by Kris Radish
Starting over.
The words “starting over” roll from Connie’s mouth as she breathes in the scents of a summer night and says the word “sex” over and over again. She says it slowly and then louder and then she whispers it to herself, gives herself permission to say it often and one more time after that, and to have it again and again.
The word “sex” becomes a small pillar that drives itself to a place deep down into Connie’s own sea. She becomes a swimmer on the shore of her own lake, diving with the pillar between her teeth, deeper and deeper, to the lock she placed on her sensual and sexual self the night her would-be lover John left her with a credit card and a bracelet that still sits on her wrist like a chain.
A goddamned chain.
Her chain.
A chain she embraced for so many long, long years.
Connie bends at the waist as she reaches her lock, swimming as if her life depends on it. She bends and she takes her teeth, her lovely, perfect, straight teeth that she has bleached and brushed and taken care of for 40-plus years since she had braces and vowed she would always have fine teeth. Connie puts her teeth on the chain from John and she smiles. Connie smiles and then she runs the metal links over her lips as if she is kissing the bracelet. She kisses it, runs her tongue over its fine, expensive edges, and she lingers there as if she is a lover and she does not want the moment to end, as if she is in charge and she will let go whenever the hell she wants to let go, as if she knows exactly where she is going.
The metal slips under her tongue and touches her perfect, white teeth. She runs the thin and long edges against the backside of her lip and one tiny edge catches there, on the precise spot where a lover might bite her, might dig in and ask for more, might stop and wait for an answer that will only come with a movement of hands and legs, the tilt of a neck.
Connie stops and feels the taste of iron, blood—her blood—and she thinks of it without hesitation as her sexual communion. She bites a bit harder and feels a trickle of that very blood move against her lip and she closes her lips to kiss it, to accept it, to own it, and then she stops.
She stops and she listens to the wind balance itself. She listens to women, free and fast, diving and laughing and running. She hears singing and the clang of silverware and laughing in every single direction. When she concentrates, the vibrations of the water and the night sky and the small edge of wind bring her individual conversations that make her smile so wide that she almost loses her grip on the bracelet.
Almost.
But Connie is in charge. She will not let the bracelet slip from her lips until she wants the bracelet to slip from her lips. She will let go only when she is ready. And she is not ready just yet.
She closes her eyes and sees the pages of her list of dreams, dreams buried under her cotton underwear, disappear under a wave of passion that crushes her and takes her breath away. It is a wave of longing and long-forgotten passion and lust for what she knows is hers, should have always been hers, will now be hers for the rest of her life.
And she almost lets go then when her chest heaves and she feels the weight of her longing move through her entire body as if someone else is inside of her and moving like a lover would move. Moving with the rhythm of Connie’s very breath and along every inch of her skin until she feels as if she is owned and wanted and almost to an orgasmic place of release, but she still does not let go.
The light June breeze stops and Connie bites into the bracelet with her four front teeth, dipping her head, lowering her torso and thinking one thought—sex.
Just sex.
And then she moves her head up fast and hard. Fast and hard because she wants it now and the bracelet holds on, trying to keep her chained, keep her still, keep her quiet, but Connie pulls harder and the bracelet cannot stop her. Nothing can stop her. No one can stop her. Connie feels the bracelet stretch and then it pops. A sound of metal giving way and sliding pieces of a jeweler’s branding escaping from its long-held and terribly controlled position.
Connie Franklin Nixon, Diva Sister of the world, sexpert to hundreds, a vibrating maker of lists, drops the broken bracelet from her teeth into the palm of her hand. And she never opens her eyes.
She does not open her eyes as she takes the bracelet and throws it over her shoulder where it lands in the dark of the night on a tree branch 30 feet in the air. Where it lands and where it will stay for the next four years until a young woman searching for a way to find romance ponders that thought under a tree, looks up, finds the glistening and slightly tarnished band, takes it back to a small town in Ontario, melts it down and forms a gold necklace out of it that will one day catch the eye of a man she will love the very second he touches her neck, just there, just below the small curve of the beautiful gold necklace.
And then Connie laughs and she sighs as a woman might sigh with lingering pleasure after terrific sex.
Fantastic, wonderful, lovely, and frigging terrific sex.
1. Stop being afraid.
6. Take yourself to confession. Make the penance easy.
Jessica will kill them, slaughter them like easy prey after a long drought that has made them thirsty enough to lose their minds, make rash decisions, not be accountable for their thoughts and especially their actions.
Thirty-three minutes into the ride back to New York, Sara asks what many normal people might think would be a simple question.
“Connie, how far is it from here to where you live in Indiana?”
The distance is a tiny blip on the map. The span from one finger to the next. Fifty miles here and then fifty miles there. Right down this way past the Interstate, across the top here and then down just a thumb or two, Connie explains, pointing with her finger while Meredith drives and tries really hard to keep from laughing because she knows.
She knows what they are about to do.
“Let’s just go,” Meredith suggests. “We’re close. We worked our asses off this week. It would take, what—one part of a day? Maybe one extra day at the most? What do you think?”
