the customer is always right
Three blocks south of my home, next to the people who keep chickens, lives a middle-aged woman named Nancy. Orange pea gravel and artfully placed granite boulders cover her front yard, and a waist-high faded plastic angel guards her entry door. She's a no nonsense woman like her landscape, and she bought three no nonsense Avon items from me last campaign. I knocked on her door yesterday.
"Oh Birdie! Come in! I'm glad you're here. I need to order more of that face cream."
Face cream? I racked my brain, wondering why I didn't remember this. I rolled my mind back to her order. One Moisture Therapy Lip Balm. One Foot Works Therapeutic Antifungal Foot Cream. One Skin So Soft Roll-On Deoderant. No face cream in my memory. I must be losing my mind, I thought. It's gotta be stress.
Nancy led me through her living room and into the kitchen. I placed my backpack on the Mexican tile floor and sat in a cane chair. The room smelled of garlic and hyacinth. There was a perverse order to the decorating. Every item sat square, all right angles and parallel lines, a geometry test of a kitchen, the knife on the counter exactly perpendicular to the crockpot beside it.
"So! You liked the face cream!" I dove in, praying Nancy would answer with an identifying piece of information.
"Oh yes. It's wonderful stuff. My face hasn't looked this good in years. My daughter-in-law noticed right away. She's a beautician, you know."
Rats. Nothing to grab, no name, no features. Nancy's face was free of makeup, and her hair was cropped short and stood out from her head in tight curls like a gray chia pet.
"That's great, you do look beautiful and your skin is so clear and smooth. What do you like most about the cream?" I stared at her pores, hoping they would whisper the product name to me, and noticed that her face had less lines, better color, more lifeforce than I remembered. Maybe it's the Retroactive cream?
"I like the texture of it. I'm using quite a bit, both morning and night, so put me down for two more tubes, ok? And I think I want to try that hand lotion we talked about, too, that Moisture Rich in the purple container."
Tubes? I smiled and pulled out my order book and the current brochure. Tubes? What face cream comes in a tube? The only product I knew was the Anew Line Eliminator, but I haven't touched it, haven't tried or sold a single one. Maybe she was using something other than Avon and didn't realize it.
"Uh Nancy, can you get me that cream? I want to copy down the product numbers." I breathed a sigh of relief as she walked to the bathroom to retrieve it. Holy heck, what cream did she buy?
I heard the medicine cabinet swing open and then close, watched Nancy turn the corner into the kitchen, hand extended with a white and ocean blue tube imprinted with the delicate line drawing of a foot. The antifungal foot cream.
7:42:16 AM 
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