janelle brown
My fiancé and I stood among the appliances stacked high on the shelves, totems to culinary efficiency, their gleaming stainless-steel surfaces still unsullied by greasy fingerprints. In the next aisle over, the glassware sparkled in the early morning sun. The room smelled like vanilla: comforting, sweet, the scent of home (ours! together!). It was Registry Sunday at Crate & Barrel, and we, after years of agonizing over other couples' registries, were finally about to begin our own. Endless possibilities lay before us: the children we'd have, the homes we'd live in, the omelettes we'd cook in top-of-the-line anodized-aluminum nonstick skillets.
Drunk. We were drunk with options. Or perhaps that was just the mimosas, made from freshly squeezed orange juice—the stylish silver juicer only $23.95, that the salesman was only too happy to demonstrate—clutched in our increasingly overwhelmed hands. Or was it a sugar high from the waffles, which a friendly saleswoman had just handed us, still hot from the waffle maker (on sale, $39.99!) and drowning in gourmet syrup?
Greg and I caught each other's eyes as the solicitous saleswoman chattered on about the waffle maker's heating elements and indicator lights. “Should we…?” I asked, the scanning gun twitching in my sticky palm.
“Do we really need…?” he asked, staring at his reflection in the appliance, his eyes slightly bugging out. Maple syrup glistened on his lips.
Reader, we didn't. But we did register for the juicer. We pointed the scanning gun and hit bleep.
To see wedding commercialism at its most crass and canny, visit Crate & Barrel on a Registry Sunday. In the early hours of the morning, before the store opens to the public, the newly affianced are invited to a “private” browsing session where they can peruse the store's goods and start a registry. Couples are greeted with a brunch buffet (produced on the spot, using, of course, Crate & Barrel appliances) and a goodie bag (ours included a hideous pair of heart-shaped champagne glasses, a box of Marimekko thank-you cards, and a registry guide reminding us that no couple was complete without both formal and informal table settings). At Registry Sunday, a personal shopping adviser offers instructions. And then, like hunters on opening day, the couples are let loose upon the store, scanning guns in hand.
Long before I got engaged, I knew that when the time came, I would register. A registry is, at its heart, utterly pragmatic. People give gifts at weddings, which meant that we would be receiving dozens, if not hundreds of gifts. A registry would make things easy. It would eliminate the guesswork, the unwanted gifts, the overlapping presents, and to ensure that we wouldn't end up with a kitchen full of near-identical appetizer trays or floral tea cozies sent from Idaho by Aunt Edna.
When I signed up for the Crate & Barrel Registry Sunday, I did so knowing full well that registries are big business to department stores and houseware chains (they were, in fact, conceived by one: Marshall Field's, Chicago, 1924), which is why those same stores were luring us with waffles and discounts and personal shoppers. The romantic mythos of the registry—that, together, friends and family are setting up the new couple with all that they'll need for their life together—had been kept alive not just by tradition, but by industry.
But until I had the scanning gun in hand, I was not aware of the extent to which a registry is both a challenge and a temptation: a dangerous cocktail of outdated marriage conventions, fantasy projection, and contemporary consumption culture that is difficult for even the most abstemious bride (which I was not) to avoid intoxicating herself with.
Deciding to do a registry at all had been a feat of compromise for us. My fiancé, a formerly impoverished ascetic whose life possessions easily fit into the payload of his ancient truck, had only recently recognized the merits of buying anything frivolous at all; whereas I, a decided aesthete, had been known to spend my weekends hanging out in home decor stores just for fun, reading the Design Within Reach catalog as if it were a magazine. Something about the idea of registering sat uneasily with us. Blatantly asking for specific presents felt acquisitional and opportunistic.
“It's like presenting a shopping list to our friends and saying, ‘Gimme,’ ” observed my still-reticent fiancé, when I told him about our date with Crate & Barrel.
But that, said our friends and family, was what weddings were all about: the one time in your life when you ask and shall receive, in abundance.
“Register for a honeymoon,” said one friend.
“Register for home electronics,” said another.
My mother, a firm traditionalist, would think of no such thing. Registries were for crystal and china, for silver and cutlery—for, she said, “The things that you'll own for the rest of your life.” I had listened to her disparaging remarks about the registries of other couples whose weddings she had attended; couples who had registered for wooden spoons and pepper grinders, useful but decidedly unglamorous household objects with trifling price tags. “Who really wants to give a wooden spoon for a gift?” my mother would complain.
