The Sunday List of Dreams (13 page)

Connie gasped, dropped her head and was quiet for a few seconds. Virginal, she was thinking, might exactly be the correct word to describe her. And that realization made her want to roll backwards and leap right out of the window and go hide someplace where no one would discover her deep, dark, not-so-wild sexual past.

“Kim—” Connie began, trying hard to look into her friend’s eyes, but Kim interrupted her.

“Connie, you’re not embarrassed? You’re not
shy
?” Kim asked, more than a little shocked that the head nurse, the wild leader of her unit, the woman who would not hesitate to slap a doctor upside the head, threaten a nurses’ walkout, who had personally tackled more than a handful of nutso patients, counseled gaggles of nurses and comforted two-plus decades of grieving relatives, patients and the professionals who could not save them was embarrassed about her not so sexually exciting past.

“Yes,” Connie admitted, softly.

The sassy, liberated, single, 31-year-old Kim, who didn’t so much date as sleep around, was obviously young enough to be Connie’s daughter and that meant, in the part of Connie’s mind that screamed “mother,” that her own three daughters could be as sexually liberated and educated as Kim. This idea floated around right next to her embarrassment, near what she now realized must seem like the hurried realities of her introverted, limited, and terribly uneducated sex life. “I’m a nurse, for crissakes,” Connie told herself. “Nurses are supposed to be physically savvy, worldly, sexually aware, a step ahead of the next societal trend, we’re supposed to know things—lots of things….”

Connie Franklin’s first kiss was a peck on the lips when she was 17.3 years old and her first and only prom date, Hank Martinelli, who almost had to stand on his toes to reach her lips, kissed her for two seconds and then ran to his car so fast he dropped his keys, banged his head on the window, fell into the seat and let his head drop onto the horn, which was not a really good thing in her neighborhood. It was a neighborhood riddled with large men who would be perfectly happy if their daughters never dated, kissed, or touched someone of the male species at 2:15
A.M
.—or ever, for that matter.

A year later—just before she met husband-to-be Roger Nixon—she had what at the time she thought was a wild evening with a guy who most likely had a name but after three shots of tequila, four beers and her first taste of marijuana there was no way in hell Connie could ever remember what it might have been. Mr. Smooth Move “let’s go into the bushes,” was, from what she could remember, adept at removing a blouse, a bra, one pair of cutoff shorts, a t-shirt and finally her lovely light blue cotton underwear—that honest-to-God were stitched in pink with the word
Thursday
. Connie Franklin’s first total sexual encounter left her with pine needles stuck up and down her legs, bird shit in her hair, the immediate feeling that she could have handed him a tight glove and he would never have noticed the difference, and a stoned hangover that carried her from living hell to purgatory and then back to the light of the living over the course of three entire days.

Then came Roger Robert Nixon.

Connie Franklin was barely into her second semester of college when Roger walked past her on the way to a math class as part of his policeman’s training program that was associated with the city of Indianapolis and then, for some unknown reason, he stopped right in front of her, turned sideways, looked at her and declared, “God, you are gorgeous.”

That single, luscious, brilliant moment could have been as great as half the sex she ever had in her entire life. Connie felt her knees soften, her uterus shift, her breasts swell, her heart stop, drop, and roll right in front of this policeman-to-be and then her heart slowed so quickly that she felt dizzy.

Connie wanted to throw him down right there and dip her entire body inside of his blue eyes, run her hands through his Germanic blonde hair, and straddle him like a racehorse until the cops showed up. Lust. It was such pure lust and such a new sensation that Connie wondered for days if someone hadn’t slipped some kind of narcotic drug into her Coke during her English seminar break. But when she saw Roger two days later and he asked her if she felt the same way as he did and he took her to his ratty apartment on their first date, kissed her hungrily and then threw her down on his bed—which was a piece of foam rubber that he had scavenged from behind a couch factory—she confused her lust, her primal sexual urges, a woman’s right to own the lines that connect her mind to her breasts and to every single inch of skin, every blood vessel, every muscle, every cavity below her waist—for love.

And that was it.

Lust for Roger Robert Nixon.

Sort of.

There were wild nights here and there after they’d had a few bottles of wine or when one of Roger’s buddies would say something like, “I took my wife to a motel this weekend and I wish we could move into the damned place. It’s amazing what something like that will do to loosen up a woman.” And then Roger would buy flowers, pull back the covers, and quickly forget that some of the guys told him sex could actually last for hours and hours and not just minutes and minutes.

