Magical Thinking - Augusten Burroughs [73]
We watched the buggy crawl ahead and the driver behind restrain himself from honking. Because I knew, on the one hand he wanted to honk, wanted badly to slide down the power window and shout “Get that fucking thing into the breakdown lane, you old cocksucker!” But on the other hand, the Amish in the buggy was the reason the driver in the Lexus was here in Blue Ball, so he really couldn’t complain. He wanted quaint, and he got it, at seven miles per hour. Supersize those fries for you?
Eventually, we found the center of town, which was, actually, rather quaint. The town of Blue Ball itself was more country store than strip mall.
We parked and began strolling. These stores were not part of larger franchises but appeared to be owned by individuals. Many of the signs were made of wood, hand-carved and leafed with gold. The lure was so powerful that we were sucked into nearly every store. One sold candles that had such an unusual, rustic charm, I bought all seventeen of them. “Do you have a website?” I asked, and the woman behind the counter simply smiled and shook her head, no. I was thrilled with these candles, which smelled of nutmeg, cinnamon, and paraffin. And I felt certain they wouldn’t explode, like the last candles I bought at Pottery Barn had. But then again, this store didn’t have a website and a toll-free customer service number I could call. And if something were to happen with these candles, I don’t believe this little store would send me a five-hundred-dollar gift certificate, and a customer service follow-up phone call the way Pottery Barn had. So in this way, we—the materialistic, commercialized, ruined modern peoples—take good care of ourselves.
Another store sold quilts. I’m not interested in crafts, as a general rule, but these quilts were very impressive. Just as impressive was the price.
“Look at this,” I whispered to Dennis, holding up the tag for him to see.
His reply was a startled intake of air. “Five thousand dollars? That can’t be right.”
I’d stitched a pair of moccasins when I was fifteen and locked in a mental hospital, so I knew firsthand how difficult it would be to stitch something as large as this quilt. “Oh no,” I said. “I’m sure that’s the right price.”
“Well, that just proves my point. These Amish are rich, rich, rich,” he said. “It’s easy to look at their houses and their ratty clothes and think they’re poor. But they’re not. They own all this land out here. And what land they don’t own, they sold to the Gap and Walmart for millions.”
That may be true, I thought. But they don’t have digital cable or Internet access, so really what’s the point of being alive? Civilized life, with all its threats and potential dooms, is too much to bear without the respite of three hundred channels. True, Osama bin Laden may very well send nuclear-bomb–filled suitcases on Amtrak trains into Penn Station, but until then: I Love the 80s on VH1.
We ambled down the street and into a furniture store. Here, we encountered an amazing solid cherry chest of drawers that was handmade without hardware—it featured tongue-and-groove construction. The wood was so glossy it looked plastic, and the finish smelled faintly of beeswax. When I pulled the drawer out, it slid with solid confidence. It was an excellent piece of furniture. The perfect size to tuck into a small corner of a room, perhaps a place to hold a few sweaters. Nine thousand dollars.
“It’s tomorrow’s antique . . . today,” Dennis said. And this was true. This isn’t the kind of thing you find at Hold Everything. This is the kind of thing your grandfather might have made, if you had that sort of grandfather, which I didn’t. My grandfather was a Nyquil salesman, and while he did make millions of dollars selling the sticky green cough suppressant, the closest he came to building furniture was specifying red leather for his Cadillac Fleetwood.
Being in the store surrounded by such fine items activated the intense need section of my brain, and I deeply wanted