by Kris Radish
“I’m Jessica’s mom and the driver,” Connie tells him. “I’ll just hang out here while you two go inside and take care of your business.”
“Nonsense,” he declares, boldly putting his arm around Connie’s shoulder. “Come in. Justin, the CEO, has a nice room we can sit in and maybe you will want to see the plant. It’s actually kind of interesting. Some day this plant is going to be on the map for more than these Diva products. Justin’s scientists are doing some remarkable things with plastics.”
Jessica’s eyes have never been this large in her entire life. “Jesus Christ,” she whispers as she follows the happy couple in through the side door of the plant. “This guy is flirting with my mother. Holy hell, my mother.”
Connie works to get Jessica’s attention as they move through a long corridor and into an office that has a couch, some chairs, and a very narrow window that offers an interior view of the plastics-manufacturing plant. Desperate for some kind of an exchange with Jessica, and obviously emboldened by the commissioner’s attention, Connie swings into action. She whispers, “Watch this,” into Jessica’s ear as the commissioner picks up a phone on the desk to call Justin out of the factory. She plants herself directly in front of him. She’s flirting too, big-time. Jessica is just an inch from being paralyzed and, before she can say anything, Connie takes over as if she just inherited the entire Watkins’s plastic manufacturing business, half of Louisiana, and every four-star chef in the French Quarter.
In the back of her mind, in a place that never really grows totally weary, a place that is filled with flying daggers to protect the weak, rows of fresh flowers, and arms as wide as the world—a place cultivated by every mother on the earth, a place that can never be erased—Connie Nixon Franklin also feels her armor fall into place.
She cannot help herself. Warrior mother, charge nurse, and also, rising like a splash of heat from a warm spot, almost dead, almost forgotten just a bit south of her pubic bone, Connie feels a wave of sensual heat.
“Michael,” she begins, busting right past the formality of the word “commissioner” and reaching out to put her hand on his arm, “what is this confusing meeting all about anyway? Jessica has her permits, this is a private business, and last time I checked the absolutely gorgeous state of Louisiana is part of the United States of America.”
Michael, clearly taken aback and captivated at the same time, tells Connie he agrees, which makes Jessica want to weep with joy. And then she gets mad.
“Why did you tell Justin he had to shut down then?” she asks, unable to control her obvious anger. “Why are we here? I am totally confused.”
“Sit,” Michael tells them as Justin walks in, introduces himself, and perches on one end of the couch. “Let me talk to you two about the politics of Jenko County for a second and then you can ask some questions. Please don’t be angry. You might think, Connie, that Louisiana is part of the United States, but Jenko County is often its own entity. I’ve been trying to bring the place into this century for the past five years. It’s no easy chore. I had to make a big deal out of what Justin is manufacturing for you,” he said.
Connie stops him by putting the famous handhold on his arm and says, “Sex toys, Michael. You can say it and your lips won’t fall off. They are sex toys and don’t worry, it took me a while to work up the courage myself. Don’t be scared. I’m not even sure what half of them are for. Some of them look like things the kids used to play with, or car parts, for crying out loud.”
“Okay,” Commissioner Michael Dennis says, smiling with relief. “The sex toys you are manufacturing are not the usual product of this part of Louisiana, Jessica, but Justin hired new people for this job, it’s terrific business for him and, in the long run, as a businessman I can see what this will do for the people in this county who need jobs, and an economy that needs all the damn help it can get. Even so, when word got out about the sex toy products, I had to make a scene. Do you understand this?”
Connie understands it like she understood how one doctor always had to pull rank, and why even though she ran half the hospital someone else always took the credit, and why she often teetered on the edge of a very thin line that could be called insubordination, survival, or prostitution, depending on how you looked at it.
“I think so,” Jessica says doubtfully. “So we really don’t have anything to discuss and I have been freaking out for nothing and the sex toys are about ready to be shipped to New York?”
