The Sunday List of Dreams (21 page)

“This is so beautiful it’s shocking,” Sara mumbles as Connie drives slowly past campers, trailers, women leaning against their backpacks, and several buses jammed with camping gear and a lovely assortment of women. Meredith is hanging out the back window, passing out Diva-labeled condoms and shouting, “Come see us at the Diva booth,” while Connie wonders how this kind of thing could have been going on for the past 30 years without her knowing a thing about it.

“Oh, my God,” she whispered when they first saw the lines, the women. The tangle of energy seemed to rise from the snake of female humanity waiting patiently for the gates to their own personal heaven to open. “I had no idea something like this existed, that women came together like this. I had no idea.”

Women waiting not for hours but for days and—after Sara jumped from the van to walk alongside and hug women and to help Meredith pass out more condoms and Diva brochures—she reports back that there are no arguments, no testy women, no one worried about being so far back in line. Sara reports that she can feel not one ounce of negative energy.

And passing through the gate is only the beginning.

“Welcome to a new world, a woman’s world, a view of life as it could be,” the festival registrar tells Connie as she places a plastic bracelet on her wrist, explains the logistics, and asks Connie where she intends to work for her festival shifts during the week.

“I’m working at Diva’s,” Connie says.

“Is this your first time?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, honey, what took you so long?”

Connie wants to haul out her wallet and show her the photographs of her three daughters, her two grandchildren, her nurse’s credentials, her insurance cards, and then pull down her pants to show her stretch marks and varicose veins. But the woman addressing her is about 65. She probably knows exactly what took her so long. So Connie just smiles and enters a world that is run and managed and has been perfected over the years by women who have a vision for a universe where tolerance, acceptance, openness, and sharing are standard fare.

Everyone does several volunteer shifts in the kitchen, garbage patrol, transportation, day care—whatever they can do, the festival worker tells her. No men are allowed on site, except the few from the local community who come at night to pump out the portable toilets or to drop off fresh produce, and their arrival in womanland is announced with a very loud horn. There are special teams, which Connie signs up for, of trained professionals who can intervene for everything from medical to mental mishaps. There is no crime. No one is hungry. When a woman with a baby showers, the stranger behind her holds the baby. Women sing spontaneously as they wait in line for vegetarian meals. Old friends hug under trees and help each other change flat tires. If a shift is short of help there are immediately 25 volunteers. There are sections for women with children, women who do not drink, women who want to party until the sun rises over the outhouse, women who are in wheelchairs, women who want to camp in total quiet, women who want to sit around the campfire with other old-timers.

Meredith, who has known about this festival for years, and has attended smaller events, tells Connie and Sara about the three women who started the festival back in the late ’60s as a way for women musicians and artists to flourish in their own space. “They wanted to create a safe haven for women, a place where women could come together at least once a year and be totally free of any male influences or pressures. And the festival has grown steadily, improved and sustained the women who attend it during the rest of the year,” she tells them. “And my mom was here for the first 15 years and brought me when I was a baby.”

Meredith ain’t no baby now, Connie knows, as they back up a trailer, haul out and erect a major tent, set up the Diva Sisters’ base camp, and then drive the van and trailer alongside of the lake, past waving women and towards the craft and retail area where they spend almost eight hours creating a Diva haven and retail shop for the hundreds of women who they expect to visit them starting the very next morning.

“Exhausted,” Connie declares that night as the three women collapse in webbed camping chairs and sip the wine Sara made them buy before they left civilization. “I feel as if I’ve just been transported to a foreign land and that my entire life has been a lie.
And
I’m exhausted.”

“Wait,” Meredith cautions. “By this time tomorrow night the ground will be humming. There will be women camped all over the place and you will see and feel even more than you do now.”

Sara has been sitting and sipping without speaking for a good 30 minutes. She’s staring into the fire, drinking her wine and occasionally looking up into a sky that is littered with stars that can only be seen from a remote location in the summer in the state of Michigan. Connie thinks Sara is seconds away from jumping onto her chair and leaping right into the sky.

“Think about what you were doing a week ago,” Sara says when Connie and Meredith finish their discussion about what is about to happen for the next seven days. “I’d been staring at my college diploma and wondering what in the hell I am going to do with the rest of my life, when I ran into Kinsey at the coffee shop.”

“And…?” Meredith asks.

