No one has ever accused me of being a perfectionist. I’m okay with that. If anything, I would classify myself as an imperfectionist. Imperfection comes naturally to me. Though she didn’t fabricate a term for it, my mom gave me my earliest lessons in the art and power of imperfectionism.
When I was five or six years old, a Bison vacuum salesman knocked on our door. I remember him distinctly because he had a prosthetic arm with two rubber-covered movable hooks for a hand. While he launched into his sales pitch, my attention was riveted on the metal and rubber limb with a 20/80 mix of fascination and terror. He maneuvered his prosthetic arm with skill and dexterity. Amazing. Mom watched the vacuum demo with her best poker face but needed time to consider before she bought. After the salesman left, she gave me a stern lecture about staring. “It’s not polite to stare,” a rebuke I had heard before.
The Bison man showed up a few nights later to seal the deal. I still couldn’t drag my eyes away from his Captain Hook arm gadget. I hoped my parents would buy a vacuum, mostly because I worried that the hook-hand would drag away the offspring of strong-minded adults who refused to buy a Bison. Rude kids who stared went first, of course.
I pictured children being sacrificed to the Bison Monster, a half-vacuum-half-minotaur that lurked in an unmarked warehouse. Sucked into the noisy blackness of a cavernous vacuum bag, the youngsters would writhe and kick against a giant dust-bunny until they succumbed and suffocated without a whimper. That would explain what happened to the Bison man’s arm: He went too close to the mouth of the Bison Monster and phwoooot, his right arm got sucked into the void. Once I had pieced together the salesman’s back story in my over-active imagination, I could turn my attention away from the claw and focus on the sales pitch.
“When did you last vacuum this carpet?” the salesman asked my perpetually exhausted mother. She murmured something non-committal. I knew the answer to that question. The living room had been vacuumed on Saturday; five days previous. Vacuuming was one of the chores on the “Duty Roster,” bane of our childhood laziness. The living room, family room, and hall got a weekly once-over whether they needed it or not.
Mr. Bison vacuumed half of our living room then opened a hatch at the bottom of his machine and shook a nub of red crayon, a couple of safety pins, one small yellow Lego brick, and an impressive mound of soft gray dirt onto a sheet of paper. He raised his eyebrows at Mom, no doubt thinking that she would shrink and crumble under the shame of it. But he didn’t know my mother. She looked him in the eye, unfazed.
Mom opened the negotiations. “Six hundred dollars seems like an awful lot to pay for a vacuum cleaner.”
The Bison man scribbled calculations on a clipboard, looked pained, and reduced the price. The bottom-line-tango went back and forth for several minutes until Mom, smelling blood in the water, casually mentioned a friend’s recent purchase of a Kirby for “four-hundred-something.” Dang, she was good. Bison guy wilted as if my Grinch-ly Mom had just stolen his last can of Who-hash. He lowered the price into the five-hundreds but would go no further.
“It’s too heavy for our kids to manage, and we’re really not prepared to make this kind of investment in a vacuum.” Game over. The salesman packed his valise, picked it up with his hooks, and headed for the door.
Not long after that, my mom actually bought a Kirby vacuum for “four-hundred-something.” The Kirby resembled the Bison machine in many ways—it sucked up anything and weighed about as much as our Plymouth station wagon. I remember nothing about the Kirby salesman, or how he managed to close a sale with my thrifty mother. But I learned something important from watching Mom stand down the Bison man and his pile of crud from the living room carpet. Clearly, my mom had no June Cleaver delusions about picture-perfect parenthood.
Sure, a little dirt lurked in our carpets. The trade-off was that I spent hours with my mom—reading books, memorizing poetry, and racing popsicle-stick boats down rain-swollen gutters. The dust in our living room rug had no lasting negative effect on my development. On the other hand, reading and rain walks delight me to this day, and I can still recite most of A Child’s Garden of Verses from memory. Remind me to thank my mother for not obsessing about housekeeping perfection. Almost thirty years after the Bison incident—when I was married with four children of my own—I had a déjà vu moment that revealed how deeply Mom’s example had taken root in me.
My husband and I had scraped together the resources to buy our first home in Northern California—no small feat in the white-hot real estate boom of the late Eighties. One day the phone rang, and a perky young woman offered a “free one room carpet cleaning.” I took the bait.
When the hour of my “free” cleaning rolled around, I found a Kirby vacuum salesman on my doorstep. He told me his associate would clean my carpet after I listened to the Kirby sales spiel. Fair enough. Our house had brown shag carpet throughout, even in the eating area. The carpet under the kitchen table was spiky with spilled milk and embedded with crusty Cheerios. I would have listened to the ghost of Charles Ponzi pitch an investment scheme if he had promised to clean that patch of rug.
I half-tuned-in to the Kirby guy’s well-rehearsed pitch, unimpressed. The nine-hundred dollar asking price might as well have been nine-thousand dollars in those stretched years. Kirby Man could see my disinterest and ratcheted up his approach. Pulling a pristine white circle of “Kirby” embossed paper out of his bag, he asked me the same question the Bison man had asked my mom in the Sixties.
