The Oriental Rug

From my long-ago (but still relevant) “Domestic Affairs” column archives:

In 1984, shortly after the birth of my youngest child—my son Willy—when I was 31 years old, the New York Times newspaper syndicate invited me to write a column about family life. I called this column “Domestic Affairs.”

Every Monday morning without fail for almost ten years, I delivered a 1,000-word story about what was going on with my husband and me and our three young children in our little farmhouse in New Hampshire. Eventually, over fifty newspapers around the country—in Portland, Oregon; St. Petersburg, Florida; Reno, Nevada; Marin County, California; and many more—carried that column.

What I wanted to do in Domestic Affairs was share real-life stories that went beyond the typical content that filled much of the women’s pages of America’s newspapers at the time—stories of cute things kids said or the wacky adventures of a slightly stressed-out housewife. I wanted to cover the story of a family with humor but also honesty, and I wasn’t going to leave out the hard parts.

I wanted to take a close, honest look at what it was like to be navigating a marriage and family life in America—with time and money and sometimes patience, or wisdom, in short supply. I loved my husband and I loved my children, but sometimes, as I admitted in my column once, I also felt frustrated, overwhelmed, misunderstood, or simply sad. Sometimes it seemed as though in the course of trying to meet the needs of my family, I lost sight of myself.

One of the joys of writing that column came in the form of the letters I received on a daily basis from readers all over the country—women (and occasionally men) who told me they waited for the paper Saturday morning and turned to Domestic Affairs first. They told me they struggled with some of the same feelings I did, and that I felt like a friend. Those readers felt like friends to me, too. More than three decades later, some of them remain friends of mine still.)

Of all the columns I ever wrote, there was probably none that inspired more letters (around five hundred of them, as I remember) than one I called, simply, “The Oriental Rug.” It was a two-parter, actually, that ran over two successive weeks. I’ve put those two columns together here, with only very minor edits.

Some readers wrote to point out that I seemed to display a striking lack of understanding of what it meant to work together as a team in a marriage. They were probably right about that. Others expressed anger over the outcome of the rug saga. “You earned that money,” they wrote. “Why should anyone tell you how to spend it?”

After you’ve read this one, maybe you’ll share your thoughts. I’d love to hear them. Here goes:

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The Oriental Rug
November, 1986

You know, walking into my house, that young children live here. It’s not just the bits of crayon under the sofa cushions. It’s the sofa itself, which was so old and stained that last year we broke down and got slipcovers, and now those look old and stained too. We try to keep things under control, but every day somebody spills his Cheerios or staples the tablecloth onto the table.

And, because of all that, my husband S. and I have not bought much in the way of furnishings or drapes or carpeting during the nine and a half years of our marriage. Most of our furniture comes from secondhand stores or yard sales. Our living-room rug is an Oriental we picked up for $50 with a hole in the middle that was the size of golf ball when we got it and is now the size of a Frisbee.

Sometimes, visiting other people’s houses, I will look longingly at someone’s living room couch or rug and think how nice it would be to have what I think of as grown-up furniture: The kind you choose, not because the person who had it first doesn’t want it anymore and it’s cheap and there’s not much damage that could be done to it that hasn’t already. The kind of couch you don’t have to drape afghans over to hide the magic marker stains.

Driving home from the home of these Friends With Nice Furniture, I may mention to S. this desire to upgrade our living-room decor. Everybody is toilet-trained now, I remind him. Even Willy puts the caps on his markers. We haven’t overdrawn our checking account in more than a year. Maybe we’re ready for a grown-up rug.

Now here I get into a prickly area for both of us, which is our vastly different attitudes about money. I wouldn’t describe myself as a spendthrift, but now and then I shell out a lot for some item that may last a lifetime—or just 10 minutes, and when I do my husband is shocked. I have been known to spend $3 for a half pint of raspberries or $50 for a haircut. I may not own a single sweater without moth holes, but I doubt whether Lady Diana has a better raincoat than I do, although Prince Charles probably didn’t react to the price tag on hers the way S. did to the price tag on mine.

Most of these purchases have been made during times when there was very little extra money, and sometimes during periods when we were downright broke. Which is maybe partly why I bought those raspberries. Those small luxuries have made doing without other things easier to take.

S. buys only what he absolutely can’t do without, and looks for the no-frills version every time. We both remember the financial hard times of our first years of marriage, but where I react to that memory with a need to make up for past sacrifices, S. looks to those times as a reminder of how closely we need to watch ourselves to avoid falling on hard times again.

Back to this rug business. I had been lobbying for a new rug for a couple of months without success. Then one day an unexpected windfall came my way in the form of the sale of an article I’d written seven years ago and forgotten about. When that kind of windfall comes our way I usually use it to pay an overdue credit-card bill or get the furnace cleaned.

This is where I’ll mention that though we live on a farm at the end of a dead end road, in a town that has yet to install stop light on Main Street, once a week I drive thirty miles with our three children to a place I think of as The City. Right around the day the check arrived, the children and I were in a nearby city (population 15,000, but a city to us) for the purpose of bringing my daughter to gymnastics class.

I bring her brothers along. At ages 2 and 4, they view this trip as a big adventure, particularly when we go to one of those car washes where your vehicle gets transported through a series of wash cycles with suds pouring down and brushes whirling over our windows. To us, it’s the closest we’ve experienced to Disneyland.

We were just making our way down Main Street—the boys and I—when a sign in a store window caught my eye: Grand Opening: Oriental Rugs at Record Low Prices. Just below the larger banner announcing the sale was an added incentive: Buy a rug, get a free trip to Florida!

Did I mention it was winter at the time? Temperature hovering somewhere around twenty-two degrees?

