Smart vs. Pretty (2 page)

“Are you the owner?” asked the blonde. Frank nodded. The woman mirrored the nod and said, “You’ve got a really nice space here. But business doesn’t look too good. You know anything about marketing? Public relations?”

Frank and Amanda had enough trouble with private relations. “We pass out fliers on the corner every day—dozens of them,” Frank said, not sure why she was telling this woman anything about her business, but she was a real live customer, a break in the routine.

Frank was intrigued by the blonde. She’d never seen such self-assurance in a woman so young. Perhaps her confidence came from a strange place, a tiny world inhabited by a superior class of human—those with smarts and prettiness.

“Clarissa O’MacFlanahagan,” the woman announced, her right hand stretched out, gold and jeweled rings on three of her fingers.

Frank shook. Her grasp was bony and dry, cool from the January outside, but not cold. Frank worried that her own hand was clammy and distasteful. “Francesca Greenfield. This is my sister Amanda. We’re co-owners.”

“May I see your flier?” asked Clarissa. Amanda peeled a copy of the red page from the top of the stack behind the cookie counter. Frank picked out the color herself. She thought cherry was cheery.

“Gourmet coffees and cakes,” Clarissa read. “Come for the hot coffee, stay for the warmth. Hmmm. It’s sweet. But fliers…I don’t know. They’re soft sell. You need a pull.”

Amanda asked, “What do you mean?”

Clarissa explained, “A pull is a marketing strategy. It’s a tactic that yanks customers in to the store as if they had ropes around their waists.”

“You mean belts?” Frank asked, wanting to sound wry.

“More like umbilical cords,” responded Clarissa with a small smile. Frank couldn’t help but smile back.

“How do we do it? What’s a good pull?” asked Amanda.

Clarissa frowned. “It’s kind of complicated; I’d have to explain the whole concept to you and then come up with a strategy.”

“Can’t you give us the Cliff’s Notes version?” asked Amanda. It struck Frank that every aspect of Amanda’s life read like the Cliff’s Notes version—her relationships, her observations, the I Ching throwing. “Because, as you’ve noticed, we need help,” said Amanda. “A lot of help. We can’t do this by ourselves.”

Clarissa looked around the café again. “I see potential. I really do. But with school and…” She stopped suddenly and faced the sisters. “Actually, maybe I can do something for you. We may be able to help each other.”

The sisters glanced at each other, Amanda’s face full of hope, Frank’s incredulous. “I’m not sure what we can do to help you,” said Frank, certain that she had nothing this woman could use.

Clarissa took a long drink. “Great coffee,” she said. To Frank, she continued, “I’m only credits away from completing business school—the Stern School of Business, NYU—major in marketing and public relations. I need a final project—a field thesis—to graduate with top honors. I’ll save your business. No charge. And all you have to do is stand back and watch.” She turned on the heel of her ankle boot and faced Amanda. “I can do it. I’m telling you. I feel it.”

“Your confidence is catching, but I think you’re a bit too late,” said Frank. “The people have spoken, and they choose Moonburst. Quality isn’t important. People want the chain-store brand. They want to dress in Banana Republic, have their living room outfitted by IKEA, brew their overroasted Moonburst coffee, and drink it out of a mug with a
People
magazine logo on it. Americans crave homogeneity. It relieves them from the mental work of having to make choices. By driving small businesses under, chain stores limit options. They’re un-American, the very breeding grounds of evil. Except The Gap. I like The Gap.”

That silenced the room. Even the coffee stopped gurgling. Amanda broke the quiet lull. “Please ignore everything Frank just said,” Amanda pleaded. “We’re not giving up and we’d love to hear your ideas.”

Clarissa waited for a few beats. Finally Frank said, “Yes, of course. Please stay. I can’t help myself sometimes. I tend to be defeatist.”

“What next?” Amanda asked their new partner.

“We sit, drink and talk,” she answered.

Frank said, “That’s a real departure.”

“Come on, Frank,” admonished Amanda. “Give this ten minutes. We don’t have anything to lose.”

