by Kris Radish
“Just do what you’ve been doing all week, Connie. The crowd will love you.”
Frannie O’Brien is off the floor and out the bedroom door before Connie can move, screaming, “I cannot wait to see this!” and Connie smiles at her lovely assistant Sara, bends over to pick up everything she has dropped, and doesn’t even bother to turn and look at her old rocking chair as she marches like a true Diva Sister towards what she’s pretty sure will be the first-ever sex-toy party held in Cyprus, Indiana.
This is the beginning. My list. It is way past time and I may never have done this if it were not for my mother and her list of dreams and our reconciliation. So here I go. Only two. It’s just a start on this late spring night while I pretend to work. While I open myself up. While I begin my own list of dreams…
1. Take down your wall. Not brick by brick but all at once. Hurry. There is a world waiting for you, Jessica. Get over it. Get going.
2. Forgive yourself. Dare to forgive yourself and before this night has ended do something your mother would tell you to do.
The constant movement of New York does not slow during an early summer rainstorm. Jessica has shifted her chair so she can lean against the sill where she has opened the window. Rain has always been her antidote. Her salve. An expensive bottle of dry white wine. A pony ride in spring. Her mother’s breath against her sleepy face on a late Sunday morning. All the bills paid at the end of the month. The one thing that she seemingly cannot resist.
Besides work. Besides her restless need to command her life and the lives of the people who stack themselves up against her left leg. Sometimes excessive. Always compulsive. Driven to the edge, around the corner, and back again.
It is 10:15 on Monday night and after she has wrestled with party planning for the release of the new Diva products, marketing releases, and a work schedule that may soon have to include new employees, a three-city expansion plan, and a nagging not-enough-sleep-food-or-drink headache, she learns that there is a Diva sex-toy party going on in the living room where she used to watch old “Charlie’s Angels” movies and eat Doritos, do her damn chemistry homework, irritate as many people as possible with her sarcastic comments, and plot the beginnings of a small woman-owned business that eventually turned into Diva’s.
Jessica Franklin Nixon has started her own list of dreams. A list inspired by the movement of her mother, by her own restless heart, by the notion that she must live as she encourages her clients to live. She has imagined her mother’s list, has heard selected portions of it during the past two weeks since her mother has not so much barged into as collided with her life, and she thinks on this gorgeous rainy night that it is time, way past time maybe, for her to follow her mother’s example. Two items, she thinks, is a great place to start.
Jessica turns to open the window even more, hoping to catch a trace of rain on her face, to feel the wind blowing in off the ocean all those blocks away, and because she hears voices. Men and women laughing. Feet dancing across the wet sidewalks. The drifting rumble of voices from the bar across the alley, a hip place for single city business people who are addicted to the world they inhabit during the day, a world they love, a world they can hardly bear to leave, a place that is more familiar than their own kitchen walls or their living room couch.
Jessica leans in, pushes her face against the screen, hoping to feel the soft rain on her face, and feels the window pop.
“Damn it!” she yells, missing the falling screen by half an inch as she tries to grab it. “Oh, no—”
“Oh, no—” not because a warm shower hits her hair and face and arms and neck when she leans out to watch the screen drift in the wind like a heavy kite, but “oh, no” because the screen is plummeting directly at a man who is standing just under her window with a book on top of his head to keep it dry.
“Move!” she screams and without hesitation the man moves forward to see who is screaming and the screen falls at his feet.
Right at his feet.
“Oh, thank God,” Jessica shouts down to him from her window, which is only a story and a half above the level of the sidewalk. Just high enough maybe to have someone lose an eye from a falling screen or get a concussion or be maimed with a screen rash for the rest of his life.
“I’m so sorry,” she yells down, leaning from the waist as far as she can go. “Are you okay?”
The man smiles. Then he laughs, and he does not stop looking up at Jessica.
“This happened to me last week,” he tells her. “I swear to God, three blocks from here, walking home late like this and another damn window fell right in front of me.”
“You’re kidding,” Jessica says, incredulous, and as if she has known this man for years and can fall into an easy conversation at the drop of a screen. “Can I get you something?”
He looks at her as if he can’t believe what she’s saying. He’s got a suit jacket slung over his arm, his tie is undone, his hair is tied up in a ponytail and he looks, well, he looks happy in spite of his second near-death experience in seven days.
“Come have a drink with me and I won’t sue you.”
“What?”
“You heard me. Whatever you’re doing can wait, for crying out loud. It’s what, going on 11, you almost killed me, I like the sound of your voice and maybe this is one of those cosmic events that brings people together.”
Jessica takes one of those long pauses, as if she is in a play and has forgotten her lines, a pause that is one part a “holy shit” pause, another part a “he could sue me” pause, and finally a tiny, soft speaking pause that makes her chest rise just a bubble with excitement and she wants to say, “What the hell.” What the hell because of what she has just written on her brand-new list, and how swiftly it is already happening, and how maybe, maybe, if she does not lean over the ledge again and say yes, everything will be the same as it was and that will not be good, not at all.
