by Kris Radish
Macy said yes and now, standing in front of the sex toy checkout counter, Connie wondered about all the lesbians and gay men who felt as if they had to parade their sexuality in front of parents and relatives and neighbors and ex-lovers. Why? she suddenly wonders as she trails thoughts of Macy’s sexual awakening behind her.
“Meredith, why do people have to come out?” Connie asks. “You know, I don’t recall sitting my parents down when I decided to have sex to let them know I was a heterosexual.”
Meredith chokes on her coffee and a small stream of the black liquid runs down her chin—which Connie immediately leans over to brush off with her fingertips.
“Where the hell did that come from, Connie?” Meredith sputters.
“Thin air, I suppose, and thinking about the time my daughter asked me to get her some birth control,” Connie shares. “I feel like you’re about to tell me some secret just like she did then and it got me wondering.”
“Actually, it pisses me off because I feel the same way,” Meredith tells her. “I don’t know why we have to come out. Maybe some people feel as if they owe it to their friends and family, so everyone will stop trying to set them up with straight people.”
Maybe that’s it, they both agree as Meredith takes Connie into the back room and suggests she ask Jessica for a job.
A job.
And now it’s Connie’s turn to spit out coffee and she wants to know if Meredith has been smoking crack with Kinsey on the job.
“Just listen,” Meredith urges. “Do you use sex toys?”
“No, but I have to admit I’ve been feeling terribly sexual since I landed in New York and stumbled in here.”
“Most of our clients are women and many of them are your age and, well, we think you’d be a terrific addition to the staff and we sure as hell need the help,” Meredith rushes on. “And you were really fabulous the other day in here, and I could give you, like, a quick in-service and we could just see what happens.”
Connie is laughing so hard inside of her loopy mind that she can barely sit up straight. Work at a sex toy store? With her daughter? Counsel women about sex? Stand up there and hold dildos and vibrators and whatever in the hell else is in all those boxes and sell them?
“Meredith, listen, I haven’t even had sex in many years—”
“Which makes you perfect for the job.”
“I have a job.”
“Not for several months.”
“I have a life back there—”
“Connie, life is everywhere. So you just try this and see what happens.”
“Does Jessica know about this? You can’t hire me. What the hell are you thinking?”
“Of course I can’t hire you but I’m asking you to think about it. Jessica needs help.”
Connie runs her right hand through her hair, or what is left of her hair, and sets down her coffee cup. She looks over Meredith’s shoulder and stares into something that she’s pretty sure is a harness—a seemingly impossible tangle of leather and silver. She has no idea how to put it on, what to do with it or why in God’s name anyone would ever wear one. She turns and sees cardboard boxes with names on them like The Sage, Seducer, The Fox, and Twirling Heaven, and she gets a twitch under her left eye that cascades down her face, rolls into her lip, and lands right in the center of her stomach.
Meredith is silent. She is watching Connie think and she’s sipping her coffee, already envisioning Connie Franklin Nixon in a black leather vest with her new hair, some nice red leather boots, and a glass of white wine, explaining, during a private party, how to use a variety of vibrators for a group of women who have recently thrown away their bridge cards.
She’s also thinking about how much she likes Jessica’s mother. Connie’s not a bit like her mother. But Connie seems to be able to handle everything from a fast trip to New Orleans to the discovery of her daughter’s blossoming business as if she was born for a trauma-induced life. Maybe it’s the nursing, Meredith thinks, but maybe it’s just Connie. Cool Connie.
“Look, Meredith,” Connie finally says. “I have things to do and a list to follow and Jessica is never in a million years going to go for this.”
“Well, Connie, Jessica might not have a choice,” she whispers, leaning over to kiss Connie just below her left twitching eye. “She’s totally forgotten that she was supposed to hire someone to go to this huge women’s festival with me in 10 days and now that the new toys are coming in and the launch party is on the horizon, she needs you badly.”
