by Kris Radish
“Stop!” Jessica yelled. “That is just too much information. I have to get out of here. Come by or call or whatever. Just sit here and smell the damn flowers all day. I’m gone.”
Still exhausted from New Orleans, her emotional roller coaster with Jessica, the flight to New York, the newfound notion of romance and the distant thought that she should probably get back to Cyprus, Connie throws herself on the bed and immediately falls into a rose-scented sleep; within minutes, she has dreamed herself into someplace very cold. When she glances down she is standing on two huge and fast-melting sheets of ice. “Large ice cubes,” she thinks, watching as they melt. Connie jumps to another set of ice cubes, watches these, too, melt, and then leaps to another pair. “What the hell,” she shouts, laughing at the endless game, the endless sea of ice, the endless maneuvering to get from cube to cube.
Twenty minutes later her cell phone rings and jolts her from her perfumed dream of ice.
“Hey, Connie, it’s Meredith. From Diva’s. How was New Orleans?”
Connie shudders, feeling chilled from her dream, which lingers at the edge of her mind.
“Wonderful. The dildos are on the way.”
“That’s funny. Remember before this sex-toy world how kids used to call each other dildo in, like, junior high school? Now, the real dildos are on the way. Hey, are you coming in today?”
Connie hesitates. In, she thinks, as in to work. Into the store. Into the wild blue yonder. Into more seconds, minutes and hours of her daughter’s life. Into trouble and onto another iceberg
“I’m not on the schedule today, am I?” she asks, stalling.
“Nope. But it’s helpful when you’re here and I’m guessing Jessica didn’t bother to get the damn coffeepot.”
“Well, I’m going to try and get a flight back home,” Connie finally says. “I really didn’t plan on coming into Diva’s at all today, sweetheart. I’m betting the place won’t close down if I’m not there.”
“You might lose that bet,” Meredith warns darkly. “Didn’t you like working here?”
Something is going on. Connie can feel a swinging door moving just slowly enough for her to peek into a hidden room. Yes, she can admit to herself, I liked being at the store. It was fun and new and embarrassing as hell, but working at a sex-toy store is not a number on the list.
“Meredith, I have this whole life going on someplace else and I need to get cranking on that,” she answers slowly. “I think you are in pretty good hands with my daughter—even if she is a little uptight. Take out one of those whips.”
Meredith is struggling. She’s an inch from desperate.
“Listen,” she finally says, going in for the motherhood kill, the stretch of words that will induce Connie into guilt. “I want to talk to you. Really. Can’t you just come in for a while? I’ll take a break about 1:30. Can you please come in then?”
Connie bites the hook and then swallows it. Meredith might look as if she’s on break from the flying circus with her loopy and wild clothes, but she’s smart, tough, fun, and maybe she needs a wise ear. Maybe that’s just it and not some kind of trap that will keep her locked up in a pair of those studded wrist cuffs for the next year or two.
“Okay, I’ll try,” Connie says, surrendering. “I’ll bring the coffee.”
“Sure,” Connie thinks. “What the hell. It will only take me 15 minutes to get a seat on the next plane back to Chicago. What’s another two hours of smelling the roses? I can clean the apartment for the 12th time, go down to the corner grocery store and flirt and then go have coffee with the kids at the sex-toy store. Then maybe a stroll before an early dinner, say good-bye to Mattie, who created a Diva and a Burt Reynolds magnet with the new hair, and then back to my life. My real life. Not this blip on the radar screen that manifested itself because of a box of papers I found in my garage. Gezus. What was I thinking? What the hell, Nixon? Get a grip. Get out the list. Go sit in a chair and take a good hard look at it lest you lose your way—again.
That was it, then. A short plan. A map with a clear path back home, to her real home, where she could get on with the business of moving forward on her predetermined journey towards the new job, the condo, and maybe the painting class—sedate #24—when she recovered from New York, New Orleans, and every other frigging new thing that had invaded her life since she’d had the bright idea to clean out the garage. Connie decides that she needs to pause more often and write on her slips, so that she can reach down and run her hand across her pocket every time she gets an offer that seems too good to refuse. She decides she needs to stay grounded to the list, to its numbers, to all those years of writing and planning and moving forward to this time, this time of the Sunday list.
