The Sunday List of Dreams (4 page)

And then the list really changed. It became wilder and bolder as the many arms of possibility showed themselves to Connie, as they often do to every woman once the grown babies begin flying away, life descends into a hum of predictability, and the edge of the horizon seems so much closer than it ever has before.

Connie smiles while she talks about this part of her Sunday list. She fills their glasses with more wine, places her elbows on the table, props up her head and goes away, her upper body moving as if she is indeed swaying to the orchestra trapped inside of her dining room walls.

Rafting the Colorado.

Having a real love affair with any man. To love, to feel lust again—to dance until dawn, to wake up in someone’s arms, to want so bad that my vagina aches. To smell like sex when I go out in public, to glow in the dark, to unearth all the passion so deep inside of me that it may require a very long expedition to uncover it again.

Not giving a shit about the 15 pounds that will apparently never go away.

Voice lessons. I want to take voice lessons.

Early retirement.

Driving up the northern coast of California in that damn blue convertible.

Connecting with all the people I let slip away.

A spa weekend. Oh my gawd—make it a spa month.

That one daughter to be my friend. I still want that.

New patterns. Change. Lots of change.

Connie Nixon is breathless when she finishes. Her face is the real horizon, Frannie thinks, adorned with gorgeous laugh lines, freckles from all those years in the sun, and something fierce and yet fine—determination, survival, the elegant grace of a woman who has come into her own and who is very nearly ready to push through the last barriers she has set in front of her own life.

“Let’s run naked through the neighborhood,” Frannie says, charged from the conversation and moving her feet off the table so she can reach in and touch Connie’s hand. “Are you ready?”

“Sure, but are the neighbors ready?”

“Good point. We’d end up having to do CPR on all of them, and some of them would die, and then we’d have to write detailed reports, and there would be lawsuits. Oh, shit, just forget it, we’d better call Daniel before we blow ourselves to hell in this singing house.”

“Can you just have him come over tomorrow?” Connie asks, squeezing her friend’s hand. “I want one more night of this ear candy. I love the house whispering to me like this, and it’s been good company, maybe even inspiration.”

After O’Brien leaves, Connie sits in her kitchen for a long time, listening to the faint line of music and smoothing her fingers across the list, the first three numbers, that she has spread out on the table in front of her.

1.
Stop being afraid.

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

She gives herself a B-plus for numbers one and two, decides that #1 might be in her pocket for a very long time, and then turns her attention to #3.

Get rid of SHIT. Start with the garage.

Connie’s laugh overtakes her musical house, floats through her gray hair, wraps itself around her ankles and seems to fill up every inch of a home that she honestly—see #2—can admit has become a lonely haven for a single, middle-aged woman, who often acts like the shit—see #3—but is indeed scared shitless.

“Cleaning out the garage,” she says, still laughing, “is going to be the easiest thing I have written on this whole damned list.”

T
he orchestra in the walls turns out to be the upgraded cable service, installed by a man who should not be let out in public with a screwdriver. Somehow he has managed to cross wires and pipe a 24-hour international radio station into every speaker that has been hammered into place throughout Connie’s house by her daughters’ boyfriends during the past 20 years. Although the wiring is not dangerous, it has to go because Connie Nixon is beginning to answer the songs, which are often muted by the walls, plaster, and the boxes of junk stacked against them.

The Irishman, Daniel, and his friend Al are so intrigued by the wiring, loops of cable wrapped up in string, tape, and in some places yarn, that they spend hours crawling around Connie’s house with pliers and drills in their hands as they unscrew vents and talk as if they have discovered buried treasure.

“Al, get over here, this one is looped around a gas pipe,” Daniel shouts excitedly from the bathroom. “It’s sitting behind the plumbing and I can’t figure out how in the hell they got it back so far into the wall. It’s kinda cool.”

The men laugh as they work and Connie watches them while she drinks coffee, works on her five-minute retirement speech, and shocks herself with an unexpected slice of pleasure.

