Don't Shoot! I'm Just the Avon Lady! (14 page)

The policeman picked up my clutch and the bills, squatting down, keeping one arm by the gun, both eyes on me. “Yes, you may put your hands down. What is your name?”

I told him my name, I told him my birthday, my age, my home address, answers to all the questions he asked, but he still didn’t tell me why he took my things, took this action, made me squirm and sweat and try not to vomit. He motioned for me to sit down on the wood bench next to his car and he wrote scratch marks and letters on a pad of paper attached to a metal clipboard. He used his left hand, the arm with the tattoo. His eyes never left me.

“Wah wah wah wah brrrrsskk crackle crackle.” The walkie talkie shook into life, someone slapping a message, an important message, asking for a response.

“Yes, I have her here. What’d you get?”

The little black box uttered more words, but I couldn’t make half of them out, only heard “woman, Avon, bag, nothing.” The contraption rattled on and on, but it took ears of practice and steel to make sense of the warble. The policeman grunted, answered a few questions with sentences I didn’t understand, finally ending with “matches her story over here. Wrap it up.” He clipped the walkie talkie back onto his belt and lifted his hand away from the gun.

“Sorry, ma’am, seems we’ve made a mistake. We received a tip that a drug deal was going down at this station today involving two women, and your exchange with the bags and money was suspicious. Your friend was apprehended on the train, and she’s clean. She’s carrying Avon, like you said. You’re free to go.” He handed me the purse, the bills, and shook my hand with a kind smile. “I’m very sorry to bother you, but we have to take these steps.”

“Oh yes, sir, I understand.” My voice cracked with relief and I started to cry. I ran to my car and drove home, drove too fast, realizing I didn’t ask the policeman for the name of my alleged accomplice. I thought about the drug sniffing dogs at the local schools and how children go through metal detectors and submit to frequent backpack checks.
Life in Southern California. Life near the border. What’s up with this world anyway
, I thought.
What’s up with this world?

Stigmata Avon

I stuffed Lady Mystery’s tip money in my back pocket. I packed one of those paper grocery bags with blood oranges from my backyard tree, a handful of shelled walnuts in a plastic baggie, a few cans of good ginger ale, a bag of homemade corn chips, a package of fig cookies, and I stuck it in the back of my van. I told the boys to grab a garden trowel and a hammer and a chisel from the bamboo shed, and I piled those in the van, too, along with five gallons of water and two empty Avon boxes. The boys clambored into the middle seat with a jumble of comic books between them and the dog and the pig shared the floor beneath their feet. I wanted to leave the pig at home but I thought about the furniture and baskets of Macademia nuts drying in the sunroom and the toys, oh man the lusciously chewable toys, covering every available surface.

And we hit the morning road! Hit it hard, rolled south with salsa music blasting from a tin radio. I glanced in the rear view mirror and watched the boys reading, dog sleeping, and pig pressing his body against Louie’s legs and his snout against the side window, watching the rocks ribbon beside us and leaving a coat of thick drool along the window gasket.

The ranchlands slowly gave way to roll-top mountains covered in graffiti-scribbled boulders. It felt comfortable and small, sort of a desert-lite, with cacti and succulents gently replacing chaparral. It felt friendly and kind. It felt just the right amount of expansive, a safe amount. I could count every bush in sight given one good lazy day. And then the road dipped and burped and we turned a corner around a seemingly insignificant hill. An alien world.

I’ve traveled this road many times now, and each time I am transported to Mars or Europa or someplace off-planet and wild and scary and breathing myth and pathos. The hill you innocently lurch around is but the top of a mountain of death and fire; covered in so many boulders and rocks it would take every lazy day of your life to count. And as far as your eye can see are more mountains just like the one your car is thundering down, rising out of badlands, rising out of ocotillo and juniper.

The boulders perch like a house of cards, looking like a chain of dominoes waiting for an eight-year old, and ominous signs reading “watch for rock slides” dot the road in an uncomfortable number. Louie stared wide-eyed for a moment and then said “Jeeeeeeeeeesus!” followed by silence, followed by a sheepish “Sorry, Mom.” I’d never taken him here before, and though I kept saying “wait till we turn the big corner, just wait, you won’t believe it!” he rolled his eyes and muttered under his breath how boring the ride was, until this moment, until the landscape held him mental hostage.

