by Kris Radish
Until today.
It is April 1 in Parker, Pennsylvania, and everywhere else on Addy’s side of the Equator and Addy thinks that if she did it today, she would have an excuse. She would plow through the garage door in second gear, which she has also imagined during the past twenty-two months, and try hard to make it through the crap and into the backyard. She could blame it on the date. “I was just going to dent it a little and say April Fool’s,” she’d tell Lucky. Lucky, she imagined, would either laugh or rush to check on his favorite bowling ball.
There is also the menopause excuse, which would be a lie because Addy is dancing lightly on the brim of menopause—that joints-aching, two-periods-in-one-month, fifteen-extra-pounds-last-year, occasionally-crying-when-she-looks-at-Mitchell’s-baby-photos place—but not in real menopause, which of course would be all of the above times one thousand. She is thinking of saying it had been a hot flash or a fast-beating heart or the ridiculous urge to shift with her elbow instead of her hand. Lucky, she knew, was terrified of the word “menopause.” Simply to say it out loud might just be enough to throw him into a state of forgiveness.
It is 6:48 P.M. and Addy has plunged into the place of wanting so badly that she has her hand on the gearshift and her mind set on ramming through the door. Addy is exhausted from the pre–spring break tests, from her college son’s absent but seemingly ever-present presence, from a marriage that has not so suddenly turned into something that feels and looks and tastes more like a business partnership that a union of two people in love and lust forever and ever.
Sitting in the car, with the tires hovering over the long cracks in the asphalt driveway, Addy this very moment wants lots of things.
She wants to ride a pony and to sleep in.
She wants to do tequila shots with her sister in Mexico.
She wants to spend the rest of Mitchell’s college money on a total house makeover.
She wants to go to Italy before she needs to wear trifocals, which is one focal away.
She wants Lucky to initiate a conversation that has nothing to do with “stuff” and everything to do with “them.”
She wants to come home, swing open the garage door, and pull her car inside.
She wants to lie in bed naked with all the magazines and books and television clickers on the floor and talk, just talk, with Lucky, just Lucky, for hours and hours and hours.
She wants to make people laugh—really, really hard and for a very long time.
Addy has one hand on the steering wheel and the other on the gearshift and the car is in first gear. She is trying to decide if she should back up and start the garage-door-bashing procedure from the backside of the curb or from where she is right this moment. Her mind is as light as a third-grade song. She pauses to place her right hand over her heart because she is surprised she is so calm, so ready, so eager. And when she feels her heart beating softly, true, regular, and as it always has, she decides that she would like to back up about twenty-five feet, shift into second, and then hit the door with an intoxicating burst of speed.
Addy turns to make certain an unseen object has not bounced into the driveway while she has been idling at the lip of her decision. As she turns, she feels the seat next to her under her right hand, notices the last glow of an early spring sunset between the two houses at the end of the cul-de-sac, thinks that her training class at the Y is paying off because her neck no longer aches when she twists sideways, and then she stops at the back end of the basketball hoop.
Addy revs the Toyota. She takes in a huge breath, a long-remembered yoga movement, and she closes her eyes.
Closes her eyes to remember the moment, the months of imagining, the abyss she must now cross to take her someplace, anyplace, through the broad barriers of a life that is a garage, a receptacle for dumpage and stagnation, and just as she raises her head and shifts, Lucky is there.
Lucky Lucky.
His head is dipping towards her as if it is a ball that has just passed through the bottom of the ragged edges of the almost-abandoned basketball net.
Addy can feel her heart bounce from her chest, crash through the windshield, and slam against the very garage door that she had hoped to have pushed apart—now.
“Gezus, Addy, I’ve been waiting for you for like an hour,” Lucky shouts, pulling open her car door.
“What?” she asks him, unable to move, wondering already when she will be able to drive through the door now that her plan has been interrupted.
“Honey, you are not going to believe this.”
“Try me.”
“Ready?”
“Yes,” Addy yells. “YES.”
“We’re going to Costa Rica.”
“What?”
“I won the company sales incentive prize.”
“You’re kidding?”
“No. Costa Rica. Do you teach that in third grade?”
Addy slowly shifts the car into park, sets the brake, turns the key into the off position, shuts off the lights, and swings her legs out of the car right in between Lucky’s legs.
“Yes,” she says, as she gets up and follows Lucky into the house.
And as she passes the garage door she touches it lightly like lovers touch when they don’t want anyone else to see.
What I should have said to Addy…
Man oh man. I practiced for like an hour on how to tell her about the trip but then when the car pulled up and I saw her just sitting there, doing who the hell knows what women do when they sit in a car and stare, I lost it.
“Lucky,” she would have said if I had told her that the thought just disappeared into some black hole behind my eyebrows, which she has been after me to trim for God’s sake, men in Parker do not trim their eyebrows, “Write it down.”
But I didn’t.
Now I remember when it’s too late. Which is pretty much how my system has been running for a while now.
“Honey,” I wanted to say, “I never told you this because I wanted it to be a surprise but some of those nights when you thought I was out farting around I was working the phones in my office because I wanted to win this trip…for you.”
There was more.
I wanted to see her walking down the beach in her bathing suit and then have one of those dinners right in the sand by the water for just two people with champagne and watch her read for about five hundred hours in a row by the pool, because she’d rather read than eat, but I got so excited when she pulled up and then I got impatient, which is another one of my many life curses, and I just ran outside and told her.
And what I really should have said to Addy disappeared.
THE SUNDAY LIST OF DREAMS
A Bantam Book / February 2007
Published by Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
All rights reserved
Copyright © 2007 by Kris Radish
Bantam Books and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Radish, Kris.
The sunday list of dreams / Kris Radish.
p. cm.
1. Self-actualization (Psychology)—Fiction. 2. Mothers and daughters—Fiction. 3. Lists—Fiction. 4. Dreams—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3618.A35S86 2007
813’.6—dc22
2006024428
www.bantamdell.com
eISBN: 978-0-553-90343-0
v3.0
