Don't Shoot! I'm Just the Avon Lady! (9 page)

She lived behind the grocery, on the street bordering the alley where six dumpsters formed a train of trash. I often saw poor immigrants fish for aluminum cans at night there, several per dumpster, holding stuffed black garbage bags and flashlights. Some nights, long years ago, I walked from dumpster to dumpster in a Midwestern town, collecting bottles and cans by moonlight, beer and coke dripping behind me, a trail of liquid poverty crumbs to my home. I wondered if Maria knew that poverty, collected discarded pieces of middle class America to sell for bread, why she found my brochure in a dumpster.

A hedge of weathered Aloe and purple plum surrounded her home, overgrown with dead cusps and branches and spindly Datura. The hedge came up to an iron gate decorated with a six-foot steel lion, front paws extended in the air above him, ornate crown on his head. I pushed his belly and opened the gate, opened to a lush tropical garden filled with red Azaleas and hanging blue Morning Glory with three spouting fountains, a Koi pond, and a large woman gardener, a large and wrinkled old woman gardener, holding hedge clippers, leaning into a thorny pink rose bush, wearing nothing but the smile God gave her and two pink plastic hair barrettes.

“Oh my gosh! Pardon me! I think I have the wrong house!” I turned to race out the gate, but I heard a guttural laugh and the clang of clippers against the Saltillo tile.

“No, no, you got the right place. I go get a housecoat. You sit down.”

She waved me to a cast iron bench, and I sat, placing my backpack at my side, orange and white spotted Koi swimming up to greet my feet. I didn’t raise my eyes to watch Maria saunter or hobble or sway to get her housecoat. The brief second of eye flesh contact was enough, enough to see folds of sweat-glistened fat and dimples and feet with cracking black volcanic soles. I looked around the yard, started plotting an escape route should any more elderly naked people appear.

“Now. Hello. What you got for me?”

Maria carried one of those cheap white plastic outdoor chairs you buy at Kmart and plunked it down next to the bench. She sat, legs spread apart, wearing a powder blue chenille housecoat, an old fashioned housecoat with a princess collar and two hip pockets lined with navy piping. Varicose veins and age spots covered every inch of her legs, but even through the generous fat I could see muscle.

“Sorry to walk in without knocking. I didn’t know you’d, uh, be indisposed.” I held out my right hand in greeting and Maria grabbed it with her left hand, a strong dry-skin grip.

“No, no, it fine. I keep the Aloe high so I can wear no clothes. Nobody ever see.”

She spoke like a man, a pirate’s swagger to her voice, rough and ready and bordered in laughter, and the many lines on her face gave away a life of this laughter, deep crow’s lines and smile arcs, not a hint of disaster or depression. “Plus I dun care. No one care about an old woman with no clothes.”

“Well I don’t blame you! Clothes just get in the way, don’t they?”

I winked at Maria and opened my pack to remove brochures and tiny lipsticks in rose and cinnamon and a stack of wrinkle care skin samples. She looked like she needed those.

“Lemme ask you. What you name? Bird? Bird, I come from Hungary. We only use the aloe and witch hazel on the face. I dun need no skin cream. I want the lipstick. Hmm. This is nice.”

She opened the cinnamon tube and applied it to her lips in a wayward pattern. “Very nice. I want order one of these. Lemme tell you Bird. My husband died two year ago. Heart failure. He was a gud man. He did no like no lipstick. But now I live by myself and I gonna wear it. Order me two of these. And that bath oil. You know.”

I wrote down two cinnamon lipsticks in my order pad and one Skin-So-Soft, the bath oil of everyone. Maria bent down and scratched her left leg. Her fingernails were mottled gray, and a thousand veins popped from her hand.

“Now Bird. Lemme ask you. How old you think I am?”

Maria smiled and sat back in the chair. It creaked against the tile and I prayed it would not collapse under her weight. I hate age questions. I peered at her face, at the frizzy gray hair held back in little-girl barrettes, at the lines around her eyes, at the fingernails mottled and dark, and leaned just a bit closer. I hesitated, tried not to remember her sagging breasts and rumpled tummy.

