Don't Shoot! I'm Just the Avon Lady! (8 page)

“Do you think my tits are accentuated?” Shanna used a fake Park Avenue accent and I curtsied in response. She struck a Vogue pose and I snapped an imaginary photograph.

We drove five miles to a biker bar in the town next door. We talked as we drove, about boys we’ve loved and lost, about the men we would meet that night. Shanna had received their photo by e-mail the day before, a faded portrait of two rockers on a dirty stage, both oh-so-young, both sporting greasy mullets.

“God, he’s so cute, don’t you think?” Shanna unfolded a printed out copy of the photograph and pointed to her date. “I don’t know how tall he is, but he looks tall in the picture.”

I didn’t look at the paper, kept my hands on the wheel, rolled my eyes and laughed. “He’s cute in the way that my kids’ friends are cute, Shanna. He’s so young. He has to be under thirty.”

Shanna smacked me in the right arm. “Remember, girl. Young ones have more stamina. You haven’t dated in a year, and God, it’s been even longer for me. I just want to sleep with him, you know?”

Yeah, I knew. I think about sleeping with men, too, but I don’t put mullets and Metallica in my fondest fantasies.

The biker bar wasn’t difficult to find. It festers near a Harley dealership, near the railroad tracks, near a strip joint, near all things gritty and defiant. We parked in the back of the lot. The front half was filled with at least thirty Harleys. We craned our necks to adjust lipstick and hair in the review mirror, and stepped out into the nighttime marine air. I tried to adjust my fishnets, make them straight and uniform, but they had a mind of their own and twisted in a gentle spiral down my right leg.

A group of men stood near their machines, smoking unfiltered cigarettes, holding glasses of beer and spirits, wearing black leather with fringe and the orange logo of their favorite brand. Shanna lunged for them, walked with her slightly bowlegged gait, no fear, no concern.

“Hey, guys? Do you know anyone named Joel? I’m meeting him here tonight.” I hung back, afraid of men with cigarettes and alcohol, watched Shanna bum a drag off a cigarette from an older biker with a serious paunch and a navy blue bandana tied around his head. She waved me over, grabbed my arm, pulled me inside the bar. I felt the eyes of the men on our backs.

I never saw so many Harley boys in my entire life in one spot. They lined the wall of the bar, occupied every booth, leaned over every pool table, every floor tile sagging under the weight of steel-toed boots. A few women in jeans and leather jackets held bottles of imported beer. They looked aggressive. I turned to Shanna.

“Oh man, I’m outta here! This is way too scary for me!” Shanna held me back, kept her fingers wrapped around my elbow.

“Knock it off, Birdie. Hold on.” She scanned the room with eyes slightly closed, and I watched the men watching us, watched two tall fellows in jeans and black t-shirts saunter our way. They both sported modified mullets, and I could tell with my expert Avon eye that they used some kind of hair gel to give their ‘dos a slightly spikey texture.
Wow
, I thought.
They look really young. Even younger than their photograph
.

Shanna let go of my arm, gave the man with the black hair a big hug, and introduced me to my date, the red-headed mulletman.

“Birdie, this is Carl, Carl, this is Birdie.” I reached out to shake his hand, wanted to say a kind greeting, but different words fell from my mind.

“Uh, hi. How old are you?” Carl laughed - which just made him look younger - and grinned. His voice sounded young, too, and as he spoke tiny freckles on his cheeks rose and fell.

“I’m 22. And I really love older women...”

He leaned in close, eyes on my strapless dress, tried to wrap his arm around me. I pushed him to the side with both hands, laughed, acted playful, coy, but under the surface I felt ridiculous and old. I walked behind him, behind Shanna and her tall mulletman, to an orange vinyl booth in the darkest corner of the bar.

I wish I could tell you I danced to Metallica and Ironmaiden. I wish I could tell you I forgot my age, that I felt 20 years old, maybe 18 and that I drank six beers and took that red-headed boy as my lover. But I didn’t. I didn’t even come close to anything fun or fantastic. I sat in the booth and watched the increasing footsies of Shanna and Joel. We drank one beer, then two. Shanna and Joel excused themselves to sneak outside for a smoke. I inched further away from Carl when he attempted to put his hand on my fish-netted thigh.

“Uh, Carl? So, tell me a little about yourself. What do you do outside of the band?”
I have a daughter I never met nearly his age
, I thought as I asked the question.
I’m old enough to be his mother
.

