I dreamed of burning beds and fog. I dreamed of a little sleeping cabin as small as a coffin, no mirrors anywhere, and in the dream I found this terribly troubling. I wanted a mirror. I had vanished inside myself as well as in the dream world. I was nowhere. I was no one. I couldn’t remember what my eyes looked like, or my lips! I was gone, but not gone. In my dream mind I suddenly knew that if I had mirrors I could look in them and see what I was. I could build a house with mirrors, glassy surfaces reflecting like light on water! Inside the house all was safe. Outside the house all was danger. There were dogs in the house—dozens of dogs, all baking cakes. I woke.
The next morning I stood before the bathroom mirror and looked at myself very carefully. I stayed there long enough to make other members of the family bang hard on the door and demand that I hustle it up. I drank four cups of coffee, and took the idea that had shaped itself in me to Lilly. “Cosmetics,” I said to my sister. “You did all the cosmetics invoices and ordering at Mr. Case’s. I don’t see why a couple of girls with cash on them couldn’t buy blusher in bulk as well as he could. We’ve got a little cash, me from the diner and you from Mr. Case’s. The most important thing to have when you start a business is customers. And you’ve got customers.” This was true—all the regulars looking to fix their lives with foundation, concealer, eye shadow; all the women who opened like flowers when someone told them that yes, they would profit from a lip liner as well as a stick—they all needed Lilly. There was nobody in Mr. Case’s store now to tell them these things but the useless Mr. Underwear. Mr. Case, guilty about firing her, let her leave her card at the counter, and her ladies began picking it up and calling her.
That’s how Be Your Best was born. We looked around and found out that setting up a storefront of our own was out of our cash flow’s range. But there had to be a better way. Why, I asked my sister, couldn’t we sell cosmetics right in customers’ homes? Who needs a store?
We gave a party at our house and invited all the ladies from Mr. Case’s who’d ever bought so much as a tiny badger brush from Lilly. We got $10 worth of orders, which translated to $3 of profit. I considered that enough of a sign to sink a good part of our savings into a bulk order of cosmetics. Ladies needed Spring Breeze Eau de Cologne more than they needed a plastic bowl and if they didn’t, they bought the cologne anyhow. We had solid proof.
The second Be Your Best party was at Ellie Goertling’s house, and four ladies showed up. We’d promised Ellie a hostess gift and she swore she’d get us at least eight women. I brought a blueberry pie. Lilly applied makeup, gave advice, swore eternal friendship to everybody there. We spent seventy cents on the pie, fifty cents on Lilly’s hostess gift, and made thirty cents that night. We thought we were sunk. But when Lilly called each of those ladies to see if they wanted to host their own parties, she got four yeses on the condition that we brought a pie. We decided to keep going.
We’d learned about credit and we used it to buy stock and turn our bedroom at home into a storage facility for future orders. Blush and liner and matte finish and Romance Glow were stacked ceiling-high. Mom was quiet at first and then kind of mad. She started making comments about pride and waste and lessons, never directed at us but always in the air. Ask the woman directly what was on her mind and she’d say rump roast. Why this circle, circle, circle around what was really on her mind? Speak up! I wanted to cry. Come out in the open and fight like a man! Lilly called me an idiot. “You don’t want to know what’s on her mind,” she said. “Easier to deal with circle, circle, circle.”
Maybe it was easier for Lilly, but it made me crazy. I said as much to Lilly, who told me lots of things made me crazy so what was new? Boo-hoo, she said. Get over it, Miss Prickly, Miss Sensitive. This made me rude at the dinner table, which led to Daddy reaching out and delivering a quick slap to my shoulder, which nobody, nobody at all, commented on the unfairness of, since it was Daddy doing the slapping.
Boo-hoo. Get over it.
I marched up to our bedroom, squeezed between the stacks of foundation and brushes, and sat on the bed. I felt sullen. Trapped. I looked around me and tried to imagine a way out. There was no doorway into my future visible from that little crowded room. I had to flee. I had to summon the nerve to plunge into the possibly fabulous (possibly horrible) unknown: to leap. Every story in the world that I loved told me that this was so.
The next day I emptied everything from the savings account that held all my pie-baking earnings and I rented Lilly and me a warehouse space as well as the couple of huge rooms and the kitchenette on the floor above it. I committed us to a one-year lease and arranged for a telephone line. I bought two mattresses and made Snyder help me move them into the rooms above the “office.” We dragged a desk up the stairs, then all the cosmetics we’d stored in our childhood bedroom.
Jane cried, because she thought everything should stay exactly the way it always had been, and even Snyder looked a little anxious as he helped us move. “It’s just so strange,” he said, looking around. “I mean, it’s just some rooms and a stove. Weird.”
“Think of it as my superhero lair,” I said.
Lilly and I weren’t the only ones who had to rethink work after the war. Snyder had lost his job at the munitions plant along with everyone else when it closed to refit itself for peacetime appliances, and he hadn’t gotten a toe-hold on the world since then. The returning vets hadn’t just taken our jobs—they’d taken the ones Snyder might have had. He trudged from day to day, still the boy who lived in his childhood room to the left of the landing at the top of the stairs. Snyder looked so small, so young, standing in our dusty warehouse with his hands drooping at his sides, watching us move on and away. “It’ll be all right,” I said, not because I believed this but because his unhappiness suddenly made me feel protective. “Thanks for helping with the move.”
“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.”