We barreled down the road. We could see the Salton Sea in the far distance, beyond the mountains, beyond the badlands, a jeweled expanse of green, like an emerald buried in sandstone. Marty asked me if we really were on a different planet and I said no, no, our planet has many faces, some gentle and inviting, some desolate and aching.

I consulted a map as I drove, can of ginger ale between my legs. I bought the map at a junk shop in Escondido, from a comic book man with deep-set eyes and thin fingers. He took a green ballpoint pen from his shirt pocket and circled areas on the map.

“The best marine fossils are here. Mounds of ‘em. You can scoop them up with a shovel. Nothing else like it in the county.” His breath smelled of coffee and alcohol and his eyes sank deeper into his head as he looked at the map and wrote off-road directions along the side. “Now here you’ve got your petrified wood. Just grows right outta the ground like cabbage. You can only take twenty-five pounds a day, that’s the law. Sometimes Border Patrol is out in that area so don’t mess around with that.”

I pulled the van off at Ocotillo Wells and dove south, into the remnants of an ancient seabed and followed those hand-written descriptions for four miles across a desert wash caked with dried mud and drying spring grasses. I drove until I knew my van would drive no more in the soft sand. We got out of the van into the cool dry air and hiked down a crusty ravine into the oyster beds of many millions of years ago. The comic book man was right. Fossils littered the ground in every direction, fossils of hard rock oysters and chevron shells and delicate brain coral, some dark split black, some opalized into a gemstone hint of pearl and glass. The boys used small trowels to dig for the best specimens and I sat on a flat piece of granite and watched them pick and dig, pick and dig. The dog lay on the tailgate of my van, curled into a tight ball. Frankie the pig followed the boys and his fire engine red harness stood out among the dull rock and our earth tone clothes.

Oysters. Frozen in time. I held a fossil and ran my hands over the rocky ridges, the smooth underside, imagined myself under hundreds of feet of water, an oyster in some otherworld sea.
I’m alone the way I’m always alone though I share a house with kids and birds and dog and now a pig. I’m alone like these, buried under years of neglect. I left a newborn daughter to be raised by an unknown family
. I held an oyster in front of my face, tried to trace what I remembered about her in the gritty pattern.
I know you
, I thought.
I remember you. I remember you
. And something broke inside of me, broke and spilled on the sand below my body. I don’t know what it was, felt past-life heavy and useless. I jumped the last mental maze hurdle.

The boys filled the Avon boxes with their treasures. I swung the van toward a lookout point featured on the map. We stood at the top of a sheer cliff, and in our view, as far as our eye could see, were the badlands. It was our second alien planet in one day. It spread, small and colorless, as devoid of life and light as anything I have ever seen. Thousands of striations and hills and mesas, all gray and brown, like the Grand Canyon of Hell. We only stayed a few minutes, somehow the sight of it was disturbing, and our minds were saturated from the desert. The sun was setting and as we left the desert, a small drizzle began and followed us home.

The boys stumbled out of the van. They rolled into bed, oblivious of tomorrow’s yard sale. Frankie shadowed me as I stuck the fossil boxes on the back deck and the leftover snacks on the kitchen counter. He nudged my leg when I reached up to find the manila envelope I hid on top of the fridge. I stuffed it in my purse. Monday I would sign and mail them. I collapsed into bed, and set my alarm for five.

My sale began at seven a.m. sharp, but I started getting ready at six. I set out two card tables with demonstration products and hand-held mirrors. I stacked two sets of two Avon delivery boxes side by side and laid an eight-foot section of particle board over them, covering it with a red and green plastic Christmas tablecloth and plates of homemade cookies, a bowl of cheese doodles, a pitcher of lemonade and fifty Sponge Bob Dixie cups. Marty and Louie placed metal folding chairs here and there, and I banished the dog to the house where she sat, wet nose pressed against the front window, wishing she were human and carefree. I set out brochures, order forms, all the samples I possessed, and created a kids’ play section in one corner of the driveway with the Avon Wellness Yoga Mat and the Avon Cardio Slide.