Then there is just time for a hasty and gracious whiff of sweet roses as Connie buries her face directly inside the middle of the bouquet and puts her hands around the vase, transporting herself back to the bayou where the scent of the rich, damp land makes her wonder what it might have been like to make love to Burt, the commissioner, in his world of luscious and totally intoxicating sensuality. The mere idea that #14—the “Maybe Sex” number—could actually become a reality makes her think about it.
She closes her eyes and wonders for a few delicious moments. Closes them and drifts to the edge of the water where Michael has pulled the boat over near a nest of ferns. Keeps her eyes closed and her nose on the roses as he takes her hand and she turns without waiting to kiss him, to take charge just a little bit, to let him know that it is not all about him. Connie’s mind goes red with passion then as Michael takes her down a path with no markings, no worn footmarks, nothing to guide him but his own feelings. When they turn past the stand of cypress trees they are in a forest of ferns and he grabs her there, right there, and gently pushes her down under a tree that he whispers will now stand guard over them while he makes love to her.
Connie sits down and does not take her hands off of the flowers while she falls into her imagined tryst. Michael kisses her neck and runs his fingers up the back of her head and then she pushes him over, straddling him around his waist and she starts to unbutton his shirt while he moves his hands across her back, down the sides of her rear end, and back onto her shoulders. Connie spreads open his shirt and slides her hands across his chest, breathing hard, as her fingers move to his belt buckle and she holds her breath.
And then the damn phone rings.
“Shit!” she shouts out loud, fairly breathless and just a bit pissed off.
It is Kinsey, also begging her to come in at 1:30. Not sooner or later but right about then. Could these two be any more suspicious? I’m coming, Connie tells him. God, she thinks, I was just about to have sex, which is so far down on the list it seems to have disappeared. The list. The list she is ignoring by going into Diva’s.
Connie takes a breath, turns to look out the window, and clears her head of the rose residue, the icebergs, her sinful falling away from the list, and then her cell phone rings.
“What the hell?”
It is Sabrina. Daughter number two. The perfect wife and mother almost catching her own mother having make-believe sex as she smells roses before she heads off to sell sexual devices to whoever wants them. Connie shakes her head, touches her own hand in her Nurse Nixon way to steady herself, and tries to sound calm.
“Hi, baby,” Connie says without the slightest hint of panic in her voice. “How is everyone?”
But Sabrina wants to know about Connie.
The conversation races at first. New Orleans. New York City. The store. Questions about her response to Jessica’s job, Sabrina’s acceptance of it as a business decision, and a surprising discussion about female sexuality. Connie bites a hole in her tongue, and then wonders why she does it, as Sabrina launches on about kids and a neighborhood meeting, and then the real reason for the phone call.
“Mom, do you think you’ll be home by next weekend?”
“I should be home tomorrow, as soon as I get online and get a seat on an airplane headed
west.”
“Well, we were wondering if you could baby-sit for a couple of days. Maybe just for the weekend, like Friday through Sunday. What do you think?”
Think? Connie thinks she wants to rip Burt’s pants off his sweet solid ass and then ride him until the swamp sunset cascades like a waterfall across her face. Think? Connie thinks she should never have left New Orleans and she sure as hell thinks she probably, most likely, sort of made the right decision by leaving Cyprus, Indiana. Connie thinks, in the seconds it takes her mind to check back to where she can have a normal conversation, that she’d love to be drinking champagne or some really great dry white wine out of a golden slipper in Commissioner Michael Dennis’s bedroom.
But that’s not what she tells her daughter.
“Sure. I can babysit for you.”
“Oh, thank God,” Sabrina says. “I asked Macy but she’s sick as a dog these early days of her pregnancy and it’s just easier for me to get the kids to your house, unless you want to watch them at our house….” Sabrina says, a sort of question.
