by Kris Radish
Jessica is drunk. Ricky is drunk. Fowler is always drunk. Everyone else is drunk or stoned and a few people in the back room are snorting or eating something and someone mentions that those particular drug freaks have been in the room now for 21 hours. Jessica knows Rocky Ricky is a mistake even before he tries to kiss her in the backseat of his father’s Buick but she does not care. She wants to get this over with. He’s not unattractive. He has not tried to rip anything off her body and she suspects he may also be a virgin and wanting to enter into the secret society of “I did it” before another second passes, and he’s also bright enough to have a condom in just about every pocket.
It’s pathetic from the beginning but she does not stop. She does not stop even as he immediately slumps on top of her and she has to shake him so she can move to pull up her jeans.
She keeps trying. Jessica Nixon is dauntless. She sleeps with five more men and it gets a little better. Ben Jacobsen is the best because she nearly falls in love with him. This helps but even Ben—who must have taken lessons from romance novels because he reads poetry to her, tries unique positions, leaves a rose petal trail at her apartment door, and licks wine off of every inch of her body—does not rouse her to passion in a way that makes her want to crawl through a building to see him naked, have him touch her, let herself slip inside of him in a way that lets her breathe fire at the same time she is a captured sex slave.
During a retreat as part of her woman’s studies class, Jessica, who identifies as a heterosexual but never closes any doors, lets Romney Switala seduce her. It is one of the loveliest weekends of her life. Women know how to please women, Jessica decides, as Romney locks her cabin door and undresses her in a way that makes her feel so sexy and wanted and beautiful that for the first time she cries when she makes love. While Romney, who is a tall, blonde woman who models on the weekends and will eventually become a vascular surgeon, rolls her onto her stomach and touches her, every single inch of her, Jessica realizes that this is exactly what she wanted. Intimacy, someone to look at her, someone to touch her, someone to be soft, to focus, to give, to see her—really see her—as a woman, a sexual being, and this is when she cries for the first time. Romney is not selfish but, eventually, during the weekend, Jessica wants her to be. At the retreat, they miss so many meetings they end up having to write three extra papers and explain their behavior, which they do without blushing, or hesitation, or excuses.
And they go on. Not because Jessica is in love or because she desires women but because she feels safe, because she is more sexually satisfied than she has ever been, because she feels desire, because she has this wild line inside of her that started from a place or a person or an event or from an ancient goddess ancestor who says to deny even one part of who she is and wants to be and what she craves would be wrong. Even when Romney asks for more, even when she thinks that maybe Jessica could love her the way she loves Jessica, even when Jessica touches her lover’s cheek and says no without saying a word and feels a surge of tenderness that is as close to deep love as she has ever been.
“But…” Jessica finally tells her. “There is something.”
Romney, who could have any woman or man on campus by turning her head the right way. Romney, who is so smart that Jessica can hear her brain snap and pop like those buzzers that try and kill mosquitoes. Romney, who loves to please Jessica not only physically but also socially and mentally. Romney, who will hold on to her notion that Jessica will one day turn the corner and see another beautiful woman and feel the sag of her heart towards her knees and the quiver in her stomach and the stab of pain from breath that wavers and makes her almost faint on the sidewalk—that Jessica will realize that she was born to love women and come back to find her. Romney will do anything when Jessica says, “But…” Anything at all.
But, Jessica tells her, but, she says, there is just one thing.
“What?” Romney asks her, panting, wondering, pleading. “Anything. What is it, honey?”
“I miss a penis.”
A penis.
Jessica says the word “penis” as if she has a wad of gum in her mouth the size of Georgia. A penis.
Jessica hesitates. She is waiting for Romney to slap her and grab her clothes and take her beautiful self out of the door, out of the apartment complex, out of the state, out of Jessica’s life.
