Don't Shoot! I'm Just the Avon Lady! Read online

  “Well what do you know? It’s the mysterious vanishing Avon Lady. Are you throwing more things at customers today?”

  My crepe flipped into my lap and I looked up to see Mr. Kilt Question staring down at me, his eyes wrinkled. With anger? No, his lips turned up slightly at the edges, dimples about to burst forth. It was just another joke, and I started laughing, couldn’t stop, couldn’t breathe, just laughed and laughed as the rum and bananas ran over my shorts.

  Below the Belt Belongs to Turkey!

  My Avon delivery man arrives like clockwork every other Wednesday afternoon in a slightly dingy nameless truck with a roll-up back door, bringing cardboard box after box of lipsticks and glossy brochures. He doesn’t wear a starched uniform, only a scruffy black t-shirt and faded low-slung jeans. His face sports slate gray eyes and a sparse black goatee that never seems to grow. I don’t know his name, only know he smells like cheap deodorant soap, only knew that Wednesday he would arrive with fifty tubes of hand cream and a few other Avon odds and ends.

  Thursday meant meeting my mysterious customer at the train station, meant dropping Marty and Louie off at a neighbor’s house for the night, meant dolling up for an evening of heavy metal and sure shots of cheap tequila with Harley ridin’ mullet boys. I didn’t have a plan for Friday yet, but imagined sleeping off the smoke and alcohol haze of my blind date. I switched on my boombox and twisted the dial until I found a station playing early 80’s big hair music, the kind my mom called “satanic” and banned from our house during my teenaged years. I stood in front of my bedroom mirror and practiced head banging to Black Sabbath’s War Pigs. I didn’t hear my friend Ulak ring the doorbell and invite himself inside.

  “Birdie. What is that terrible noise? Is there something stuck in your ears? Why are you shaking up and down like that?”

  Ulak spoke in his customary staccato sentences. I whipped around in embarrassment and pretended I was tousling my hair.

  “Oh! Hi Ulak! Don’t worry, just some hair RX!” I fluffed a bit more for emphasis.

  The first time I met Ulak he stood in line at a coffee shop along the Pacific Coast Highway. He barked out his order as if giving simple instructions to a confused child. I stood behind him, stared at the tufts of black and gray hair sticking out from the back of his neck. My God, what a hairy man, I thought. Thank God he’s not shirtless.

  Just a month or two later I saw a shirtless Ulak at the beach, lying on his stomach as his traditional mother sat in a folding chair under a voluminous umbrella. She wore a long eggplant-colored tunic with a matching head covering. Aqua and pink watersocks peeked out from under her skirt. A cooler nestled in the sand between them, open to reveal a plethora of exotic Turkish delights. I waved hello, kept walking, dragging my boys and their beach toys behind me, terrified that if I set camp beside Ulak he might ask me to rub lotion on his back...hair.

  Now, most weeks included breakfast with my Turkish friend in a diner surround by tire stores and piercing salons on the Pacific Coast Highway. He chose the same special every time - a huge Spanish omelet with home-fries and rye toast. One morning my legs ached with the fatigue of a hundred hills of Avon brochure delivery, and I stretched them under the table and rested my feet on the red vinyl booth seat next to my friend. The waitress filled a pot of hot water and placed it on the scarred Formica table next to a basket of herbal tea. She wandered back to the kitchen, hummed Heartbreak Hotel along with the chrome retro jukebox. A surfer waved her down and pointed to the breakfast specials. His hair stuck up in sun-blonde spikes with crystals of salt and sand resting at his hairline.

  My friend stuttered and squinted at a folded newspaper sitting on the edge of our table. He once studied philosophy and argued with the best-known minds in the Far East. They called him “Aristotle” and predicted he’d go far in the world of ideas and internal mirrors. But the universe gave him a swift poke in the side, and he dropped out of graduate school after a realization that the world was greater than even philosophical truth. He started a Turkish coffee distribution business and dragged a rolling suitcase from café to diner to sit-down eatery, a study of metaphysical concentration under chaotic wiry eyebrows and warm brown eyes.

  “So, c’mon, tell me! What does your mom think of the Avon cologne and deodorant I gave you?”

