The Sunday List of Dreams (35 page)

Kris Radish
is the author of six books. Her Bantam Dell novels
The Elegant Gathering of White Snows, Dancing Naked at the Edge of Dawn
and
Annie Freeman’s Fabulous Traveling Funeral
have been on bestseller and Book Sense 76 Selection lists. She also writes two weekly nationally syndicated columns.

She travels frequently throughout the country speaking about women’s issues, the value of female friendships and the importance of personal empowerment, as well as the necessity for laughter, a terrific glass of wine, lying quietly in the summer grass, embracing kindness, following the path in your own heart and no one else’s, and having fun at all costs.

Kris lives in Wisconsin with her partner, a teenaged daughter—whom she sees when the gas tank is empty, a college son—who shows up when it’s time to wash clothes, and where she is cruising through menopause on her Yamaha 1100 Classic VStar, her Trek bicycle, a treadmill, a pair of orange-laced walking shoes, a chlorine-blocking swimsuit, a gallon of calcium, about 100 notebooks for her novels, short story, poetry, and journalism ideas and a case of cheap wineglasses.

She is also working on her fifth novel,
Searching for Paradise in Parker, PA,
which Bantam Dell will publish in 2008.

Also by Kris Radish

The Elegant Gathering of White Snows

Dancing Naked at the Edge of Dawn

Annie Freeman’s Fabulous Traveling Funeral

And coming soon from Bantam Books

Searching for Paradise in Parker, PA

The 48th revision

1.
Stop being afraid.

2.
Let go. Stop holding on to things so tightly. Loosen your grasp. Be honest.

3.
Get rid of SHIT. Start with the garage.

4.
Dance with a handsome man who doesn’t care if you have a double chin, have to pluck your long facial hairs, or put on a girdle in order to get into the damn dress.

5.
Stop setting the alarm clock.

6.
Take yourself to confession. Make the penance easy.

7.
Recapture Jessica. Find Jessica. Hurry, Connie, but start slowly. Find your baby.

8.
Do something with your damn hair. Everyone looks the same after 47. Take a deep breath and hand the scissors to someone else, for crissakes.

9.
Imagine what it might be like to fall in love. It’s a place to start. Look up the word in the dictionary first. Get over it.

10.
Buy a convertible. Something flashy. Red or blue. Put the top down and drive someplace without thinking. Just get in the car and take off.

11.
Watch all the movies you have clipped out of the review section for the past—what?—thirty years.

12.
Take a deep breath and allow the two daughters who actually let you visit them to live their own lives. Accept their traditional choices. Maybe this one should be listed in two places. This is hard. Keep your mouth shut except to smile when you visit or they visit.

13.
A span of time to indulge myself in any damn thing I want. Eat. Drink. Be merry time. Turn off the phones. Maybe lie about what I’m doing. Minutes. Seconds. Hours. Days.

14.
Maybe sex. Something meaningless. Just sex. A man’s hand on my face, my breast. Not caring what happens next. Over and over again. Sex. I can’t even believe I just wrote this. It’s a HUGE dream. Sex. My list. SEX. This one is a big maybe. But I wrote it down. I can’t even believe I knew how to spell it.

15.
Be my own boss. Lots of employee benefits. Hiring people I want to be with a lot. Free lunch all of the time. A clear view of a goal that includes the feelings, schedules and talents of the people who work for me. I like this one. Oh, yes. Hey, I’m in charge.

16.
Really good wine. I want to go into a store that has removed all of the price labels and just buy whatever kind of wine looks fabulous. Just buy whatever in the hell I want to buy, without worrying about how much it costs.

17.
Another camping trip. Don’t call me crazy. I loved camping when I was a kid. I want to resurrect the old tent and do it. Fires every night. Burnt hamburgers. Cold mornings. Whiskey in my coffee cup.

