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

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.
    She lived behind the grocery, on the street bordering the alley where six dumpsters formed a train of trash. I often saw poor immigrants fish for aluminum cans at night there, several per dumpster, holding stuffed black garbage bags and flashlights. Some nights, long years ago, I walked from dumpster to