“What are you talking about?” Connie asks, bewildered.
“Too much work and not enough help. Jessica’s totally on overload.”
“I’m a nurse, for God’s sake, not a salesperson!”
“Oh, I know, and you are the perfect age, and you are attractive, and just say you will think about it, give me a little time to talk to Jessica, and let me start you on my little Sex Toys 101 class right this second.”
Connie closes her eyes and tries to remember what her backyard looks like. She sees a small stack of firewood, a broken door leading into the garage, a pile of junk leaning against the neighbor’s fence that has been there since the day they bought the house and that’s all she can remember. Everything else is hazy around the edges. She can barely remember the color of the fading siding that has needed paint for five years.
She looks at the tops of her hands, which are now resting on her legs, looks up at Meredith and she wonders what Meredith sees when she looks at her.
“I would have been cleaning out the rest of the garage today,” Connie mutters.
“This could be much more fun.”
Connie doesn’t say anything but she knows #37 should be in her pocket and she moves her hand there and runs it over the very top, just below her waistband, slipping one finger inside so she can feel where the slip of paper should be, just for reassurance. She wonders what it might be like to say no, to ignore #37 and all the numbers that are before it so she can…What? Start over? Go backwards? Follow some line of descent that is only a ledge of safeness she has built inside of her own mind? Then she shakes her head up and down and not sideways. She shakes her head up and down and then into a little twist that only she knows could, with a bit of a stretch, look like the number 37. She squeezes her eyes shut and she thinks she should keep them shut and when she opens them up Meredith is sitting in front of her with a tiny, long blue thing that looks like a funky cigarette lighter.
“This is a waterproof vibrator.”
Connie puts it in her hand, feels it vibrate through her skin, into her thumb muscles, through the bones in her 58-year-old fingers, and she wonders if O’Brien has remembered to shut off the porch light, grab the newspapers, and call the damn realtor. She’s a very practical woman, sitting in a sex toy store in Manhattan that her recently unestranged daughter owns, with a blue vibrator purring in the palm of her hand.
“Oh, Connie, you’re blushing,” Meredith almost shouts. “They are going to love seeing you blush just like they do.”
“Well, I hope to hell I am blushing,” Connie says, turning one shade pinker. “Last week I would have tried to plug this into my dashboard.”
“We’ve got one of those, you know—”
“Of course you do,” Connie says, shaking her head and smiling. “I know right where it is. Right down the first aisle. I think I told someone last week it was a fish locator.”
Meredith laughs so hard she bumps into Connie and they both drop to the floor at the same moment to pick up the cute blue waterproof vibrator and Connie would have given away everything she owned just that second for a photo of Meredith and herself crawling on the floor of Diva’s, trying to catch a swift-moving vibrator while the rest of the world drove through traffic, turned on the oven for dinner, worked overtime or cried into a beer at the corner bar.
“This doesn’t mean I’m staying,” Connie says just as she snatches the vibrator. “I might not stay. Do you hear me?”
“Right,” Meredith says, mock
ing her.
Right, my ass, Connie thinks as she laughs herself back into the chair and holds out her hand for the next sex toy, which happens to come in her new favorite color—beet red.
23. Tell the people you love that you love them. Do it more.
The bathroom on the fifth floor of Geneva’s office building is like a palatial harbor for every woman who has discovered its location. There are three extra long and extremely soft couches, spotless sinks, wicker baskets filled with plush blue washcloths, scented lotions, stalls as wide as most Manhattan apartments, flickering candles that smell like the earthy forest after it rains in central Wisconsin, and a cluster of chairs that have doubled as Jessica and Geneva’s office for as long as Diva’s has been in business.