18.
A fancy dress. Something formal and long that sits right at the tip of my breasts. A Cinderella dress—this is embarrassing, but sometimes when I dream I see this dress—slits up the side, beads. Maybe when I wear it I’ll be someplace wild and wonderful.

19.
Moments with my daughters that are real and open and where each of us can be who we really are.

20.
Time in New York City. This city scares me but I dream about it. I want to walk on the streets, sit in a café, meet people at a bar. New York City. I want to own the damn place.

21.
Start sleeping naked again.

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

23.
Tell the people you love that you love them. Do it more.

24.
Take a painting class—start with oil and then try watercolors. If this is a success—meaning no one laughs too loud—take a pottery class.

25.
Write more thank-you notes—real notes, not email. Let people know. Even for the little things.

26.
Mix up your friends. Do this with intention. Younger, older, whatever. Not just the ones who are convenient.

27.
Buy your own damn books. Stop sharing. You can afford this. Don’t wait until they are out in paperback, either.

28.
At least think about the possibility of love—this is a biggie. Maybe this one should take up a couple of pages. Right now this is a blink of a dream. Maybe it’s more of a nightmare.

29.
Look at yourself naked—physically and psychologically and spiritually. Figure out how to salute what you see. Shit—this has been on the list, I think, since it started.

30.
Drink wine before noon and anything else you want. Stop trying to figure out who made all these senseless rules anyway. Stop following the rules.

31.
Sign the final house papers.

32.
Pick out all the extras for the condo. Stop procrastinating.

33.
Go see more plays.

34.
Take an Italian cooking class without worrying about all the damn calories in pasta.

35.
Call all those people in your address book who disappeared—even those jackasses from high school. A call does not a reconnection make. Find out whatever happened to everybody.

36.
Enough. Stop writing—Connie—Stop writing and start doing something.

37.
Make certain the list changes. Give yourself that option. Keep some. Throw some away.

If you loved Kris Radish’s

The Sunday List of Dreams,

you won’t want to miss any of her acclaimed titles. Look for them at your favorite bookseller’s.

And read on for an early look at Kris’s next novel

SEARCHING FOR PARADISE IN PARKER, PA

coming soon from Delacorte Press

Addy hits the wall…

A
ddy Lipton has been nurturing a wild desire for a good twenty-two months to drive her 1998 dark blue Toyota Corolla right through the closed garage door of the lovely two-story white brick and cedar home she shares with a man she vaguely remembers marrying a very long time ago.

The Toyota has not been inside of the garage since 1992 and the last time she opened the kitchen door leading into the garage, and stepped inside of what she now calls “The Kingdom of Krap,” was just days before her milestone fiftieth birthday and very close to two years ago. Addy had opened the door to set a bottle of wine in the cool garage so it would chill before her sister showed up to help her celebrate. She placed it next to the bag of dog food left over from Barney the black lab—who had passed without a doubt into doggie heaven in 2001—and then dared to look into the bowels of the garage where she had not bothered to gaze for a very long time.

“What the hell,” she said out loud as she raised her eyes and wondered if she had suddenly been transported to a used appliance store.

The garage, totally her husband Lucky’s disgusting domain, was crammed to high tide with refrigerators, a couple of dishwashers, three dryers, an assortment of machines that must have been something workable at one time when they could actually be plugged in and turned on, and—from what she could see—about 15 dead microwaves.

“Lucky, Lucky, Lucky,” she said through a jaw that was as tight as a rusted dishwasher bolt, scanning past the machines and having
a moment
. A moment of desperation, wonderment, tepid fury, and astonishment at what not only her assumed half of the garage, but her entire life in halves and quarters and eighths and sixteenths had become.

“A garage filled with crap that my husband will use with his goofyass friends, not to fix, but to spread across each other’s lawns like teenagers,” Addy told herself, turning slightly in the kitchen doorway to see two piles of old bowling balls, a stack of wire coat hangers, a lawnmower that she knew for a fact did not start, and the back end of a 1951 Chevy that Lucky had been working on since he found its decaying hulk sticking out of his uncle’s old shed and dragged it home when their son was a baby. Nineteen years. The car had not moved, or turned over, or gravitated to the local restored antique car parade, for nineteen years.

