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.
Slowly, other customers arrived, one by lone one, a couple here, a couple there. Most were women I met in their homes, stopping by to gossip and get a free sample or two. Several women placed orders for makeup and skin care items. Two Latina ladies stopped at the table, looked at the brochures, chose a lipstick each, and waved thank you. I raised my arm to wave in return.
“Jesucristo!” Both women invoked Jesus’ name and made the sign of the cross. I turned around to see what the heck was happening now, but nothing but my messy driveway and garage door stared back at me. The women spoke excitedly in Spanish and left my yard in a hurry. I saw them gesturing with arms and hands, squishing into a two door Toyota Celica with a dented engine hood. I stood with hands on hips, wondering what made them run, when I heard a voice I remembered, a voice I’d heard twice in my Avon past.
“So where’s your kilt, lassie?” The man who questioned what was under said kilt stood at the end of the drive with a woman on his arm. She towered over him by at least three inches, placing her well above six-feet tall. Her hair cascaded down her shoulders in golden waves, movie star hair, and she laughed in a low knowing tone at her companion’s question.
“I saw your note and had to see what you’d do next. Here, show Eliza what you’re selling.” He took a chair next to the exercise station and rested his elbows on his knees, looking over the wreckage with that same sardonic grin. I showed Eliza around the three tables, gave her colors and powders and creams in little sample packettes, gave her brochures and printed fliers. I peppered her with questions, tried to find out if she was his wife or girlfriend or sister.
“Ha Ha, did your friend tell you how I threw some lipsticks at him a few weeks ago?” I hoped the word ‘friend’ would be enough bait but Eliza just snickered. She placed an order for a blush, a powder, a powder puff, and two Glimmersticks, and left her address, a house across town from Kilt Man’s place. They left together, arm-in-arm, laughing, walking slowly like good pals or lovers, perhaps both.
When all was said and done and cleaned and put away and laid to rest, Alleluia and Amen, I stripped in the bathroom, ready to take a long, hot Avon-scented bubble bath. My ripped-up thigh caught my eye, and then I turned my arm to look at the damage there. Jesucristo, indeed! The sure face of Jesus, complete with bleeding thorns, peered out from my skin. That is, if I squinted a little and I flexed the triceps just so.
Balls to the Wall
I dressed in my shortest skirt and a yellow-striped tube-top. I applied extra lipstick in 24-Hour
Red and lined my eyes with a black Glimmerstick. I sprayed as much Avon Advanced Techniques Hair Spray as my dark brown locks could take and added my highest heels. A healthy squirt of Goddess fragrance completed the ensemble. If your regular sales avenues fail, use what ya got, I thought, hiked up my tube top, stuffed those forty Men’s Catalogues in my backpack and grabbed the boys.
Every other Sunday I buy four chocolate croissants and two Mexican mochas with extra whipped cream and two kid-sized hot cocoas at the French bakery and carry them across the parking lot to the 76 gas station garage. I give a pastry and coffee to the mechanic, Miguel, and we sit on oil-stained metal folding chairs and talk. He always eats too quickly and jumps up to finish rotating tires or replacing timing belts or changing oil. Sundays aren’t a busy time for him, but he takes his work seriously. I take longer to eat, and sip my mocha and watch him work while he tells me his theories of the universe. Miguel lets Marty and Louie play with a box of old car parts. They twist nuts onto bolts and make fantastic robots.
Miguel emigrated from Mexico City twelve years ago. He snuck over the border by way of the Imperial sand dunes, and three members of his alien group died of heat and dehydration. The Border Patrol found the rest, gave them water and food and sunscreen, and trucked them back to Tijuana in a green van with tinted windows like they always do, but not Miguel. He rested under the sands with the sidewinder rattlesnakes, knowing his destiny was United States or death. It didn’t matter which one.
