This Woman Does Not Have Children or Pets
The other day, a catalog arrived in my mailbox.
Catalogs used to annoy me. When one came, I'd wonder why, because no one has subscribed to a catalog since the Squall jacket heyday of Lands' End, and I'd make a big fuss about it ruining the environment. Now, my brain is addled by the bottomless needs of a two-year-old and a two-month-old, and when a catalog arrives I'm like, Ooh. At night, I sit down and go through it, and afterwards I feel soothed and enriched. That's where I'm at.
But this catalog did not soothe and enrich me. This catalog-Anthropologie: The Journey Home (which showcases furniture and household goods, in conjunction with their new home-focused stores)-infuriated me. Anthropologie: The Journey Home is not your typical featherweight Anthropologie catalog. It has the heft of a literary journal (or, to put it in terms of my current diet, two Ballard Designs and a Pottery Barn Kids). Its 199 pages star an imaginary, worldly woman who owns places in Paris, Idaho, and Cuba.
This woman makes me angry. I am taking her personally. It's not just the big things, like the $3498 silk-covered ottoman she uses for resting her cake and vodka. It's the little things, like the bouquets of dried herbs tied with twine and hung upside down throughout her homes. I mean, that right there suggests three inarguable truths:
a) She grows herbs.
b) She's so good at growing herbs that, after cooking and giving them away to friends, she has bushels left over for decorating.
c) She doesn't just own twine-she has a place she puts twine, a place she returns to over and over again knowing that her twine will be there, because it is the place she puts her twine, and she never forgets to restock it.
There is a drawer in my house where my sweaters share space with maternity capris (clothing's ultimate sad face emoji) and random Happy Meal toys belonging to my son. With her pristine twine filing, this woman is spitting in my face. And she may very well be on her way to your house right now, ready to vandalize your self-esteem. I want to help you prepare, so I've made a list of her distinguishing traits, as gleaned from the catalog, for you to read up on.
She was the hottest girl at her summer camp. How do I know this? The woman has made it to her mid-thirties without anyone telling her that liking dreamcatchers is dorky as hell. She's a grown lady who has a dreamcatcher collection over her sofa, who has somehow found a way to keep plants inside still more dreamcatchers. And just as they did at Camp Timberwood Catskills Eagle Puberty, boys are still nodding along, like, cool, we want to hear more about your passion for yarn and feathers.
She does not have children or pets. People who have to take care of anything living do not borrow trouble by having coffee tables with holes in them. Living and loving tri-coastal as she does right now, the woman's $68 French bulldog cheese board is all the responsibility she can handle.
She is almost certainly single. If you sleep in the ornate, bird-oriented $2498 Odelina bed-"inspired by Celtic mythology and verse"-you are probably not sharing it with a man. In fact, the quickest way to find love is to decorate your space with things from Anthropologie. The second you've lugged home your $10,000 haul-a.k.a. three tiny vases, two fancy hooks, and one set of hand-wash-only bedding-you will meet The Guy. He will make you throw all of it away when he moves in. And you will be left feeling like you flushed your money down the one household item Anthropologie doesn't make. (Related: the woman does not move her bowels. She grows dewy with toxins, dabs them away with a $20 Moonbloom Tea Towel, and stores it in a $38 Hammered Borealis Canister.)
She plays the banjo. The woman has three massive homes, but, evidently, no banjo storage. The banjo is always sitting out somewhere, exposing innocent guests to the low-level hell that is a conversation about the banjo or, worse, the woman actually playing the banjo for them, never breaking eye contact during her 30-minute set.
She has seen some shit. We only glimpse the woman herself a few times throughout the catalog. She is featured most prominently on page 9: We see her greasy-haired, huddled and wrapped in a blanket. It seems likely that she has just witnessed a murder. Luckily, Idaho cops have excellent taste in linens, and have arrived on the scene armed with the $168 Avoca plaid lambswool throw.
She doesn't often see her brothers. I can tell, because if I tried to pull the move from page 67-hanging the $580 Boucharouette Wall Art-my brothers would not respond charitably. Depending on how many Yuenglings they had consumed when they noticed the one-of-a-kind piece sourced from Morocco, they would either crack up and ask why my bathmat was on the wall or pull it down and flog me with it.
She won the race to get Cuba. This woman doesn't just already have a home in Cuba. She already has an electrician in Cuba who has hung a $1498 Flowerburst Pendant from her twenty-foot, two-hundred-year-old ceilings. So don't bother: It's too late for Cuba to be your thing. Cuba is her thing.
She won't admit when she's made a mistake. How does that Billy Joel song go? "Oh, and she never gives out, and she never gives in, she just… keeps pretending that this room makes sense, that she's not constantly bumping her head on this lamp and no, this low lounger thing isn't giving her scoliosis and yes, humans can use a typewriter built for a mouse 'cause she's always a woman to me."
She has recently solved a problem she has been wrestling with for years: how to reconcile her struggle to read small print with her allergy to things that look useful. You say $278 is a lot for a stationery golden magnifying glass. The woman says it's a small price to pay to avoid being seen at Staples.
She's fig-obsessed. Do you see a fig painting on the wall? Notice figs strewn just so on the table? She's nearby. Figs are the woman's calling card. Her crime: rubbing it in your face that she knows where to find fresh figs and you don't.
Her Paris friends are bitches. All the things in the woman's pied a terre seem to be named after chic villains: There's the Oscarine bed with its Zonda duvet, the Dorette chandelier hovering over the Claribel sofa. I'm guessing that these girls make up the woman's Paris clique, a fragile group never more than a cigarette away from hating each other. If someone throws a brick through the woman's window one day, my money's on Lindley, of the $798 Lindley side table.
But if it's a Fischer-Price shopping cart that breaks the glass, it was probably me.
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