by Kris Radish
Meredith Rojas is 28, Hispanic, beautiful, and pierced in her nose, ears, eyebrow and most likely numerous other places—one in particular which she mentioned during her interview to prove that she was not only sexually aware but could relate to the intimate problems, questions, and concerns of Diva’s customers. An NYU graduate in psychology, Ms. Meredith is in love with the hippie renaissance and with Manhattan, where she has held a succession of jobs while she tries to “stay focused on her cosmic abilities, desire to experience life, and passionate need to make certain women are sexually satisfied.” To help herself with that last little goal, Meredith has tried to sleep with every woman in the five boroughs and Jessica figured if she hired Meredith all seven thousand of her successes to date might become customers.
And Meredith is sassy, bright, fun, and has tons of retail experience, what with her psychology degree, nine years of waitressing, stints at two shoe stores, a bakery and one upscale jewelry retailer—and there’s little doubt that she already knows the products. Her first day of work at Diva’s and Meredith shows up in a scarlet miniskirt, white flip-flops, a white spaghetti-strap tank top with a black lace nightie-looking top and a grin that is as eager as it gets.
Then there is Kinsey. Lovely Kinsey Barnes. A tall, thin white boy from Cleveland who is one of the thousands of Broadway star wannabes who have immigrated to New York and who can also handle lots of the day shifts when he is not auditioning for off-Broadway plays, taking voice lessons, or riding his bicycle into the side of moving taxicabs. Kinsey is outgoing, in a goofy kind of way that might make anyone buy something from him. He has spent way too many years as a bartender in a sleazy side-street saloon and is more than willing to learn how to usher lovely ladies and divine men up and down the aisles of Diva’s, where he can also use his technical skills to manage the website, keep an eye on the storeroom, and call one of his barroom thugs if anyone gets out of hand.
Kinsey arrives at Diva’s this morning wearing a pink shirt, red tie, gold vest, and jeans. He is so adorably anal that he straightens the leather whips, nudges a window sign closer to the edge of the sill, and looks as if he’s ready to take over not just the business but the entire city on his way to the front of the store.
Jessica sighs. She says good morning and then she has a brief moment when she wonders if she should not run screaming from her store and all the way back to her apartment where she can plop into bed, ask her mother to make more coffee, and sleep until the books are balanced, the assholes in New Orleans have been spanked, and the store shelves have been lined with Diva’s own signature products.
Her mother and what lies ahead is a topic Jessica decides to ignore.
Jessica jams on her CEO hat, grabs a stack of training documents she has prepared, and launches into phase one of her Diva training program with a chorus of tiny hammers pounding against her temples. She wishes, as she hands employment papers to Meredith and Kinsey, that she could have a beer or a Bloody Mary to feed her narrowed blood vessels so they’d stop slamming around in her head. She takes her new employees into the back room so they can fill out forms, and fights off any uncertainty about what is happening.
And it begins.
And there is no time to blink. The phone rings. Half of New York has decided to visit Diva’s on this particular day. Jessica has a hangover, her mother is probably rearranging her apartment at this very moment, and a bunch of shitheads in the Big Easy are trying to shut down her manufacturing shop.
“Geneva,” Jessica whines into the phone as she scoops it up and tries to straighten up the mess which has accumulated around the cash register. “It’s a madhouse here and I’ve got Meredith and Kinsey lurking around all day. I hope to God this training program I devised works out.”
“You were born to do this, baby,” her partner encourages from the desk of her “real” job as an accountant on the other side of Manhattan. “I’d come in but as you know I have absolutely no vacation or sick days left,” Geneva tells her. “At least you can lie down on the floor if you have to. If I do that here, some other accountant will jump on top of me.”
“You know I’m going to New Orleans tomorrow for crisis number 55, right? You have to open, close, and work with Meredith all day. And then you get Kinsey on Sunday. So follow the damn instructions I wrote down and don’t invent anything new while I’m gone.”
“What are you going to do down there?” Geneva asks. “Do you have a plan?”
