by Kris Radish
Before tackling Jessica’s SHIT, she decides to sort out the photographs. This is not on the list, she realizes, and then she remembers that there is a place for change, for adding new numbers, and she does it in her head. “Number whatever—Sort through the photos.”
And she begins.
Babies and Girl Scouts.
Family reunions.
Camping trips.
The first day of school.
Prom. Twirp. Homecoming.
Tennis matches. Track. The three weeks Macy lasted in soccer.
Drinking beer on the roof.
The last trip to the lakeshore.
Connie sits at the table and runs her fingers over the photographs as if she is touching the real faces of her daughters. Her left thumb brushes against glossy braids, a sunburned arm, the flushed curve of a cheek, legs that look like spring twigs. As she lays out a series of photos she is suddenly overcome by a crashing wave of emotion that she knows can only be called love.
Babies growing into young girls. Young girls growing into teenagers. Teenagers turning into women. Grown women. Women who make love and cry into their own glasses of wine and who have stretched the connection between themselves and their mother long and hard and, in Jessica’s case, very near the breaking point.
It takes her two hours and more than half a bottle of wine to sift through the stacks of photos and as the three piles grow she wraps the stacks with rubber bands. And she wonders, as she imagines she will wonder on and off for the rest of her life, if it was okay. Was she okay? Where did she fail them, frighten them, make them want to run and hide? Will they remember the good parts, the moments captured in the photographs? Will they? Will she? Will you, Connie, ever be able to forgive yourself for the mistakes of motherhood that come with the first set of baby booties?
When the last photo has been stacked, Connie sits in the quiet of the kitchen, realizing for the first time since she started the project that her bedroom music has stopped, and she finishes her glass of wine in the quiet. Then she kisses each stack of photos and places them inside a box, sets the box by the front door, and faces a serious challenge.
Jessica’s boxes.
Thank God for the wine.
“Now or never,” Connie says as she contemplates the first box. She pushes aside the half-empty wine bottle with the edge of the box, takes a deep breath, and cracks open the cardboard carton.
Files. Documents. Sketches.
“Sketches?” Connie says out loud as if she is talking to the walls once again. “What the hell are these?”
It takes her 15 minutes to sort through the box and, halfway through the papers, files, and artist renderings, she sits down on a chair, pulls over the bottle of wine, and finishes what is left of it in one long drink as if it is tepid water, without bothering to put it into a glass. She wonders if anything she knows about life, her daughters, the world, her own fingers that are holding sketches of items she barely recognizes but could surely not name, is true. Connie Nixon feels like an idiot, someone who is the last to know—the wife who wakes up and finally realizes her husband is unfaithful, the woman who doesn’t know about the hidden stash of money in Bermuda—and then she goes numb from the rush of wine, from what she has just discovered in her daughter’s box of shit, and because of what she is already thinking about doing next.
Her daughter, Jessica Franklin Nixon, lives in New York City; this is true. She is a marketing and manufacturing executive—in fact, she is at this very moment part owner of a business that manufactures, sells, and distributes a fascinating array of products and apparently makes lots and lots of people, mostly women, very happy. This is all also true.
Jessica is CEO and part owner of Diva’s Divine Designs—one of the most successful sex-toy stores in the United States of America.
Connie cannot breathe. It feels as if someone has lowered a rope into her chest through her open mouth and has tied off her lungs.
She stands up, puts both hands on the table for a moment to steady her heart, looks quickly through the other box that is loaded with business plans, more papers, letters from banks, phone numbers—secrets from a world so far away Connie thinks she may not even be able to visualize it, to find it, to locate its name on a map.
Then suddenly, the quiet house is screaming, but what Connie hears is the sound of her own voice. A voice mixed with anger, regret, and a yearning so deep that it buckles her knees. It is the voice of loss, the voice of a wounded heart, and Connie stretches her mind back to a succession of moments that helped build a wall between her and her oldest daughter.
Arguments. Questions about boys and girls. Those moments when Connie wondered about her daughter’s sexuality, about her honesty, about aspects of her life that Jessica said were none of her business. A mother’s seemingly simple worries that piled up and turned into hills and then mountains. And the weight of the world Connie often put on her oldest daughter’s shoulders and then could not seem to remove.
The night shifted inside of Connie like a painful and very physical ache. She paced, drank more wine, stood by the window looking out at the spontaneous shoes until the sky was littered with spring stars, and then she closed up the house and went to the rocking chair in her bedroom.
It was not so far from dawn when she finished tearing apart strips of paper and then writing on them, not in pencil like all the others, but in ink. Not so far from dawn when she rose from the rocking chair, lined up the slips in an even line right next to the bedroom telephone, and wondered if she could honestly do it. Not so far from dawn when Connie Franklin Nixon stood with her hands on the old bedroom dresser and peered into her own eyes to see if there was one thing that she could recognize in the mirror. Not so far from dawn when Connie fell asleep with her hands locked like claws on her list of dreams, wishing like hell that she had never let the Irishman silence her encouraging and terribly inspirational house.
2. Let go. Stop holding on to things so tightly. Loosen your grasp. Be honest. (And try to work this number off the list before the end of this decade.)
