by Kris Radish
“What a shame,” Connie scolds her, insisting that she skip the floor and sleep in the bed with her.
“I can’t believe you’re here,” Jessica tells her, promising not to drool.
“You always drooled,” her mother reminds her. “You also used to grind your teeth. It drove your sister Sabrina out of her mind.”
“So that’s how it happened.”
“Stop it.”
Jessica laughs, turns over, and is an inch from sleep when Connie opens her suitcase, uncovers her toothbrush, and accidentally runs her fingers over the nicked and battered leather book that holds her list of dreams. She picks up the book, turns to make certain that Jessica is not looking at her, closes the lid on the toilet and then sits for what she thinks will be just a few seconds as she turns the pages, not to read them but just to look at them, just to feel them brushing against the skin on the tips of her fingers, just to see the building blocks of her words, her dreams stacked against each other on page after page.
Jessica turns once, twice, and then quickly falls into the exhausted kind of sleep that is enhanced by alcohol, emotional trauma, confusion, and the mere thought of having her mother barge into her life and then pause there as if she may stay, as if she may peek in her underwear drawer, as if she might find another secret that she doesn’t even know she possesses and a few dozen that she totally claims as her own.
Connie leans forward from her throne and sees her cheek pressed against the sheets, long hair splayed across the pillow, hands curled under her chin, and she closes the book. When she rises she slips it back into the bottom of her bag and then she climbs into the bed, focusing on nothing, absolutely nothing at all but her first dream, her biggest dream, the most important dream of all.
Jessica.
Jessica Franklin Nixon. CEO to the masses, sexual goddess extraordinaire, New York hipster and, even after all these years, a drooler who still loves to push her cold feet up against her mother’s legs, sleep on her left side and crank the pillow around her head as if she is the queen of the bed and the pillow is her crown.
7. Recapture Jessica. Find Jessica. Hurry, Connie, but start slowly. Find your baby.
6. Take yourself to Confession. Make the penance easy.
What the hell?”
“Are you awake, honey?”
“How could I not be awake, Mother? It sounds like you are slaughtering a cow in my make-believe kitchen.”
“How’s your head?”
“What head? I feel like shit. How much did we drink? I can’t remember a damn thing from the time I hit the pillow. Did I drool?”
“Yes, sweetie, it was a flood.”
Morning in New York is hilarious and unlike the serene scene in Cyprus, Indiana, where the paper shows up at 4:43 A.M., the coffee kicks in unabashedly promptly at 5:05 A.M., Connie’s feet hit the floor—or did up until about a week ago—at 5:15 A.M., the shower goes on three minutes later and Matt Lauer rests easy inside the old Panasonic television for his morning debut seven minutes after that. New York, on the other hand, is loud and fast. There are apparently no walls in between the cheap apartments in Jessica’s building. Tenants sneeze, use the bathrooms constantly, and argue. Horns honk without stopping and when someone speaks on one end of Manhattan you can hear them plainly on the other side of the island. It is one noisy-ass city.
Connie, so charged by the kinetic energy, by the noise, by the city cycle of life that in one day seems like an endless circle of vibrancy, feels 20 pounds lighter, bewildered, stoned, drunk and frightened halfway to Tennessee and back. Her initial reunion with her estranged daughter has given her hope and the past night’s reading of her list of dreams in the doorless bathroom has given her courage. She keeps moving because she wants not only to blend in with the action and the noise and the people and the very sidewalk below the apartment, but because she is afraid if she stops she’ll realize what she has done and, then, in the ensuing moment, that she has no idea what will happen next.
Jessica wants to get out of bed but the thought of any movement other than breathing makes her stomach roll into her throat. She speaks slowly and with great agony.
“Mother, what in God’s name have you been doing? It smells like food in here. There was no food in this apartment last night, or the night before that.”
“I couldn’t sleep. New York is too damn loud and so I went for a walk. I bought food. I met people. I cooked. I started to hang the door. I read three newspapers—imagine that, three newspapers all in the same city—and I met this guy who wanted to take me out when I was at that little grocery store, I think about four blocks away, and you were totally asleep.”
Jessica groans. She wonders for a moment if she is still drunk. She wonders the next second how her life has gone from the crazed place it was in just hours ago to this—her mother cooking eggs and toast in her ridiculously small kitchen, a half-hung door, a very close-to-intimate conversation over dinner, some vague memory of a hair appointment, the family home going on the market and oh, yes, the silly little problem in Louisiana that she needs to fix. And then there is the small problem of what to do with her mother while she restocks sex toys and trains two new clerks during the next 15 hours.