I went in to look, priced a few rugs, all of which cost considerably more than S. and I have ever paid for one item of home furnishings. Then the salesman unrolled an oriental rug, deep red with birds and flowers woven in and a deep blue border. This rug was just the right colors for our living room (meaning, no particular color scheme at all; this rug featured all colors, it seemed) and the perfect size too. It cost more than the other rugs—exactly as much money as my windfall check. If you want to know the truth, the price tag on this rug said two thousand dollars.

Ten minutes later I walked out of that store with a new rug.

I did not consult my husband. My concept was that I’d surprise him. Did I actually think he’d be happy? Perhaps I was kidding myself, but I remember telling our children—in the car, on our way home from the rug store—“Won’t Dad be excited when we show him this?” Young as they are, they seemed a little dubious on that point.

I set the stage well. Positioned S. on our (exceedingly old and stained) living room couch, when we got back to the house, with beer in hand. “Wait right here,” I said. Then I went out to the car to bring in my purchase. I had to drag it through the snow—thinking, as I did, about that trip to Florida.

It is not the easiest task, for a 123-pound woman to drag a 5-by-7-foot Oriental rug from the back of her Ford Country Squire station wagon into her living room. But ten minutes later I was rolling it out on the floor in front of my husband. Eleven minutes later, he was staring at me with a look that reminded me a little of Desi Arnaz, when Lucy brought home an entire side of beef (as an economy move) and a commercial freezer to store it in.

If my husband could speak Spanish, he might have said Hay caramba. As it was he just asked if I’d lost my mind.

I won’t go into the details of the argument that followed, except to say that like most arguments it was about more than what started it. I had intended to bypass the price issue by not telling S. how much the rug cost. But I am a believer in honesty as the best policy, so I told him, though I pointed out that the price represented a 20% markdown, and that a free trip to Florida was thrown in with the purchase. Airfare only. For one person.

A look came over my husband’s face that I may only have seen one time, when he broke his wrist in three places, before the doctor gave him the painkillers.

S. is generally a man of few words, even in happier times, but I could see him translating that price into car payments, firewood, mortgage payments, hours of work, and looking pretty horrified at how much it added up to.

“You’ve got to return this rug,” he said. “We can’t afford something like this. We don’t even own a vacuum cleaner.”

(This was not precisely true, actually. I’d just found a real beauty at the dump only the week before. Not quite in working order yet, but very possibly repairable. A Kirby, no less.)

It was too late to call the store that night, and anyway, I told my husband I didn’t want to do that. What was a life that didn’t contain a few beautiful things? Did everything we did have to be practical and make sense?

We passed a miserable night, not speaking to each other much. The children walked gingerly in the living room, or simply avoided it. Even Willy, not yet out of diapers, seemed to understand that the rug’s days in our home might be numbered.

And in the morning, wind no longer in my sails, I watched as my husband dialed the number of the rug store.

I heard only his side of the conversation of course. The gist of which was that his wife had gone a little crazy the other day when she bought that rug. And now, of course, my reason had returned to me. More accurate, his reason had overruled my own apparent insanity.

At this point in their conversation, the man at the store, Mahmoud, must have reminded S. about the trip to Florida.

“Florida?” my husband said. “We’re lucky if we can make it to Manchester.” (New Hampshire, not England.) When that didn’t wash, he must have mentioned his store’s no-return policy. But gradually I could tell they were finding some sort of common ground. Mahmoud must have told S. some story about some crazy thing his own wife had done one time. S. chuckled softly.

Women. You’ve got to love them. (Or not.)

Eventually, the two men (allies now, strangely, in a world populated by women who didn’t fully understand the realities of life) agreed on a plan. S. rolled up the rug and drove it back to the store. A few hours later he returned with a new rug—bigger, but polyester. 100%. No refund check, but the rug man had agreed to pay out the significant difference between the cost of the original rug and this one in weekly fifty-dollar increments. I could pick these up on my trips to the city when I drove our daughter to gymnastics.

Now that’s how it goes. Every Wednesday—gymnastics day—I pull up to the oriental rug store, no longer with the dream of buying a rug. Simply to pick up my weekly check. My sons generally accompany me on this mission. They seem to understand that for me, the rug store is not a place to linger happily, jumping on rugs.

I make it snappy. Mahmoud hands me my check. I’m out of there.

In another year or two we will have received our full refund.

As for that windfall money I’d received for the article I’d sold: It has gone to the purchase of snow tires. And I have learned a lesson on the importance, in the future, of making major financial decisions like this one together, rather than unilaterally.

I wish I could end this with some wise, happy solution to our rug problem. Which isn’t just a rug problem, of course. It’s a marriage problem. Because what’s at issue is two people struggling to work as one unit. Which is hard sometimes.

I have made one small adjustment in my schedule, however, on those days I drive to the city for my daughter’s gymnastics class. After I pick up the check, the boys and I stop by the bakery nearby. Each of us gets a cookie.

It’s not the same as a rug. But—even factoring in the calories—less dangerous.

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As a post-script I will add, simply, that my marriage to my children’s father ended three years after the events I described in these columns. Thirty-five years later, when I go to some city to give a talk—if it’s a city where the local paper used to run “Domestic Affairs”—I am often still asked the question, “Did you ever get an oriental rug?”

I did actually. The day my mother died, I returned to the small city I describe in the story of the oriental rug. Oddly, perhaps, I felt a need to buy something. The fact that I chose to do this should in no way serve as indication of my lack of love for my mother, or an absence of grief over the loss of her.

I paid a visit to the same rug store I describe in this column. The same man, whom I call Mahmoud here, was still running the place.

I was feeling lost that day. I was thirty-five years old. My marriage had just ended, and I had just moved out of the old farmhouse I’d loved, that I’d shared with my husband, where my children had been born.

“I’ve come to buy an oriental rug,” I told the man.

And I bought one.