“Most women would have hesitated,” Sara tells her Diva Sisters. “They would have mentioned the rent payment, or the need to find a real job, or they would have offered a frightened laugh. Why is it that ‘no’ is often our first response—well, the response most likely to come first when someone asks us something that society has conditioned us to think is not correct? How did that happen?”

Connie looks up at Sara and sees a woman who is younger than all three of her daughters and perhaps wiser than all of them put together. She sees someone she has learned to trust in just the span of a few days. She sees a young woman of remarkable intelligence who dresses like a Joni Mitchell groupie, loves to drink before 10
A.M
., has probably never turned down an offer for fun in her life, has a shiny college degree and a pierced nose and eyebrow, and who believes that she can turn the world on a dime if she wants to.

“It happens because we just let it happen,” Connie tries to explain as the wind picks up and makes the smoke change direction so that she has to cover her eyes. “It’s so easy to think that you are going to be different and live your life in a way that honors all your dreams and then, well, shit happens and most of us become ordinary.”

“You don’t seem ordinary,” Sara says, waving her hand through the smoke as if she can feel it slide through her fingers.

“What?”

“Connie,” Sara says, sitting up. “You could be my grandma, really, and here we are, drinking Pinot Grigio, sitting by a fire in the middle of nowhere, and we’re about to turn on thousands of women. You said ‘yes.’”

“This time,” Connie admits. “But I almost didn’t come. I had this plan just like other people have and I was terrified to veer off it.”

And she fingers the scraps of paper in her pocket and ushers out her life story for her Diva Sisters, a parade of haste, a warning from the hinterlands, a saga of happenings that overtook her world and gave her just a few regrets but not enough opportunities.

Meredith scoots her chair towards the fire. She looks right at Connie and smiles.

“Jessica tells me all kinds of stories about you, do you know that?” she tells Connie.

“What?”

“Don’t tell her I told you this, but her stories…well, Connie, you may have looked at yourself as a ‘no’ woman, but you totally inspired Jessica to start this business, to be her own woman, to rock the world with more than just a vibrator.”

Connie can’t speak. She holds out her glass so that Sara can fill it again and then she says very softly, “What?”

“Really,” Meredith assures her. “Jessica’s told me stories about how hard it was when you decided it was better to be alone than to be with a man who gave you nothing but a fishing anchor. She watched you—hell, don’t we all watch our mothers?—and she may have slipped away, but she really never went anywhere, Connie. I think you’ve probably said ‘yes’ more than you think you have.”

Connie closes her eyes. She struggles to remember something. There is a faint glow towards the back of her wine-woozy mind. She sees herself curled up on the old couch, divorced, cramming past 1
A.M
. for some stupid-ass nursing certification that she needed so she could make another $1.50 an hour—$1.50 which meant the difference between having and not having dance lessons, a tank or two of gas a month, and a pair of shoes for Jessica’s birthday that otherwise would have been a laughable request.

“Mom”—Jessica’s young voice echoes in Connie’s mind—“I know what you’re doing.”

Connie turns to see Jessica at 15, proud, growing into her beautiful blonde self as if she knew all along where she was going, walking towards her at 1
A.M
. on a November morning with her t-shirt pulled down over her knees and her hair sticking up as if she’s just had her finger inside an electrical box.

“What?” Connie asks.

“I know you stay up like this to study so you can get that raise,” Jessica tells her.

“You do what you have to do.”

“But is this what you want to do?”

Sitting by the fire with her eyes still closed, Connie looks at her daughter and sees years past that moment, maybe towards a night when she is sitting by a campfire and figures something out, maybe in a week when something else new and wonderful gleaned from this week has magnified and jumped into her heart, maybe something she remembers about another moment that is as reassuring as this very conversation, the moment of remembering, the new knowledge of the past becoming present, becoming now.

“Yes,” Connie told Jessica. “I want to give you the world, honey, you know that, and sometimes giving you the world, or something extra, or maybe just the basics, is not always easy, but it’s my choice. Yes, Jessica, it’s what I want to do and what I want to do this very moment, right now, the second you are standing there in your underwear and t-shirt.”

Slowly, Connie opens her eyes, and she looks through the flickering crimson and gold flaming arms of the fire.