I’m not sure how he ended up a mechanic. Maybe he learned his trade in Mexico. I asked him one day and he told me again of his night in the sands when an angel appeared and told him to burrow and hide and keep his ears covered with sand, pressed into the dunes, so that he could hear when it was safe to leave.
“Wow. No way! What kind of an angel,” I asked him, “Can you describe her?”
And Miguel laughed and told me I didn’t understand. “Birdie, not one of your Catholic angels. A desert angel. They don’t have wings.” He shrugged his shoulders and the buttons down his shirt pulled uncomfortably apart. “And man, you gotta stop bringing me this stuff. I gotta go on a diet.” He picked up a wrench and bent into the hood of a silver Thunderbird, and I heard the echo of metal against metal against his smooth low voice. “I’m too fat to hide in those dunes now. For the young, that is. For the young.” He laughed again.
Miguel isn’t an ordinary mechanic. At least I don’t think other mechanics drive to the desolate areas in the spring and take time-lapse photographs of ocotillo and sage flowers and write longhand letters to physicist Stephen Hawking and speak to angels and demons on days when the garage sits empty and the marine fog rolls in and around the piles of broken greasy parts.
I met him when I brought my minivan to his shop for an oil change. I watched him feel the hood with lovers’ hands, saw his eyes roll white under his wild Latino afro as he listened, heard him match the engine drums with a human hum. I must have stared too hard because he raised one side of his mouth and gestured toward the ceiling. He spoke like a priest, slow and clear with soft rounded vowels, almost a sign song tone. “The spirits tell me what to do. Your car is alright but you drive too fast and she doesn’t like it.”
This Sunday morning we sat and talked about time. Miguel told me that I felt the hands of the clock because culture and church and convention played tricks on my mind. The universe is one point, he said, one point of existence where time and space collide.
“It’s like this. Time is space, and there is no time. It’s like it all already happened one moment and now we just live bites of that moment. Get it? Just a bite at a time but it’s one big donut. You gotta small mouth. You can only eat one bit at a time.” Miguel wiped a fly off his forehead, leaving a timeless splotch of black oil in a line above his eyebrows.
Time is space, and there is no time. I started repeating this to myself, hoping the mantra would chip tiny cracks in my rigid thought, leaving a crevice into which enlightenment can seep. The message is clear: everything happens at once, not only in the garage, but also in my heart, in my mind, in the whole, huge, entire expanding universe.
I just didn’t get it. I’m in my late thirties. But this moment today is the same moment I lost my first tooth, it’s the same moment I began menstruating, it’s the moment I lost my virginity, and the moment I married. It’s the moment I became a mother, and the moment I gave my daughter up for adoption, the moment I found myself divorced. It’s the same moment I met Miguel, and the moment I eventually die. It all happened at once, in the same first breath as the universe was spun and the same last breath as it decays. Time is as simple and profound and as enigmatic as birth.
I closed my eyes and listened to Miguel grab a rusty nut with pliers, heard him grunt and pull, the sound of oil splattering into a plastic tub underneath the car.
“So Miguel. Is this what you wrote to Stephen Hawking? All this stuff about time?” Maybe new theories about the nature of reality would arise from my mechanic’s interaction with one of the greatest scientific minds in all history.
“Nah. I told him he was wrong about black holes. You can see what’s happening with those black holes if you just look at the pictures. Doesn’t he look at the pictures? Who’s an expert anyway?” He tapped a new filter into place, and for a second, as Miguel squeezed hard to tighten the seal, out of the corner of my eye, I felt him breathe, felt Steven Hawking breathe, as if our mouths were connected to one starburst lung spilling mocha oil into the center of the galaxy.
“Miguel, I’m signing those papers tomorrow and sending them across the country. Do you think my daughter is contacting me out of curiosity? Maybe she just wants to see what I look like and find out why I left her. Maybe that’s all she wants, and maybe when I meet her I’ll want more. Maybe I’ll be left behind this time, the way I left her.” I kept my voice low so Marty and Louie wouldn’t hear. They tapped broken wrenches against metal slats and connected air hoses together. The robot grew tall.
