by Kris Radish
“I’m a nurse, for crissakes.”
“You were a nurse,” Sara reminds her. “Maybe you can be an ex-nurse and be something else. A part of you will always be a nurse.”
“Selling sex toys isn’t what I had in mind,” Connie admits. “I feel kind of like an ass. Like a kid who gets a bag of candy after a long fast, eats it all and then pukes into his own lap.”
Sara and Meredith laugh. Meredith asks if Connie wants to go in to the restaurant and get some coffee, but Connie says she can’t face the public yet, so Sara brings back three huge cups of coffee in paper cups and they sit in a circle in the empty back of the van to hash out Connie’s nervous breakdown. There are no windows back here, just the cushion of sleeping bags and a soft tent bag and the loose structure of sharing, conversation and openness that has sustained the Diva Sisters since they left New York. It is a miracle of mixed generations, lifestyles and cultures that is astonishing and brilliant and so remarkably possible.
Connie looks at Meredith and Sara and smiles, imagining what her life would be without them, imagining the same way she imagined just hours before what her life would be like without O’Brien, Sanchez, McHenery, and everyone else who was at her house fondling Diva products, drinking coffee and wine and laughing until way past midnight.
And she decides to confess. What could be worse than what these two women have both just witnessed? Connie falls into the saving grace of two women, two of the most unlikely suspects she has ever had land in her life, and yet she feels the karma of their female presence, sees the arms that have already captured her as she was falling, erases their ages, their wild looks, the knowledge that she is old enough to be their mother, and she confesses.
Connie tells them about her list, how they were and are a part of it as #26, and they both listen, kind, young women warriors of the road who between them seem to have an arsenal of emotional and worldly experience stockpiled and ready to go at a moment’s notice. Connie pulls a very wrinkled #1 from her pocket to show them and tells them that she has been scared since last night, and maybe for a very long time before that as well. Sara and Meredith listen, occasionally lean over to place a gentle hand on Connie’s shoulder or leg, and they do what women do best, what other women know they do best, what women always need from each other.
They listen.
It is not just the list, Connie confesses. It’s a fascinating and terrifying pause in life, this flying into the wind, this major leap in 15 directions when I thought I was headed in another, and this eating up of weeks of my time—the time of the list.
“When I first got back home, everything looked unfamiliar and distant,” she says, creeping into the half-opened closet of her fears as if she may faint at what she sees. “A part of me wanted to run screaming from the house, from how I lived, from where I thought I was going. And then, as the evening wore on, I settled back into who I am, where I am supposed to be going, and I wanted to stay and yet…”
“Yet?” both Sara and Meredith say at the same time.
“Now, I’m scared I might miss something. I’m scared if I stick to the program, if I focus on my list as I had intended to do, an entire world might fly past me and I would have considered it only as a passing storm cloud and not as a chance, an adventure, something new to try.”
“Anything else?” Meredith asks.
Connie is silent. She remembers moments like this from when she was a kid and she had to go to confession, had to walk up the endless aisle of her church and step behind a curtain and say things that even back then she thought were stupid and controlling, and how a part of her ever since has held something back. Held something back in a secret cave behind her heart and a narrow chasm that leads to the edge of her very lonely pubic bone. A cave that has seemed to crumble bit by bit since the day she discovered the plans for her daughter’s sex-toy empire hidden in the box in the garage. Crumbled as she leaned into a daughter she feared she might never know. Crumbled as she tapped into her reserve of control and danced with swamp rats, learned how to charge up a vibrator, and reclaimed the luscious heart of her sexual self.
“I thought I knew where I was going, and what I wanted, and what was going to happen in three months,” Connie says. “My whole life, since I divorced, has been about making certain I knew what might happen one day and then the day after that and well, hell, the uncertainty makes me feel a bit unsettled, even if I was excited about dancing through these next three months in an unstructured way. At the end, I knew exactly where I would be and how I would be living and what I would be doing.”
This, Sara reminds her, makes no sense, given the trail she has followed for such a long time. Raising kids alone, running the hospital, a few quiet adventures here and there, landing on her feet no matter how hard the blowing wind was trying to knock her over.
“Connie, I am new at this sex-toy business too but you seem so damn natural when you are talking to people. And last night when you actually put on that harness in front of your friends and showed them what to do—well, good God, Connie, do you think that was the act of a woman who is afraid?”
Connie actually blushes. She blushes as she remembers how no one in the room would admit that they knew how to wear a harness that is used to hold a dildo, and how Sara and Meredith looked at her as if she were nuts when she held one out to them to demonstrate, and how she ended up standing on the coffee table in the middle of the living room demonstrating how to do it, and it—meaning numerous intimate sexual adventures with a partner—man, woman, or someone in the middle.
“Nurse Nixon, you look stunning!” O’Brien had bellowed.
“Knock it off,” Connie told her. “This is serious business.”
“Sex is always serious business,” the doctor yelled back. “Connie, the world has suddenly turned on its end because of you.”
“Me?” Connie shouted back from her perch on the table. “What did I do?”
