The Sunday List of Dreams (9 page)

“Listen,” she says, trying to act nonchalant. “Let me take care of your arrangements for the New Orleans thing. You get up, shower—you will notice there is a bathroom door now so don’t walk through it—and eat if you can.”

Jessica grabs her head and thinks: “This is what heaven must be like. Someone helping you through a rough passage. Coffee that smells like a street in Paris. And a bathroom door. A lovely bathroom door.”

“Okay, Mom,” she manages to mumble. “That would be terrific. You have me at a very weak moment. Save me some time later today. I have something else I need to tell you. We might as well get everything on the table and see if the damn thing tips over.”

The second Jessica pulls herself together and manages to leave the apartment, Connie swings into action as if she has just been released from a chain gang. She cleans, makes the bed, and then plops down in front of the computer to get airline phone numbers and to email O’Brien, Sabrina, and Macy. Her emails sound like an ad for someone who is considering increasing her Prozac dosage.

“Sabrina and Macy—
You will never believe it but I decided to start my time off by visiting your sister in New York. As you both know, it’s much different than Indiana and I can now spend some time traipsing through the city like I have always wanted to do. Your sister, as you also know, is busy with her business, so I will steer clear of her and see the sights. We are also speaking to each other which, as you know, is really something. No yelling—just speaking—so far, anyway. You have my cell phone number and I know you are in touch with Jessica, so call if you need me—otherwise watch the newspapers—maybe I’ll get a stint in one of the Broadway plays.”

Her note to O’Brien is more to the point.

“Love it here. Staying for a while. Don’t feed the cat. I don’t have one. I’ll call you this afternoon when I know you are not chasing crazy people.”

While she is on hold with the airlines, Connie stands and moves to the tiny window that looks out over a busy street, the name of which eludes her. With one hand on her left hip, and the other on the phone, she doesn’t feel like a mother or friend or nurse or even a woman. She feels simply
powerful
. Ready, excited, new. Connie Nixon feels
new
.

When the phone finally clicks and she gets a live human being on the end of the line—always a miracle—she reserves two seats on the Saturday flight to New Orleans—not one but two—and she does so without hesitation because New Orleans is now on her list, it’s always been on her list, and Connie knows she has to go there.

She
has
to go there.

Jessica doubts her hiring expertise the second she looks up and sees Meredith and Kinsey enter Diva’s for their first day of training. Talk about colorful opposites.

“Shit.” She whistles to herself as she pours her fifth cup of caffeine and sizes up the outfits and personalities of her two in-store employee selections.

Meredith Rojas is 28, Hispanic, beautiful, and pierced in her nose, ears, eyebrow and most likely numerous other places—one in particular which she mentioned during her interview to prove that she was not only sexually aware but could relate to the intimate problems, questions, and concerns of Diva’s customers. An NYU graduate in psychology, Ms. Meredith is in love with the hippie renaissance and with Manhattan, where she has held a succession of jobs while she tries to “stay focused on her cosmic abilities, desire to experience life, and passionate need to make certain women are sexually satisfied.” To help herself with that last little goal, Meredith has tried to sleep with every woman in the five boroughs and Jessica figured if she hired Meredith all seven thousand of her successes to date might become customers.

And Meredith is sassy, bright, fun, and has tons of retail experience, what with her psychology degree, nine years of waitressing, stints at two shoe stores, a bakery and one upscale jewelry retailer—and there’s little doubt that she already knows the products. Her first day of work at Diva’s and Meredith shows up in a scarlet miniskirt, white flip-flops, a white spaghetti-strap tank top with a black lace nightie-looking top and a grin that is as eager as it gets.

Then there is Kinsey. Lovely Kinsey Barnes. A tall, thin white boy from Cleveland who is one of the thousands of Broadway star wannabes who have immigrated to New York and who can also handle lots of the day shifts when he is not auditioning for off-Broadway plays, taking voice lessons, or riding his bicycle into the side of moving taxicabs. Kinsey is outgoing, in a goofy kind of way that might make anyone buy something from him. He has spent way too many years as a bartender in a sleazy side-street saloon and is more than willing to learn how to usher lovely ladies and divine men up and down the aisles of Diva’s, where he can also use his technical skills to manage the website, keep an eye on the storeroom, and call one of his barroom thugs if anyone gets out of hand.