7. Recapture Jessica. Find Jessica. Hurry, Connie, but start slowly. Find your baby.
20. Time in New York City. This city scares me but I dream about it. I want to walk on the streets, sit in a café, meet people at a bar. New York City. I want to own the damn place.
Savage packing.
Savage traffic.
Savage parking.
Savage ticket line.
Savage two-hour O’Hare International Airport terminal wait.
A series of suddenly savage moments turns the ordinarily quiet, yet far from mild, Connie Nixon into an urban Amazon who is ready to rip the throat out of the next person who says, “That will be $35.98 please,” or, “I’m sorry, you can’t park there.” Or, “You can’t get the super discount, just the regular discount because you missed the deadline by 13 seconds.” Or, “I’m sorry, we are out of that.” Nurse Nixon has had it. She’s whiplashed world-class surgeons and spit on the shoes of senators who tried to derail patient-needs funding and grabbed post-op professional football players by the throat, and tackled more than a few of O’Brien’s would-be escaping psych patients. The airport personnel, parking lot attendants, and assholes who think the plane will leave early if they cut in line in front of Nurse Nixon are looking like easy prey to her. She snarls back at everyone. Holds her ground. Moves through the lines and gates and check-ins and check-outs and past the security point of no return without looking back or physically assaulting any men, women, or children. It’s a miracle.
Connie has suddenly dipped so deep into her list of dreams that she is running on pure adrenaline. Unable to sleep following her discovery of Jessica’s biggest secret to date, armed with her latest slips of list numbers, and possessed like only a mad mother can be possessed, Connie rose from her bed, grabbed her retirement airline gift from the back of her list of dreams book, made a reservation to New York with an open-ended return, and within three hours had packed, closed up th
e house, downed four cups of tar-like coffee, and headed straight for the airport lest she lose courage.
Halfway to New York City it hits her. She has not made friends with the garlic-breath man who is sitting next to her in the extra-wide and very fine Midwest Express seat because he’s had his face buried in his computer since the airplane leveled off. So when she says, “What the hell am I doing?” out loud he looks up as if he’s been slapped at a cocktail party for staring at someone’s breasts.
“Are you talking to me?”
“I’m just talking but it could be to you if you want,” Connie answers, feeling a bit cocky from her terminal experiences.
She’s wearing beige sandals, a fairly hip pair of jeans with flared legs. Her list numbers are riding in the left front pocket of those jeans, next to a tank top and an old navy blazer. She looks normal and this throws off Mr. Computer, who is used to judging a book by its cover. Looks normal. Sounds goofy. He wavers and Connie, still more than pissed off about the chain of traveling events that seemed destined for a time to derail her spontaneous trip, decides she really does not want to talk to this man or any man at all.
“Sorry,” she says, touching his hand in a way that she knows totally disarms most humans—softly, with her hand skimming the top of his wrist and then gliding off towards his fingers in a sensual push that makes his entire body shiver. This is not sensual for Nurse Nixon. It has everything to do with control and she’s used the wrist move on so many patients they gave her a plaque with a hand on it as part of her retirement party.
The retirement party.
Days ago.
Hours ago.
Connie turns away from her now-breathless companion and gazes into the face of a cloud. This time she asks herself, and no one else, what in the hell she is doing and she teeters on the edge of that very fine line, as thin as thread, that could make her either laugh or cry, try to scramble out the window or order a stiff drink, take the man into her arms and kiss him, or pretend that she has forgotten she is on an airplane and headed for an unknown terminal in a city that is as foreign to her as the Panama Canal.
Connie smiles. She touches her own wrist, feeling what the man just felt, and instead of letting her fingers drop, she holds her own hand, fingers across her wrist, thumb to thumb and she steadies her emotions, checks her balance and decides that if she did tell Mr. Computer her story he would ask to switch seats.
“Well, I just retired and I was going to watch movies, clean the garage and then have this series of adventures, dreams really—kind of like making my dreams come true one at a time, no rushing, but then I discovered this box in the garage. That changed everything because I found out my daughter makes, well, she makes sex toys and I thought she was some big executive in a manufacturing company and so I dropped everything and I am rushing off to New York…to…”
“To what?” Connie wonders. “To run into the store and throw myself on top of a vibrator? To grab her and try to figure out who she is? To find out what possessed her? What? What am I doing?”
Reckless is not a word that anyone would use to describe Connie Nixon. She knows this and as she entwines her fingers, lacing them together as if she were praying, she imagines what it might be like to own that word. She wants to own it. She doesn’t want to admit that a part of her is frightened, not only because she is going to a city that is so huge and wild and loud she wonders how she will survive even the first thirty minutes, but because she knows her approach into this world of her daughter’s has to be smooth, and maybe even gentle, and she has no idea how she is going to be able to do that. To land without screaming. To march into the store, place her hand against a display case of funky implements of sex and nonchalantly say something like, “So, honey, what’s new?”
