Don't Shoot! I'm Just the Avon Lady! (15 page)

Slowly, other customers arrived, one by lone one, a couple here, a couple there. Most were women I met in their homes, stopping by to gossip and get a free sample or two. Several women placed orders for makeup and skin care items. Two Latina ladies stopped at the table, looked at the brochures, chose a lipstick each, and waved thank you. I raised my arm to wave in return.

“Jesucristo!” Both women invoked Jesus’ name and made the sign of the cross. I turned around to see what the heck was happening now, but nothing but my messy driveway and garage door stared back at me. The women spoke excitedly in Spanish and left my yard in a hurry. I saw them gesturing with arms and hands, squishing into a two door Toyota Celica with a dented engine hood. I stood with hands on hips, wondering what made them run, when I heard a voice I remembered, a voice I’d heard twice in my Avon past.

“So where’s your kilt, lassie?” The man who questioned what was under said kilt stood at the end of the drive with a woman on his arm. She towered over him by at least three inches, placing her well above six-feet tall. Her hair cascaded down her shoulders in golden waves, movie star hair, and she laughed in a low knowing tone at her companion’s question.

“I saw your note and had to see what you’d do next. Here, show Eliza what you’re selling.” He took a chair next to the exercise station and rested his elbows on his knees, looking over the wreckage with that same sardonic grin. I showed Eliza around the three tables, gave her colors and powders and creams in little sample packettes, gave her brochures and printed fliers. I peppered her with questions, tried to find out if she was his wife or girlfriend or sister.

“Ha Ha, did your friend tell you how I threw some lipsticks at him a few weeks ago?” I hoped the word ‘friend’ would be enough bait but Eliza just snickered. She placed an order for a blush, a powder, a powder puff, and two Glimmersticks, and left her address, a house across town from Kilt Man’s place. They left together, arm-in-arm, laughing, walking slowly like good pals or lovers, perhaps both.

When all was said and done and cleaned and put away and laid to rest, Alleluia and Amen, I stripped in the bathroom, ready to take a long, hot Avon-scented bubble bath. My ripped-up thigh caught my eye, and then I turned my arm to look at the damage there. Jesucristo, indeed! The sure face of Jesus, complete with bleeding thorns, peered out from my skin. That is, if I squinted a little and I flexed the triceps just so.

Balls to the Wall

I dressed in my shortest skirt and a yellow-striped tube-top. I applied extra lipstick in 24-Hour Red and lined my eyes with a black Glimmerstick. I sprayed as much Avon Advanced Techniques Hair Spray as my dark brown locks could take and added my highest heels. A healthy squirt of Goddess fragrance completed the ensemble. If your regular sales avenues fail, use what ya got, I thought, hiked up my tube top, stuffed those forty Men’s Catalogues in my backpack and grabbed the boys.

Every other Sunday I buy four chocolate croissants and two Mexican mochas with extra whipped cream and two kid-sized hot cocoas at the French bakery and carry them across the parking lot to the 76 gas station garage. I give a pastry and coffee to the mechanic, Miguel, and we sit on oil-stained metal folding chairs and talk. He always eats too quickly and jumps up to finish rotating tires or replacing timing belts or changing oil. Sundays aren’t a busy time for him, but he takes his work seriously. I take longer to eat, and sip my mocha and watch him work while he tells me his theories of the universe. Miguel lets Marty and Louie play with a box of old car parts. They twist nuts onto bolts and make fantastic robots.

Miguel emigrated from Mexico City twelve years ago. He snuck over the border by way of the Imperial sand dunes, and three members of his alien group died of heat and dehydration. The Border Patrol found the rest, gave them water and food and sunscreen, and trucked them back to Tijuana in a green van with tinted windows like they always do, but not Miguel. He rested under the sands with the sidewinder rattlesnakes, knowing his destiny was United States or death. It didn’t matter which one.

I’m not sure how he ended up a mechanic. Maybe he learned his trade in Mexico. I asked him one day and he told me again of his night in the sands when an angel appeared and told him to burrow and hide and keep his ears covered with sand, pressed into the dunes, so that he could hear when it was safe to leave.

“Wow. No way! What kind of an angel,” I asked him, “Can you describe her?”

