by Kris Radish
Connie sets down her drink and leans towards Saffine. Saffine has her legs crossed and is bobbing the top foot up and down so fast somebody will get hurt if she moves it wrong.
“Concentrate, honey,” Saffine urges. “Let your mind race forward a bit and brush your hands across the cards.”
Jessica turns to look at her mother and she too is suddenly wondering if she could ever have dreamed of this moment. Half drunk before 6 P.M. in the middle of the week. Watching her mother sell Diva products to her customers. Discussing the intricacies of her latent sex life with the woman who used to ground her for banging the old motorcycle against the garbage cans along the side of the garage.
Jessica wants to laugh at the sudden absurdity of her world. She wants to throw herself down on the tiny card table, right on top of the soiled doilies and the Kmart candles and the vividly colored cards, but Saffine turns abruptly and begins shouting at a man who is perched behind her and has leaned over to touch the back of Saffine’s chair.
“Goddamn it!” Saffine snarls, totally disrupting the cosmic flow of her reading. “I told you to stay away from here and not to touch anything! Get the fuck out of here!”
When she finishes she turns back to Connie and Jessica as if nothing has happened and starts fingering the cards, totally oblivious to her bizarre behavior. Connie grabs Jessica’s hand, squeezes it at the same moment Jessica gently kicks her leg under the table. Connie thinks Saffine couldn’t get a good reading if she had a cell phone connection to the future but says, “That’s okay, honey” so Saffine won’t think they are offended by her Tourette’s syndrome–like behavior.
“People hate me,” Saffine declares, launching into her own story instead of getting on with the card-reading. “It’s not my fault I have this gift. People get jealous because everyone wants to come to me.”
If Connie or Jessica were impolite, either one of them would have leaned forward, grabbed back the $30 they had given Saffine that was still sitting on the edge of the table, and said, “What the hell?” But neither one of them wants to miss this moment.
“It just came to me, whoosh, like that,” Saffine explains, waving her hand in the air flamboyantly. “My friend Reg was reading me and then all these images and people came into my head and I just knew I had it and that was that.”
“Wow,” Boom-Boom responds with one elbow on the table, imagining what it would be like to live in Saffine’s world. “So now what? What’s up with the sex-change?”
“Oh, honey,” Saffine says while she continues to shuffle the cards and cocks her head sideways to make certain the bad man won’t intrude again on her territory. “My life could be a book. I’ll get to that someday.”
Then, while Connie and Jessica sit back, cross their own legs and let the moment happen, Saffine tells them her life story. Her mama raped her. Her daddy raped her and she fled to the streets of Atlanta to sell herself to the highest bidder. Lost her soul for years to the slavery of drug abuse, lived until recently with a male lover who was helping to pay for the beginnings of the sex-change operation.
“Want to see my titties?” Saffine asks.
Even for nurse Nixon, this is a new one. Without turning to look at Jessica, who has not moved since the beginning of Saffine’s horrific story, Connie says, “Oh, please, that would be nice.”
Saffine lifts her shirt and exposes a very tiny but lovely right breast. It’s as if Saffine has just launched into puberty and has budded out before the final hormone rush that will make her breasts swell and turn into glorious mounds of female flesh.
“They are quite nice,” Jessica manages to say. “When will you be able to finish?”
“Well, I’m working my tush off doing these readings and saving like crazy and as you can tell I surely don’t eat much and sometimes I just live on the street, so I’m hoping soon, sweetie, really soon.”
Oh, baby, Connie thinks. If ever a man was born to be a woman, it is Saffine with her blonde curls and blue eyes and the gestures and heart of someone who has tangoed this far in time on a tiny male shoestring.
And then, finally then, Saffine looks down at the cards and launches into her rendition of the futures of Connie Franklin Nixon and Jessica Franklin Nixon.
“Do you have a control issue?” she asks Connie. “Just let it go, honey. Let it go.”
“And you,” she continues, looking at Jessica. “Honey, you need some lovin’. You really need some lovin’. Can you do it?”