“Look around, honey,” the doctor said. “You may have just changed the lives of every single woman in this room. How’s that for a powerful feeling?”
Connie had brushed it off, sold everything that the Diva Sisters had set on the counter between the dining room and the kitchen that had never seen the likes of this wild night, and then even sold the harness she was wearing.
Uncertainty, she now tells Sara and Meredith, has suddenly frightened the living hell out of her. Maybe, she explains, I don’t know who I am.
“Well, shit, Connie, it’s been my experience in all of my 28 years,” Meredith says, stretching out her legs so one falls on either side of Connie, “that the heart of us stays the same. You are still Connie, the nurse, mom, friend and all that other stuff, but if we didn’t evolve, if we don’t leave ourselves open for chances and what we might become—minus the heart stuff—what the hell would be the point of life?”
“Profound,” Sara says, lowering her head.
“Listen,” Meredith persists. “If you really want to know, I had no clue that I’d be doing what I’m doing now, but I love this and I have no idea what I might be doing next year or when I’m your age but that’s just dandy with me because I’m pretty sure I know who I am.”
There’s something attractive, Sara admits, about safeness, about knowing what time the alarm clock will go off every day and what time you will eat and that you will retire in 32.5 years and get a pension and maybe take a cruise to Hawaii and then go to Arizona or Florida every winter or to the same cabin in the woods every July until the day you die.
“Sounds like hell,” Connie tells her.
“Well, hell, yes, but a comfortable kind of hell.”
“Look, Connie,” Meredith finally says. “Knock it off. You are just going back to New York to help us settle in at the store, work the party, just a few things that I know Jessica really needs help with. Do you have to question whether it’s your frigging destiny?”
Destiny? Connie cannot remember the last time she heard that word. Destiny. It sounds horrid, old, crusty and
rotten. She pulls up her legs, laces her arms around her knees, shakes off the last trace of the bird wings that brushed against the exposed valves of her heart, and says, “No,” just as she tucks #1 back inside her pocket.
“No.”
Connie sits in the passenger seat and she breathes in and then out, and five minutes pass, and then an hour and she is back inside chipping away at the sides of the cave and thinking that maybe she can work on the list and take occasional detours. Then, when she thinks they may be driving like this for the rest of their lives, she sees the blaze of lights that can only mean New York City is close and, as they get closer and closer to Manhattan, to a world that still seems like Disneyland to her, she says another word.
Connie says, “Yes,” and when she looks up they are parked right outside of Diva’s and it’s almost the next day.
The rest of the week at Diva’s is about as close to chaos as Jessica can bear to be a part of, witness, stand next to, and administer. The stunning success of the women’s festival, the Diva Designs new product line party that is scheduled for Saturday, the sudden and very welcome return of Sara—whom Jessica hires full-time on the spot—Meredith and Connie, makes Jessica want to thank everyone within a five-thousand-mile radius. Beyond the necessary flurry of activity that needs to happen there is also this one new idea—sex-toy parties for the masses—that seems to have swallowed them all whole.
“You should have seen them,” Meredith reports. “The women are hungry in more ways than one for something like this, and your mother was perfect.”
“It was something I had hoped we could start maybe next year but now…” Jessica is thinking out loud. “Now? I am so overloaded I want to lie down and wake up back on that couch in Cyprus myself.”
Connie stands speechless while Jessica, Geneva, Sara, and Meredith talk about her as if she is absent, a breathing mannequin, a fly who has come in on the backside of a dark pair of suit pants.
“It wouldn’t be hard,” Sara adds. “Even though the store here is comfortable and easy, there are still lots of women who just don’t want to walk into a sex-toy store. They might talk about it, but doing it is something entirely different.”
And they go on and on and Connie listens and then she slips into the stockroom and feels, once again, as if she wants a cigarette.
Then, later, there is also the massive bouquet of daisies that Connie notices—as if she could miss it—sitting on the end table in the corner of the living room of Jessica’s apartment.
“Flowers?” she cries. “Can I read the card?”
Jessica wants to say no. She has her head buried in a stack of paperwork. She has managed to keep Screen Man a secret from her mother for one entire day. She’s also managed to say yes to dinner with him at the same small bar which features a lovely assortment of bar food that at the time seemed delicious and non-threatening. Dinner, she told Screen Man, is about all she thinks she will have time for during the next week, month, or indeed the next 12 years of her life.
“Go ahead,” Jessica says, surrendering to the inevitable as her mother glances down at the bouquet.
Hillary and I had the time of our lives. No more screening in my life. More drinks? Dinner? Do you want to move in?
Connie reads the card and smiles when she slips it back inside its little envelope. She doesn’t say anything. She waits. She stands right there and she waits.
“His name is Martin. I sort of had a date. He was standing under my window and a screen almost fell on his head. He’s smart, sexy, and he loves Hillary Clinton.”
Jessica details what happened, stays away from the simple idea of fate, and tells her mother without hesitation that she’s attracted to him, his Hillary Clinton book, and his lovely ponytail.
“This is grand news, baby,” Connie tells her. “I suggest you get him to a swamp as quickly as possible.”
