The Sunday List of Dreams (8 page)

And they pause.

They pause as everything Connie wants to say backs up against the top ledge of her heart. Jessica may be a wise woman of the world, a city legend, a sex goddess, but rushing this, saying what comes to mind before a pause, before a breath, before wine and dinner and the lovely balance that a public room can bring to a discussion that has the potential to blow doors off of hinges is a necessity.

This from the mother. The wise mother. The mother who has mourned the loss of a daughter every single day since the last day, the last embrace, the last phone call. And Connie knows that they both have things to say, things to forgive—how she hopes Jessica can forgive and she knows if she can get Jessica to the second bottle of wine that it will pry open an emotional lid that will allow the frantic and lovely movement of reality—two worlds of reality: one Connie’s and the other Jessica’s—that will hopefully push back time and chance and whatever reasons might propel them to say or not to say something.

The weight of her mother’s fingers is a long-buried signal to Jessica to stop, just stop, and Jessica bites into her own tongue and wonders what will happen next and how in the living hell this, her mother showing up in her sex-toy store and in her world, has happened just now. Just now when so much is happening and about to happen. Just now when her rear end is in a sling with deadlines and problems and just now when the last person, the last problem, the last relative she ever expected to see is her mother.

“Mom…” Jessica speaks because she cannot stop herself, because as always she wants to hurry and solve problems and get it over with.

“Can it wait?” Connie asks. “Can we just wait?”

“Are you upset about what I do? I can wait but I have to know before we take a step, mom. I have to know.”

Connie wonders if she did not grip her daughter’s arm hard enough.

“Here it comes,” Jessica thinks. “She wants to know if I am a lesbian or if I have some kind of freaky sexual appetite or if I’ve been arrested yet. She wants to know for sure if my sisters know about my real life or if I ever mentioned it to her sidekick, O’Brien. She wants to know if I love pain and have fallen and hit my head.”

“What, Mother? What are you thinking?”

The pause is long enough for the traffic light to change, for them both to walk into the intersection across the street from the restaurant, for a heart to pass three gallons of blood through veins that have temporarily seemed to stop.

“Is there a family discount?”

Connie says it without blinking, while looking into her eldest daughter’s eyes, where something shocking lodges the moment the words hit Jessica’s lively brain and she realizes that her mother is just as shocked.

7
½. Recapture Jessica. Again and again until it really happens.

J
essica and Connie are laughing so hard when they get into the restaurant that every single diner looks up as they stumble into the lobby and the hostess asks them if they are all right.

“We are fine,” they both say at the same moment and then begin laughing all over again simply because they are in sync.

At the bar they sit and order their first cosmo as if they are drunks waiting for a fix. Jessica keeps looking at her mother to make certain that she is real, and that what is happening is real as Connie asks her if she is okay. Okay, yes, Jessica says and then does not say that she is shaking on the inside, wondering if the long moment of laughter will get them through what surely must come next, what she must say, what her mother must also say.

And what that is neither one is certain of and while the first drink settles against the empty lining of their stomachs they talk about the neighborhood, about the flight, about the retirement party and everything but themselves until they are seated.

Jessica tells her mother about New Orleans while they sip the first drink at the table, to get it out of the way. How a plastics manufacturer, settling back into Louisiana following the hurricane, has been helping design and manufacture a signature line of Diva products and how suddenly there is a problem, just weeks before the huge “mostly planned” release party for these Diva products and an even bigger announcement about Diva stores multiplying across the country.

“Some jackass local politician from Jenko County has appeared like Jesus and I have to get down there fast, hire some new employees, plan this huge party—well, shit, Mother, and now you show up,” Jessica explains, temporarily enboldened by the booze.

Connie, who is constantly brushing her hand against the list numbers in her pocket, does not say a word. She considers this tongue-biting exercise to be a ticket to paradise, a free drink when she needs one, a kiss from a handsome stranger.

After they order a huge-ass dinner—pasta and fish, mega salads and a basket crammed with delicious carbohydrates—and are well into the second bottle of wine, Jessica, in the restroom, calls her business partner, Geneva Wheaton, a lovely, brilliant, lesbian Hispanic accountant, to warn her about her mother’s arrival. At the table, Connie seizes the moment to grab her own cell phone and call Frannie O’Brien. Both phone calls are a swirl of questions and answers, uncertainty, excuses, and unintentional hilarity. If Jessica had exchanged phones with her mother, the two women on the other end of each line might never know it.

