The Sunday List of Dreams (10 page)

And she’s suddenly thinking about sex.

Who wouldn’t, with make-believe penises and whips and chains and clothing that make you want to shudder just looking at them flashing in front of you as you enter Diva’s?

Who
wouldn’t
think about sex?

1.
Stop being afraid.

C
onnie is saying, “Who wouldn’t?” as she pushes open the door to Diva’s with one hand clutching a bag of bagels she picked up at the coffee shop, and a carafe of coffee and some cups in the other, correctly assuming that Jessica has not bothered to install a coffee center in her own store.

“Mother…” Jessica mumbles under her breath, as if this is the first time she’s seen her in years. “You’re back.”

“A snack,” Connie says, holding up the bag. “And some willing arms if you need some help this afternoon.”

Jessica freezes. She’s a rock. Frozen in place. Unable to think. Dumbfounded.

The new kids, Meredith and Kinsey, are in the back room stacking shelves, there are five customers roaming through the store, both phone lines are ringing, and there is a delivery guy pounding on the back door.

“Mom,” Jessica says a little louder, with her teeth clenched, as if someone were pulling the words from her mouth. “You know we sell sex toys here. This is not a hospital emergency room. Sex toys.”

“I’ve figured that out, Jessica,” Connie replies, looking around the store. “It looks like you’re busy. Why don’t you let me help you?”

Jessica feels like a trapped dog. Her mother? Selling sex toys?

“Wait here for two seconds,” she orders sort of politely, and then gets Kinsey to handle the delivery and Meredith to handle the customers. Handling her mother will take half an army, she’s certain of it.

Connie obeys and remembers her promise to try and keep her mouth shut. It is not an easy promise to keep. When Jessica returns and they head into the back room, Connie cannot stop herself. She sets down the coffee and whispers into her daughter’s ear, “You should get some terrific coffee in here. And some Diva cups. People will want to keep shopping while they drink your coffee.”

Jessica looks at her mother as if she has just witnessed a miracle. She’s never seen this woman before. She has no idea who she is.

“You were a nurse, Mother, but maybe there is some carryover into this profession,” Jessica says as she writes down
buy coffeepot and funky coffee,
and adds, “What the hell” to her sentence, almost as if she were speaking to herself. “Set up the coffee out there and let me think for a few minutes. Is that okay, Mom?”

Connie is so happy to be doing something she almost drops the bagels as she turns to maneuver her way through the store. And Jessica watches her mother introduce herself to Kinsey and Meredith, greet two customers, and begin passing out coffee.

Her mother.

Jessica stops and places her right hand on her desk. Her left hand goes to her heart. For an instant a frozen thought parades into her mind, pushing through the debris of her day, the New Orleans fiasco, the 37 things on her “to-do” list, and she is a prisoner. She remembers.

Her parents’ divorce. Her mother working odd shifts as a supervisor. Jessica, 17, who now has her driver’s license and a boyfriend and her own brand-new, almost-adult responsibilities, grows weary with supplementing as her mother’s assistant and tells her mother to go to hell. Her mother. The woman who has packed her lunches, rubbed her back through 47 menstrual cycles, gone up against the inappropriate English teacher, supported the family on wages that frequently seemed criminal given the level of her responsibilities, carried the load when the grandparents were ill, and sacrificed her personal time and any potential relationships because the girls—her three daughters, her life—had to come first.

“All this driving Sabrina and Macy and picking them up and making certain they are where they’re supposed to be is so not fair!” Jessica had screamed. “What about my life, my time, my dreams…what about them? You can go to hell, Mother. I’ve had it.”

Her mother is so wounded by Jessica’s vicious attack that she stumbles against the refrigerator door as if she has been pushed there by the weight of the world.

Her mother’s face. Jessica will never forget her mother’s face, which instantly became an acre of pain, an ocean of torture, a universe of sorrow as she dropped to her knees and wept quietly into her hands.