Romance, Roger, Connie wanted to say.

Seduction, Roger, Connie wanted to say.

Foreplay, Roger, Connie wanted to say.

And she would have. Connie would have said it.

Then, of course, Connie got pregnant. Connie got pregnant three times.

“And, honest to God, Kim, that was pretty much it,” she confessed in such a rush of words that Kim almost missed what she was saying. “That was
it
.”

“Oh, you poor baby,” Kim moaned. “That was it? Tell me you’re lying. Tell me that the woman I hold up as a goddess, a woman that I revere as the model for all liberated women who do not take shit, has never really let go in the bedroom? Tell me my entire life is not a lie. Tell me, Connie. I’m begging you. Please tell me you are not my mother, who I think had sex twice, got her kids, and then sewed something very useful shut.”

And Connie went on to explain, while the tea got cold and just outside their little hideaway they could hear the next shift grumbling about the full load of patients, that shit happens. Shit happens, Kim. Like you fall in lust, and then work your ass off to make it seem like love, and then life does not stop and large hunks of the lust break loose very quickly. You have a baby and you never want a man to frigging touch you again. You have to finish school and get your nursing degree to help support the baby and then before you can even step into your new white nylons and spongy nurse shoes, you miss a period from having sex, goddamned sex, and then you work all those months while your feet swell and your mother yells at you for not quitting your job and your husband occasionally wants to get frisky and you really want to cut off his wiener with a dull hatchet. Then you get tired, Kim. You’re a beautiful, young, liberated woman who lives in a different time and place and space than I did, even though the media makes it seem like every woman over the age of 50 screwed her brains out and knows how to have orgasms while brushing her teeth and wearing a jogging suit or simply breathing.

Not.

You get tired.

And then this thing happens where he slips over from wanting to bounce on you every 15 seconds to sleeping in the chair every single time he sits down, and you notice that his hair is falling out along the edges just a few inches from his big hairy eyebrows, and he doesn’t move as fast and he doesn’t want to play baseball any longer. He’s done. He’s done unless you say, “Let’s go fishing.” His little pee-pee has reached its peak and those three greatest peaks are now entrenched in grade school and middle school, Girl Scouts, soccer, band practice, basketball, dance classes, and birthday parties for every goddamned kid this side of the Mississippi and you do not have time to go to the bathroom let alone think of ways to have a grand romp in the hay—or the bedroom or any room at all.

And then you pick up a
Seventeen
magazine or God help you,
Cosmo,
or something your daughter leaves under her stack of unwashed clothes, and you see that your own sexual peak could be years away and that you are supposed to be luring men into your stylish boudoir and making love as if there is an aphrodisiac hooked to your stretched-out brassiere.

Sometimes though, Kim, you actually do feel sexy. Just for a second or two, or maybe even an entire minute, when you look into the mirror and you see your grandma’s beautiful fine skin that will wrinkle only about 15 seconds before you die. You see that your lovely breasts that were small in high school have now filled out and will most likely never descend more than a few centimeters, you are a nurse who never sits down and there is not an inch of fat on your thighs, and when you touch your own breasts you close your eyes and wonder what it would be like to have someone else touch them in every damn way they can. Someone who is not the man snoring on the chair.

“But,” Kim interrupted. “There is so much stuff—books and toys and movies…. You didn’t do
anything
?”

“Kim, Kim, Kim, oh, the blessed innocence of the childless, unmarried, hot women of this decade,” Connie told her, raising her head and feeling a rising tide of missing, the loss of something so unfamiliar to her she cannot bear to find a name for it. “There is and was never time for that. Thinking about sex was so low on the list I’d need bifocals just to see it. Roger and I had sex twice the year before we divorced. Twice.”

“Holy shit,” Kim mumbled. “I want to cry. I just can’t imagine living without it.”

Connie thought about it with John, her second date in the eight-year span since she had divorced Roger. She liked John. He was kind, handsome, and frisky, but he was a gentleman, as her mother would have said, six years older than she was, widowed…and extremely impotent as she was about to discover.

First they met for dinner at the Starlight in a suburb of Chicago where John had rented a hotel suite and decked it out with champagne, flowers, three cards placed strategically in every room, a beautiful hand-crafted gold bracelet, and every single thing that might scream romance except his very own libido.

Connie, who had not taken her clothes off in front of anyone for almost nine years but her pal O’Brien’s dog, Reckless, a lively Irish setter when she dog-sat, was beyond devastated. John was humiliated. He confessed that he had tried everything including Viagra, had no idea how to sexually please her without a penis, and left Connie with his Visa card, a sobbing apology and the words, “It’s not your fault.”