Kinsey arrives at Diva’s this morning wearing a pink shirt, red tie, gold vest, and jeans. He is so adorably anal that he straightens the leather whips, nudges a window sign closer to the edge of the sill, and looks as if he’s ready to take over not just the business but the entire city on his way to the front of the store.

Jessica sighs. She says good morning and then she has a brief moment when she wonders if she should not run screaming from her store and all the way back to her apartment where she can plop into bed, ask her mother to make more coffee, and sleep until the books are balanced, the assholes in New Orleans have been spanked, and the store shelves have been lined with Diva’s own signature products.

Her mother and what lies ahead is a topic Jessica decides to ignore.

Jessica jams on her CEO hat, grabs a stack of training documents she has prepared, and launches into phase one of her Diva training program with a chorus of tiny hammers pounding against her temples. She wishes, as she hands employment papers to Meredith and Kinsey, that she could have a beer or a Bloody Mary to feed her narrowed blood vessels so they’d stop slamming around in her head. She takes her new employees into the back room so they can fill out forms, and fights off any uncertainty about what is happening.

And it begins.

And there is no time to blink. The phone rings. Half of New York has decided to visit Diva’s on this particular day. Jessica has a hangover, her mother is probably rearranging her apartment at this very moment, and a bunch of shitheads in the Big Easy are trying to shut down her manufacturing shop.

“Geneva,” Jessica whines into the phone as she scoops it up and tries to straighten up the mess which has accumulated around the cash register. “It’s a madhouse here and I’ve got Meredith and Kinsey lurking around all day. I hope to God this training program I devised works out.”

“You were born to do this, baby,” her partner encourages from the desk of her “real” job as an accountant on the other side of Manhattan. “I’d come in but as you know I have absolutely no vacation or sick days left,” Geneva tells her. “At least
you
can lie down on the floor if you have to. If I do that here, some other accountant will jump on top of me.”

“You know I’m going to New Orleans tomorrow for crisis number 55, right? You have to open, close, and work with Meredith all day. And then you get Kinsey on Sunday. So follow the damn instructions I wrote down and don’t invent anything new while I’m gone.”

“What are you going to do down there?” Geneva asks. “Do you have a plan?”

Jessica considers answering that the best plan would still be to run screaming from the building as fast as possible but she takes a breath instead and tells Geneva that she does not have a definite, well thought-out, organized assault, but she will surely have one by the time the plane lands in New Orleans.

“Great. You get to traipse around Bourbon Street while I show Fritzina and Harry, our new hired hands, how to make us rich,” Geneva says, mocking Jessica. “Tough work if you can find it.”

“Want to trade, Wheaton?” Jessica asks her. “Some southern jackass will probably try to kill me and I’ll be staying at the same Motel 6 I’ve stayed at the last 10 times and I’ve never been to Bourbon Street in my life.”

“You are such a baby,” Geneva informs her.

“Hey, when you cruise by during your lunch break, bring every single file from New Orleans that you have at your office. I do have to throw something together before I get down there. I swear to every plastic god in the universe that we have our bases covered, but I want to call our attorney and make certain they can’t throw an injunction or some work-stop clause at us.”

As she hangs up the phone, Jessica, a slender blonde who was such a brainy geek in high school that she was the president of the chess, political, and computer clubs at the same time, wishes that Geneva could go with her. Geneva, a track and soccer star in high school and college, saved her aggressiveness for athletics, financial figures, women’s causes and her live-in lover, a gorgeous Latino woman who moved with them from Chicago and is now fully entrenched in her own life canvas—teaching art to grade schoolers at an experimental school and working on her own paintings when Geneva and Jessica are working at the store, which is pretty much all of the time. Geneva—who could get a below-market-value deal on gold, could negotiate leases and manipulate men and women with a wink or a nod but who hated social interactions if they didn’t have anything to do with her business—was no match for Jessica’s ways of the world. The Diva partners are perfect professional dancers: they moved in the same direction but listened to two totally different tunes at the exact same moment. No two women could be more opposite or more equally matched.

