Don't Shoot! I'm Just the Avon Lady! (3 page)

“Wow, fifty! You must have really dry hands, ha ha ha!” I joked, imagined writing down the product number and the quantity of fifty on an order pad. “Now, do you need anything else? What are your name and telephone number and address, please?” I grabbed my purse from the shotgun seat and shoved it between my legs. I rummaged through the bag with one hand, in desperate search for a pen and any spare scrap of paper, my shoulder beginning to stiffen from holding up the cell phone.

“No, this is all I want. You don’t need my name. I’ll meet you at the train station where you left your brochures. When will the lotions be ready?”

I mentally patted myself on the back for leaving those books at public locations around town. Southern California is the land of crappy mass transit. My town sports sporadic busses that never stay on schedule and one lone train station guarding the site of the old hot springs, the spot which gave my town its German name. Two months earlier, on a June Gloom migraine day, my two young boys and I walked two long miles to that station to take the Coaster two towns south. I sat on the metal bench outside the station, watching my boys chase a hungry red-eyed pigeon, wishing my headache would disappear, wishing the train would hurry, wishing the stupid busses traveled to my part of town, wishing I could think of another business to try, anything but Avon. It was one of those days.
Why the heck am I selling makeup anyway?

I remembered the first morning I attempted door-to-door sales. My best girlfriend called as I stood next to my bed, stuffing a beat black backpack with tiny square samples of skin care, miniature lipsticks and a thick stack of glossy brochures. Shanna owns a tile installation company and rides a Harley. She doesn’t wear make-up, doesn’t use lotions or perfume, doesn’t even scrub away the dirt and dust most days. Her fingernails are permanently filled with old grout and mold, but she doesn’t seem to notice. We take our dogs to the lagoon beach twice a week and throw rotting tennis balls into the water and talk politics and pets. She’ll never marry, she says. A dog is muddy child enough.

“I’m going to take my brochures and see how the rich live.” I spoke into the phone with a bad British accent and listened to my friend laugh and laugh.

“Come on Birdie. The rich don’t use Avon. They use that Clinique shit. You should stick with coastal rednecks like yourself.”

I had to find out, though, and put my best and most expensive samples in my kilt pockets and hit the road. Fifty brochures weigh as much as a small child, or a bag of dog kibble, or a case of beer. Maybe a baby cow. Or six bars of gold. An extra large sack of potatoes? I spent the first mile contemplating the heft and girth of my ratty backpack and even made up an Avon song to sing to myself. I sang it to the tune of “My Favorite Things.”

My town still sleeps, hasn’t rolled out of bed like hoity-toity La Jolla or Del Mar. Most of the residents work long hours to pay for their ocean breeze, and spend weekends tending their lawn and cheering their children at soccer games. But one road snakes through town, along the juniper-laden crest of the tallest mesa, the yellow brick road of sea view glory, where the landowners drive Mercedes and oversized gilded Hummers and hire illegal aliens to tend their Birds of Paradise and to wash their picture windows facing the beach. This was my destination.

I felt like Maria from the Sound of Music, facing these homes the way she faced the Baron’s mansion, guitar and suitcase in hand. I stood at the entry gate to a stone palace surrounded by a pointed iron gate, remembering how Maria sang a song and swung her guitar in a circle to get over her fear of ringing the bell. I hummed my Avon song under my breath and grabbed a brochure from my back and two Color Rich lipstick samples in muted sensible coral tones and raised the heavy knocker, let it crash to the mahogany door.

A tall man with white hair and a beard opened the door and looked at my face, my backpack, the brochure, my kilt. His mouth turned up in a sardonic grin, and the grey of his eyes matched the geometric pattern of his silk shirt.

“So, Lassie, what DOES an Avon sales woman wear under her kilt?”

I didn’t think to answer, didn’t stop to think at all, just threw the brochure and the lipsticks at him and bolted down the drive, down the road, around the corner and collapsed against a gnarled and peeling eucalyptus tree. I think he was kidding. My heart pounded and I placed my hand on my chest as if to physically stop the “thump thump thump.”
He was making a joke, Birdie, just a joke. He’s just a man with a lot of money and a dumb sense of humor. It’s ok, it’s all right.
I slouched home, minus that one brochure, and made a cup of strong tea. I hoped coral was his color. I stared at my sack, still full of freebies, and contemplated quitting after just one trek.