Jessica:
“What the hell? She just showed up. What am I going to do with her? Of course I never told her about the store. And now I have to go to New Orleans…. Go ahead and laugh. It’s not funny. You know my apartment is the size of a pinhead and I have not cleaned in like a year. Do you think she even knows what a vibrator is? Well, no, she didn’t freak out. What do you mean I’m the one who is freaking out? I am not the one who is freaking out. Where is your mother? Very funny. Invite her ass up here from South Carolina for tea and see how you like it. Help? What could she do? Shut up, Geneva. I am not drunk. Just a little tipsy. It’s the pressure. I’ve got to go. Tomorrow.”

Connie:
“How the hell was I supposed to know? There were two other kids, you know, a mortgage, I was worried about shit all of the time. I have no idea. She seems okay. I’ll stay there for a day or two. Christ, O’Brien, I am flying by the seat of my pants here. All I know now is that Jessica in so many ways seems like the same Jessica she has always been and I don’t mean that way. The plane ride? Oh, gezus, I met a hairdresser. She wants to do a makeover on me tomorrow. Maybe I’ll go. Shut up. Of course I have no idea what I am doing. Have I ever known what I am doing? Oh, listen, quick—before she comes out. No, she can know I called you but just be quiet for a second and listen. Call the girls. Just tell them I went to New York.
Yes, come on. To visit their sister. They don’t call much anyway but I want to cover my rear end. No, let the goddamn plants die. Pick up the mail if you think about it. I’ll call you tomorrow. I love you too, you big asshole.”

“Mom,” Jessica begins after she puts her phone away, “I know it must have been hard for you to show up here and I don’t want you to ever think it was all you all these years because it wasn’t.”

Connie listens, half-suspended above the words, watching the moment play out in front of her, and decides to hold back her own transgressions, her own misgivings, her own not-quite-there understandings. She puts them back inside of her soulful pocket, closes the zipper, and thinks that her life would have been chaos, empty, a wasteland of ignorance if she had not thrown her book of lists on top of her ratty Jockey cotton underwear, gotten on the airplane, and headed through traffic as thick as an Army brigade on its way to the next Republican war in this slice of New York City.

“I didn’t mean to hurt you,” Jessica concludes. “I just charged forward, I was done with Indiana, ready for this phase of my life, removed, even emotionally, from most of my past, even you. I don’t even know if that’s wrong but it is the truth.”

“Things happen,” Connie Nixon tells her daughter, trembling a bit from the edge of her elbow to the fingers that are holding onto her glass as if it were a life raft. “We’ll work through it. It’s what happened, what you needed, where you were headed.”

“Doesn’t this freak you out at all?” Jessica asks, pointing in the direction of Diva’s. “Your daughter is creating a sex-toy dynasty, for crying out loud. She’s had lunch with porn stars and ordered sexual objects from businesses in Europe, demonstrated how to use all this shit and obviously—well, obviously I believe in what I sell and I use what I sell.”

“Freaked is putting it lightly, Jessica, but my first glimpse this day, of what you are doing, well, we are sitting here talking, are we not? And we have laughed and if I think about how much I have missed looking into your beautiful eyes, I’ll start crying and never stop.”

Then without speaking Jessica reaches out, touches her mother’s hand and smiles the exact same way she always did when she knew her mother was on to her.

Later Connie Nixon is not stunned or embarrassed or shocked by the size or condition of her daughter’s apartment. She has seen and lived in worse. The apartment, she can tell immediately, doubles as an office, conference room—Diva Central, she begins calling it right away.

Both women are exhausted, one inch away from the kind of drunkenness that could give birth to terrible headaches in the morning. They have covered the sisters, O’Brien, the retirement party, just one small slice of Connie’s plans for the next forty or fifty years. Really, just the part about the new job and taking some time off and the revelation from Connie that the house will be on the market soon and that she’s “open” to change and life. Sort of.

“Sort of?” Jessica asks, brushing her teeth in the doorless bathroom.

Connie ignores the question and asks if she can help her hang up the bathroom door in the morning. “Do you have the door?”

“Yep. Never needed it. I don’t have many sleepovers.”

“What a shame,” Connie scolds her, insisting that she skip the floor and sleep in the bed with her.

