Don't Shoot! I'm Just the Avon Lady! (2 page)

My van’s tires hum an anxiety song when we cross the highway, and this time they yowled over the rock-studded cactus street, and down into the ocean subdivision where my new customer lived. I love my crappy van. I love the way her navy blue coat holds scratches, gravel dents and pockmarks, an acne-complexioned van with knobby tires and two broken window handles. I love the rusty hole in the floor beneath the shotgun seat. Sometimes I eat cherries and try to pitch the hard black pits through the hole. I think she loves me too, at least in the way a car can love a girl. She drove me home after yesterday’s cell phone call. I hit the steering wheel and sobbed, yelled curse words at my past, and I could feel something through the metal floor, some kind of rumble-love metallic hug.

The day before, a number had flashed on my cell phone and I flipped it open with my left hand as I tossed an Avon brochure against a customer’s flagstone walk with my right. The area code was from the town and state in which I lived twenty years ago.

“Hi, is this Birdie?”

“Yes?” I racked my brain, trying to place the woman’s voice with a face from my past.

“Birdie Jaworski?”

“Yes?” I still didn’t recognize her, but she spoke with the slight hesitation of someone who bears uncertain news.

“My name is Janet Andrews. I’m a social worker with Catholic Charities.”

I heard the sharp intake of my own breath. Janet continued her greeting. The baby girl I gave up for adoption twenty-one years ago was now an adult, and was seeking her birth mother.

“She’s inquisitive. She’s certain she wants contact with you. Her adoptive parents are supportive of this. Her father came into our offices with her.”

Janet carefully relayed the information, speaking slowly, with deliberation. She didn’t reveal a name or location. I didn’t speak at all, only made small humming noises into the telephone. She talked for an hour, explaining my options. I could choose to remain anonymous at this point in time, perhaps forever. I could write or e-mail or take my birth daughter’s call. I only remember part of the conversation. I stopped hearing her nasal voice. I thought about what happened. I was so young.

I walked along the outskirts of a local college campus. I traveled the border of crabgrass and oak forest every day on my way home from the library. I walked barefoot in the grass, carried my Dr. Scholl’s sandals in one hand, and sang songs like “Hurts So Good” and “Centerfold” and “Rosanna” as if I were a rock and roll singer.

I must have been singing when it happened. I don’t remember now. I don’t remember much. Someone stepped out of the dark canopy of trees and grabbed me around the neck. He covered my mouth with one hand and dragged me into the forest. He had a knife. He raped me. I remember only bits and pieces of the attack. I don’t remember his face or his height. I don’t remember how long it lasted. I can still hear his voice, though, the way he hissed “don’t look at me” over and over and over. I can still feel his arm tight around my neck and his hand clutching my mouth. And I remember one part with multicolor slow motion clarity - the part where he grabbed my right hand and deliberately broke three fingers, one by one, pinky, ring finger, middle finger, broke them like chicken bones. Sometimes I hear that cracking pop in my dreams.

Two months after the rape I kept waking up sick and disoriented. My fingers were healing, bruises fading from purple to yellow brown, but my stomach felt worse, like fire and gunpowder water and it radiated to my throat, to my head. I didn’t know I was pregnant until my breasts swelled and my back began to ache. I looked in the Yellow Pages and called an abortion clinic, the one that advertised a sliding scale fee and twilight sleep. I told the receptionist I was young and raped and poor and pregnant. She told me to bring six hundred dollars in cash, a friend to drive me home, and an empty stomach the next morning. I didn’t have a friend or six hundred dollars so I stayed home. I had a baby daughter. I gave her up for adoption.

Janet jotted down my current address and told me to expect a package of legal information.
I’m OK
, I thought.
I just don’t know
.

You Don’t Know Jack

We pulled up to the gate and I leaned out the driver’s window and entered the security code on a gleaming metal plate. The cast iron slid discreetly into a wall of lavender Azaleas and I piloted the van into a road like a jungle, so unlike the dust and sage of my neighborhood, a jungle of mature twisted vines and king palms and the pink trumpets of Datura. My customer’s house sat immediately to my right, a three-story monster of dark wood and metal with porthole windows, a sea-whipped American flag, and six redwood decks circling the structure like a hoop skirt.

