The Romance Reader's Guide to Life Page 11

  “I could come back tomorrow,” he said. “I know a store that’s getting rid of shelving. You could use some shelving. Let me have the extra key and I won’t even have to bother you to get it in.”

  Nothing we said could keep Snyder and his shelving from coming back, several times. For those first weeks when we were trying to settle into the warehouse we’d return from a cosmetics party or an appointment with a cosmetics supplier to find him perched in the single comfortable chair in our living space.

  “Leave him alone.” Lilly shrugged. “He needs someplace to go besides that firetrap bedroom of his. He isn’t bothering anybody.”

  True and not true. Our old contentious habits with each other weren’t going to vanish just because I felt sorry for him and he needed someplace to hide from his life. The first time he left a cup and three dishes in the sink I told him that if it happened again I’d take back the key we’d made the mistake of giving him the week he helped us move in.

  “Why is he hanging around here so much?” I complained to Jane.

  “Daddy. Daddy’s been giving him a terrible time. He says it’s time Snyder grew up.”

  “Well,” I said. “It is.”

  “Daddy says that he was helping support his family when he was in ninth grade. He says Snyder should leave the nest.”

  “Daddy let Lilly and me live there after graduation even when we both lost our jobs. Why isn’t he letting Snyder have some leeway?”

  “Snyder’s a boy. Girls stay with their parents until they go to a husband. Don’t pretend like it’s news to you that that’s how Daddy sees things, Neave. If this gets bad, you and Lilly are going to take him in.”

  And we would take him in. Jane would make us do it. Lilly and I had a brief meeting on the subject. The only solution we could come up with was to find our brother a job so Daddy would leave him alone. Lilly found a fruit-and-vegetable store that was looking for help and willing to hire a non-vet. Snyder didn’t want to sell oranges and potatoes, but Jane made him do it. He took the job. Daddy backed off somewhat, and a fragile peace was achieved.

  Meanwhile I got us a party line with dozens of ladies on it who might be tempted to rock a receiver out of its cradle to eavesdrop away a spare ten minutes. As soon as it was installed I called everybody I knew and sprinkled the date and time of our first cosmetics party into each conversation. I don’t think I’d ever met a woman, besides my mom, who didn’t rely on their telephone party line for the occasional distraction. They spread news almost free of charge, whether you wanted them to or not, and I was going to make sure every single call that Lilly or I made included our phone number, along with cheerful descriptions of glowing skin, luminous eyes, and free pie. I didn’t stop at telephone calls. I pursued well-dressed strangers on the street. I invited a neighbor in the middle of a condolence call the day after her husband died.

  The lease had been a terrifying motivator—one year at $23 a month. Lilly might have the glamour and the sales touch but there was something to be said for a willingness to be terrorized, and I was better at terror than my sister. That first party cost us $3.28 in pie ingredients, lemonade, and coffee. The office did not show to advantage at the time and I told Lilly I was sure we would have done better if the walls hadn’t had some holes and the room hadn’t looked so enormously empty with just us, all huddled at one end of the warehouse. We sold enough to make $13.98 profit.

  “Lilly,” I said, “Half those women came to this party because they haven’t gotten out of the house since the war ended. Four of them lost their jobs just like we did.”

  “Vets took ’em?”

  I nodded. “You could teach them to do what you do: make women up, make them feel better. We could turn them into salesgirls.”

  “Why would we do that?”

  “We would do that because it’s how we’re going to make money. We find salesgirls, show them how to run a party and do makeovers, show them how to sell product … we make them buy their sales kits from us and when they get rid of their first kit, we keep supplying them. For a percentage. We have to stop thinking of ourselves as selling makeup and start thinking of ourselves as selling sales positions. We talk to everybody we meet who looks lively and restless—talkative waitresses who know what to do with lipstick, moms in the park trying to start conversations with strangers, women who look like they pay to get their hair done standing next to us in line for a movie—we tell them there’s money to be made in sales.”

  “Is there?”