Jessica, unaware of what is happening at this very moment at Diva’s with her mother, has claimed their usual meeting spot—the two big chairs next to a waterfall—an absolutely real and wet waterfall in the women’s restroom. The first time she heard running water in the bathroom, and turned to see the floor-to-ceiling masterpiece, she wanted to strip down and jump right into the decorative display, reminded of the rippling sound of the waves along her favorite beach in northern Indiana, the beach her mother and O’Brien took her to so many times as she was growing up. Jessica loves the cascading sound of the artificial oasis. And sometimes, while she waits for Geneva to free herself from the chains of the numbers and figures that keep her partner tied to her desk in her accounting world, Jessica moves the big chair close to the pool and dips her fingers in and out of the water that tumbles down and then miraculously rotates right back up to the top of the falls.
“There’s something sexy about water,” she told Geneva the first time they claimed the room as their permanent meeting place. “It drives me wild.”
“It’s wet, for one thing,” Geneva had suggested.
“I think it makes me want to let go,” Jessica said, as she touched the falls for the first time. “Makes me remember being a kid, back when not much bothered me.”
“What changed?”
“Life. A broken heart here and there, my parents’ divorce, college loans. The usual stuff. Just like everyone else,” Jessica answered, lost in the rise and fall of the water.
“You need to let go, baby,” Geneva offered.
But Jessica had held on. She held on to her potent and remarkably powerful need for success in the business world. She held on to her notions of love and sex that were apparently much more freeing for her customers than for herself. She held on to a small box that was locked and sealed with her heart and inhibitions, and where she kept the key to that invisible box was a secret, even to her. She held on for a very long time to the notion that her mother would never accept her, that what she did would never be enough, that it was best to not merge their lives.
This day—with hours of work stretched out in front of her, with unsolved problems, the rising strain of staffing an upcoming festival and this wild party that is being designed to launch Diva’s and Geneva and her into a new national orbit—the water makes her pause. She cannot stop herself. Jessica leans back, slips out of her lovely black heels, rests her head on the back of her chair and pushes her left hand into the water.
Then she groans with pleasure.
Her right hand is riding on her thigh, Jessica Franklin Nixon is smiling, her legs dangle like toothpicks in the wind and for the first time in a very, very long time, she is thinking about sex. Not her customers having sex, not her mother having sex, or Geneva or someone she sees on the subway—but herself.
A whisper of wind, a breeze from a slight movement right in front of her, makes her open her eyes. Startled, Jessica opens her eyes to see Geneva standing close, hands on hips, smiling as if she has just witnessed the landing of a vehicle on Mars.
“Geneva.”
“Jessica.”
“Where were you, baby?” Geneva asks.
“I was just sitting here,” she explains. “Waiting for you.”
“Jessica, did something happen in New Orleans?”
“Lots of things happened in New Orleans.”
“Did you sleep with someone?”
“What the hell, Geneva? When would I have had the time? Are you kidding?”
“Girl, you have been nothing but a pent-up piece of work for a very long time,” Geneva tells her. “You sell sex toys but I bet you never use them, and when the heck was the last time you had a date? And this business with your mother. How did it go?”
Jessica longs to jump inside of the waterfall and stay there for a year or two. She has not had a date in longer than she can remember, and when she thinks of dating it is men who make her turn sideways, not women, or maybe not women, and yet there is this unsolved canal that leads her right back to her old female flame, Romney. Why?
And her mother. Better. Getting better. Not the best. But a bridge she thought was uncrossable has been half crossed and Jessica has begun whittling away at the wedge she placed inside of her own heart to keep her mother away.
Geneva is studying Jessica as she shuffles several file folders from one hand to the next. She’s waiting patiently for Jessica to speak even though she knows that Jessica has no idea what to say. She looks at her watch, feels the lunch-hour meeting time eating itself up, launches into her noon lecture.
“You are clueless, aren’t you?” Geneva asks Jessica.
“What the hell do you mean?”
“For a woman so business-savvy and out there and attractive and feisty, you are like a 14-year-old girl, woman. What happened to you?”
Jessica sits up. A small fire ignites itself somewhere deep inside of her bloodstream and she wants to bop Geneva in the head, or maybe start a water fight in the bathroom they use as an office refuge.