The women are momentarily impressed and then the bad man comes back, lurking in the background, Saffine launches back into her “fuck you” routine, her little rainbow flag dips towards the table and the two women rise and leave Saffine for her next unsuspecting customers.
“Holy shit,” Connie says as they lurch away from their fortune-teller. “Wasn’t that something?”
“Jesus, Mother, think about her life. Do you think there’s any joy in where she’s headed? What she has to do to get there?”
“Here and there, baby,” Connie says, grabbing her daughter’s hand. “Just like our lives—here and there, but don’t you think it could be more here than there?”
The Nixon women wander up one street and down another, stopping once at a tiny hole-in-the-wall to get another drink lest they lose their perpetual New Orleans buzz, and then they follow the sound of music until they come to a street where a small group of men are playing a banjo, a guitar and a trumpet. They sit and listen and fall into the rhythm of a city that feeds itself on the soul of life—music, love, fun, the wild connections to the heart of life the way it was meant to be lived.
Connie turns after a while to Jessica and says with a slight, rum-laced slur, “Do you know this was on my list and it just dawned on me.”
“What list?”
Connie wonders if she would tell this story to her daughter if they were both not tipsy and hundreds of miles from their real life. She knows, even with the rum cascading through her veins, that she would never have told her this in her kitchen in Indiana, from a phone in the back bedroom, during a conversation when Jessica flew home for a 20-minute visit. But now, in the street with their feet dangling in the gutter, men playing songs from their souls, the heat of the late spring night wrapping itself around them, and the knowledge that she and Jessica have finally passed through some unseen barrier, she tells her daughter, her oldest baby, the woman who is now Boom-Boom, about the list. The list of dreams.
And Jessica cries.
“Oh, Mom, I never knew. I never thought about you giving up your dreams for us, and I so fought against so many things that you did and were,” Jessica tells her. “I feel like such an ass.”
“Oh, honey, it’s nothing to feel bad about,” Connie answers. “After all, I didn’t know about your dreams, about the passion you’re trying to find. It’s what happens but, really, it should never have happened.”
Jessica falls into her mother’s arms and feels something as familiar as her own breath when Connie wraps her arms around her and touches her hair the very same way she touched her hair all those years ago when she was a baby, a child, and when she occasionally allowed her mother to touch her as a teenager. She smells her mother’s smell—rich and warm, like the sweet smell of a Cyprus summer—and then she asks her mother to forgive her for wandering away without leaving an address, for losing touch.
“Listen, Jessica, it’s what we do,” Connie tells her. “You need your own life and place and space and it took this time for us to weave our way through our own shit, through worlds of hunger and schedules and finding the right trail which, you know now, is a trail that shifts and changes and here we are now, baby. Let’s hang on to this.”
And they do hang on. They hang on as they visit a voodoo temple and sip pungent red wine with a priestess who launches off on some tangent about women and their periods and the cycle of life. They hang on as they put dollar bills on her temple altars and giggle on their way out the door and then walk back up to the infamous Bourbon Street that is as aw
ake at 1 A.M. as it is at 10 in the morning. They both look up at the same moment and see men and women dangling beads the colors of a rainbow from a balcony.
“Jesus, Mom, should we?”
“Honey, both of us have put way too many things on hold and I for one refuse to live like that any more. Yes, we should.”
And they do. Connie raises her shirt, stretching out her favorite bra, exposing her very fine and still-firm breasts as a waterfall of beads drops onto her head and then Jessica follows suit—not for as long, but she does it—and then the two women dress themselves in the beads and walk hand in hand back to their hotel. Connie thinks that she has not felt this happy in a very long time and Jessica thinks, I did it, oh, my God, I did it!
And the world does not stop but it does tilt for just a second as the Nixon babes swagger into the lobby, Connie reaches over to pinch the ass of the stunned doorman, and they laugh themselves into bed for a measly five hours of sleep.