  “Who knows? But there won’t be any if you don’t pretend you believe it’s out there. We can make them successful. We co-host their first parties, coach them if they’re having trouble, treat them like they matter, and then let them loose on the world with our blessing and our makeup.”

  “I don’t know,” Lilly said. Then she said, “We need some cash to prime the pump.”

  And who would loan us a nickel, two girls with a warehouse lease and big plans? It turned out Mr. Case, still feeling guilty about firing Lilly, would, to the tune of $500. “You were a good worker and a smart girl, Lilly,” he said when he counted out the bills. “And I know you’ll pay me back.” We took $200 and created new kits in pretty blue cases with “Be Your Best” printed on the side. Then we went out in search of hungry-looking young women who would listen to us tell them about what their lives could be. We pulled out our pencils and figured out just what they could make in a week if they sold five kits; we told them anybody with determination could do twice as many as that.

  About fifteen of them bit, and we invited them all to the warehouse for an introductory tea. We put a robin’s-egg-blue box with an ivory cloth bow on every one of their seats. When they opened them there was a picture of a watch that any salesgirl who moved a certain amount of merchandise in a quarter would receive. The watches had already been ordered, COD, and we were counting on the salesgirls’ profits to help pay for them.

  I made chocolate pie, raspberry supreme pie, and lemon chiffon pie—the prettiest ones I knew. Lilly made little cucumber sandwiches exactly the way they said to do it in Ladies’ Home Journal. The tea settings came from the same going-out-of-business hotel sale that the chairs did. We borrowed tables and linens from Mom’s church, signing them out under her name. I’d stripped Daddy’s backyard of flowers, which he grew as handily as tomatoes, and we filled the robin’s-egg-blue training corner of our office with blooms for what we were calling our first Be Your Best sales conference.

  “Someday,” Lilly said to me as we cleaned up afterward, “there’s going to be a ring of real diamond chips around that watch face and not just glass ones. Someday there’s going to be a real pearl necklace in that little blue box. And then robin’s-egg-blue cars. Also fur coats,” she went on. “Then incentive vacations to tropical paradises.” She spoke lightly, but there wasn’t any joking in the tone. There would be cars and coats.

  “Silver-blue mink coats,” I repeated. She nodded. “We’re going to have ourselves a time, Lilly.” We sat down on the floor at the end of that day, popped open a bottle of beer (we’d looked at Champagne but the last nickel in what I was calling our training event budget had gone into cucumber sandwich ingredients) and passed it back and forth. It felt wonderful. We’d been knocked down but there we were, wobbling a bit but back on our feet. For my money, that day on that floor with that can of beer was the real beginning of Be Your Best.

  NEAVE

  Problems Arise, Solutions Appear

  By the end of our second year we had more than thirty salesgirls, some selling like mad and some just sitting on their sales kits doing nothing. Problems arose. Some husbands did not like having their wives at evening sales parties. It disrupted their dinner and they were alone with their own children, who didn’t want to eat their vegetables or go to bed. We held cooking and freezing demonstrations so ladies whose husbands didn’t want them to work outside the home could continue to look like they didn’t. We sent letters on robin’s-egg-blue stationery to the husbands, thank
ing them for their support for their wives and quoting fake husbands who wrote to us to say that their wives looked so much better groomed, were so much happier and peppier now that they were cosmetics representatives. “If we can convince them it’ll spice up the bedroom life, they’ll handcuff their wives and deliver them to our doorstep,” Lilly said. “Talk up the ‘pep’ benefit.” I worked on the prose. She edited it.

  The salesgirls had some bad parties. Five caved to their husbands’ demands for hot dinners at regular evening mealtimes and quit. Six others cried when parties didn’t go well. They got mad at us when we offered suggestions. What did we know? they protested. We were children—kids who didn’t understand what it meant to have an angry husband and toddlers with colds. Three salesgirls gave up when their children began to cry whenever they saw their mothers dressed in heels and makeup to go out to a sales party. Then a leak in the roof let in enough water one weekend to soak through a quarter of our unsold product, all of which had to be trashed. Bills and rage and self-doubt all week, and then the leaky roof.

