ESSAYS
The Adventures of a Telecommuter Answering Her DoorbellMISSOULA, MT 18 January 2007 |
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When I’m standing in my socks, on a slightly damp doormat, the moisture seeping through into the creases of my toes as an older couple in trench coats thrusts pamphlets on sin and temptation into my hand, I feel a little indignant.
I try to be polite to these folks; they’re my neighbors.
But what I really want to say is:
This is not my day off.
I was not lounging
around in my socks drinking coffee, or browsing through the bible.
I was working.
The dong of the doorbell was cut short by the barrel-chested bark of my “guard dog,” and that dropped
a jolt of adrenaline into my blood, and the sentence I was typing vanished from my brain.
I need that sentence.
It’s gone. Can you find it?
Do you often stop at places of business?
My funny bone still feels a little buzzed from that adrenaline rush.
Is this buzzed feeling a sin?
My toes are getting cold.
And that woman-harlot being ravished by tigers for her sins in the pamphlet’s drawing—she looks to be resting in the heady afterglow of orgasmic encounters.
I do not need saving.
This is my punishment for being a telecommuter--for evading office gossip and shoes: I’m home when the doorbell rings Monday through Friday.
Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormon missionaries, FedEx drivers, the oil delivery man, and random strangers asking for favors.
I wish I could look into the faces of the trench-coat-wearing Jehovah's and deliver such a biting monologue.
But their braced countenances stop my daydreaming.
Shoulders inch towards their ears, waiting for me to let loose.
They must hate this, I think.
They almost always call on a weekday morning when most people are at work.
They skip the two slightly run-down apartment buildings next to me.
All attention focuses on my fingers clamping down on the pages of the pamphlet about False Religion.
Upon contact, they're already halfway through promising “we can talk about this next time.”
My translation: “Please, just let me leave. Please don’t slam the door in my face.”
The same couple comes each time, and they never follow up on the “talk.”
Maybe I’m not the vulnerable conversion type they’re looking for; I'm just another check on their propaganda scorecard.
Maybe they just want to deliver the news that I will not be saved at Armageddon.
A pair of Mormon missionaries came calling a while back, when I rented a little cabin across the drive from my elderly landlady.
“How’s the reception been?” I asked them, wondering how one wanders the world with backpacks and keeps
such starched-white shirts.
“Mmm, well you know, most people are nice … but your neighbor was kind of cold.”
My neighbor/landlady was frigid to her own family; to a stranger pedaling religion, I’d imagine she was in the category of nasty with vinegar leaking from her tongue.
Spreading the gospel door to door ranks right up there with telemarketing as occupations that would make me quake in my shoes.
Thus, as much as I disagree with why these people knock on my front door, I want to believe that, in some way, they hate it.
Occasionally, the Jehovah's Witnesses arrive in a wide beige sedan, with company.
They fit three in the back and three across in the front as well, sending only two to the door.
It’s the loophole in their requirement—how they spread the insults of slammed doors and acidic words over six people, rather than two.
When I was a kid, an Oldsmobile loaded with Jehovah's Witnesses pulled up in front of our barn in Vermont, and our black lab mix, Windy, circled it, tail wagging.
The car sat parked--no visible movement inside--until my father walked out of the house.
A door finally cracked open, and as a man with black trousers tried to slip out to greet my father, Windy nosed her way in, wiggling over the freshly ironed laps of Jehovah's Witnesses, tongue licking their stiff necks as they turned their heads in hopeless escape.
They were not amused.
Maybe the slobbed-up kisses and her toenails pressing into their thighs reminded them of a tiger eating a harlot.
We laughed about it for years:
How our dog found her own loophole in their loophole.
I have pity for them.
So far.
I have yet to meet a peddler of religion who’s actually tried to convince me I need saving or that I’m going to hell.
That's why I still have compassion for the couple at my threshold.
Why I answer my doorbell and only curl my toes in protest.
One of these days though, I might buy a dressing gown and a push-up bra and answer the door looking like the woman in the pamphlet, holding a glass of red wine at 11 a.m., claiming it's my birthday and I'm getting started early.
That might cause a clash with the trench coats.
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