Maybe I didn't feel compelled to stack my cupboards with silver, but I saw her point. In twenty years, that wooden spoon would be moldering in a dump somewhere, but a silver bowl would last forever. It was a principle, I convinced Greg, that we should use for our registry. If people were going to go to the trouble and expense to buy us gifts, we should make sure their gift would be appreciated and used for years to come.
So we finally agreed. We would register, modestly and reasonably, at only two stores: Zinc Details, a favorite specialty design boutique in San Francisco, and Crate & Barrel. We would register only for items we truly loved or needed, objects that were beautiful and eternal. We would not descend into shopping madness, in which we registered for a hundred things we didn't need and wouldn't ever use— panini presses and steak knife sets—simply because they appeared in one of those registry guides published by bridal magazines or because a department store clerk suggested we wouldn't be complete without it.
No, we would be rational. We would have taste and originality. We would not be greedy.
So what had happened at Crate & Barrel?
Frankly, we had been seduced. The sober plan of registering for a few key items—glassware, flatware, some utilitarian appliances—evaporated the minute we stepped into the barrage. It is rare, after all, that you are let loose in a store and allowed to indulge your every homemaking fantasy. That cocktail set? Bleep! It's practically yours. The turquoise vase? Bleep! It's already on your dining room table. It's all so ephemeral—each electronic beep simply adding a line on a list somewhere, with no money exchanged, no box to be carried home—that the question soon becomes not “Why?” but “Why not?”
We walked out of Crate & Barrel that Sunday dizzy, not quite sure what had hit us, and in possession of a registry packed with frivolous kitchen gadgetry: espresso makers, juicers, ice-cream machines, woks. Jittery on freshly brewed cappuccino, I could almost convince myself that we really did need that juicer. Think how much fuller, how much healthier, our lives would be if we could just start each day with a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice! But Greg looked vaguely ill.
Part two of our plan was to register at Zinc Details, a stylish boutique in San Francisco that carried only high-end artisan wares such as vintage Japanese lacquerware, imported cashmere blankets, and furniture by local designers. This would reaffirm our initial registry goals of registering for unique, beautiful objects that we would keep forever. But the registry was in-store only, which meant that our friends in Los Angeles (where we had recently moved) wouldn't be able to shop there; which, in turn, seemed to necessitate that we register at the equivalent shop in Los Angeles, a boutique called Fitzsu.
This brought our grand registry total to three stores; which, all things considered, was still hovering around normal. We killed another two weekend days poring through the two boutiques, picking out German table settings, Finnish glassware, and enough Italian decorative bowls to cover every flat surface in our home. These, we assured ourselves, were the kinds of beautiful objects that would really last forever, each a piece of art in itself; the sort of things we would never buy for ourselves.
Even Greg was starting to enjoy the process. “Don't you think we should register for both soup plates and bowls?” he asked, caressing the “modern” yet “timeless” striped china we had carefully selected. “I mean, they do look nice together. And what about the matching espresso cups? Just in case we get that espresso maker…”
“But see,” I explained, finally putting those lost weekends in home design stores to good use. “You want a different color…to add contrast to the table.” We were starting to sound like Martha Stewart clones, and I secretly found it exhilarating. Who knew my Spartan fiancé could enjoy this as much as I did?
The modest bride is supposed to pretend that gifts are irrelevant to getting married, a nice gesture but secondary to the whole love-and-commitment part of the wedding, but the truth was that I loved the gifts. I loved hearing the doorbell ring, loved seeing the poor UPS deliveryman juggling a half dozen boxes, each the size of an oven, loved the explosion of Styrofoam peanuts. Even though I knew what was coming, I still experienced a frisson of excitement each time I ripped open the wrapping paper to discover an item I'd coveted (bleep!) in the store.
Thrillingly, the objects piling up in our living room were ours—not mine, or his—but gifts for us together, Janelle & Greg, the first we'd ever received as a couple. Each object was a glimpse into the life we were going to have together— a life where we served roasts on silver platters to exactly twelve guests (instead of barbecue on paper plates to thirty). A life where we would need crystal goblets for both red and white wine (wine that that wouldn't come with Charles Shaw labels) and one where we lived in a house that would have abundant shelving to display the uselessly gorgeous decorative bowls we'd registered for. Instead of being the perpetual guests at my parents' table at Thanksgiving, we would be hosting the meal ourselves, on our own imported German plates, with our own children and (looking long-term) grandchildren lined up and down the table.
