Killer Pancake

Startled, she looked up at me and giggled. Her cheeks colored. She gestured toward a silver half-globe protruding from the ceiling above the shoe department. “That’s like, a one-way mirror. The camera sees out but you can’t see in. It has pan, it has zoom, and it’s watching us all the time. See, check this out.” She ducked behind the counter and came up with a Prince & Grogan hag in one hand and three miniature jars of pink stuff in the other. “These are free samples of Rejuvenation, the new cream Mignon is pushing. I’m allowed to give three samples to each person, which includes me. And of course, it includes you. Anything more than that is considered employee stealing and I’ll be out on my behind. Now, you can bet they’re zooming in on me.” She nodded at the silver half-globe and held up the three jars before putting them in the bag. “Okay,” she said with a laugh, “now you’ve got your free stuff that ordinarily costs ninety bucks a bottle. Let’s take a look at your face. Would you describe your skin as oily?”

Actually, I told her I wouldn’t describe my skin as anything besides normal, because I just didn’t pay that much attention to it. She frowned, and I remembered that when I was a doctor’s wife, I’d worried about my complexion endlessly, and bought all kinds of stuff. I guess it was some kind of sublimation for worry about what was going on in the rest of my life. Your skin is under relentless attack, the ads screamed, and you have to fight back. No kidding. Needless to say, the gumption I’d eventually developed hadn’t come from a bottle. In the money-scrimping years that followed my divorce, the only thing I used on my face was sunscreen. As far as makeup went, I hadn’t missed a thing. And certainly the last thing I wanted to go back to was my endless trips to the counters of La Prairie, Lancôme, and Estée Lauder, seeking the best concealer to cover my black eyes and bruised cheeks, looking for someone who hadn’t waited on me before, hadn’t seen the damage the Jerk liked to inflict.

“Goldy? Hello? You in there? What kind of cleanser are you using now?”

Pulled back to reality, I replied that I used soap.

“Soap?” echoed Dusty incredulously. “Real soap? Soap-soap?” When I nodded, she persisted, “What brand of soap-soap?”

“Whatever’s on sale at the grocery store.”

Dusty couldn’t help it, she put her hand on her chest and began to giggle. “That must be how you got to be friends with Frances Markasian! You know, that reporter you introduced me to?”

“The woman in red who was here earlier, right? The one I introduced you to yesterday?”

“Yeah, spending lots of money, I couldn’t believe it. She sure has changed her tune. Maybe she has a new boyfriend. Did you see that article she wrote on cosmetics for the Mountain Journal! I went home and looked it up, to see if it was the same person. I swear, she must be the queen of the skinflints. She wrote that people should just use Cetaphil, witch hazel, and drugstore moisturizer. Can you imagine?”

“I must have missed that issue. When was it?”

Before she could reply, Harriet, who had been writing in the large ledger, closed it with a firm slap and came over.

“I remember one time,” she said in her honeylike voice, certainly not a voice I would associate with someone in her late sixties, “when we had a widow come in. She was fairly young, and all she’d ever used was drugstore makeup.” She shook her head at me beneficently, as if to say, You see, being a soap-user isn’t the stupidest thing we’ve ever seen here. “That poor woman … it just brings tears to my eyes to remember.” I looked at Harriet’s eyes. They were wet, all right. “Of course, her skin was a mess—too dry in one place, too oily in another. Her foundation didn’t match her skin tone, she wore bright green eyeshadow, and her cheeks were so caked with blush, she looked like she had scarlet fever. I sold her our complete line. She had the insurance money, you see, and she could do whatever she wanted. A thousand dollars’ worth of cosmetics I sold to that woman, and she was so happy! In less than an hour.” She reached for a tissue and dabbed at her eyes.

“I’ll bet you just loved that, Harriet,” Dusty commented.

Harriet ignored this. “Oh, it was wonderful,” she said to me. “Really touching, what I did for that woman. She looked beautiful when she walked out of here. She looked perfect.”