The Sunday List of Dreams (7 page)

“Oh, my fucking gawd,” she says and then apologizes for using the F word.

“What?”

“I love Diva’s,” Mattie admits. “I go there all of the time. My salon is just three blocks from the store. Shit. Is your daughter Jessica? My God. You look like her, or she looks like you. I’ve been trying to fix her Midwestern hair for three months. How absolutely cool is this? Her store is pretty popular. I can’t believe you didn’t know this. How could you not know this?”

Connie doesn’t know what to say. She’s never even seen a dildo, and now she has a daughter who not only sells them but apparently designs them as well. How did she not know? How could she let Jessica slip away into a world and life that seem as foreign to her as Antarctica? Should she have asked more questions? Hired a private detective? Kept her locked in the back bedroom? Turned her into a female eunuch before she reached puberty? Tried harder to climb over the huge mountain separating them?

“Shit happens, isn’t that what they say?” she finally responds.

“You never visited? Did she think you’d be mad? Did you two have a fight or something?”

Mattie spits out these queries as if she is on fire.

“These are good questions, Dr. Hairstylist,” Connie fires back. “That’s what you are. Hairstylists, bartenders, and nurses like me, we’re all psychiatrists. We listen and ask questions no one else dares to ask, especially if we have scissors, a shot glass, or a sharp needle in one hand. That’s why I’m on my way to New York City. I guess I want to know the answers myself. I want to know how the hell this happened.”

Mattie takes her hand and Connie squeezes it.

“You’re cool, Connie,” Mattie tells her. “Most mothers would just call and scream. Well, my mother would call and place a large order but most mothers—really, they’d freak.”

Why? Connie wonders while they sit and sip their drinks and she can feel the plane start to lower its belly towards earth. Why is #7 from the list so important? Will it make everything else easier, the dreams closer, the numbers in my pocket sing louder? What is it that makes mothers go wild like this? Why do they freak out if their kids, who they have hopefully raised to be productive citizens of the universe, change course a bit?

And that goddamn insane love of a mother for a child.

“Do you have children?” Connie asks her new friend.

“No. I have absolutely no desire to bring another human into the world. I would not be a good mother. It’s something I’ve always known. I can nurture hair and faces and run the show at work, but babies and this instinctual thing women are supposed to have, well, it passed right by me.”

“Good for you,” Connie tells her. “For knowing, I mean.”

“You make me want to cry,” Mattie says softly.

“Why?”

“Most people freak when you tell them you don’t want to be a mother. It’s like the third question at every frigging party. What do you do? Are you married? Do you have children? It’s how society defines us and it pisses me off. You are the first person who ever responded in a positive way when I said I didn’t want to be a mother—well, except for my own mother and about eight hundred men who just wanted to screw my brains out and didn’t want to have to worry about me wanting them to be a father.”

Nurse Nixon has a parade of bad mother stories in her head that kick off and start running. Bruised arms. Burned fingers. Empty tummies. Mothers on crack. Unwanted pregnancies. Little children who have been molested and tell you it’s okay if you want to touch their pee-pees. Even in Indiana, land of flowing cornfields, basketball heroes, home-baked bread and the Christian brigades, babies cry and suffer and lurch towards adult insanity because so many women become mothers without the credentials of the heart and soul.

“Nothing really prepares you anyway,” Connie tells Mattie. “You think, especially if you have been medically trained like I was, that you’ll jump right in and some magic thing will happen and you will know how to become their everything overnight. But it’s almost impossible to be ready. And then there they are, this thing, this person, this
face
resting below your left breast and two things happen.”

“Two things?”

“First of all, you are scared shitless,” Connie tells Mattie. “Even if you’ve had other babies and can bounce one on your leg while you write poetry and cook dinner and save the whales. Then, you look at them and see this wonderful pathway into the universe. This transforming tunnel that is like an electric charge that turns you into a raving maniac, a protective lioness, someone who could push over a car, rip off the face of a stranger, kick ass from one end of the world to another, to save your baby. You go mad. Mother mad.”

“That’s it then,” Mattie tells Connie, clapping her hands to congratulate herself. “
That’s
why you are going to New York.”

“Why?”

“You’re mad.”

“I suppose. I have to do this. I’ve missed Jessica. I so want to know who she is, why she is, what she is, everything about her.”

