The Sunday List of Dreams

by Kris Radish

  “Have you thought about that, Mother? Did it ever occur to you that this is part of your list of dreams? That sticking to a plan, one that you think is written in stone, might not be the best way to live?”

  “I haven’t had the time to line it all up like that but the thought has recently crossed my mind.”

  “Go get it,” Jessica orders. “I know you have it with you.”

  Connie pulls her list of dreams, her imagined second half of life, her world of thoughts and wonderment and an occasional burst of passion and angst out of her bulging make-believe dresser—her suitcase—and carries it back to the table as if she is holding a carton of eggs.

  “Tell me,” Jessica urges, inching her chair forward so that she can put her arm around her mother.

  “No one has ever read it and I don’t want anyone to ever read it,” Connie shares. “It’s intimate stuff. Private, like a journal. And sometimes when I look at it, it makes me sad to remember who I was, what I was doing, where I was in my life when I wrote it. There are many, many versions and this new idea that the list already needs to be revamped.”

  “You were a good mom. I would have hated you along the way no matter what had happened, divorce or not, lifestyle or not. It’s programmed into the genes of teenagers. You know that.”

  Connie knows and she sees herself pages beyond that. She sees herself wrapped up in a part of life that is as tantalizing as it is terrifying. She imagines out loud what it would be like to change everything. Everything. The house. The new condo. The job. Where she lives. Everything.

  “It’s not in the pages, huh?” Jessica asks gently, touching the side of Connie’s list book.

  “Not like that.”

  “Look again. Maybe you missed something,” Jessica says, smiling.

  Connie looks. Jessica politely gets up, makes yet another pot of coffee, slips into the bathroom to call and let Kinsey know she is going to be a bit late, and studies her own face in the mirror to give her mother a little time alone. When she looks in the mirror, Jessica sees the soft skin of her mother, matching eyes, three teeth that could have been moved back into place with braces, but three teeth that seem perfect to her anyway. When she lifts up her hair, pulling it behind her ears and then onto the top of her head, she sees that she does indeed look like her mother. She leans forward, hands on her head, belly against the cold sink, and she suddenly knows what she will look like when she is 58 years old, Connie’s age.

  Jessica stands there a very long time. She runs a parade of questions through her own mind, asking herself if she can really stand to work with her mother for an extended period of time, and answering with a soft, “Yes.” She asks herself if her business, if Diva’s could be more because of her mother, and she gets the same answer. She asks if she could use her mother in ways that she has not bothered to sit down and examine. Yes, again.

  But live with her? Again? Now that she is a daughter, a friend, a boss but no longer a little girl? Not so much.

  And then she knows what her mother will say. She knows exactly what her mother will say when she goes back to the living room/kitchen/dining room/office/bedroom. She knows what Connie will say and she wonders when other daughters get the mother-daughter connection. When do other daughters peer into their own eyes and see their mother’s eyes? A shell that was designed by the womb of a woman, outlined with parts of her own self and then left empty, almost empty, for the girl-daughter to fill as she wishes? When does that girl, who becomes a woman, gaze into her own eyes and forgive and open her own heart and wander down a new trail that crosses beyond the hedges of just mother-and-daughter? When do other daughters not just lean in but stand straight so that the mother can lean too? When do they lift up their hair and see the cheekbones, the long ears, the sloping necklines, the rounded chin that graces the face of their own mother?

  Jessica knows what her mother will say as she steps from the room, drops her hair back down to her shoulders, and rubs her eyes so that she can see, she can truly see.

  “Maybe that page fell out,” Connie says.

  “Maybe it did,” Jessica says, sitting back down and turning her chair so that she can plant her feet on either side of her mother.

  “What did you find?”

  “Piles of dreams, baby. All kinds of them and, as you already know, some of them are bursting into reality as we sit in this spacious apartment.”

