Don't Shoot! I'm Just the Avon Lady! (29 page)

What? What did he see? What would make me yell or point or flail around in agony?
I wanted to ask, to demand an answer, but I was more embarrassed that Ulak was right. I would sneak around like a two bit marital problem detective, then snap a photo and point and cry or whatever the scene warranted, yes I would.
Crap. Am I that transparent?

“So Miss Birdie. I grabbed a cab to Venice Beach and walked slowly - slowly, Birdie, slowly, not fast like you - to the bookstore and waited. I just waited, and talked to my friends at the restaurant, and looked at the vendors, and I looked out at the sea, and I found out all about your little friend. What do you suppose she does with your Avon? Do you have any idea at all?”

I didn’t flinch, didn’t change my expression, just stared at Ulak’s left eye, the eye pinning me to the fountain tiles.

“She sells lotions by the seashore,” Ulak singsang like the tongue twister, “She sells ‘intimacy’ lotions with sandalwood and myrrh. Massage lotions. She squeezes out your Avon into glass bottles and mixes them with essential oils and sells them for twenty dollars a bottle. Here, I bought one for you.” Ulak pulled a blue glass bottle from his cargo shorts and handed it to me. The label said “Magikal Massage Lotion - Clove” in spirited twirly script and I opened it, breathed it in, and smelled the unmistakable scent of cloves mixed with Moisture Rich hand cream. Fifteen bucks a bottle, and no walking door-to-door? Geez. Why didn’t
I
think of doing that?!

Runaway Nuts

The summer rounded a corner, turned from July to August. Serious Avon Apathy moved to my address. Sure, I knocked on doors, left satin smooth brochures and samples of beauty promise on beach cottage porches, under doormats, stuffed behind screen doors, balanced on mailboxes. But my heart didn’t hold any Skin-So-Soft or Lift and Tuck. It carried the harsh reality of unpaid bills, a drumbeat unrest with life and location, sparse communication with friends and family, and my customers noticed. They started leaving me desperate messages. Hey, Birdie! Come play makeover with me! Give me diamond cut lips! Reduce my hips! C’mon, Birdie! I know you’re there!

I ignored them. I left Avon bags of goodness in the moonlight, let them mail me checks as some customers faded to nothing, to other Avon Ladies full of lipstick lifeforce. The hell with Avon, I thought. I need a change. This ain’t cutting it anymore. Why hasn’t Kilt Man Kevin called? Where the hell are my friends?

My potbellied pig didn’t care that I paced my yard calculating inadequate income and overwhelming outflow. Frankie sure made himself at home. He discovered every cabinet containing food and started stealing the dog’s chew toys. He learned to sit and stand and roll and play dead and dance and fetch and sing! He took to climbing the hill and trotting across the catwalk to the treehouse and spent long afternoons up in the Mexican Pepper tree watching people walk up and down the neighboring street. One day he even dropped a heavy rawhide bone on the sidewalk-ridden Boxer who left gifts of dog doo under my pear tree. Klunk! It landed on the offender’s lumpy head, and I received a snotty call from an irate owner.

He snoozed in the morning sun, his pink and black and white sides coated with perspiration, while the kids played water fights. He sat under the early evening shade of the Macadamia trees and mimicked the call of sparrows and crows in an uneven earthy grunt. One afternoon I heard a raucous cheer from the neighborhood kids and ran out to the backyard to see Frankie run at full speed across the yard and then SPLASH!!!! A full stomach belly flop and fast scoot along my boys’ Slip ‘n Slide. He rose at the end, up on four hooves fast, and I swear he bowed and waited for his score. He ran to the end of the line and waited his turn without a push or shove, and he stood with respect until the tiny boy before him finished his slide and stepped off the plastic.

Frankie plopped his body into the dusky clay under the Macadamia trees and pushed the round nuts with his snout most afternoons, let the sun and wind coat his hide with fine sand while my young boys sat on his back and hugged his bulging neck. I fed him bowls of piggy kibble and leftovers, and watched him grow fat and happy and sure of his place in my world of child management and bottled allure. He put away more food than each of us human animals combined. He let crumbs fall from his mouth onto the floor, near x-rated ecstatic groans escaping his lips, the first bite to the last. He honored the meal with a sideways flip to the ground, a full-on collapse of satisfaction, ending each meal with a gratified snore. He ballooned to 125 pounds of solid pack pork and I exchanged his small cedar pillow for a wicker Great Dane dog bed.

