The Sunday List of Dreams (20 page)

“I can tell and so can every man who walks past you, darling,” Geneva whispers seductively. “I told you—you are in heat—and I know there’s a better way to say it but it’s me and you here, baby. You are spicy, girl. Very spicy these days. It sort of coincides with the arrival of your mother now that I think about it, and I just hope you can keep it and, especially, use it. And your mom, Jessica—well, she’s smart and sexy and when she’s in the store, in case you haven’t noticed, she sells more than anyone.”

“My mom and I have collided in a good way. It’s not over, but we are both trying like hell to make it work. Thanks for caring, Geneva. I needed a slap upside the head.”

“Care, my ass. I’ve always cared. Let’s just see what the hell you do with it. And just so you know, baby—your mother is hot but you still don’t have a clue.”

“What do you mean?”

“You have no idea?”

“What?” Jessica asks, totally mystified.

“Baby, women and men hit on you, and I heard you and you claim to be physically attracted to men. Am I right so far?”

Jessica nods. She’s thinking. She’s hot, but she can still think.

“The best sex you’ve ever had, the greatest love of your life up to this moment right here, has been with a woman, right?”

“Right.”

“Which brings me right back to the clueless part.”

“Maybe I want everyone. Maybe I’m into that polyamory gig where people have several lovers. Men. Women. Whatever.”

Geneva loves Jessica. She cannot imagine her not in her life, in her world, living too far away. She’d throw herself in front of a New York bus for her and at this very moment she knows a hell of a lot more than Jessica knows.

“Jessica, why do you have to decide?”

Jessica shrugs and says it seems as if it would be easier.

“It’s not like we’re playing dodge ball and you’re picking teams,” Geneva advises. “Just go with it. Just flaunt your sexual self and see what happens. You’ve let go this far—why not just take off the entire shell and see where the hell you go?”

Jessica pauses. She wonders if Geneva is right. Wonders if she, for just the second time in her life, should let things simply happen. If she cuts back a bit on the use of the duct tape she’s been using to keep her life in place, what might happen? Who might happen? When might it all happen?

“I’ll try,” she finally says, surrendering the last piece of camouflage that she has used to keep herself away from the wild dogs of the world.

Geneva applauds her, throws open her bag of folders and spreadsheets and numbers and the two women plunge back into the world of business as if they have been discussing what to make for the gang at the employee appreciation dinner.

And there is much to discuss and not every discussion has an answer that can be as simple as the word “sex.”

By 3:55
P.M
., Connie Nixon Franklin believes she has become a senior citizen sexpot. She has her AARP card and is wondering, as she occasionally runs into the back room to look at the notes she made during her crash course in the use and care of sex toys, if she is supposed to be having this much fun.

“Quick, hey, Meredith, what did you say again about batteries and plug-in vibrators and the differences in sensation?” she asks as she races into the back room while a woman waits by the counter.

Meredith tells her and wants to jump up and scream. She’s created a monster. Connie is not only fun but she’s also smart and she cares and the customers—at least the last 15 who have come in since Connie’s mini–sex training class—seem to adore her.

And Connie is flirting with both the men and the women. She’s flirting and she’s selling sex toys and occasionally she’ll rush past Kinsey or Meredith, who cannot stop smiling at her, and say something like, “How are you planning on sneaking me across the border?” or “”I want a raise” or “I had no idea” as she maneuvers past them holding a sexual device that looks as if it belongs in a baby’s playpen.

And in a moment when she stops, pauses to regroup in between customers, Connie is not at all convinced that she is doing more than just filling in at her daughter’s store for a few days. She’s not at all sure she knows what in the hell she is doing. She is not at all sure that she should have left Indiana, kissed Burt, temporarily abandoned her list of dreams, forgiven her daughter for living in a world that she never even knew existed, and helped throw her entire life into a tailspin that has her parading around a city she was so scared of just days ago as if she knows what in the hell she is really doing.

Connie is afraid to look in a mirror because she may not recognize herself but she’s also hanging on to #37 on her list so tightly that she tells herself she cannot afford to change directions—especially if it means going backwards. But pausing just around the corner from the desk-door, from the eyes of her co-workers, and with her hand resting on a long purple feather that is attached to a finely woven black leather handle, Connie Nixon Franklin doubts herself. She doubts her ability to sell like this, to keep up with the kids she works with, to rotate her life so quickly without even calling O’Brien, for crissakes. What could she be thinking? Has one kiss caused her to go mad? What if Jessica fires the whole damn bunch of them when she finds out about her whip-toting mama?