And Miguel laughed and told me I didn’t understand. “Birdie, not one of your Catholic angels. A desert angel. They don’t have wings.” He shrugged his shoulders and the buttons down his shirt pulled uncomfortably apart. “And man, you gotta stop bringing me this stuff. I gotta go on a diet.” He picked up a wrench and bent into the hood of a silver Thunderbird, and I heard the echo of metal against metal against his smooth low voice. “I’m too fat to hide in those dunes now. For the young, that is. For the young.” He laughed again.

Miguel isn’t an ordinary mechanic. At least I don’t think other mechanics drive to the desolate areas in the spring and take time-lapse photographs of ocotillo and sage flowers and write longhand letters to physicist Stephen Hawking and speak to angels and demons on days when the garage sits empty and the marine fog rolls in and around the piles of broken greasy parts.

I met him when I brought my minivan to his shop for an oil change. I watched him feel the hood with lovers’ hands, saw his eyes roll white under his wild Latino afro as he listened, heard him match the engine drums with a human hum. I must have stared too hard because he raised one side of his mouth and gestured toward the ceiling. He spoke like a priest, slow and clear with soft rounded vowels, almost a sign song tone. “The spirits tell me what to do. Your car is alright but you drive too fast and she doesn’t like it.”

This Sunday morning we sat and talked about time. Miguel told me that I felt the hands of the clock because culture and church and convention played tricks on my mind. The universe is one point, he said, one point of existence where time and space collide.

“It’s like this. Time is space, and there is no time. It’s like it all already happened one moment and now we just live bites of that moment. Get it? Just a bite at a time but it’s one big donut. You gotta small mouth. You can only eat one bit at a time.” Miguel wiped a fly off his forehead, leaving a timeless splotch of black oil in a line above his eyebrows.

Time is space, and there is no time. I started repeating this to myself, hoping the mantra would chip tiny cracks in my rigid thought, leaving a crevice into which enlightenment can seep. The message is clear: everything happens at once, not only in the garage, but also in my heart, in my mind, in the whole, huge, entire expanding universe.

I just didn’t get it. I’m in my late thirties. But this moment today is the same moment I lost my first tooth, it’s the same moment I began menstruating, it’s the moment I lost my virginity, and the moment I married. It’s the moment I became a mother, and the moment I gave my daughter up for adoption, the moment I found myself divorced. It’s the same moment I met Miguel, and the moment I eventually die. It all happened at once, in the same first breath as the universe was spun and the same last breath as it decays. Time is as simple and profound and as enigmatic as birth.

I closed my eyes and listened to Miguel grab a rusty nut with pliers, heard him grunt and pull, the sound of oil splattering into a plastic tub underneath the car.

“So Miguel. Is this what you wrote to Stephen Hawking? All this stuff about time?” Maybe new theories about the nature of reality would arise from my mechanic’s interaction with one of the greatest scientific minds in all history.

“Nah. I told him he was wrong about black holes. You can see what’s happening with those black holes if you just look at the pictures. Doesn’t he look at the pictures? Who’s an expert anyway?” He tapped a new filter into place, and for a second, as Miguel squeezed hard to tighten the seal, out of the corner of my eye, I felt him breathe, felt Steven Hawking breathe, as if our mouths were connected to one starburst lung spilling mocha oil into the center of the galaxy.

“Miguel, I’m signing those papers tomorrow and sending them across the country. Do you think my daughter is contacting me out of curiosity? Maybe she just wants to see what I look like and find out why I left her. Maybe that’s all she wants, and maybe when I meet her I’ll want more. Maybe I’ll be left behind this time, the way I left her.” I kept my voice low so Marty and Louie wouldn’t hear. They tapped broken wrenches against metal slats and connected air hoses together. The robot grew tall.

“Well, you know, Birdie, it’s like I said about time. It all happened at once, in one burst. What’s gonna happen already happened.” Miguel fiddled with the undercarriage of a Volvo. His words echoed against the muffler and I caught them twice.

“But Birdie, let me say this. It’s not what you want to hear, but it what you need to hear. You made the decision to send that letter. You’re ready for what follows. Maybe she wants to know you. Maybe she doesn’t. All of life might have happened but it’s still unpredictable.” I heard an echo of Comet’s words, all of life is sad. I wiped tears from my face and patted Miguel on the leg.

My cell phone beeped and I waved ‘bye to Miguel and dropped a Men’s Catalogue on his messy desk. The boys and I piled into the van.

