On Dealing With Peddlers

I WAS expecting a telegram that Thursday afternoon, which explains why I hurried to the door without making a reconnaissance. It was maid’s day out, and I was, comparatively speaking, defenseless. ‘How’s your vacuum cleaner working?’ asked the red-headed young man.

For an inarticulate second, rage rolled me under as furiously as ever the surf did at Jones Beach the day after a northeaster. Then the spirit of my ancestors rose up in me and put into my mouth such guile as has amazed me ever since. ‘Perfectly,’ I smiled. ‘I’ve had it only three days.’

The young man was stunned in his turn, but he also rallied. ‘I’m selling the Uwallopem machine, which we consider the best on the market. What kind is yours?’

I scrambled in my mind for the name of some vacuum cleaner or other — any one. I could n’ t think of any — naturally. I grasped at a straw. The All-Glorious people made our refrigerator. Was it too much to hope that they made vacuum cleaners too?

They seemed to answer well enough, for the redheaded youth only shrugged his shoulders politely, as if wondering whether it was worth while to converse with one so misguided as to have actually bought a rival product. But salesmen are tempered to the point of heroism. He continued. ‘Our machine has two speeds. Has yours?’

I grew boastful. ‘Three,’ I said.

Perhaps it was the one thing too much for even a salesman. Perhaps he was n’t a very good salesman. (I noticed lie used the first person plural a lot, and I have been told that gregariousness is a sign of weakness.) Or maybe he did n’t really believe me — though why a vacuum cleaner should n’t have three speeds (whatever they are) if I want it to, when the most insignificant automobile has at least three, I don’t know. But I rather think that when that redheaded young man bowed himself off and down our beautiful tree-lined street that Thursday afternoon he had some suspicion that he had met his master at painting the lily.

No doubt master is too strong a word. Though I did master that situation, as I have many another since, I realize that I am still only an apprentice liar. I practise only on the door-to-door salesmen; and they seldom average more than one a day in our half suburban, half old country town, even considering all the offscourings of the wheels of industry in the form of knives, soap, razors, electric cheese-parers, magazine subscriptions, applecorers, chances on turkeys and on the Irish Sweepstakes — for all of which markets must be, as the industrialists so blasphemously say, created.

The household miles are long and tedious enough on the best of days; but the ones that really hurt the hoofs of this old war horse are the ' ’ammer, ’ammer, ’ammer on the ’ard ’ighway ’ from the second-floor linen closet to the front door; from the preserve closet in the cellar to the front door; from the depths of the kitchen garden to the doubly damned front door; from the clean smell of lavender, and the stringence of rue, the savory warmth of sage and the tartness of all the pickling vinegars, to the peddler at the door with his audacious inanities, or to that smooth voice on the telephone (with an unfamiliar or vaguely familiar name that might be somebody you met at a tea last week) which turns out to be a racketeering photographer, or a new laundry soliciting your trade with promises of tender buttons restored. Is it any wonder that one takes refuge in fantasy?

I am still an amateur in the art of active sales resistance. I still gasp and sputter mentally at the first plunge from my native element of scrupulous truthtelling into the icy surf of extemporaneous invention. And yet, once the first stroke is behind me, I find that I can spurt hand over hand not too far behind the best of them — Munchausen, Rabelais, Mandeville.

And, all things considered, I do pretty well. I have even got an answer to that most difficult gambit, the Queen’s Pawn Opening. When some hyperthyroid spinster with loose-geared hair says insinuatingly, after a quick glance at the tricycle in the front yard, ‘May I ask how old your child is?’ I reply (having noticed, with a bookworm’s agility at reading upside down, that the pamphlet innocently ready in her hand bears the title Sophistication of Book), ‘Twenty-three. But he’s a little retarded. He has n’t learned to read yet. However,’ I sigh resignedly, ‘it seems to run in the family. I’ve never learned to read, either. None of us ever have, except Great-uncle Isaac, and he was only a relative by marriage. We’re the despair of the Board of Education.’

The venders of kitchen utensils I dispose of with the laconic and purely American phrase, ‘We eat out.’ To purveyors of needles and pins, thread, scissors, dishtowels, adhesive tape and bandages, I exclaim with horror, ‘Oh, I could n’t. I would n’t have one of them in the house.’

But what I secretly consider my master stroke, one which I freely and unreservedly recommend to you next time you are approached by a cross-eyed Boy Scout with a long, pedestrian, and absolutely unstoppable harangue already working at the corners of his mouth, with an answer to every objection in your vocabulary ready to fizz up like baking soda at the touch of the sour milk, is this. It came in a flash of inspiration when a pimply youth sent in word by the maid that he had a personal message for me. I made the punishment fit the crime. The words leaped in answer like Minerva from the head of Jove: ‘Tell him,’ I said, ‘to write it out.’