But that fantasy life was not here now and would not be for a long time. The gifts were, for the most part, going straight into the closet, where they remained sheathed in their boxes. In our care to pick out only beautiful objects that would last us forever, we had somehow ended up with an avalanche of presents better suited to a middle-aged yuppie couple with two kids living in a six-thousand-square-foot loft in Tribeca. Who really, really liked freshly squeezed juice.
If this was who Janelle & Greg were, then I had never met them.
We realized what we'd missed when we looked at the registry of friends who were getting married just a few months before we were. They had registered at Macy's, and where our registry was full of “forever” objects and Crate & Barrel kitchen geegaws, their registry was decidedly practical: towels, sheets, luggage. Sonic toothbrushes. Toiletry cases.
“Luggage?” brightened Greg, growing enamored with the process. “We can register for that?!”
And, despite a nervous feeling that we were, just possibly, overindulging, back we headed to the shopping mall, to register for more practical items at Macy's.
Back in my mother's day, the registry was a trousseau for the woman newly emerged from her pubescent pupae. Everything she (and, by association, her husband) would need to fit her (and, by association, his) first home with the complete accoutrements of homemaking and entertaining. In 1969, when my mother was married, this made sense. She had never lived on her own before and had not even a dinner fork to her name. But I—like most of my friends— waited until I was thirty-one to get married, and by that time I'd already accumulated an entire house full of stuff. What would once have gone into my trousseau had instead been trickling into my apartment for years via birthdays and holidays and simple necessity. The KitchenAid mixer? Christmas 2003. The cutlery? IKEA, self-purchased. The Cuisinart? Birthday, age twenty-seven.
Maybe I'd originally promised myself that we would register only for things that we loved or needed, but what, really did we “need”? Not much. Our house was fully, if often cheaply, equipped. What was left, I realized when we arrived in Macy's home department, was upgrades. Instead of the hand-me-down Teflon pan, a $120 Anolon twelve-inch sauté pan. Instead of the stained khaki-colored quilt Greg had picked up at Bed Bath & Beyond eight years earlier, the four-hundred-thread-count Calvin Klein duvet. A complete set of matching luggage to replace the decrepit carry-on suitcase with a broken zipper that I'd toted around the world. Egyptian cotton towels. Soft, fluffy new pillows.
We were now fully cosseted in invisible abundance; no aspect of our life (hypothetically) unimproved. But did we really know anyone who would buy us a $225 duvet cover, let alone the entire $650 bed set? As it turned out, no. Nor did anyone want to buy us the high-end pots and pans, the luggage, or even the very reasonably priced pillows. No, people wanted to buy us those expensive but useless decorative objects, semifrivolous kitchen gadgets, and anything made from crystal or silver: Those gifts apparently felt more special, more fun to give. As the gifts continued coming—rice cookers! silver serving trays! cut-glass vases!—we realized that we might as well not have registered at Macy's at all.
We now had a slightly embarrassing four registries listed on the back page of our Web site—what had happened to our testaments to moderation?—but at least we were done registering, once and for all. Or so we thought.
I was the first of two daughters to get married and had learned right away that my mother had specific ideas about how it should be done. She had arrived for a celebratory cocktail on the day of my engagement with a bag full of earmarked bridal magazines, some dated up to a year earlier. I was still enamored with the ring on my finger, but my mother had already picked out the table decorations for my wedding.
Overwhelmed by my mother's enthusiasm for the whole process, I had conferred with (and, occasionally, conceded to) her on almost every aspect of the wedding—location, attire, flowers, menu. The registry, I'd assumed, would be a sanctuary of decision making for Greg and me. After all, my mother wasn't going to be living with our presents.
How wrong I was.
Once our registries went online, the e-mails began pouring in from my mother, who was living four hundred miles north in a suburb of San Francisco. “Did you register for serving spoons? I didn't see a serving set on your list.” “Do you realize there's hardly any silver on your list?” “I can't believe you want a knife block for $140!” When I didn't respond, the e-mails grew more pointed, such as, “If you want my advice on some items, let me know.”
