by Kris Radish
Connie remembers and is embarrassed by her frightened heart.
Frannie leans forward as if she is waiting for something that she has never seen before to fly out of her friend’s mouth—an African snake, three blue pigeons, naked dancing men, ancient explorers, Annie Oakley.
What comes out instead involves a new hospital administrator, a series of horrid deaths on the unit, her aching ankles and the discovery that she could indeed afford to retire and work part-time if she downsized, if her life really did change.
“And…?” O’Brien presses, impatient, eager for this part of the story to unwrap itself.
“And I’m almost retired. I’ve got a new part-time position at the Midwestern nursing facility as a roving consultant. And these three months. Three free months stretching out in front of me, following the damn retirement party, to do what I want, to tackle my list, to live a few of these dreams.”
“Come on,” O’Brien coaxes. “The best part. Bring it on, sweetheart.”
Connie laughs and at the same time wonders if she would have done any of this without her co-pilot, her sometime navigator. She imagines her life as it has been—predictable, unchanged, rotating at the same speed and level and with the same flavors it has always held in its mouth for another year, three more after that, and maybe another 10 after that. Her stomach turns. She keeps smiling and sends a signal skyward to the goddess of friends, the delightful queen who sends women exactly the most perfect and fine best friend in the universe.
“No one but you knows the whole story,” Connie answers slowly, savoring the words like fine wine before a feast, a cup of coffee on a long trip, a kiss from a long-lost lover. “I’m locking myself in here for a week or so and then taking off without any serious obligations until my next job starts in three months. And I’m going to do whatever in the hell I want to do whenever I want to do it.”
“That was easy once you got into it,” O’Brien said, pleased. “Stop being so scared, sweetheart. The span of time you have in front of you will fly. You’ll have a glorious time and I’ll be jealous as hell.”
“Once I get through the rest of this crap, the retirement, once I really lean into the list, I will focus on what I’m going to do the day after that and the next day.”
“Which is not very many days away, is it?”
And it wasn’t and the days suddenly moved like rockets.
Connie finished her retirement speech and then decided to throw it away two days before her party at the best restaurant in town. She had started playing CDs in her bedroom really, really loud to replace the singing house, and so that she would stay focused on moving forward and not slouching backwards. It was a concert of noise and action she needed to hear.
She thought about being spontaneous. The word was not on her list, which she had taken to reading not just at night but at least three times a day. When Connie placed her mind on the word “spontaneous” and on how she had lived for almost 30 years—schedules, kids, work, the necessary demands of life—it occurred to her that acting on the moment had been absent. There had been no room—she had made no room for dancing with a moment. She’d decided that the entire theme of the list could be centered on the word spontaneity and that’s what had prompted her to tear up her one copy of the speech—which she had reasoned was really part of #3 and getting rid of shit—and then immediately regretted it.
But it was too late.
Macy and Sabrina came to the party, left their husbands and babies at home, and informed her, as they were leaving for the restaurant, that they couldn’t spend the night because of their kids and husbands, and as they rambled into their confessions Connie simply held up both hands, said, “This is fine,” and showed them the dozen roses that had come with a simple card from their sister Jessica that said, “Congratulations Mom,” and she added, “At least you two showed up,” which made her two youngest daughters laugh.
Sedated with cocktails, Connie managed to brave her party with the grace and style her co-workers had been accustomed to throughout every single year of her career. Her speech ended up to be an unsentimental remembrance of the old days and a challenge to always remember what the medical profession was all about. It lasted three minutes.
Her gifts included a bright pair of funky white tennis shoes for her new job, a hilarious photograph of Connie sitting on an old-fashioned bedpan at the last Christmas party, a plaque with a mannequin’s hand on it to celebrate Connie’s special way of “touching” people, a dizzyingly expensive bottle of champagne, and a round-trip airplane ticket to any destination in the United States.
Connie stayed up until 2 A.M. following the party. She was alone and bravely hanging on to the edge of her new list-driven life as she set the champagne bottle in the refrigerator, placed her new photograph on the dresser she hoped to sell sometime very soon, opened up the back door and threw her old nursing shoes against the tree by the garage, and slipped the airplane voucher into the back of her list of dreams book.
Then she wrote.
She took out a piece of paper, jotted down her numbers for the next day, the real first day of her new life, and fell asleep thinking that tomorrow she could do whatever in the hell she wanted to do.
Or not do.
3. Get rid of SHIT. Start with the garage.
5. Stop setting the alarm clock.
11. Watch all the movies you have clipped out of the review section for the past—what?—thirty years.
13. A span of time to indulge myself in any damn thing I want. Eat. Drink. Be merry time. Turn off the phones. Maybe lie about what I’m doing. Minutes. Seconds. Hours. Days.
Connie Franklin Nixon wakes at 9:57 A.M. and wonders what the bright light is that’s shining in her eyes. When she realizes it is the late-morning sun, she rises up out of bed as if someone is lifting her towards the ceiling with a very fast crane.
“Shit,” she says, jumping straight up. “I’m late.”
