I had a very strange experience this afternoon; one of those “these things seem to happen only to me” events.  I went over to a potential client’s house to present a price opinion to her.  I had not met this woman before in person; when I arrived, she told me her husband was out in the back yard finishing up some planting, and he’d be right in, and maybe we could just get started.  OK, great.  She was probably in her late fifties, tall and thin and a little bit homely, in a pleasant way.

She asked if I wanted anything to drink.  I politely declined.

“Oh, but don’t you want some iced coffee?  I already made the espresso.  I’m going to have some.  Don’t you want some?”

I didn’t feel like arguing with her, so I agreed that I did, after all, want iced coffee (which I really, really didn’t — I avoid stimulants when I’m on appointments, as I tend to still get a little nervous around clients I don’t know, and coffee just makes it worse).  Then she had to talk me into having cream and sugar in it, which I also didn’t want.  She put a straw in the glass, and set it down in front of me, beaming.

“I see your signs all over the place,” she said.  “That’s why I called you.”

“Oh?  Well, that’s nice.”  I pretended to drink some of the coffee; luckily that’s easy to do with a straw.

She was watching me with a curiously intent expression.  “Do you have any children?” she asked, apparently apropos of nothing.

“Uh — no.  I’m not married.  I mean … not that I’d have to be married to have children.   But I don’t have any.”

“Oh.  I thought you did.”

Why she would have thought this was beyond my comprehension.

“No.  I don’t.” I wondered whether this was my conversational cue to ask her whether she had any, but I didn’t feel like talking about her personal life.  “So — do you already have somewhere you’re thinking of moving to, or would you be considering looking for another house as well as selling this one?”  I asked cheerfully, hoping to move things along.

“We’re going to move out to our summer house in LaPine,” she said.  “You must be wearing colored contact lenses.”

As regular readers of this blog may recall, this is an incorrect observation people make on a disconcertingly regular basis.  I don’t know what makes people think this, nor do I understand why they feel the need to bring it up.

“No, I’m not,” I said.  “LaPine is nice.  Nice dry climate, I understand.”

“Yes, it’s dry.  Dry and hot.  Lots of sun.”  She looked down at my arm, which was resting on the table, and remarked, “Your skin is beautiful … it’s like cream and honey.  I wish I had skin like that.”

At this point, I had absolutely no idea how to react.  I could hear her husband at the back door, and hoped that whatever the fuck she was doing, she would stop when he joined us.  I racked my brain for something to say, and came up with the wholly inadequate, “Are you a dermatologist?”

As it turned out, I know her husband by sight from walking in the neighborhood, and the situation was somewhat defused by his “Hey, nice to see you again!” line of conversation.  I still don’t know what the hell she was up to … whether she simply has no sense of interpersonal boundaries, or if she had some sinister agenda, or both, or neither, or what.  I don’t think I can possibly do business with her, however.