I delivered Avon today. I didn't have a whole lot to deliver, just eight bags. The most popular items this campaign were the holiday gift lip balms and purse-sized hand creams. Everyone ordered them in every flavor and color, so I spent hours this morning sorting and counting and reading the fine print on the labels and wishing I was a telephone repair person or a school nurse or a horse whisperer. Just anybody else. I don't want to be an Avon Lady anymore. It didn't help that I listened to my most bad luck down country music about love gone wrong. I started writing an Avon Lady song in my mind, one about a woman who runs away from her customers and sticks it to the Avon Man. Man, I'm losing it.
And somewhere between visiting monkey lady Melva and delivering her backordered Avon Snowman Surprise - and that, my friends, is a story in and of itself - and posting photos of the Avon cracker server and asking for contest submissions I bit the bullet and called Roger the gemologist card shark.
"Hi, is this Roger?"
"Yes?" He drew out the yes like this: Yesssssssssssssss. A snake yes, a low rumble cobra yes and I found myself getting warm, getting flustered.
"Uh, hi! This is Birdie! The Avon Lady?"
"Hey, babe. Glad you called."
I laughed, well, giggled, and told him I was just returning his call, but he read between the lines, knew I wanted to call, was afraid to call, knew all these things and more, I could hear it in his voice, in the way he took his time answering me, in the way he reach through the phone and grabbed my vocal cords, touched my hair, ran his hands, just the tips of black fingers, across my bare back. Oh, damn, what a voice.
"Come to Vegas with me. New Years weekend. I'll teach you how to play real poker. We can both wear pajamas."
I counted days on my fingers, looked at the calendar on the wall to my right, figured the days family would visit, figured the days I needed to be home, needed to be baking and wrapping and tending to scraped knees. And maybe it was the figuring of time, or maybe it was the country music. Or that damn cracker server, the way it sat on my kitchen table filled with kiddie graham snacks. Maybe it was his deep rusty voice. Ah, whatever it was, it only took me eleven seconds. I said yes.
Well I have an idea. Let's have a contest!!! It's been a few months since the last one!!! A package of Avon goodies (up to the discretion of the management of course) for the best/weirdest/most fun idea for what the heck I can do with the Avon cracker server. Have at it folks, multiple entries permitted! We'll all vote like usual for the winner. Get your entries in, here in comments, by Noon, PST, Dec. 17th. Yeah, it's only a few days but what the heck. That way you can have your Avon goodies by Christmas!
Five days ago I turned thirty-nine years old. I jumped into my crappy minivan at five-thirty in the morning and drove one town north to pick up my best friend, Patrick. We drove south, over a hundred miles south, past San Diego, past the dirty border towns and heavy cement beams marking the country to country transition, into the sun worn lands of Baja. Most of the experience is still too close to my heart. I'll never visit Mexico with Patrick again in this life. I'll never spend another birthday telling him my woes or selling him Avon. He's dying, we both know it, and this trip wrapped black electrical tape around our years of friendship, sealed it tight against water and sand and stray sparks.
We did all the usual things tourists do in Baja. We ate crispy fish wrapped in corn tortillas in Ensenada. We bought delicate silver bracelets inlaid with abalone shell and smooth Oaxacan black clay pots. We drank spicy velvet Mexican hot chocolates at a festive outdoor cafe and slammed back shots of Reposado tequila at Hussongs Cantina. Honestly, I remember nothing of this, but my camera tells me we did these things, shows me photos of Patrick sitting on a painted wooden bench, two men with mustaches and guitars playing Mariachi birthday songs behind him, shows me images of tiny shops crammed full of marionettes and jumping beans and sombreros, all that stuff Americanos purchase. I can almost see the wood shavings lining the floor of Hussongs, almost taste the salt and lime the bartender squeezed into my hand to lick, but it's a memory of a memory somehow. I guess those things weren't important.
The part that I can't get out of my head begins the moment we left Ensenada. I drove south sixteen kilometers to Highway 3 to a small dirt road veering east, into the center of the peninsula. We still felt the tequila and we blasted the radio, spreading salsa music to the livestock wandering into the road. We laughed and pointed, bumping over small hills, nearly hitting cows and jackrabbits and lizards and potholes, some the size of a pregnant beach ball, past a couple ramshackle farms and a stream bloated from the winter rains paralleling the road. The sky blew gray and green with short breaks of sun in the cloud cover, never hit the deep blue we wanted, and I wrapped my sweater around me tighter so that we could still keep the windows down, still call mooooooooo to the cows, yodel at the scraggly coyote stalking a lonely ridge.
We passed the town of Agua Caliente - Spanish for "hot water" - and the L-shaped faded adobe hotel with the two desert palms swaying in the winds and a sign promising a hot spring swimming pool but we kept driving. We knew where we were headed - someplace secret, someplace quiet - the natural hot water rising from the grounds deep in the hills outside of town. I pulled off the dirt road and parked next to another minivan, this one much crappier than my own. It was held together with duct tape and hemp rope and I peeked inside to see no seats - no seats! - just two slats of wood bolted to the sides of the vehicle like an old fashioned school bench. We walked through the brush to the two springs, each surrounded by circular red brick work done years before my birth, and we nodded to the two men in one tub and three women in the other, all Mexican, all naked, all silent and resting.
I shed my clothes, left them in a heap by a bush of black sage, and joined the women.
"¡Buenas tardes!" I whispered, easing into the hot water. I never felt water this warm, I thought, never felt such a rush of heat and emotion. I looked at the other women in my circle, knew they couldn't speak my language the same way I couldn't speak theirs, at least not well enough to hold conversation. But words didn't matter. We vibrated heat together, all of us mothers, with those scars and natural lumps our children gave us, all of us simple and human and soft and beautiful. One woman with a wide smile and round face pointed at my Avon Rose Drop necklace, the one with the iridescent stone and beadwork around the silver chain like a set of rosaries. She asked me something, but I didn't understand her. I unhooked the clasp and gave her the necklace.
"¡Estás en vuestra casa!" I said this with a flourish as I handed her the jewelry. It means "make yourself at home" which was the closest Spanish I could think up to mean I wanted her to keep it. The women laughed, smiled, the two on each side of me grabbed my hands. We sat like that for a long time, as long as my body could take the heat, and I hugged them and rose from the water to find Patrick rising from his pool at the same time.
We drove home, through those Baja lands, past those cows and coyote, but this time I felt them breathe, as if the spring water seeped into my skin, gave me a new Mexican identity. I listened as Patrick gave me my birthday present, a grand idea of what I should do with the time I have left on this planet, a good and sound and fun and important idea. Soon we found ourselves back in San Diego, back into our alien frazzle dazzle life.
