illustrated English Social History.” We put them near the fireplace and sit on them.

The IKEA catalogue has a message on the front: “Designed for people, not consumers.” In the photograph, some young people are having a fun, unfussy dinner at a crowded table. There are dishes piled on a cart and a guitar is leaning against the wall. The IKEA catalogue sits on top of a pile of catalogues with photographs of sterile rooms and furniture that has never been touched. The messier way of life, IKEA suggests, is not just less expensive. It is more human.

On my way out of New York, during the fourth or fifth move of my twenties, I left behind a bed frame that my mother had made. It was simple and spare with no headboard, Shaker almost, and designed for celibacy in that it was narrower than a single bed. My mother was upset when she learned that I had abandoned it. I tried to explain that I wasn’t leading a life that allowed for furniture.

In California, I slept on a slab of foam that could easily be rolled up and moved anywhere. My boyfriend, who kept his clothes in a large cardboard box, suggested that we make all of our furniture out of cardboard boxes. It was an idea that had already been pioneered by IKEA, who made particleboard end tables with hollow interiors. Within a year, I had rolled up my mattress and moved my boxes to Iowa, where I found my furniture on the street.

“A better everyday life for more of the many” is IKEA’s mission, on paper. I think of all the IKEA furniture that I have seen eaten by life. The end tables with broken legs, the cracked slats of futon frames, the particleboard desks left out on the curb and destroyed by the rain before they can be taken to a new home. IKEA, one of the largest consumers of wood in the world, has made furniture into something that gets used up. It is furniture for the apocalypse. But what I like, what makes me laugh a little about “for people, not consumers,” is the implication that consumers are not people.

“A metaphor is all this really is,” David Graeber writes. He means consumption, which was once the name for a wasting disease, and is now the word anthropologists use for almost everything we do outside of work—eating, reading, shopping for furniture. Consume, he notes, is from the Latin consumere, meaning “to seize or take over completely.” A person might consume food or be consumed by rage. In its earliest usage, consumption always implied destruction.

Consumption was the opposite of production in Adam Smith’s “Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.” Smith made this inquiry in 1776, when work was being relocated into factories and lives were newly divided between home and work. We still use the math of that time to subtract what is consumed at home from what is produced at work. In that crude equation, only work that earns money is productive. And as long as there’s no third quantity, like reproduction, the equation works out to zero.

She ate it, my father told my sister years ago, when she wondered what happened to my stereo. This was during my first year in New York. 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. He had three more children to send to college. The stereo was an exception, a surprise for my birthday, and I did eat it. I wanted a stereo but I needed food.

I’m upset about the gravy boat. And the roasting pan, and the coasters, and the platters, and the cheese plate. I don’t want any of this. All I wanted was serving spoons for Thanksgiving dinner and John bought all these other things.

John laughs off my dark mood as he stuffs the turkey. I laughed at my grandmother, years ago, when the Thanksgiving dinner I was cooking in her kitchen upset her. See this, she said, showing me the thin ring of pumpkin I’d left in the bottom of a can. Waste! We have too much food, she moaned. All this food, and who’s going to eat this banana before it goes bad? I’ll have to, she said, stuffing the brown banana into her mouth angrily.

The gravy boat is ridiculous, John agrees. Nobody needs one. But we’re hosting Thanksgiving for the first time in our own house and the occasion calls for a fucking gravy boat. It’s absurd, I know, for me to spend this particular holiday feeling upset about having things I don’t want. And I don’t understand why I’m upset, other than that this all feels like too much. Even the phrase “our own house.”

When we bought this house after years of looking, I was no longer convinced that I wanted a house. The money in our savings account was not money, in my mind, it was time. All those dollars were hours banked, to be spent on writing, not working. It seemed like a waste to spend time on property. I tried to bargain with John about the house. I wanted to know what he would trade me for my agreement to buy it. Nothing, John told me. Either I wanted the house or I didn’t.

