The Sunday List of Dreams (26 page)

To live her own list.

1.
Stop being afraid.

I
n Ohio, rumbling across I-90 just as the lawn-encrusted suburbs of Cleveland start appearing everywhere, Connie has second, third and fourth thoughts. It is the first time in her life that she is truly terrified. Sara is driving, and Connie has her knees lodged up against the back of the front seat so that she can write in her portable planner, and suddenly she feels as if she is being pressed up against a brick wall in a space that only has room for something the size of a cheap box of wine.

Meredith, who is busy reading a stack of magazines and newspapers Connie dragged along from her kitchen counter, turns to ask Connie a question and sees that she is as white as her running socks.

“Babe, Connie, hey, are you okay?”

Connie has a snake wrapped around her throat. A very large truck driver is sitting on her chest. A band of monkeys with yellow stripes that run from their long noses to the tip of their pointy asses are pulling on her hair. Her feet are on fire and long flames of red and white and gold are moving towards her arms and face and are poised to rip down her throat like a wildfire if she opens her mouth.

When Connie does try to open her mouth she discovers her jaw has been wired shut. Her hands have turned to ice and she cannot dislodge them from their tight grip on Sara’s headrest. Connie Franklin Nixon cannot remember how to speak. Is she Spanish? German? Did she grow up in Argentina? If she did speak what would she say?

“Get off the freeway!” Meredith yells to Sara. “Exit! Just get off.”

Sara looks in the mirror and sees that Connie has turned to stone. Meredith has one hand on her arm, a place of human contact, a touch of reality, and has moved across the bench seat to be right next to her.

When Connie looks up, she sees that she is in the parking lot of a restaurant. But where? There is a huge green garbage dumpster in front of the van, a string of cars on the other side, and a warm hand on her arm. She still cannot speak. The weight on her chest has left her breathless. Everything is hazy, as if someone has turned her over, poured a load of smoke and fog into her body and mind, slammed the door shut, and run like hell from the scene of the crime.

“Listen, Connie, it’s Meredith, we are in Cleveland, just off the Interstate and everything is going to be OK,” she hears Meredith say. “Can you say something? Need a drink of water? Do you want to go to the hospital?”

“The hospital,” Connie manages to whisper and then she begins to laugh.

Sara is standing outside the van window, just inches from Connie’s face, and sees her laughing. Sara looks at Meredith as if she has just witnessed a flock of geese flying out the back window.

“The hospital,” Connie says again, and then Meredith gets it.

“You’re laughing at the word ‘hospital’ because that is who you were, that is what freaked you out, that is where you never want to go again the rest of your life. Is that right?”

Sara motions for Meredith to move over and roll down the window and then she puts her hands on either side of the door and leans in so that she is as close as she can get to Connie without sitting in her lap.

“Hey, Connie,” she says softly. “It’s okay. It’s gonna be fine. We’re going to take care of you. Take a breath.”

Connie comes back slowly. She sees a soft shade of blue, the disappearing wings of the wild birds that have cluttered up her mind. She hears the lovely voices of her friends, her companions, her co-workers, her sex-toy assistants, and she feels safe and embarrassed as hell. She puts her face into her hands, hunches over and she tells Sara and Meredith that she thinks she just had a panic attack. She tells them she was reading through her notes, wondering if she had made all the necessary phone calls, locked the back door, reset the timer light on the dining room table, canceled the newspapers, given a list of stuff that needs doing to O’Brien, closed the garage door, left a message for the Realtor, and called her other two daughters.

“Not to mention,” she says, straightening up, putting one hand on Sara’s arm and one hand on Meredith’s, “this sudden overwhelming feeling that I have no clue what I’m doing and that I should just stay the hell back in Cyprus where I belong.”

“I thought so,” Meredith says firmly. “You’ve been fidgeting since last night when your friends drank everything we had, bought every last sex toy, and told you they were jealous of your newfound profession. You also talked about the hospital.”

“I’m a nurse, for crissakes.”

“You
were
a nurse,” Sara reminds her. “Maybe you can be an ex-nurse and be something else. A part of you will always be a nurse.”

“Selling sex toys isn’t what I had in mind,” Connie admits. “I feel kind of like an ass. Like a kid who gets a bag of candy after a long fast, eats it all and then pukes into his own lap.”

Sara and Meredith laugh. Meredith asks if Connie wants to go in to the restaurant and get some coffee, but Connie says she can’t face the public yet, so Sara brings back three huge cups of coffee in paper cups and they sit in a circle in the empty back of the van to hash out Connie’s nervous breakdown. There are no windows back here, just the cushion of sleeping bags and a soft tent bag and the loose structure of sharing, conversation and openness that has sustained the Diva Sisters since they left New York. It is a miracle of mixed generations, lifestyles and cultures that is astonishing and brilliant and so remarkably possible.

Connie looks at Meredith and Sara and smiles, imagining what her life would be without them, imagining the same way she imagined just hours before what her life would be like without O’Brien, Sanchez, McHenery, and everyone else who was at her house fondling Diva products, drinking coffee and wine and laughing until way past midnight.

And she decides to confess. What could be worse than what these two women have both just witnessed? Connie falls into the saving grace of two women, two of the most unlikely suspects she has ever had land in her life, and yet she feels the karma of their female presence, sees the arms that have already captured her as she was falling, erases their ages, their wild looks, the knowledge that she is old enough to be their mother, and she confesses.

