The Sunday List of Dreams (11 page)

“Excited?” Jessica asks, knowing that they are headed for a tiny sex-toy store that she has frankly never taken the time to go into, had the need to see, or had the nerve to enter.

And, yes, Romney is excited. And, yes, Romney is a sex-toy expert. And, yes, Jessica blushes in the store as Romney tells the little man behind the counter that she doesn’t need any help and that they might be there for a while so that he will go back to his book and his dish of granola.

They shop.

Jessica is speechless.

Why she never imagined such a place or has never been to one is almost as astounding to her as what she sees and holds and unabashedly wants to try.

What Jessica Franklin Nixon most remembers from the day, from the trip to the sex-toy store, has nothing to do with dildos and sexual pleasure and her lover’s need to please her, to try to keep her, to make her happy—which is what a true lover is supposed to do. Jessica, even now, remembers the way the sun stood for an unbelievably long time on the very edge of the lake as she walked back to the car that day with Romney. She remembers how she simply pushed on Romney’s arm, as if to say, “Stop, please, for just a second,” and how Romney stopped because she knew what she wanted without a word. They stood there, at the intersection of two streets, one curving towards something unseen, and one straight that ended along the usual path. They held hands, not caring who would see them, and they clutched the bag with the dildo between them and watched the sun move sweet, soft and slow until it fell off the edge of the sky and into the dark lip on the other side of the lake.

Jessica remembers feeling alive, sure, wanted, beautiful, courageous, and so frigging
empowered
. She remembers stretching her hand out so that if someone had taken a photo, just then, it would have seemed as if she were holding the sun between her fingers. And then Romney let go of a breath, a wish that she had been holding, and leaned against her and the warmth from her shoulder melted into her and moved through her arm, touched her heart and then skidded along the road that curved and disappeared into the night, black and intoxicating, with an unknown end.

When she finishes her story, Jessica looks up and her mother begins sobbing into her hands. “Mom,” she says. “Are you okay?”

Connie stands up, takes a step forward, and then opens her arms.

“I may never have been more okay in my entire life,” she says, moving to embrace her daughter so that she can say she understands, that she too has more secrets to share, and so she can especially say she is sorry for never understanding when Romney was in Jessica’s life all those years ago and why Jessica disappeared and turned into a Diva.

And when Connie Franklin Nixon speaks, it is with a voice that is totally sure and unafraid.

C
onnie remembers to check her cell phone for messages just after midnight when she is huddled for protection in Jessica’s bathroom, thanking her dead grandfather for teaching her how to hang a door, and wondering what in the hell she could say to her oldest daughter to get her to shut up already about the fact that her mother is going with her to straighten out the politically misaligned faces of the good ol’ boys.

“What the hell?” Jessica says not so softly about a minute before Connie has locked herself in the bathroom pretending to have to use it for something besides a safe harbor. “Mom, you can’t just fly into my life like this and take me by the hand and think that you can join in the fun and games as if you’ve always been there. I said get
me
a ticket, not get
you
a ticket.”

“I could help like I did this afternoon,” Connie replies, not at all oblivious to the fact that she and her oldest daughter have completely switched roles, and that she is begging just a bit. She knows she sounds like a teenager who wants something she knows she might not get. “It’s not like I am some kind of ignorant ass who has never dealt with the public.”

Connie
had
helped. She’d helped so much in fact that Jessica had wondered what she would have done to survive the day without her. Her mother had no idea what she was selling, no clue about what the difference between a vibrator and a dildo was, looked a few times as if her mouth had been permanently propped open when a customer asked her for something Connie had never heard of. Jessica was certain that at least two couples, one a lovely man and woman and the other a lovely man and man, had been stunned to see someone who looked remarkably like their mother running around the store with coffee cups and a whip hanging out of her back pocket.

And Connie, even after dipping into her pocket to read—
Stop being afraid
.—a good ten times, could not bring herself to tell Jessica she had purchased two tickets to New Orleans until moments ago. Moments she wishes she could somehow exchange along with the damn tickets.

“Mom,” Jessica snarls, partly out of simple frustration for the disruption her mother has brought to her life, “it’s sex toys we’re talking about here. This isn’t a hospital. This isn’t a post-op patient recovery room, you don’t dress in one of those perky pink surgical costumes, unless of course a customer wants you to special-order one because they have some kind of funky medical fetish and love to put Band-Aids on people. I do this stuff alone. Geneva handles the store when I’m gone and I’m going down there to kick some ass and it might not be
pretty
.”

