Don't Shoot! I'm Just the Avon Lady! Read Online Free PDF Page B

of alive, almost four decades of unthinking breath. My eyes wandered through the market. A couple with more tattoos than skin sat under a Eucalyptus tree with paper bowls of ice cream, watching their daughter chase boys. I stared at the blue patterns on their entwined arms: a Chinese fish, rings of Plumeria flowers, a woman’s face framed with flowing dark hair. What Avon cream is best for tattoos? I wondered.
    I remember being young like that. I’m like the old moms at my boys’ school now. We chat among ourselves, woman to woman. We don’t snuggle with men in public any more. We talk about Halloween parties and laundry stains. I mentioned my Avon business at the last PTA meeting of the academic year and passed out white business cards printed with a photo of lipsticks in a bouquet. I felt out of sync with these women, even though they were kind and took my cards and told me they would call to order something.
    I longed to wrestle in the shaded grass with a young man in tattooed skin, his arms around my waist as I laugh, whisper in his ear.
    “Never forget this!” I want to yell this to the young parents, to tell them to breathe the grass and sky and ice cream and remember.
    Years ago I was young like that, and oh-so-restless. I ran away to Puget Sound with my boyfriend. I found myself managing a Knights of Columbus trailer park on a dreary algae lake, far from the place I called home, with my parents’ frowns on my permanent record and no money to my name.
    I fell in lust with my lover’s red hair and sense of humor. He was four years older, and the son of an Air Force survivalist trainer. He could fix anything that was broken. He loved me because I was so different from any of his previous girlfriends. And I liked sex. We didn’t start as friends, became immediate lovers, and nothing else seemed to matter. His friends hated me, my gypsy style of dress, my loud hyena laugh, my way of discussing every subject to death. My friends hated him, the way he would emotionally withdraw, his silly puns, his love for dumb movies. Everyone pointed out we had nothing in common, but we rolled our eyes as countless other young couples have done.
    I cooked, I cleaned. I made flies for the fishermen who frequented our campground store. We rode the trailer park paddleboat around the lake every night. I even worked as a talking, dancing pig at the state fair. I loved being poor and struggling. We ate potatoes and green beans for an entire summer, and picked illicit strawberries at night when the farmer down the road was asleep. We walked the railroad tracks of western Washington in bare feet through the summer and fall. My parents’ disapproval didn’t matter to me. Life moved forward, and for a time the rumble beneath the surface of my heart seemed to fade like the roll of the cargo trains headed for Seattle in the distance.
    If those mystics are right, and you choose your own obstacles through many lifetimes, I picked my road this time around to be hidden and lumpy and snaking through dark sticky brambles, full of brochures left in doctor’s waiting rooms and stacked in neat piles next to DEET-enhanced bug sprays at wind-torn campground stores. I danced around town with two boys on an invisible leash. And all the while my heart sang songs about the way I was, the way I am, the way I might someday be, maybe a rich Avon Lady touring Thailand, or a broke Avon Lady eating peanut butter, maybe somebody between, maybe someone quite different.
    I thought about my old life, the times I wanted to quit and run. I remembered the winter the ground froze solid, insulating the earth from everything on the surface. Covered in long cotton underwear, multiple sweaters, hats, gloves, scarves tied around our faces, we were insulated from each other, relying on words to get our emotions across. The winter broke me, too cold to work, too cold to think, my dreams frozen, becoming icicles, eventually breaking free and shattering on the ground. My