Instead, Romney smiles a slow smile, the sun rising on Christmas morning, sweet smells from the sea all those miles before you see it against the blue Pacific sky, something you want really bad rolling like silk through your fingers, holding the baby for ten minutes and then the lovely feeling of not having to take her home to feed her, bathe her, raise her, send her to college, watch her fall in love with the wrong person.
“A penis.”
“What?” It’s Jessica who asks this time.
Romney smiles.
“Do you hate me?” Jessica asks.
Romney laughs and Jessica is instantly disarmed. She has worked for a long time to convince herself that she did not, could not, really love Romney. She has worked on that thought like a poor woman in a village linking together the broken threads of string to make the socks last just one more winter. Just one more week. One more second.
“I can get a penis,” Romney tells her, clearly in control, knowing that she has this woman she loves for at least another month, maybe longer, before she begins medical school on the other side of the country and Jessica begins her business internship and resumes her hunt for a man—the man.
“Get dressed,” Romney orders, slapping Jessica on the ass and strutting through the tiny bedroom to find her own clothes. “And I will get you a penis.”
Jessica is no sexual dunce. That’s what she tells herself as Romney orders her into the car, smiles at her sideways and drives through the center of Madison, Wisconsin, as if the rear tires are on fire. She turns the car towards Lake Mendota and then misses the clutch on her Toyota for the first time that Jessica can remember, and the car stalls in mid-traffic.
“Excited?” Jessica asks, knowing that they are headed for a tiny sex-toy store that she has frankly never taken the time to go into, had the need to see, or had the nerve to enter.
And, yes, Romney is excited. And, yes, Romney is a sex-toy expert. And, yes, Jessica blushes in the store as Romney tells the little man behind the counter that she doesn’t need any help and that they might be there for a while so that he will go back to his book and his dish of granola.
They shop.
Jessica is speechless.
Why she never imagined such a place or has never been to one is almost as astounding to her as what she sees and holds and unabashedly wants to try.
What Jessica Franklin Nixon most remembers from the day, from the trip to the sex-toy store, has nothing to do with dildos and sexual pleasure and her lover’s need to please her, to try to keep her, to make her happy—which is what a true lover is supposed to do. Jessica, even now, remembers the way the sun stood for an unbelievably long time on the very edge of the lake as she walked back to the car that day with Romney. She remembers how she simply pushed on Romney’s arm, as if to say, “Stop, please, for just a second,” and how Romney stopped because she knew what she wanted without a word. They stood there, at the intersection of two streets, one curving towards something unseen, and one straight that ended along the usual path. They held hands, not caring who would see them, and they clutched the bag with the dildo between them and watched the sun move sweet, soft and slow until it fell off the edge of the sky and into the dark lip on the other side of the lake.
Jessica remembers feeling alive, sure, wanted, beautiful, courageous, and so frigging empowered. She remembers stretching her hand out so that if someone had taken a photo, just then, it would have seemed as if she were holding the sun between her fingers. And then Romney let go of a breath, a wish that she had been holding, and leaned against her and the warmth from her shoulder melted into her and moved through her arm, touched her heart and then skidded alon
g the road that curved and disappeared into the night, black and intoxicating, with an unknown end.
When she finishes her story, Jessica looks up and her mother begins sobbing into her hands. “Mom,” she says. “Are you okay?”
Connie stands up, takes a step forward, and then opens her arms.
“I may never have been more okay in my entire life,” she says, moving to embrace her daughter so that she can say she understands, that she too has more secrets to share, and so she can especially say she is sorry for never understanding when Romney was in Jessica’s life all those years ago and why Jessica disappeared and turned into a Diva.
And when Connie Franklin Nixon speaks, it is with a voice that is totally sure and unafraid.
6. Take yourself to confession. Make the penance easy.
8. Do something with your damn hair. Everyone looks the same after 47. Take a deep breath and hand the scissors to someone else, for crissakes.
10. Buy a convertible. Something flashy. Red or blue. Put the top down and drive someplace without thinking. Just get in the car and take off.
