Cake or Death (8 page)

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.

Then there’s novelty sound gear, plus, for some reason, a lamp with a small silver Harley-Davidson motorcycle as a base. No ginger jars for Brookstone. The shade is imprinted with dozens of classic photos of unspecified classic … things. “The lamp also briefly revs its engine when turned on.”

Then there’s tooth-care stuff, but I don’t care about teeth.

You can buy a device that measures your heart rate as you exercise, while tracking your speed and distance. The weird part is that it comes with a global positioning system device that tells you precisely where you are on the planet. But knowing the Brookstone customer, you’re wearing this indoors on your treadmill, so this is just sad, if not scary. Brookstone’s implying that you’re trekking the Himalayan foothills but I suspect
someone’s
still in their rec room watching a Rick Steves “Let’s Go to Prague” travel show.

There are other devices. A turquoise Panasonic Epilator for instance. It plucks as it shaves as it holds skin down “with minimal pain,” but if it mistook a bump for a hair, I can see things going badly wrong and my entire armpit being sucked into a hand-held. Hand-held what? the emergency room people will ask. I’m not sure, I’ll say. They’ll be pulling strips of skin out of the blades and trying to stick them back on my scarlet underarms. I think not.

The motion-activated soap dispenser would have pleased Howard Hughes in his later dementia but I see all kinds of problems for the sane. Sure, you don’t have to pump your soap but you still have to turn taps off and on, use a towel and then a doorknob. Germs lurk. It’s not a question of touching. They’re in the air. Are you wearing your face mask? And what’s the point if you’re going to have sex?

It always comes back to sex. This whole catalogue is profoundly anti-sex. It doesn’t make loneliness easier to
bear, it actually enhances it, makes it more likely. It’s a funny thing to pay for.

But here’s a useful gadget. It was named the best overall key chain flashlight by
The Wall Street Journal
, Brookstone proudly announces. It has an LED bulb that will last 100,000 hours. Now, even the liveliest and most sociable of people will not spend 100,000 hours getting into their car and abode. That’s 8,333 nights. That’s twenty-three years. And why does Brookstone boast that it can be seen up to a mile away? This is a key chain for a mobster charged with body disposal. Who else would be out at night and in need of such a sturdy nonstop light source? On second thought, no, this is a tool for a serial killer.

I love the blood alcohol concentration device. You blow into it when you’re drunk to see if you can drive. Then you drive. I think it just encourages people.

I don’t love the tennis stand. It’s a sort of tripod with a ball on a wire that plays tennis with you for hours and hours and helps you improve your swing. Tennis for people with no friends. So why is the next device a stainless-steel tub cooler that keeps thirty-two cans or five 2-litre bottles icy cold for twelve hours? You play tennis, run, float, sit, lounge, golf and sleep alone (Brookstone sells a special Tempur-Pedic body-shaped pillow that hugs you from head to crotch, just like a human would if it loved you) and now you’re having a blowout party? With whom? I think it’s a fantasy item to soothe the social aspirations of a Brookstoner, whose dreams will never be fulfilled unless you get out of the house and down your driveway, away from the Grill Alert Talking Remote Thermometer
that tells you when your meat is cooked should you move three hundred feet away from the barbecue, the only reason for which would be to go to the bathroom because, God knows, you wouldn’t have anyone there to chat to or you might strain your neck.

I’ll end with the Motorized Grill Brush. You use it to clean your outdoor grill, thus possibly developing arm musculature that will attract the opposite sex, or any sex. But no, it’s motorized. You don’t have to tense a muscle, you saggy, lonely old Epilated hermit living in a Tucson subdivision and looking for love in the Brookstone catalogue.

Oh, you’ll find love there. The creepy kind. Not the kind you dreamed of when you were young and taut, every skin cell awaiting the touch, the kiss, of the glorious friend-filled future you had planned. But you’ve got a chair that shivers. That’s something. Thanks, Brookstone! Hit me again with your black leather hammer. Harder. Harder. Don’t stop.

The only thing to be said for the latest stream of books explaining why women are crap is that they’re written by women. If a man ever wrote a book saying women killed feminism when they got jobs that paid better than other women’s jobs, or women are all sluts starting from age nine, or women aren’t as smart as men it’s a scientific fact, or women are total cunts for thinking they can have it all when they can’t have anything and I’ll make sure of that…. well, that man would be dead now.