The Sunday List of Dreams

by Kris Radish

  “No shit,” Meredith laughs from behind her own coffee cup. “There’s no turning back now.”

  No turning back.

  Connie wrestles with this idea as she stretches her legs and realizes that in just a few hours they could pull up to her Indiana house, toss the sex toys into her garage, fire up the grill, pop open some dry white wine, and call it a day—or a week and a half.

  O’Brien, of course, has not only encouraged this fascinating cross-country adventure but has run interference for Connie with her daughters, who Connie assumes may be wondering if their mother has lost her mind. “She’s having fun and cannot tend the grandbabies,” O’Brien told them, trying to get them to grasp the notion of a grandma peddling implements of sexual satisfaction at a women’s festival. “After raising the three of you, don’t you think it’s just dandy if your mother has a little adventure, tries something new, kisses a few boys, and drives off into the sunset for a while?”

  O’Brien had tried hard to stay with Connie’s new life direction when Connie called to fill her in on the latest installment of the Nurse Nixon Story, which was unfolding daily in what was starting to seem like a comic parade of chance, change, and a flaming middle-aged crisis. Connie told her everything, from her sex-toy training session to the notion that she had been newly ordained to save as many sexually repressed women as possible and, try as she might, O’Brien actually could not discourage her friend.

  “What do you have to lose?” O’Brien said, after hearing how Jessica never batted an eye when she heard about everyone’s new plans for her mother. Jessica was just not totally prepared for this cross-country trip, not to mention the business at the store, the pending arrival of the new products, the final planning for the big launch party and the list of business-related activities so long that it was about to make her go blind. She had planned but not quite enough and, to Jessica, her mother was suddenly like an unexpected Christmas bonus.

  “Mom,” Jessica had confessed, when Meredith and Kinsey and Mattie told her their plans, “I need you and not just to fill a spot at the store but a spot in my life as well. I love you, Mom.”

  Connie never imagined it like this. She never imagined it would slide into a gorgeous embrace, a wall that seemed to collapse with the weight of the words, “I love you,” and with the unexpected acknowledgment of mistakes made, forgiveness accepted, lost time to be made up, and a wild and joyful horizon of possibilities to be explored.

  “I love you too, Jessica,” Connie told her daughter. “That has never changed, it will never change. But this work thing—you and me, and me working for you. Is it maybe too much?”

  “Yes and no,” Jessica answered honestly. “From a business standpoint it’s perfect. But from a ‘Can I really work with my mother?’ standpoint, I have no clue…. But let’s try. Do the trip, Mom. See what happens. Let’s do this one day at a time.”

  That “one day” philosophy is what Connie thought about when she sat in Jessica’s bathroom as she packed for the trip and wrestled with her list, wrestled with the notion of the flashing #37. And then she realized that what she was doing, where she was going, and what might happen were all part of the dream list anyway. Connie convinced herself, as she wrote down numbers on her slips of paper for her camping pants’ pocket, that she had not veered too far off the list after all and that maybe, well sort of maybe, it was all going to be just fine. “I won’t lose anything,” she whispered out loud, hoping the sound of her own voice would make her believe.

  And O’Brien thought about losing Nurse Nixon herself. She thought about how she already hated driving over to Connie’s house and knowing that she would not be there. She hated the empty kitchen, the quiet, untalking walls, the way Connie’s newspapers landed against the side of the front door and then fell into the bushes as if they had totally surrendered and abandoned the house.

  “What if you never come home?” Frannie asked her.

  “How could that be possible?”

  “Jesus, baby, look at where you’re going. Anything is possible. You should know that now more than ever. You are headed to a wild music festival to sell sex toys with a couple of kids. Did you even suspect that was possible a week ago?”

  “Hell, no.”

  “Well, then, maybe you will never come home.”

  “Maybe anything is possible,” Connie admitted as she watched the New York traffic from the window of Jessica’s apartment. “Maybe I was guilty of getting so caught up in a plan I thought I had to follow that I almost missed something. A whole bunch of somethings.”

