The Sunday List of Dreams (15 page)

It is a very long kiss that costs them both an entire beer as the bottles drop onto the pier and then roll into the bayou where they sway like happy dancers until the soft currents of that south Louisiana waterland carry them towards the center.

The center, as Connie Franklin Nixon liked to tell her recovering patients before she retired, is a very fine place to be, because from there you can see both sides and select the best way home.

M
usic not so much drifting as slamming into the hotel room jolts Jessica awake, as if someone has jumped on top of her face and is blowing a whistle in her right ear. She is drooling, too, and this does not please her. She rolls to one side, feels an ache wind its way across her hips and down her left leg from lifting boxes, pulling plastic sheeting out of huge packages, and bending over long tables with drafting designs stuck to them as Justin explained what he laughingly called “the ins and outs” of sex toy development.

Jessica turned to him once during his discussion that included angles, lengths, widths, and surface bumps, and left her body for a brief moment. Justin, from that position, was just a nice-looking guy in faded jeans, a polo shirt, slip-on loafers without socks, a fine black leather belt with a small silver buckle and a simple silver watch on his left wrist. He wore a tiny gold band on the same hand and Jessica imagined that he was married, had two young daughters who had no clue what their father made for a living and a wife who had left a lucrative position as an advertising executive to marry him and raise their two children so they would not have to go into daycare.

Justin caught her looking at him and turned sideways to smile at her.

“Are you looking at my ass?”

“What?” Jessica exclaimed, startled and embarrassed because that is exactly what she was doing.

He laughed and straightened up, resting his hands on the drafting table, and told her that he wondered if anyone ever looked at his ass anymore.

“I work too much, don’t get out very often, and I think the last time I had a date was more than a year ago,” he told her. “How about you, Jessica? I bet your life is the same. You seem a bit possessed.”

Jessica, in fact, could not remember the last time she’d had an intimate conversation with a man, or anyone besides her mother or Geneva, let alone a real date. She wanted to tell Justin that he did indeed have a nice ass but she could not bring herself to do it and so, within two minutes, she had steered the conversation back to business, which confirmed every single thing Justin thought about her.

She did let him drive her back to the hotel, left a message for her mother that she didn’t need a ride, and then he asked if she wanted to have a drink or go out for dinner.

“I promised my mother a wild night in the French Quarter,” she lied, because it was her mother who had promised her the wild night. “And we have to leave in the morning to get back to New York.”

“Sounds like an all-nighter to me,” Justin said as he pulled up in front of her hotel. “They have a terrific bar in here. I’m going to park and make you have one drink with me.”

Jessica tried to stop him but he parked anyway, took her arm, let her stop at the restroom, and then paraded her into the bar where they had more than one drink and a really good time. And during the 90 minutes they spent together they mostly talked about everything
but
the production of sex toys, which made Jessica more nervous than discussing whips, crotchless panties, sensuous massage oil and implements that come with or without batteries.

Thus the semi-drunken nap on the bed that was induced by three glasses of wine, a polite handshake from Justin, who said he would really—with an emphasis on the word
really
—look forward to her next trip to Louisiana.

Jessica spun into the room, fell on the bed, and before a clear thought could pace itself through her mind she fell dead asleep.

And then the band arrived.

“Shit,” she complains, rising with a raging thirst. “What in the hell is that?”

That,
she discovers, is a band of six, walking itself down the street in front of the room. It might have been hired specially to announce the arrival of her mother, who flies through the door with a touch of sunburn on her nose and cheeks and a fine glow in her eyes that startles Jessica.

“Mother, it’s almost 7
P.M
. and I was getting worried,” Jessica lies.

“My good gawd,” Connie drawls as if she has a southern accent all her own. “I had the most remarkable day and we talked so long that I ended up going to a committee meeting with him and we got your message late because I had my cell phone off and so we went back—”

“Stop!” Jessica shouts, putting her hands up. “Food. I have not eaten in hours and I had a few drinks with Justin.”

Connie wants to jump and clap her hands at the same time over Jessica’s news but, instead, she washes her face, looks in the mirror, as if she is 14 and has just had her first kiss from some short bozo on the playground, to see if she looks different, and then takes a moment to calm her fast-beating heart and change out of her shorts.

When her slips of paper fall out of the shorts pocket, her morning list of dream notes, Connie thinks about how easy it would be now to lose her way. How easy to run off with the first man she kisses, how easy to forget about the most compelling, the most important number on the list. Jessica. Number seven. Connie pulls on some slacks and leans into the mirror again and quickly adds 7½ to her list. She writes it with her mind, pins it to the top of her heart and makes certain that it sticks. This is a big night. A possible last chance. Connie looks into her own eyes one more time, takes in a huge breath, and softly says,
“Yes.”

Then she hustles her oldest daughter out of the room and towards the restaurant Michael recommended.

And what a recommendation it is.

Seafood that fairly dances as it is eaten, thick homemade buttermilk rolls, a martini that seems to sing a soft jazz tune as it goes down her throat, and then another, as Jessica surprises her mother and orders a bottle of very expensive wine and they compare notes about the day. They launch into a conversation that both of them will wish for the rest of their lives they had captured on tape and film and audio and with someone who was a color-crayon artist, if such a person existed.

It starts with the kiss.

“I kissed Michael,” Connie whispers across the top of a blue-cheese–stuffed olive.

“What the hell?” Jessica whispers back across her own olive. “Mom?”

Connie closes her eyes, smiles, and says, “Oh, Jessica, it’s been so long, so very long since I felt, well, sexual, alive, attracted to something besides getting home early when I worked second shift.”