Then, as if someone has sent out an emergency call for a career/sex counselor, Mattie, the lively hairdresser, bursts into the store, not so much walking as floating. She’s looking for Connie in the middle of a late afternoon coffee break, takes one look at her standing with her hands on her hips, at her perfect hair, her eyes focused on the billowing material against the far wall, and she thinks she’s helped create her own Diva.

“Connie, you look fabulous!” Mattie exclaims as she moves in for a hug. “Actually, you’re glowing.”

“I got kissed.”

“It’s the hair,” Mattie yells, pumping her fist into the air. “Actually, I have someone else for you to kiss. I came in to see how you feel about blind dates.”

Connie cannot speak. If she said the word “fuck” as often as other people did, as often as her own daughter or most of the women she worked with back at the hospital, that is what she would say right now. But instead she says nothing. Nurse Nixon looks at Mattie as if she too has lost her mind and cannot find it.

“Connie, you are sort of shimmering here while you stand under the shadows of the lovely sex toys. I’m serious. There’s this guy who comes in to my salon all the time and I told him all about you and he wants to take you for a drink or dinner and I already checked him out. He’s not a serial killer or anything.”

“Honey,” Connie stammers. “Hold on. I just left Indiana, plowed into the sex-toy business, kissed Burt Reynolds, found out my oldest daughter’s deepest secrets and now this?”

“Burt Reynolds?”

“Well, he looked like Burt Reynolds and let me tell you, if Burt Reynolds kisses like that you can call me a stalker,” Connie shares. “But…”

“But what, baby?”

“Shit, Mattie, I just spent the last few hours learning about sex toys because Meredith confided in me that Jessica is on overload, and they have some kind of festival they might need me to go to and I just thought, ‘What the hell?’ and now I’m thinking for real, ‘What the hell am I thinking?’” Connie says, not waiting for an answer, or a breath, or anything from her new friend.

Mattie grabs her and pulls her into the back room while holding up her right hand as a moving stop sign so that Kinsey and Meredith know to leave them alone.

“Sit,” she orders.

Connie sits.

“Now listen, woman.”

Connie listens.

She listens as Mattie drops her sex bomb. It is a bomb filled with years of sexual heartache from all of her clients. It is a bomb that coincides with every ounce of scientific and medical research—research that supports Jessica and Geneva and Mattie’s contention that way more women are sexually dissatisfied than satisfied. It is a bomb that explodes with the reality that so many women, even now, even after all these years of education and experimentation and liberation, still do not know their bodies. It is a bomb that explodes with the very real and extremely sad news that many women still buy into the sexual and historical stereotypes that blast the world with the idea that men like and need sex and women do not.

Woman do not need it.

Women do not like it.

Women do not want it.

And the bomb explodes in Connie’s brain as if she had been holding it in her own hand.

“You know this is true because this has been your life and the life of many of your friends,” Mattie tells her softly, but forcefully, as if it was something she knew Connie had already thought about and held close but needed to hear from someone else. “I bet you have talked about this now and then with your friends, but I bet it’s even hard for you, a woman of the world, a nurse who has seen and heard and felt and witnessed everything.”

Connie wants to know how a hairstylist can be so smart but she is afraid to speak. Because every single word Mattie is saying is true.

“Do you know how many of my clients I send right here to Diva’s after I warm them up with a shampoo and a neck massage and they begin to cry and tell me something like, ‘I’ve never had an orgasm’?”

Hundreds, Connie imagines, but she knows Mattie does not want her to speak and she also knows she probably could not speak even if she was allowed to at this moment.

“My God,” Mattie continues, putting her hands against her face. “It’s so damn sad, Connie. So sad to see these beautiful, seemingly smart women trapped in this arcade of a life, and to know that they have never experienced sexual pleasure in a way that can set them free. Jesus. I’m tempted to quit and come over here to Diva’s myself. I’m serious. I know Jessica wants to open more stores and I feel like it’s saving womankind to offer services and classes and sex toys and a place to allow women to let go and learn.”

