Read Don't Shoot! I'm Just the Avon Lady! Online
Authors: Birdie Jaworski
Tags: #Adventure, #Humor, #Memoir, #Mr. Right
Don't Shoot! I'm Just the Avon Lady! (31 page)
I watched Manuel run through the door. His body cast a shadow like Godzilla against the ballroom wall, and I willed him peace, willed him love and sanctuary. I wondered if he might have killed me if we continued, if our dance fell through eight levels of hell. The couples took their places once again, and I picked up my purse and slowly walked from the hall. I tripped in the place I last saw Manuel. My purse fell to the floor, fell open, and all my Avon samples spread in a pattern like our soles against the wood, like his sadness and my confusion, mirrored patterns of loss and redemption.
I left those samples splayed along the exit, left them to rot or use, walked into the pinprick of sun still left behind the row of pines lining the street. The third-quarter moon stared at me, seemed to send me a message, something like laughter, something only the celestial can understand, something like love. I rounded the corner and saw my van against the orange horizon, whole and rotting like what seemed left of my life. I climbed inside, pointed the wheels toward home.
Accidental Joy
The last three days of summer vacation melted the way my heart did when I left the dance. I sat on the deck, Frankie at my feet, watching my boys catch bugs and chase the little neighbor girls. I felt the same age, like the same little girl I was thirty years ago. If someone gave me the power to go back in time and tell her a secret about the future, about things that will happen, forests to avoid, parties to crash, about the year when everything in the universe happened at once, I would just smile from a distance and watch her run across that field.
My birth daughter sent me a small parcel. It arrived with the regular mail, in a soft rectangular manila envelope secured with too much tape and stuffed with bubble wrap. Louie collected the package and assorted bills and grocery store circulars and carried them into the house.
“Hey mom! You have a package! Who’s this from?” He handed me the package, covered in hand-drawn geometric designs, my name in bold purple block letters, my birth daughter’s name in a yellow flourish on the back. I told her in my first e-mail that my favorite colors were purple and yellow.
Louie didn’t recognize the name, even though I’d told him the name of his secret sister, even though I referred to her from time to time when we were driving alone by the beach winding road.
It’s not real to him yet
, I thought,
just a name like a person on page two of a new book, not enough action details and smells and purple yellow letters to make her real. Not yet.
I took the package into my bedroom and locked the door, and what fell out of the envelope was such a jangle of memory and familiar story and kinship and mystery that I couldn’t move, could barely breathe, for a long time. She wrote a short note on torn yellow legal pad paper, a one-sentence yelp of a note, calling me by first name in left-slanted print, signed with a heart near the frayed bottom edge. I picked up the contents, one by one, tried to make them into a completed puzzle of a young life. She enclosed a hand-made friendship bracelet in red, yellow, and purple, a ripped corner of an envelope with a cascade of starburst design, all in colored pencil, signed with her last name and ‘04 on the back, three photographs from age two and five and eighteen, and a cassette tape of mixed music with the words “I hope you enjoy this” written in jagged letters like a heart beat along the edge. A care package built by a color-drenched wildfire artist much too young to know anything but all the things you forget when you get old and sturdy and smart.
I remembered when I rubbed my nine-month belly and promised my baby a happy life, and then I did the only thing I knew that might give me help and guidance and money for rent, the piece of my childhood I still carried in my pocket. I prayed, holding a strand of tiny glass beads, working through the sorrowful mysteries, holding out for redemption.
I didn’t know why my daughter’s package reminded me of those rosary beads. I carried them for years, in pockets, in purses, always close at hand, from my first communion to now. They belonged to my great-paternal-grandmother, the woman I never met whose name I own. I learned that she ruled the family with harsh words and an evil stare. I learned that she handed out blessings and curses from under a short black head veil in her favorite pew during Latin Mass. She died when I was a couple of months old, and when I turned eight and ate the bread they called Jesus for the first time, I learned my name wasn’t unique, and inherited her crystal beads connected by silver wire, with a cross so rubbed that the body of the crucifix no longer held features.
I pulled out those beads every day since I got the package. They sat in a leather zippered pouch at the bottom of my purse for years, since I left my husband and decided I didn’t want to follow the spiritual rules of a group of old men. I hold them to the light, watch the sun make patterns through them, remember the nights I spent praying and crying when I dreamed my nightmare would end and my secret pregnancy would spontaneously abort. But it didn’t. Mary and Joseph and Jesus and St. Jude, the Saint of The Lost whose name I took at confirmation, didn’t hear one lonely girl. Maybe they hear others. I don’t know.
I kept praying the rosary for a few years after I gave that baby away, through a bout of rape therapy, through a marriage that didn’t stick, through so many heartaches that I felt stuck in the sorrowful mysteries. I never made it to the glorious mysteries, never resurrected like Christ, at least during those days. I quit my marriage and quit my church and dropped the beads into the bottomless pit of my purse and let them sit and think about how they failed me.