  O’Brien knows she is right and she tells her that, as well as the truth that she misses her. Misses her like crazy.

  “Oh, shoot, Nixon, you’d be out of your mind worse than you are already not to go to Michigan, not to see what it’s like to sexually turn on women you may never see again the rest of your life but who will always remember the way you looked at them when you handed them a sex toy,” O’Brien said, relenting in her own selfish desire to get her pal back in town. “So just tell me what you need and I’ll send out your stuff right away.”

  And Frannie mailed everything, from a pair of long underwear in case the Michigan weather turned ugly, to Connie’s camping clothes, a cookstove, and her hiking boots. And then Connie had to bravely call Sabrina and tell her daughter that she would not be able to baby-sit during the coming weekend because she would be en route to one of the largest women’s music festivals ever held in the United States of America.

  “You’re going to the Lakeside Women’s Festival?” Sabrina asked in a tone of voice that was not even close to being soft and quiet.

  “Yes, I am.”

  And the conversation went downhill from there, until Connie made up an excuse to hang up, told Sabrina to call Jessica if she had any questions, and promised to send the kids something from the trip.

  Then Burt Reynolds called, yelped like a puppy when he heard about the road trip, and asked innocently if he could somehow manage to meet her at a wayside, or maybe in her tent. Connie was flattered but filled him in quickly with the facts of a festival that surely did not disdain men but disallowed them from joining in on the women-only adventure. It’s just for females, she told him. It’s an oasis of safe, woman-driven openness. It’s apparently a place bordered by a private lake where an entire community is erected every June. It’s a self-contained, volunteer-orchestrated womb of life. A female Nirvana with music, camping, food, demonstrations and more laughter and fun than some women experience the rest of the year. It’s a terrific spot for Diva’s to set up shop for a week with a captive, sexually deprived, under-stimulated, ready-to-feel-good, all-woman audience.

  And driving through a very long and heavy rainstorm with baby Sara, teenager Meredith, and the constant whistling of highway wind through the back window that never quite shuts, Connie Franklin Nixon—nurse extraordinaire, mother to three would-be goddesses, kisser of Burt Reynolds, follower of her list of dreams—rides out this portion of the sort-of-welcome storm of her life with as much abandon as she can muster for a woman who thought she would be home packing boxes, picking out a new couch and worrying about osteoporosis.

  And as she drives she holds on to the slips she keeps dragging out of her pocket as if they are the only things keeping her from jumping out the window and running back the way she has just come.

  The drive to female Nirvana takes two days and requires a one-night stay along the Interstate near Toledo. The kids—especially Sara who has just turned 22 and wants to see the inside of as many bars as possible before she gets back to her New York apartment—suggest a night out, but Connie cracks the for-real whip she’s taken to carrying with her—pink and black with a deep red handle—and makes them work out a plan for setting up camp, the mobile Diva station, and a schedule for the week-long festival. She promises both her charges time off for fun and thinks, the entire time that she is speaking, that running a portable sex-toy store is not unlike running a ward of a hospital—except it may be a
lot more fun.

  Connie Franklin Nixon has never been to an all-women’s festival in her entire life. She’s never ridden through three states with two 20-something, openly wild women. She’s never commanded a trailer filled with sex toys, eaten Chinese take-out while huddled over makeshift plans for a booth display, or had a man call her on her cell phone and talk dirty while she is driving a van as her companions sit in the backseat and play strip poker.

  This is what Connie thinks about as she hugs her pillow in the double bed with the crappy mattress, next to Sara and Meredith. Her traveling companions have fallen asleep to the constant hum of a hotel air conditioner while Connie, restless, her mind a buzz of extraordinary ideas for a kick-ass booth at the festival, rolls over for the eighth time with the certainty that none of what awaits her was drafted onto the pages of her list of dreams even when she thought she was ready to hibernate in her house more than 400 miles away in Cyprus, Indiana.