Connie has a sudden urge to get up and run through the streets with a vibrator in her hand. She has heard the stories, some of the same stories that Mattie has heard. Women cradled in her arms who are sick and boozy with medication telling her their deepest secrets. Women holding Connie’s hands tighter and tighter when their husbands come into the hospital or ER room and do not bother to touch them or kiss them or offer any words of love. Women, some of them her own close friends, who have been raped and abused, who have yet to cross over that very long bridge back through sexual recovery to their own selves.

“Connie, look at yourself, look at who you are, and how you’ve lived, and what you could bring to a place like this,” Mattie urges her. “You are sexy and you are not a kid and you have all those years of administrative poise and tact just burning a hole in your pocket. Jesus, Connie, besides that, can you imagine anything more fun at this particular moment in your life than being your age, selling sex toys, and hanging out with really cool hairstylists? If you were coming in here, wouldn’t you like to talk to
you
?”

Connie doesn’t hesitate this time. She stands up and she grabs her friend Mattie and she hugs her and as she hugs her she thinks about Mrs. Cradow. Mrs. Cradow who, back in 1983, was in bed 12 on the surgery ward following a hysterectomy. Mrs. Cradow, who had given birth to nine children. Mrs. Cradow, who had lost five children during the third to sixth months of pregnancy. Mrs. Cradow, who was only 39 years old but who looked like a grandmother. Mrs. Cradow, who had already taken her 16-year-old daughter to Planned Parenthood when her husband wasn’t looking. Mrs. Cradow, who had grabbed Nurse Nixon just below her elbow and pulled her with such force onto the bed and who then wept in her arms and said over and over again for 15 solid minutes, “This is the happiest day of my life because I will never have to worry about having another baby. Who needs a womb anyway? I have never once, not once, had sex for pleasure.”

Connie Franklin Nixon turns her head just a tiny bit while she is standing in the stockroom of her daughter’s sex-toy store and thinks she sees her old white nurse’s cap drop to the floor and vanish under a shelf right under the stacked boxes of the new blue vibrators.

Then she turns her head back towards Mattie’s ear and says, “No, Mattie, I cannot think of one thing more fun than being right here, right now. But what about Jessica?”

“Oh, Connie, all you have to do is let her know you love her! Just tell her, for crying out loud,” Mattie answers. “Jessica needs you here and in all places of her life just as much as you need her. Just tell her.”

“I will,” Connie promises, to her own astonishment. “The second she walks in here, that is exactly what I will do.”

And then they both giggle as an entire carton of strawberry lubricant falls off the shelf when Connie leans in to hug Mattie and dozens of tiny red bottles roll against each other and sound as if they are clapping at the edge of a vast and endlessly enchanting stage.

I
t could be a movie.

This same thought is rocketing through three minds at the exact same moment. Connie, Meredith, and a last-minute recruit who appeared as if by chance, Sara Hanson, a lanky 22-year-old casual acquaintance of Kinsey’s who happens to be free for the days needed to drive a trailer loaded with sex toys, a tent, an assortment of camping gear, and three women all the way from Times Square to Michigan, attend the big festival, and drive back again.

Connie is the designated mother. The woman in charge. The official organizer, keeper of sanity, harmony, and the religious conductor of a schedule that appears by the time the fascinating group of traveling women reach the Ohio-Michigan border to be an insane impossibility. She has not even bothered to write down the glorious #26—the mixing of friends—and here she is in the middle of it so thick it may be impossible to travel in the proper direction.

“I cannot believe we are doing this,” Connie says from the co-pilot seat as she sips from her seemingly perpetual cup of gas-station coffee. “How did this happen to us? I can’t believe my daughter hired me.”

A laugh from Sara—a dark-haired misplaced ’60s flower child look-alike who wears long skirts and tank tops and the requisite Birkenstocks, and who is sprawled in the backseat of a van that is filled from top to bottom with Diva products—has everyone say in reply, “This would be a
great
movie!”

“No shit,” Meredith laughs from behind her own coffee cup. “There’s no turning back now.”

No turning back.

Connie wrestles with this idea as she stretches her legs and realizes that in just a few hours they could pull up to her Indiana house, toss the sex toys into her garage, fire up the grill, pop open some dry white wine, and call it a day—or a week and a half.