Connie tells them about her list, how they were and are a part of it as #26, and they both listen, kind, young women warriors of the road who between them seem to have an arsenal of emotional and worldly experience stockpiled and ready to go at a moment’s notice. Connie pulls a very wrinkled #1 from her pocket to show them and tells them that she has been scared since last night, and maybe for a very long time before that as well. Sara and Meredith listen, occasionally lean over to place a gentle hand on Connie’s shoulder or leg, and they do what women do best, what other women know they do best, what women always need from each other.

They listen.

It is not just the list, Connie confesses. It’s a fascinating and terrifying pause in life, this flying into the wind, this major leap in 15 directions when I thought I was headed in another, and this eating up of weeks of my time—the time of the list.

“When I first got back home, everything looked unfamiliar and distant,” she says, creeping into the half-opened closet of her fears as if she may faint at what she sees. “A part of me wanted to run screaming from the house, from how I lived, from where I thought I was going. And then, as the evening wore on, I settled back into who I am, where I am supposed to be going, and I wanted to stay and yet…”

“Yet?” both Sara and Meredith say at the same time.

“Now, I’m scared I might miss something. I’m scared if I stick to the program, if I focus on my list as I had intended to do, an entire world might fly past me and I would have considered it only as a passing storm cloud and not as a chance, an adventure, something new to try.”

“Anything else?” Meredith asks.

Connie is silent. She remembers moments like this from when she was a kid and she had to go to confession, had to walk up the endless aisle of her church and step behind a curtain and say things that even back then she thought were stupid and controlling, and how a part of her ever since has held something back. Held something back in a secret cave behind her heart and a narrow chasm that leads to the edge of her very lonely pubic bone. A cave that has seemed to crumble bit by bit since the day she discovered the plans for her daughter’s sex-toy empire hidden in the box in the garage. Crumbled as she leaned into a daughter she feared she might never know. Crumbled as she tapped into her reserve of control and danced with swamp rats, learned how to charge up a vibrator, and reclaimed the luscious heart of her sexual self.

“I thought I knew where I was going, and what I wanted, and what was going to happen in three months,” Connie says. “My whole life, since I divorced, has been about making certain I knew what might happen one day and then the day after that and well, hell, the uncertainty makes me feel a bit unsettled, even if I was excited about dancing through these next three months in an unstructured way. At the end, I knew exactly where I would be and how I would be living and what I would be doing.”

This, Sara reminds her, makes no sense, given the trail she has followed for such a long time. Raising kids alone, running the hospital, a few quiet adventures here and there, landing on her feet no matter how hard the blowing wind was trying to knock her over.

“Connie, I am new at this sex-toy business too but you seem so damn
natural
when you are talking to people. And last night when you actually put on that harness in front of your friends and showed them what to do—well, good God, Connie, do you think that was the act of a woman who is
afraid
?”

Connie actually blushes. She blushes as she remembers how no one in the room would admit that they knew how to wear a harness that is used to hold a dildo, and how Sara and Meredith looked at her as if she were nuts when she held one out to them to demonstrate, and how she ended up standing on the coffee table in the middle of the living room demonstrating how to do
it,
and
it
—meaning numerous intimate sexual adventures with a partner—man, woman, or someone in the middle.

“Nurse Nixon, you look stunning!” O’Brien had bellowed.

“Knock it off,” Connie told her. “This is serious business.”

“Sex is always serious business,” the doctor yelled back. “Connie, the world has suddenly turned on its end because of you.”

“Me?” Connie shouted back from her perch on the table. “What did I do?”

“Look around, honey,” the doctor said. “You may have just changed the lives of every single woman in this room. How’s that for a powerful feeling?”

Connie had brushed it off, sold everything that the Diva Sisters had set on the counter between the dining room and the kitchen that had never seen the likes of this wild night, and then even sold the harness she was wearing.

Uncertainty, she now tells Sara and Meredith, has suddenly frightened the living hell out of her. Maybe, she explains, I don’t know who I am.

“Well, shit, Connie, it’s been my experience in all of my 28 years,” Meredith says, stretching out her legs so one falls on either side of Connie, “that the heart of us stays the same. You are still Connie, the nurse, mom, friend and all that other stuff, but if we didn’t evolve, if we don’t leave ourselves open for chances and what we might become—minus the heart stuff—what the hell would be the point of life?”

“Profound,” Sara says, lowering her head.

“Listen,” Meredith persists. “If you really want to know, I had no clue that I’d be doing what I’m doing now, but I love this and I have no idea what I might be doing next year or when I’m your age but that’s just dandy with me because I’m pretty sure I know who I am.”

There’s something attractive, Sara admits, about safeness, about knowing what time the alarm clock will go off every day and what time you will eat and that you will retire in 32.5 years and get a pension and maybe take a cruise to Hawaii and then go to Arizona or Florida every winter or to the same cabin in the woods every July until the day you die.

“Sounds like hell,” Connie tells her.

“Well, hell, yes, but a comfortable kind of hell.”

“Look, Connie,” Meredith finally says. “Knock it off. You are just going back to New York to help us settle in at the store, work the party, just a few things that I know Jessica really needs help with. Do you have to question whether it’s your frigging destiny?”

Destiny? Connie cannot remember the last time she heard that word. Destiny. It sounds horrid, old, crusty and rotten. She pulls up her legs, laces her arms around her knees, shakes off the last trace of the bird wings that brushed against the exposed valves of her heart, and says, “No,” just as she tucks #1 back inside her pocket.

“No.”

Connie sits in the passenger seat and she breathes in and then out, and five minutes pass, and then an hour and she is back inside chipping away at the sides of the cave and thinking that maybe she can work on the list and take occasional detours. Then, when she thinks they may be driving like this for the rest of their lives, she sees the blaze of lights that can only mean New York City is close and, as they get closer and closer to Manhattan, to a world that still seems like Disneyland to her, she says another word.