My boys fueled his fire, snuck snacks while I sat at my computer, stuffed Graham crackers and peanut butter sandwiches under their shirts and let Frankie munch them under the shade of the deck. 125 became 140 turned 160, and I noticed Frankie developing an unhealthy obsession with the creak of the refrigerator door. His stomach started to sway from side to side as he walked, like the lurching swing of an old dancer’s hips.

“Give that pig some exercise!” I pointed to the harness and leash hanging over the laundry room door, and made Marty and Louie saddle up, walk Frankie around the block, once, twice, three hundred times.

Good, I thought. He’ll slim down and the boys will keep out of my hair.

A week passed. Then two. The pig enjoyed his exercise more than I anticipated. Frankie stood at the front door for hours, waiting for Walk Time, and I stared at his speckled gut, wondering why the damn pig looked swollen and impatient. My boys hustled down the street, tied pig in hand, and I shrugged my shoulders. A pig is a pig is a pig. They simply aren’t small animals.

I didn’t know that Frankie and the boys kept a delicious secret. My boys wandered my door-knocking neighborhood with long faces and a fat pet who liked to sit and scratch every sixteen feet. The Avon customers I loved, ignored, and lost spied the spectacle, called my boys close for gossip and sympathy, and Marty and Louie told the long sad story of the hungry pig and the demanding mother. The ladies along my street handed out Ritz crackers and processed cheese and hotdogs and packaged cookies... all for poor, starving Frankie and his indentured companions.

One evening I thought I smelled Oreos when I bent down to pat Frankie on the head.
Hmmmmmmmm
, I thought.
Something is just not right
. I grabbed the boys and gave them the evil eye until they spilled the beans.

“Mommmmmmmmm. Frankie loves to eat! He’s a pig! He can’t help it.” Marty sat on the tiled floor and leaned against the pig. “Plus Mrs. Caldwell gives us apple pie and Gatorade.”

I banned the boys from their dinner-spoiling outings and cut Frankie’s rations in half. The pig howled at the door. His ears flapped up and down as he tried to reach the doorknob with one hoof. I massaged his back and tummy, carefully explaining that even pigs need to be mindful of gluttony. He didn’t care. He didn’t stop, either, kept yodeling and pushing and pawing the door, with a determined and fatalistic grimace.

I rolled my eyes and headed for the kitchen. I ran warm water into the sink and added dish soap. Frankie grunted twice. I scrubbed a pot, then some silverware. Frankie fell silent. I breathed a sigh of relief and finished my kitchen chores, making a mental list of the Avon deliveries I still needed to make. I dried my hands and turned the corner. The front door shook slightly in the wind. Open! Frankie was gone!

I sucked in dry white air. The door stood ajar, looked alone, frightened, as if it kept secrets. I felt the rush of salt air through the hall. It met my feet, my legs, and my heart sank as I strained to look through the front window, hoping to see Frankie munching grass or a wax-leaved potted succulent. Nothing. No pig. I heard the electric rattle of toy trains and my youngest boy imitating the call of the conductor.

“Frankie! Fraaaaaaaaaaaaankie!” I yelled into the cul-de-sac, but my voice bounced off the empty asphalt, echoed and rolled down the hill, didn’t hit a runaway pig.

I knocked on Louie’s bedroom door, made him shelve his comic book and join the living room fray. He sighed long and hard and hit the couch hard with his butt. His younger brother continued operating the train. He blew a wooden whistle and wore a striped engineer’s hat. I grabbed my cell phone and shoved it in my front kilt pocket and slammed the front door behind me.

“Frankie! Fraaaaaaaaaaaaankie!” I ran as fast as I could, passing locked gates and manicured lawns. No sign of hungry swine on a grocery rampage. At the bottom of the street I hovered. Right or left? I hustled up a brick walk belonging to an old woman who once bought six bottles of Imari perfume.

“Hello? Mrs. Frazier? Are you there? It’s me, Birdie. The Avon Lady. Hello?” I banged the door knocker hard against her pine door. “Hello! Please open up!”

