Free Don't Shoot! I'm Just the Avon Lady! by Birdie Jaworski Page A

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