I'm sleeping... and right in the middle of a good dream
I think I love you
Lea lives in a dinky beach cottage near the Interstate 5 underpass. I walked a mile to her house last week, carrying a fancy bag with rope handles imprinted with Salma Hayek's face on the sides and the Avon logo. She ordered everything in the Anew Clinical line - the wrinkle cream, the fake botox treatment, the two step facial peel - and I wrapped them carefully in baby blue tissue paper and added a free Glimmerstick and a tube of Silicon Glove hand cream as thank you gifts.
I left brochures and samples along the way, set them on pollen-covered plastic lawn chairs and beside painted mailboxes, even stuffed one under the arm of a cement St. Francis guarding a quiet front door. I cut through a backyard and squeezed through a hole in the chain-link fence bordering the train tracks. Somewhere between the jimson weed decaying next to the railroad and a lumpy green metal dumpster a flutter of dirty paper caught my eye. An Avon brochure. Old. Faded. Crusted in salt and red dirt. I recognized the cover - the Christmas Campaign 24 book - and flipped it over to see what local representative littered my favorite short cut. Oh. Wow. Me. Damn.
I stuck the book in my kilt pocket and cursed my Avon life. I'm adding so much rubbish to this world, I thought. I'm giving people brochures they don't want, colors and creams they don't need, trying to sell women on the fake idea they don't have a one-hundred-percent drop dead gorgeous life without slimming lotion and shimmer blush. What the hell is wrong with me? What the hell. I'm just a stupid makeup prostitute. I kicked a flat black stone and watched it skip across the railroad ties. My flip-flops thwacked the silver line, rang an echo of slow sell-out despair. I wished I wasn't adding to the problems of the world. I also wished I sold a lot more stuff, and that dichotomy nearly split my mind into two.
I knocked on Lea's door. I didn't expect her to answer. She never answered, always left a check under the sisal welcome mat, but this time the check wasn't there. I waited a moment, knocked again. Her porch floor was uneven and dirty. A broken bar stool leaned against the side of the cottage. It needed a good coat of paint. A new roof too, I surmised, some patching on that screen door, cleaner curtains, I continued making a check list of Lea's Home Depot needs, started to turn to walk home when she opened the door.
"Hi, you must be Birdie." She peeked around the door, held it tight against her body, and I could smell sandalwood incense and aromatherapy candles. She wore her hair extra short, almost a Marine-type buzz-cut, and her eyes were lined in deep brown kohl. "Would you like to come in?"
I smiled and stepped inside. She wasn't what I expected. I thought she'd be older, maybe fifty or sixty. I thought she would wear classic clothes and carry a Kate Spade bag, but this woman looked my age, looked like a skinny goth tattoo superstar, with daisy chains and barbed wire around her bare arms.
"Please sit down while I write out a check. Sorry I wasn't ready. I was doing my meditation." She motioned toward a homemade alter made of a rickety card table with a short mahogany bookshelf atop.
She walked into another room and I stared at the altar. Every square inch was covered with photographs and concert tickets, all carefully framed and dusted, all of ancient teen idol David Cassidy of The Partridge Family fame. Six candles glowed in front of a four-foot poster of David standing in front of the family bus, all bell bottoms and day-glo green and blue and orange. Wow, that's weird, I thought. A plate of fruit sat in front of an autographed portrait. An apple, an orange, a handful of cherries, artfully arranged as some kind of offering.
Lea carried a check into the room. She extended her arm, looked ready to accept her product and have me run. I handed her the bag of Avon and wondered what kind of meditation she practiced. Some kind of David Cassidy telepathy experiment, perhaps? I wanted to laugh, but the look behind her eyes shamed me, told me I didn't know what I was thinking, told me there was a deep story here, one I would never hear.
I accepted the check, unzipped my backpack, stuck it inside, saw a plastic baggie with my walking snack - two of the super yummy homemade chocolate biscottis that Nancy sent me - and I pulled them into the sandalwood air.
"Hey. Can I leave some biscottis for David?" I didn't wait for an answer, set them carefully next to the orange, turned to see her smile, waved goodbye.
On the walk home I chucked the dirty old brochure in the dumpster, walked the tracks like a tightrope, arms straight out at my sides, decided the world didn't have to make sense.
I think I love you, world. Yeah. What the hell.
7:22:53 PM 
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