Just Pick the Lock
by HANNAH SMITH
HANNAH SMITH, who was brought vp in the Middle West, now lives in Arcadia, California. She is the author of an amusing autobiography, For Heaven’s Sake (Atlantic-Little, Brown).
ALL the doodles on my stenographic notebook looked like cupcakes, and I once drew a pattern for a tea cozy on the back of a letter to the Digglesxsorth Hrass Foundry. Even though I was working in an office from nine to five, I was just a homebody at heart, I kept telling myself; and oven though I stayed with MacFerguson, Obermcyer & Cart right for eight years, kept myself alive by dreaming about the blissful time when I’d say good-by to the company and stay home.
When the day finally came, I did lap dance steps on the way home, looked lovingly in appliance store windows, and planned to make salt-rising bread and soup stock every day for tho rest of my life. I was even on going go iron Joe’s socks.
“Home, Home, sweet, sweet Home,”I sang in a line, dear soprano and ran up my front steps and right Into the I lousewife’s Major Problem, alt hough I didn’t know it then.
Somebody had beat me to the front porch. Tall, shy, and Jimmy Stewartish. he leaned awkwardly against the mailbox anil explained bashfully that he only needed to sell three more subscript ions to enable him to take fiving lessons. My heart throbbed in pity for this landlocked bird man and I flung open my handbag. When he had taken his freckles and blushes away, I found that ’d just subscribed for ten years for a six-page journal, printed on gray paper toweling, called The Diesel Digest.
Even then, I had no inkling of the problem facing me, the creeping, insidious plague that was going to keep my floors unwaxed ami dim, Joe’s socks unironod — and even unwashed — that would put. the early gray in my hair and wear the two-foot track across the living-room rug to the front hall.
Perhaps it was more than a week later before the truth in all its dread, chilling proportions confronted me, when I realized that I was spending most of my day with a dripping egg beater in my hand, waving the front door open and shut like a fan at a Fourth of July picnic.
Why, I asked myself bitterly, had no one told me the truth about the Great Front Door Plague? Why had no one hinted that more domestic work-hours were lost in trips: from kitchen to front door than were sacrificed to childbearing or the common cold ?
At first the bell-ringing squad were all alike to me —I couldn’t even distinguish them by their touch on the doorbell; but a ft or a long, weary while I got to the point where I could tell, almost before I opened the door, to which category my new caller belonged.
A staid, gentle tinkle of the bell usually signaled the Refined Gentlewoman. The first time one of her species appeared on the doorstep, in hat, white gloxos, and genteel, fluttering smile, I stood there frying to decide whether she was a local clubwoman, a new neighbor, or a forgotten aunt. Before I had made up my mind, she slipped like a well-bred wraith into my living room, opened her sober handbag, and drew out sixteen pamphlets on “Skin Care After Forty.” Before ’d got the front door closed, she had sized up my complexion and whipped out a large, economy-size jar of Alligator Lubricating Oil and had landed a quick dab behind mv left ear.
The Cagney Type, or Gashousc Gus, was easy to identify from the first. By keeping close watch from the living-room window, I could usually pick him out far down the street, exchanging loud insults with one of my neighbors. Ordinarily Gus traveled in gangs, I had learned, and the sight of two or three dark-jowled gentlemen in double-breasted subs stalking my avenue gave me enough warning so that I could push a table against the front door while I ran to look up the Fetter Business Bureau in the telephone book.
No matter what the Gashousc Gang was selling, I had learned that the Customer was always wrong. If I refused to subscribe for the magazine Gus was peddling, he snceringly inferred that I probably couldn’t read anyway. Most of the visits made to our street by the Cagney Type were followed shortly after by a police squad car, summoned by some irate woman wh’d finally got a little too much front-hall salesmanship.
In time I got to be an unwilling expert on the classification of peddlers, agents, and professional beggars. I could spot at sight the Santa Claus Salesman, who was going to give me all for free, because I’d been selected as an outstanding citizen of the community, a twenty-pound dictionary. Santa Claus had such a forgiving, jolly soul that he only smiled charitably when 1 suggested that everyone else along the street had coincidentally been selected as outstanding, too.
I could pick out the Oliver Twist Type at t wenty paces. He usually approached fairly briskly but on mounting my front steps seemed to come down with an incipient attack of pellagra. By the time ’d opened the front door, he’d aged ten years and his hands trembled.
“Lady,” h’d whimper, “I am an unemployed veteran of the French and Indian War, with three grandmothers and a crippled Great Dane to support. I wonder if you’d buy one of these crocheted fly-swatters, please, please, Lady:”
I got a No PEDDLERS AND AGENTS sign. It didn’t help. The day after I nailed it up, a Cagney Type tried to sell me some brass polish to keep the sign in better trim.
I kept a shawl in the front hall and, draping it over my shoulders for local color, tried insisting, with gestures, that I no spik Angleesh. Next day the Oliver Twist type brought one of his grandmothers along for an interpreter.
Finally I decided on the lcy Silence technique. I got up a routine. Open the door, glare coldly, say not a word, point with a dramatic, sweeping flourish to the No Peddlers sign. Close the door. Exit peddler.
When the doorbell rang the next morning, I ran through my routine quickly and made for the door. The man outside, carrying an official-looking clipboard, waited politely while I drew myself up, sniffed, glared, and pointed.
Then he shook his head impatiently. “No, no!” he said. “’m taking the census!”
I turned a bright, all-pervading red and slunk against the doorjamb. “Oh. Oh, yes,” I muttered, wrapping one leg around the other. “Well, go ahead.”
“Name? Address? Age? Husband’s income? Any trouble with faulty breathing? Bad debts? Last visit to the opera?”
He scribbled busily while I unbuttoned my blouse collar and ran my lingers nervously through my hair. Undoubtedly he was going to report me to Washington on his way back to ihe office.
He looked up. “What kind of soap do you use:”
“S-s-soap?”
He whipped a couple of bars out of his pocket. “Show me where you wash dishes,” he said sternly, and I stepped aside.
I left the door open behind him. Alight as well make it handy for the other boys and girls working the street.