by Kris Radish
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.
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.
Jessica 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.”