“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 of 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.
“She called me shiny and vapid, can you believe it? What’s ‘vapid’? She said she wanted to talk to the rude one.”
“The what?” I asked.
“She meant you, of course.”
“I’m not rude,” I insisted.
“I know that, sweetie. People misunderstand.”
I dragged my feet on the Ruga Potts thing, not sure at all that I wanted or needed her. Then we got a call from a salesgirl who reported that one of her customers had returned a tube of “After Dark” lipstick and demanded her money back. “Rancid!” the salesgirl cried.
Just what Ruga Potts said would happen.
We pulled every tube of that lipstick from the kits we had pre-made in the office and I called in any tubes that the salesgirls had left. Then I went to Mrs. Brightman’s rooming house after dinner and asked her if she would please tell Ruga Potts that I hoped to have a word with her.
“Does she owe you money?” Mrs. Brightman demanded. “She owes me money.”
“No, Mrs. Brightman. In fact, I hope to buy something from her. Tell her that.”
Ruga Potts let me wait a good ten minutes before she came down. “Not here.” She sniffed, looking around Mrs. Brightman’s parlor. “We sit on front steps.” Ruga Potts didn’t have much conversation to spare and she said nothing more as she led the way to the front steps and sat down. I told her I was interested in buying her mother’s moisturizer and toner formulas. She stood up and headed into the rooming house, waving me back down when I scrambled up to follow. When she reappeared she had two shot glasses and a bottle. She filled them, held one out to me. I hesitated. “You’re here to do business, yes?” I bobbed my head up and down. “Neave. You are Neave?” I nodded again. “Neave, if you want to do business with me you should accept my vodka.” I held out my glass. She poured shots for both of us. “You should ask me to make cosmetics for you. That would make more sense. Be smarter.”
“Why? It’s cheaper to buy a formula from you and take it to a manufacturer than hire you.”
“Your manufacturer has already produced one rancid product. Give him another formula and he will cut corners and make you another rancid product. You need a chemist to oversee the process.”
“We don’t have a chemist.”