Sara does not hesitate. She says, “I’m in,” without taking a breath, so Connie, who knows exactly how to get there from Eastern Michigan, thinks about telling Meredith to turn left on Highway 12.
Connie hesitates for seconds and realizes that a month ago she would have hesitated for minutes. She is still a little afraid, just a little, but when she thinks about #1 she tells herself if she cannot knock #1 off the list she may as well throw the whole damn thing out the window so it can blow all over the freeway.
“What the hell,” Connie shrugs as if this is something that she does all the time, twice a week, without blinking.
“Are you sure?” Meredith asks, smiling.
“I’ll call Jessica,” Connie answers, feeling cocky, still riding the high from addressing #14 in a way that is beyond huge. “I’ll just leave a message on her machine and tell her we might be a day or two late. Will that screw anything up for Kinsey?”
“Not really,” Meredith replies. “I think I had the day off anyway so I could crash because I knew we were going to be wiped out after this week-long adventure. Kinsey is in between gigs. He’s cool. Good to go. He’s our man.”
Wiped out? Connie thinks. Wiped out, my ass. Who’s tired? I feel as if I could fly. I want to fly. But, I’ll play dumb. I’ll say I had to stop home. I’ll figure this out. I’ll make this work with Jessica. Leave it up to me.
Connie calls immediately, praying for an instant, as she is dialing, that Jessica will not be there. And she is not.
“Honey, it’s Mom. We are exhausted and I really need to stop at home and get my bills and check on some things, so we may be at least a day late. I hope this isn’t too much for you. Call me. We should get into Cyprus before 5 and I’ll make certain the girls don’t look under your old twin bed.”
Sara and Meredith cannot stop laughing and, when they hit Highway 12, Meredith turns right, and not left, and the Diva Sisters have a good five-hour drive to discuss the thrills an
d spills of living in a place like Cyprus, Indiana. There’s the handful of stoplights, cheerleading tryouts, the mid-summer citywide picnic, a battle over sewers on the south side of town, neighbors who lean over fences that are actually painted white to share coffee and wine, sixteen people of color, a singing waitress at the midtown coffee shop, and not one sex-toy store.
First, however, Connie needs to notify O’Brien, who picks up the phone on the first ring and screams as if she has been slashed with a surgery instrument when she hears that Connie and the Diva gang are cruising into Cyprus. Not only will she be home and available in five or six hours but the hospital crew is scheduled for its monthly Monday night binge at her house and how cool if Connie could make it.
“Come to my house,” Connie suggests. “I have my Diva Sisters with me, but you will have to be in charge of the food and drinks and I have no clue about what the house looks like.”
“Your house is as fine as it has always been,” O’Brien says. “The mail is on the table, the newspapers are stacked up against the dishwasher, and the damn real estate agent keeps calling me because you will apparently not return her calls.”
“Shit.”
“What does that mean?” O’Brien asks.
“Well, I have been a bit busy and I never checked phone messages this week, which is like a miracle, and I am way behind on my bright idea to begin showing the house next week.”
O’Brien snorts and reminds Connie that it’s her house and her life and if she is not ready, because she has been busy selling sex toys and not cleaning out the rest of the garage, all she has to do is tell the real estate agent.
“Tell her what?”
“Tell her you will get back to her when you’re ready.”
“Ready.”
Connie thinks “ready” is a funny word on this particular Monday. She thinks she may need to put a wedge into whatever idea, or plan, or thought had formed her decisions before she took off like a wild cannon shot, before she yanked the gold bracelet off of her wrist, before she felt the hands of life embrace her in a way that was not so much holding as a caress.
“We’ll talk tonight, baby,” Connie promises her old friend. “What time are you expecting the mad bomber crew to arrive?”
“By 7. I’ll have them start at my house because I won’t be able to get ahold of all of them. I’ll bring the food. Stop and pick up some drinks and warn those two young things what they are about to get themselves into.”
“Like they don’t know,” Connie says as she hangs up and wrestles with the idea of her soon-to-be surprise homecoming. Wrestles with how to explain to her hospital friends what she has been doing for the past few weeks, rehearses it in her mind and decides quickly, as her traveling companions also wrestle with the radio dials, where to stop for coffee and what it might look like in a place called Indiana, how absolutely comedic her description of the last three weeks might sound to someone who knew her just a month ago when she was wiping up the floor outside the day room on her hospital floor with a surgery gown.
“Oh, well,” she practices in her mind, “I just flew off to New York after I discovered that my daughter is a sex-toy entrepreneur and then we ended up in New Orleans and, yes, we saw the damage from the flood waters everywhere we went but the French Quarter looked beautiful, alive. And, well, then I met this man who tried to shut down the manufacturing side of the sex-toy business, those dildos and what-not, and he got a crush on me because, oh, as you can see, I got a wild new haircut in New York from this woman I met on the airplane. Then right after that Burt Reynolds, oh, the man, who looked like Burt Reynolds, kissed me, not just once either, and then we had to get back to New York. Then this woman, here she is, it’s Meredith—the other one, Sara, has just a few piercings and tattoos, and Meredith, she’s the punky-looking one—she asked me if I would help out at the store and then after she trained me very quickly in the use and care and feeding of sex toys, well, after that I almost had no choice but to help out with this road trip where we went to the Lakeside Festival—I am sure you’ve all heard about it. It was quite a week and you have no idea how many women are sexually unsatisfied and we sold tons and tons of products and did demonstrations and many of the women came back to tell us they had tried the products and that they work perfectly and now here we are for just a quick visit before we head back to New York, and…”
And, what?