A
manda took one look at Clarissa and knew: she would be their savior. For starters, the blonde had the diamond-shaped face of a cat. Clarissa seemed to purr when she spoke. Amanda read once that cats served on Earth as conduits to the astral plane, that they connected people to forces from beyond this world and acted as guides. Of course, Clarissa was human. But her remarkable feline quality sent out waves of energy only Amanda (being sensitive) could properly appreciate.

Amanda asked Clarissa, “Have we met before?”

The cat woman said, “Not in this life.” Perfect answer! Amanda turned a moony-eyed smile toward her sister. Frank had to feel it too—that Clarissa would change their lives forever.

Frank said to Clarissa, “It’s obvious that you can build an outfit from the bottom up, but a business is far more complex. Even a small one.”

Clarissa stretched her lustrous lips into a smile. She spoke, swiveling her head every several seconds to make eye contact with each sister in turn, playing into their vanities, holding both of their complete attention on the edge of her mascaraed lashes. To Frank: “I fully appreciate how hard it must be to run a business, and that’s exactly what I need you for. I sense that you’re the practical business brains in this enterprise. We can work together, shoulder to shoulder. You have so much to teach me, and I think I have a few ideas for you, too.”

To Amanda: “And you’re the heart, the furnace that keeps the café a warm, bright place. You’re the shining face behind the register that makes it easy for people to hand over their money.”

To Frank: “Of course, they’re not handing over much money right now. That’s going to change. First we have to get them inside those doors; then they’ll know where to spend their coffee budget.”

To Amanda: “It’ll happen, if we believe in the spirit of reinvention. The soul of the place has to bloom.”

To Frank: “We should start by coming up with a concrete plan.”

To Amanda: “The first step of which is to reach out to the people. Who are you trying to reach? Who’s your market?”

Amanda, watching Clarissa’s head snap back and forth, was reminded of the time she went to the U.S. Open in Flushing, Queens.

Frank said, “Ideally, we’d like to reach coffee lovers. I spend so much time and energy pursuing the best beans in the world, I’d love to be surrounded by people who understand quality. Beyond that, I’d settle for just about anyone who can jingle a dollar in change in his pocket.”

Amanda said, “Most of our customers are women who want a peaceful place to sit and meditate. It’d be lovely if they preferred our coffee to Moonburst’s, but I’m not sure they have to.”

“How could they not? Moonburst coffee is overroasted swill,” said Frank.

“Coffee is coffee,” said Clarissa.

Silence.

Amanda prayed Clarissa spoke out of ignorance rather than indifference. A coffee bean, however compact, was no small thing to a Greenfield. Coffee itself, the liquid finale of centuries of harvest and weather, was holy. Every family vacation they’d taken was to an equatorial coffee-producing country. Amanda’s earliest childhood memory was of being chased by Frank through knotty coffee bushes in the sun-baked mountains of Guatemala. Her favorite childhood bedtime story was of Khaldi, the ancient Abyssinian goatherd, whose flock gorged itself on the red cherries of white-flowering hill trees. As legend had it, these fruit-stuffed, highly caffeinated goats got up on their hind legs and danced around the Arabian pasture. Soon after, every Arab goatherd who wanted a buzz was scarfing coffee cherries. The sisters never counted sheep; they counted dancing goats. Coffee ran through Greenfield veins. Frank was genius with it. She had the gift of a gourmet. Amanda was a well-educated gourmand.

“Coffee is coffee?” Frank blurted. Amanda felt her sister’s restraint stretch like a rubber band. She waited, cringing, for the snap.

Clarissa said, “I want you to think of me as the typical consumer. I’m just like everyone else out there. Coffee is a caffeine-delivery system. If it tastes good, so much the better. I think Moonburst is great. It tastes better than Maxwell House. It blows Folgers out of the water. If you want to get more customers in here, you’ve got to cater to people like me. Quality doesn’t mean all that much.”

“Is that how you feel personally, or are we still in a marketing exercise?” Frank asked.

“For the sake of the exercise, yes, that is how I feel about coffee,” said Clarissa. “Worshiping a beverage seems a bit precious to me.”

“So why did you come in here in the first place?” asked Frank, both hurt and offended.

“The line was too long next door.”

“We don’t want to compete with Moonburst,” Amanda said, trying to deflect the tension. “We just want to stay afloat.”