“Look, she’s still your baby. For crying out loud, my mother still makes me lasagna every year for my birthday and sends me towels, and asks if I’ve had a flu shot. If it snows in Milwaukee, where she lives, she calls to make sure I’m not driving.”

“I get all that.” Connie shakes her head. “Shit, I can’t believe I’m talking to you like this, but what the hell. Part of me, well, part of me is totally embarrassed that she didn’t tell me, embarrassed and maybe a little pissed off, and I feel a weight around my heart that needs to let go so
I
can let go. I’d also like to see if we can figure out how to forgive each other.”

Mattie reaches over to touch Connie on the arm as if to hold her back.

“You look pretty damn loveable, except for that shitty hair,” she tells Connie. “She probably doesn’t know who you are, just like you may not know who she is.”

Connie shrugs and turns her back to the clouds. This hair artist, she thinks, is totally correct. Connie Franklin Nixon has no idea who Jessica Franklin Nixon is. She knew her once, could predict what she would eat off of her plate, how she would stand in the doorway, what her grades in math class would be. She has this view of Jessica, her daughter, as that—a daughter. A girl still, one who rushes in and out of her mother’s life, has a cardboard box filled with secrets and, apparently, ran screaming from Indiana to New York City with a dream that she never once shared with her mother. Her own mother.

“I hate you,” Connie says, smiling, moving across her seat so she can whisper the next sentence. “I’m sure she never uses any of the sex toys she sells.”

The two women, unlikely companions on a journey through a slice of life that Connie sees as a thin line connecting her to something…something new, something frightening, something beyond what she imagined just hours ago as she boldly attacked three major numbers from her list at the same time.

It is female communion. That astonishing crossing of cultures and ages and time and place that wraps women together and makes them one. It is a holy moment, a sacred sharing of estrogen, a remarkable gift of love. It can happen in a public waiting room when a stranger asks another woman to hold her baby—her beautiful baby—when she needs to go to the bathroom. It can happen when you see a woman on a street corner and two guys are hassling her and you open your car door and she gets in without hesitation. It can happen when you see a woman at the grocery store crying because she is a dollar short and you pay her bill and carry her groceries to the car with her kids and then slip her another 20 bucks. It can happen when you are at a play and that woman you saw arguing with that asshole man won’t come out of the last stall of the bathroom until you hand her some toilet paper and then she cries into your shoulder and you give her the phone number of the women’s shelter. It can happen when your mother tells you about her first love and your heart stops because you realize your father was her second choice. It can happen anywhere—this female communion where women feel safe and close and absolutely as if they have touched a piece of heaven because of you.

It can happen on an airplane on the way from Chicago to New York.

“See, you look sexy when you are sad and I can’t help but imagine you with a light color, some dark tits, oops, I mean tints.” Mattie laughs as the plane dips lower and New York spreads itself out on either side of the plane as if it were doing its own Broadway dance. “Oh, look, there’s my city.”

Connie looks. She pushes her forehead against the window and watches the edges of the city grow like a fan until New York is an enormous palette of brown and silver and green below her. Massive lines of cars moving like snails across bridges, and the surge of blue when the plane dips towards the Atlantic makes her stomach rise with excitement. The city glows. She has only been to New York City once before, on a quick two-day trip with a group of friends from the hospital, but she’s never really
been
to the city and she surely has never imagined that this is why and how she would get there.

When she turns back towards Mattie, her new friend—who is young enough to be her daughter and wise enough to be her mother—is smiling. She has written her cell phone number on the back of her business card.

“Wait till you get your feet down there,” Mattie says, pressing the card into Connie’s hand. “I love the action, the sleeplessness of it all, the constant surge of life that makes you feel as if nothing, not one single thing, is standing still.”

“I live in Indiana,” Connie replies flatly and they both laugh again.

Connie looks at Mattie, her temporary muse, a modern crusader for the individual rights of a woman, artist to the masses, friend to traveling and confused mothers, and she feels a bizarre sense of security. She slips the business card into the back pocket of her jeans and knows, like a mother would know, that if she called this woman, if she said she needed help or directions or a ride, Mattie would come to rescue her in a second. More communion.

Before they get off the plane, Mattie cannot help herself. She leans over and pulls what she can of Connie’s hair in some kind of funky new direction, the left side to the right and the right side to the left, and reminds her that she has an appointment for the following evening.