Addy reached down and picked up the wine bottle, telling herself that she would not now wait for her sister, that she would open the bottle immediately and drink it warm. Warm, like everything else in her life. Nothing hot or cold or spicy but every damn thing seeming to sit right in the middle as if waiting for something, someone, anything to push it off to one side.

After the bottle was empty and her sister Helen—Hell as she was aptly named—stole her away for a birthday dinner where Lucky actually managed to show up on time, and she was back home again, Addy could not stop thinking about the damn garage, which as a birthday gift to herself she began calling The Kingdom of Krap.

And the garage drove her crazy with wondering.

Wondering what else might be stored behind ragged cardboard boxes and the mountains of junk Lucky and his ridiculous friends scavenged from behind stores and each other’s garbage piles.

Wondering how a section of the house and her life had gotten so out of control.

Wondering what would happen if Lucky spent half as much time with her as he did with his obsessive collecting and make-believe restoration projects.

Wondering why she was somehow content to sit and simply observe as her marriage seemed to drift off to a place where she could barely see the outlines of what it used to be.

Wondering if she was really prepared to spend the next thirty to forty years—if the family genes held up—lurking at the edge of her garage, of her life.

And that’s when she started wondering what it might feel like to drive the car right through the door.

She imagined it first as an accident. Something that she did as she bent down to grab the papers and books and piles of third-grade projects that she needed to grade for school the following day. Addy would close her eyes during recess duty or a staff meeting and see herself reaching backwards just as her foot fell off the brake and hit the gas pedal while the car was in first gear.

The car would lurch forward like a large stone that had been pried loose after much pushing. It would jump just as she turned to see the front end of the little Toyota crash an inch below the handle in the middle of the door and then she would see the old Chevy buckle, the dishwashers spread as if Moses were driving the Toyota, and coat hangers fly like thin birds who have just seen a large dog advancing upon them.

Sometimes this vision got her through a particularly tough day. One of those days when a sick third grader would vomit first on himself, and then on the girl in front of him, and then, on the way out the door, on Addy. A day when the principal would drag a mother into the room who didn’t like a comment on a paper composed by one of her students that was obviously written by the mother who had forgotten that third graders do not usually know how to spell words that she has to look up in the dictionary. A day when her son might call her from his dorm room and whine about money, or the pressures of his measly part-time job, or the fact that his mother would not give him five hundred dollars to go on a spring break trip to Florida so he could drink cheap booze until his brain swam.

More times than she cared to remember, Addy had actually edged the Toyota inch by inch up the driveway until she felt the front bumper kiss the garage door. She’d put the car in neutral and then imagine the whole scene all over again—flying pieces of the wooden door diving past her window, rocketing wedges of metal, years of precious scavenging being pummeled by the foreign car Lucky sold parts for but hated to recognize as a superior model.

But she never did it.

She never did more than nudge the door. Never bothered to tell Lucky she had harbored an overwhelming desire to flatten his hobbies, his haven, his Krappy land of fun and freedom. Never told her sister, never mentioned it during the after-work pizza-and-beer gatherings, never told her friends at the YWCA, never asked her son Mitchell what he thought of the mess in the garage, never did more than simply think about ramming her automobile from the edge of her world right into the center of her husband’s.

Until today.

It is April 1 in Parker, Pennsylvania, and everywhere else on Addy’s side of the Equator and Addy thinks that if she did it today, she would have an excuse. She would plow through the garage door in second gear, which she has also imagined during the past twenty-two months, and try hard to make it through the crap and into the backyard. She could blame it on the date. “I was just going to dent it a little and say April Fool’s,” she’d tell Lucky. Lucky, she imagined, would either laugh or rush to check on his favorite bowling ball.

