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, thanking 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.