“I can’t believe you’re here,” Jessica tells her, promising not to drool.

“You always drooled,” her mother reminds her. “You also used to grind your teeth. It drove your sister Sabrina out of her mind.”

“So that’s how it happened.”

“Stop it.”

Jessica laughs, turns over, and is an inch from sleep when Connie opens her suitcase, uncovers her toothbrush, and accidentally runs her fingers over the nicked and battered leather book that holds her list of dreams. She picks up the book, turns to make certain that Jessica is not looking at her, closes the lid on the toilet and then sits for what she thinks will be just a few seconds as she turns the pages, not to read them but just to look at them, just to feel them brushing against the skin on the tips of her fingers, just to see the building blocks of her words, her dreams stacked against each other on page after page.

Jessica turns once, twice, and then quickly falls into the exhausted kind of sleep that is enhanced by alcohol, emotional trauma, confusion, and the mere thought of having her mother barge into her life and then pause there as if she may stay, as if she may peek in her underwear drawer, as if she might find another secret that she doesn’t even know she possesses and a few dozen that she totally claims as her own.

Connie leans forward from her throne and sees her cheek pressed against the sheets, long hair splayed across the pillow, hands curled under her chin, and she closes the book. When she rises she slips it back into the bottom of her bag and then she climbs into the bed, focusing on nothing, absolutely nothing at all but her first dream, her biggest dream, the most important dream of all.

Jessica.

Jessica Franklin Nixon. CEO to the masses, sexual goddess extraordinaire, New York hipster and, even after all these years, a drooler who still loves to push her cold feet up against her mother’s legs, sleep on her left side and crank the pillow around her head as if she is the queen of the bed and the pillow is her crown.

W
hat the hell?”

“Are you awake, honey?”

“How could I not be awake, Mother? It sounds like you are slaughtering a cow in my make-believe kitchen.”

“How’s your head?”

“What head? I feel like shit. How much did we drink? I can’t remember a damn thing from the time I hit the pillow. Did I drool?”

“Yes, sweetie, it was a flood.”

Morning in New York is hilarious and unlike the serene scene in Cyprus, Indiana, where the paper shows up at 4:43
A.M
., the coffee kicks in unabashedly promptly at 5:05
A.M
., Connie’s feet hit the floor—or did up until about a week ago—at 5:15
A.M
., the shower goes on three minutes later and Matt Lauer rests easy inside the old Panasonic television for his morning debut seven minutes after that. New York, on the other hand, is loud and
fast
. There are apparently no walls in between the cheap apartments in Jessica’s building. Tenants sneeze, use the bathrooms constantly, and argue. Horns honk without stopping and when someone speaks on one end of Manhattan you can hear them plainly on the other side of the island. It is one noisy-ass city.

Connie, so charged by the kinetic energy, by the noise, by the city cycle of life that in one day seems like an endless circle of vibrancy, feels 20 pounds lighter, bewildered, stoned, drunk and frightened halfway to Tennessee and back. Her initial reunion with her estranged daughter has given her hope and the past night’s reading of her list of dreams in the doorless bathroom has given her courage. She keeps moving because she wants not only to blend in with the action and the noise and the people and the very sidewalk below the apartment, but because she is afraid if she stops she’ll realize what she has done and, then, in the ensuing moment, that she has no idea what will happen next.

Jessica wants to get out of bed but the thought of any movement other than breathing makes her stomach roll into her throat. She speaks slowly and with great agony.

“Mother, what in God’s name have you been doing? It smells like food in here. There was no food in this apartment last night, or the night before that.”

“I couldn’t sleep. New York is too damn loud and so I went for a walk. I bought food. I met people. I cooked. I started to hang the door. I read three newspapers—imagine that, three newspapers all in the same city—and I met this guy who wanted to take me out when I was at that little grocery store, I think about four blocks away, and you were totally asleep.”

Jessica groans. She wonders for a moment if she is still drunk. She wonders the next second how her life has gone from the crazed place it was in just hours ago to this—her mother cooking eggs and toast in her ridiculously small kitchen, a half-hung door, a very close-to-intimate conversation over dinner, some vague memory of a hair appointment, the family home going on the market and oh, yes, the silly little problem in Louisiana that she needs to fix. And then there is the small problem of what to do with her mother while she restocks sex toys and trains two new clerks during the next 15 hours.