There is also the menopause excuse, which would be a lie because Addy is dancing lightly on the brim of menopause—that joints-aching, two-periods-in-one-month, fifteen-extra-pounds-last-year, occasionally-crying-when-she-looks-at-Mitchell’s-baby-photos place—but not in real menopause, which of course would be all of the above times one thousand. She is thinking of saying it had been a hot flash or a fast-beating heart or the ridiculous urge to shift with her elbow instead of her hand. Lucky, she knew, was terrified of the word “menopause.” Simply to say it out loud might just be enough to throw him into a state of forgiveness.

It is 6:48
P.M
. and Addy has plunged into the place of wanting so badly that she has her hand on the gearshift and her mind set on ramming through the door. Addy is exhausted from the pre–spring break tests, from her college son’s absent but seemingly ever-present presence, from a marriage that has not so suddenly turned into something that feels and looks and tastes more like a business partnership that a union of two people in love and lust forever and ever.

Sitting in the car, with the tires hovering over the long cracks in the asphalt driveway, Addy this very moment wants lots of things.

She wants to ride a pony and to sleep in.

She wants to do tequila shots with her sister in Mexico.

She wants to spend the rest of Mitchell’s college money on a total house makeover.

She wants to go to Italy before she needs to wear trifocals, which is one focal away.

She wants Lucky to initiate a conversation that has nothing to do with “stuff” and everything to do with “them.”

She wants to come home, swing open the garage door, and pull her car inside.

She wants to lie in bed naked with all the magazines and books and television clickers on the floor and talk, just talk, with Lucky, just Lucky, for hours and hours and hours.

She wants to make people laugh—really, really hard and for a very long time.

Addy has one hand on the steering wheel and the other on the gearshift and the car is in first gear. She is trying to decide if she should back up and start the garage-door-bashing procedure from the backside of the curb or from where she is right this moment. Her mind is as light as a third-grade song. She pauses to place her right hand over her heart because she is surprised she is so calm, so ready, so eager. And when she feels her heart beating softly, true, regular, and as it always has, she decides that she would like to back up about twenty-five feet, shift into second, and then hit the door with an intoxicating burst of speed.

Addy turns to make certain an unseen object has not bounced into the driveway while she has been idling at the lip of her decision. As she turns, she feels the seat next to her under her right hand, notices the last glow of an early spring sunset between the two houses at the end of the cul-de-sac, thinks that her training class at the Y is paying off because her neck no longer aches when she twists sideways, and then she stops at the back end of the basketball hoop.

Addy revs the Toyota. She takes in a huge breath, a long-remembered yoga movement, and she closes her eyes.

Closes her eyes to remember the moment, the months of imagining, the abyss she must now cross to take her someplace, anyplace, through the broad barriers of a life that is a garage, a receptacle for dumpage and stagnation, and just as she raises her head and shifts, Lucky is there.

Lucky Lucky.

His head is dipping towards her as if it is a ball that has just passed through the bottom of the ragged edges of the almost-abandoned basketball net.

Addy can feel her heart bounce from her chest, crash through the windshield, and slam against the very garage door that she had hoped to have pushed apart—now.

“Gezus, Addy, I’ve been waiting for you for like an hour,” Lucky shouts, pulling open her car door.

“What?” she asks him, unable to move, wondering already when she will be able to drive through the door now that her plan has been interrupted.

“Honey, you are not going to believe this.”

“Try me.”

“Ready?”

“Yes,” Addy yells. “YES.”

“We’re going to Costa Rica.”

“What?”

“I won the company sales incentive prize.”

“You’re kidding?”

“No. Costa Rica. Do you teach that in third grade?”

Addy slowly shifts the car into park, sets the brake, turns the key into the off position, shuts off the lights, and swings her legs out of the car right in between Lucky’s legs.

“Yes,” she says, as she gets up and follows Lucky into the house.

And as she passes the garage door she touches it lightly like lovers touch when they don’t want anyone else to see.