“Mother…” Jessica tries to say, sitting up, and then falling back over.
“You need some water, baby,” Connie says, mostly to herself because Jessica has the pillow pulled over her head. “Here,” Connie says, sitting on the edge of the mattress and pressing a glass of water into Jessica’s limp hand. “Drink this while I get the coffee.”
“Coffee,” Jessica manages to murmur as she finishes the water and sets the glass on the floor. “Coffee in my coffeepot and not from the joint by the subway. Mom, how do you make coffee?”
Overjoyed by the perfume of high-octane caffeine, by the warm cup she can feel in her hand, Jessica forgets for a moment about her immediate and seemingly perilous future. And as she rises to accept the cup, the princess lifting her head from the pillow, she realizes the last time anyone served her anything in bed, besides a fast-handed condom, was probably about six Christmases ago when her mother did this very same thing.
“Jesus…” Jessica whispers.
“Honey, is the coffee that good?”
Jessica looks at her mother, really looks, and holds back a stream of memories—some bad, some good—that could flood her right out the door and into the elevator. Reams of kindness. Yelling. Her father pounding on one side of the door while her mother pounds on the other. Curling up tight at the end of the hall when she got sick in fourth grade. The summer she couldn’t go to camp because there wasn’t enough money. The sound of her mother walking from room to room—no matter what time it was, no matter what day, no matter how many hours she had worked—to make certain everyone was in bed, tucked in, breathing. The screaming fights over boys and bras and college. All the things unsaid when Jessica zipped a bag over her mouth and heart and her entire life when she slipped away not just to New York but before that—when she lied about something terribly important and lied about studying over Easter break when she really went to Paris—glorious Paris—and the look, the sad, hurt, crushed look on her mother’s face when she told her—how many times?—that no, she would not be coming back for Thanksgiving, or Christmas, or maybe ever, if she could help it. There are barges filled with memories that have been awakened with this simple cup of frigging coffee. Jessica pushes them all back, levers each one against a place three steps closer to the front of her mind and heart, and then quickly steps away.
“Mom, you are, like, freaking me out.”
Connie takes a step back, hands on hips, and agrees with Jessica that, yes, a mother uncovering some of your secrets, showing up at the door, making you breakfast in a virgin kitchen, and flirting on the street corner is probably a fairly good reason to freak out.
“I am a little freaked myself, Ms. Sexy Diva, but we’ve already had part of this conversation and I bet you have to get your sorry ass out of bed and go to work,” Connie bickers
back. “I probably should have taken notes last night so we can move right along.”
“Right along to where?”
“Good question,” Connie tells her daughter with a laugh. “I haven’t thought much beyond breakfast and that hair thing tonight.”
“Hair thing? What hair thing?”
Connie looks at her daughter, who has one leg under the covers, the other on the floor, her hair sticking up in a classic hospital-head style, and she wishes she had a camera. She has one camera planted inside of her head, the same one every mother has, every woman has, who wants to seize a moment and put in a place so that she will never forget it.
“I don’t suppose you remember the part last night about me being a traveling hooker who works out of a tattoo parlor in Cyprus now that I’m retired,” Connie says, moving to get the rest of breakfast. “Get up, use the bathroom, young lady, eat and then—don’t you have a business to run?”
“You act like my mother,” Jessica says, obeying her and wishing that her mother had managed to hang the entire door as she asks Connie to turn her head and then comes out with the screwdriver in her hand.
Connie has the door up in ten minutes and, when she turns around to congratulate herself, Jessica is sound asleep and looking as if she could sleep for a year.
“Now what?” she asks herself as she sits down gently beside her daughter and removes the warm coffee cup from her hand. She sits on the cheap sofa bed, unable to move, unable to decide what she should do next or right after that or the week following.
Connie’s touchstone—her rope to a reality that she is creating every moment—is the feel of the white slips of paper in her pocket and a stolen moment, while Jessica slept, to read through her list of dreams book. Beyond that she is winging it, flying without a compass, hovering in New York City—which she is thrilled to say is #20 on her list.