  Jessica, the CEO, swings into action. She whips a quick plan out of an idea that has been floating between her and her mother since the moment her mother walked into her store. Jessica throws it out there, knowing already that her mother will catch it and accept it and that the plan, just like any plan or any list, might, could, or should change at any moment.

  Connie will stay and help with the party.

  She will help at the store.

  She will, with Geneva’s blessing, become a kind of administrative assistant while she is in New York, serving at the will and whim of the CEO. She will be worked into the schedule. She will sit in on some meetings. She will stay at the apartment unless her stay is extended and then she may, for reasons of personal, physical and mental safety, have to find alternative living space. She can offer her opinions on the progress of the business at any moment but her opinions and thoughts may be dismissed.

  And of course she has the right to change anything Jessica has said at any given moment.

  “Let’s do a week by week,” Connie says, agreeing to just that. “I’ll stay through the party, try not to get in the way if and when you have any downtime or the Screen Man wants to come over, and then we’ll just see. We’ll just call this a nice extended visit for a while. I do have to make some decisions about the house, the other job, the condo.”

  “You know, Mom, you are still in charge. No matter where you are, or what you do, or where you go, you are still in charge.”

  Connie’s laugh rips through the apartment like a wild breeze. She raises her arms, sets her list book on the desk, encircles her daughter—the CEO of Diva’s—kisses her on the lips and says, “Just give me that lovely whip, sweetheart, and I’ll show you who is in charge.”

  Just give Connie the whip.

  4. Dance with a handsome man who doesn’t care if you have a double chin, have to pluck your long facial hairs, or put on a girdle in order to get into the damn dress.

  19. Moments with my daughters that are real and open and where all four of us can be who we are.

  12. Take a deep breath and allow the two daughters who actually let you visit them to live their own lives. Accept their traditional choices. Maybe this one should be listed in two places. This is hard. Keep your mouth shut except to smile when you visit or they visit.

  18. A fancy dress. Something formal and long that sits right at the tip of my breasts. A Cinderella dress—this is embarrassing, but sometimes when I dream I see this dress—slits up the side, beads. Maybe when I wear it I’ll be someplace wild and wonderful.

  Frannie O’Brien has just finished a release evaluation on a 15-year-old white female from a lovely suburb near Chicago who has already been pregnant, run away, had an abortion, been through two drug treatment programs, tried to steal her family’s car and fortune, and has been asking for a sex-change operation for the past year and a half.

  The girl cannot leave the hospital. She may be in the select care psychiatric unit for a very, very long time and this fact makes O’Brien want to weep not because the girl will be there, not because she needs to be there, but because she has to be there.

  “Damn it,” she says out loud, in her office. “This baby girl may be in the hospital for a very long time, but she’ll get out. She will get out.”

  O’Brien believes everyone will get out. She stretches her psychiatric nurse’s training and her severely enlarged heart across every single patient who is admitted to her hospital and, by the time they get to her unit, one of the best in the country, they have pretty much been everywhere else. Sometimes they get out. Sometimes they do not get o
ut for a very long period of time and the reality of this often brings O’Brien to her knees and makes her pick up the phone to call Nurse Nixon—her friend, her muse, her listening ear.

  And that damn Nurse Nixon is suddenly not available, and temporarily parked in a new harbor, and Frannie misses her so much her teeth ache and she has lost count of the number of times she has tried to call her only to remember that Connie is not at home and sorting through the junk in the garage. She is not walking the sand dunes, or skydiving, or taking a pottery class, or whatever in the hell was on her list of dreams, but she’s in New York or New Orleans or New Something. And, as happy as O’Brien is for her sweet pal, that is exactly how unhappy she is for herself.

  Right this second she fights the urge to call Connie’s cell phone and tell her about this girl who wants to be a boy, and who is as messed up as any kid who has ever come into the unit, but she does not pick up the phone.

  She does not. And then there is a knock on the door.

  “What?” she bellows with the intonation of someone who has been interrupted and who very much does not like to be interrupted.