“Joel and me ride our bikes up the coast sometimes. I like watching TV, you know, those reality shows like Fear Factor. I want to be on that show. I’d eat anything, pig testicles, cow snot, it doesn’t matter. I can eat anything.” Carl continued rattling on and on about reality shows I never knew existed, about the gross and daring dark moments of human entertainment, and I thought again about my age, about the gulf that divided us. His red hair spikes didn’t move, stood straight at attention and I noticed he wore a bottom retainer.
Wow, just a kid
, I thought again.

“Cool. Fear Factor. I never saw that before.” I tried to show interest, but my eyes kept wandering to the front door. What happened to Shanna?

“Heh heh heh.” Carl gave a provocative laugh, placed his hand back on my thigh, inched his butt along the wooden bench. “Is it true what they say about older women?”

I didn’t even bother rolling my eyes. I lowered my voice to just above a whisper and drew out the spaces between my words with extra breath.

“Carl. Let me tell you a secret. You want to know about older women? Whatever you heard, just double it. No, triple it. Us women over thirty-five are in our peak sexual prime. We can all have multiple orgasms. Sometimes just by THINKING about sex. Sometimes when someone ELSE thinks about sex. Multiple orgasms, Carl. Every time.” I slanted my eyes like a cat and winked. “And now, I must use the ladies room.”

I stood, grabbed my purse, and sauntered toward the restrooms. Carl sat and stared, mouth fully open, retainer hanging out, and I saw him adjust his jeans with one hand. Men. Sheesh. A fat biker in a black leather jacket and brown chaps accosted me, swung his arm around my neck and held me tight against his stomach. I could feel his dinner squirming through his clothes, and I started to sweat in fear.

“Hey honey, where YOU goin’ so fast?” He laughed, sprayed drunken spittle against my hair, and I steadied my feet strong against the floorboards and walloped him with my purse. Thank goodness I still had that Avon bubble bath I meant to drop off at a customer’s house. He doubled over in surprise and I ran, boots smacking the floor like the tail of a fish out of water, ran like hellfire to my car. Shanna and Joel didn’t notice me; they stood one against the other against the stucco side of the building, melting metal, exorcising lonely demons. I waved, turned the motor and hit the gas. Shanna lifted one leg, waved it at me. Joel didn’t see me at all.

Chasing the Energy

I left tote bags on doorsteps, all the while nursing a slight hangover from my mulletboy date. When you have sixty bags of Avon to deliver, you try to facilitate fastness, the dance of the sleek. You want to get those bags out of your rumpled french fry smelly car and into waiting hands and collect a pre-made check in three minutes flat. You don’t have time for chit chat and sample consultation and stories of beer-deviled wandering husbands. You don’t have time to be a real Avon Lady, the nurse and shrink and pure pink Madonna mother you exude most days.

My cell phone rang wildfire. Carl’s number flashed over and over like some kind of sick cosmic joke. Click. I turned my phone off, stuffed it beneath all my Avon at the bottom of my pack and slung the bag upon my shoulders. I wiped my forehead with one hand, then the other. My backpack felt like a hundred pounds of lead, felt like Carl himself lay deep inside. I wondered where Shanna was, whether she slept with Joel. My lower back ached from my deliveries, and I stopped for a moment by a patch of black sage, stopped and rubbed it with my right hand. I felt the pattern etched into my skin as if it rose from my body to greet my fingers.

I’m not a biker chick like Shanna
, I thought.
But I own India ink, own a chosen design.
I remembered the year I turned thirty-four. I moved to the sea, decided my favorite color was purple, quit dieting and took up swearing with a passion. I lived in a rental house on a quiet palm-lined street filled with soccer children and platinum-haired moms, and I wasn’t like them, I wasn’t like them at all. I told the neighborhood children ghost stories behind my house, a bonfire spark popping in the ceramic fire pit I lugged back from Tijuana. I called the fire pit “The Vagina” and began collecting the first of my animal farm, a scrawny pooch with hip displasia I rescued from the pound. I dyed my hair purple, the royal purple of the gypsies, and I wore lots of black kohl around my green eyes and mini skirts with striped socks and layers of lingerie instead of button-up shirts.