“To stay afloat, you have to compete.” Clarissa rose from her chair and began circling the table. Amanda noticed that her pants were expertly hemmed just below her ankle.

“You say most of your customers are women?” Clarissa asked, peeking over her shoulder at the two patrons. Strands of Clarissa’s hair dragged across her lapels as she turned to look, leaving a few blond stragglers. Amanda held herself back from reaching out to pick them off her jacket. They weren’t intimate enough for grooming gestures.

“Does that matter?” asked Frank.

Clarissa said, “Step one of any marketing plan is to identify your customer base. I’d do a poll but, no offense, it might not be statistically accurate, considering the size of our sample. So let’s go with impressions. I’d say, from the look of things, your base is lonely, single women in Brooklyn Heights who have time to kill. They do it by drinking coffee, eating cakes, and conducting rich fantasy lives.”

“You got all that from these two women?” Amanda asked, tilting her head at Lucy and the romance reader.

“Perception is everything in marketing,” said Clarissa. “It’s all about image, an idea. Once you figure out who you’re selling to, and what they want, the next thing is to position your brand. All markets with homogeneous products—like coffee—have positions. For example, what do you think when you hear Ivory soap?”

“Coffee is not homogeneous,” said Frank.

“Ivory soap is pure,” Amanda said.

“Bounty?”

“Strong.”

“Charmin?”

“Soft.”

“Moonburst?”

“Poison.” That was Frank.

Clarissa said, “Moonburst’s position is quality. That they sell premium stuff—strong, serious coffee for adults. And, sorry to say, they’ve got the position locked.”

“Sounds painful,” Frank said. “Besides which, Moonburst isn’t serious coffee. It’s McCoffee. They uniformly burn their beans in giant factories with no regard to the quality of the individual crop, and then the beans sit in warehouses for God knows how long. They make such a big deal about using arabica beans. Every gourmet coffee bar in the world uses arabica beans. And their blends! They’ll wave a Hawaiian bean over a fifty-pound barrel of Colombian, and then call it a Kona blend! For Christ’s sake, they permit hazelnut syrup!” Frank stopped to catch her breath.

“The McCoffee-drinking public doesn’t know the difference. They just want their coffee strong, hot, and full of caffeine. Which Moonburst provides,” said Clarissa.

“This is where any kind of education could be useful,” Frank said. “The longer you roast a bean, the greater the reduction of caffeine. Moonburst coffee might taste strong, but it doesn’t have the real kick of a milder arabica roast. In fact,” Frank continued, “arabica beans don’t have half the caffeine of robusta beans anyway. Supermarket blends like Maxwell House might taste like the shrubs they’re grown on, but for pure caffeine, it’s much better than Moonburst.”

Clarissa nodded at Frank and said, “Okay. Good to know.” To Amanda: “We still need a position.”

“On top is good,” said Amanda. “But it’s been so long, I can hardly remember.”

“Are you guys single?” Clarissa asked them.

“Not you,” said Amanda.

“Can you believe?” said Clarissa.

Amanda was about to launch into a tirade about her sorry, single state (a sure way to insta-bond), but she could almost hear Frank blush with embarrassment. Frank hated to talk about dating, always waving off the subject by saying, “Not my area.” For no reason Amanda could understand, Frank was incredibly sensitive about her desirability. An unfounded insecurity: Frank was completely adorable, always impossibly thin with dark, thick hair as straight as a pin. Amanda couldn’t remember Frank ever breaking out or needing a facial. The younger sister tried to send Frank a message telepathically—
Relax
. Frank wouldn’t fear harsh judgment if she weren’t so harsh and judgmental about herself.

“Am I interrupting something?” Clarissa asked, watching the two sisters lock eyes and then break apart nervously. “Am I prying?” she asked Amanda.

“Not at all. Frank’s just a little jumpy about men,” Amanda said. Frank looked a bit angry to be exposed, but the chatty younger sister refused to feel guilt, saying, “We need to talk about our fears, open them up, and air them out. Don’t you agree, Clarissa?”

“Of course,” she said. “Free expression is the key to happiness.” Amanda wondered if Clarissa were even more intuitive than herself. “If our position is also quality, we need a gimmick,” Clarissa said. “A reason besides the coffee to get business.” She mused, “What do women want?”