Connie is not sure she can even remember where she lives. Does she own a house? What is her last name? How many grandchildren does she have? Will she drive to Chicago or have the children driven to wherever in the hell she lives? Is this woman really her daughter? And the roses…where did they come from?
“Yes,” Connie says, four times in a row. “Yes, and yes, and yes again.” They say good-bye and hang up.
And then, before she can get up to use the bathroom, turn in a circle, or rearrange her thoughts, the cell phone rings yet again.
Shit. Damn it. What the hell?
“WHAT?” she yells into the phone without waiting for an answer. “WHAT THE HELL IS IT NOW?”
It’s O’Brien. O’Brien laughing at the rich sound of her friend, the irritating bob of the words, the way Nurse Nixon does not even try to be friendly.
“Jesus, baby, has New York got your underwear all balled up or what?”
“My underwear is wet,” Connie says, fast. “I’m horny as a teenager, kissed a stranger, the kids want me to come down to the sex toy store, my daughter has become my friend, sort of, Sabrina wants me to baby-sit, and I suddenly cannot remember my last name or how I even came to be in this city in the first place.”
O’Brien drops the phone, laughing. Nurse Nixon hears the phone hit something and then crackle, and then she hears what sounds like her best friend in the world coughing.
“Honey,” O’Brien wheezes when she retrieves the phone, “have you come undone?”
“No. But I want to really, really bad.”
And Connie tells O’Brien everything. The kiss, the date, the dinner, the roses, even details of her make-believe lovemaking session that had been interrupted by the damn phone call from daughter number two.
“Why in the hell would you come home?” O’Brien asks, seriously.
“What do you mean?”
“Think about it, you jackass. Look where you are, what you have just done, who you have met and kissed. Listen to me…are you totally crazy? Are you that far off the list?”
Maybe, Connie tells herself, maybe I am crazy or I would not be here. Maybe I should just call back home and have someone blow up the rest of the junk in the garage. Maybe I need to lie down for a week. Maybe I should not lie down because something sinful might happen. Maybe I suddenly have no idea about anything. Maybe I need to sit down and look at the list again.
“Are you there?” O’Brien asks. “Baby, I’m worried.”
“Worried,” Connie says. “Think of how I feel. Think about this wild, roller-coaster turn of events in my life and the last conversation we had when the house was talking and the discovery of my daughter becoming the queen of the sex toy world. Think about Burt Reynolds putting his tongue down my throat and me wanting to rip his pants off and these kids from the store calling me with mysterious questions and demands and my God, O’Brien, I don’t even look the same.”
“So what?” O’Brien tells her. “You big crybaby.”
“I’m not a baby.”
“So smell the flowers, then take a big, deep breath.”
Connie takes a breath. She takes a breath while O’Brien briefs her on the past weekend which included two checks on her house, one call from the real estate agent, a frozen pizza, two emergency admissions to the psych unit—both women—a son who called to tell her by the way he was going to Egypt for Christmas, and a huge sale on chicken cutlets at Connie’s favorite grocery store.
“See what you’re missing, baby? See what you’d be racing home to?”
“Shit.”
“Yes, shit covers it nicely.”
And that’s what Connie thinks about after she hangs up and fishes for airline flights anyway, puts one of them on hold until midnight, takes a shower with the bathroom door wide open, leaves a thank-you message on Burt’s answering machine and then takes a right turn outside of her daughter’s apartment building so she can pick up more coffee on the way to meet the kids at Diva’s, where she knows she will definitely run into more shit.
Halfway to Diva’s it finally hits her: this is the first time she has left the apartment, made a move, taken a turn in many days without first writing down a number from her beloved list and putting it in her pocket.
She stops. Takes a breath. Remembers bold-sounding #37 from her list. The number of change. The number of options. The number, so it seems, that would lead her towards all things made of chance. “Make certain the list changes. Give yourself that option. Keep some. Throw some away.”