  Or maybe, just maybe, every single thing was right there on all those years of pages and she just never bothered to notice.

  Incredulous.

  Remarkable.

  Unbelievable.

  Jaw-dropping.

  Connie, Sara, and Meredith are visually and emotionally awestruck. They are creeping through a superbly organized maze of womankind that snakes its way inside a forest on an unmarked dirt road a good 30 miles from a town so small it is not even on a map. They have driven through Detroit, east and north from Flint, and have been following a road lined for miles with women sleeping in ditches, waving flags, singing to each other, cooking over portable grills, and holding each other’s hands and babies as they wait for the main gates to open.

  Diva’s display and sales pass allows them to enter the festival a day early so they can set up their portable shop and their own camping area, and prepare for the estimated five to eight thousand women who are expected to pass through the gates of the festival during the next 48 hours. Already it looks as if half of those thousands are camped and eager to get inside, and the three women—the Diva Sisters, as they have taken to calling themselves—are stunned. Sara has been crying since they hit the dirt road.

  “This is so beautiful it’s shocking,” Sara mumbles as Connie drives slowly past campers, trailers, women leaning against their backpacks, and several buses jammed with camping gear and a lovely assortment of women. Meredith is hanging out the back window, passing out Diva-labeled condoms and shouting, “Come see us at the Diva booth,” while Connie wonders how this kind of thing could have been going on for the past 30 years without her knowing a thing about it.

  “Oh, my God,” she whispered when they first saw the lines, the women. The tangle of energy seemed to rise from the snake of female humanity waiting patiently for the gates to their own personal heaven to open. “I had no idea something like this existed, that women came together like this. I had no idea.”

  Women waiting not for hours but for days and—after Sara jumped from the van to walk alongside and hug women and to help Meredith pass out more condoms and Diva brochures—she reports back that there are no arguments, no testy women, no one worried about being so far back in line. Sara reports that she can feel not one ounce of negative energy.

  And passing through the gate is only the beginning.

  “Welcome to a new world, a woman’s world, a view of life as it could be,” the festival registrar tells Connie as she places a plastic bracelet on her wrist, explains the logistics, and asks Connie where she intends to work for her festival shifts during the week.

  “I’m working at Diva’s,” Connie says.

  “Is this your first time?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, honey, what took you so long?”

  Connie wants to haul out her wallet and show her the photographs of her three daughters, her two grandchildren, her nurse’s credentials, her insurance cards, and then pull down her pants to show her stretch marks and varicose veins. But the woman addressing her is about 65. She probably knows exactly what took her so long. So Connie just smiles and enters a world that is run and managed and has been perfected over the years by women who have a vision for a universe where tolerance, acceptance, openness, and sharing are standard fare.

  Everyone does several volunteer shifts in the kitchen, garbage patrol, transportation, day care—whatever they can do, the festival worker tells her. No men are allowed on site, except the few from the local community who come at night to pump out the portable toilets or to drop off fresh produce, and their arrival in womanland is announced with a very loud horn. There are special teams, which Connie signs up for, of trained professionals who can intervene for everything from medical to mental mishaps. There is no crime. No one is hungry. When a woman with a baby showers, the stranger behind her holds the baby. Women sing spontaneously as they wait in line for vegetarian meals. Old friends hug under trees and help each other change flat tires. If a shift is short of help there are immediately 25 volunteers. There are sections for women with children, women who do not drink, women who want to party until the sun rises over the outhouse, women who are in wheelchairs, women who want to camp in total quiet, women who want to sit around the campfire with other old-timers.

  Meredith, who has known about this festival for years, and has attended smaller events, tells Connie and Sara about the three women who started the festival back in the late ’60s as a way for women musicians and artists to flourish in their own space. “They wanted to create a safe haven for women, a place where women could come together at least once a year and be totally free of any male influences or pressures. And the festival has grown steadily, improved and sustained the women who attend it during the rest of the year,” she tells them. “And my mom was here for the first 15 years and brought me when I was a baby.”