Once I traveled to London, and though the British spoke the same language and looked just like me, I felt lost and alone. I made new friends, hiked through the farmlands of Wiltshire, placed my hands on the monoliths of Stonehenge, and began to feel the underlying current of humanity that fills every part of our Earth. Yet I knew it would take me months to adjust to that country if I were to move there. I remembered this feeling, kept wishing for the train with my customer to arrive, and thought how much Avon was like England to me. A place of pretty things, a world of exploration, but nothing like home. A seagull flew to the ground and searched for tidbits of food near my feet.

The train station loomed over my head, all oak beams and new green plastic panels, a tiny window for purchasing tickets behind which a woman with buck-teeth and a greasy pony tail stood. A splotch of mustard decorated the collar of her forest green uniform shirt, and she spoke under her breath to herself but I couldn’t make out any words. A stack of Watchtower magazines, the recruiting arm of the Jehovah’s Witness church, rested in a wire rack next to my bench, a thin coat of white sand covering the top book. “Oh, right!” I thought, and opened my purse to retrieve five Avon brochures. I placed them in the rack next to the Watchtowers and snapped my purse shut. Ms. Railway Clerk leaned her head from under the “Buy Tickets Here” sign. Her breasts smooshed against the wood counter and I worried a button would pop.

“Ma’am! You can NOT leave soliciting materials at the train station. This is government property. Please remove those at once!” One palm pounded on the counter, keeping time with her tirade.

“Well, hey, that’s not fair! The Jehovah’s Witnesses have their religious tracts here. Did you see these Watchtowers?” I stuck my hands on my hips and raised my eyebrows in my best liberal beach town hippy common sense way, and kept my butt firmly planted on the bench.

“Ma’am, do you want me to call station security? We are under a terror watch and I can NOT allow any materials to be left at this station. Those Watchtowers have undergone a security check. They belong to me.” She closed her mouth, leaving two twisted teeth peeking out over her bottom lip and picked up a cordless telephone in a threatening manner.

I picked up my brochures and stood next to the bench, ignoring Ms. Big Crooked Teeth Railway Clerk, and stared into the distance, down the crushed-rock-surrounded rails, past the quiet center of town, hoping the train would blare a welcoming siren. The clerk continued muttering to herself and I heard the ring of the telephone. I sat down on the bench once again, brochures in my lap, and watched her talk on the phone, laugh once, twice, turn around and rifle through an ivory file tower.

The sea breeze ruffled the cover of the top Watchtower magazine, the train wailed from half a mile away, and I had a sneaky Avon Lady idea. Casually I inched back to the wire rack and shoved an Avon brochure inside each Watchtower, plumping them higher, brushing the top cover of each one, leaving a stack twice and high and a million times more interesting in its place, as if God himself blew pregnant beauty possibility into each evangelical leaflet. Ms. Railway Clerk laughed again, and I saw her slam the file shut as I gathered my boys and finally boarded the railcar. It must have been these brochures that my telephone caller with the strange request had found.

I asked her once more for her name as my van turned onto my home street. The boy next door ran outside as if he’d been waiting for us to return, and my sons leaped from the side slide door the second I parked. I strained to hear my new customer over the laughter of boys dragging scooters across the driveway. I heard the bark of my dog behind the fence.

“Sorry. I can’t give out my name. Don’t worry. You’ll get your money.”

My mystery hand lotion lady refused to give her identity, even when I explained that I would never divulge it to anyone, ever. I wondered if she was a celebrity, or perhaps she was Ms. Railway Clerk playing a practical joke, upset that I’d left heathen Avon in her heavenly literature. But it didn’t sound like the buck-toothed gal, didn’t sound fake or unsure. I figured at the least it was a quick sale, so I ordered fifty hand creams and set a train station delivery date for the following Thursday.

What the Hell is Cute, Anyway?