“Mother…” Jessica tries to say, sitting up, and then falling back over.

“You need some water, baby,” Connie says, mostly to herself because Jessica has the pillow pulled over her head. “Here,” Connie says, sitting on the edge of the mattress and pressing a glass of water into Jessica’s limp hand. “Drink this while I get the coffee.”

“Coffee,” Jessica manages to murmur as she finishes the water and sets the glass on the floor. “Coffee in my coffeepot and not from the joint by the subway. Mom, how
do
you make coffee?”

Overjoyed by the perfume of high-octane caffeine, by the warm cup she can feel in her hand, Jessica forgets for a moment about her immediate and seemingly perilous future. And as she rises to accept the cup, the princess lifting her head from the pillow, she realizes the last time anyone served her anything in bed, besides a fast-handed condom, was probably about six Christmases ago when her mother did this very same thing.

“Jesus…” Jessica whispers.

“Honey, is the coffee that good?”

Jessica looks at her mother, really looks, and holds back a stream of memories—some bad, some good—that could flood her right out the door and into the elevator. Reams of kindness. Yelling. Her father pounding on one side of the door while her mother pounds on the other. Curling up tight at the end of the hall when she got sick in fourth grade. The summer she couldn’t go to camp because there wasn’t enough money. The sound of her mother walking from room to room—no matter what time it was, no matter what day, no matter how many hours she had worked—to make certain everyone was in bed, tucked in, breathing. The screaming fights over boys and bras and college. All the things unsaid when Jessica zipped a bag over her mouth and heart and her entire life when she slipped away not just to New York but before that—when she lied about something terribly important and lied about studying over Easter break when she really went to Paris—glorious Paris—and the look, the sad, hurt, crushed look on her mother’s face when she told her—how many times?—that no, she would not be coming back for Thanksgiving, or Christmas, or maybe ever, if she could help it. There are barges filled with memories that have been awakened with this simple cup of frigging coffee. Jessica pushes them all back, levers each one against a place three steps closer to the front of her mind and heart, and then quickly steps away.

“Mom, you are, like, freaking me out.”

Connie takes a step back, hands on hips, and agrees with Jessica that, yes, a mother uncovering some of your secrets, showing up at the door, making you breakfast in a virgin kitchen, and flirting on the street corner is probably a fairly good reason to freak out.

“I am a little freaked myself, Ms. Sexy Diva, but we’ve already had part of this conversation and I bet you have to get your sorry ass out of bed and go to work,” Connie bickers back. “I probably should have taken notes last night so we can move right along.”

“Right along to where?”

“Good question,” Connie tells her daughter with a laugh. “I haven’t thought much beyond breakfast and that hair thing tonight.”

“Hair thing? What hair thing?”

Connie looks at her daughter, who has one leg under the covers, the other on the floor, her hair sticking up in a classic hospital-head style, and she wishes she had a camera. She has one camera planted inside of her head, the same one every mother has, every woman has, who wants to seize a moment and put in a place so that she will never forget it.

“I don’t suppose you remember the part last night about me being a traveling hooker who works out of a tattoo parlor in Cyprus now that I’m retired,” Connie says, moving to get the rest of breakfast. “Get up, use the bathroom, young lady, eat and then—don’t you have a business to run?”

“You act like my mother,” Jessica says, obeying her and wishing that her mother had managed to hang the entire door as she asks Connie to turn her head and then comes out with the screwdriver in her hand.

Connie has the door up in ten minutes and, when she turns around to congratulate herself, Jessica is sound asleep and looking as if she could sleep for a year.

“Now what?” she asks herself as she sits down gently beside her daughter and removes the warm coffee cup from her hand. She sits on the cheap sofa bed, unable to move, unable to decide what she should do next or right after that or the week following.

Connie’s touchstone—her rope to a reality that she is creating every moment—is the feel of the white slips of paper in her pocket and a stolen moment, while Jessica slept, to read through her list of dreams book. Beyond that she is winging it, flying without a compass, hovering in New York City—which she is thrilled to say is #20 on her list.