“I’m serious,” she insists, hugging Connie as they move into the terminal. “If you don’t come I’m going to find you at Diva’s and chase you through Manhattan with scissors and a bottle of dye in my hand.”

Connie kisses her on the cheek and then stands in place for a few seconds, not just to look around but also because she isn’t sure what she is going to do next. Get a taxi, obviously—but then what? The airport is a whirl of business travelers, men and women walking and talking on cell phones, people sitting in chairs and working on computers, restless children being yanked through the narrow hallways and past stacks of candy bars, potato chips, and magazines. Connie watches it all, a little mesmerized by the hurricane of activity, wondering where everyone is going, who they are when they take off their polyester jackets and, when they land, how exactly do they do it. “How will I do it?” Connie asks herself.

Fighting the urge to call O’Brien, who might order her right back onto the airplane or encourage her to become a Rockette, Connie follows the signs at La Guardia and wanders to the main floor where the taxi signs point her towards the sidewalk. She stops and fishes out of her pocket the address of Diva’s that she found in Jessica’s files, realizes that if she is going to show up at the store before it closes, she’d better stop hesitating and get moving.

When it is her turn for the taxi, she gives the address to the driver, a tall African-American who is almost too beautiful to be a man. Connie says, “It’s called Diva’s,” and the driver winks, shakes his hips seductively, and opens the door for her as if he is ushering a goddess into the back seat of his yellow cab.

“What the hell am I doing?” she asks herself again as the taxi pulls out into the pre–rush hour traffic that is already beginning to snarl and snap to a chorus of beeping horns which make her laugh.

And so Connie Nixon, nurse to thousands, mother to three, friend to many, murmurs “What the hell,” as her yellow taxi eventually slides to a stop in the long shadow of Diva’s Divine Designs. She sucks in her breath and walks forward as if she knows exactly where she is going.

C
onnie Nixon wants a cigarette. The craving rises inside of her like an unseen volcano erupting with a surge of unexpected want, pushing against her lungs, riding her like a cowboy in Bozeman, Montana, forcing her to focus as if she is about to commit a crime and needs every ounce of her strength not to do it.

“Shit,” she whispers as she paces like a nicotine junkie outside of Diva’s. Actually, Connie is just to the left of Diva’s, behind a series of newspaper boxes and a light pole, and under cover of a long umbrella that has cast a shadow large enough to hide every cowboy in Montana, not just the ones in Bozeman, as well as a confused, slightly dazed, and incompetent-feeling mother from Cyprus, Indiana.

Nurse Nixon is trying to think. She is trying to figure out what to do, how to do it, what to say, when to say it. She hasn’t had a cigarette in 23 years, except on those occasional drunken nights with her friends at their favorite bar and restaurant or when she made the girls try them when they went camping, thinking that smoking a cigarette with a parent is the same as smoking it with your friends behind someone’s garage. But what she suddenly remembers as she is gasping for a solid fill of air is the comfort that the cigarettes gave her, the sense of evenness when the smoke hit her lungs and the nicotine surged through her bloodstream and jolted her with a narcotic fix. She wants to feel that way right this second, now, before she walks into the store that her daughter not only owns but runs and where both of them will undoubtedly feel so uncomfortable that one or maybe both of them will want to close her eyes, open them, and be on another planet.

Wonder-nurse and super-mom Nixon knows her behavior is not only ridiculous, but probably unwarranted as well, but that doesn’t change her uncertainty, the way she imagines every possible outcome of what is about to happen. While the news-addicted New Yorkers buy newspapers, six women go into her daughter’s store, five come out, and absolutely no one looks her in the eye.

Connie decides a cup of espresso to keep herself from fainting will help. She discovers a small bodega around the corner, orders her poison, and then unzips the side pocket of her travel bag to retrieve her list of dreams book.

For a second she considers throwing it into the garbage and racing back to the airport but, as she lifts the book, a photograph falls out and catches her off guard. She’s saved the photograph from the stack on the kitchen table and she is astonished to realize that it is the fuel that will make her take the next step. It is a photo of Jessica at her 14th birthday party. Her hands are on her hips, she’s looking away from the camera, and she’s laughing at the Barbie doll birthday cake that Connie has made for her as a joke.

More than anything else in the world Connie wants to find that Jessica again, the girl in the photograph. She wants to take her daughter into her arms and start over, retrace steps, forgive and be forgiven. She wants to run her hands along the back of her oldest daughter’s neck, kiss her on the lips, unlock the door and pass right through the very tall mountain separating them.