Fifty tubes of hand cream for the Mystery Train Lady. Check. Extra bottles of Skin-So-Soft for Wild Dog Nana. Check. I entered the product numbers into my Avon computer account and clicked “save.” I did the math in my head, figured out my profit and realized the eighty bucks or so I would earn wouldn’t allow me to sit on my butt the remainder of the campaign. Rats. I restocked my backpack, applied fresh lipstick and smoothed the creases out of my kilt. I noticed a smudged dirty paw mark on my right pocket and tried to wipe it off with a warm washcloth.
Damn dogs
, I thought.
Not sure they’re worth the six dollars
. I called the troops, pointed our new route, and we hiked across the street and into the canyon sprawl.

I delivered brochures along the short streets of the old neighborhood behind the elementary school. I never canvassed here before, never saw these hundred homes hidden by eucalyptus and palm, a hundred older homes still untouched by recent years of rocket-crazy real estate investors. I handed the boys handfuls of books at a time, and they ran ahead of me, trading houses back and forth, leaving books on faded wooden door steps and cracked driveways.

I wasn’t in the mood to knock on doors. I wasn’t in the mood for Avon, period. I should have been in the mood. Gas is expensive and children are expensive and I had but three days left in the campaign. But I couldn’t shake random memories from my mind. I thought about what happened twenty years ago – another lifetime. I was so young. I remember the doctor speaking to me.

“Can you describe the rape to me?”

I was silent.

The hardest thing I ever went through was those nine months. I was alone in labor. I was alone for hours, and the nurse called me weak when I asked for pain medication.

I wanted time with the baby after birth, but they wouldn’t let me have it. I only had a glimpse of her - dark eyes so green and alive like mine, dark wavy hair - before they snatched her away and sent her to live with a foster family until the adoptive parents signed the papers. They put me in the worst room of the maternity ward, a room cold and metallic, purely functional, without comfort, and I felt like I had done something terribly wrong. I was just a kid. I didn’t know I could ask for something better.

The next day I lay still in my steel bed and they wheeled me into a cozy and cheerful room with another new mother. Friends and family came to admire her baby, bearing flowers and baby clothes, and candy. My stay was a secret from my family. They lived many miles away and my tongue refused to say the words when I talked to them on the phone. I lay alone. My body ached for my baby.

A hospital worker in pink and blue came into the room and announced it was time for us to have our babies’ photographs taken, and I was too grief-stricken to explain. She kept telling me it was ok, it was free. She thought I didn’t have the money for the photographs, I looked so young and poor.

I yearned to explain it, over and over again, to everyone I saw for weeks afterward. I had two stories: the real one, and my cover story that the baby died during birth. Retelling the rape each time I explained why my belly now appeared flat and why I had no baby in my arms tore at my heart and I was silent.

I watched those brochures fly through the air and land on pebbles, stopped to pet a skinny yellow cat and walked the boys to the playground behind the school, did all of these things without thinking, a zombie momma trapped in another dimension. And all I could think and remember, when my brain finally reopened, while my boys swung higher than the trees, was that I had to keep moving forward. One brochure here. One sample there. Keep peddling my Avon. I could manage my business, and the summer, one lipstick at a time. I called my boys down from the equipment and gave them more samples and brochures to sprinkle like grass seed.

Marty wore his green crocheted beanie. He stuffed samples inside and plunked it on his head. He refused to give out those samples.

“I want them under my beanie, Mom.” He looked like an acorn, a fast loud running nut. He took three books at a time, and ran from house to house along his side of the street. Louie took the other side. I couldn’t keep up with them. I saw Marty drop behind a gnarly pepper tree and thought, “what the heck is he doing?” I held the straps of my backpack tight and ran to find him. The demonstration bottles slapped my back in time to my steps. I peered over an Aloe hedge, saw him stooped down, rubbing a sample packette on his shorts.

“Hey, why are you doing that?” The ground was damp and gritty. Maybe the sample fell into the dirt. He turned his head up to me and looked with big brown innocent eyes. One of his hat samples poked out over one ear, and I pushed it back under his cap.