Spring in New York rises from every crack and corner and seems to leap from the amazingly blue sky. The air is warm, light, fresh, and Connie realizes, standing still in the midst of a place that never stands still, that she is no longer afraid of getting lost, of bumping into a criminal, of losing her wallet, or of meeting someone who might want to whisk her away to a side street café for a lingering lunch, a proposition of chance, a moment to just…pause.
Connie looks behind her. She hesitates only a second before looking at her watch and then she bravely moves forward and, as she walks, she makes believe she is tossing all the numbers on her list into the air so that they can blend together into something that would make #37 very, very happy.
1. Stop being afraid.
26. Mix up your friends. Do this with intention. Younger, older, whatever. Not just the ones who are convenient.
Connie misses Jessica by less than two minutes, which makes Meredith and Kinsey almost wet their pants.
“Holy crap,” Kinsey whines to Meredith when Jessica lingers to restack a display. “If they run into each other, we are dead. Jessica will kill us, fire us, and I’ll have to go and beg to get my last job back.”
“Maybe she’d be fine with it,” Meredith replies. “They just got back from New Orleans and they’re still speaking to each other and no one is dead yet.”
“Think about it,” Kinsey hisses, as Jessica answers a customer call. “Would you want to be selling dildos with your mommy?”
“Honey, my mommy bought me my first dildo.”
“You don’t count. You skew the study I’m doing. You are not normal.”
“Well,” Meredith shoots back, as Jessica pauses at the door and frowns at both of them, like she’s sure the store’s going to burn down if she does leave it, “I happen to think I am normal and everyone else who does not embrace their sexuality and who did not have a generous and open mother like mine is not normal.”
Ten minutes later, when Jessica has finally left and Connie breezes in with her coffee and muffins, she catches the kids still arguing. She sets down her treats and orders them to stop it or she will send each of them to their rooms.
“Where’s Jessica?” she asks.
“A meeting.”
“You knew this,” Connie tells Meredith.
“Yes.”
“You wanted me to come when she wasn’t here? Why? Are you going to quit? Steal toys? Tell me a secret, as if there a
re any secrets left.”
Connie looks at Meredith and Kinsey standing silently and not answering her questions and she can only imagine what must have gone on before she arrived. Some magical conspiracy by a couple of 20-something New Yorkers who would probably get lost in Indiana if they didn’t go crazy 30 minutes after landing there. Meredith, who always looks as if she left the house in a hurry—long earrings in one ear, short in the other, just like her wild hair which also seems short on one side and long on the other—but a woman who struts and saunters as if the world is waiting for her arrival. And Mr. Potential Movie Star, Kinsey Barnes, who is so in touch with his feminine self Connie would like a peek under his very tight zipper. Kids. Powerful, wonderful kids who could probably teach her a thing or two about not only sex toys but about their world as well. They are lovely and wild and kind and, sweet Jesus, she thinks suddenly, they could be #26.
“Can we have coffee first?” Kinsey asks her. “And maybe, Meredith, maybe you should just talk to Connie while I handle the customers for a bit.”
Connie is suddenly reminded of a discussion that was almost exactly like this. A conversation that took place years ago, when middle daughter Macy came home, quietly asked for a private meeting in her bedroom, and then wanted to know if Connie would take her to the clinic or Planned Parenthood or someplace so she could get birth control.
Connie had tried to act cool. Connie had tried to act as if a conversation with her 18-year-old daughter concerning the staggering news that the latter was ready to have sexual intercourse, sex, SEX, was an everyday and totally acceptable occurrence.
“I’m ready, Mom, and Ryan and I discussed this, and we decided to just be up front about it and so I’m asking you for help,” Macy said, moving her fingers back and forth so fast Connie wondered if her daughter was about to levitate.
A deep breath filled Connie’s lungs before she spoke and, when she did, it was very slowly, lest she fall off the edge of Macy’s bed, vomit, or call 911.
“This is a wise decision,” Connie told her daughter. “Are you sure you’re ready, honey? This is a pretty big step.”