Although she likes a good battle, Jessica is also grace under fire, embraces poise as a pattern of life, and can plan a party, store opening, or marketing campaign to knock the socks off of men and women who would walk ten miles to buy her products even in the dead of winter—without their socks. She and Geneva had met in graduate school, thrown their own dreams into the same barrel, and were inches away from opening up a Los Angeles store, another in Chicago, and hopefully blowing their small list of competitors out of the water while at the same time enhancing the sexuality of women from one end of the universe to the next. The future, when they remember to think about it, is beyond intoxicating.

The connecting link, the last piece of their workaholic obsessions, the passageway to phase two of the Diva Plan, as they love to call it, is the delivery of the order from the manufacturing plant east of New Orleans. Diva’s signature line, products with a purpose, sexual stuff, sensual pieces of life’s feminine puzzle, life-enhancing articles of amazement that no woman should live without, objects of tremendous, trembling joy—all this is a main part of the dream that is very close to the finish line.

At this moment, Geneva and Jessica don’t even get to the mother part of Jessica’s life. Connie Nixon. Former nurse. Mother to the sex goddess. Coffee-maker extraordinaire. New York City street-walker.

Back at the apartment Connie is slamming through the tiny rooms like a human vacuum cleaner. Organizing. Grabbing what she assumes is her daughter’s travel bag and throwing it on the bed, loading up the tiny, apartment-sized washer, and then sorting through the few pathetic items of clothing that she managed to put into her own bag before she left. Shoes, slacks, jeans, a sweater, an old beige skirt, and not one thing dressy or professional enough to wear to a shout-out in Louisiana.

While one load tumbles, and the other washes, Connie races to the small boutique she discovered when she went food shopping. She slips inside and into a world that is so far from Cyprus, Indiana, she almost wants to ask for a map so she can find her way around the store. When she’s finished buying a gorgeous turquoise blue linen suit, two blouses, a pair of leather dress sandals that cost more than every garment she’s purchased in the last ten years, a tailored pair of dress slacks and a tight-fitting denim blazer, she races back to Jessica’s apartment as if she just purchased a weekend stash of drugs.

She can’t help it. She leaves what she thinks will be a distraught message on O’Brien’s answering machine but instead it sounds as if she’s just robbed a bank and no one cares.

“I just spent hundreds, let me repeat that
hundreds
of dollars, on clothes. I think I’ve lost my mind. Maybe something happened when those walls were talking. Oh, one other thing, O’Brien. I’m going to New Orleans in the morning. Now I bet you will call me the minute you get off work tonight.”

When she hangs up, Connie says, “I’m sassy,” to herself, folds the last load of wash and pauses just long enough to close the lid on the toilet, sit down and motivate herself by pulling her book of dreams out of her bag and simply touching it. “Please let Jessica not be mad. Please let me keep my mouth shut. Please help me find my way to the store. Please help me not to turn back, not now.”

As Connie begins walking towards Diva’s, nothing and everything makes sense to her. While she maneuvers through the crowds and dodges cars to cross streets, she feels as if old air is being sucked from her lungs. Connie bounces through several intersections, and fights all her old urges to plan, to prepare, to always be ready. She has no idea what she is going to do when she gets to Diva’s. She has no idea what will happen in New Orleans or if her daughter will politely and then not so politely refuse to allow her to go. She may end up at a hotel tonight and even that does not matter.

And she misses Frannie O’Brien. While she waits at the last traffic light, Connie thinks that if someone asks her if she is married while she is in New York she will say, “Yes, I’m married to this truly wonderful woman and her husband. We do everything together—well, almost everything.” And then she wonders if she’s ever too much for Frannie. Frannie, who calls her just as much and who often plans her days and weeks in unison with Nurse Nixon’s. We are good, she reaffirms to herself, but maybe I need to be an Indiana hermit for a while.

Maybe.

Or maybe not.