He waits. The ponytail man waits in the pattering rain and she can see his white smile, and that he is slender like a marathon runner, and that he has moved the hand with the book in it to his hip and she suddenly wonders what he is reading.
“First tell me what you’re reading,” she hears herself saying.
His laugh is a swell that bursts like a riptide in the rain. His laugh tells her instantly that he holds nothing back, that he knows how to let it go, that he is unafraid, that he is a risk-taker, and she likes everything she hears.
“Hillary Clinton’s book, for the third time. I want her to be the first woman president. I want to work for her.”
Now, Jessica knows she should go down. She knows that she should laugh into the warm June rain and turn off the lights very quickly and grab something off one of her shelves and run down the steps to meet this man who she almost nailed with a falling screen. She knows that this would very quickly erase #2 right off the list she has just—JUST—started.
She should.
But Jessica hesitates. She’s close to just running out the door but the queen of control does not have this encounter written down in her appointment book. She’s got a good two hours of work left and he could be a mass murderer, or not.
Jessica Franklin Nixon hedges her bets. She is in the middle of the fence, on the very windowsill of her life, and she pauses.
She pauses.
She thinks of choosing the man or the not part. She thinks about how it felt when she finally said, “I love you” to her mother. She thinks about lists and dreams and the fragile, wild opportunities of chance.
“Can I meet you in the bar, right there, in a few minutes?” she asks him, pointing towards the rendezvous. “I’ll be the one with a wet head.”
“Yes,” he calls up to her. “Please come. Really. Even if you don’t like Hillary. Come anyway.”
This time Jessica laughs and it is as if she has never heard the sound before. The light swift movement of air from her lungs, the sound of fun, the sound of life seems suddenly unfamiliar to her. A part of her wants to scramble right o
ut the window, just like the old days, when she met her boyfriends next to the garbage cans alongside the garage by the house where her mother has kidnapped half of her staff and is now holding them for an unknown ransom.
“I will,” she promises. “Give me 15 minutes to close up.”
He smiles and she doesn’t move.
“By the way,” she adds. “I’m already volunteering for Hillary.”
Screen Man touches his finger to his wrist where most people would wear a watch, says “Fifteen,” and turns to stride across the street and into the bar.
And Jessica sits down. She doesn’t turn off the lights or lock the window or make any sudden move to leap across her door-desk and head to the bar that she has been listening to ever since she opened her store and started working late at night with the window open.
Jessica—woman of the world, professional sex-toy entrepreneur, asexual, bisexual, nothing sexual, sex addict wannabe—panics.
“Jesus, what am I doing? What am I thinking? Why did the damn screen fall? Who is this guy? What are the chances?”
The word “chances” bounces off her throat like she has been punched by a wild boxer and she takes the word and holds on to it as if the entire building has just been flooded and the word is her only way out. Her life raft. Her list of dreams. A chance. Number two.
Chances.
Chances.
Chances.
The chance of a lifetime. The chance to know. The chance to find out. The chance to dance through a conversation. The chance to flirt. The chance to dismember the borders of a man who may not really have any borders. The chance to open my eyes for the first time in my life and see what my mother has been telling me I need to see.
Jessica puts one hand on her heart and covers it with the other. She forms a cross, a sign of hope, a marker of light on her own chest, and she lets herself think of her mother now, her new mother. The kisser of swamp men, and the new queen of the women’s festival. The broad with a whip in her back pocket who has given Diva’s a lurch into a place that Jessica did not even know existed a few weeks ago. Her mother, who she’d partially dismissed, who she wonders now if she ever knew, who has unexpectedly transformed herself into a woman…a woman…
“A woman…” Jessica says out loud. “She showed me how to be a woman.”
And WWMD?
What Would Mother Do? A screen drops on a man’s head and passion of the physical sort beyond tireless hours of work is nonexistent in my life. I work too much. The necessity for the sexual side of my own life has been denied. I can sell advice about sex but I have not been able to cross some border that I built, a wide canal of frigidity. But I started my own list. My own damn list that may be identical to the list my mother created.
What the hell, Jessica says, stopping the chain of wretched thoughts that is dragging itself through her mind, and not through a place where it can vibrate her into ecstasy.
What the hell.
Jessica spins her chair around so that she is sitting with her face as close to the window as possible. She can see the soft lights from the bar where Screen Man is waiting for her, the darkened line of windows from the neighboring businesses, the wet June sky and a parade of cars that seems to be endless in Manhattan, no matter what hour of the day it is.
Jessica gets up and leans out into the rain. She has a hundred rain memories that start with her father in a fishing boat and move to picnics outside, her mother running through the backyard in her bathing suit in early April, camping in the dunes when the road was swept away, a college night on a drenched rooftop, and this night. This moment.
Now.
Jessica thinks of just now. She thinks of what she might never have again if she doesn’t turn off the lights, hide the money bag instead of depositing it three blocks away at the bank, slam the window and then run as fast as she can into the bar and into a conversation and who the hell knows what else with a man who is reading a book she has almost memorized and who refuses to cut his hair and who probably knows what to do with every single thing that she sells in a store that has for just this night taken up enough pages in her own play of passion.