“So many people never live in the present and keep reaching back,” she tells Meredith and Sara. “There’s lots of stuff back there to pull out, but I think some of us, some of us who are lucky, we learn not to apologize all of the time. I’ve made tons of mistakes and many of them with Jessica. It’s silly, really, to think that you would make the same choices now that you made back then. Look back right now, both of you, and think about some dumb-ass thing you did.”

Both women laugh.

“It could have been something you did yesterday or a month ago but the bottom line is that you are not the same person this second as you were even a day ago,” Connie, the head Diva Sister, assures them, trying to reassure herself as well. “I sure as hell would never have said yes to this adventure ten years ago, or even a month ago, but sitting here right now, I can’t imagine saying no to anything.”

“Anything?” Meredith asks with a dirty laugh, as if she is about to propose something way, way off the beaten path.

“Yes,” Connie shouts boldly into the chilly, star-filled Michigan night air. “Yes, yes, and yes again.”

Connie’s voice carries like a wild seed in a March wind and women camping along the edge of the lake hear her
yes
ing into the wind and they spontaneously join in chanting from one campfire to the next—“yes” and then “yes”—until there is a chorus of yesness reverberating throughout acres of land, out into the fields, back through every single camping loop and towards the gate by the dirt road where sleepy guards are holding steamy cups of hot coffee to stay awake until morning. “Yes!”

And each woman who chants “yes” thinks of something or someone to say yes to.

A lost lover.

One missed chance.

Tomorrow’s question.

A lusty rendezvous.

Postponed dreams.

Third and fourth chances.

That one time something or someone wonderful may come back around again because she is ready. Now she is ready.

Change…please, now, change.

And just yes, just yes, to this one moment, a chorus of women, ready, wanting, eager, to be, to try, to never settle, to be together, to navigate for these few precious days into a place of glorious companionship, learning, yearning—into a tide that will tug them into a sea of
yes
with or without a well-worn list of dreams.

An endless, bountiful sea of yes.

22.
Stop doubting yourself—for God’s sake, you save people’s lives
for a living.

J
osie has a slight limp, a very loud voice and absolutely no inhibitions, so when she says, “I’m 62 years old and I don’t believe I have ever had an orgasm,” at least forty women within a 75-foot radius hear her and turn suddenly in the direction of her voice as if they have been shot in the face.

Sara and Meredith cannot move. It is barely noon and they have worked like ravenous dogs for three hours. They greet. They sell. They explain. They laugh. They hug. They start all over again and the astounding stories, just two hours into their Diva festival week, are stories that have already made them weak in the knees.

And there limps Josie.

“What the heck is this?” she demands, picking up a lively looking black-and-silver instrument with a curved end and a couple of buttons that fits like it was made to nestle into the palm of her hand and only her hand.

Connie looks quickly at her Diva Sisters, then steps forward. She wants to leap over the counter, grab Josie in her arms, rock her like a baby, and whisper in her ear, “It’s never too late.” But instead she moves along the side of the Diva counter, which is actually a string of portable tables arrayed with sex toys, gently puts her arm around Josie and says, “Come over here for a second.”

The second lasts a good 20 minutes as Connie quietly explains how a hand-held G-spot vibrator works. Josie stands silently, not moving, listening with such attentiveness that Connie bumps her shoulder against the woman once to make certain she is still breathing.

“Most women never have an orgasm by vaginal penetration,” Connie explains, as if she has been demonstrating sex toys her entire life.

Josie looks into Connie’s eyes and then quickly looks away, not because she is embarrassed, but because her mind is focused on the magical black instrument that could, just could, take her to a place she has never been before.

“There is this wonderful soft spot just inside of your vagina, not more than an inch or two, called the G-spot, which ironically is named after the man who discovered it—as if such a discovery is possible by a man,” Connie explains, remembering the details of her Diva sex-toy class from Meredith perfectly. “And this little instrument is designed to stimulate that wonderful spot and hopefully give you the orgasm you’ve been searching for.”

“How do I find the spot?” Josie asks in a barely audible whisper.

“That’s the fun part,” Connie answers. “You get to play around with this. You will find it, believe me, and while you are looking you may find a few other places that get you flying as well.”

Josie abruptly covers her face. Nurse Nixon emerges quickly.

“What is it, sweetheart?” Connie asks.

“This is suddenly so embarrassing, and I rarely get embarrassed.”

“I’m a woman, and I also happen to be a nurse, so don’t be embarrassed,” Connie says, putting her arm around Josie.