O’Brien, of course, has not only encouraged this fascinating cross-country adventure but has run interference for Connie with her daughters, who Connie assumes may be wondering if their mother has lost her mind. “She’s having fun and cannot tend the grandbabies,” O’Brien told them, trying to get them to grasp the notion of a grandma peddling implements of sexual satisfaction at a women’s festival. “After raising the three of you, don’t you think it’s just dandy if your mother has a little adventure, tries something new, kisses a few boys, and drives off into the sunset for a while?”

O’Brien had tried hard to stay with Connie’s new life direction when Connie called to fill her in on the latest installment of the Nurse Nixon Story, which was unfolding daily in what was starting to seem like a comic parade of chance, change, and a flaming middle-aged crisis. Connie told her everything, from her sex-toy training session to the notion that she had been newly ordained to save as many sexually repressed women as possible and, try as she might, O’Brien actually could not discourage her friend.

“What do you have to lose?” O’Brien said, after hearing how Jessica never batted an eye when she heard about everyone’s new plans for her mother. Jessica was just not totally prepared for this cross-country trip, not to mention the business at the store, the pending arrival of the new products, the final planning for the big launch party and the list of business-related activities so long that it was about to make her go blind. She had planned but not quite enough and, to Jessica, her mother was suddenly like an unexpected Christmas bonus.

“Mom,” Jessica had confessed, when Meredith and Kinsey and Mattie told her their plans, “I need you and not just to fill a spot at the store but a spot in my life as well. I love you, Mom.”

Connie never imagined it like this. She never imagined it would slide into a gorgeous embrace, a wall that seemed to collapse with the weight of the words, “I love you,” and with the unexpected acknowledgment of mistakes made, forgiveness accepted, lost time to be made up, and a wild and joyful horizon of possibilities to be explored.

“I love you too, Jessica,” Connie told her daughter. “That has never changed, it will never change. But this work thing—you and me, and me working for you. Is it maybe too much?”

“Yes and no,” Jessica answered honestly. “From a business standpoint it’s perfect. But from a ‘Can I really work with my mother?’ standpoint, I have no clue…. But let’s try. Do the trip, Mom. See what happens. Let’s do this one day at a time.”

That “one day” philosophy is what Connie thought about when she sat in Jessica’s bathroom as she packed for the trip and wrestled with her list, wrestled with the notion of the flashing #37. And then she realized that what she was doing, where she was going, and what might happen were all part of the dream list anyway. Connie convinced herself, as she wrote down numbers on her slips of paper for her camping pants’ pocket, that she had not veered too far off the list after all and that maybe, well sort of maybe, it was all going to be just fine. “I won’t lose anything,” she whispered out loud, hoping the sound of her own voice would make her believe.

And O’Brien thought about losing Nurse Nixon herself. She thought about how she already hated driving over to Connie’s house and knowing that she would not be there. She hated the empty kitchen, the quiet, untalking walls, the way Connie’s newspapers landed against the side of the front door and then fell into the bushes as if they had totally surrendered and abandoned the house.

“What if you never come home?” Frannie asked her.

“How could that be possible?”

“Jesus, baby, look at where you’re going. Anything is possible. You should know that now more than ever. You are headed to a wild music festival to sell sex toys with a couple of kids. Did you even suspect that was possible a week ago?”

“Hell, no.”

“Well, then, maybe you will never come home.”

“Maybe anything is possible,” Connie admitted as she watched the New York traffic from the window of Jessica’s apartment. “Maybe I was guilty of getting so caught up in a plan I thought I had to follow that I almost missed something. A whole bunch of somethings.”

O’Brien knows she is right and she tells her that, as well as the truth that she misses her. Misses her like crazy.

“Oh, shoot, Nixon, you’d be out of your mind worse than you are already not to go to Michigan, not to see what it’s like to sexually turn on women you may never see again the rest of your life but who will always remember the way you looked at them when you handed them a sex toy,” O’Brien said, relenting in her own selfish desire to get her pal back in town. “So just tell me what you need and I’ll send out your stuff right away.”