The steady slow thump of Mrs. Frazier’s walker against Mexican tile frustrated me. I kept twisting my head right and left, looking, listening, hoping to take in some outlying radar ping of pig frenzy. The old woman opened her door and greeted me with a huge smile.

“Birdie! It has been so long. Please do come in.” She spoke with the careful articulation of her generation, turned her back, and lifted and clunked her walking device in a methodical pattern toward her paisley couch. I took a deep breath and interrupted her concentration.

“Mrs. Frazier, I’m so so sorry, but I can’t sit down. I’m here to see if you saw a runaway pig? My potbellied pig ran away just a few minutes ago but I don’t know which direction he took. Did you see him outside your window at all?” I made running motions with my hands as if I were a pet control mime. Mrs. Frazier stared at me through rheumy gray eyes.

“Birdie, I have not seen any pigs unless you count the chorizo defrosting in my refrigerator. Now let us sit down and you can take an Avon order from me. I have gone through those six bottles of Imari and could use a few more.” She scooted the walker once more, and I realized with a start that the house absolutely reeked of Avon fragrance. I began breathing through my mouth and beads of sweat broke out along my hairline.

This is what my life has come to
, I thought.
I can’t even smell the damn stuff anymore.

“Mrs. Frazier, sorry! I have to go!” I hiked my kilt and high-tailed it outside, gently closing the door, then sprinting from her house to the next. I didn’t know the old lady somehow set the psychic stage with some kind of strange thought pulse that sent beauty desperation in concentric circles through my neighborhood.

Some kind of Imari-challenged Mrs. Frazier greeted me at every house along the street. Come in, Birdie, each woman said, old and young. I haven’t seen you in forever! I need Avon! Let’s chat about the summer colors! I tried to bring the conversation around to my missing pig, but no one heard.

I must have Glimmerstick tattooed on my forehead
, I mused.
I’ve been in the land of the missing, but all anyone wants is the load my arms carry.

I promised each woman I would return with my backpack and the latest samples. I promised each woman I wouldn’t stay an Avon stranger, I would help her life be beautiful and fragrant. I was promising one woman - a spry chick of seventy-six with a long blonde wig - that I would bring her wrinkle cream and lipstick and six shades of blush and, and, and.... and as my hand cramped with speed ordering, I saw a fat little beast saunter through her backyard, saw him stop and sit and eat two pink roses from a bush.

“Holy crap! Mrs. Belvins, I have to go! Sorry! I’ll come back tomorrow to finish this!” I crammed the order in my back pocket and twirled to run, but Mrs. Blonde Wig grabbed my arm with surprising strength.

“You know what the trouble with you is, Birdie?” She stood eight inches shorter than me, but she met me eye-to-eye in mental martial art combat. “You don’t take your Avon seriously.”

She dropped my arm and gave me a wry grin. “Your pig is safe in my backyard. Now let’s finish up this order, shall we?”

So I took her long order, and drank chamomile tea and ate crackers and cheese and thought about my boys and the pig and the snack and Avon and my long list of neglected customers.
She’s right. And she’s wrong, too. And she’s right. But she doesn’t know, will never know the hurricane sideways one-hundred-mile-per-hour wind that blew through my summer. Ah, life is damn complicated.
I glanced outside to watch Frankie dig and root through a patch of Ice Plant.

“Thanks, Mrs. Belvins. You’re right. I haven’t been a good Avon Lady. But I can try again, hey?”

I hauled my pig home, my pocket full of neighborhood orders. Frankie stopped every sixteen feet, sat and belched. The scent of roses lifted from his snout, and I remembered the day someone dropped him at my home.

“It’s me and you, pig. We’re both runaway nuts. C’mon. Let’s go home and eat some cookies.”

Jesus Marches On

Cat woman Gail’s son called me. She died peacefully in her sleep, an expected and welcome death with her family by her side, he said. He told me he already placed her herd of cats in safe and loving homes.

“Birdie, please come to the funeral services at St. Patrick’s Church. Bring your family. Gail took a liking to you, and I know she would want you there.”

I promised I would attend with my boys, and I wished Gail’s son all the peace of the world.