She likes seeing men crawl around her house with their butt cracks showing.

Daniel hears her laughing in the kitchen and as he walks past he leans over, sets his hands on the table, and asks her what is so funny.

Frannie O’Brien’s husband and their two boys have been Connie’s handymen for years. They have jump-started cars, installed gutters, helped her put up and take down her window screens, trapped mice and squirrels and one time a wild cat in the basement. They have pretty much been on call since Connie’s ex-husband got sidetracked with a new wife and more kids, and Connie made a conscious decision not to replace one man with another.

“It’s nice to see your ass and Al’s ass while you crawl through the house,” Connie admits as she drops her head into her hands and blushes.

Daniel laughs almost as loud as his wife.

“You think we’re hot?” he manages to ask, swaggering a bit and hoisting up his pants.

“Hot is a bit much, honey,” Connie says, lifting her eyes and laughing at the strange sight of a testosterone-motivated Daniel. “Truth be told, dear friend, it’s been so long since I’ve seen
any
skin, besides my own, a gorilla could crawl through here and it would excite me.”

“You slut,” Daniel says, leaning in to plant a kiss on top of her head. “You know, Connie, you are sweet and smart and attractive. You should start dating again.”

Connie’s heart stops at the mere thought. Today the butt crack, tomorrow the whole banana; it’s not going to work for her no matter what is on her list.

“All this because I saw the top half-inch of your white butt? Honey, imagine what would happen if I held a man’s hand. Go,” she orders him. “I’m focusing here. And for God’s sake, keep your pants on your fine ass and tell Al to do the same thing.”

The Irishman has thrown Connie temporarily off course. She is tempted to make Al and Daniel leave immediately so that the singing house, which has given her great courage, will continue to push her forward. She knows there are items on her list about sex, and men, and love, and Connie cannot imagine when in the hell she’ll put those numbers in her pocket and start living them. It took her nearly three glasses of wine to even
write
those items on her list of dreams; actually
living
them makes her want to roll back into her bedroom with a very sturdy eraser.

Frannie has already mentioned that it was not the house that started Connie moving towards living her list, but her well-rounded and -designed plan to retire early. That way, Frannie reminds her, she can begin sorting through all the other “shit” in her life.

“Not just the physical shit either,” O’Brien had admonished. “You are so take-charge at work, and with at least two of your daughters, but you do have some other shit going on, baby.”

Like Connie didn’t know. Until the house started singing, she had been unmoved, terrified, and content to just plan her simple retirement party and procrastinate selling the house, which would force her into moving more than just a few boxes. She’d have to move the rest of her life as well.

By the time Al and Daniel hoist up their pants and leave, Connie has worked herself into a panic. Men. Sex. The unfinished speech. An old job and a new job. Days and weeks and months of unstructured time. The numbers in her jeans pocket from the list that seems to be laughing at her. Whimpering, she calls O’Brien and tells her she needs a house call.

And, of course, Frannie O’Brien makes house calls.

They talk for a long time and O’Brien makes Connie lean back and remember the parade of decisions that actually brought her to the kitchen table, the retirement speech, the singing house, and the men with the lovely butt cracks. Frannie pushes her, asks her to just talk, to simply process the journey. Even in friendship, Frannie O’Brien’s skills as a psychiatric nurse flood to the front of everything she does, everything she is, everything she hands to the people she loves.

Connie remembers and is embarrassed by her frightened heart.

Frannie leans forward as if she is waiting for something that she has never seen before to fly out of her friend’s mouth—an African snake, three blue pigeons, naked dancing men, ancient explorers, Annie Oakley.

What comes out instead involves a new hospital administrator, a series of horrid deaths on the unit, her aching ankles and the discovery that she could indeed afford to retire and work part-time if she downsized, if her life really did change.

“And…?” O’Brien presses, impatient, eager for this part of the story to unwrap itself.