  Meredith ain’t no baby now, Connie knows, as they back up a trailer, haul out and erect a major tent, set up the Diva Sisters’ base camp, and then drive the van and trailer alongside of the lake, past waving women and towards the craft and retail area where they spend almost eight hours creating a Diva haven and retail shop for the hundreds of women who they expect to visit them starting the very next morning.

  “Exhausted,” Connie declares that night as the three women collapse in webbed camping chairs and sip the wine Sara made them buy before they left civilization. “I feel as if I’ve just been transported to a foreign land and that my entire life has been a lie. And I’m exhausted.”

  “Wait,” Meredith cautions. “By this time tomorrow night the ground will be humming. There will be women camped all over the place and you will see and feel even more than you do now.”

  Sara has been sitting and sipping without speaking for a good 30 minutes. She’s staring into the fire, drinking her wine and occasionally looking up into a sky that is littered with stars that can only be seen from a remote location in the summer in the state of Michigan. Connie thinks Sara is seconds away from jumping onto her chair and leaping right into the sky.

  “Think about what you were doing a week ago,” Sara says when Connie and Meredith finish their discussion about what is about to happen for the next seven days. “I’d been staring at my college diploma and wondering what in the hell I am going to do with the rest of my life, when I ran into Kinsey at the coffee shop.”

  “And…?” Meredith asks.

  “Most women would have hesitated,” Sara tells her Diva Sisters. “They would have mentioned the rent payment, or the need to find a real job, or they would have offered a frightened laugh. Why is it that ‘no’ is often our first response—well, the response most likely to come first when someone asks us something that society has conditioned us to think is not correct? How did that happen?”

  Connie looks up at Sara and sees a woman who is younger than all three of her daughters and perhaps wiser than all of them put together. She sees someone she has learned to trust in just the span of a few days. She sees a young woman of remarkable intelligence who dresses like a Joni Mitchell groupie, lov
es to drink before 10 A.M., has probably never turned down an offer for fun in her life, has a shiny college degree and a pierced nose and eyebrow, and who believes that she can turn the world on a dime if she wants to.

  “It happens because we just let it happen,” Connie tries to explain as the wind picks up and makes the smoke change direction so that she has to cover her eyes. “It’s so easy to think that you are going to be different and live your life in a way that honors all your dreams and then, well, shit happens and most of us become ordinary.”

  “You don’t seem ordinary,” Sara says, waving her hand through the smoke as if she can feel it slide through her fingers.

  “What?”

  “Connie,” Sara says, sitting up. “You could be my grandma, really, and here we are, drinking Pinot Grigio, sitting by a fire in the middle of nowhere, and we’re about to turn on thousands of women. You said ‘yes.’”

  “This time,” Connie admits. “But I almost didn’t come. I had this plan just like other people have and I was terrified to veer off it.”

  And she fingers the scraps of paper in her pocket and ushers out her life story for her Diva Sisters, a parade of haste, a warning from the hinterlands, a saga of happenings that overtook her world and gave her just a few regrets but not enough opportunities.

  Meredith scoots her chair towards the fire. She looks right at Connie and smiles.

  “Jessica tells me all kinds of stories about you, do you know that?” she tells Connie.

  “What?”

  “Don’t tell her I told you this, but her stories…well, Connie, you may have looked at yourself as a ‘no’ woman, but you totally inspired Jessica to start this business, to be her own woman, to rock the world with more than just a vibrator.”

  Connie can’t speak. She holds out her glass so that Sara can fill it again and then she says very softly, “What?”

  “Really,” Meredith assures her. “Jessica’s told me stories about how hard it was when you decided it was better to be alone than to be with a man who gave you nothing but a fishing anchor. She watched you—hell, don’t we all watch our mothers?—and she may have slipped away, but she really never went anywhere, Connie. I think you’ve probably said ‘yes’ more than you think you have.”