“Yes,” Justin assures her. “It’s just part of the game, Jessica. I’m sorry but I couldn’t tell you. Down here people still tap phone lines, eat without silverware, and sleep in pajamas instead of in nothing or boxers.”
“So we’re done already?”
“Not really,” Justin adds. “People know we are having this meeting. You have to hang out here for a while so they think we are arguing. So let’s take a tour of the plant, mostly so your mother can see what we do here, if she doesn’t mind, have a cup of coffee, and then we will release you.”
By the time that happens, Connie has cemented a morning date for a swamp tour with Commissioner Michael Dennis that does not include her fine, beautiful, and extremely dazed daughter, who will, instead, spend the morning in product development meetings with Justin’s design staff who have come up with an idea for a new toy that they know from personal experience and experimentation could make lots and lots of women very happy.
Three hours later, drifting back towards New Orleans, Jessica, who has been fairly speechless since they peeled out of the factory parking lot, turns to her mother and asks her if she has lost her mind.
“I thought you’d be happy that you can still make your toys, honey,” Connie replies, turning to look at Jessica, who is leaning up against the car door as if she is trying to escape.
“Mom, you are going to a swamp or bayou or whatever in the hell you call it with a man who has been married at least twice and who just tricked us into a trip here to save his own political ass,” Jessica says, accelerating her voice along with the engine. “I ask you again: Are you out of your mind?”
Connie’s throat seizes up. She can actually feel something moving up from the base of her heart and towards her mouth. It is something old. Something she has never spoken out loud before. Something she now decides could change everything and—no matter what—it’s something she has to share with her daughter. A daughter she has lost, a daughter she so wants to reclaim, a daughter who needs to know where her mother has been.
Right now.
Connie pulls off less than a mile from the freeway and parks the car at the edge of a dirt road facing a stand of tangled bushes. Jessica looks frightened but Connie lets her have it anyway. And it is nothing Jessica expects.
“You told me your story, your sexual encounter with Romney, why you have launched into this business, why you pulled away, how my seemingly rash judgments of you and your sexuality made you distant, made you leave my life,” Connie explains, at first looking right at Jessica, and then looking away as she begins her own story, a story she has never before shared with anyone. “Now it’s my turn. Can you listen to this?”
Jessica nods with the slow movement of someone who is terrified and compelled at the same time.
And Connie begins.
The man she was dating said he was ready to try.
Connie was way past ready. Nurse Connie was so far past ready that she was afraid if John McCorde simply rubbed up against her she’d experience such a great swell of sexual pleasure she could just send him home and call it a night.
It was so far past time to have a physical encounter with the man she had been dating for almost nine months that Nurse Nixon was on the verge of begging. She was ready to crawl, to cry, to assist in any way physically, medically, socially, and spiritually possible.
“Your kids would even tell you that you need to get laid,” her friend and co-worker Kim Ratton told her about 23 times. “I know you think you are from the old school, honey, but this is all about y
ou now. It’s time to get on with a bit of pleasure.”
“Pleasure?” Connie had said at first. “It’s been so damn long since I’ve had that kind of pleasure, I’ll be lucky if I know where to put everything.”
“Everything?” Kim, a saucy little redhead who apparently could co-author a sex manual, had asked her, laughing. “What do you think he’s going to bring along?”
“Jesus, Kim,” Connie had admitted while they gulped their tea during a shift changeover, “it’s been ages since I’ve been intimate with a man and I’m scared to death. You know that. I launched into babies when the rest of the women my age were out running naked on the streets, smoking dope, and sleeping with 12 men in one night.”
Kim took her hand and smiled.
“You can’t even say the word ‘sex,’ honey,” she tells Connie, her smile growing larger. “Think of what you do here, what you’ve seen, the conversations you’ve had. Your kids are teenagers and then some, for crissakes, Connie. I know you and it’s pretty damn hard for me to imagine that you’re so…virginal. That’s it, so virginal.”
