“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