Connie did not cry. She drank the champagne and took her fingernails, the ones she had painted a light shade of mellow red and let grow just a bit so she could run them down the sides of John’s glorious back, and used them instead to dig an invisible trench around anything that even might appear or taste or smell or look or feel like lust or sex. Goddamned sex.

“I don’t care anymore,” she told herself for the next six hours in that hotel room, never sleeping, watching some old stupid-ass reruns, refusing to cry as she played with the bracelet that John had hooked onto her left wrist when she had walked into the bedroom after putting on a long silk robe that she knew matched her dark blue eyes. A robe that made her feel beautiful, sexy, ready to inhale every inch of John. Simply—ready to make love.

Kim could have helped her reach at least some sexual plateau but then Kim left the hospital because she was sick of cold weather, and Connie lost her sexual muse.

And then college, romantic and career crises erupted times three with Jessica, Sabrina and Macy.

And then Roger got remarried.

And then Connie got promoted.

And then the years stumbled over themselves.

They stumbled into what Connie would eventually tell her granddaughter was a “quiet pause of personal and physical reflection” and then laugh and say honestly that she had yet to discover a piece of herself, a buried third arm, her own natural and glorious yearning for sexual pleasure and release that every woman deserves.

Connie, the smart, sassy, attractive divorced woman from Cyprus, Indiana, who should have known better, who could have talked to a hundred friends, fifty professionals, her own educated and sometimes—at least before they were married—promiscuous daughters, her best friend Frannie O’Brien, and any high school or college girl/woman within a fifty mile radius—did not.

She did not.

Connie Franklin Nixon, the daughter of a hardworking carpenter and a grade-school secretary, a woman who could seize the reins of her own life in almost every imaginable arena, rolled over that night in the suburban Chicago hotel that had a sweeping view of a city that she loved, and she gave up.

And she never told a damn soul.

Not one.

Until this moment on the highway with her daughter quietly crying behind her hands, the heat from the southern landscape rising between them, and a confession like nothing she ever imagined when she wrote down #7 on her list of dreams.

T
he scent of water—fleshy, rich and hot—is a dark wave of narcotic sensuality that washes over Connie Franklin Nixon the moment she drifts off the blazing hot spring Louisiana freeway with her boyfriend of two days, Commissioner Michael Dennis.

Connie is riding in a blue convertible with the Burt Reynolds twin. Her hair is too short to blow in the wind but she can feel its recently dyed edges dance just a little like a baby ballerina’s. She’s listening to Michael’s life story while she keeps peeking into the side mirror to make certain she’s alive and hasn’t been stabbed to death by her daughter who is convinced her mother is just this side of nuts to be heading out to a swamp with a man who lured them to the Deep South because he is afraid of a political institution he’s trying to bust like a wild teenager from a country farm.

Michael is taking her to the bayou, his bayou. He closes his eyes when he says the word “bayou” as if he’s just had a sip of the most exquisite Scotch ever produced this side of heaven. “I was raised in the backwater,” he told her. “My God, Connie, it’s a treasure chest of life and love that few people ever get to see or experience.” He’s showing her the other side of New Orleans, he says, the one that stretches and meanders and saunters its way for hundreds and hundreds of miles through parts of Louisiana that have yet to see the bottom of a human foot and he’s so sincere and real and interested in her that Connie wants to throw him down and rip off his shirt every single time she looks at him.

Connie has no idea what to do with the rebirth of this feeling, with the easy way she said “yes” when Michael asked her if she wanted to see his world, and with the tentative—make that malicious—manner in which her daughter has reacted to the fact that her mother may have anything beyond maternal instincts, feelings, urges and drives.

The newly launched relationship with Jessica has hit a brick wall, so Connie has decided to walk around the wall and let it rest, at least for one day. The temptation of Burt and a swamp was too much, too delicious, too intoxicating to ignore and even that astounds Connie. “What is happening to me?” she keeps asking herself.

“Some people think I’m a slick shyster,” the commissioner had explained in the parking lot of the manufacturing plant as he tried to convince her to head south with him for just part of a day so he could show her his boyhood neighborhood—a place, he explained, where the simple magic of basic survival blended with a bit of wildlife, a touch of swamp-water moonshine, and an uncle who had a singing voice that sounded like heaven.