  We went to a little bar near the office and sat in a booth with two beers in front of us. “You’d think somebody with three-year-old twins would leap at the chance to put on some decent shoes and go talk to somebody taller than a milk box,” Lilly said with a sigh, referring to the first mother whose children’s tears had convinced her to quit. “Mom will just love this. She and Daddy just live to be able to say that lipstick is vanity and we were in over our heads.”

  “We’re not in over our heads and we’re not just selling lipstick,” I snapped. “I’ve seen you sit down with a woman and talk about her face. We sell the way lipstick makes her feel. Daddy doesn’t know that feeling exists and Mom’s afraid of it. Forget them,” I said.

  Plunge ahead, I thought, no matter what wastes of unknown space are ahead.

  “That’s right,” Lilly said. “It’s sink or swim and we’re going to paddle like mad.”

  Of course, the old reverse-roles thing was going on. I was struggling with a secret belief that Mom was right and we would fail, while Lilly didn’t believe a word Mom said. Nobody in the world had yet convinced Lilly Terhune that she was a fool. She might be a grasshopper but she knew I was an ant, and I was with her. She had faith in me, and I was going to get us back on our feet and lug more than my own body weight as I marched. We would get more salesgirls. We would rally. Women with gumption who wanted a job and some control over their own destinies were everywhere and we would find them and make them brilliant representatives of Be Your Best Cosmetics.

  And then just when we needed it to happen, the winds of destiny got behind us in the form of Ruga Potts, recent émigré from the skeletal postwar remains of her part of Europe. We found her at a Be Your Best party, dragged along by her landlady, who thought her foreign renter needed some American influence, meaning neighbor ladies and a piece of pie.

  I took one look at Ruga Potts and the rest of the room fell away. Her skin was poreless and her black hair fell in waves as far as her shoulders. She was perfectly, if a bit boldly, made up, an exotic bird in a room full of pigeons. She looked bored.

  I sat down next to her. “I made the pie myself.”

  “How nice for you.” She lit a cigarette and sat right where she was, ignoring the chattering groups of women around her waiting for an eyeliner-application demonstration. She clearly didn’t need any instruction in the eyeliner department. Everything about her looked like a pacing animal even though she was at rest. I pushed myself into the narrow space beside her.

  “I’m Neave.”

  “Ruga. Potts.”

  “You’re interested in makeup?”

  “Not this makeup.”

  “Really? Why not?”

  Ruga Potts leaned forward and plucked a lipstick out of my hand. I’d been demonstrating its smearlessness. She slipped her hand into her own purse and produced another—an Elizabeth Arden in an elegant little gold tube. She twisted both open and held the first one under my nose. “Smell,” she ordered. I did. “Now feel.” She drew two lipstick lines down the back of my hand, one from Be Your Best and the other from Arden.

  “The Be Your Best is creamier,” I said proudly. “And it smells better than the Arden. Coconut.”

  “That is why your lipstick is junk.”

  “It’s what?”

  “Junk. It goes on too smooth, like I think perhaps there is too little ceresin. Some people would say pine bark might fix all.” She shrugged. “I say ceresin wax. But this lipstick you sell, if you leave in car, in sun, just a puddle. Also it is rancid in ten weeks no matter what. That is what I think.”

  “I don’t agree, Miss Potts. We ordered those lipsticks from the same manufacturer who produces for many top cosmetics companies.” I sounded stung because I was. “Are you a cosmetics manufacturer? A makeup artist?”

  “I am a drone. I color in airplane-engine drawings for engineers at your General Electric plant.”

  “Why do you do that?”

  “An agency for refugees arranged all—job and landlady. So I am now in the land of ice cream and steak, coloring pictures.”

  “Did you work in fashion before the war?”

  “In Warsaw I was a chemist.”

  “Did you make cosmetics in Warsaw?” I asked.

  “No,” Ruga Potts replied. “I learned about cosmetics in my mother’s and grandmother’s kitchens before the war. Every little village and town in Hungary and Poland had a woman who knew how to do this and sold to neighbors. My mother was known everywhere for parsley skin tonic. For moisturizer she used evergreen found only in Carpathian forests. She called it Krakow Cream and women came from Vienna to buy. Vienna,” she repeated, her tone reverential.