Connie gasped, dropped her head and was quiet for a few seconds. Virginal, she was thinking, might exactly be the correct word to describe her. And that realization made her want to roll backwards and leap right out of the window and go hide someplace where no one would discover her deep, dark, not-so-wild sexual past.
“Kim—” Connie began, trying hard to look into her friend’s eyes, but Kim interrupted her.
“Connie, you’re not embarrassed? You’re not shy?” Kim asked, more than a little shocked that the head nurse, the wild leader of her unit, the woman who would not hesitate to slap a doctor upside the head, threaten a nurses’ walkout, who had personally tackled more than a handful of nutso patients, counseled gaggles of nurses and comforted two-plus decades of grieving relatives, patients and the professionals who could not save them was embarrassed about her not so sexually exciting past.
“Yes,” Connie admitted, softly.
The sassy, liberated, single, 31-year-old Kim, who didn’t so much date as sleep around, was obviously young enough to be Connie’s daughter and that meant, in the part of Connie’s mind that screamed “mother,” that her own three daughters could be as sexually liberated and educated as Kim. This idea floated around right next to her embarrassment, near what she now realized must seem like the hurried realities of her introverted, limited, and terribly uneducated sex life. “I’m a nurse, for crissakes,” Connie told herself. “Nurses are supposed to be physically savvy, worldly, sexually aware, a step ahead of the next societal trend, we’re supposed to know things—lots of things….”
Connie Franklin’s first kiss was a peck on the lips when she was 17.3 years old and her first and only prom date, Hank Martinelli, who almost had to stand on his toes to reach her lips, kissed her for two seconds and then ran to his car so fast he dropped his keys, banged his head on the window, fell into the seat and let his head drop onto the horn, which was not a really good thing in her neighborhood. It was a neighborhood riddled with large men who would be perfectly happy if their daughters never dated, kissed, or touched someone of the male species at 2:15 A.M.—or ever, for that matter.
A year later—just before she met husband-to-be Roger Nixon—she had what at the time she thought was a wild evening with a guy who most likely had a name but after three shots of tequila, four beers and her first taste of marijuana there was no way in hell Connie could ever remember what it might have been. Mr. Smooth Move “let’s go into the bushes,” was, from what she could remember, adept at removing a blouse, a bra, one pair of cutoff shorts, a t-shirt and finally her lovely light blue cotton underwear—that honest-to-God were stitched in pink with the word Thursday. Connie Franklin’s first total sexual encounter left her with pine needles stuck up and down her legs, bird shit in her hair, the immediate feeling that she could have handed him a tight glove and he would never have noticed the difference, and a stoned hangover that carried her from living hell to purgatory and then back to the light of the living over the course of three entire days.
Then came Roger Robert Nixon.
Connie Franklin was barely into her second semester of college when Roger walked past her on the way to a math class as part of his policeman’s training program that was associated with the city of Indianapolis and then, for some unknown reason, he stopped right in front of her, turned sideways, looked at her and declared, “God, you are gorgeous.”
That single, luscious, brilliant moment could have been as great as half the sex she ever had in her entire life. Connie felt her knees soften, her uterus shift, her breasts swell, her heart stop, drop, and roll right in front of this policeman-to-be and then her heart slowed so quickly that she felt dizzy.
Connie wanted to throw him down right there and dip her entire body inside of his blue eyes, run her hands through his Germanic blonde hair, and straddle him like a racehorse until the cops showed up. Lust. It was such pure lust and such a new sensation that Connie wondered for days if someone hadn’t slipped some kind of narcotic drug into her Coke during her English seminar break. But when she saw Roger two days later and he asked her if she felt the same way as he did and he took her to his ratty apartment on their first date, kissed her hungrily and then threw her down on his bed—which was a piece of foam rubber that he had scavenged from behind a couch factory—she confused her lust, her primal sexual urges, a woman’s right to own the lines that connect her mind to her breasts and to every single inch of skin, every blood vessel, every muscle, every cavity below her waist—for love.