“Long-or short-term?” asked Frank.

“We’re not talking about an investment strategy,” said Clarissa.

“We’re not?” asked Amanda, making Clarissa laugh a ringing, echoing sound, as if the blonde’s insides were hollow. Amanda ventured, “Women want to be happy. Love, security, passion, freedom. Spiritual enlightenment. To let go of fears like death, disease, and poverty.”

“Now you’re talking.”

“That’s all she’s doing,” said Frank. “And this is the last place someone should come to if they want to stop thinking about poverty.”

“I was intrigued by the love part,” Clarissa said. She pinched her cheeks rosy, deep in thought—so deep that Amanda wondered if Clarissa’d accidentally slipped into meditation mode. “A contest!” she shouted suddenly. “Most of your customers are women, right? And”—Clarissa leaned forward and whispered—“if they’re as plain as these two, we can turn this dump into a gold mine.”

All Amanda heard was the word
dump
. The brick might be crumbling, the gum under the tables might be thirty years old, nearly all the mugs were cracked, but it was not a dump. Barney Greenfield’s was her heritage. Amanda felt anger rising in her throat, but she relaxed her muscles, did a few deep-breathing reps, and pictured waves breaking on the shore. At all costs Amanda avoided negative, soul-eradicating feelings. She calmed herself and waited for Frank to reclaim the family pride.

Frank said, “Gold mine, huh? Go on.” Amanda turned toward her sister, stunned.

“Contests are one example of pull marketing,” said Clarissa. “And the best part is, they don’t cost much right out of pocket.”

Frank said, “But I don’t see how you get from
love
to
contest
. A contest offering the prize of love? That would be a ‘pull,’ all right. A pull of their legs.”

“Just listen,” said Clarissa. “What do women want? Men. To get more women, we have to get men in here. But not just any men. Superattractive, hair-on-head, washboard abs, tall, athletic men. If we can guarantee women that the café will be stocked with a constant supply of hot, young,
available
guys, the women will swarm in droves. And to get the men,” Clarissa continued, “we need to offer them something
they
want.”

“Sex!” Amanda said. That men wanted sex, she was certain.

Clarissa nodded. “Kind of illegal. Besides, the men we’re after have plenty of access to sex already.”

Frank said, “In my albeit limited experience, I’ve found that men love a woman’s seeming disinterest, football, their ‘space,’ the Three Stooges, Laurel and Hardy, long, loud guitar solos, burping and farting at will, falling asleep with the TV on, their mothers, working on the weekends, complaining about working on the weekends, sex with more than one woman at a time and then lying about it.”

Amanda said, “Men want mystery and intrigue. They want to be seduced with danger and the promise of something new and exciting. Then they want you to go out with them wearing short skirts and no underwear.”

Clarissa said, “I was thinking more along the lines of complimentary coffee, combining two great male loves: hot beverages and anything that’s free.”

“Men also love to show off for each other,” Amanda added. “So if a guy brings in a friend, he should get a free muffin as a bonus.”

“I love that!” Clarissa said. “Brilliant!”

Amanda soaked up praise: “It’s just a little something I thought up.”

“Let’s go all the way with it,” Clarissa said. “Let’s give the friend free coffee, too. Ten friends. The more guys, the better. To get it going, we’ll pass out fliers—new fliers. We’ll get an ad in the newspaper to solicit applicants.”

“Applicants for what?” Frank asked, bewildered.

Clarissa explained, “We’ll hold a contest to award one handsome man each week with free coffee for himself and his equally hot and available friends. The applicants will have to have certain physical requirements. We can call the winner Mr. Barney Greenfield.”

“Our grandfather?” asked Amanda.

“Hmm. Not very sexy. Mr. Coffee of the Week!” Clarissa declared. “While we’re at it, we need to change the name of the place. Barney Greenfield’s does not scream
sex
.” Amanda had a sudden mental flash of her Grandfather having sex with Grandma, their bed rattling the tchotchkes on the night table.

“Barney Greenfield’s has been the name of this shop for almost fifty years,” said Frank.

Amanda said, “Change means growth.”

Clarissa nodded encouragingly.

Frank leaned back defensively. “So you want it to scream
sex,
too?” she asked her sister. “Why do I feel ganged up against?”