Lady Godiva
Yesterday morning I dropped 9 and 8 at a 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 brochure with every housekeeper and soccer mom and landscape artist and grannie and cook and stray child. I passed out handmade stickers that read "13 Hours of Madness" and my telephone number and tomorrow's date. 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 what looked like a satanic symbol.
I rang the doorbell for a house like all the others, pretty behind Lombari pines 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." I held the three samples in my left hand and the book in my right and shifted my hip and nodded to show her that my red shoulder bag contained amazing beauty goodies, and she opened the door a bit wider and motioned for me to come in and sit down.
The room smelled of sandalwood incense and pot and was so dark and quiet it was like stepping into a permissive church during midnight mass. When my eyes adjusted to the light, I noticed my raven-haired potential customer wore a long silk men's shirt covered in a pattern of gold and silver cubes, and nothing else. The shirt should have been a good six inches longer, I thought, it's quite evident she doesn't dye her hair.
"Well, um, here's all three samples! You can have them all, plus the brochure. Um. In fact, I can give you another sample, how about an eye cream?" I dropped the samples on a short wicker table with a glass top and rummaged through my bag, peering into it as if I were looking for a bar of gold, anything to keep me from looking at Lady Godiva.
"No, no. Sit down. I never heard of the Deep Crease. Is this something new?" She walked to a black leather stuffed chair and I noticed she held a lit herbal cigarette. She sat down and drew a long breath, closing her eyes as she inhaled. "Avon is a great company. We used to have a girl come around but I haven't seen her in a coupla years." She blew out pungent smoke in my direction. I sat on the edge of the matching leather couch, my bag in my lap, and I tried to look at her eyes and nothing else.
"Well, the Avon Anew Clinical Deep Crease Concentrate is a brand new product. I got a bottle at the product expo in Anaheim last weekend. It will be in the Campaign 20 brochure, in about six weeks. But I do have some samples to give to interested customers. It's like a botox treatment, but you can still move your face afterwards." I continued explaining the benefits of the serum and opened the white glass bottle and squeezed out a drop onto my hand and showed her how it melted into your skin with no greasy aftereffects. My eyes jumped from the bottle to my skin to her eyes, not seeing, not registering the places in the middle.
"Hmmmmm. Interesting." She drew on her cigarette again, stubbed it out in an overfilled ceramic tray and leaned back, staring at me with cat-like slits for eyes. She looked vaguely Italian, with a soft complexion and carefully sculpted nails, a Rubanesque figure, an aqualine nose.
"Well I gotta run, gotta pick up my kids from art class. Nice to meet you! I'll let myself out!" I stood up and shoved the Deep Crease Concentrate in my kilt and headed for the door. When I got home I realized I didn't put the top back on the bottle, and now my kilt smells like a beauty treatment and pot and burnt herbs and sandalwood and embarrassment.
4:54:29 PM 
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