But now I look at them and see a story at each bead, see my own stories instead of the Jesus mysteries, see my own life mysteries, all connected by silver wire, all joined in an unending circle of joyful, sorrowful, and glorious days. My pregnancy didn’t abort, I gave up a healthy baby girl, and now that circle has closed with a package of joyful color beads, and who am I to think strange old saints don’t know what they’re doing? Who am I, anyway? I’m just a blue bead, just another face of the goddess, another face of Jesus, another face of a secret daughter, another face like you, like anyone, another sparkle ancient mystery bead.
I drove my sister’s stick shift car from Manhattan to New Jersey. Dog hair covered every square inch - brown dog hair and curdled dirty baby cups and half-chewed pretzels and I held a print-out map of the winding way to my daughter’s small town between my legs. As I drove I thought about things. I thought about my life, all the years between the rape and now, all the adventure of campouts and school field trips and pizza Fridays, all the x’s in my cross stitch life map, how I added color and texture and design, how I always left a corner undone.
I’m so different now
, I thought.
I’m not that girl in the woods, that girl with broken fingers and no friends. I’m not that girl.
I thought of the photos my birth daughter sent me, how she looks like that girl, looks like a young me.
I know so little about her
, I thought.
She looks like me but she’s a stranger.
I drove around a tall hill with granite outcroppings and fall-colored trees. I turned at a blinking red light and shifted down, coasting to a stop at a small house in the woods with two decorative scarecrows in the front yard and a pumpkin on the porch. My daughter stood at the edge of the gravel drive. I was half an hour late, but she stood waiting, her hands behind her back, and I stepped out of the car and backwards in time, two decades back, to the night of her birth, into her arms.
I don’t understand life, or death, or anything, really. All I know is you get what you get. I got an old new daughter, not a stranger, a real child just like her brothers, and my heart and arms and mind couldn’t find a difference. I saw those years of exile disappear, rise off my body like fever during the short walk from my sister’s car to the edge of the drive, to my daughter.
I don’t remember the words I used when I told her about her birth. I don’t remember anything I said to her or anything she said to me. But somehow a million busy cells swapped stories and places and memory and we found ourselves on the black lake behind her house, in a blue paddleboat with a candy-striped canopy, alone on the lake, drifting, drifting, not paddling, resting, letting the water transform two decades into glass-shattered reflection, into nothingness.
Ring! My cell phone buzzed. I almost didn’t answer it, the day was too sunny, too quiet. I sure as hell didn’t want to deal with an Avon customer. But I flipped it open as my boys tackled the dog.
“Hello? This is Birdie!”
“Birdie. This is Ulak. I called to thank you for what you did.”
I paused, wondered what the heck my Turkish friend meant. I didn’t recall doing anything important.
“Birdie. Listen. You did a brave thing. You always do brave things.”
I hesitated, unsure what to say. I thought my messy summer, Shanna’s upcoming New Year’s Eve wedding, how I almost dated a man who liked kilts, the way the universe brought me a DNA piece gone missing for many years. I smiled, and as I spoke, I knew my friend could hear the vibration of my heart.
“Ulak. The road to Istanbul is found by asking and asking along the way.”
Acknowledgements
Special thanks and love to Didi Menendez, Carroll McNeill, J.K. Kaufman, Louise Pring, Matthew Arnold, Jack McGeehin, Lloyd M., Mike Firesmith, Patia Stephens, Nancy L., Stever, Miss T., and every other reader who sent me kind comments and encouragement.
Extra special thanks and love to my children, each of whom is special and dear to me in millions of ways.
Many of the stories in this work first appeared in Birdie Jaworski’s blog,
Beauty Dish: Underground Adventures of an Avon Lady
.
Stories have also appeared in:
Virtual Occoquan
Common Ties
BlogHer.org
Gather.com
The Las Vegas Times
Adoption Today
About the Author
Birdie Jaworski lives in Las Vegas, New Mexico with her two young sons, two dogs, two rabbits, and two parrots. Beauty Dish, the blog on which this memoir is based, has been featured in the New York Times, Time Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, and Positive Thinking magazine.
Birdie’s stories have appeared in many online and print journals, including Good Housekeeping, The San Diego Reader, the Las Vegas Times, the Las Vegas Optic, Adoption Today, MiPOesias, BlogHer, The Nervous Breakdown, and the Virtual Occoquan.
You can visit Birdie’s website at
birdiejaworski.com
.
Table of Contents
What the Hell is Cute, Anyway?
Below the Belt Belongs to Turkey!
Show and Tell at School, at Train Station
Don’t Shoot! I’m Just the Avon Lady!
Wherein I Test a Product on an Animal