“Uh, 53? At the most, I mean!” Maria laughed and laughed, slapping her knee, nodding her head, laughed with delight and the sureness of someone who knows the answer will be good and great and predictable.

“Bird, lemme tell you. I am 81 years old. Yes, 81. No one think I am 81. No one. I look so good because of the aloe. And because I swim one mile every morning in the ocean. One mile! Imagine that! I am 81 and I swim one mile every day! I could be in those Olympics but I’m not American citizen.” Maria stated that last bit like it was damn fact, like she was damn fast, as fast as Micheal Phelps himself, should he be 81 and a naked gardener and swim in a riptide ocean.

“Wow, one mile! No way! You don’t look 81 at all!” I clapped my hands and grinned wide, thinking Oh Yes you old Hungarian lady, you look exactly 81 years old, but I love it, love the way you look and act and talk and growl. I love it.

I drove home, thinking about Maria, knowing she shucked the housecoat the minute I slammed the metal lion shut, knowing you could cast her far out to sea, past Catalina even, and she’d backstroke home, naked and slick with aloe, through storm and shark and beds of mysterious kelp, sure as Hungarian witch hazel, a crazy pirate laugh on her lips.
Why can’t I be that sure, that Olympic, that crazy? I want to make bold decisions, too
, I thought.
But I have
, I remembered.
I took a tattoo. I gave life to a child, then gave her life again with new parents
. Maria’s face taunted me, told me something I knew the moment I signed those relinquishment papers.

I wanted to agree to some kind of contact with my birth daughter.

Ulak’s Folly

Shanna called me six days later from Cabo San Lucas. She laughed over the phone, and I heard the plaintive cry of seagulls and the splash of someone diving cannonball into a resort pool. Joel murmured something in the background about going to get more cigarettes and Shanna made kissy noises with her hand over the receiver. I rolled my eyes.

“Birdie, I’m in Mexico with Joel! Oh my God, Birdie, he’s divine. I’m so fucking in love.”

I hung up the phone after hearing about whale watches, Baja lobster dinners, and Latino heavy metal.
Wow
, I thought.
Shanna found the real thing
. I brushed the hair out of my face and smoothed my t-shirt over my snugger-than-usual jeans.
Geeze, I gotta lose a few pounds
. I swore off chocolate for a week. I thought of Shanna and her zaftig figure and True Love mullet boytoy.
Hmmmm, maybe chocolate is OK
. I tumbled on the couch, decided I should write my own personal ad and find, find…find, what? No heavy metal guy for me. Maybe a chef. Or a fireman. I pictured men in utilitarian uniforms chasing fire, rescuing cats and grandmothers, their muscles sweaty, heaving under flame-retardant material. Yeah, a fireman. I lifted the newspaper from the floor and vowed to write that profile the next day. A glossy brochure dropped from the paper. An Avon Men’s Catalogue. Must have been sitting under the couch. I wiped the dust off the cover and turned it over in my hands.

The prior fall, Avon printed thin glossy catalogues featuring items like battery-operated nose hair trimmers and NFL pajamas. A Men’s Catalogue, oh baby yeah. And good Avon Lady that I am, I bought in. I ordered two hundred brochures, pictured the fat neighborhood bookkeeper with the closet full of red plaid shirts buying moisturizing face cream and an extra-large spritz bottle of RPM cologne. I might double my earnings, I thought. I might meet a cute single guy in need of soothing eye cream and a soft pair of fingers to apply it.
This Men’s Catalogue is brilliant
, I thought.
Brilliant
.

Three months later one hundred fifty Men’s Catalogues taunted me from my bedroom floor. No one wanted them. No men sifted through the slick pages, carefully considered the benefits of daily exfoliation. My female customers laughed when I tried to slip them a Men’s Catalogue or two to give to the homeboys ruling their sun. You’ve gotta be kidding, they said. My man barely showers. He ain’t gonna start spreading Ab Cream on his love handles. It’s a joke, right? I’ll just order him that soap-on-a-rope in the regular Avon book.

So I tried stealth brochure drops - leaving those aging books stuck under the windshield wipers of every pickup truck in town, placing one or two next to the girly mags covering the coffee table at the barbershop. But no beauty-hungry men called. My demonstration nose hair trimmers gathered dust.