I stood at the double entry - two doors made of thick oak panels and carved with an intricate Japanese design. I rang the doorbell and turned to give my two young boys a warning glance.

“Yes?” A woman in denim overalls opened the door in one big gust. She wore a backwards baseball cap over short frizzy gray hair and black flip-flops on gnarly feet. Her mouth turned down in a perpetual frown and her face was lined and spotted with sun damage. I estimated her age to be fifty.

“Hi! I’m Birdie the Avon Lady! I have your Skin-So-Soft and a brochure so you can order a fresh bottle.” I held out the goods with my biggest grin. My Louie-year-old held out the Avon Campaign 16 brochure on cue.

“Hey! Does this house really cost a million dollars?” Marty interjected his question with a high-pitched rapid-fire voice and I turned to give him the evil eye.

“Ha ha, he’s such a kidder!” I stuck my right leg behind me and kicked him gently in the shin.

“No, I’m not kidding. You said only millionaires live here and this lady sounded like a weird millionaire. She doesn’t look that weird to me except for THAT!” He pointed at the bunion on the side of her foot, a painful peeling red onion of skin overhanging the side of the flip-flop.

I wanted to drop the Skin-So-Soft and run. I wanted to leave the boys there, with books and bunion talk, to fend for themselves, but I forged ahead.

“Oh my, I’m so sorry, I’m so embarrassed. Marty! Apologize right now!” He mumbled an insincere apology and looked quizzically at his brother, who shrugged his shoulders, arm still outstretched with the brochure.

The woman glared at me. Her expression didn’t change, still spoke of crabapple dreams. “Just come in. Nana is expecting you.”

Bunion Lady led us inside, into a cavern of a house, a beach cottage on steroids, as if you took the imaginary seaside vacation home of your childhood and pumped it full of air and tossed around white doilies and romance novels like confetti. It looked the way a haughty expensive ocean-side home ought, with windows as big as a whale’s mouth overlooking surfers and seagulls and one lone barge resting in the waves. But none of this caught my attention the way one thing assaulted me and held me hostage.

“Ewwwwwww! What’s that smell?” Marty grabbed his nose and wrinkled his face into a prune. I decided then and there never to bring him on a customer call again. Ever. But embarrassment or not, he was right. The place smelled like a musty oven of animal excretion mixed with pine sol and rubber.

“Just breathe through your mouth. That’s what I’m doing,” Louie offered helpfully to his brother and I shook my head and hoped Bunion Lady wouldn’t tell Nana - whoever she was - that I had hell children with porcupine manners.

We walked through a dining room with a gray marble floor and into a kitchen with an iceberg of an island in the middle. Expensive, unused pots and pans swung from a rotating wheel on the ceiling. Bunion Lady stopped at French doors covered with silver and green brocade drapes. She turned and looked at me with a wry expression.

“Perhaps your children would like to wait here. I’ll get them some crackers and milk. I don’t think you’ll want them in the next room.”

I nodded at Marty and Louie and they ran to the swivel bar seats and began spinning, the strange odor forgotten in this fantastic culinary playground.

Bunion Lady opened the right side of the door and I stepped inside to face the oldest person I have ever seen.

“You the Avon woman?” Her voice seemed so much younger than her years, loud and strong, you could hear the vinegar beneath the surface. She sat on a green vinyl recliner with an aluminum walker waiting to one side. Her face and arms and hands were made from wrinkles, and I couldn’t imagine a time when she danced with young men and wore rose blush on soft cheeks, when she didn’t look like the oldest alligator leather purse in the world. She looked older than old people in cartoons, older than the shrunken apple-head people you can buy at holiday church bazaars.

But this was a visit of superlatives, and the smell was bigger than the house and she was older than the smell, and the flock of beasts surrounding her was even odder than her appearance. Dogs. Small dogs, all wiry and spastic with black and brown and white painted fur. They ran and yelped and jumped and scratched, mostly scratched, and I think I counted sixteen, my mouth open and speechless.

“You the Avon woman? Cat got your tongue?” Nana barked the question and I nodded.

