Little Kate takes piano lessons on Tuesday and swims on Wednesday, possibly with her brother Zach, who also plays soccer. While Kate and Zach are swimming, Dad is playing golf. Mom takes yoga classes twice a week. Dad seems to have a good job because his golf game is scheduled at 3 o'clock, either an early departure from work or a round of golf with colleagues. Mom probably doesn’t work regular hours outside the home because her yoga class meets at 10 a.m. Mom’s organizer holds a "To Do" list and a magazine called Real Simple. Dad’s organizer is stuffed with a newspaper and a Federal Express envelope. Sound familiar?

I am in my usual lifestyle swoon as I flip through the pages of the Pottery Barn catalog where, it has been noted, actual humans have begun to appear, if blurrily. Some of my own house looks a little like the Pottery Barn, not accidentally, but is also infused with Williams Sonoma (because of the brick patio) and by the inevitable intrusions of my own and my partner’s taste. And, of course, because I and my partner work regular jobs, we rattle along on the salaries of a teacher and a non-profit worker… which means that no one plays golf in the middle of the day or achieves quite the level of comfort and order implied by the Pottery Barn pictures. Hence my middle-class, privileged-but-yearning swoon.

As I turn more of the pages, though, I begin to feel a creeping unease about the Pottery Barn occupants, whose traces grow ever more numerous. By the time I get to page 102, I’ve moved into a full-blown anxiety, for here they are, The Family. Not in portraits, mind you, but in their own Pottery Barn version of the lost colony of Roanoke: They are an absent family of notes, schedules, and bulletin board reminders. There on page 102 is the large white schedule where I learn about the yoga classes and golf games, where I learn that Kate plays an instrument and participates in one sport while Zach plays two sports, no instruments. On the following page is one of those handsome galvanized organizers; Kate’s holds a coloring book, Zach’s a summer reading list with Hemingway’s (highly canonical) Old Man and the Sea at the top.

But besides that reading list, there’s also the ever-accumulating list of gender that is emerging just as clearly in those activities, those traces of a social and economic life for Dad (besides golf, there’s "tennis with Frank") while Mom seems to be all about to-doing. On the bulletin board, a "To Do" list reminds: "feed fish," "feed bird," and, strangely. "add fresh water" to chickens. At the bottom is Ms. Campion’s cell phone number, so perhaps this particular list is for the kids Or is the reminder more general and the fish and bird really do lead this tenuous an existence? It’s hard to know, but surely Dad, immersed in newspaper and Federal Express, just doesn’t want to be bothered.

I confess, I need a magnifying glass to read the rest of the bulletin board, some of which–like who exactly got the academic achievement award–continues to elude me. But there’s a letter with, I’m pretty sure, a recipe; there’s an invitation, a note that accompanies flowers, and a picture of a boy in white jacket and bow tie. And something else I can’t read, even with the magnifying glass.

How much money do you figure Dad makes? A lot, I’d guess, given Mom’s probable stay-at-home status, the expense of golf and other hobbies, plus the $592 (excluding tax) it would cost to buy the items pictured, the requisite baseline of organization for, as the copy tells us, "a busy family." Jeez. These people are really starting to annoy me. So I turn the page, but my mood is bad now because I’m just sure this family has at least one enormous SUV and would appear incredibly self-satisfied if you met them in the local expensive grocery store, where they maintain a running account. I’m just certain that nobody does meaningful work, and I’m worried that the men are engaged exclusively in competitive sports. I’ll bet the father voted Republican for the first time in the last election and while Kate loves birds and flowers, Zach grows increasingly withdrawn and concerned that his grades won’t be good enough to get him into Harvard. And I can’t shake the sense that I see entirely too many of these people, who represent such a small proportion of American society but whose imprint is everywhere.

Bah. The Pottery Barn now officially gives me the heebie-jeebies. "What is this? The l950s?" I grumble as I stuff the catalog into the recycling bin. Postmodern, hip retro, faux, ironic-return-to-earlier-decade–all very well in furniture, but depressing as hell everywhere else

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