I turned from my back to my stomach on the couch. The boys flipped cards on the carpet in a game of War. I squinted to read the fine print on the back of the brochure. One week before the damn catalogues expired. I still had close to forty glossies littering my floor.
Oh crap
, I thought.
That’s fifty cents a book thrown away. My yard sale isn’t for another week, dang it. And where the heck did I store those nose hair trimmers, anyway?
I considered dumping the entire lot. My boys fought against each other. Jack beats ten. Queen beats Jack. King beats Queen. Louie raised one eyebrow and gathered his cards close to his body. I decided this Queen wasn’t gonna bow down to any King.

I searched the newspaper for some event where men gathered - a demolition derby perhaps, or a bear hunting convention. But Southern California doesn’t host a whole lotta manly man get-togethers, so I squished the paper into a small ball. As I reached over my head to toss the wad into the trash, the words Men’s Bowling League caught my eye. Oh! This is it! I unwrapped the paper, read the small notice about the summer league finals and nodded my head. Yeah. Bowling. Yeah!

The phone jangled and I rolled off the couch.

“Hello” Giggles escaped from my lips as Marty nonchalantly attempted to sneak a peek at his brother’s cards.

“Ummm, is this Birdie?” The voice sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place it.

“Yes, this is Birdie, can I help you?” I cleared my throat in embarrassment and reached for my Avon order pad.

“I bought fifty tubes of Moisture Rich hand cream from you two weeks ago -”

“Oh man, I’m sorry, Avon shorted me two tubes but I didn’t get a chance to tell you because you ran off so quick.” I jumped into her words, assuming she called to take me to task.

“No worries about that. I need fifty more tubes. Can we make the same arrangements?”

We agreed to meet once again at the train station on Thursday, at the same four-ten time, under the same ticket counter, on the same bench, and I assured her the bags would contain exactly fifty-two tubes, but she didn’t seem to care. She still refused to give me her name or number, and I didn’t press. I remembered that thirty-five dollar tip, and figured she was paying for my bewildered discretion. I also gave a prayer of thanks as her order jacked me into the highest Avon commission sales level, a cool fifty percent.

Train station, Thursday. Yard Sale, Saturday. Men’s Bowling League, Sunday. I wrote the upcoming events in my organizer and mentally spent the boatloads of cash I was sure to earn.
I’ll buy a new pair of jeans, and a new set of water glasses to replace the ones the boys broke
. Marty’s screaming broke my reverie and I stepped in to referee a fight over who was cheating who at War.
Oh man, make this summer go away, give me school days
, I thought. I called my Turkish friend, Ulak, in desperation.

“Ulak, I can’t do it. I can’t keep sane. I’m not a good Avon Lady. All I know how to do is bake cookies and cakes and tell kids funny stories and build school projects out of dried macaroni noodles. I can’t even sew patches on pants, Ulak! I’m freaking out over here! I’m serious! I’m freaking out! It’s a long hot summer and my Avon sales are way way down. I’m just not getting into it right now. Can you come over and entertain Marty and Louie so I can at least get my fucking brochures delivered without listening to their incessant whining? Please? Please?”

I could hear Ulak’s mother in the background. She yelled something to him in Turkish and I heard him cover the phone received with his hand and answer back. She made a noise of disapproval, but Ulak returned to the phone.

“Ok, I’ll come over. But on one condition.”

“Fuck, I’ll do anything. Anything! What?”

“Stop cursing. It’s unladylike.”

Ulak drove over and parked his SUV in my driveway and the boys ran out to hug him. He handed them each a Hershey’s bar, and they wiggled and churned a chocolate victory dance around his car. Ulak saw me peering through a window and he waved to me, waved “come outside.” I slid into my Avon NASCAR slippers and walked out front. The air felt unusual, cold and heavy and damp, the aftermath of unusual torrential summer rains, and I saw piles of empty trashcans up and down my street and realized I forgot to take out the weekly garbage.
Damn
.

“Birdie, good afternoon.” Ulak bowed his head in greeting and pulled a newspaper clipping out of the front pocket of his jeans. “Look, it says they have a new dog park by the old volcano. Let’s get your dog and go. You need a break, you don’t look good.”