Frankie stood in the playpen. One of the aluminum legs was loose so I shored it up with duct tape. Louie made a Petting Zoo sign and fastened it to the mesh sides. I tied a dozen rainbow balloons to my mailbox and sat down to wait.

And wait. And wait. And wait.

At ten-thirty I was still waiting. Marty, Louie and six neighborhood kids sat in a circle next to the fitness equipment, playing Duck, Duck, Goose, and eating what remained of the cookies and lemonade. Frankie gave a soulful look to any child who glanced his way, hoping for a cookie. I watched middle-aged neighbors mow lawns, prune trees, travel to and fro with groceries and surfboards. They waved at me, their crazy cohabitant Avon Lady, happy I was home to watch all their children, not grateful enough to sit on my lawn and flip through a brochure.

A tiny girl with raven hair and her mother’s unusual stretchy mouth left the circle and pointed to the makeup samples.

“Can you put some on me?”

Why not? No one else was running up my hilly street for some blush and a bit of eyeliner. I ran my hand along the pile of miniature lipsticks looking for something simple and innocent, but Goth Girl grabbed the most virulent of the reds.

“This one!”

So I shaded her lips as lightly as I could with Reckless Red. I added a touch of Shimmering Gleam Creme to her cheeks and eyelids and patted her arms with fragrant Timeless bath powder. She stared in a hand-held mirror, studying the shape of her lips. As I reached for a black Glimmerstick - I wanted to draw in a fake beauty mark on her left cheek - the short grumpy man three doors down opened his garage and his killer dachshund yipped and flew straight for my herd of duck duck geese.

“AaaaaaaEEeeeeeeEEEEeeeeAAaaaaaaa!!!!!!!!!!!!” The screams of eight children rang through the court as the hotdog jumped for either the plate of cookie crumbs or the bowl of cheese doodles. The plates went one way, the kids went another, the particle board fell off the boxes, into the grass, into the dog, lemon halves and orange doodles flying through the air like a flotilla of miniature UFOs. And Little Miss Goth screaming, screaming for life, for fun, for the terror of it, because of the spastic hyper pooch, because she was outside and red and shiny and five years old. And then she dropped the mirror, crash, clang, shatter, into a thousand shards of bad luck on the drive.

But that wasn’t the worst of it, oh no. Louie decided we needed paper towels and brooms and a trash can to clean up this mess of an Avon sale, and he snuck away from the commotion and ran into the house, the house containing the big white sissy dog who stood watching the shrimpy Hound of Baskervilles wanna-be tear through HER YARD, and she tore past Louie, through the door, and sailed into the front yard with a tousle of fur and fleas and anger and justice and growled straight for the dachshund. I dove for Suzie and grabbed her by the collar but she didn’t let up, and I fell to the ground like a pancake, flat on my belly, Suzie dragging me three feet or more until she gave up and plopped on the ground, head between two sad paws. Frankie sat still in his playpen. He gave us a sad look as if he’d seen messes like this in the past.

I stood, blood oozing from my right arm, the side of my right thigh like raw hamburger, and carried my heavy dumb dog back into the house, cleaned my wounds, took a hundred deep breaths, and wished for those days back in the neighborhood of my youth, where we lived for sneaking out at night and drinking Schlitz Malt Liquor Bull down at the dock.

When I came back outside, I saw eight little kids sweeping the driveway, picking up broken plates and bottles of Skin-So-Soft and those thousand beauty samples, trying to arrange them just so on the particle board now cracked down the middle and tilted like a canoe, covered in dirty Christmas wrapping. My grumpy neighbor walked toward me, the man who once, eight months ago, stood in the street and pointed at me and my house and called it a clown house, an embarrassment, called me a white-trash woman with loose morals, called me things ten times worse. He walked with hands in pockets, his perpetual motion hotdog back in his yard, and I braced for another barrage of weary insult.

“Sorry ‘bout that. Whatcha selling?” He looked at me through brown eyes trying to be kind through his hard edge, and I noticed for the first time in five years that he had beautiful wavy black hair. He bought two bottles of bug lotion and ordered a sunscreen. He wrote me a check then and there, and I was afraid to tell him no, you don’t pay until it arrives.