Jessica considers answering that the best plan would still be to run screaming from the building as fast as possible but she takes a breath instead and tells Geneva that she does not have a definite, well thought-out, organized assault, but she will surely have one by the time the plane lands in New Orleans.
“Great. You get to traipse around Bourbon Street while I show Fritzina and Harry, our new hired hands, how to make us rich,” Geneva says, mocking Jessica. “Tough work if you can find it.”
“Want to trade, Wheaton?” Jessica asks her. “Some southern jackass will probably try to kill me and I’ll be staying at the same Motel 6 I’ve stayed at the last 10 times and I’ve never been to Bourbon Street in my life.”
“You are such a baby,” Geneva informs her.
“Hey, when you cruise by during your lunch break, bring every single file from New Orleans that you have at your office. I do have to throw something together before I get down there. I swear to every plastic god in the universe that we have our bases covered, but I want to call our attorney and make certain they can’t throw an injunction or some work-stop clause at us.”
As she hangs up the phone, Jessica, a slender blonde who was such a brainy geek in high school that she was the president of the chess, political, and computer clubs at the same time, wishes that Geneva could go with her. Geneva, a track and soccer star in high school and college, saved her aggressiveness for athletics, financial figures, women’s causes and her live-in lover, a gorgeous Latino woman who moved with them from Chicago and is now fully entrenched in her own life canvas—teaching art to grade schoolers at an experimental school and working on her own paintings when Geneva and Jessica are working at the store, which is pretty much all of the time. Geneva—who could get a below-market-value deal on gold, could negotiate leases and manipulate men and women with a wink or a nod but who hated social interactions if they didn’t have anything to do with her business—was no match for Jessica’s ways of the world. The Diva partners are perfect professional dancers: they moved in the same direction but listened to two totally different tunes at the exact same moment. No two women could be more opposite or more equally matched.
Although she likes a good battle, Jessica is also grace under fire, embraces poise as a pattern of life, and can plan a party, store opening, or marketing campaign to knock the socks off of men and women who would walk ten miles to buy her products even in the dead of winter—without their socks. She and Geneva had met in graduate school, thrown their own dreams into the same barrel, and were inches away from opening up a Los Angeles store, another in Chicago, and hopefully blowing their small list of competitors out of the water while at the same time enhancing the sexuality of women from one end of the universe to the next. The future, when they remember to think about it, is beyond intoxicating.
The connecting link, the last piece of their workaholic obsessions, the passageway to phase two of the Diva Plan, as they love to call it, is the delivery of the order from the manufacturing plant east of New Orleans. Diva’s signature line, products with a purpose, sexual stuff, sensual pieces of life’s feminine puzzle, life-enhancing articles of amazement that no woman should live without, objects of tremendous, trembling joy—all this is a main part of the dream that is very close to the finish line.
At this moment, Geneva and Jessica don’t even get to the mother part of Jessica’s life. Connie Nixon. Former nurse. Mother to the sex goddess. Coffee-maker extraordinaire. New York City street-walker.
Back at the apartment Connie is slamming through the tiny rooms
like a human vacuum cleaner. Organizing. Grabbing what she assumes is her daughter’s travel bag and throwing it on the bed, loading up the tiny, apartment-sized washer, and then sorting through the few pathetic items of clothing that she managed to put into her own bag before she left. Shoes, slacks, jeans, a sweater, an old beige skirt, and not one thing dressy or professional enough to wear to a shout-out in Louisiana.
While one load tumbles, and the other washes, Connie races to the small boutique she discovered when she went food shopping. She slips inside and into a world that is so far from Cyprus, Indiana, she almost wants to ask for a map so she can find her way around the store. When she’s finished buying a gorgeous turquoise blue linen suit, two blouses, a pair of leather dress sandals that cost more than every garment she’s purchased in the last ten years, a tailored pair of dress slacks and a tight-fitting denim blazer, she races back to Jessica’s apartment as if she just purchased a weekend stash of drugs.
She can’t help it. She leaves what she thinks will be a distraught message on O’Brien’s answering machine but instead it sounds as if she’s just robbed a bank and no one cares.