37. Make certain the list changes. Give yourself that option. Keep some. Throw some away.
Kinsey Barnes has his hands on his favorite wide leather belt, which is holding up his straight-leg black jeans. Kinsey’s head is bent towards the floor, his feet are pointed at the lovely display case that is cradling beautiful boxes of scented, flavored, and colored condoms, and he feels deflated, depressed, lied to, totally out of his league, the entire ballpark, and male humankind altogether.
“Meredith, honey,” he whispers just loud enough so his co-worker can hear him. “I feel as if my half of humanity has done a huge disservice to the other half.”
“What is it, sweetheart?” Meredith asks as she slings a box of vibrators onto her sturdy shoulder. “Did you see an old girlfriend in the store?”
“I could have. The planet is probably littered with unhappy women who have known me,” he responds glumly. “I’m just stunned.”
Meredith and Kinsey are opening the store alone on Monday morning. Their boss Jessica is giving them time to settle in, to see if they can do it, to tie or untie themselves with the Diva ropes. She’s a phone call away and it’s minutes before opening after a wild weekend of record sales, baptism by sex-toy fire, and a promise from Geneva that she will never ever again be as bitchy as she was Sunday afternoon.
“I hate this shit,” Geneva groused as she’d locked the door 30 minutes late, totally exhausted and overwhelmed by the apparent success of a weekend without Jessica bossing them around. “Customer service is not my bag. Jessica better get her ass back here and, as for you two—I’m buying you both dinner and drinks after this kick-ass day.”
Dinner and three pitchers of beer did nothing to calm Kinsey, who had fancied himself a sexually alert and astute male. A man who knew women. A guy who could listen. A big boy in the bedroom. But nothing had prepared him for the parade of women who came into Diva’s with tears in their eyes and a longing in their loins that astounded him.
“After all the discussion last night I have to tell you that I’m, like, numb about the numbers of sexually dissatisfied women in New York,” he tells Meredith as she turns to face him on Monday morning. “New York is a hip city and I feel terrible for women everywhere who still think sex is something everyone else has or does.”
“Baby,” Meredith says, walking to him with her arms open. “I’ve been doing my part for years but it’s places like Diva’s that can really create a groundswell.”
“I keep thinking about all the women I know,” he confesses. “I want to run through the city with a dildo in my hand like the Pied Piper and say something like, ‘Come with me and you will come.’”
“You should feel good about what you’re doing here,” Meredith consoles him. She’s trying not to laugh. “It’s apparently not just a job to you but a life’s mission now. Be proud, son.”
Kinsey pushes her away and laughs, but also tells her that he’s serious. He’s serious, he says, every single time a woman comes in and peeks at him from behind a stack of vibrators and then shyly comes forward to ask him a question. He’s serious, he tells Meredith, when he overhears a woman old enough to be his own mother confess to him or Geneva that she’s never had an orgasm. He’s serious, he says, when he thinks about all the women in the world, and yes, even those three sensitive men, who were around before toy stores like Diva’s were open and when sex was something the bad girls did and only boys liked.
“Welcome to the real world, cutie-pie,” Meredith applauds, punching him in the arm. “It’s no different in the lesbian world that I inhabit. You’d think that particular group of women would be free and would have this sex thing down to a fine artful science, but I’m here to tell you even women who love women need a little help and, well, some of them need a lot of help.”
Kinsey groans, “Oh, no, they were my last hope,” and then the day starts, as they have already taken to joking, “with a bang.” The phone rings precisely at 11 A.M. and both Kinsey and Meredith mouth, It’s Jessica, before Meredith picks up the phone and then smiles as she, silently, says yes and the first customer not so much walks as sneaks into the store.
It’s a woman. She’s not smiling. She looks frightened and this is the part that Kinsey does not have down yet. This is when he looks up, thinks about his mother having sex with her second husband, or her first husband, or one of the boyfriends in between and he goes temporarily blind, deaf and especially dumb. This customer looks like she’s in her mid to late 50s and she is as white as the drapes flowing behind the checkout counter. He looks towards Meredith but she’s on the phone and busy writing. He looks at his feet and they are not moving. He shakes his head, desperately tries to slip into his actor mode, and walks towards the woman.
