The Sunday List of Dreams

by Kris Radish

  It wasn’t until this moment, driving past cornfields, tiny burgs that would fit into the left finger of New York City, sleeping Divas on the back seat, toward a potentially uproarious welcome-home party, the new and enlightened uncertainty of the future, that Connie knew her mother had friends, loved them, and had showed Connie how it was done and how she’d got it, most likely way before Connie got it.

  The storm, Connie thinks, has really just begun.

  Meredith has been in every room, touched every piece of furniture, opened cupboards, sat on the couch, walked through the garage, examined all of the photographs on the wall outside of Connie’s bedroom and, without asking, started to unthaw a small turkey that she discovered when she opened up the freezer in the back of the garage.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Connie asks her, laughing at the absurdity of cooking a mini-Thanksgiving dinner on a wonderful summer evening when the hospital gang will be arriving soon with so much food they will never be able to eat it all.

  “Half of the turkey is the smell,” Meredith tells her, working some kind of microwave-water-back-to-the-microwave magic on the turkey.

  “The smell,” Connie echoes, hands on hips, watching Sara move her shoulders into the couch the exact way Sabrina used to do. “You’re making a turkey dinner for the smell.”

  “Well, we can eat the damn thing and then pack sandwiches, if we ever leave, to eat in the car and you have not seen me around a turkey and, Connie, this house and your pre–sex-toy life, it’s just so Rockwellish that I am compelled to do this.”

  Rockwellish.

  Connie knows what Meredith means and she likes it. She likes that her backyard touches her neighbor’s backyard and that they often share a hose, garden utensils, a half-ass power mower. She likes that she can wave to people from her front window and that she had a turkey in her freezer. She likes that in this moment there are people in her house, women filling up all the quiet spaces with talk and energy and laughter and life—wonderful, noisy, wild life. She likes that her couch is worn so thin in the places that matter—where a rear end bumps against a cushion, where elbows rest on extended arms and feet graze like lazy cows against fabric that has been discontinued so long that no one could find its name in a file if they tried. She likes it too that there are hints of a life past the worn exteriors that have rumbled through the walls and floors and often out the back windows when no one was looking, or when her three girls thought that no one was looking. She likes the house, what happened here—mostly—and that someone from the big city who grew up in apartments, rattled around in buses and in the subway, and who understands the peace of a place that is simple and familiar would feel comfortable enough to go through her underwear drawer and freezer.

  And yet.

  Yet, nothing feels the same. There is no urgent need to stay in Cyprus, to clean out the garage, to march back to the hospital to say hello to everyone who will not be at this evening’s party. There is no yearning from the center of her uterus to stay staked to the corners of her house, of her plan, of any damned list that she may have worked on for the past 30-plus years and this throws Connie into a near tailspin. A tailspin that she disguises with activity.

  She opens the mail, tosses a bag of chips and a cold beer at Sara, tells Meredith to let it rip and to throw down plates and chill any white wine she finds, and to make herself so much at home that she wants to buy the place. Connie talks on about O’Brien, about her own pre-dildo life as a head nurse, as a manager, as someone who is destined for a new career as a medical consultant, as someone who is totally confused at the moment about her immediate destiny in spite of all the planning and lists and who does not want anyone, except maybe O’Brien, to know about these confusing aspects of her life.

  The turkey-thawing adventure works; the house quickly smells like a holiday and Sara and Meredith ask for a personal tour of the room that was once Jessica’s and, when they get inside, Meredith, the kick-ass, no-holds-barred woman of the world, yanks her cell phone out of her pocket and calls Jessica.

  She calls Jessica, which makes Connie want to run screaming from the house because she expects the old Jessica to answer the phone, the girl-woman who up to a few days ago had kept her professional identity a secret, the quiet loner, the control freak of the century, the emotional riptide roller-coaster kid. But instead someone else answers Meredith’s call. Someone who Connie can hear laughing during a conversation that is a one-sided cliffhanger.