And then she begins her well-practiced “Get Ready for Work Dance.” She lunges for her watch, looks desperately for her schedule book which is not where it usually is, and rotates her head in a circle to crack her neck into place.
It is only when she turns and sees the small pile of papers beside her pillow that she remembers it is the day after her retirement party. Connie sits back down on her bed with a sigh the size of her entire right lung, reads each one of the three pieces of paper she wrote on seconds before she fell asleep, starts laughing, and slips them inside the pocket of the baggy t-shirt that someone else might call a nightgown. Before she passes through the doorway she turns on her CD player for company, for encouragement, for inspiration, and just in case.
“My God, I picked a mess of easy stuff to start with,” she says, stuffing her feet into her pink slippers that look like half-dead and dyed kitty-kats and wandering into the kitchen.
The day—what is left of it for a woman who often rises at 4 A.M. and who has worked every shift and been at work every hour of the day for most of her adult life—is such a gift, such a glorious span of time, that Connie almost starts to cry.
Almost.
Connie remembers the champagne and kisses her own hand because she also has orange juice in the refrigerator. Brilliant move, Connie, absolutely brilliant.
Connie Franklin Nixon, the retired nurse, the retired administrator—for 90 days, anyway—is feeling celebratory, light, and bold, even before her morning mimosa. She fills up the largest glass she can find and parades through her house.
Finally the singing walls are resting. There are no men crawling around with sagging tool belts and smiling ass moons. There are so many damn empty rooms, diminishing signs of life, a house in retreat, that Connie ponders turning the CD player on high when she cranks it on. Time, then—maybe past time—to pass on the reins of this once lively dwelling to someone who can change its face, set a new heart inside of its kitchen, guard its parameters with a different set of rules.
When Connie looks out the back window she sees t
hat her old nursing clogs are lying next to the tree like wounded soldiers waiting for an airlift. She decides to leave them there. It looks as if someone has climbed the tree and dropped the shoes from the first branch. It surely looks spontaneous to her and also a bit funny. Funny is good and so is the champagne.
When she walks by the telephone she pats her t-shirt pocket as a salute to #13 that is resting on one of the white slips so very close to her braless bosom, picks up the phone, and sets it on its side so it will turn off in a few moments. In a rare act of total abandon she also turns off her cell phone.
This is big. Really big. Connie, the mother of three daughters, the official stepmother of O’Brien’s two boys, the mother hen of dozens and dozens of nurses, unit managers, doctors and hospital administrators, has not turned off her cell phone since the day she bought it. What if there was an emergency? What if one of the girls needs her? What if O’Brien has a crisis? What if all hell breaks loose and they need a triage expert?
Connie holds the phone for a few seconds, drains her glass, and then drops the phone into the top drawer of the desk near the front door.
“O-h m-y G-o-d,” she says, sounding out the letters of each word as if she is just learning English. “I’m doing it. I’m actually doing it.”
Giddy from the power of free time, and from the glorious champagne, Connie keeps walking through the house, and then makes herself a second mimosa about the same time she would normally be poring over stacks of reports from the third shift. Then, very quickly, she decides to watch two movies. Two movies right in a row. One after the other. No turning the phones on. No pause for a bath. No break to drive over to the gas station for a newspaper, a donut, or one of those slices of pizza with huge jalapeno peppers baked into the crust.
“Forget about the shit,” she says out loud. “Sit.”
She doesn’t get dressed, which in the old days might have resulted in a public whipping. Connie gets a little tipsy after the second movie, a holiday sleeper called Pieces of April. The movie keeps her plastered to the couch and she consumes half the bottle of champagne, which tastes much better without the orange juice, and goes astonishingly well with a late-morning meal of popcorn that fills up a bowl the size of a very large puppy.
Besides being a bit tipsy, Connie is also lost in her day. She has not looked at a watch, answered a phone call, bothered to read a newspaper, or worried. When she gets up from the couch just before 3 P.M. to use the bathroom, make a sandwich and take a peek at the spontaneous shoes, she realizes it was probably the champagne that made her not worry, so she decides to keep drinking it and watch something else on television.
And then she chugs through two Oprah reruns, watches an incredibly detailed show on the Discovery Channel about finding murderers, and decides, without having gotten dressed or turning the phones back on, that she is simply going to go to bed and read. And she doesn’t read the list. She barely gets through three pages of a novel before she turns off her CD companion and falls asleep with her fingers resting on the pocket where her little slips have been nesting for the entire day.
By the next morning Frannie has left her six phone messages, there’s a turn in the weather and it’s suddenly 62 degrees in Indiana in early spring, Connie is out of champagne and almost out of her mind with restlessness. By 9:14 A.M. she hops out of bed, rolls her tongue around her mouth, and for a mere three seconds wonders how in God’s name they are getting along without her at the hospital.
“You have either suffocated yourself with your own list or you’re in a drunken stupor and can’t answer the phone,” O’Brien’s first message sings. The five after that get a bit longer and louder and include a gentle reminder that the Irishman and his wife are going to be gone for four days visiting son Numero Uno and the wife would like just one call from Connie so she won’t worry when they are on the road.
