Something Like Maria

A few days ago a woman called me. She found my Avon brochure in a dumpster behind the grocery, she said, it was missing the front cover and smelled like old fish, and she wanted me to visit, give her a new brochure, some lipstick samples, and take her order. She spoke with a thick accent, but I couldn't place it. Latina? Nah. Italian? Nah. Something European, not French or German, maybe Polish. I asked her to repeat her address twice. She told me her name, but I didn't catch that, either, only knew it was something like Maria.

She lived behind the grocery, on the street bordering the alley where six dumpsters formed a train of trash. I often saw poor immigrants fish for aluminum cans at night, several per dumpster, holding stuffed black garbage bags and flashlights. Some nights, long years ago, I walked from dumpster to dumpster in a midwestern town, collecting bottles and cans by moonlight, beer and coke dripping behind me, a trail of liquid poverty crumbs to my home. I wondered if Maria knew that poverty, collected discarded pieces of middle class America to sell for bread, why she found my brochure in a dumpster.

A hedge of weathered aloe and purple plum surrounded her home, overgrown with dead cusps and branches and spindly Jimson weed. The hedge came up to an iron gate decorated with a six-foot steel lion, front paws extended in the air above him, ornate crown on his head. I pushed his belly and opened the gate, opened to a lush tropical garden filled with red azaleas and hanging purple datura and morning glory with three spouting fountains, a koi pond, and a large woman gardener, a large and wrinkled old woman gardener holding hedge clippers , leaning into a thorny pink rose bush, wearing nothing but the smile God gave her and two plastic pink hair barrettes.

"Oh my gosh! Pardon me! I think I have the wrong house!"

I turned to race out the gate, but I heard a guttural laugh and the clang of clippers against the saltillo tile.

"No, no, you got the right place. I go get a housecoat. You sit down."

She waved me to a cast iron bench, and I sat, placing my backpack at my side, orange and white spotted koi swimming up to greet my feet. I didn't raise my eyes to watch Maria saunter or hobble or sway to her housecoat. The brief second of eye flesh contact was enough, enough to see folds of sweat glistened fat and dimples and feet with cracking black volcanic soles.

"Now. Hello. What you got for me?"

Maria carried one of those cheap white plastic outdoor chair you buy at Kmart and plunked it down next to the bench. She sat, legs spread apart, wearing a powder blue chenille housecoat, an old world housecoat with a princess collar and two hip pockets lined with navy piping. Varicose veins and age spots covered every inch of her legs, and even through the generous fat I could see muscle.

"Sorry to walk in without knocking. I didn't know you'd, uh, be indisposed."

I held out my right hand in greeting and Maria grabbed it with her left hand, a strong dry skin grip.

"No, no, it fine. I keep the aloe high so I can wear no clothes. Nobody ever see."

She spoke like a man, a pirate's swagger to her voice, rough and ready and bordered in laughter, and the many lines on her face gave away a life of this laughter, deep crow's lines and smile arcs, not a hint of disaster or depression. I liked her.

"Plus I dun care. No one care about an old woman with no clothes."

"Well I don't blame you! Clothes just get in the way, don't they?"

I winked at Maria and opened my pack to remove brochures and tiny lipsticks in rose and cinnamon and a stack of wrinkle care skin samples. She looked like she needed those.

"Lemme ask you. What you name? Bird? Bird, I come from Hungary. We only use the aloe and witch hazel on the face. I dun need no skin cream. I want the lipstick. Hmm. This is nice."

She opened the cinnamon tube and applied it to her lips in a wayward pattern.

"Very nice. I want order one of these. Lemme tell you Bird. My husband died two year ago. Heart failure. He was a good man. He did no like no lipstick. But now I live by myself and I gonna wear it. Order me two of these. And that bath oil. You know."

I wrote down two cinnamon lipsticks in my order pad and one Skin So Soft, the bath oil of everyone.

"Now Bird. Lemme ask you. How old you think I am?"

Maria smiled and sat back in the chair. It creaked against the tile and I prayed it would not collapse under her weight. I hate age questions. I peered at her face, at the frizzy gray hair held back in little girl barrettes, at the lines around her eyes, at the fingernails mottled and dark, and leaned just a bit closer.

"Uh, 53? At the most, I mean!"

Maria laughed and laughed, slapping her knee, nodding her head, laughed with delight and the sureness of someone who knows the answer will be good and great and predictable.

"Bird, lemme tell you. I am 81 years old. Yes, 81. No one think I am 81. No one. I look so good because of the aloe. And because I swim one mile every morning in the ocean. One mile! Imagine that! I am 81 and I swim one mile every day! I could be in those Olympics but I'm not American citizen."

Maria stated that last bit like it was damn fact, like she was damn fast, as fast as Micheal Phelps himself, should he be 81 and a naked gardener and swim in a riptide ocean.

"Wow, one mile! No way! You don't look 81 at all!"

I clapped my hands and grinned wide, thinking Oh Yes you old Hungarian lady, you look exactly 81 years old, but I love it, love the way you look and act and talk and growl. I love it. Oh I want to be an old Maria dumpster diving mound of naked flesh when I reach 81. An American Hungarian backyard Olympian. That's the life!

I drove home, thinking about Maria, knowing she shucked the housecoat the minute I slammed the metal lion shut, knowing you could cast her far out to sea, past Catalina even, and she'd backstroke home, naked and slick with aloe, through storm and shark and beds of mysterious kelp, sure as Hungarian witch hazel, a crazy pirate laugh on her lips.