“Well, you know, Birdie, it’s like I said about time. It all happened at once, in one burst. What’s gonna happen already happened.” Miguel fiddled with the undercarriage of a Volvo. His words echoed against the muffler and I caught them twice.
“But Birdie, let me say this. It’s not what you want to hear, but it what you need to hear. You made the decision to send that letter. You’re ready for what follows. Maybe she wants to know you. Maybe she doesn’t. All of life might have happened but it’s still unpredictable.” I heard an echo of Comet’s words, all of life is sad. I wiped tears from my face and patted Miguel on the leg.
My cell phone beeped and I waved ‘bye to Miguel and dropped a Men’s Catalogue on his messy desk. The boys and I piled into the van.
“Hi, it’s Birdie!” I chirped my greeting but my voice remained time-trapped in sadness.
“Hey, Birdie, it’s Noreen. On Oakdale Drive?”
Noreen ordered Avon once before, in my early days as an Avon Lady. She ordered the same thing this second time - six opaque bottles of Skin-So-Soft original lotion and one Burgundy lip-plumping lipstick. I repeated her order out loud and motioned for Louie to grab my trusty notebook and make an entry.
“I really need the Skin-So-Soft as soon as you can deliver. Sorry to be so demanding, honey, I should have called you a few weeks ago. But you know how that is, time just flies away.” Her voice sounded more harsh and irritating than her words would suggest. I heard a whirring machine sound behind her, a scraping noise, and someone clearing a hoarse throat. I told her I had three bottles in stock and could bring them by Monday afternoon.
“Good.” She took a deep breath and rushed into her next sentence. “But don’t come to my front door, honey. Come around through the side gate and knock on the side entrance.”
“No problem, Noreen. Tomorrow around 2, okay?”
I hoped my crazy schedule would add to fatter profits, and tried to mentally calculate how much I earned between Lady Mystery and the yard sale. I dropped the boys at a birthd
ay party. I watched them ring the doorbell and shook my head when I noticed the smudges of mechanic’s oil covering their butts. Marty held the wrapped present and Louie carried a bag of complimentary Avon for the mom. I optimistically stuck ten extra brochures in the bag, and crossed my fingers that the hostess would pass them around with the party gift bags.
The circulating lights around the Surf Bowl sign seemed to wink at me as I parked in the decaying asphalt drive. I could smell the salt and dead fish of my ocean mixed with the exhaust of a thousand Sunday drivers and the acrid fumes of a group of smokers hiding behind the dumpster. Every time the door opened a waft of sixties surf tunes blew from the alley. The smokers turned in unison to watch me click up the cement stairs. The wind picked up and my skirt rose above my panty line.
No one noticed me walk inside the alley. All eyes were on a string of electronic scoreboards, each displaying a team name across the top and individual players in a neat row along the left-hand side. A team named “Spare Me” rose to their feet with a holler, fists pumping the air as a middle-aged man in a Hawaiian shirt printed with naked hula dancers rolled the pins down, rolled a strike.
They look like good prospects, I thought. Six men sat back down in molded plastic chairs, all late-forties, early-fifties, all in need of some serious men’s Avon. A tall man with a shock of gray chest hair escaping from the collar of his “Save Our Oceans” t-shirt stood, picked up a black ball and stuck two fingers and a thumb in the holes. The track lighting above him bounced off the sheen of the ball, created disco lights on the floor. He twirled around three times as his team-mates chanted “strike, strike, strike, strike,” lined the ball to his eye, swung his arm back with a step, let ‘er rip. The ball flew from his hand as if it held a hidden magnet, flew straight for the pins, left just two standing. The team lifted beer bottles in unison, tilted heads back and swallowed deep sips. I made my move.
Don't Shoot! I'm Just the Avon Lady! Page 11