“I don’t even know where my clitoris is.”

Holy hell.

Connie wants to cry. She wants to storm a stadium filled with men who are grabbing themselves in the crotch area and yell, “What the hell have you been
doing
?” She wants to line up the hundreds and hundreds of women she expects to see during the next seven days and tell them all at one time, “You can do this. You can let go. You can be sexually satisfied with a partner or with yourself. Let me show you how. You never have to worry or wonder again.”

“Oh, sweetheart,” Connie manages to tell Josie, “lots of women have never been sexually satisfied and I can walk you through this if you won’t feel embarrassed. Can you listen for just a moment? You don’t even have to look at me. Is that okay?”

Josie squeezes her eyes shut and nods and then Connie takes her on a verbal tour of her own body. She walks Josie down her own breasts, she waltzes her down her stomach and towards her vagina where Connie, Nurse Nixon once again, explains the ins and outs of every inch, every fold, every mound that lies in a place that has been foreign territory for Josie.

“See?” Connie asks gently.

“I think so.”

“Do you want to try one of these?” Connie asks, touching the edge of the black-and-silver vibrator.

Josie smiles. Her smile is a trillion-candle light in the middle of nowhere, dawn in the spring desert, the light of early winter before nightfall, and she nods and then asks Connie to take her back to the table and to show her every single thing that she might consider purchasing that could squeeze into her backpack.

Josie leaves 45 minutes later, having spent $349.55. She hugs Connie for so long that three other customers come and go, and then she promises to report back before the end of the week, after she has a chance or many chances, she says, winking, to try out her Diva delights.

And Connie sighs and once again wants to cry. She wants to cry for every single woman at the festival, in the state, in the country, in the entire world who has never been able to feel the release of her sexual power and energy. She wants to cry for Josie and for every lost soul like Josie who has already paraded into the Diva booth. She wants to cry for herself, for having given up on something that she is just beginning to realize is a very important and wonderful and necessary part of life. And she wants to cry, too, for remembering that she hesitated, that she questioned coming to the festival, that she was so consumed by drifting through her list she might have missed the entire point of the list even as she focused on #22, which is propelling her through her day like a wild rocket.

And the parade of women galloping towards the Diva display is seemingly endless.

The customers come and they go. They ask questions and they say things, they tell the Diva Sisters things they have never before been comfortable telling anyone—ever.

The stories are astounding. The stories are heartwarming. The stories are a litany of longing, loss and heartache. They are beautiful and powerful. They are funny and terribly sad. Occasionally there is a story of hope. Sometimes there is a sexual success story.

——No one told me I could feel something like this.

——My friend wanted to show me but I was too embarrassed.

——My husband says it’s my fault. He says I am frigid.

——Sex has never lasted more than five minutes and that’s been for 26 years.

——I went into a sex-toy store once and there were men behind the counter. They laughed at me and I slapped the first one I could reach and ran out the door.

——I had no idea things like this existed. Show me. Show me now. Please. Can you hurry up, because my friend won’t be back at the tent for a few more hours?

——My daughter needs this shit. Give me one of these and this one and I love this one. I’m getting her all of this and I don’t care what it costs or what it says. Wrap it up. She will not go through what I went through. She will not.

——I’ve been using sex toys for five years. Do you have any job openings?

——If you start sex-toy parties you will put Tupperware out of business in three weeks.

All of this in just the first day and that evening the Diva Sisters proudly call Jessica, who is flabbergasted by their success but quickly agrees to ship more products to Flint, and then tells her mother she is proud, says, “I love you” three times during the phone conversation, while Sara and Meredith slump on folding chairs, exhausted and humbled by the scope and importance of what they are doing.

“Mom,” Jessica asks, “are you doing okay?”

Connie is so tired she could lie down on the portable table and sleep while the vibrators whirl in her ears. She is thinking about her deep bathtub in Cyprus and a cold glass of wine and someone rubbing her feet and how in God’s name she is going to sleep on the ground for seven more nights, but she pauses before she answers. Connie looks over at her Diva Sisters, who are talking quietly, mostly with their hands, and at the women in the booth next to them who have quickly become her friends, and she funnels back through the day to Josie and Cara and Susan and all the other women who may now have a shot at sexual happiness because of Diva’s, because she is there, because she has done something that just might be very close to remarkable.