“I just spent hundreds, let me repeat that hundreds of dollars, on clothes. I think I’ve lost my mind. Maybe something happened when those walls were talking. Oh, one other thing, O’Brien. I’m going to New Orleans in the morning. Now I bet you will call me the minute you get off work tonight.”
When she hangs up, Connie says, “I’m sassy,” to herself, folds the last load of wash and pauses just long enough to close the lid on the toilet, sit down and motivate herself by pulling her book of dreams out of her bag and simply touching it. “Please let Jessica not be mad. Please let me keep my mouth shut. Please help me find my way to the store. Please help me not to turn back, not now.”
As Connie begins walking towards Diva’s, nothing and everything makes sense to her. While she maneuvers through the crowds and dodges cars to cross streets, she feels as if old air is being sucked from her lungs. Connie bounces through several intersections, and fights all her old urges to plan, to prepare, to always be ready. She has no idea what she is going to do when she gets to Diva’s. She has no idea what will happen in New Orleans or if her daughter will politely and then not so politely refuse to allow her to go. She may end up at a hotel tonight and even that does not matter.
And she misses Frannie O’Brien. While she waits at the last traffic light, Connie thinks that if someone asks her if she is married while she is in New York she will say, “Yes, I’m married to this truly wonderful woman and her husband. We do everything together—well, almost everything.” And then she wonders if she’s ever too much for Frannie. Frannie, who calls her just as much and who often plans her days and weeks in unison with Nurse Nixon’s. We are good, she reaffirms to herself, but maybe I need to be an Indiana hermit for a while.
Maybe.
Or maybe not.
And she’s suddenly thinking about sex.
Who wouldn’t, with make-believe penises and whips and chains and clothing that make you want to shudder just looking at them flashing in front of you as you enter Diva’s?
Who wouldn’t think about sex?
1. Stop being afraid.
Connie is saying, “Who wouldn’t?” as she pushes open the door to Diva’s with one hand clutching a bag of bagels she picked up at the coffee shop, and a carafe of coffee and some cups in the other, correctly assuming that Jessica has not bothered to install a coffee center in her own store.
“Mother…” Jessica mumbles under her breath, as if this is the first time she’s seen her in years. “You’re back.”
“A snack,” Connie says, holding up the bag. “And some willing arms if you need some help this afternoon.”
Jessica freezes. She’s a rock. Frozen in place. Unable to think. Dumbfounded.
The new kids, Meredith and Kinsey, are in the back room stacking shelves, there are five customers roaming through the store, both phone lines are ringing, and there is a delivery guy pounding on the back door.
“Mom,” Jessica says a little louder, with her teeth clenched, as if someone were pulling the words from her mouth. “You know we sell sex toys here. This is not a hospital emergency room. Sex toys.”
“I’ve figured that out, Jessica,” Connie replies, looking around the store. “It looks like you’re busy. Why don’t you let me help you?”
Jessica feels like a trapped dog. Her mother? Selling sex toys?
“Wait here for two seconds,” she orders sort of politely, and then gets Kinsey to handle the delivery and Meredith to handle the customers. Handling her mother will take half an army, she’s certain of it.
Connie obeys and remembers her promise to try and keep her mouth shut. It is not an easy promise to keep. When Jessica returns and they head into the back room, Connie cannot stop herself. She sets down the coffee and whispers into her daughter’s ear, “You should get some terrific coffee in here. And some Diva cups. People will want to keep shopping while they drink your coffee.”
Jessica looks at her mother as if she has just witnessed a miracle. She’s never seen this woman before. She has no idea who she is.
“You were a nurse, Mother, but maybe there is some carryover into this profession,” Jessica says as she writes down buy coffeepot and funky coffee, and adds, “What the hell” to her sentence, almost as if she were speaking to herself. “Set up the coffee out there and let me think for a few minutes. Is that okay, Mom?”
Connie is so happy to be doing something she almost drops the bagels as she turns to maneuver her way through the store. And Jessica watches her mother introduce herself to Kinsey and Meredith, greet two customers, and begin passing out coffee.