Connie suddenly longs to slap her and say, “I’ll show you ass-kicking. I’ll show you
pretty
.” But instead she makes believe her hands are around her own throat so she cannot speak, says in a monotone, “Excuse me for just a second,” and departs swiftly to the restroom which she hopes will provide some kind of answer to the seemingly short but extremely complex question,
What now?

The cell phone leaps into her hand. There are 23 messages and most of them are from O’Brien, one from each of her daughters, three from the real estate agent and two from her former co-workers who called during a staff meeting and left the speaker phone on so she could hear what she was missing—a power play for the final say on patient discharge protocols; a discussion on where the garbage can should be located at the nurses’ station; a rather spirited debate about who would organize the fall picnic; a few stifled laughs when someone asked why Dr. Lambrinski allowed his dog to slink into the waiting room three times in one month while the good MD ran into his office to grab files, talked to staff members, and stole a drink from the lounge fridge.

Connie turns on the bathroom fan and calls O’Brien, who she prays to God will answer the phone. While she waits, she goes from being pissed off to thinking that maybe she really did lose her mind when the house started talking to her. Maybe, she tells herself, there was nothing wrong with the wiring and everyone was trying to protect her until they could get her out of the house and into some kind of secure environment where she wouldn’t hurt herself or anyone else—especially her eldest daughter. Maybe she snuck out and got on the airplane to New York just in time and totally screwed up the plan. Connie feels as if she will take a giant step backwards unless she can hear O’Brien’s voice.

“The plan, hell,” she utters out loud just as the fan kicks in. “What about my list? What the heck am I doing?”

“Jesus, Nixon, what in the hell is going on?” O’Brien shouts into the phone on the fifth ring. “I leave you alone for a few hours and now you’re selling sex toys, getting makeovers, flying to big cities and making the one daughter you desperately need to have a relationship with hate you even more than she already does. I’m jealous as hell.”

Connie suddenly feels like a fool, and an ass, and that’s exactly what she tells O’Brien as through the closed bathroom door she hears Jessica fling God knows what in the space that serves as her living room, dining room, porch, basement cellar, bedroom, and the corporate headquarters for Diva’s.

“Imagine how you would feel if your mother showed up while you were unpacking cartons of condoms and lubricating gel, sweetheart,” O’Brien admonishes. “It’s not like she runs a flipping daycare center. And she’s also used to being alone. You upset her routines, her schedule, her life balance, and, apparently, made her wonder what the hell happened to her
real
mother.”

“I’m the same. I haven’t changed,” Connie protests, stung.

“Tell me what you look like right now.”

Connie was not the same and neither was her daughter—physically and mentally. They had both, with more than a bit of cajoling and badgering and finally the appearance of Mattie at the door of Diva’s with a blow-dryer aimed at Jessica as if it were a gun, turned into Divas themselves. They had become new women—at least from the neck up. Haircuts, dye jobs, a parade of brushes and wands and scissors and a takeout order of Chinese, almost two six-packs, and 3.5 hours later and the two Nixon women were definitely saucy and Connie had not even written #8, the hair dream, down on her pocket list yet.

“Shit,” Connie admits over the hum of the bathroom fan. “I’m sort of a blonde now.”

“See,” O’Brien says, trying not to laugh, “Jessica probably doesn’t even recognize you. No wonder it’s thrown her into some kind of frantic realization that her mother is an adult, she is also an adult, and everything has changed. Don’t start baking chocolate chip cookies and reading her
Goodnight Moon,
for God’s sake, or you will screw up everything.”

“Tomorrow, shit, Frannie, in like
five
hours we are supposed to fly to New Orleans and I had this idea that I could help and she doesn’t want me to go and I don’t know what the hell to do,” Connie moans, hands on her knees, ass on the closed toilet, and the fan blowing on her bare neck where Mattie had shaved off all of her hair.

O’Brien lets her have it for a good three minutes. Just go to New Orleans, for crissakes, she tells Connie. You’ve got the ticket, you’ve wanted to go for years, if Jessica doesn’t warm up just go to a different bar in the French Quarter every 15 minutes until she’s finished. Go see a swamp. Stop treating her like a daughter and just treat her like a woman. Gezus, Nixon, you ran an entire hospital, raised three kids pretty much on your own, and you don’t usually take shit from anyone. Don’t back down. Get pissed off yourself.