“Honey, I’m frigging bone-tired but I don’t remember ever feeling like this in my entire life.”

“Like how?”

“Satisfied. Totally exhausted but satisfied and powerful and as if I’ve changed more lives in one day than I did all those years on the surgical unit or sloshing through some stupid-ass meeting or kissing the rear end of yet another 29-year-old doctor who had no idea how to tie up his own damn pants.”

Jessica laughs so loud that Sara and Meredith can hear her, and then she suggests that it must have been a pretty damn good day for Connie to feel what sounds like euphoria.

“I get what you do now, Jessica,” Connie told her. “I see something now. I only glimpsed it when I was in New York, but I get it in a whole new way now that sexually repressed women are weeping in my arms and begging for Diva products and advice.”

“Advice?”

“I’m trying.”

“Mother, maybe you should take some of the products back to the tent with you,” Jessica suggests. “Do you have a clue what you are talking about?”

“Sort of.”

“What do you mean ‘sort of’?”

“Meredith gave me the crash course, remember? And every time there is a break we play with the toys.”

“It’s not quite the same,” Jessica suggests.

“Honey, the tent is a little crowded and this is not, let me repeat that,
NOT
something I want to discuss with my daughter, who happens to be my employer,” Connie says forcefully, turning her back to her Diva Sisters.

Jessica laughs, which disarms her mother.

“What is so funny?”

“Think back, say, three weeks ago, Mom,” Jessica says. “Could you have even imagined this conversation?”

“Hell no,” Connie says, starting to laugh, too. “Three weeks ago I was a different person.”

“Me too.”

“Two miracles,” Connie suggests. “Remember what I told you when you were little?”

“Which time, Mom?”

“There’s always something,”
Connie reminds her. “That’s what I told you.”

“I’m realizing that more than ever,” Jessica says, wondering as she does so what the next something might be. “Mom…”

“What, baby?”

“Thanks.”

“For what, sweetheart?”

“For everything. Thanks for everything.”

Connie cannot speak. Connie Franklin Nixon, nurse to the masses, senior citizen sexual goddess instructor to thousands, kisser of Burt Reynolds, keeper of the list of dreams, grandmother of two—and soon to be three—and lusty seeker of unprovoked passion, simply cannot utter one single word.

“It’s okay, Mom. Did I tell you that I love you?”

Connie whispers, “I love you too, baby,” just before Jessica hangs up and a line of women, short, tall, young, old, single, married, heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, transsexual, asexual, white, black, religious and non-religious, spiritual and not-so-much, from every imaginable neighborhood and pattern of life in the United States, Europe, New Zealand, Canada, China and even Indiana continue their parade into the tent that covers the Diva Sisters and their products that Connie has lined up and filled with batteries in a spot for testing she lovingly calls “the playpen.”

Three days of almost total sunshine, one rainy morning, a night spent laughing during a campfire with new Diva clients—women who are unafraid to tell their life stories, an assortment of female humanity that would make Eve jealous and rock with gratitude—following eight concerts, three workshops, after Connie’s first group shower in 44 years, discussions about everything from cheap sex to how the United States totally screwed up the Gulfshore disaster, countless moments of quiet introspection while walking back and forth from the campsite to the Diva display…and Nurse Nixon gets her first voluntary call to duty as a member of what is affectionately known at the Lakeside Festival as the Marauding Mothers.

It is 1:21
A.M
. on Thursday morning. Connie thinks she is dreaming when she hears a gentle voice so close to her ear she can almost feel the breath against her cheek.

“Connie. Connie Nixon. The nurse. We need you.”

Sara and Meredith, awash in young dreams that have been sautéed with very long and delicious Margarita party trimmings, do not budge.

Connie answers “yes,” and only then remembers suddenly that she is in a tent in the middle of Michigan, peddling sex toys, and not rolling over in her old double bed in Cyprus, Indiana.

“Connie, we have a crisis and we need you STAT.”

Without thinking, Connie’s nursing feet move as if they have been set on fire with a blowtorch. She pulls on her sweatpants, a light jacket, and the ever-handy fanny pack filled with everything from a tweezers to a secret dose of Demerol that she has kept within arm’s reach almost every day for the past 30 years. She unzips the tent, steps into the low beam of several flashlights and sees the faces of three other women who quickly identify themselves. A surgeon, a physical therapist, and a volunteer guide.