by Kris Radish
O’Brien, who knows that Connie, in spite of her own often swaggering demeanor, is terrified of living her dreams, of what she might discover, of who she might become, of where the list she has been making might take her.
“Focus,” O’Brien tells her, snapping her fingers and throwing her legs up onto the table. “The list.”
The list.
Connie closes her eyes and pushes through the tangled mass of memories that are much dimmer towards the back, where the list was born. Years ago. A night before the first baby. A Sunday night, home alone. House dark. Sitting in the same rocking chair that is now about to fall into 45 pieces in her bedroom. A one-bedroom apartment only blocks from where she has lived ever since. Terrified out of her mind because of what she knows as a nurse about having a baby. Husband working second shift as a patrolman. Three years into her job as a hospital nurse. No mother. No Frannie O’Brien. No true friends since the move from Chicago and the university and the closeness of her now scattered family.
“Gnawing at your leash,” her sister Kimberly told her when she would call crying, lonely, scared. Kimberly with three kids in five years, a husband with an exploding career at IBM in Rochester, Minnesota, and no time for any sympathy for a baby sister who had a tendency to “be too liberal and want it all.”
“Up yours,” Connie told her sister, whose next bit of advice that night was to tell her, “This is just how it is.” Their relationship never swayed from that point and when Kimberly’s husband took off one miserably cold winter day when they had three kids in high school at the same time and that darling little oops baby in fourth grade, Connie almost bit a hole in her lip to keep from saying, “He must have been gnawing on that leash a really long time.”
Frannie sits silently through the telling of this story. She has heard it only twice. Once when two of Connie’s daughters were home just last year, as Connie was beginning her retirement plans. Connie’s youngest two daughters—Sabrina, 27, the suburban Chicago mom, and the baby, Macy, 25, a “way too young” married mom herself who refused to work, lived in Indianapolis with her graduate student husband, and who had made a hobby out of criticizing her mother—had come to visit for the weekend. The impromptu gathering did not include their older sister Jessica, who never even returned a phone call asking if there was any way she might make it home for two days. Connie and Frannie had huddled in Connie’s bedroom, listening to Sabrina and Macy’s voices rumble through the tiny house, and that night, while her daughters caught up, Connie shared the story of the list. And again six months ago, during a long quiet weekend when the Irish husband was out of town and Connie and Frannie had a slumber party.
The telling of its creation sounded powerful and beyond poignant but it was that night, nine months pregnant and rocking alone, wondering how the course of her life had veered so far to one side, afraid, angry and wanting to stop the forward movement of time, to push it in a new direction, that Connie Nixon claimed the right to create her list. She rocked and wrote and as she did so she placed her life—all the hard parts, the giving, the wanting, the sacrifice, mistakes, unspoken words, inappropriate reactions, lost chances, expected behaviors—every single thing that she regretted, into a deep cave that was temporarily inaccessible from her position on the chair.
And she rocked and the only thing she took with her on her rocking chair voyage was a brown leather notebook, a pen, and every dream she could capture. Connie wrote until her ankles, already the size of large, ripe tomatoes, swelled another inch. She wrote until her back tingled and her baby shifted so that her weight was directly on top of Connie’s already minimized bladder. Sometimes, during her two-hour dream ride, she closed her eyes and imagined that she was doing exactly what she wrote about. Some things simple, some complicated, some hilarious, some selfish, some just an exercise in physical, joyful abandonment.
Sleeping in without an alarm clock.
Never cooking dinner at the exact same time every single day ever again.
Having the entire bed to myself.
Moving into a real house with a backyard.
Having the perfect baby.
Sometimes one idea covered an entire page and included wild drawings, scraps of food, drops of wine, milk or tea. Sometimes a page just contained one word—“sleep” or “exercise”—and sometimes it detailed in precise form how something would happen—“Sleep in very late. Walk through the house without stepping on anything and notice immediately that a maid has been in to clean the entire place—TOP to BOTTOM.”
Connie Nixon kept the book for a long time in a drawer that no one else bothered to open. Sometimes, when her one baby had turned into two, and then two became three, and when she realized that the burdens of married life, because of her husband’s rotating police work schedule and his addiction to fishing, would keep the division of family labor tilted towards her side of the ledger, she would simply open the drawer and touch the brown book, as a lover would touch the arm of a partner in passing, and then keep going.
And there were always Sundays.
The only day of the week, at first, when she reserved a small space of time, sometimes only fifteen minutes, when she could fall into her own dreams, see what they looked like when they turned into words and imagine the reality of what she would do someday when they danced to life. And the list changed as her life and needs and own direction changed.
My own bathroom.
One lesbian daughter so I do not have to worry about boys ever again.
Make that two lesbian daughters.
A trip to New York City.
A convertible the color of Paul Newman’s eyes in The Hustler.
A place to be alone where no one can find me.
At least one of my daughters to be my friend, my real friend, someday.
Sometimes, when the house was a crowded maze of kids and friends, Connie would spend an hour in her bedroom and write only one item for the list. Sometimes she would doze off and wake up hours later to realize that no one had died, the house had not burnt down, the fish were still biting and her daughters were figuring out how to live one moment, and another one and the one after that, without her. There were weeks when she could not retreat into the bedroom and work on her list—work schedules, kid schedules, exhaustion, a vacation, or someone was ill. And there was the period of time before, during, and after the divorce when the tone of the list changed to reflect loss, yearning and a sweet desire for simplicity.
One day without yelling.
A maid.
Someone else to drive the two girls who do not have driver’s licenses to the three thousand places they need to be every single damn week.
Just one daughter telling me that she has decided to remain a virgin and dedicate her life to saving orphans, the sick, lame, and poor of the world.
Someone to say “sorry”—so I don’t have to.
O’Brien smiles while Connie tells her this part of the list story because she remembers each one of the dreams. She remembers because Connie would talk incessantly about what she wanted, how she was counting the days until the divorce was finalized, as if something magical would happen at the very moment the judge ruled that the marriage had been irrevocably broken, pounded the gavel and sent the newly divorced couple on their separate ways. Nurse Nixon, she also recalls without saying so, was exhausted during those months. Exhausted from the idea of change, from facilitating it, from managing the girls and work and the trembling and frightened heart of a husband who had grown accustomed to a life that was guided by the lifting of a single finger, his occasional presence, and the automatic depositing of his check into the family bank account.
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.”
2. Let go. Stop holding on to things so tightly. Loosen your grasp. Be honest.
2½. Do not apologize for keeping this one on the list.
The 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 reme
mber 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.