  I peppered him with questions, bouncing up and down while the vinyl squeaked and sighed beneath me. I wondered whether my old fashioned friend liked the stuff I dropped at his door wrapped in pink tissue paper. Ulak placed his cup gently on the table and wiped his hands with a paper napkin.

  “Birdie. My mother said to my brother, ‘Çem, do we have a female guest?’ He answered, ‘No Ana, we live in America.’ Well, now my brother wears it too, so there are no more comments. As the saying goes: ‘Dogs bark, but the caravan continues on its way.’ “

  Ulak continued eating, poured cream in his coffee, while the waitress leaned on the counter, reading the Calendar section of the Los Angeles Times, her strawberry print seersucker sleeves rolled to her elbows. I thought I smelled the faint odor of underarm protection as he lifted his cup.

  A few weeks before I begged him, “Please Please Please let me wax your back. It’ll be fun! I’ll bring snacks! I’ll tell you funny stories!”

  “Birdie. Turkish men do not wax backs. This is American silliness. Women do not mind back hair.” He breathed heavy into the telephone, sounded like he was trying to convince himself as much as me.

  “Now, Ulak. Do it for me. For science! For Avon! Come on! I need a good subject to test the Avon Skin-So-Soft Hair Removal Wax Kit and you’re the hairiest person I know. It won’t hurt a bit. Plus all those cute Middle Eastern girls you like will think you’re super HOT. Come on! It’s almost beach season.” I used my whiny voice, the one that makes Ulak promise anything - anything! - to shut me up. It worked. But, there was one small hitch.

  “Birdie. Ok. I will let you remove the hairs. But we cannot do this at my home. My mother will not understand. We can do it at your home.”

  I paused for a moment, wondered how to manage a delicate hot wax treatment with pets and kids underfoot. All problems, but none as caustic as Ulak’s mother. Oh, what the heck. “Ok. Deal!”

  The next day I took a good look around my house, decided the master bedroom was the best location for such a procedure, and spread a clean sheet on top of my bed. I corralled Marty and Louie and pointed to the bed.

  “Guys, Ulak is coming over. I’m going to spread some sticky Avon stuff on his back and rip out his hair. You can watch, but you have to stay out of my way. Ok?” The boys looked at each other, looked at me, looked at the bed. Marty ran out the door, chased after Suzie our pet Labrador, didn’t seem to care one way or another what strange things I might be doing with my Turkish friend in the bedroom, but Louie squished up his eyes in the way that meant he was processing information.

  “So, Mom? Why are you doing this?”

  Why, indeed.

  I baked a chocolate cake, let it cool on the counter as I called Ulak once more, begged him to let me wax him at his house. “Come on, Ulak. Do you really want Marty and Louie watching this?” He stood firm, though, only grunted once. “Oh, and Ulak! One more thing! I read the instructions and it says that the hair must be between one-quarter inch and one-half inch long. I think we may have a little, uh, problem, as I suspect your back hair may be slightly longer than a half-inch. We may have to do a little pre-wax trim.” It was at least three inches long, maybe four, I remembered, but didn’t want to embarrass Ulak any more than was needed.

  “Birdie. I will measure my hairs. Goodbye.” He slammed down the receiver.

  That night we ate rich cake with sploots of good homemade whipped cream, and I blended a pitcher of mango margaritas and poured them into salt-rimmed glasses. It was during Ulak’s third margarita that he made this announcement:

  “Birdie! I have measured the back hair and you were right. They were too long. So I did a little trim myself. In the mirror. I don’t think I did a
bad job.” Ulak pulled up the bottom of his red polo shirt and turned around at the table. Marty and Louie leaned in close to get a good look. His back was slightly less hairy, and if you could call a weed-whacked back an improvement, well, this was a bit better. Better for waxing, anyway. I shot back the last of my second margarita and stood up. “I think we need another pitcher, Ulak. You know, to get through the next phase here.”

  I dragged two kitchen chairs to the bedroom and instructed Marty and Louie to stay seated on those chairs for the entire project. I pointed to the bed and told Ulak to remove his shirt and lie, face down.