“Hi, it’s Birdie!” I chirped my greeting but my voice remained time-trapped in sadness.

“Hey, Birdie, it’s Noreen. On Oakdale Drive?”

Noreen ordered Avon once before, in my early days as an Avon Lady. She ordered the same thing this second time - six opaque bottles of Skin-So-Soft original lotion and one Burgundy lip-plumping lipstick. I repeated her order out loud and motioned for Louie to grab my trusty notebook and make an entry.

“I really need the Skin-So-Soft as soon as you can deliver. Sorry to be so demanding, honey, I should have called you a few weeks ago. But you know how that is, time just flies away.” Her voice sounded more harsh and irritating than her words would suggest. I heard a whirring machine sound behind her, a scraping noise, and someone clearing a hoarse throat. I told her I had three bottles in stock and could bring them by Monday afternoon.

“Good.” She took a deep breath and rushed into her next sentence. “But don’t come to my front door, honey. Come around through the side gate and knock on the side entrance.”

“No problem, Noreen. Tomorrow around 2, okay?”

I hoped my crazy schedule would add to fatter profits, and tried to mentally calculate how much I earned between Lady Mystery and the yard sale. I dropped the boys at a birthday party. I watched them ring the doorbell and shook my head when I noticed the smudges of mechanic’s oil covering their butts. Marty held the wrapped present and Louie carried a bag of complimentary Avon for the mom. I optimistically stuck ten extra brochures in the bag, and crossed my fingers that the hostess would pass them around with the party gift bags.

The circulating lights around the Surf Bowl sign seemed to wink at me as I parked in the decaying asphalt drive. I could smell the salt and dead fish of my ocean mixed with the exhaust of a thousand Sunday drivers and the acrid fumes of a group of smokers hiding behind the dumpster. Every time the door opened a waft of sixties surf tunes blew from the alley. The smokers turned in unison to watch me click up the cement stairs. The wind picked up and my skirt rose above my panty line.

No one noticed me walk inside the alley. All eyes were on a string of electronic scoreboards, each displaying a team name across the top and individual players in a neat row along the left-hand side. A team named “Spare Me” rose to their feet with a holler, fists pumping the air as a middle-aged man in a Hawaiian shirt printed with naked hula dancers rolled the pins down, rolled a strike.

They look like good prospects
, I thought. Six men sat back down in molded plastic chairs, all late-forties, early-fifties, all in need of some serious men’s Avon. A tall man with a shock of gray chest hair escaping from the collar of his “Save Our Oceans” t-shirt stood, picked up a black ball and stuck two fingers and a thumb in the holes. The track lighting above him bounced off the sheen of the ball, created disco lights on the floor. He twirled around three times as his team-mates chanted “strike, strike, strike, strike,” lined the ball to his eye, swung his arm back with a step, let ‘er rip. The ball flew from his hand as if it held a hidden magnet, flew straight for the pins, left just two standing. The team lifted beer bottles in unison, tilted heads back and swallowed deep sips. I made my move.

“Hey, guys? Can I sit with you? I have some good luck Avon stuff for you.” I didn’t wait for an answer, sat cross-legged on the floor at their feet. “Now, guys. Be honest. You wear those bowling shoes all the time, right? How many of you have athlete’s feet?” I started opening my backpack to retrieve a handful of samples and a demo tube of Avon Antifungal Foot Cream. The men still held their beer bottles; their mouths open in surprise. “I mean it, guys, I have something that can help. Don’t be shy. Speak up!”

A short man with his pants belted far below his stomach clunked his bottle on the floor. “Oh what the hell. I’ve got athlete’s feet.” He began to untie his shoes.

“Bob! You’re up! Wait and do that later, man!” Hawaiian shirt man pointed to the scoreboard overhead.

“Nah. Maybe she’s good luck. Remember the night we snuck the cat in?” The men nodded, looked thoughtful. Bob continued to remove his shoes. I squeezed a generous dollop of cream in his hands and told him to rub it in and around his red toes. I had to breathe through my mouth to avoid smelling them, praying the peppermint and menthol in the product would cover up his nasty foot odor. The men stared at Bob, watched him massage his toes, replace his socks, custom made bowling shoes, stand and grab his ball, a lively glitter green one, and he twirled, they chanted, he rolled....STRIKE!