“Look, Mom, I’ve had three glasses of Chablis, one and a half martinis, and there’s a bottle of Burgundy in front of me,” Jessica said. “I may need to drink everything in sight to complete this conversation.”

Connie takes a sip and reaches out to put her hand over the top of Jessica’s hand that is resting with her fingertips on the bottom of her glass. She can feel the early weight of the drinks tiptoeing through her own blood, accelerated perhaps by her own astonishing afternoon. It is now or never and Connie is feeling suddenly more powerful than she usually does and is in no mood to accept the word “never.” She wants Jessica in her life, wants to be a part of Jessica’s life, wants to cross that rare bridge between a mother and daughter that allows them to be friends in a way that demands openness, spontaneity, and a soulful connection going way beyond weighty familial boundaries.

“Listen, kiddo,” she says, pushing away her plate and pouring them each another glass of wine. “Why should it be so hard to talk about physical emotions with your mother? I never once shied away from talking about sex with you, and I admit that my own sex life sucked.”

“It’s hard to think of a mother that way,” Jessica admits. “It’s also…easy to assume things,” she concludes uncomfortably.

“Well, shit, honey, think about it. Your father made three babies and fished. I worked and most of what I learned was from my girlfriends at Girl Scout camp, and later from reading
Our Bodies, Ourselves,
” Connie explains. “The sexual revolution still has not caught up with me, baby, and I’m beginning to think that truly sucks.”

Jessica smiles and squeezes her mother’s hand. She leans in just a bit, closes her eyes, shakes away thoughts of her mother tucking her into bed, reading to her the week she got the flu, grounding her for climbing in the bedroom window way past curfew one too many times. When she clears as much as she can away from her memory bank, she opens her eyes again and looks at a woman named Connie. Not her mother, but Connie Franklin Nixon.

“I’m so sorry,” Jessica says with such sadness in her voice that Connie’s breath catches in her throat. “It’s hard, even if you are my age, to think of your mother as a sexual being.”

“But isn’t that what your business is all about?”

Jessica pauses. She’s teetering on the same brink of uncertainty that her mother has been balancing on since she wrote the invisible number seven-and-a-half on her list and, for a second, before she answers her mother, she thinks about how hard and painful holding back has been. She thinks about the times she wanted to pick up the phone and call her mother, the hours she wondered what her mother would think, how Jessica would fail her again and how goddamn much she has missed so many parts of their early relationship.

Jessica finishes her second martini, moves on to the wine, and tells Connie something bold, something she has wanted to say for days, something she knows she must say before she too can move forward.

“Mom, I so want to be over this. I so want to forgive you, forgive myself, and have you be a part of my life in all the ways you have not been a part of my life,” Jessica says. She’s running her words together because if she stops she may lose courage. “I’ve missed you, Mom. And there have been a hundred times when I knew you could help me, help the business, be a part of my life, and I just could not do it.”

She goes on like a rocket. Recounting the boyfriends, the weekend in the cabin with Romney Switala, the months of sexual fulfillment, her inability to open her heart, her last date, and the tremendous idea to merge her passion for business with the notion that women must claim their sexual selves and do it every possible way and with the help of 100 Diva’s, if that’s what it takes.

Throughout the telling Connie does not blink, move her fingers off the table, lower her eyes, or think at any moment that she is going to have a heart attack. She does think that she is in the midst of one of the most remarkable moments of her life.

“Do you hate me, Mom? For all the secrets I’ve kept from you?”

“I’m Connie now, remember. Your mom is home baking bread and cinching up her chastity belt.”

“It’s a bit much, even for a hipster like you,” Jessica reminds her.

Connie is quiet for a second and decides that it really is now or never. She moves her hand to her heart, touches the very sacred place where she has placed number seven point five, and then she slowly peels back the layers of what lies below it, all the sections of her own heart, every inch.

“It’s not a bit much and your honesty right now is the greatest gift you have ever given me, Jessica,” Connie tells her daughter. “I cannot tell you how I have grieved over our relationship, how I have replayed our arguments, how I wish I could go back and change who we were, how we acted, what our lives were like.”

Jessica has occasionally imagined this conversation and to suddenly be in the middle of it is a breathtaking pause of reality. Her mother is rambling through her life, pushing through a wide barrier that has been held up by both of them, and is detailing her own version of why Diva’s is so necessary.

First the drunken guy at the party and the sad news that sex, a generation prior to Jessica’s generation, that generation which was on the cusp of the great sexual revolution, was not as widespread as some 30-somethings like to think.

“We learned most of what we knew from each other at slumber parties, from library books, and from a few consciousness-raising meetings we may have drifted into in between home economics and babysitting,” Connie explains. “Imagine my life after that—three kids coming out of me like rockets—and your father fishing and working every possible shift and where do you think the sexual revolution ended up on my priority list?”

“I never thought about it, Mom,” Jessica admits. “I never thought of you as a sexual person, as someone who sacrificed so much.”

“It is what a mother does,” Connie tells her.

“Do you have any idea how many of us there are, honey?” Connie whispers. “How many women have made babies and run businesses and saved lives and changed the world and who have not yet been sexually fulfilled? You think you know but I’m telling you there could be a Diva store on every corner and there still wouldn’t be enough equipment to make us all happy.”

Jessica has wine in her mouth and she cannot swallow it. She cannot move.

“Jesus, Jessica, I have no idea what I was selling in your store,” Connie admits. “I didn’t know but I did know that I loved handing one of those things to another woman and knowing that she is going to become very happy because of what she just purchased from me and it’s made me think, well, about a lot of things.”