Being afraid is not a bad thing. Connie Nixon knows this better than half the world. She knows what it’s like to be around people who are scared to death all the time. Cancer moving from one breast to the next. Diabetes crawling up the side of a leg and eating it from the inside out. A heart that wants to stop beating inside the body of a baby who can barely hold onto the pinky finger of her terrified mother. Teenaged girls and boys with arms and faces and legs mangled from car crashes. The newlywed who discovers a rare kidney disease before he can return the tuxedo. She knows this kind of fear.
And the fear of loneliness, of being alone, the weight of that. The fear of waking up in the middle of the night when you hear a noise and knowing that whatever caused it could rip your throat out or cost you thousands of dollars—a burglar or a broken furnace. Knowing then that the weight of your life, your decisions, your next moment is all driven by your very own hands and not another’s. The weight of that. No one to throw the grenade if you forget one. No one to remember change for the tip. No one to hold the daughter who screws up the ACT test and decides to forget about college and have a baby instead. A few good friends to cover your ass but no one there always. No one to curl around your back in December when the worst storm of the year pulls against the gutters, strands you inside for 38 hours, and the girls, all three of them, are trapped someplace else. That ache just to have someone want you. The paralyzing fear that you may have once been beautiful and never knew it. Maybe also, maybe someone you know wanted you, wanted to run his fingers along the inside of your thigh until you jumped on top of him and rode him like a pony. What if you missed that because you were afraid you might miss it? What if you forgot to look up and see if he was watching you because you were always too damn busy? Wondering if you stay alone and when you turn 45 who will help you with your canes, who will adjust the hearing aids? Who will drive you to the liquor store for the Syrah? Who will buy you the occasional, and deeply loved, Saturday night rum-laced cigar?
Connie Nixon knows about being afraid. She knows what it’s like to spend months imagining life without him, wondering if the girls will be permanently damaged by the blight of yet another divorce, another broken family, the seemingly common surrender to the statistics of failed marriage. Will they read the local paper that shows up like an insurance bill so regularly and quietly one afternoon after volleyball practice, choir rehearsal, and hanging out at the library and say, “Holy shit, you guys, look! Mom and Dad’s divorce is in the paper!”
Will the car make it another year? Will anyone come home for Christmas? Will I really be able to pull off my expedition into the list of dreams I have been nurturing all of these years? If I screw up, will everyone still love me? Will I ever not be afraid?
The trenches of her own world have turned Connie Nixon into a soldier who has no more space for the Purple Hearts she has won—even as she prepares for another battle. Even as she closes her eyes and imagines rolling into the clouds without the cover of an airplane. Even as she wonders what she will say, where she will stay, what will happen next, she also knows that in two months, a week, or even a few hours later she will look back on these moments of hesitation and self-doubt with the mature knowledge that somehow everything will be just fine. Somehow there are still lessons to learn and pages to read and places to see. Life, Connie knows, from seeing it slip through her hands hundreds of times, never ends or begins at one particular time. It is a succession of chances and change and challenges that ripple through your life in waves that, thank God, sometimes give you another opportunity, another moment to catch your shallow breath, another view of a terrific beach, another unexpected experience that can change the direction of the very air that courses through your lungs.
And without warning it happens to her. Just like that. A crashing wave that sneaks up when Connie is passing a cloud that she has decided looks like a turkey riding a pig. The man with the computer pushes himself out of the chair, stands, looks towards the back of the airplane, takes a very fast glance at Connie, and then gathers up his computer and leaves. Connie figures he needs to spread out and she is about to do the same thing when a woman drops into the seat beside her as if she has fallen out of the overhead bin across the aisle.
“Thank God,” the woman says, flopping back in the seat and then looking at Connie as if she knows her. “Did you hear the frigging coughing? There’s a guy up there who must have escaped from a TB ward.”
The woman’s blonde hair is about an inch long except in the front where it dips into her eyes. Maybe about Sabrina’s age—27-ish, maybe a bit older. Light makeup, silver jewelry everywhere, blue cowboy boots, a red tank top with a white cardigan sweater and a pair of jeans that are faded in just the right places. She reeks of self-confidence and Connie imagines this woman’s life. New Yorker. Party girl. Artsy. Doesn’t take shit. Gets free drinks at the bars. Travels without a suitcase. Smokes dope on the weekends and loves to flirt with men and women. Hip.
She’s a hairstylist.
“No, really?” Connie says as a question-statement, as if her new friend Mattie has just told her she is in a traveling circus and has a spare body part tucked into her back pocket. “You look, well, artsy.”
“What I do is art, Connie baby. I get $125 for a 30-minute haircut.”
“No kidding?” Connie mouths in shock.
“No shit, it’s art, all right. I can take anyone and turn her or him into a flaming goddess,” Mattie assures her. “By the way, thanks for letting me sit here. If you get sick I’ll give you a free haircut.”
“Could you fix this?” Connie asks, grabbing her hair, suddenly totally distracted from her perilous mission of visiting her secretive oldest daughter by the disarming woman who leans over without hesitation to feel her hair, push it around between both hands and all her fingers, and then pulls back to imagine what she would look like “fixed” in New York.
“You need color. It will take 15 years off you, sweetie,” Mattie promises. “I’d highlight it, trim back the sides. What I’m thinking here is that you’d be borderline hot.”