“Yes, ma’am. I’m the Avon Lady. Here.” I stuck my hand out, still holding the Skin-So-Soft, and she grabbed it in old wrinkled hands much stronger than mine.

“Good. These bastards have fleas. My God do they have fleas. These are organic Jack Russells and I can’t use Advantage.” She spat as she spoke and picked up a pair of rhinestone-studded black cat’s-eye glasses and held the bottle inches from her face. “How do you apply this? It doesn’t say how to get rid of fleas.”

“Well, I’ve heard that it’s a good insect repellent, but I don’t know the specifics. Maybe stick them in a bath and add the Skin-So-Soft and shampoo it in?” As I answered the question I pushed down no less than four terriers and felt the sharp accumulation of scratch marks on my bare legs.

“Hmmmph.” Nana set the bottle on an oak stand and picked up a large pink change purse with a simple metal pin clasp. “How much do I owe you?”

“Oh, nothing, this is a new customer gift to you, but I would appreciate an order for something, maybe more Skin-So-Soft. Gee you have a lot of these lovely dogs. Organic, eh?” I kept pushing dogs down, pushing them back into the wooden floor, feeling sharp nails against my skin, and feeling the prick and itch of biting fleas.

Nana didn’t answer my question, and I wondered what an organic Jack Russell was - a new breeding technique, perhaps, or a New Age marketing ploy? I left her sitting with the Skin-So-Soft, reading my Avon brochure, and wrestled my way out the door, feet entangled in terriers.

I packed the boys in the van. The sun still sat low on the horizon, yawning itself awake on the other side of the desert mountains. I couldn’t hear Nana’s terriers from the driveway, but I imagined them jumping and scratching, waiting in line for a Skin-So-Soft bath massage.

“I think that lady was a hundred years old.” Marty fished a ginger snap from between the car seat cushions and shoved it in his mouth. “An’ her dogs smelled like YOU!” He threw another cookie at his brother and they wrestled and giggled as I tossed my backpack in the front passenger seat.

We hustled toward home. My boys counted fleabites and I leaned down to scratch my leg in solidarity. I pulled at my left shirt armhole with my right hand, left still at the wheel, tried to press against my sunburn to relieve the pressure.

My van squealed and I watched countless SUVs and Beamers and white sedans zip around us like we were trouble, like they wanted to escape the bedroom lands, didn’t want to see the poverty they hid, didn’t want to see the dead rattlesnakes lining the road. All my years living near the coastal desert, it’s been exactly the same. Though my town rolls new strip malls and clumps of identical stucco housing and fast food joints and peep shows like tumbleweeds along the freeway, the desert stays brown and quiet and dimpled unless you water the hell out of it, always smells of mesquite and coyote droppings and loneliness.

We barreled pass the Catholic Church. A woman in torn jeans and trendy sheepskin boots stood in front of the marquee which announced the times for Mass and Confession. She wore a mini leather backpack and hovered, as if studying the schedule would offer inspiration or answers. Her wispy platinum hair flew in the wind, formed a lonely-woman halo around her head. I wondered when the Catholic Charities paperwork would arrive. I tried not to cry as we turned at the light and my boys begged to stop for an ice cream.

My cell phone rang - broke my reverie. Marty and Louie jumped, and a hundred crumbling cookies spilled between the backseat cushions of my van. I flipped open the phone but the number didn’t appear on the display, only the words “Private Caller.”
Wow, must be another customer
, I thought.

“Hello! This is Birdie! May I help you?” I used my professional order-taking Avon voice - bright, cheery and articulate - and stuck the phone between my neck and cheek as the person on the other end breathed into my ear.

“Yes, you can. I need fifty tubes of Moisture Therapy hand lotion.” A woman’s voice, low and sultry, ordered the products, and I sensed a slight hesitation, as if she were afraid of someone listening to her speak. “And I need it right away.”

The Man Who Likes Kilts

“Are we going straight home?” Marty sighed from the back seat as the woman spoke. I placed my hand over the cell phone mouthpiece and shushed him with a quick sideways “I Mean Business” glance. He leaned against the door, one hand in the empty cookie bag. I cleared my throat. Did the woman actually ask for fifty hand creams? If so, it would be my biggest sale to date.