“Oh, Mother,” Jessica says in a tone of voice that is much louder than a kind response. “I’m not as fast as you are. I let him touch my hand. We may kiss in a month or two.”
“Very funny.”
“Speaking of funny, mother dearest, your personal stylist has been by and you apparently have a date for the party on Saturday night.”
“Are you nuts? What are you talking about?”
“Mattie asked for an invitation for some guy who is a customer who she thinks you have to hook up with, someone she already mentioned to you, and I said, ‘Why not?’ and he’s coming with her, but he’s really coming with you.”
“I don’t have time for a date, for crissakes,” Connie says, wondering how this could have happened. “I’m working, aren’t I? And what a fine place to meet a man—while I’m handing out free Diva condoms.”
“There will be plenty of time for flirting, Mother, don’t worry.”
“Worry?” Connie yells about a decibel higher than her daughter. “Worry? What? Me, worry? Jessica, have you stopped to think about everything that has happened during the past few weeks? Have you?”
Connie feels the soft wings of the same birds that flew into her chest on the drive home trying to work their way back inside of her but she fights them off with a surge of anger and honesty.
Without giving Jessica a chance to answer, Connie asks the big question.
“How long do you think I can keep doing this for you?”
Jessica has not bothered to have a prepared answer for this question. She has been juggling her mother from one day to the next, tossing her from her left hand to her right hand, off the back of her foot, down her back and right into whatever needs to be done or is happening at the moment and maybe, just maybe, even further than that. But to where? For how long? In what capacity?
Jessica looks at her mother, her blazing eyes firing questions, even after her mother has become silent. She balances for just a moment with one foot standing firmly in place as an employer, a maker of good decisions, a business leader, and the other foot planted just as solidly in the heart of a woman she calls Mother, new friend, a mentor of action and example. She chooses to stay in the middle, to hedge all of her bets, to pull wisely from both sides.
“How long do you want to keep doing this?” she fires back.
Connie freezes for a moment, and then she smiles.
“I should ground you for the rest of your life, young woman,” she says, pushing the birds way back where they belong, clearing her mind, rushing forward while holding onto a major pause.
And there are still two questions hanging like an unanswered wedding invitation, an extended hand, a map with endless roads.
Jessica reaches out across the desk and puts her hand on top of her mother’s. She longs to go to confession, she wants to ease the lines from her mother’s face, and maybe from her own.
“Mom, listen,” Jessica says slowly, not at all certain about what she is about to say, “just so you know, part of the time I have absolutely no idea what I am doing. None at all. When we went to New Orleans? Not a clue. The new employees? Sort of knew. The party? That’s under control because it’s easy. Expansion and sex-toy parties? I’m halfway there but not really and add to that this Screen Man Martin and you may as well start laughing.”
“So, you are human?”
“Very, Mother. I don’t have the answers to either of these questions right now but I can tell you that you came here at a time when I needed you more than ever and didn’t even know it, and that spending these weeks with you, getting to know you, having you help me look at myself and who I am, and what I might be missing is, and continues to be, absolutely wonderful. And—”
And.
And Jessica tells her that she has been inspired to begin her own list of dreams. She holds out the beginnings of her own small list, tells her mother that her presence and her presents have moved into her life like an unexpected gift, and that is how she met the Screen Man, and why she now knows that risk is a pleasure that needs to be addressed every day.
Connie can feel her heart leap and begin a tango with itsel
f. She puts her hands on Jessica’s face, kisses her on the lips and whispers, “Thank you, sweetheart.” And then she adds, “Does this mean I get a raise?”
“Actually, Mother, I think I should start paying you. You are working your ass off, for crying out loud. You deserve it.”
“I’m torn,” Connie admits. “This is an adventure. It’s fun. I never in my wildest dreams imagined doing something like this, staying here, coming back from the festival…any of it, but here it is and what do I do?”
“What do you do?” Jessica asks her right back.
“My mother would say, ‘Wait and see,’” Connie replies. “But I look back, towards Cyprus, and I miss it. A part of me really misses it.”
“Is that so bad?”
“At some point it may affect your plans, where you are going. You rely on me now, and that’s okay, but I was just getting used to looking out the window and seeing this expanse of free time, all the things I’ve been thinking about doing for such a very long time.”
“Mom, you are a big girl now. You are in charge. You can come or go at any time. You can stay and work. Or go home. You run the show. You know that. You’ve always known that. Now you just have a few choices.”
“In charge” is always a good thing to say to Connie Franklin Nixon. And she knows her wise daughter is right, and she knows she could come or go or leave in the middle, and she’s thinking that if she leaves now she might miss something on this side of her life just as much as she might miss something on the other side of her life.
The Franklin Nixon women talk for a very long time. Jessica pushes back her books, her computer, her endless lists of tasks, and they go through an entire pot of coffee and they both get feisty. Connie stampedes Jessica with questions, with her own business-minded concerns, with the harsh realities of living with a relative for an extended period of time. Jessica throws her mother a bone. She talks about business chances, creating a new world of friends, exploring a side of herself and her life that might have been on her damn list anyway.