  I laid the instruments of torture on the bed next to Ulak. Twenty fabric hair-removal strips, the hot wax, a spatula for application, and the camera. I noticed how his back hair fell straight below his pants, probably to a full-haired butt, so I knelt over him, hands on my hips, and pondered out loud. “Geeze. Your hair goes so low. What the heck am I going to do? I don’t want to get wax on your pants. Maybe you should just take them off...” but before I had a chance to finish my thoughts, Ulak interrupted me.

  “No! Below the belt belongs to Turkey!”

  The wax spread easily on Ulak’s back. I made sure to wipe the spatula in the direction of hair growth. I pressed a fabric swatch in the direction of growth, rubbed it vigorously as directed, and with a hearty “1, 2, 3!” I yanked it off in the proper direction. Ulak’s eyes watered, but he didn’t yelp. He reached his arm down to the floor, grabbed his margarita glass, and tipped the remnants of his fifth drink down his throat. I stared at the fabric in my hands, the sheer amount of long back hair, and almost tossed my tequila all over my poor subject, all over my bed.

  “Birdie. Does a person need a beautician’s license to perform this kind of operation?” Ulak looked hopeful that I might decide I’d done enough, but I soldiered on.

  “Um, I think my Avon Representative status allows me to wax back hair of Turkish friends, Ulak.”

  I forgot Marty and Louie were watching, they sat silent as statues, eyes riveted to the wax and fabric and the heave-ho of the Mothership muscling hair off her swarthy friend. Ulak’s back looked sleeker but grew angry and red from irritation. The boys tired of back hair removal inspection and left the room. I heard them tackle the dog, and the yelps of feral boys and pooch alike filled the house.

  The splotches spread across his skin like sidewinder tracks in the sand. The wax coated my hands until they looked like refugees from Madam Toussaud’s museum. I picked flecks of gunk off each finger as Ulak stood and stretched. He twisted his head to look at his back in the mirror and grunted approval.

  Ulak continued to twist. He reached behind with one hand and rubbed a particularly raw spot. He winced. I cursed my decision to have margaritas two nights in a row. The room swayed as Ulak pondered his new look. He coughed three times, then grabbed his shirt and pulled it over his head. Marty ran into the room, riled canine on his heels, skidded across the wood floor in tube socks and twirled to a stop, a startled look of sheer horror on his face.

  “Wow, Ulak. Your back is redder than your shirt!”

  Now I stood in the mirror, contorted, twisted in mind and body, as Black Sabbath played unlikely angels of peace. My hands hovered, my head turned in an odd angle to my body. I tried to tell Ulak about my mullet boy date, about the call from Catholic Charities but my mouth wouldn’t release any words. He bent over and flicked the music off. The wicker nightstand shuttered as the noise died.

  “Birdie. This is not music. This is garbage cans and a cat howling. What are you doing, Birdie? You worry me.”

  “Hey, Ulak?”

  I plopped face down on my bed and patted the comforter with one hand. Ulak sat on one corner. He rested his hands in his lap. He grunted some kind of response. I tried to pull my mind together. The afternoon sun poked through the blinds, cast horizontal shadows on my stucco wall. I tried to say Hey, Ulak, I gave a baby up for adoption. I tried to say it twice. Instead, my mind found some kind of easy common ground, a question Ulak could help me answer.

  “Ulak, what’s the right thing for a person to do when she doesn’t know what the right thing is? How can you tell what’s right?”

  Ulak didn’t act as if my question was anything other than our usual philosophical banter. He squinted and his hands fingered the lacy trim of my blanket, as if he were searching for good answers among the filigree. He took his time, and I almost fell asleep to the careful meter of his breath.

  “Birdie. Istanbul is found by asking and asking along the way.”

  Lady Godiva

  One mile from the beach as the gull flies, at the top of a steep road carved into the broad side of a mesa during the 1970’s, my house overlooks all the others on my street. It sits at the apex of a short cul-de-sac comprised of small Spanish-style ranch homes and pepper trees. If you sit on the roof you can see an accordion-shaped lagoon stretching into the ocean, watch the sun sink and burp behind the power plant, and in the east on cool summer nights at 9:20 sharp, you can see the bloated fireworks display rising from LegoLand. It’s a nice place to live.