“Tell me, wiseass, just tell me. Stop all this dancing around whatever’s bugging you. We have a lot to do.”
“Let me explain it with a story,” Geneva says, kicking off one shoe so she can curl her foot underneath her. “If I said you were in heat and we just got on with our business here, you’d probably never speak to me again.”
“How poetic,” Jessica says sarcastically, stretching back to where she was before Geneva entered the picture. “So I’m in heat, am I?”
Geneva quiets Jessica by holding up her hand and then launches into a story about a friend of hers, Elaine, who discovered her sexual attractiveness one day sort of by accident. Elaine was on a business trip and, like Jessica, the woman was all business. She never paid any attention to the physically passionate part of her life, beyond a rare date or romantic fling that gave her about as much satisfaction as a trip to the dentist. And then one day she was reading a novel on an airplane and the book had a section in it about a woman just as sexually dead as she was.
Jessica looks up at Geneva with a mocking smirk. Her “get to the point” face does not make Geneva hurry. Geneva happens to think this is an important discussion and she happens to know there was some serious flirting going on in New Orleans—by Justin, the factory manager, if not Jessica. She also happens to know that being satisfied in every arena of your life is truly important and that Jessica has not been satisfied with a man, a woman, or with herself for a very long time. But she is getting close.
“The book made Elaine think,” Geneva goes on. “She thought about missed chances, about rapture, about the fact that she might miss her sexual peak—as if such a thing is possible—that she might be attractive now and not the following year.”
Jessica is listening. She doesn’t really want to, but she is listening because this morning when it was her turn in the bathroom she had done that very same thing, just after she finished worshiping the new door that her mother had put up, a door that she was able to close behind her.
That morning, hands on the sink, totally naked, with absolutely no makeup on her face, before she hopped into the shower, Jessica Franklin Nixon looked at herself. She ran her fingers across her forehead, turned her head first to one side and then to the
other, backed up so she could look at her ass, her flat stomach, the way her thighs and calves had miraculously held their athletic shape since high school, and then she ran her hands down the entire length of her body. “My body,” she said aloud, as if she had never seen herself before, never felt her own skin under her fingertips, never dared to caress herself in a way that someone else might think was sexual.
“I am beautiful,” she told herself, haltingly at first and then, after a few seconds of deep breathing, of reaching inside of herself, as if her body was a pillow and she was fluffing herself up, she said the three words again and she believed them. “I am beautiful.”
And then she thought of her mother.
While she moved into the shower and washed her hair and kept her mind on a track that was as distant and unfamiliar as a wild kiss, she thought of the years her mother had given away. Years of sleeping alone, of no romantic involvement, of never addressing what must have been at least an occasional sexual desire. Jessica thought about that and she wept.
Jessica wept not just for her mother but also for her own missed chances. She wept for the years she had lost when she could have known her mother, called her a friend, put her own hand back inside of her mother’s heart and life. She wept for not being ready for Romney and for walking away from other chances at love. She wept for knowing, finally knowing, what the ache inside of her—in that now hollow spot just at the top of her pubic bone—must be.
Sexual longing.
Desire.
The need to be touched.
The ability to let someone slip inside of her not only physically but any other way she wanted them.
Lust.
Every single thing she tried to help her customers embrace.
Jessica cried for having realized her loss before it was too late, before she missed a good year, before her hips swelled and her breasts fell and she could no longer harness her sexual and physical and mental power and then she stopped herself right in the middle of that thought and grasped the idea that her mother, pushing 60, was sexy and had just lured Burt Reynolds into the bushes. She thought about her last professor, a lusty woman of 69 who had two lovers, a trail of ex-husbands, and a list of men and women who would have loved her in a second if she would have them. She thought of her manufacturing consultant in downtown Chicago, a woman 55 years old, who had a lover of 23. And then Jessica cried some more.