  All from Meredith:

  “Yeah, it’s kind of retro in an Indiana-virginal sort of way.”

  “No way? The window?”

  “Mothers always know, honey. She knew.”

  Connie shakes her head. She knew about the window and the ladder under the trees and the party on the one freaking Friday night her girls were ever left alone when they were teenagers.

  “Under the mattress. How clever! Do you want me to look?”

  Meredith motions for Sara to get off the bed and to lift up the mattress, which Connie can verify has not been moved or flipped or turned for at least ten or more years. Not since the weekend she went through the house in a manic relay that had her cleaning as if she had just been knighted by Martha Stewart. A weekend from hell, as her children would surely remember it—the grand weekend from hell.

  Meredith motions for Sara to lift up the bed and to fish around with her hands. Connie can’t stand it and she starts pulling back the covers and lifting the far edge of the bed so that she can slip her fingers between the mattress and the box spring. What could possibly be under the mattress? What other Jessica secrets has she yet to uncover?

  Connie finds two magazines that make her laugh out loud. A Playgirl and a Playboy. She holds them out for Meredith and Sara to see.

  “Magazines, huh? Just like the movies, Jess. Seems as if your sexual ambiguity started right here in this house.”

  There’s more, Jessica says. The beginning of everything, Meredith mouths to them as they keep looking and finally Sara finds it wedged between the metal frame and the side of the box spring.

  “Oh, my God!” Sara exclaims, grasping the ancient vibrator in her hand as if she has just discovered a cure for some horrid social disease. “It’s a little baby vibrator.”

  Well, shit, Connie thinks as Sara drops it into the palm of her hand. Just shit. She stands there, imagining where Jessica must have purchased it, probably at some roadside joint between Indianapolis and Cyprus during a funky car trip with her girlfriends. How brave of her, Connie thinks. How damn brave.

  Without thinking she says out loud, “I should have bought this for her.”

  “What?” Meredith and Sara say at the same time.

  “I should have given her this. She probably bought it from some sleazy guy who sold them from the back of a trailer.”

  “My mother bought one for me,” Meredith shares as they all sit on the bed staring at the small vibrator in Connie’s hand as if it may speak at any moment. “It freaked me out at the time but it worked like a dream.”

  “Hey,” Sara says, crossing her legs and pushing her skirt under her ankles, “you weren’t the same person back then as you are now, Connie. I would have freaked if my mom had given me something besides a slap across the face if I even said the word ‘sex.’”

  “It was a different world, really, think about it,” Meredith says without hesitation. “My mom was an old hippie chick and I was raised in this wonderful way that allowed me to embrace all of my self—including the sexual parts. I know I was like one in a million.”

  Meredith and Sara decide to wrap up the vibrator and carry it back to New York, where they will start a personal sex-toy museum in the corner of the Diva store. Connie drops the vibrator into Sara’s hand and when they leave the room she stretches out sideways on the bed and tries to imagine herself back when Jessica must have purchased what was probably her first sex toy.

  Worried.

  Overworked.

  Scared.

  Lonely.
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  Impatient.

  Mostly broke.

  Trying hard to be everything to everyone.

  And apparently frigid as hell.

  “It was a different world,” Connie says out loud just as the doorbell rings, holding onto each syllable as she says it so that she can convince herself with her own words. “And I was a different person. Totally different. I have to forgive myself. I have to.”

  Then Connie rolls off Jessica’s old bed, kneels on the floor, pulls the mattress back into its old well-worn position, fixes the sheets for one of the Diva Girls and then skips, actually skips, into the kitchen excited as hell to witness the look on O’Brien’s face when she sees the wild hair and glowing eyes of a woman almost, sort of, and very nearly unleashed.

  The sex-toy party doesn’t start out that way. Not at all. Never in a million years. Not even close.