I didn't let her know, but she let me know instead. The biggest mistake we'd made—besides not registering for enough decorative picture frames and having so far failed to choose a silver pattern—was that we hadn't registered at Bloomingdale's. She called me, upset: “All my friends are going to want to shop for you at Bloomingdale's.”
“We registered at Macy's and Crate & Barrel,” I said. “Can't they go there?”
“The Macy's at our local mall is really tacky,” she said.
“Then they can shop online.”
The silence on the other end was deafening. “They want to be able to see what they're buying you. I don't know why you didn't ask me before you registered at Macy's; I would have told you that.”
I'd already lost too many wedding-related arguments with my mother to get into another; I gave up almost immediately and told Greg that we would have to register at one more store.
“You're kidding,” he said. “A fifth registry? There's nothing left to register for.”
“We'll just replicate the registry at Macy's,” I told him. “Both stores carry the same stuff.”
“So we're going to knowingly ask people to buy us duplicate gifts? That makes no sense whatsoever,” he said.
“It's for my mom,” I muttered. “It's not about making sense. Just go with it.”
But his ascetic's warning bells had finally decided to sound the alarm, and he refused to have anything to do with it. While he furiously gave his clothes away to charity to soothe his conscience, I spent a listless afternoon alone on the Bloomingdale's Web site, duplicating our registry from the four other stores without adding anything new. Once again, I requested the Swedish crystal from Orrefors, the Calvin Klein duvet, the Nambe bowls. But it wasn't fun anymore, it wasn't wish fulfillment or fantasy; it was a chore. I added Bloomingdale's to the list of registries on our wedding Web site, more than a little mortified by what it suggested about us. So much for not conveying “Gimme.”
But my mother was thrilled. The next time I visited her in San Francisco, she insisted that we walk through Bloomingdale's together, to get a firsthand look at our registry. Watching her excitement, I realized that it wasn't her friends who wanted to see my gifts at Bloomingdale's—it was her. As much as I had fantasized about my future life with Greg—those roasts, those dinner parties, the endless display shelves—she had too. She was imagining herself at her daughter's well-appointed Thanksgiving table, excited by her daughter's happy marriage to a very nice young man. If the only way she could contribute to the bottom line of her own fantasies for Janelle & Greg was to help me pick out a timeless silver pattern and some steak knives, well, then, dammit, she was going to do it.
It was a small thing to concede to her, I decided.
In our house, we now have an entire closet we refer to as the “schwag closet.” It is overflowing with wedding gifts, most of which, a year later, are still in their original boxes. In the year since our wedding, the gifts have continued to trickle in; though, by this point, most of the stragglers have bypassed our outdated registries and are just sending cash or gift certificates. This is a good thing, since we no longer have room to store anything. (We had a mere one hundred guests at our wedding: I can only imagine the storage requirements of a couple who invited two or three hundred.)
A good half of our gifts have gone unused because our life is still too chaotic, too young and carefree, to merit their use. Last week, we once again had a barbecue for thirty people. As usual, we used paper plates. There wasn't enough German china for everyone, anyway. I put away the fancy new stainless and hauled out the old IKEA forks, just in case an inebriated friend threw one away by mistake. Greg did, however, inaugurate the coordinated barbecue set from Crate & Barrel, and I served salad in a vintage Japanese lacquer salad bowl, which, I must say, looked stunning even on our secondhand picnic table.
We have used the fanciest gifts—the crystal Orrefors glasses and the Nambe bowls—but only once, when my parents came to visit and we attempted to show off with a dinner feast worthy of the best Beverly Hills hostess. My mother was, of course, thrilled. Then everything disappeared back to the closet. I figure we'll break them out again in five or ten years; but it's nice to know they are there, just waiting for us to really grow up. Someday, we finally will, won't we?
If the life bequeathed to us by our registry hasn't yet fully materialized, there is an adult quality to our lives now, a sense of a now-and-future Us (right there, in that closet!) that wasn't there before. Whether this has more to do with the fact that we stood under an arch of flowers and committed our lives to each other or that we now own a full set of sterling silver flatware, I wouldn't begin to guess. But if we could survive the registry—exposing, in the process, our weakest and greediest selves, but loving each other anyway; forcing ourselves to accommodate each other's wildly different worldviews; but discovering, in the end, a common dream for a future together—our relationship can probably survive anything. Bleep.