I wanted it. I wanted to paint the kitchen Moir Gold and I wanted to plant a garden in the back yard. I wanted to make something mine. What I wanted, more than anything, was the illusion of permanence the house provided. The solid foundation, the bricks that wouldn’t blow away, the sense of security. That was a fantasy, I knew, but it felt real.

I light the wick on a candle shaped like a turkey, which will burn itself away, headfirst. At the potlatches thrown by the Kwakwaka’wakw people, houses were burned and sewing machines were thrown into the sea. But this was not typical of the tradition. This was the potlatch around 1900, after the Kwakwaka’wakw had been decimated by disease and were living in a new economy. Unrecognized as citizens and unable to file land claims, they had lost most of their land to commercial fisheries and canneries. But they worked for wages in the canneries and could buy machine-made blankets and store-bought goods. They had more than they’d ever had before, in one sense, and less in every other.

Two artists can have all this? Nami asks when she arrives. She’s marvelling at the new dining table and the big empty living room. Not without paying for it, I tell her.

Using money to get more money, I tell my father, is David Graeber’s definition of capitalism. I’m a bad capitalist, my father says. I am, too, though I seem to be getting better. It’s the way we were raised, my father suggests. He was raised Catholic, but I was not.

Historically, the Catholic Church didn’t approve of the “breeding” of money, the making of money from money. The New Testament implored Christians to give their money away. As Luke put it, “Lend, hoping for nothing again.” A gift, an act of charity, was morally superior to a loan. 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. 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. Capitalism, Lewis Hyde writes, is “the ideology that asks that we remove surplus wealth from circulation and lay it aside to produce more wealth.” The defining feature of capitalism is not the breeding of money but the hoarding of money for that purpose.

Hoarding, in the form of saving and investment, is regarded as smart and morally upright. 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. But ours is not the only system given to hoarding. “It is quite possible,” Hyde notes, “to have the state own everything and still convert all gifts to capital, as Stalin demonstrated.” Stalin funded his five-year plan by exporting grain from collective farms while the farmers who produced those profits starved. “To move away from capitalism,” Hyde writes, “is not to change the form of ownership from the few to the many, but to cease turning so much surplus into capital, that is, to treat most increase as a gift.”

I wonder what this really means, in a lived life—to treat most increase as a gift. I think of Toni Morrison and the women she lived among in Queens in the seventies. She was a single mother supporting two young children, but she’d send a check, a “grant,” to another woman writer, say, Toni Cade Bambara, whenever she made some extra money freelancing. And Toni Cade Bambara, or someone else, might show up at her house with groceries, unasked, and cook dinner.

A gift, Hyde writes, must keep moving. A gift must always be given away again, or something else must be given in its place.

There’s wallpaper under the old paint in the living room, and it’s buckling slightly. I show John a corner that I found curling up behind the radiator. He grips the corner and pulls, tearing a huge sheet of wallpaper off the wall, exposing plaster below. I feel like we’re going to get in trouble for this. But the house is ours. John begins to strip the rest of the room. He works with a lamp on the floor, which projects my shadow onto the naked wall. Stay there, John says, and he uses a carpenter’s pencil from his toolbox to trace the outline of my shadow directly onto the plaster. Touched, I trace his shadow next to mine.

We’re still there under the new paint, two shadows joined in pencil. We were married without paperwork, on our own authority. And then we were married again years later, for health insurance, in a courthouse with forms and fees. Marriage, my mortgage, a document not intended to be understood. At the signing I tried to read every page until I realized how many pages there were, and then I just committed my name, again and again. Not to ownership but to the promise of payment.

The house isn’t mine. I don’t own it so much as I take care of it. This occurs to me as I work on the roses, cutting away the old canes. I don’t like the roses, but I care for them because they came with the house. As I prune them, I have the sense that all of this—the brick the roses climb, the lath and plaster, the copper pipes, the oak floors, the coal room, the cracked slab on which it all rests—is a gift. Not to me but to the future.

I’m in service to the house. The truth of this is married to the other truth, that the house serves me. I can borrow against this asset, which will grow in value if all goes well. But a house, my grandfather warned me just before we bought this house, is a place to live. Not an investment.