While O’Brien tries hard to motivate her, Connie wonders if Jessica might be afraid of failing, of dipping backwards into her own fears, into that place where not making it seems predestined. Connie thinks that if the New Orleans trip works out, she may be able to cross out number seven. And number seven, she reminds herself, is the real number one.

Connie listens and then has so much to say that she needs to take a breath before she starts, but Jessica pounds on the door just then and yells, “Mom, get off the phone and come out,” and Connie does just that, thinking the fight will resume. But Jessica really needs to go to the bathroom, and probably make her own “What the hell?” calls, Connie thinks. And as tempted as she is to stand by the door and listen, she cannot bring herself to do it. In the next 15 minutes, instead, Connie finishes packing, checks to make certain the tickets are tucked into the pocket of her new jacket, runs her fingers through her very short and very blonde hair, and then drops into bed imagining the early morning smell of New Orleans—a mix of serious coffee and lightly baked beignets, she fantasizes, a perfume seeping through the cracks of the very old, very well-restored, and very hip bed-and-breakfast hotel room she has reserved on the second floor of a building encased in antique wrought iron on Dumaine Street in the very heart of the French Quarter.

“And you have done harder things,” she reminds herself in a whisper. “So many dreams, so many are so damn close.”

It is possible, Connie Franklin Nixon discovers, to do some serious traveling with a partner and not speak to her. You can sleep in the same bed, get dressed, eat a bagel, hail a cab, check in, sit right next to her on the plane, pass her a note that says
Geneva called while you were in the shower,
order coffee, and then slink away into your own world, all without saying a single word.

Silence is like a delicious appetizer to Connie, who has decided to ride out the silent storm and enjoy the scenery.

“Call it mother’s revenge for the secrets of the daughter,” she tells herself, “but I am not excited about arguing and my good intentions need to be recognized. Christ,” she adds, silently of course, “I paid for the plane tickets and this spicy suite. A little jazzy decadence, wild fun and 24-hour street dancing…I’ve wanted a slice of The Big Easy since I can remember.”

And remembering goes way past those days when Ms. Sex Toy Diva who is now sitting beside her on the plane was a baby and Connie was lucky if she had the time to read a page in a book, and when reading a whole book would be like having an illicit affair, which she admits she would not have known how to have anyway. So page by page, month after month, Connie would read and finally finish a book—mostly when she was in the bathroom because it was absolutely the only place in her house where no one would bother her.

“Mommy is going potty!” she would yell out to one of the girls while sitting on the toilet but not for the usual reason. “Go play with your sisters until Mommy is done!” And for every time Connie said that, she would have to have had six bladders and a urinary tract infection every month for seven years but it was the only way she could finish books and make believe she was traveling to exotic places like New Orleans, places that she doubted she’d ever actually get to see in person, with or without a cranky, pouting, and very silent daughter.

When they start the approach into the appropriately named Louis Armstrong International Airport, and Connie looks out the window from her aisle seat to the expansive green blanket of lushness called Louisiana that seems as if it is opening its arms to the plane, she catches Jessica’s eye for a moment and starts laughing. Connie cannot stop and Jessica sets down her notebook, glares at her mother and waits for her to say something. Connie’s laugh is not the sweet, “on an airplane” laugh that might come squeaking out of a short-haired, middle-aged blonde woman who is reading women’s magazines. Connie roars. Wild dogs would have run. Janis Joplin would be offended. Harley riders would be insulted. Jessica decides her mother has lost her mind.

“Mother,” she finally says, looking totally disgusted. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

“It was the bathroom,” Connie giggles, “when you were a little girl and I always told you I was going potty—”

Jessica is trying hard not to grab her mother and tell her she is sorry, except she isn’t quite ready for that yet because she is still trying to figure out what to do later in the day when she meets with the boys from her manufacturing company and the assholes from Jenko County. Jessica Nixon, the MBA entrepreneur who has stabbed the odds in the back, is at a self-confidence standstill, a professional pause, an unforeseen roadblock that was definitely not covered in economics class, business logistics, or any of the other goddamn MBA classes she took that cost her close to $50,000 and three of the best years, so she thinks, of her life.

Add to her professional panic the near-constant presence of her mother, a woman who was not a stranger just days ago but surely estranged, and Jessica is on the edge of exploding.