{XVII}

My wife wants a massage chair. She wants one every year. And I never give her one. Why? Because there’s something depressing about massage chairs, and how would you wrap it, or get it under the tree? Inevitably, the massage chair would end up in a spare room, seldom or never used, and whenever you went in there you’d think about how much money you wasted. Later, when you moved, you’d have to decide whether to bring the massage chair with you or to sell it on eBay, but nobody would want an old massage chair, and so you’d schlep it to your new apartment, there to occupy some other spare room or basement, and years later, when you died, your kid, coming back to clean out the parental house, would see it — Mom’s old massage chair, gathering dust — and it would just break her heart.

THE GIVING SPREE, taken from THE NEW YORK TIMES, by Jeffery Eugenides.