Her mother.
Jessica stops and places her right hand on her desk. Her left hand goes to her heart. For an instant a frozen thought parades into her mind, pushing through the debris of her day, the New Orleans fiasco, the 37 things on her “to-do” list, and she is a prisoner. She remembers.
Her parents’ divorce. Her mother working odd shifts as a supervisor. Jessica, 17, who now has her driver’s license and a boyfriend and her own brand-new, almost-adult responsibilities, grows weary with supplementing as her mother’s assistant and tells her mother to go to hell. Her mother. The woman who has packed her lunches, rubbed her back through 47 menstrual cycles, gone up against the inappropriate English teacher, supported the family on wages that frequently seemed criminal given the level of her responsibilities, carried the load when the grandparents were ill, and sacrificed her personal time and any potential relationships because the girls—her three daughters, her life—had to come first.
“All this driving Sabrina and Macy and picking them up and making certain they are where they’re supposed to be is so not fair!” Jessica had screamed. “What about my life, my time, my dreams…what about them? You can go to hell, Mother. I’ve had it.”
Her mother is so wounded by Jessica’s vicious attack that she stumbles against the refrigerator door as if she has been pushed there by the weight of the world.
Her mother’s face. Jessica will never forget her mother’s face, which instantly became an acre of pain, an ocean of torture, a universe of sorrow as she dropped to her knees and wept quietly into her hands.
That was Jessica then, and Jessica now cannot move. A line of anguish cruises through the very veins that rested against the side of her mother’s womb before she was born. Veins that glided through her stomach, and into her own heart and then up through her throat and into her neck and towards the very brain that has occasionally made her selfish, rude and ignorant.
Her mother pauses on the floor all those years ago and lets her anger ride itself out through the front door, into the tiny front yard, and onto the roof of the first car that passed by the house so she could watch it disappear. Then she looked up at her daughter, the girl-woman who looks so much like her that they could, on a really, really good day, pass as sisters, and she let her heart settle so she coul
d say one of the most powerful and poignant things that she has ever spoken.
“You are my dream, baby. Beautiful. Strong. Wise. Sometimes a pain in my ass, but I have held you close and tight and I have let other things go, but never my dream. My dream to see you grow and go and build your own nest of dreams. Get them. Get your goddamn dreams and ride them until you hop on a new one. But never let them go, no matter how much it hurts.”
Jessica takes a cleansing breath, a purging announcement to her lungs, her heart, and especially to her soul that she remembers everything. She remembers how her mother apologized for all the responsibility, for all the empty nights and days when she was not there because she had to work, for the anguish of the divorce, for all the things they could not afford but never, not once, for living her own dream, for wanting to be happy, for knowing she could be happy.
And then Jessica sees Connie move towards the vibrator aisle, raising her hands to touch the flowing fabric as she walks, and then leans in to ask the gorgeous woman who is holding something that looks like a rabbit if she’d like a cup of mocha java while she shops. Jessica watches and she knows now, immediately, before anything else happens or changes, that she needs to tell her mother the real story of why and how Diva’s came to be, the real reason why she finally pulled away, a story that is intimate and a story that desperately needs telling.
First, she orders a trial by fire for her new employees. “My mother and I will be talking back here. Handle everything,” she orders. She then asks Connie to sit, tells her before they can go anyplace else, before they can really move forward, Connie needs to hear the true story about the beginning of Diva’s, about the woman Connie once accused of being a bad influence on Jessica, about the girl-turned-woman who is her daughter.
And then Jessica begins and Connie listens, unmoving, barely breathing.
Jessica Franklin Nixon is 19.9 years old the first time she has sex with a man. Well, sort of a man. His name is Ricky, or Rocky, or did he say Ron something, and he’s in her economics class at the university and he is also 19 and they both know Fowler Jackson, the university basketball star from Kentucky who is as famous for his parties as he is for his extreme height and the way he rockets the ball into the net no matter where he is standing or how hungover he is at that exact moment.