  “I’m sorry, Frannie, but this came for you by some kind of special courier, a really cute guy in a gold truck….”

  O’Brien wants to laugh in spite of the interruption but she cuts off the lovely young secretary and asks for the package, and struggles not to utter, “What the hell,” out loud. It’s a letter from Nurse Nixon, and folded inside it is a sealed envelope.

  Sweetheart,

  This is last-minute but you and Daniel have to come. I know you can get the time off of work. This is on me. I want you to be there. I want you to be with me. I want to have fun and I want to show both of you how much you mean to me and how much I appreciate everything you have done and still do for a fat-ass divorcée who occasionally hears her house singing. I will be at the airport. Bring something fancy to wear, drinking shoes, and not a damn thing else.

  Missing you like crazy.

  The Sex Queen

  Frannie rips open the envelope and two airplane tickets and a confirmed reservation for a Manhattan hotel fall out of the envelope and she cannot help it. O’Brien cries. She kisses the tickets, holds them against her heart, closes her eyes and imagines herself and Daniel in New York City and she keeps on crying.

  O’Brien cries for a while and then she thinks it might be a really good idea to see when the tickets are for, and she is hoping for late July, or maybe even August, and she looks at the tickets and she sees that they are for Friday. That’s the Friday that is two days from the Wednesday she is in the middle of and as she shuffles through the tickets in a state of near panic something else falls out that she missed. It’s a beautifully designed formal invitation embossed in gold letters on bright red paper.

  YOU ARE CORDIALLY INVITED TO THE RELEASE PARTY

  FOR DIVA’S DIVINE SIGNATURE PRODUCTS…

  JOIN US AS WE SALUTE THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION

  BY CREATING ONE OF OUR OWN.

  COCKTAILS AT 6 P.M.

  UNVEILING AT 7 P.M.

  DINNER AND DANCING FOREVER AND EVER.

  COME…ALWAYS COME…IF YOU DARE.

  Oh, my God.

  Frannie drops the tickets and invitation and puts her hand to her face, covering her eyes. She has never been to New York City. She has tried to go for years but schedules and finances and kids and life have blocked her exit. O’Brien knows where all the best restaurants are located, where to go, what she would do if she even had one free day in a city that has captured her imagination for years. It’s been her dream. It’s been on her own list and she is overwhelmed.

  “I am going to kick her ass,” O’Brien growls as she reaches for her phone to call her husband and she wishes with all of her heart that she could see his face when she tells him where they are going to be for the weekend and what they are going to do once they get there.

  “You want me to what?”

  Connie asks this question of Jessica—who has a phone in each ear and her computer running while she mouths directions to Sara, who is on the floor stuffing lovely blue bags with free Diva products for Saturday’s gala, and simultaneously gives directions to Connie, who occasionally thinks that nothing will ever again surprise, startle, or shock her.

  “You have to get to the airport in, like, one hour.”

  “What?” Connie shrieks at the news. “Why?”

  “It was going to be a surprise but I, once again, need your help to facilitate what was going to be your surprise.”

  Jessica talks into one phone, hangs up the other one, and tells her mother that she was going to go to the airport but now, because of yet another glitch, she has to get back to the store and handle a massive shipment that they need for Saturday’s party. Saturday being tomorrow. The day after today. Hours away.

  “Who’s at the airport?” Connie asks.

  “Sabrina and Macy.”

  Connie is surprised, shocked, and startled, which startles her even more.

  “How?” she manages to utter. “The kids?”

  “They’re coming alone, no husbands, a network of babysitters and they can only stay two days but…”

  Connie grabs Jessica by the arm and finishes her sentence.

  “But this is a huge event. It’s not only a party for the products, dear daughter, but it’s a celebration of your hard work, Geneva’s hard work, and what a woman can do when she wants to. I’m proud to be a part of this, sweetheart, and now, with your sisters, O’Brien, and Geneva’s family—the ones she dared to invite, flying in, too—how grand is this?”