2. Let go. Stop holding on to things so tightly. Loosen your grasp. Be honest. (Accept the idea that this one may never come off the list.)
Connie remembers to check her cell phone for messages just after midnight when she is huddled for protection in Jessica’s bathroom, thanking her dead grandfather for teaching her how to hang a door, and wondering what in the hell she could say to her oldest daughter to get her to shut up already about the fact that her mother is going with her to straighten out the politically misaligned faces of the good ol’ boys.
“What the hell?” Jessica says not so softly about a minute before Connie has locked herself in the bathroom pretending to have to use it for something besides a safe harbor. “Mom, you can’t just fly into my life like this and take me by the hand and think that you can join in the fun and games as if you’ve always been there. I said get me a ticket, not get you a ticket.”
“I could help like I did this afternoon,” Connie replies, not at all oblivious to the fact that she and her oldest daughter have completely switched roles, and that she is begging just a bit. She knows she sounds like a teenager who wants something she knows she might not get. “It’s not like I am some kind of ignorant ass who has never dealt with the public.”
Connie had helped. She’d helped so much in fact that Jessica had wondered what she would have done to survive the day without her. Her mother had no idea what she was selling, no clue about what the difference between a vibrator and a dildo was, looked a few times as if her mouth had been permanently propped open when a customer asked her for something Connie had never heard of. Jessica was certain that at least two couples, one a lovely man and woman and the other a lovely man and man, had been stunned to see someone who looked remarkably like their mother running around the store with coffee cups and a whip hanging out of her back pocket.
And Connie, even after dipping into her pocket to read—Stop being afraid.—a good ten times, could not bring herself to tell Jessica she had purchased two tickets to New Orleans until moments ago. Moments she wishes she could somehow exchange along with the damn tickets.
“Mom,” Jessica snarls, partly out of simple frustration for the disruption her mother has brought to her life, “it’s sex toys we’re talking about here. This isn’t a hospital. This isn’t a post-op patient recovery room, you don’t dress in one of those perky pink surgical costumes, unless of course a customer wants you to special-order one because they have some kind of funky medical fetish and love to put Band-Aids on people. I do this stuff alone. Geneva handles the store when I’m gone and I’m going down there to kick some ass and it might not be pretty.”
Connie suddenly longs to slap her and say, “I’ll show you ass-kicking. I’ll show you pretty.” But instead she makes believe her hands are around her own throat so she cannot speak, says in a monotone, “Excuse me for just a second,” and departs swiftly to the restroom which she hopes will provide some kind of answer to the seemingly short but extremely complex question, What now?
The cell phone leaps into her hand. There are 23 messages and most of them are from O’Brien, one from each of her daughters, three from the real estate agent and two from her former co-workers who called during a staff meeting and left the speaker phone on so she could hear what she was missing—a power play for the final say on patient discharge protocols; a discussion on where the garbage can should be located at the nurses’ station; a rather spirited debate about who would organize the fall picnic; a few stifled laughs when someone asked why Dr. Lambrinski allowed his dog to slink into the waiting room three times in one month while the good MD ran into his office to grab files, talked to staff members, and stole a drink from the lounge fridge.
Connie turns on the bathroom fan and calls O’Brien, who she prays to God will answer the phone. While she waits, she goes from being pissed off to thinking that maybe she really did lose her mind when the house started talking to her. Maybe, she tells herself, there was nothing wrong with the wiring and everyone was trying to protect her until they could get her out of the house and into some kind of secure environment where she wouldn’t hurt herself or anyone else—especially her eldest daughter. Maybe she snuck out and got on the airplane to New York just in time and totally screwed up the plan. Connie feels as if she will take a giant step backwards unless she can hear O’Brien’s voice.
“The plan, hell,” she utters out loud just as the fan kicks in. “What about my list? What the heck am I doing?”