There is also the reality of Jessica’s life and the lingering promise from her daughter to tell her a very important story. But first Jessica must get to her Diva office and apparently must make arrangements to travel to New Orleans. During the course of their alcohol-laced marathon meeting, Jessica mentioned training new clerks, budgets, her home office, some major problem, expanding, her business partner Geneva and life in the fast lane. Connie places her hand on Jessica’s hair, a soft reminder of a long-ago ritual when Jessica had gone through her nightmare stage and could only fall asleep if Connie was stroking her hair and sitting right next to her on the bed.

“You have to close the closet,” Jessica would insist with the covers pulled over her face.

“There’s nothing in here,” Connie would respond almost every night, and then she’d push through the hanging clothes and sometimes actually crawl through one side of the closet and out the other to prove her point.

“Only I can see them,” Jessica would explain patiently. “They’re
my
monsters.”

Occasionally, as the monsters screamed on from one month and into the next and then into the third and fourth, Connie would lose her patience. One night she let Jessica cry until the door rattled with her anguish and then Connie, filled past her eyebrows with guilt, raced into the room, pulled Jessica out of bed and carried her into her bedroom where she held her until the sun rose and apologized every three seconds for abandoning her and leaving her alone with the bogeymen.

The monsters finally departed for good, as they always do, and Connie braced herself for the other monsters that would eventually move into Sabrina and Macy’s closet and she’d lose her patience again and no one died and the monsters did not eat one single daughter.

Connie can still see a glimpse of the baby who was terrified of monsters when she touches Jessica and she cannot stop herself from running her fingers from the tips of Jessica’s hair to the side of her daughter’s face where her hand lingers and her heart stops. Connie then imagines her daughter’s monsters since the days of the permanently closed closet. What could they be?

School. Friends. Lovers. The impossibilities of the still male-dominated business world. That guy Jacob who called incessantly for months even after he knew Jessica had moved to New York and Connie had stern instructions not to share her phone number. And this Diva stuff. Sex toys. Some hidden desire to physically please, Connie assumes, the sexually unfulfilled women of the world. Finding a store. The business partner. The stares of people who still think sex is something you do once a year to fulfill a marital obligation. The tangle of city codes and laws and the charming personalities of the zoning and health inspectors. Probably a crippling wad of guilt because of what she has not shared with her mother, but apparently with her siblings. And this New Orleans problem. Franchise expansion. An apartment that has just moments ago been christened with its first cup of real coffee.

Oh, Jessica, Connie thinks. Oh, my baby.

“Your monsters are still there, aren’t they?” she whispers so quietly that the breath from her words is as faint as the breeze from a butterfly’s wings. “Monsters everywhere you look, bogeymen the size of Army tanks. Oh, sweetheart, where did you go? I had no idea. I had no idea how much I missed you—or how much I have missed.”

In those minutes while Jessica sleeps, her mother wonders if she couldn’t make Jessica’s small apartment sing to her like Connie’s house sang to Connie. She wonders what will happen tomorrow or next week, and at the tail end of that thought is also the knowledge that it does not matter. It doesn’t matter if she stays here in New York for a week or a month or maybe for the rest of her damn life. It doesn’t matter because she is here now and Jessica is here, too.

She wakes Jessica after that. Connie wakes her sweetly with her fingers dancing through her hair and then onto her face, across her lips.

“Hey, baby, what time do you have to get to Diva’s?”

Connie’s voice is a semi-foreign noise that rides itself through the corridors of Jessica’s brain and out to the ledge of her woozy consciousness. She remembers as she stumbles awake. She remembers strips of the past 24 hours as if she is watching a cartoon being put together. The champagne. The phone call. Her mother standing by the purple dildos. Dinner. All the damn booze. A conversation that would have stunned her into oblivion if she had not been stoned on the grapes of Santa Barbara. The bathroom door. Coffee. And now…her mother touching her face and this feeling as old as her heart that she will soon, very soon, call a love as fine as life itself.

“Jesus, Mom, I can barely move. I have been so damn busy I’m not even drinking anymore.”

“How sad is that?” Connie whispers again, this time a bit louder.

“What time is it?”

“It’s close to nine. What time do you open?”

“Not until 11 today, but I have to get my sorry ass in there and set up and I’m training the new clerks at noon.”

Connie’s brain flashes into mother mode. In less than five seconds, she smiles and forms a plan for the day. It could be 15 years ago when all three girls got the flu on the same day and she was scheduled to give a lecture, head up a conference with three administrators, and meet her insurance agent for an update after work.