My lover told me it was mid-life crisis. He told me he liked me better before I dyed my hair, he liked my eyes without the black rings, liked my quiet house before The Vagina and the pooch. I just rolled my eyes and laughed at him and put him to sleep with tornado sex, my hands wrapped in that good red hair, adopted doggie scratching and groaning under the bed. I knew it wasn’t mid-life crisis, it was first-life grown up crisis, yeah, first-life crisis rising from too many years of motherhood running from that train wreck of an adolescence, all those years of casseroles and a control freak husband and the church of patriarchal wonder and heaps, mounds, years of maternity clothes.

I wanted a tattoo. I told my lover, showed him sketches of dragonflies, handmade scratches on paper, held it behind my back, against bare skin, showing him my plans for an insect skin fossil bed.

“Cut it out, Birdie. Tattoos are common. Cut it out. You’re still angry with your parents or something. Can’t you just be normal again?” Red sat at the edge of my futon bed, such a young perfect specimen of a lover, wearing glasses like Cary Grant, his hands, oh those beautiful long-fingered hands holding the side of the mattress.

“Yeah. You’re right. Forget I mentioned it.” I leaned over to kiss his hair, waved him goodbye as he drove across town to his small condo at the water’s edge, to his job as an industry engineer counting and measuring and placing things just so. But I was so not just so in those days, and I jumped in my car and drove far and dirt devil fast, down the east-bound highway, to the cowboy town at the edge of the mountains and strode into the only tattoo parlor I knew, the one the alternative paper itself called artistic and unusual, and plunked my scaly pencil paper on the counter and pointed to my back.

A woman picked up my paper. She looked older than me by at least ten years, and her hair hung long and frizzy wild. She wore a red t-shirt and jeans, her arms adorned with bursts of color flowers and hearts and fairy dancers in a row, so intricate, so delicate, intimate, and I blushed, feeling as if I read a secret sex life story in this art. She copied my dragonfly on transparent paper, erased parts of wings and legs and reconnecting them, resurrecting them, a dragonfly changeling, until it became a stylized iron-work dragonfly from a hundred years ago, a garden portrait insect, a perfect intersection of ink and carapace, and I nodded Yes, please. Yes.

I removed my shirt and lay face down on a reclining tattoo chair, black lace bra against the cool black vinyl seat cover, arms hugging padded metal in anticipation and fear. Two green street signs hung from the ceiling above me, Pain Street and Pleasure Street. I stared at them while the woman prepared the ink and needles.

I don’t remember much of the tattoo process, it hurt like nails, put me in a trance of discomfort bordering on orgasm, and I watched a man with a silver bull-nose ring pierce the belly of a young woman just come of age. The needle broke my skin endless times, electric drone filling my ears, and I felt the woman wipe away excess ink and blood with a soft cotton towel. She never spoke, but hummed hard rock songs along with the radio.

“It’s done! Take a look!” The woman’s voice jostled me from my pain nirvana and I stood, back to a wall mirror, grabbing a white rimmed hand mirror, and looked at my perfect ancient iron dragonfly.

I tried not to cry as I paid eighty dollars in twenties and collected an orange piece of paper with tattoo care instructions, but in my car, sore back against the blue towel acting as a seat cover, I cried and cried, cried for the sheer perfectness of it, the courage I had to get a tattoo, the way it reflected all things primordial and mysterious in my own skin. Oh, I loved it.

The following year I let my hair grow out to its natural auburn color, stopped wearing all that back eye makeup, put the lingerie away and broke up with my red-headed man. The Vagina broke into a thousand ceramic pieces during the move to my first California-bought house. But I didn’t stop casting ghost story spells on unsuspecting neighbor children, and sometimes they get a peek of my magic dragonfly when I stoop to smell the lavender bush in my front yard.

I set my backpack on the ground to rest my back. I stooped over, opened it, found my organizer and unzipped it. I compared the address I wrote in my own personal shorthand with the numbers on the fence before me. They matched. I heard my customer’s scratchy voice in my mind. She found my Avon brochure in a dumpster behind the grocery. She said it was missing the front cover and smelled like old fish, and she wanted me to visit, give her a new brochure, some lipstick samples, and take her order. She spoke with a thick accent, but I couldn’t place it. Latina? Nah. Italian? Nah. Something European, not French or German, maybe Polish. I asked her to repeat her address twice. She told me her name, but I didn’t catch that, either, only knew it was something like Maria.