  There is first, and for a very long time, fun and friends who gallop like wild ponies through the house embracing the Diva Girls, sampling turkey, piling bags of chips and homemade salsa and an assortment of other food a good foot high onto the counter. There is a zipping hot coffeemaker, beer and wine for the nurses who do not have to get up until the beginning of the second shift, three cakes, a bag of freshly made cookies, a plastic container filled with fresh fruit, and an assortment of wonderful women that could probably find a cure for cancer, save the environment, hopscotch naked down at the town square, and party for a week without stopping if they didn’t have kids, jobs, families, lives and several thousand other responsibilities.

  When O’Brien shows up, Nurse Nixon leaps into her arms. O’Brien holds her without looking first so that she can feel her friend’s heartbeat, move her hands across her shoulders and just feel her, right there, next to her. When she does pull away, never taking her hands off of her friend, O’Brien sees exactly what Connie thought she would see.

  A woman unchained.

  A heart that has risen from the dead.

  A magical transformation that is as spiritual as it is physical.

  A touch of fresh sensuality.

  A wild-ass cannonball that has recently left its red-hot barrel.

  Nurse Nixon grabs her friend, the woman she feels has permanently lodged herself into the left side of her heart, and they escape to the bedroom while Meredith and Sara pelt the other women—four nurses, three aides, a unit manager, one doctor, and a social worker—with tales of the Lakeside Festival, the traveling sex-toy store, and life in the big city.

  Frannie O’Brien, with a lovely mouth the size of Cincinnati, is almost speechless. Almost.

  “Girl,” she says as Connie sits in her rocking chair and O’Brien positions herself on the bed across from her. “What have you done with yourself?”

  “Everything, it seems like, Frannie. I feel like I’ve been gone for, like, ten years. Everything looks different here.”

  “Sweetie, you look different. The hair, the swagger, the new attitude. Was this shit on your list? Was this the stuff you never wanted me to see? Sex-toy goddess? Kisser of men in swamps? Woman who attends infamous women’s festival and rocks the world? Jesus.”

  Connie cannot imagine a time when she has not loved this woman sitting in front of her. She cannot imagine what it would be like to not do this, sit and talk and open herself up so that everything beyond her ribs is exposed. She cannot imagine that she would be who she is right this moment—a wild, unhinged woman who thought she knew exactly where she was going and who has instead taken an almost magical turn into uncharted territory. A woman who knows nothing and who also knows everything.

  “Frannie, I think I am having the time of my life.”

  “It looks like it. You are glowing in the dark. Think of the money you’re saving on lightbulbs, for God’s sake.”

  “It’s a bit bizarre, Frannie, but I feel like I’ve done more in the past two weeks than in the past three years.”

  “It’s not more, it’s just different. Have you stopped to think that you may have used up this part of your life—Cyprus, the medical path you never really chose but you felt as if you had to take?”

  “Damn it, I didn’t want to get serious tonight, O’Brien, but it’s clear—well, sort of clear—that I’ve grabbed onto something new and unexpected. I’ve had fun before—you know that because you’ve been there for most of it—but when I think of the word ‘fulfilling’ right now, working as a consultant and doing what I’ve done for most of my life makes me want to vomit.”

  “Not a good thing, babe,” O’Brien whispers, taking her hand.

  Taking her hand and then asking her to imagine the impossible. Imagine, O’Brien asks, never coming back. Imagine a shift in the wind that turns you around so you face a whole new direction. Imagine a life in a place you never imagined having a life before. Imagine that you could come back, that you could always come back and jump into the shoes you leave by the side of the door, but imagine then—imagine anything and everything else.

  “You know,” Frannie continues, “when you have a friend and they are, like, dating or married to this huge asshole and you just can never bring yourself to tell them?”

  “All the time. Me, for instance.”

  “Yes, you, but—ready for this now?”

  “Sure. Hit me, Frannie.”

  “I sort of thought that way about you taking this job and moving but not really moving and plodding along on the damned list of yours as if it were some kind of religion.”

  Connie looks at her friend and her heart leaps like one of those Irish dancers who never move their bodies, only their feet. It lurches, and then stands till.