Connie’s question hangs in the warm air of the van for a good 50 miles before they stop for gas and Sara wonders if there is a U-Haul dealership in Cyprus where they can unload what is left of their product line and drive back to New York without the trailer. The question hangs for more miles after that, when Connie drives and her two assistants fall asleep in the back seat cuddled up in each other’s arms and snoring softly as if they are in their own beds, which makes Connie think about women.
She thinks about how safe and wonderful it is to be able to lie curled around someone you care about who also cares about you. Meredith and Sara have managed to slip out of their seatbelts and are lying on the bench seat behind her, Meredith against the back of the seat and Sara in front of her, curled against her as if they have done this a hundred times before.
Connie glances at them, sleeping like babies, and thinks that their very position defines the wonderment of female friendship. There is nothing evil or insane or sick or sexual about what they are doing. There is only their even breath, an occasional movement of a leg or elbow as the van rattles over a bump, and the miraculous notion that these two women have swiftly bonded like blood sisters over shared time, space, and a common cause.
It’s beautiful. Simple. Lovely. Wonderful.
Connie thinks about the parade of female humanity that passed before her during the past week. An assortment of women of every shape and size, of every conceivable sexual preference, from places and professions throughout the world, with views and ideas and ideals that stretch out in a multitude of directions, with absolutely nothing in common and everything in common.
She finds herself wondering if she showed her own daughters, her Jessica, Sabrina and Macy, the true joys and wonderment of female friendships.
Was I open enough? Did they see me laugh and act with abandon with my own girlfriends? Was I too damn stuffy? Did the divorce change everything and not necessarily for the good? Should I have been a better example? Was I too strict? Not strict enough?
The questions flash by like road signs, one after another; questions Connie has already asked herself so many times the words fall from one part of her brain and into the next in almost rehearsed action. But she still wonders.
And she wonders about the example of her own mother. Did she ever lie against the backseat of a car with her head in her best friend’s lap, laughing out the window, down some long highway in the hinterlands of Illinois? Did she pull over for a hamburger and a beer? Did she sit for hours in the town café smoking the cigarettes that eventually killed her while she talked about sex, men, and more sex?
The Diva Sisters roll and rotate as Connie maneuvers through her memories, pausing when she remembers Lydia, the woman who lived next door to them when she was growing up and who was almost always in the kitchen when Connie came home from school. Connie’s mother—who never worked outside of the home, who believed in all things traditional and Catholic, who had dated and slept with only one man her entire life, who slipped a book on menstruation and sexual intercourse under her pillow and never spoke about it, who loved to drink cheap wine on Friday nights with the guys before her father’s poker games and who then retreated silently to the kitchen, who cried like a baby when Connie told her she was getting a divorce, who was always there but who seemed to always have something to say that she never could quite say—her mother told her once that she loved Lydia.
It must have been menopause, Connie thinks as she passes through a long stretch of nothingness just above the Indiana border. She remembers her mother crying at odd moments and, once, waking during a storm to find her
drinking coffee at 2 A.M. and doing crossword puzzles at the kitchen table while lightning flashed against the side of the house and exposed the tired eyes of her mother who suddenly looked ill, sad and terribly lonely. Connie remembers standing there and then looking up to see Lydia moving in her own kitchen across the yard as if she were putting away dishes.
“Can’t sleep?” Connie asked.
“No. I just can’t sleep, sweetheart.”
“Maybe you and Lydia should just hang out, Mom. It looks like she’s up too.”
Her mother smiled. It must have been a secret, Connie thinks now, a secret that the two women were meeting in the middle of the night for coffee, for comfort, maybe a glass of port wine, for whatever it was that they fed each other.
“I was just over there,” her mother confided. “Sometimes we wake up and when we can’t sleep we come to the kitchen, turn on the light and then she comes over here or I go over there.”
Connie looked at her mother and then she looked across the yard and into the kitchen where Lydia was now standing with her hands on her hips, not moving, apparently looking out of the back window and into the black spaces that now filled up her own yard.
“Is Lydia your best friend, Mom?”
Connie’s mother had smiled. Her face grew still and she rested her chin on the top of her hands, which were rolled into little balls. She shifted her legs under the table and then she closed her eyes.
“I love Lydia,” she answered. “She’s the best friend I’ve ever had. I just love that woman. I don’t know what I would do without her.”
Lydia’s kitchen light went out then and Connie’s mother got up, set her cup on the counter, and said, “Come on, baby, the storm is almost over. I’ll tuck you back into bed and maybe we can both go back to sleep.”
