“Hey! Does this house really cost a million dollars?” Marty interjected his question with a high-pitched rapid-fire voice and I turned to give him the evil eye.
“Ha ha, he’s such a kidder!” I stuck my right leg behind me and kicked him gently in the shin.
“No, I’m not kidding. You said only millionaires live here and this lady sounded like a weird millionaire. She doesn’t look that weird to me except for THAT!” He pointed at the bunion on the side of her foot, a painful peeling red onion of skin overhanging the side of the flip-flop.
I wanted to drop the Skin-So-Soft and run. I wanted to leave the boys there, with books and bunion talk, to fend for themselves, but I forged ahead.
“Oh my, I’m so sorry, I’m so embarrassed. Marty! Apologize right now!” He mumbled an insincere apology and looked quizzically at his brother, who shrugged his shoulders, arm still outstretched with the brochure.
The woman glared at me. Her expression didn’t change, still spoke of crabapple dreams. “Just come in. Nana is expecting you.”
Bunion Lady led us inside, into a cavern of a house, a beach cottage on steroids, as if you took the imaginary seaside vacation home of your childhood and pumped it full of air and tossed around white doilies and romance novels like confetti. It looked the way a haughty expensive ocean-side home ought, with windows as big as a whale’s mouth overlooking surfers and seagulls and one lone barge resting in the waves. But none of this caught my attention the way one thing assaulted me and held me hostage.
“Ewwwwwww! What’s that smell?” Marty grabbed his nose and wrinkled his face into a prune. I decided then and there never to bring him on a customer call again. Ever. But embarrassment or not, he was right. The place smelled like a musty oven of animal excretion mixed with pine sol and rubber.
“Just breathe through your mouth. That’s what I’m doing,” Louie offered helpfully to his brother and I shook my head and hoped Bunion Lady wouldn’t tell Nana - whoever she was - that I had hell children with porcupine manners.
We walked through a dining room with a gray marble floor and into a kitchen with an iceberg of an island in the middle. Expensive, unused pots and pans swung from a rotating wheel on the ceiling. Bunion Lady stopped at French doors covered with silver and green brocade drapes. She turned and looked at me with a wry expression.
“Perhaps your children would like to wait here. I’ll get them some crackers and milk. I don’t think you’ll want them in the next room.”
I nodded at Marty and Louie and they ran to the swivel bar seats and began spinning, the strange odor forgotten in this fantastic culinary playground.
Bunion Lady opened the right side of the door and I stepped inside to face the oldest person I have ever seen.
“You the Avon woman?” Her voice seemed so much younger than her years, loud and strong, you could hear the vinegar beneath the surface. She sat on a green vinyl recliner with an aluminum walker waiting to one side. Her face and arms and hands were made from wrinkles, and I couldn’t imagine a time when she danced with young men and wore rose blush on soft cheeks, when she didn’t look like the oldest alligator leather purse in the world. She looked older than old people in cartoons, older than the shrunken apple-head people you can buy at holiday church bazaars.
But this was a visit of superlatives, and the smell was bigger than the house and she was older than the smell, and the flock of beasts surrounding her was even odder than her appearance. Dogs. Small dogs, all wiry and spastic with black and brown and white painted fur. They ran and yelped and jumped and scratched, mostly scratched, and I think I counted sixteen, my mouth open and speechless.
“You the Avon woman? Cat got your tongue?” Nana barked the question and I nodded.
“Yes, ma’am. I’m the Avon Lady. Here.” I stuck my hand out, still holding the Skin-So-Soft, and she grabbed it in old wrinkled hands much stronger than mine.
“Good. These bastards have fleas. My God do they have fleas. These are organic Jack Russells and I can’t use Advantage.” She spat as she spoke and picked up a pair of rhinestone-studded black cat’s-eye glasses and held the bottle inches from her face. “How do you apply this? It doesn’t say how to get rid of fleas.”
“Well, I’ve heard that it’s a good insect repellent, but I don’t know the specifics. Maybe stick them in a bath and add the Skin-So-Soft and shampoo it in?” As I answered the question I pushed down no less than four terriers and felt the sharp accumulation of scratch marks on my bare legs.
“Hmmmph.” Nana set the bottle on an oak stand and picked up a large pink change purse with a simple metal pin clasp. “How much do I owe you?”
“Oh, nothing, this is a new customer gift to you, but I would appreciate an order for something, maybe more Skin-So-Soft. Gee you have a lot of these lovely dogs. Organic, eh?” I kept pushing dogs down, pushing them back into the wooden floor, feeling sharp nails against my skin, and feeling the prick and itch of biting fleas.
Nana didn’t answer my question, and I wondered what an organic Jack Russell was - a new breeding technique, perhaps, or a New Age marketing ploy? I left her sitting with the Skin-So-Soft, reading my Avon brochure, and wrestled my way out the door, feet entangled in terriers.
I packed the boys in the van. The sun still sat low on the horizon, yawning itself awake on the other side of the desert mountains. I couldn’t hear Nana’s terriers from the driveway, but I imagined them jumping and scratching, waiting in line for a Skin-So-Soft bath massage.
“I think that lady was a hundred years old.” Marty fished a ginger snap from between the car seat cushions and shoved it in his mouth. “An’ her dogs smelled like YOU!” He threw another cookie at his brother and they wrestled and giggled as I tossed my backpack in the front passenger seat.
We hustled toward home. My boys counted fleabites and I leaned down to scratch my leg in solidarity. I pulled at my left shirt armhole with my right hand, left still at the wheel, tried to press against my sunburn to relieve the pressure.
My van squealed and I watched countless SUVs and Beamers and white sedans zip around us like we were trouble, like they wanted to escape the bedroom lands, didn’t want to see the poverty they hid, didn’t want to see the dead rattlesnakes lining the road. All my years living near the coastal desert, it’s been exactly the same. Though my town rolls new strip malls and clumps of identical stucco housing and fast food joints and peep shows like tumbleweeds along the freeway, the desert stays brown and quiet and dimpled unless you water the hell out of it, always smells of mesquite and coyote droppings and loneliness.
We barreled pass the Catholic Church. A woman in torn jeans and trendy sheepskin boots stood in front of the marquee which announced the times for Mass and Confession. She wore a mini leather backpack and hovered, as if studying the schedule would offer inspiration or answers. Her wispy platinum hair flew in the wind, formed a lonely-woman halo around her head. I wondered when the Catholic Charities paperwork would arrive. I tried not to cry as we turned at the light and my boys begged to stop for an ice cream.
My cell phone rang - broke my reverie. Marty and Louie jumped, and a hundred crumbling cookies spilled between the backseat cushions of my van. I flipped open the phone but the number didn’t appear on the display, only the words “Private Caller.” Wow, must be another customer, I thought.
“Hello! This is Birdie! May I help you?” I used my professional order-taking Avon voice - bright, cheery and articulate - and stuck the phone between my neck and cheek as the person on the other end breathed into my ear.
“Yes, you can. I need fifty tubes of Moisture Therapy hand lotion.” A woman’s voice, low and sultry, ordered the products, and I sensed a slight hesitation, as if she were afraid of someone listening to her speak. “And I need it right away.”
The Man Who Likes Kilts
“Are we going straight home?” Marty sighed from the back seat as the woman spoke. I placed my hand over the cell phone mouthpiece and shushed him with a quick sideways “
I Mean Business” glance. He leaned against the door, one hand in the empty cookie bag. I cleared my throat. Did the woman actually ask for fifty hand creams? If so, it would be my biggest sale to date.
“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 broc
hures 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.
Don't Shoot! I'm Just the Avon Lady! Page 2