  “You’re kidding!”

  “No.”

  “Wow.”

  “You were living, you are living—but some of those things on that Sunday list of yours, well, they were simple things, places and people and magic moments that would be over soon like a carnival ride.”

  “Well, Frannie, I hate to say this, but up yours. You never said one word. Why? And not everything is quick. Recapturing Jessica has not been quick and I have not had sex yet, but I am thinking about it, which is more than I have done in a very long time.”

  Frannie does not let go of her friend’s hand. She smiles and tells her that the list was real, it is real and it is still very important. She tells Connie that to have said something would have been to negate all those years of dreaming and wishing and wondering what it might be like the minute she could actually do something about it. It would have been crossing out your list and inserting my list, she tells her.

  “Your list?” Connie asks. “You have a list?”

  “Christ, baby, we all have a list. Some of us write it down and some of us don’t write it down. Number one on my list is to get the hell out of here when the man retires. You know that. We’ve talked about all of this but it just hasn’t lined up like your list. It’s my list. It’s not like yours. I just want you to see that it’s just dandy if the list changes because you are changing right along with it.”

  Connie pushes herself to the edge of the seat so that she is inches from O’Brien’s face.

  What else? She wants to know what the hell else is on O’Brien’s list.

  Grandchildren. Paris in the dead of winter. A break from the weary world of the insane but then going back, always going back to help those people. More time like this. One last dance with her ill brother. A painting class. More grandchildren. A ton of free time to volunteer. Brandy at 11:30 A.M., just before lunch.

  All things Connie knows but, line them up, and they become a list.

  A list of dreams.

  “What happens is that my list changes,” O’Brien shares. “That’s why I don’t write it down. It is as unfaithful as a male movie star. You kept yours so close, so tight, it was unthinkable for you to move off-center.”

  “Maybe. But it changed a bit from here to there.”

  “Just maybe?”

  “Would you have told me all of this if I hadn’t found the box and gone to New
York like a madwoman?”

  “Eventually. I figured something else would have happened. Something unexpected to throw you off-course. Something to show you more choices. Maybe not, though. I think this is like some great chance. What happened to you is cosmic. A kind of lovely slap in the face. We get slapped like this all of the time but most of us don’t pay attention and then the moment is lost. You, Connie, baby, have chosen to feel the slap.”

  Connie laughs big-time. A surge of fear and fun runs through her mixed in with something almost narcotic that feels cleansing and just this side of insane.

  “Honey, I have no idea what I’m doing,” Connie admits. “I have been winging it for the past two weeks.”

  “What else is new? You’ve been winging it since I’ve known you.”

  Winging it is exactly what happens next as Sara pounds on the door and then pushes it open without waiting for a yes or no response. Sara, who is standing in the door with her arms full of left-over Diva products and the most devilish smile Connie has ever seen on her young face, begs them to come into the living room.

  “What?” Connie asks as if she doesn’t already know.

  “We are having a sex-toy party. And we want you to help demonstrate.”

  O’Brien drops to one knee, and then the other, laughing so hard she is certain she will wet her pants.

  Connie cannot move. Out in her living room are women who have vaulted through her life, in a mostly professional, sometimes fun, always kind and generous manner but who, to the best of her recollection, have never discussed sex toys in a group setting.

  “What?” Sara demands, trying very hard to be patient.

  “Are you all drunk?” Connie wants to know.

  “Mostly just me and Meredith. Everyone else is just curious as hell. Really. They just want to know.”

  O’Brien lifts up her head and looks at Connie, raises one eyebrow in that Well-are-you-going-to-do-something-about-this? way, and then Connie gets up slowly.

  “Do we know how to do this?” Connie asks Sara, who is weaving and about to drop three vibrators, a couple of dildos, two harnesses and a handful of cherry-flavored condoms. Turning and thinking that what will happen next may be the penance, the #6 that she has been hoping to cross off of her damned list.