“Jesus, Nixon, what in the hell is going on?” O’Brien shouts into the phone on the fifth ring. “I leave you alone for a few hours and now you’re selling sex toys, getting makeovers, flying to big cities and making the one daughter you desperately need to have a relationship with hate you even more than she already does. I’m jealous as hell.”
Connie suddenly feels like a fool, and an ass, and that’s exactly what she tells O’Brien as through the closed bathroom door she hears Jessica fling God knows what in the space that serves as her living room, dining room, porch, basement cellar, bedroom, and the corporate headquarters for Diva’s.
“Imagine how you would feel if your mother showed up while you were unpacking cartons of condoms and lubricating gel, sweetheart,” O’Brien admonishes. “It’s not like she runs a flipping daycare center. And she’s also used to being alone. You upset her routines, her schedule, her life balance, and, apparently, made her wonder what the hell happened to her real mother.”
“I’m the same. I haven’t changed,” Connie protests, stung.
“Tell me what you look like right now.”
Connie was not the same and neither was her daughter—physically and mentally. They had both, with more than a bit of cajoling and badgering and finally the appearance of Mattie at the door of Diva’s with a blow-dryer aimed at Jessica as if it were a gun, turned into Divas themselves. They had become new women—at least from the neck up. Haircuts, dye jobs, a parade of brushes and wands and scissors and a takeout order of Chinese, almost two six-packs, and 3.5 hours later and the two Nixon women were definitely saucy and Connie had not even written #8, the hair dream, down on her pocket list yet.
“Shit,” Connie admits over the hum of the bathroom fan. “I’m sort of a blonde now.”
“See,” O’Brien says, trying not to laugh, “Jessica probably doesn’t even recognize you. No wonder it’s thrown her into some kind of frantic realization that her mother is an adult, she is also an adult, and everything has changed. Don’t start baking chocolate chip cookies and reading her Goodnight Moon, for God’s sake, or you will screw up everything.”
“Tomorrow, shit, Frannie, in like five hours we are supposed to fly to New Orleans and I had this idea that I could help and she doesn’t want me to go and I don’t know what the hell to do,” Connie moans, hands on her knees, ass on the closed toilet, and the fan blowing on her bare neck where Mattie had shaved off all of her hair.
&nbs
p; O’Brien lets her have it for a good three minutes. Just go to New Orleans, for crissakes, she tells Connie. You’ve got the ticket, you’ve wanted to go for years, if Jessica doesn’t warm up just go to a different bar in the French Quarter every 15 minutes until she’s finished. Go see a swamp. Stop treating her like a daughter and just treat her like a woman. Gezus, Nixon, you ran an entire hospital, raised three kids pretty much on your own, and you don’t usually take shit from anyone. Don’t back down. Get pissed off yourself.
While O’Brien tries hard to motivate her, Connie wonders if Jessica might be afraid of failing, of dipping backwards into her own fears, into that place where not making it seems predestined. Connie thinks that if the New Orleans trip works out, she may be able to cross out number seven. And number seven, she reminds herself, is the real number one.
Connie listens and then has so much to say that she needs to take a breath before she starts, but Jessica pounds on the door just then and yells, “Mom, get off the phone and come out,” and Connie does just that, thinking the fight will resume. But Jessica really needs to go to the bathroom, and probably make her own “What the hell?” calls, Connie thinks. And as tempted as she is to stand by the door and listen, she cannot bring herself to do it. In the next 15 minutes, instead, Connie finishes packing, checks to make certain the tickets are tucked into the pocket of her new jacket, runs her fingers through her very short and very blonde hair, and then drops into bed imagining the early morning smell of New Orleans—a mix of serious coffee and lightly baked beignets, she fantasizes, a perfume seeping through the cracks of the very old, very well-restored, and very hip bed-and-breakfast hotel room she has reserved on the second floor of a building encased in antique wrought iron on Dumaine Street in the very heart of the French Quarter.