  “You guys are going to make me cry,” Sara says, looking up from her sea of boxes and tissue paper.

  “My mom will get lost on the way to the airport, Sara. Can you help her? Bring them back here. They can give us a hand. I have so much shit to do in the next 24 hours I’m thinking I might go blind.”

  Jessica blubbers, she is talking so fast, but Connie understands everything. Her daughters are staying around the corner at a very sweet boutique hotel; she’ll meet them back at the apartment in two hours; they can help with the packaging, phone calls, opening wine, whatever needs to be done and then they can walk to the store and have dinner across the street. Then Connie stops Jessica.

  “That’s enough,” she says, pushing her daughter back into her chair. “I’m on it. Sara, we leave in ten minutes.”

  And they do, with Sara driving and Connie sitting back in wonderment as they whip past Central Park, join the horn-honking parade of cabs, businessmen and -women and a constant caravan of buses that remind Connie of absolutely nothing that she encounters when she drives in Indiana. Chicago maybe. Indiana never. Sara serenades Connie with her own family tales as they head across the bridge and join a line of cars at the tollbooth, and Connie fades.

  Connie fades from where she is and into the worlds of her other two daughters. Those girls, as she has referred to them for the past ten years with O’Brien, and occasionally with Jessica. Those girls, who managed to finish college, marry fast, have babies and become, so Connie thinks, part of a world that she thought did not often match the rhythms of her own beating heart. A world that, in her mind, revolves mostly in one direction. A world, she once imagined, that would not allow them to travel to big urban wildernesses for the unveiling of their sister’s sex-toy products.

  “Was I wrong?” Connie asks Sara, who can usually pick up on her undisclosed thoughts and who now only imagines the question has something to do with the other daughters, the good girls, the ones with the babies and the lives that are so far south from anything Sara can imagine that she’s actually excited to be meeting them.

  “Something about these two chicks we’re picking up?”

  “I used to wonder where I went wrong because they married and starting throwing out babies so fast, and then I just figured it was their lives, and yet I sometimes imagine it’s because of the divorce, how much I worked, well, everything that I was and did that they did not want to be and do.
”

  “But they did,” Sara answers.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Connie, they both found men they claim to love, they got married, they had babies—they did everything you did, so apparently the divorce and whatever lectures you threw at them about what happened to you bounced through one ear and out the other.”

  “That’s what I told them not to do.”

  “They were kids. What you said didn’t matter. Have you asked them?”

  “They seemed happy. I think they are happy, it’s just that, well, I was hoping they’d be more like Jessica.”

  Sara laughs so loud she snorts and Connie reaches over to grab her a tissue and steers while she blows her nose—still laughing.

  “What’s so funny?” Connie demands.

  “Connie, you can’t have three of them the same. Imagine how crowded the sex-toy industry would be if what you wanted was true?”

  “I just wanted them to know they had choices, that they could be and do anything.”

  “That’s what they seem to be doing,” Sara throws back. “Hey, it’s probably a damn good thing I am coming along with you.”

  But they flew into Connie’s arms screaming as if they had not seen her in years, kissing her face and lips, not letting go of her arms, shouting about how they were in New York, “without the damn kids or men,” and looking as if they were on fire from the inside out.

  “Mom,” Sabrina said, “in a million years did you ever think we’d all be meeting here to go to the sex-toy launch for our sister and your daughter? Did you?”

  “It was something I always prayed for,” Connie said, feeling the skin of her daughters, her babies, the girls she never wants to let go of. “Of course not. It’s more likely we’d all be at a Tupperware Party in Indianapolis.”

  “And Mom, Mom, have you tried any of the stuff she sells?” Macy asks, whisking her hair out of her eyes and then closing them as if she is remembering what happened the last time she used a Diva product. “It’s all so remarkable. If I was not so bound up in my own work and daycare and everything I’d open a store for her in Indianapolis.”