You Don't Know Jack - Part 3
Bunion Lady led us into the house, into a cavern of a house, a beach cottage on steroids, as if you took the imaginary seaside vacation home of your childhood and pumped it full of air and tossed around white doilies and romance novels like confetti, the way a chi-chi expensive ocean-side home ought to look, with windows as big as a whale's mouth overlooking surfers and seagulls and one lone barge resting in the waves. But none of this caught my attention the way one thing grabbed me and held me hostage.
"Ewwwwwww! What's that smell?" 7 grabbed his nose and wrinkled his face into a prune. I decided then and there never to bring him on a customer call again. Ever. But embarrassment or not, he was right. The place smelled like a musty oven of animal excretion mixed with pine sol and rubber.
"Just breathe through your mouth. That's what I'm doing," 9 offered helpfully to his brother and I shook my head and hoped Bunion Lady wouldn't tell Nana - whoever she was - that I had hell children with porcupine manners.
We walked through a dining room with a gray marble floor and into a kitchen with an iceberg of an island in the middle, expensive, unused pots and pans swinging from a rotating wheel on the ceiling, and Bunion Lady stopped at French doors covered with silver and green brocade drapes. She turned and looked at me with a wry expression.
"Perhaps your children would like to wait in the kitchen. I'll get them some crackers and milk. I don't think you'll want them in the next room."
I nodded at 7 and 9 and they ran to the swivel bar seats and began spinning, the strange odor forgotten in this fantastic kitchen playground.
Bunion Lady opened the right side of the door and I stepped inside to face the oldest women I have ever seen.
"You the Avon woman?" Her voice seemed so much younger than her years, loud and strong, you could hear the vinegar beneath the surface. She sat on a Lay-Z-Boy recliner with an aluminum walker waiting to one side. Her face and arms and hands were made from wrinkles, and I couldn't imagine a time when she danced with young men and wore rose blush on soft cheeks, when she didn't look like the oldest alligator leather purse the color of dead skin. She looked older than old people in cartoons, older than the shrunken apple-head people you can buy at church holiday bazaars.
But this was a visit of superlatives, and the smell was bigger than the house and she was older than the smell and the flock of beasts surrounding her were even odder than her age. Dogs. Small dogs all wirey and spastic and painted black and brown and white fur. They ran and yelped and jumped and scratched, mostly scratched, and I think I counted sixteen, my mouth open and speechless.
"You the Avon woman? Cat got your tongue?" Nana barked the question and I nodded Yes, Yes I am the Avon Lady.
"Here," I stuck my hand out, still holding the Skin-So-Soft, and she grabbed it in old wrinkled hands much stronger than mine.
"Good. These bastards have fleas. My God do they have fleas. These are organic Jack Russels and I can't use Advantage." She spat as she spoke and picked up a pair of rhinestone-studded black cat eye glasses and held the bottle inches from her face. "How do you apply this? It doesn't say how to get rid of fleas."
"Well, I've heard that it's a good insect repellent, but I don't know the specifics. Maybe stick them in a bath and add the Skin-So-Soft and shampoo it in?" As I answered the question I pushed down no less than four terriers and felt the accumulation of scratch marks on my bare legs.
"Hmmmph." Nana set the bottle on an oak stand and picked up a large pink change purse with a simple metal pin clasp. "How much do I owe you?"
"Oh, nothing, this is a new customer gift to you, but I would appreciate an order for something, maybe more Skin-So-Soft, gee you have a lot of these lovely dogs. Organic, eh?" I kept pushing dogs down, pushing them back into the wooden floor, feeling sharp nails against my skin, feeling the tiny tang of flea bites.
Nana didn't answer my question, and I never found out what an organic Jack Russel was, maybe a new breeding technique or marketing ploy I guessed. I left her sitting with the Skin-So-Soft, reading the Avon brochure, and wrestled my way out the door, feet entangled in terriers.
It's over a week later, and all I have to show for Nana and the Dogs is the scabby remains of eleven flea bites and an order for six bottles of Skin-So-Soft. I guess it could be worse.
10:21:41 AM 
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