The Avon Lady

She’s coming up the walk, Homer’s nightmare in black. He flirts with the temptation to pretend no one is home, but seeing how she’s having such a rough time of it, awkwardly stepping through the banks of snow with that big black Avon trunk banging against her dead leg and her frozen breath making clouds in front of her face and stuff, Homer’s conscience won’t let him bail on demonstrating a sampling of the civility outside agents have so painstakingly instilled in him.

Why me, though? he wonders.

The doorbell rings and Homer takes his time, unable to avoid contemplating avenues of escape, lamenting that his disposition has denied him even the most rudimentary skills for carrying on a dialogue with the Avon Lady. He creaks open the main entry door, and there’s her face, hovering white and wrinkled outside the storm door, smiling kindly back at him. Inadvertently treating her as if she might be dangerous, Homer cracks open the door and pokes his hair out into the atmosphere. A raw stream of snow-filled air swoops in around his ankles and up his nose.

“My mom’s at the store,” he says, as if delivering a speech in a cavernous auditorium. “She should be back in a half hour.”

And there’s this moment, as he’s standing there in his stocking feet, his head stuck partway out into the cold, and the Avon Lady’s there on the porch, in her heavy black overcoat and red church gloves, breathing fog, that Homer wonders why he isn’t inviting her inside.

In a hoarse whisper, she thanks him, smiles and turns to leave. Homer warns her about ice on the steps, and she thanks him again. He watches her go, navigating carefully with that one big black boot, the black trunk banging against her dead leg, until nothing is left but the wind and her tracks in the snow.

Homer returns to the den and lies on the couch, unable to get comfortable. It seems the Avon Lady has taken possession of his mind. Something about this latest encounter keeps nagging him—something, in particular, about the Avon Lady’s face, something about the expression.

Yes, it was her face. It was the way her face had seemed like wrinkled white leather all twisted and out of control on one side, yet the way her red lipstick had been applied with consummate precision, its redness a rose against the white cold, and the way she’d smiled at him, standing out there politely against the pitiless elements, with her big black trunk of Avon products, ready to be presented.

Yes, though the face was broken, the smile had been natural and true.