I was sitting on the couch reading (you could even say engrossed in) Renata Adler's 1976 novel Speedboat. I am weeping openly, not from emotion (the book is actually extremely funny) but from springtime allergies. It is a "beautiful day", and here I am. Rather than feel "trapped inside", as they say, or "cooped up", as mothers like to put it, I feel privileged to be sitting in a comfortable room reading such a fine book as Speedboat by Renata Adler, even if I have to pause every so often because my copious tears are making it difficult to make out the words on the page.

I'd just re-read the following sentence, which made me laugh, and was thinking of telling it to my housemate, when there was a rather-too-loud knock on the door, the kind that traditionally makes me roll my eyes in disgust:

"I would have called you sooner," he said, "but I have the most terrible eczema."

So I'm enjoying this sentence, which occurs on page 59, repeating it to myself aloud with pleasure, when these loud raps on the door interrupt me. I carry the book over with my thumb marking the page and crack the door, not wanting to expose myself to too much pollen. There is a man on the porch, a slender, brown-complected man with slicked-back dark hair and dark mustache, wearing a lavender shirt, black tie, and pleated trousers. He held pamphlets. I was dead.

The first thing was, he had this look, a look I've come to recognize when people of Hispanic descent come to sell something and they see me. It's a look that says, I may have just lucked into something, for here is a brother. I'm always a little torn upon seeing this look. Part of me always wants to say "I know that look, and you're barking up the wrong tree, amigo." It's the same look the two Latino defendants gave me when I was in the jury pool for their rape trial. Anyway.

So he starts in with his sale, some Mexican restaurant opening, do I want to buy coupons and so on, he displays the offerings and waits to continue until I open the screen door to look closer at the menu pamphlet he's unfolded before me. I don't move. He tries to joke. "Aw, come on, why waste this beautiful day?" I close the door in his face and return to the couch.

The problem with selling, with being forced to try to ingratiate yourself with strangers, is that you must make all kinds of coarse assumptions about the people you are so rudely interrupting. It's not a beautiful day, not for me, and I am not feeling the fellowship that similar melanin levels and bone structure suggest we might potentially share, and I am busy reading this book, which I am holding open in my hand as he talks to me. He sees the book, but because the book isn't a screaming infant or a sizzling frying pan or a phone with a hand cupped over the mouthpiece, he feels he couldn't possibly be interrupting. Well, he is.