As she scans down her list of dreams, flipping pages as if her fingers are on fire, Connie Franklin Nixon realizes that the most important number on the list, the one that means more than anything, the one that will solve every other riddle, her biggest dream, is #7.

Recapture Jessica.

And then she gets up. Her mother-madness is screaming so loudly she turns to see if someone else hears it and then remembers she’s in New York City, where people wear dogs on their heads and dance publicly in their underwear.

After what would have been enough time to chain-smoke four cigarettes, Connie decides she simply has no choice. She waits on the sidewalk a few more seconds, frozen like a hunk of quartz, hoping that all the customers will come out of Diva’s so she can be alone with her daughter but then realizes that the woman she sees through the window could be in there for hours and then eighteen more women or men could follow in right behind her.

She cannot put off this encounter any longer.

One step inside of the store and Connie cannot breathe. The word “seduction” seeps into her mind, holds every inch of her brain in its sexy hands, and keeps her pinned against its lusty arms. She cannot move and lets out what Jessica will later tell her is a groan and, at that exact same moment, Connie catches the eye of her daughter who looks up from behind her desk to see who is having sex in her store before purchasing anything.

“Oh my God,” Jessica shouts, grabbing the edges of her desk to steady herself. “Oh my God,” she repeats as if she can’t remember what she has just said.

Connie does not want to stop looking at the off-white and sky-blue lighting, the way yards of silver material are draped from the edges of the wall and onto the tops of shelves, as if the entire room is one giant waterfall. She doesn’t want to stop listening to the wind and the water she hears rushing from the 27 tiny speakers that are hidden throughout the store and she wants to follow the rocky path that has been created on the floor with pebbles and midsized rocks and one very large boulder as if she were in the middle of a forest adventure.

But there is Jessica, looking as if she has just swallowed something the size of a small handbag that has lodged halfway down her throat. There is Jessica, looking beautiful and wise and so New York in her low-cut white shirt, very short black skirt and shoes with three-inch heels the color of a Mexican sunset. There is Jessica, watching her mother surrounded by vibrators and condoms and leather wrist cuffs with silver studded links.

“Hi, sweetheart,” Connie says, striding forward, her voice quivering with emotion.

Jessica lets go of her desk and discovers that she fits just as she has always fit in the grooved spot below her mother’s chin. She lets her arms move around her mother’s shoulders, and when she does this, she can feel her mother’s heart beating as wildly as her own, and she takes comfort not only in the embrace, but in the knowledge that her mother must be as terrified at this moment as she is herself.

“Mom,” she whispers into Connie’s ear.

The sound of Jessica’s voice is like a hammer. It pounds back from this very moment to all the moments before it when Jessica whispered in her ear, cried in her arms, coughed into her hair, laid her hands on her face and told her a hurt, a wish, a secret. Jessica’s voice. The voice of a woman that resonates with all the Jessicas within her—baby, girl, young woman, not-so-young woman. Every syllable a link to a moment, a memory, a time that will never, could never be erased from Connie Nixon’s internal electrical system. Jessica’s voice.

The last customer has made her way to the front of the store, arms filled with Diva’s delightful products, and Jessica pulls away, says “Just a second, please,” and walks to the other side of the store.

Connie uses her second to watch her daughter move and smile and sell and stand and converse and she cannot remember ever having seen this before. Jessica the businesswoman. Jessica, the adult. Jessica, the woman of the world. Jessica, especially, without her mother as a significant part of her life.

And Jessica is praying for a torrent of customers. She wants a tour bus to pull up outside, unload 300 people, sweep them into the store and then accidentally take her mother with them when they depart. Shit. Just shit. She inhales, throws back her shoulders, and feels like kissing the customer who has temporarily distracted her on the lips.

“What in God’s name are you doing here?” Jessica asks Connie when the woman finally leaves. “I almost had a heart attack when I saw you.”

Connie takes in a huge breath, the last puff of her imaginary cigarette, and makes an instant decision to save that answer for later, maybe much later, because she isn’t sure what to say. She is sure that she is stunned by the store, by the apparent success and grace and panache of the young woman who once moved to the backyard tree fort for two weeks because she was protesting her allegedly excessive chores, always hated to shave her legs, and pierced her own belly button during freshman orientation week in college.