  I painted my house a gentle purple, a color that made me think of tropical gardens and the smell of lavender and the silly frilly dress I wore to my first prom. I fly a pirate’s flag from my poor woman’s panoramic rooftop view point, a ripped and faded Jolly Roger, and count construction workers and art teachers and line cooks as my neighbors.

  I sat at my computer and thought about ways to boost sales as the morning sunlight crept through the open blinds. My eyes tried to make sense of the words on the screen, but they kept returning to that bloody forest edge two decades ago. I stared out the window, into the cul-de-sac, and saw a neighbor boy chasing his pet Chihuahua. The dog ran under a row of tin-soldier Lombardy pines and stood on his hind legs as if to imitate them, barking from sheer joy.

  I have to be gentle with myself, I thought. If I decide to have contact with my daughter, this event will be one of the most traumatic and emotional experiences of my life, regardless of what else happens. I know no one else can understand this, can feel this, can ever in a million zillion years touch my mind and pull out the meat unless they’ve been through it themselves.

  How can you be you and not be you? How can you be a good and special Avon Lady and remember to call customers and write thank you notes and smile and laugh when three quarters of your mind climbs the evil trees of long ago? How can you find the trail of breadcrumbs you thought you left though counseling and tears? I think the owls swooped down and ate them. I think I have to make another trail, my own trail, ask for help along the way, just like Ulak said. I don’t know how.

  The boy grabbed the Chihuahua and carried him home. A swatch of black hair stood straight out behind his ears as he nuzzled his pet. He opened his front door and tossed the dog inside. He swiped a toy helicopter from an old card table decaying on the porch. The table shivered as the boy slammed the door. Hmmm, I thought. That gives me an idea. I faced my computer again, and opened a new document.

  Avon Wing-Ding-O-Rama!

  Free Makeovers!

  Free Cookies and Drinks!

  See the NEW Avon Products!

  Meet a REAL Avon Lady!!!!!

  I liked the last line the best. At the bottom I listed my address and the nearest cross street and the date and hours of the event – two weeks in advance. I printed out thirty copies on large paper and a set of rainbow fliers, and spritzed them all with the most ghastly overpowering perfume Avon sold. I drew a scarlet-red lipstick kiss around the prose, as if the invitation floated out of the puckered mouth of a wanton woman. I pressed colored felt-tip markers against sheets of blank labels and printed “13 Hours of Madness” along with my telephone number and the date of the event.

  I stood in my front yard as the sun rolled overhead and imagined my Avon Open House Wing-Ding-O-Rama, at the top of the patchwork cul-de-sac with assorted children gun-running lemonade and peanut butter cookies and one lone short grumpy middle-aged bastard of a neighbor three hou
ses down, peering out behind tasteful beige drapes, hoping I’d use too much Avon fade cream and disappear with the orange sun before any fireworks start. I crossed my fingers and hoped at the end of the sale I wouldn’t see him laughing at the sight of me jilted at the Avon altar.

  I dropped Marty and Louie at an afternoon community art class and headed for my favorite neighborhood, a swirl of busy cul-de-sacs of identical cream stucco spaces where I would never want to live, but boy, do they buy a lot of Avon. I left a flier with every housekeeper and soccer mom and landscape artist and granny and cook and stray child. I passed out my handmade stickers. One boy pulling a skateboard by a fraying dirty piece of rope took two stickers and stuck them under his board next to a skull and a foul-mouthed television cartoon character.

  I rang the doorbell for a house like all the others, pretty behind a stately jacaranda and a brick tiled drive, and a woman opened the door a foot and stuck her head outside.

  “Yes?” Her hair cascaded past her shoulders at least two feet, all black and wavy with a few stray grey strands.

  “Hi! I never got anyone to answer this door before! My name is Birdie and I’m your local Avon Lady! Would you care for a brochure and some free samples? I’m giving out rose lipsticks and Treselle fragrance and Planet Spa mud masks. Which do you prefer? I can also demonstrate the new Anew Deep Crease Concentrate. It makes you look stunning, not stunned. And that’s not all! I’m holding a huge yard sale – 13 Hours of Madness!” I held the three samples in my left hand and the book and flier in my right and shifted my hip and nodded to show her that my ratty backpack contained amazing beauty goodies, and she opened the door a bit wider and motioned for me to come in and sit down.