They play phone tag while Connie shuffles through the house in the same dingy and terribly comfortable t-shirt, makes a very large pot of coffee, tosses out the champagne bottle, and shudders when she looks around the garage.
“Number three, I hear you,” she says out loud as she drops the bottle into the blue recycle bin and realizes that she is going to lose her mind if she doesn’t keep moving. One day on the couch has not only made her rear end sore but it’s also made her anxious. Three months is 90 days. She’s only got 89 days left.
The last message Connie sends O’Brien via her cell phone is a tiny whimper of hopeful action.
“I’ve got to do something,” she whines. “I’m going to start dismantling the house again and browse through my list. I’m fine, baby. Go have fun with Mr. Nice Ass. I’ll see you next week.”
Connie goes down the hall to her room, throws on a jogging bra, a pair of black sweatpants, and a t-shirt with the sleeves ripped off that’s left over from the last breast-cancer walk, and heads for the garage.
The garage is a formidable mess. A disgusting tangle of shit with a capital S. Mountains of boxes, some of them actually hers, are stacked against both sides and up against the old workbench on the back wall. Every single box needs to be looked through and Connie guesses there might actually be one or two items she wants to keep out of the entire collection. At least half a dozen of the boxes are Jessica’s. She’d had Macy drop them off three years ago before Jessica left for New York and for what she called “the manufacturing opportunity of a lifetime.” Jessica took off with her business degree and six years of marketing and managerial experience in her portfolio and Connie has not seen her since.
And not much before that, either.
Simply looking at the boxes with her oldest daughter’s name on them brings Connie to a dead stop. Her heart races. She will touch them last, when her courage is at an all-time high. She will touch them when the patron saint of hopeless causes brushes his shoulder against hers, or later in the day when everything else is finished—whichever happens first. Connie purposefully walks past Jessica’s boxes and, in a show of control, to convince herself she can do it, she kicks open the garage door and starts on the SHIT.
And there is definitely shit. Years and years of shit that has been stacked in corners, piled on top of the totally dormant workbench, hanging from the rafters like loose ends of a life that needs to be tied together to form something new, anything new. A car has not been parked inside of the garage since…when? Maybe just before Macy got her driver’s license, before the world started turning sideways, the father left, and Jessica left, came back and then left again, so it seems, for good.
Connie has pawed at the boxes and broken pieces of furniture on and off for months but the garage needs a serious and final assault. She knows that to get to #31—signing the final house papers—she has to purge, push, and pull. Fortified with an entire pot of coffee, more sleep than she’s had in years, and the terrific advice from the Oprah show that she watched hours ago about reorganizing your life, Connie is determined.
By mid-afternoon she has called the local St. Vincent de Paul Store and begged for a truck to come clear away what she thinks is “most of the good stuff” and when the truck shows up the workers are not disappointed. They score a lovely but beaten dining room table, a not-so-bad floral couch, three lamps, 12 boxes of paperback books that Connie kisses good-bye right in front of them, eight bags of used female teenage clothing and six boxes of “assorted” shit that includes Halloween costumes, flower vases, mismatched glasses, and some doodads Connie thinks may have been from her ridiculous wedding.
And the garage is still not finished.
Connie is so proud of what she has done, so excited about almost getting number three off of her damn list, that she goes to bed early. Putting on the same t-shirt that she has slept in for two nights, she fingers the pieces of paper in her pocket, and decides to give it one more day. Tomorrow, the 88th day, she’ll finish the garage if she is dauntless. She’ll wash the t-shirt and get on with the list.
The plan starts out fabulously. Connie hoists open the garage do
or the next day only to discover that the 60-degree weather has cranked itself back down to 40. The door closes and she gets a sweatshirt. The first two boxes she picks up are photos. All the photos she took during the past three thousand—so it seems—years and then jammed into these very same boxes thinking like an ass that one day she’d make really beautiful photo albums and later some of those lovely scrapbooks made by women who did not have to hold a catheter in place when someone’s veins ruptured, raise three daughters almost alone, and keep a house from falling down around their ears by begging friends to help. She carries the boxes into the kitchen, deciding that she’ll simply divide the photos in three piles, give each daughter a box filled with them—even Jessica—and be done.
What’s mostly left then are Jessica’s boxes. Two are obviously filled with old clothes with pilled sweaters falling out of the top; another is loaded with her old college textbooks. Connie pushes these towards the edge of the garage. She’ll give Macy a call and see if she wants to store them. Then they will be gone. There is no room left in Connie’s life or garage for Jessica’s shit.
Three of the last boxes, Jessica’s boxes, appear to be filled with papers and documents. Connie brings them into the house, sets them on the table, and then goes back out to sweep the garage which, when she is finished, is about as good as it is ever going to get.
“Hot damn,” she says, standing with her hands on her hips and smiling into the fabulously uncluttered space. “You could park a car and a half in here now and still fill up the side wall with more boxes.”
Connie celebrates by opening up a bottle of wine. Her ridiculously small wine rack has five bottles in it, all dry reds, and she picks the best one—a lively Syrah from California that she lets breathe a bit while she washes off her face and hands, grabs her numbers out of the pocket to prop them in a line on the counter, and then takes her first drink.