There is also the reality of Jessica’s life and the lingering promise from her daughter to tell her a very important story. But first Jessica must get to her Diva office and apparently must make arrangements to travel to New Orleans. During the course of their alcohol-laced marathon meeting, Jessica mentioned training new clerks, budgets, her home office, some major problem, expanding, her business partner Geneva and life in the fast lane. Connie places her hand on Jessica’s hair, a soft reminder of a long-ago ritual when Jessica had gone through her nightmare stage and could only fall asleep if Connie was stroking her hair and sitting right next to her on the bed.
“You have to close the closet,” Jessica would insist with the covers pulled over her face.
“There’s nothing in here,” Connie would respond almost every night, and then she’d push through the hanging clothes and sometimes actually crawl through one side of the closet and out the other to prove her point.
“Only I can see them,” Jessica would explain patiently. “They’re my monsters.”
Occasionally, as the monsters screamed on from one month and into the next and then into the third and fourth, Connie would lose her patience. One night she let Jessica cry until the door rattled with her anguish and then Connie, filled past her eyebrows with guilt, raced into the room, pulled Jessica out of bed and carried her into her bedroom where she held her until the sun rose and apologized every three seconds for abandoning her and leaving her alone with the bogeymen.
The monsters finally departed for good, as they always do, and Connie braced herself for the other monsters that would eventually move into Sabrina and Macy’s closet and she’d lose her patience again and no one died and the monsters did not eat one single daughter.
Connie can still see a glimpse of the baby who was terrified of monsters when she touches Jessica and she cannot stop herself from running her fingers from the tips of Jessica’s hair to the side of her daughter’s face where her hand lingers and her heart stops. Connie then imagines her daughter’s monsters since the days of the permanently closed closet. What could they be?
School. Friends. Lovers. The impossibilities of the still male-dominated business world. That guy Jacob who called incessantly for months even after he knew Jessica had moved to New York and Connie had stern instructions not to share her phone number. And this Diva stuff. Sex toys. Some hidden desire to physically please, Connie assumes, the sexually unfulfilled women of the world. Finding a store. The business partner. The stares of people who still think sex is something you do once a year to fulfill a marital obligation. The tangle of city codes and laws and the charming personalities of the zoning and health inspectors. Probably a crippling wad of guilt because of what she has not shared with her mother, but apparently with her siblings. And this New Orleans problem. Franchise expansion. An apartment that has just moments ago been christened with its first cup of real coffee.
Oh, Jessica, Connie thinks. Oh, my baby.
“Your monsters are still there, aren’t they?” she whispers so quietly that the breath from her words is as faint as the breeze from a butterfly’s wings. “Monsters everywhere you look, bogeymen the size of Army tanks. Oh, sweetheart, where did you go? I had no idea. I had no idea how much I missed you—or how much I have missed.”
In those minutes while Jessica sleeps, her mother wonders if she couldn’t make Jessica’s small apartment sing to her like Connie’s house sang to Connie. She wonders what will happen tomorrow or next week, and at the tail end of that thought is also the knowledge that it does not matter. It doesn’t matter if she stays here in New York for a week or a month or maybe for the rest of her damn life. It doesn’t matter because she is here now and Jessica is here, too.
She wakes Jessica after that. Connie wakes her sweetly with her fingers dancing through her hair and then onto her face, across her lips.
“Hey, baby, what time do you have to get to Diva’s?”
Connie’s voice is a semi-foreign noise that rides itself through the corridors of Jessica’s brain and out to the ledge of her woozy consciousness. She remembers as she stumbles awake. She remembers strips of the past 24 hours as if she is watching a cartoon being put together. The champagne. The phone call. Her mother standing by the purple dildos. Dinner. All the damn booze. A conversation that would have stunned her into oblivion if she had not been stoned on the grapes of Santa Barbara. The bathroom door. Coffee. And now…her mother touching her face and this feeling as old as her heart that she will soon, very soon, call a love as fine as life itself.
“Jesus, Mom, I can barely move. I have been so damn busy I’m not even drinking anymore.”
“How sad is that?” Connie whispers again, this time a bit louder.
“What time is it?”
“It’s close to nine. What time do you open?”
“Not until 11 today, but I have to get my sorry ass in there and set up and I’m training the new clerks at noon.”
Connie’s brain flashes into mother mode. In less than five seconds, she smiles and forms a plan for the day. It could be 15 years ago when all three girls got the flu on the same day and she was scheduled to give a lecture, head up a conference with three administrators, and meet her insurance agent for an update after work.
“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 compu
ter 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.