Connie had imagined for about 2.3 seconds what it might be like to be back home in Cyprus—simply fingering her list of dreams and not actually doing anything about it. She’d be packing boxes, watching 19 more movies, calling out for a veggie pizza with extra green olives, taking 10 more calls from the nurses who missed her, and then driving her car to the sandy ledge of her favorite Lake Michigan cliff for the 200th goddamn time—and she said, “Yes, Commissioner, sir,” with barely a breath to separate those three words.

But then there is the first drink before noon. Way, way before noon.

“Maybe I am nuts,” she tells herself as Michael pulls into a small parking lot at a place that has a huge sign about as big as an operating room in Indiana that says F
ROZEN
D
RINKS.

“Connie, I want you to stay calm now, but this is a part of New Orleans just as much as Bourbon Street and those gators we’re about to see,” Michael tells her. “My mama raised a polite boy and don’t think I am trying to get you liquored up so I can take advantage of your sweet northern naïveté, darlin’, but this is a drive-thru daiquiri store and you have to experience this.”

“You pig,” Connie says, laughing. “Drive-thru drinks? Drinks with booze? Does this have anything to do with that lively tour yesterday?” And then she remembers where she is, what it took to get her there and how being in the car with an almost unknown man, a daughter waiting to tear her into shreds, and a list that has suddenly gone from one number to another way too fast, and she turns to Michael and says, “Get me a large, please.”

Michael laughs so loud and long that Connie wonders if she should drive or get out to make certain he is okay. And just the mere mention of the tour of the factory makes her start laughing, too, so that they are both doubled over and look as if they are sick.

The tour was a blessed event that took them through the research department, to the moldings wing, and out into the heart of the factory where men and women worked to build and mold and then probably pray over the vibrators, dildos, plugs, and an assortment of attachments that would eventually make their way to the Diva warehouse and then to the store in New York City. The tour, directed by Justin and assisted by one Jessica Franklin Nixon, was a serious affair that pretty much launched the bayou rendezvous of two middle-aged people, both divorced grandparents who had at one point in their lives thought they had seen and done everything—but that was before what they were now calling the DT—dildo tour.

“My favorite part of the DT was when Justin held up The Cowgirl and proudly explained that it was a Diva signature product designed exclusively for my daughter’s company and that she had an entire line in the works to honor every wonderful profession occupied by women,” Connie recalled as she and Michael sipped their slushy, sugar-filled drinks out of cups the size of bird feeders. “Michael, I’m a nurse for God’s sake and I’ve seen just about, let me repeat that,
just about
everything. But this, this tour with you and my daughter and Justin and all those, those—”

“Sex toys, darlin’,” Michael said, interrupting her with what Connie thinks is a sexy southern twang. “They are sex toys. Don’t be afraid to say it.”

“You kill me, Michael,” Connie says, laughing. “You absolutely kill me. You know we thought you were going to be a royal asshole. And here we are boozing it up on the way to the bayou.”

At first Connie could not explain her attraction to Michael, beyond the immediate physical pull she felt from seeing any handsome man. The way he touched her arm, paid attention to her, the way he smelled, and what he wore, and even the damn way he talked made her want to stand next to him and pant. Had this ever happened before? Had she ever before let herself feel this way? Could she jump over the vicious looks of her daughter and just have a day with a handsome man who made her feel rich, attractive—and almost beautiful, sweet and fine?

The answer came following a very long conversation, while she and Michael leaned against boxes in the storage room and Jessica and Justin, a seemingly perfect anal and business-minded couple, discussed shipping procedures, labeling, and the glorious differences in communications systems, hiring procedures, and the future of independent and risqué enterprise.

The facts in Connie’s mind were hard to ignore. Commissioner Michael Dennis is nice, she told herself—working hard, she will eventually admit, so he can usher her off to some backwater wonderland. He’s damn nice. He’s witty, funny, and fierce in his love for this land where his roots are so deep that they meet the rising tides at the end of the Mississippi. He meant no harm, he told her, in giving her daughter such a difficult time with the factory.

His first wife had left him for another man 22 years before. He left his second after she took to tending bar at one of their restaurants, fell in love with Jack Daniels, Ms. Smirnoff and Bloody Mary, and refused his offers, his pleadings, his cries that she admit herself to one of the best treatment centers in the country. He has two kids, both adults now with their own babies, but he raised them and was glowingly proud of their successes. Overwhelmed by his honesty, Connie said, yes, yes, Michael, show me the swamps and let’s have us a day.