  “So your mother was the Helena Rubinstein of Poland.”

  Ruga Potts smiled at me for the first time, amused. “And where do you think all those Helena Rubinsteins came from? They came from Krakow, from the Australian bush, from little Polish shtetls. You know why cosmetics now all use lanoline? I tell you—because Chaya Rubenstein, also known as Madame Helena Rubinstein, lived among greasy sheep on a ranch in Australia. Sheep grease? It is lanolin. It stinks, but so good for skin. So she hides the stink with lavender and water lilies. Voilà. Expensive skin cream. Sheep grease and lavender.” Ruga Potts turned away from me to survey the room. She sighed. The guests were seated in little groups, two getting massaged with Soft Touch Moisturizer for Hands and the others around samples of the cosmetics.

  “Would you like to try our new rouge?”

  She stared. “You joke with me?”

  “Is everybody from Warsaw as rude as you?”

  “My manners deserted me sometime in the spring of 1939. I keep watch for them but they have not returned. Why do you care? You do not seem like a woman who worries too much about manners. You call me rude to my face.”

  “Because you’re rude.”

  She shrugged. “Better than stupid. Or dull.”

  “Why aren’t you working as a chemist if you’re a chemist?”

  “I am a refugee with a Polish accent that sounds, to ignorant people, German. A bad accent for these times. I am a woman. What combination could be worse here? No engineer’s license and here one must have a license. They ask me always how fast I type. Also, at the moment, I am tired.”

  “But you hate the job at General Electric?”

  She nodded. “Boredom is so exhausting. I am tired now all the time.”

  “I’ll bet you could double your salary selling these cosmetics. You’re glamorous. You know how to use them.”

  “Don’t be foolish. I am rude. These women are stupid. The ones who are not stupid I would tell to go buy Madame Rubinstein’s cosmetics, or better yet, I would tell them how to go home to their kitchens and make their own creams and not to waste their money on yours.” Ruga Potts leaned over a sales kit and pulled out a moisturizer, took a dab from the jar, and applied it to the back of her hand. “A moisturizer is mostly water. Then mineral oil. A bit o
f citric acid to lighten skin perhaps and hide lanolin smell. Little bit white paraffin and acetanilide to soften.” She shrugged. “Unremarkable. Women who pay so much for this kind of thing are fools.”

  “You look like you use moisturizer, though. In fact, you look like you use lots of cosmetics. Does that make you a fool?”

  “Do I look like a fool?”

  “No. So tell me, Ruga Potts, whose makeup are you using?”

  “My own and my mother’s formulas. Sometimes a little something from Arden. Arden hires good chemists. This”—and here she held up a jar of Be Your Best demonstration moisturizer—“I make for maybe seven of your pennies. I do not waste what little money I have on pretty jars.” She shook my hand. “Here,” she said, digging into her purse and producing a bottle and a small tin container. She handed it to me. “A gift. This is my mother’s toner and her moisture cream. Use it. Then you see.” She stood, told Mrs. Brightman that she could easily walk home, and she left the party.

  That night we made $29.85.

  * * *

  I went home and described Ruga Potts to Lilly, who was less interested in her history than in the toner and moisturizer she’d given me. After four weeks with it, Lilly declared the concoctions revolutionary. Even at two weeks, she’d said in amazement, there were actual visible changes, something that few honest cosmetics producers actually expected. “We need to buy the toner and moisturizer formulas from this Ruga woman,” Lilly said, “or we can do it the same way everybody else in the business does it and steal it. We just need a smart chemist.”

  “Is that the way they do it?”

  Lilly snorted. “How can you be so smart and so clueless? I think this Ruga Potts, whoever she is, might be just what we need. Let’s get her on board.”

  Lilly was buoyant heading out the door to Mrs. Brightman’s rooming house, where she fully expected to find a malleable and grateful Ruga Potts. An hour later she was back, angry, empty-handed.