B&H, Brandon had assured her, would give Anna a better deal than J&R, but all the clerks at B&H were Hasids and Anna found this too distracting. The last time she’d gone there (two Christmases ago, to buy a digital camera for her mother) she could think of little else but the Hasids, who seemed so happy and prosperous living under such terrible constraints. The Hasid who had helped her that day had red hair and blue eyes, and, of course, Anna couldn’t help but thinking this was unusual for a Jew. She couldn’t stop herself from wondering how many children he had, or from staring overmuch at his yarmulke. And the salesman’s benign comparison of wide-angle focal lengths did nothing to camouflage his contempt for her lifestyle. She was sure of it, that if all the Hasids at B&H had any say, they would agree that Anna, a woman, shouldn’t be there discussing megapixels and LCD screen resolution in the first place. That her hair should not be dyed. That her dress should not be so low-cut and should instead remind men of Soviet architecture. That she should be at home, making things nice for the husband and children she didn’t (but should) have. She knew Hasids didn’t have sex until they were married, until after they’d had children even, and could only imagine what the red-haired Hasid would think if he knew that she’d had phone sex—regular phone sex, not even the brave video-chat kind—with a man she’d met on the Internet.
No, the winner of this double-consonant-ampersand contest could only be J&R. Even if it was cheaper, B&H was out of the question.
The salesman who ended up helping her at J&R was named Khuleh. He was from Oman and, unlike the Hasids of B&H, who spoke with the clear diction and authoritative tones of asylum attendants, Anna understood none of what Khuleh said. She did understand that he was trying to sell her a different camera, because he had picked up the box for a Kodak Zi8 and started waving it slowly in front of her face.
“Goolex!” Khuleh insisted. “Goolex.” Whatever that meant.
This only made Anna angry, because she knew all about the Kodak Zi8, which didn’t have any mic inputs whatsoever and was just an overpriced pocket cam for tourists. Anna pointed instead at the box for the Panasonic 3MOX AVCCAM.
“I want this one,” she said.
But Khuleh kept waving the Zi8 at her, so she picked up the AVCCAM box and waved it at Khuleh, realizing that now they had become two people waving boxes at each other, executing some complex, consumer form of Butoh in the camcorder aisle of J&R. Finally, Khuleh, conceding which side his bread was buttered on, stopped waving the Zi8 and took the AVCCAM box from Anna. He filled out an order form and Anna went downstairs to the cashiers. With New York sales tax everything came to almost thirty-five hundred. And when Anna handed half of Aunt Clara’s money over to the cashier, she kept reminding herself of the little things she skimped on. I don’t have cable, Anna thought. I’ve never downloaded a ringtone. After running the card, the cashier made a big thing of explaining J&R’s return policy, which was sternly worded and seemed to indict Anna as a money launderer or a pedophile before her goods were even in the bag.
She made it as far as the park, as far as the smiling Chinese family posing for a snapshot in front of Seiso, the tottering turd sculpture that looked not unlike a man on a horse, when she realized the box was too heavy and flagged a cab back to Brooklyn. An additional thirty dollars, Anna could not help but notice.
When she got home, she set the box down in front of the hallway closet and went to fix herself lunch. Brie wouldn’t be home until past seven—on Tuesdays she worked as an intern at Condé Nast’s ad sales department. The rest of the week, Brie had a different internship, at a small music management company downtown. Anna did not really understand how Brie survived when her per diems barely covered lunch and didn’t include a Metrocard. But Brie had told her these internships were highly competitive. They took only five people at Condé Nast per semester, and had it not been for Brie’s prior internship at Women’s Wear Daily, she could never have snagged this one. The music management position was even more exclusive; Brie had to wrangle that one through inside connections. It was amazing to Anna that Brie worked so hard just for the privilege of working hard. But what did Anna know? She was, after all, ten years older than Brie. In her day, people had simply gone out and gotten jobs after college or some kind of paid fellowship. Still, Anna was willing to concede that those were simpler times—before 2007 and the collapse of hope.
She put a frozen saag paneer dinner in the microwave for four minutes on high, and while that was cooking, ate half an avocado. But with a minute and a half still left to go, the avocado was already gone, so Anna got herself a bowl of seedless grapes and sat down to check her Gmail. She had eleven messages, which was good for a Tuesday. But then, heart sinking, she realized only one was real—from Brandon—and the rest were just Flavorpill bulletins, auto reminders about various depressing things she’d pay to forget, and a bulk-mailed greeting from a woman in the contracts department of Pinter, Chinski and Harms, smugly enjoying her overseas “vacay.”
The microwave pinged and Anna, feeling already full, looked over at the box, still sitting by the door. J&R didn’t have a bag big enough for it, so the AVCCAM box sat naked on the floor, its sides splattered with pictures of itself, its features announcing themselves in garish cartoon letters. Next to the AVCCAM box lay a large plastic bag that contained the two smaller boxes with her sound gear: an AV-JEFE CM520 professional lavalier mic with Shure mini 4-pin XLR connector and a Sennheiser MKE 400 compact video camera shotgun microphone.
The microwave pinged again, and Anna got up to fetch the saag paneer. This one didn’t come with rice, so she got herself a roll of sourdough bread. She ate straight from the plastic container while reading The Daily Beast’s “Cheat Sheet” on her laptop. When she finished eating, she clicked over to Daily Intel, then Fishbowl NY, then back over to her e-mail, where there were no new messages in her in-box. She considered checking Newser (though she didn’t much trust Michael Wolff), or PopEater (even though it always made her feel guilty afterward). Then Anna wondered whether The Daily Beast’s “Cheat Sheet” had refreshed in the past half hour, whether it was worth maybe checking back in. But then she caught herself and remembered the box.
She had cleared her entire day for that camera, so why was it that now, after all the hassle and money spent, with the camera finally home, she did not want to open the box? It was because, Anna knew, inside the box, the camera would be broken into its many subcomponents. And each component would have to be assembled according to very specific instructions that would be meticulously outlined in an instructional booklet divided into eight chapters, and translated into French, Japanese, German, and Russian. Annoyingly, there would also be a separate disk with software that might or might not be compatible with her operating system. There would be many small plastic bags inside the box, with little coiled cables inside each bag. Each cable would look exactly the same, but of course their inputs and outputs, their minute, electronic genitalia, would differ ever so slightly. The cables would be molded into perfect little bows and held in place with a single twist tie. Unwrapping them would make Anna feel guilty. Ripping the small plastic bags open would make her feel guilty. Throwing away the cardboard backings would make her feel guilty. She pictured herself with the components and the bags and the cables all spread out in a big, guilt-inducing, Earth-destroying pile before her, and she pictured the tiny font of the instructional booklet, which she would dutifully struggle to follow before tossing it aside to just follow her instincts instead. Inevitably, she would unpack everything only to find that something was missing. Or that she had an extra component left over. She would turn on the camera to find that it wouldn’t turn on. Or that a little red light wouldn’t stop blinking.