“And I’m almost retired. I’ve got a new part-time position at the Midwestern nursing facility as a roving consultant. And these three months. Three free months stretching out in front of me, following the damn retirement party, to do what I want, to tackle my list, to live a few of these dreams.”

“Come on,” O’Brien coaxes. “The best part. Bring it on, sweetheart.”

Connie laughs and at the same time wonders if she would have done any of this without her co-pilot, her sometime navigator. She imagines her life as it has been—predictable, unchanged, rotating at the same speed and level and with the same flavors it has always held in its mouth for another year, three more after that, and maybe another 10 after that. Her stomach turns. She keeps smiling and sends a signal skyward to the goddess of friends, the delightful queen who sends women exactly the most perfect and fine best friend in the universe.

“No one but you knows the whole story,” Connie answers slowly, savoring the words like fine wine before a feast, a cup of coffee on a long trip, a kiss from a long-lost lover. “I’m locking myself in here for a week or so and then taking off without any serious obligations until my next job starts in three months. And I’m going to do whatever in the hell I want to do whenever I want to do it.”

“That was easy once you got into it,” O’Brien said, pleased. “Stop being so scared, sweetheart. The span of time you have in front of you will fly. You’ll have a glorious time and I’ll be jealous as hell.”

“Once I get through the rest of this crap, the retirement, once I really lean into the list, I will focus on what I’m going to do the day after that and the next day.”

“Which is not very many days away, is it?”

And it wasn’t and the days suddenly moved like rockets.

Connie finished her retirement speech and then decided to throw it away two days before her party at the best restaurant in town. She had started playing CDs in her bedroom really, really loud to replace the singing house, and so that she would stay focused on moving forward and not slouching backwards. It was a concert of noise and action she needed to hear.

She thought about being spontaneous. The word was not on her list, which she had taken to reading not just at night but at least three times a day. When Connie placed her mind on the word “spontaneous” and on how she had lived for almost 30 years—schedules, kids, work, the necessary demands of life—it occurred to her that acting on the moment had been absent. There had been no room—she had made no room for dancing with a moment. She’d decided that the entire theme of the list could be centered on the word
spontaneity
and that’s what had prompted her to tear up her one copy of the speech—which she had reasoned was really part of #3 and getting rid of shit—and then immediately regretted it.

But it was too late.

Macy and Sabrina came to the party, left their husbands and babies at home, and informed her, as they were leaving for the restaurant, that they couldn’t spend the night because of their kids and husbands, and as they rambled into their confessions Connie simply held up both hands, said, “This is fine,” and showed them the dozen roses that had come with a simple card from their sister Jessica that said,
“Congratulations Mom,”
and she added, “At least you two showed up,” which made her two youngest daughters laugh.

Sedated with cocktails, Connie managed to brave her party with the grace and style her co-workers had been accustomed to throughout every single year of her career. Her speech ended up to be an unsentimental remembrance of the old days and a challenge to always remember what the medical profession was all about. It lasted three minutes.

Her gifts included a bright pair of funky white tennis shoes for her new job, a hilarious photograph of Connie sitting on an old-fashioned bedpan at the last Christmas party, a plaque with a mannequin’s hand on it to celebrate Connie’s special way of “touching” people, a dizzyingly expensive bottle of champagne, and a round-trip airplane ticket to any destination in the United States.

Connie stayed up until 2
A.M
. following the party. She was alone and bravely hanging on to the edge of her new list-driven life as she set the champagne bottle in the refrigerator, placed her new photograph on the dresser she hoped to sell sometime very soon, opened up the back door and threw her old nursing shoes against the tree by the garage, and slipped the airplane voucher into the back of her list of dreams book.

Then she wrote.

She took out a piece of paper, jotted down her numbers for the next day, the real first day of her new life, and fell asleep thinking that tomorrow she could do whatever in the hell she wanted to do.

Or not do.