She takes one look at Kinsey and sees her son. She sees his pressed jeans and his fine belt and the way his hair moves in circles and waves and she imagines he tossed it like a salad, just like her son does, before he came in to work, moments before he knew he was going to sell sex toys to someone who looks like his sweet grandmother or mother.
“Can I help you?” Kinsey whimpers.
“Just browsing,” the nice customer manages to say.
“Well, if you need any help just ask, okay?”
“Sure,” she nods as she angles towards the edge of the store. “I’ll do that.” Just as soon as an elephant flies out of my rear end, she also says to herself.
Like hell, Kinsey thinks at the same moment. She’d rather walk a frigid line right back where she came from and that’s what he tells Meredith who is busy making a nice, anal list of everything she has to do before Queen Jessica gets to the store.
“I can’t talk to some of these customers,” he seethes as quietly as possible through his teeth, his lips barely moving as he leans across the counter. “Women like that don’t want to talk to some jackass kid who could be their son, and you, my dear, look like a punk rocker. She’s not going to ask us how to stick a G-spot vibrator up her vagina.”
“You did okay yesterday.”
“I was behind the cash register most of the day, remember?”
“The guys like you.”
“Most of our customers are women. The guys like me because I look like I’m gay, for crissakes. I’m an actor. I have to look like I’m gay.”
Meredith looks up. She sees the woman dodging in between aisles, holding a package up to her face, and she decides that Mr. Kinsey might be on to something.
“What are you thinking?”
“It’s too soon for me to retire. I like this place, even that ramy, hyper, slave-driving Jessica. But, well, remember when Jessica’s mom was in here shuffling around last Friday, offering coffee, selling everything from whips to lubricant?”
Meredith remembers. Connie was like an older-chick magnet. Even the younger women were not hesitant to ask her questions. Connie looked pained half the afternoon but she managed to get the questions answered even as she admitted she’d never used, held, or discussed sex toys in her entire life—not even when she helped remove some of them from vari
ous parts of bodies in the emergency room during her nursing career.
“Well, isn’t she, like, a retired nurse or something who has a new job?” Meredith asks.
“Something like that,” Kinsey says. “But doesn’t it make sense to have someone like her passing out cookies and coffee while she helps them regulate vibrators and try on red leather harnesses?”
Before she can respond, they hear the door chime ring as the woman who kick-started the day slips out of the door without saying another word, asking a question, or spending one thin dime.
“Shit,” Meredith yells. “I think you may be on to something, Kinsey.”
“We need a grandma in here selling dildos and stuff,” he says, grabbing onto his belt and hoisting it as if he just discovered gold and he doesn’t want to get his pant legs wet in the Sacramento River. “Think of a way to lure Connie into the store today and we’ll give her a crash course in sex toys when Jessica goes to her meeting with Geneva this afternoon.”
“I’m on it, baby,” Meredith promises as she grabs the phone. “Go stack some batteries like a good boy. Grandma is coming for a visit.”
Connie Franklin Nixon is staring at a dozen long-stem red roses. She wants O’Brien to show up and slap her across both cheeks so she’ll know that she’s alive and back in Jessica’s apartment in New York City and not floating in some Nirvana-like place that’s shadowy and sultry like a fabulous dream.
“Mother, what the hell?” Jessica barked when the doorman brought up the flowers. “Did you sleep with this guy or just kiss him?”
“I should slap you upside the head, missy,” Connie snorts. “I happen to be a really good kisser.”
“Did you slip him your tongue?”
“Hey, that’s none of your business. Do you want me to wash out your mouth with soap?”
“There’s my answer. Mother, you little slut.”
“A slut would have thrown Burt Reynolds down in the swamp, Ms. Know-It-All. It was just a kiss. An extremely nice kiss and then several more along the way home, and in the parking lot…”