She shakes her head and water flies everywhere and Jessica leans into the New York night further, further than she has leaned into any night in a very long time, and she waits for the rain to run down her face and cruise across her breasts and trickle down to the top of her not-so-expensive slacks.
And finally, Jessica Franklin Nixon makes a decision. It’s a long-time-coming kind of decision that has risen inside of her like a spring tide, slowly—receding and then growing bolder until there is nothing to do, absolutely nothing to do but surrender. Surrender already to her own list of dreams. To her life. To now.
She decides to let go. Tonight for starters and maybe every night. Maybe.
She decides that she may never be just one person, may never be attracted to just men or women, maybe will fall in love with Screen Man and marry him before tomorrow’s nightfall. She decides that whatever happens in the bar tonight will not be a mistake but an adventure.
It will be a chance.
A chance to feel. A chance to walk off the edge of the windowsill and into the arms of whatever or whoever catches her—a simple, wild, wonderful, miracle of a chance.
Then she moves like a bullet. She dances across the floor, turns out lights, slams the window, hides the money, and does not think of anything else except the man waiting at the bar and the warm summer rain on her face, and what she might have missed by waiting so goddamned long to seize this kind of chance.
To live her own list.
1. Stop being afraid.
In Ohio, rumbling across I-90 just as the lawn-encrusted suburbs of Cleveland start appearing everywhere, Connie has second, third and fourth thoughts. It is the first time in her life that she is truly terrified. Sara is driving, and Connie has her knees lodged up against the back of the front seat so that she can write in her portable planner, and suddenly she feels as if she is being pressed up against a brick wall in a space that only has room for something the size of a cheap box of wine.
Meredith, who is busy reading a stack of magazines and newspapers Connie dragged along from her kitchen counter, turns to ask Connie a question and sees that she is as white as her running socks.
“Babe, Connie, hey, are you okay?”
Connie has a snake wrapped around her throat. A very large truck driver is sitting on her chest. A band of monkeys with yellow stripes that run from their long noses to the tip of their pointy asses are pulling on her hair. Her feet are on fire and long flames of red and white and gold are moving towards her arms and face and are poised to rip down her throat like a wildfire if she opens her mouth.
When Connie does try to open her mouth she discovers her jaw has been wired shut. Her hands have turned to ice and she cannot dislodge them from their tight grip on Sara’s headrest. Connie Franklin Nixon cannot remember how to speak. Is she Spanish? German? Did she grow up in Argentina? If she did speak what would she say?
“Get off the freeway!” Meredith yells to Sara. “Exit! Just get off.”
Sara looks in the mirror and sees that Connie has turned to stone. Meredith has one hand on her arm, a place of human contact, a touch of reality, and has moved across the bench seat to be right next to her.
When Connie looks up, she sees that she is in the parking lot of a restaurant. But where? There is a huge green garbage dumpster in front of the van, a string of cars on the other side, and a warm hand on her arm. She still cannot speak. The weight on her chest has left her breathless. Everything is hazy, as if someone has turned her over, poured a load of smoke and fog into her body and mind, slammed the door shut, and run like hell from the scene of the crime.
“Listen, Connie, it’s Meredith, we are in Cleveland, just off the Interstate and everything is going to be OK,” she hears Meredith say. “Can you say something? Need a drink of water? Do you want to go to the hospital?”
“The hospital,”
Connie manages to whisper and then she begins to laugh.
Sara is standing outside the van window, just inches from Connie’s face, and sees her laughing. Sara looks at Meredith as if she has just witnessed a flock of geese flying out the back window.
“The hospital,” Connie says again, and then Meredith gets it.
“You’re laughing at the word ‘hospital’ because that is who you were, that is what freaked you out, that is where you never want to go again the rest of your life. Is that right?”
Sara motions for Meredith to move over and roll down the window and then she puts her hands on either side of the door and leans in so that she is as close as she can get to Connie without sitting in her lap.
“Hey, Connie,” she says softly. “It’s okay. It’s gonna be fine. We’re going to take care of you. Take a breath.”
Connie comes back slowly. She sees a soft shade of blue, the disappearing wings of the wild birds that have cluttered up her mind. She hears the lovely voices of her friends, her companions, her co-workers, her sex-toy assistants, and she feels safe and embarrassed as hell. She puts her face into her hands, hunches over and she tells Sara and Meredith that she thinks she just had a panic attack. She tells them she was reading through her notes, wondering if she had made all the necessary phone calls, locked the back door, reset the timer light on the dining room table, canceled the newspapers, given a list of stuff that needs doing to O’Brien, closed the garage door, left a message for the Realtor, and called her other two daughters.
“Not to mention,” she says, straightening up, putting one hand on Sara’s arm and one hand on Meredith’s, “this sudden overwhelming feeling that I have no clue what I’m doing and that I should just stay the hell back in Cyprus where I belong.”
“I thought so,” Meredith says firmly. “You’ve been fidgeting since last night when your friends drank everything we had, bought every last sex toy, and told you they were jealous of your newfound profession. You also talked about the hospital.”