Before that happened, however, Connie had to endure a fight with lovely Jessica. Alas, she’d thought Jessica would be jubilant about the dildo production victory, the news that her breakthrough products were about to be released from captivity in Louisiana and sent out to the willing and waiting masses, the oh-so-very-tiny interruption of her mighty Diva development plan, the nice commissioner, but she leapt off the other side of the bridge instead and wailed about the injustice of politics that was a tarnished blade of the past. A man who played a game she refused to play. A county that allowed her to make her dildos but also made her want to vomit.

“Shut up,” Connie finally told Jessica as they parked the car and walked into their hotel and Connie found herself wondering how in the hell this raging creature had come out of her. “The world is not some book you read in school, sweetheart. You want to exist and survive and flourish, then sometimes you have to play the game the way the guy in charge says you play the game.”

Jessica, spunky and not so forgiving, retorted that she wanted to make her own rules and play her own game. Their conversation lingered and rose and fell over dinner at a restaurant just two blocks away that made Connie’s heart swell because the food tasted as exquisite as the restaurant looked. Everything hot. Everything spicy. Everything fun. Not that she could actually enjoy it with Jessica breathing down her neck like the heat in a bottle of voodoo hot sauce.

“And running off to the swamp with this guy, Mother,” Jessica scolded, dipping her head while she looked at the two shrimp that were left on her plate. “I never thought you’d do something like this. I just don’t get it.”

Connie paused. She looked at the long part that ran all the way from the front of her daughter’s blonde head to the back and realized that she had most likely created the permanent line because she had kept Jessica’s hair parted and in braids for most of the first 11 years of her life.
So much of what I did, what you saw, is who you are now,
Connie thought before she said anything.
“Like mother, like daughter” is very true.

“You poor thing,” she said instead.

Jessica looked up at her with wide eyes and a stunned expression. “Don’t you think it’s possible that we barely know each other, Jessica?” Connie asked, instead of launching into some long discussion about childhood angst, religion-induced guilt, and the backwards glances everyone seems to make to determine if a decision, a thought, a gesture, a way of life had really been the correct path to choose. There was not, Connie decided, enough time or wine to handle
that
particular long discussion in one short evening.

“You’re my mother, of course I know who you are,” Jessica acknowledged, pushing back in her chair as if she was ready to jump up and launch into a physical fight at the very mention of one wrong word.

“Oh, Jessica,” Connie sighed, exhausted from trying to hold back. “Are you ten years old? I’m not
just
your mother. I am a woman, a friend, I’ve been someone’s lover, I’m a nurse, and—dammit—I’m starting the rest of my damn life.”

Jessica gaped at her as if she had just announced she was going to have a sex-change operation in the middle of the restaurant right after dessert.

“I’m just going to spend part of a day with a nice man,” Connie said, backing off from a deep and very passionate desire to whack her oldest daughter upside the head in what would be the girl’s first physical assault of her life from her mother. “Let’s just call it living. I’m
living,
Jessica.”

“Mom, you are a dreamer,” Jessica said, looking disgusted.

Oh, baby, if you only knew,
Connie said to herself, thinking about her list of dreams, the years she saw spanned out in front of her like Tarot cards, like the choice of direction she had come to know that even uptight little Jessica Franklin Nixon had made in her own life. And she began wondering what Jessica’s list of dreams might contain—soft strains of hope and laughter? Or the pull of regret, of reconciliation, of yearning?

The women called a truce after that because Connie was afraid she truly might flip out and because Jessica was exhausted from what was obviously her second passion in life these days—worrying—and together they walked back through the terribly lively streets and to the hotel with Connie managing to say, “Tomorrow night we are going out—I mean
REALLY
going out—so get your work done and when I get back from the swamp you and I are going to see the French Quarter. I am not going to sleep here without exploring every street. So don’t lift any heavy sex toys or you will be too tired in the morning.”

That was, Connie was thinking as Michael pulled out of the liquor barn with a Jamaican Red slushy in one hand and drove back onto the state highway, if she ever came home from the swamp….

The morning drink buzzed through Connie’s veins as if she had inhaled an illegal substance. Michael reassured her that he could handle the convertible, drink slowly, and get them to the swamp safely. “I’ve been doing this since I was 14 years old,” he said, smiling, and with total confidence. Connie believed him. She knew she would believe anything he told her. “The car flies.”
Great.
“We are never coming out of the bayou.”
Terrific.
“Sixteen swamp rats will meet us with torches and take us to an underground cavern that leads to a magic kingdom.”
Sign me up.