And Frannie mailed everything, from a pair of long underwear in case the Michigan weather turned ugly, to Connie’s camping clothes, a cookstove, and her hiking boots. And then Connie had to bravely call Sabrina and tell her daughter that she would not be able to baby-sit during the coming weekend because she would be en route to one of the largest women’s music festivals ever held in the United States of America.

“You’re going to the Lakeside Women’s Festival?” Sabrina asked in a tone of voice that was not even close to being soft and quiet.

“Yes, I am.”

And the conversation went downhill from there, until Connie made up an excuse to hang up, told Sabrina to call Jessica if she had any questions, and promised to send the kids something from the trip.

Then Burt Reynolds called, yelped like a puppy when he heard about the road trip, and asked innocently if he could somehow manage to meet her at a wayside, or maybe in her tent. Connie was flattered but filled him in quickly with the facts of a festival that surely did not disdain men but disallowed them from joining in on the women-only adventure. It’s just for females, she told him. It’s an oasis of safe, woman-driven openness. It’s apparently a place bordered by a private lake where an entire community is erected every June. It’s a self-contained, volunteer-orchestrated womb of life. A female Nirvana with music, camping, food, demonstrations and more laughter and fun than some women experience the rest of the year. It’s a terrific spot for Diva’s to set up shop for a week with a captive, sexually deprived, under-stimulated, ready-to-feel-good, all-woman audience.

And driving through a very long and heavy rainstorm with baby Sara, teenager Meredith, and the constant whistling of highway wind through the back window that never quite shuts, Connie Franklin Nixon—nurse extraordinaire, mother to three would-be goddesses, kisser of Burt Reynolds, follower of her list of dreams—rides out this portion of the sort-of-welcome storm of her life with as much abandon as she can muster for a woman who thought she would be home packing boxes, picking out a new couch and worrying about osteoporosis.

And as she drives she holds on to the slips she keeps dragging out of her pocket as if they are the only things keeping her from jumping out the window and running back the way she has just come.

The drive to female Nirvana takes two days and requires a one-night stay along the Interstate near Toledo. The kids—especially Sara who has just turned 22 and wants to see the inside of as many bars as possible before she gets back to her New York apartment—suggest a night out, but Connie cracks the for-real whip she’s taken to carrying with her—pink and black with a deep red handle—and makes them work out a plan for setting up camp, the mobile Diva station, and a schedule for the week-long festival. She promises both her charges time off for fun and thinks, the entire time that she is speaking, that running a portable sex-toy store is not unlike running a ward of a hospital—except it may be a lot more fun.

Connie Franklin Nixon has never been to an all-women’s festival in her entire life. She’s never ridden through three states with two 20-something, openly wild women. She’s never commanded a trailer filled with sex toys, eaten Chinese take-out while huddled over makeshift plans for a booth display, or had a man call her on her cell phone and talk dirty while she is driving a van as her companions sit in the backseat and play strip poker.

This is what Connie thinks about as she hugs her pillow in the double bed with the crappy mattress, next to Sara and Meredith. Her traveling companions have fallen asleep to the constant hum of a hotel air conditioner while Connie, restless, her mind a buzz of extraordinary ideas for a kick-ass booth at the festival, rolls over for the eighth time with the certainty that none of what awaits her was drafted onto the pages of her list of dreams even when she thought she was ready to hibernate in her house more than 400 miles away in Cyprus, Indiana.

Or maybe, just maybe, every single thing was right there on all those years of pages and she just never bothered to notice.

Incredulous.

Remarkable.

Unbelievable.

Jaw-dropping.

Connie, Sara, and Meredith are visually and emotionally awestruck. They are creeping through a superbly organized maze of womankind that snakes its way inside a forest on an unmarked dirt road a good 30 miles from a town so small it is not even on a map. They have driven through Detroit, east and north from Flint, and have been following a road lined for miles with women sleeping in ditches, waving flags, singing to each other, cooking over portable grills, and holding each other’s hands and babies as they wait for the main gates to open.

Diva’s display and sales pass allows them to enter the festival a day early so they can set up their portable shop and their own camping area, and prepare for the estimated five to eight thousand women who are expected to pass through the gates of the festival during the next 48 hours. Already it looks as if half of those thousands are camped and eager to get inside, and the three women—the Diva Sisters, as they have taken to calling themselves—are stunned. Sara has been crying since they hit the dirt road.