And that was it.
Lust for Roger Robert Nixon.
Sort of.
There were wild nights here and there after they’d had a few bottles of wine or when one of Roger’s buddies would say something like, “I took my wife to a motel this weekend and I wish we could move into the damned place. It’s amazing what something like that will do to loosen up a woman.” And then Roger would buy flowers, pull back the covers, and quickly forget that some of the guys told him sex could actually last for hours and hours and not just minutes and minutes.
Romance, Roger, Connie wanted to say.
Seduction, Roger, Connie wanted to say.
Foreplay, Roger, Connie wanted to say.
And she would have. Connie would have said it.
Then, of course, Connie got pregnant. Connie got pregnant three times.
“And, honest to God, Kim, that was pretty much it,” she confessed in such a rush of words that Kim almost missed what she was saying. “That was it.”
“Oh, you poor baby,” Kim moaned. “That was it? Tell me you’re lying. Tell me that the woman I hold up as a goddess, a woman that I revere as the model for all liberated women who do not take shit, has never really let go in the bedroom? Tell me my entire life is not a lie. Tell me, Connie. I’m begging you. Please tell me you are not my mother, who I think had sex twice, got her kids, and then sewed something very useful shut.”
And Connie went on to explain, while the tea got cold and just outside their little hideaway they could hear the next shift grumbling about the full load of patients, that shit happens. Shit happens, Kim. Like you fall in lust, and then work your ass off to make it seem like love, and then life does not stop and large hunks of the lust break loose very quickly. You have a baby and you never want a man to frigging touch you again. You have to finish school and get your nursing degree to help support the baby and then before you can even step into your new white nylons and spongy nurse shoes, you miss a period from having sex, goddamned sex, and then you work all those months while your feet swell and your mother yells at you for not quitting your job and your husband occasionally wants to get frisky and you really want to cut off his wiener with a dull hatchet. Then you get tired, Kim. You’re a beautiful, young, liberated woman who lives in a different time and place and space than I did, even though the media makes it seem like every woman over the age of 50 screwed her brains out and knows how to ha
ve orgasms while brushing her teeth and wearing a jogging suit or simply breathing.
Not.
You get tired.
And then this thing happens where he slips over from wanting to bounce on you every 15 seconds to sleeping in the chair every single time he sits down, and you notice that his hair is falling out along the edges just a few inches from his big hairy eyebrows, and he doesn’t move as fast and he doesn’t want to play baseball any longer. He’s done. He’s done unless you say, “Let’s go fishing.” His little pee-pee has reached its peak and those three greatest peaks are now entrenched in grade school and middle school, Girl Scouts, soccer, band practice, basketball, dance classes, and birthday parties for every goddamned kid this side of the Mississippi and you do not have time to go to the bathroom let alone think of ways to have a grand romp in the hay—or the bedroom or any room at all.
And then you pick up a Seventeen magazine or God help you, Cosmo, or something your daughter leaves under her stack of unwashed clothes, and you see that your own sexual peak could be years away and that you are supposed to be luring men into your stylish boudoir and making love as if there is an aphrodisiac hooked to your stretched-out brassiere.
Sometimes though, Kim, you actually do feel sexy. Just for a second or two, or maybe even an entire minute, when you look into the mirror and you see your grandma’s beautiful fine skin that will wrinkle only about 15 seconds before you die. You see that your lovely breasts that were small in high school have now filled out and will most likely never descend more than a few centimeters, you are a nurse who never sits down and there is not an inch of fat on your thighs, and when you touch your own breasts you close your eyes and wonder what it would be like to have someone else touch them in every damn way they can. Someone who is not the man snoring on the chair.
“But,” Kim interrupted. “There is so much stuff—books and toys and movies…. You didn’t do anything?”