Connie decides to go with the truth, most of the truth, a small taste of the truth, just to get warmed up.

“I found your boxes in the garage. The ones with all the papers for the business. I was cleaning. And I sort of freaked out, wondered who the hell you are and made a decision last night to find you, see you. So I hopped on a plane. And here I am.”

“Are you angry?” Jessica asks, crossing her arms in front of herself, ready for battle.

“Not angry at you, angry at me for missing something, for not knowing who you have become, for setting up some kind of roadblock so you felt as if you couldn’t tell me, couldn’t see me, couldn’t be in my life.”

It is Jessica’s turn to take a breath, to hold it and let it stop everything for just a second so she can focus. But she cannot focus. A small part of her, a piece of skin the size of a long envelope, wants her mother to touch her again. How long has it been? Three years? The rest of her, the parts that are confused, suddenly wandering around in the past like a blind woman in the middle of a maze, want to throw this woman out of the store.

“Look,” Connie starts to explain, acknowledging with her soft voice that the mere sight of her may have put her daughter into the early stages of shock. “There’s more. There’s lots more to tell you and it might seem absolutely stupid and ridiculous to see me standing here, to just show up in your life like this, but here I am.”

“Mom, your timing sucks. I’m in a bit of a mess here. As you can see, I have my own story to tell.”

“What? Are you in trouble? Did something happen?”

Jessica begins to explain and after the first sentence realizes that the explanation will turn into a two-hour-long story. She mentions something about New Orleans, new products, crooked politicians, staffing problems, and then stops herself, looks at her mother standing in front of her with a bag in her hand, a pair of jeans she recognizes from five years ago, and a look of terrified exhaustion blinking on and off in her eyes like a stoplight.

Connie follows Jessica through the store, the mother–student to daughter–teacher as Jessica walks through Diva’s closing procedures out loud. Connie follows behind, listening, helping to lift boxes without being told, shutting the back windows, straightening shelves and smiling to herself when she locates something—which is pretty much everything—that she has never seen before. She marvels at the interior design and tries to avert her eyes from stacks of lustily adorned videos, magazines covered in whips and chains, and a selection of garter belts that are not only beautiful but provocative as they hang suspended in front of a wall of floating silver material.

“Now what?” Jessica asks as she looks over Connie’s shoulder lest she has forgotten one small detail.

“Let’s have dinner. Is that okay with you? If you don’t have any plans, and then—you might not like this—but I need to sleep on your couch or have you get me to a hotel.”

“I don’t have a couch, Mom, but we’ll figure this out as we go along. And, of course, I don’t have any plans tonight. I usually stay here and work late into the evening.”

“No social life?”

“Work, this business, the company—it is my life. Right now it’s my entire life.”

“I had no idea,” Connie reminds her, skidding right into pissed-off mother mode, but then catching herself. “I just knew what you told me and I guess I just assumed certain things. That’s not necessarily a good thing to do.”

Jessica stops outside her door, sets the alarms, and only then turns back to respond.

“Mom, this isn’t easy. I never expected this and I don’t have time for this in my life right now, but here it is. Here we are.”

Jessica pauses and her throat tries to close up. She’s fighting back tears, pushing her top teeth tight against her bottom teeth, her jaw forming a steel cliff, stranded for just a few seconds in an emotional oasis that seems like an isolated, dangerous, and very tiny island.

“Mom, listen, just listen for a second,” she stammers, edging towards her words slowly, afraid that she will say the wrong thing, insult her mother, throw the entire past hour into a tailspin that will crash and burn and never be able to fly again. “I thought you wouldn’t understand this. I thought if I just told you I was in the manufacturing business, which is true, that you’d just accept it and move forward and not worry. A part of me, maybe, thought you had already worried enough for about 25 lifetimes. And then of course, it’s not like I’m selling Tupperware.”

Connie tries to say something but Jessica puts a hand up to stop her.

“There’s the other stuff too, Mom,” she explains. “All the crap from high school and college and the same old unspoken knowledge that I’ve held onto all these years that no matter what I do it won’t be good enough for you.”

Connie puts her hand out. She touches Jessica on the arm to steady herself, and then tightens her grip, so that Jessica will go no further, so that she will stop right where she is, so that she knows if she says one more thing, what might happen between mother and daughter might not happen.