That was Jessica then, and Jessica now cannot move. A line of anguish cruises through the very veins that rested against the side of her mother’s womb before she was born. Veins that glided through her stomach, and into her own heart and then up through her throat and into her neck and towards the very brain that has occasionally made her selfish, rude and ignorant.

Her mother pauses on the floor all those years ago and lets her anger ride itself out through the front door, into the tiny front yard, and onto the roof of the first car that passed by the house so she could watch it disappear. Then she looked up at her daughter, the girl-woman who looks so much like her that they could, on a really, really good day, pass as sisters, and she let her heart settle so she could say one of the most powerful and poignant things that she has ever spoken.

“You are my dream, baby. Beautiful. Strong. Wise. Sometimes a pain in my ass, but I have held you close and tight and I have let other things go, but never my dream. My dream to see you grow and go and build your own nest of dreams. Get them. Get your goddamn dreams and ride them until you hop on a new one. But never let them go, no matter how much it hurts.”

Jessica takes a cleansing breath, a purging announcement to her lungs, her heart, and especially to her soul that she remembers everything. She remembers how her mother apologized for all the responsibility, for all the empty nights and days when she was not there because she had to work, for the anguish of the divorce, for all the things they could not afford but never, not once, for living her own dream, for wanting to be happy, for knowing she could be happy.

And then Jessica sees Connie move towards the vibrator aisle, raising her hands to touch the flowing fabric as she walks, and then leans in to ask the gorgeous woman who is holding something that looks like a rabbit if she’d like a cup of mocha java while she shops. Jessica watches and she knows now, immediately, before anything else happens or changes, that she needs to tell her mother the real story of why and how Diva’s came to be, the real reason why she finally pulled away, a story that is intimate and a story that desperately needs telling.

First, she orders a trial by fire for her new employees. “My mother and I will be talking back here. Handle everything,” she orders. She then asks Connie to sit, tells her before they can go anyplace else, before they can
really
move forward, Connie needs to hear the true story about the beginning of Diva’s, about the woman Connie once accused of being a bad influence on Jessica, about the girl-turned-woman who is her daughter.

And then Jessica begins and Connie listens, unmoving, barely breathing.

Jessica Franklin Nixon is 19.9 years old the first time she has sex with a man. Well, sort of a man. His name is Ricky, or Rocky, or did he say Ron something, and he’s in her economics class at the university and he is also 19 and they both know Fowler Jackson, the university basketball star from Kentucky who is as famous for his parties as he is for his extreme height and the way he rockets the ball into the net no matter where he is standing or how hungover he is at that exact moment.

Jessica is drunk. Ricky is drunk. Fowler is always drunk. Everyone else is drunk or stoned and a few people in the back room are snorting or eating something and someone mentions that those particular drug freaks have been in the room now for 21 hours. Jessica knows Rocky Ricky is a mistake even before he tries to kiss her in the backseat of his father’s Buick but she does not care. She wants to get this over with. He’s not unattractive. He has not tried to rip anything off her body and she suspects he may also be a virgin and wanting to enter into the secret society of “I did it” before another second passes, and he’s also bright enough to have a condom in just about every pocket.

It’s pathetic from the beginning but she does not stop. She does not stop even as he immediately slumps on top of her and she has to shake him so she can move to pull up her jeans.

She keeps trying. Jessica Nixon is dauntless. She sleeps with five more men and it gets a little better. Ben Jacobsen is the best because she nearly falls in love with him. This helps but even Ben—who must have taken lessons from romance novels because he reads poetry to her, tries unique positions, leaves a rose petal trail at her apartment door, and licks wine off of every inch of her body—does not rouse her to passion in a way that makes her want to crawl through a building to see him naked, have him touch her, let herself slip inside of him in a way that lets her breathe fire at the same time she is a captured sex slave.

During a retreat as part of her woman’s studies class, Jessica, who identifies as a heterosexual but never closes any doors, lets Romney Switala seduce her. It is one of the loveliest weekends of her life. Women know how to please women, Jessica decides, as Romney locks her cabin door and undresses her in a way that makes her feel so sexy and wanted and beautiful that for the first time she cries when she makes love. While Romney, who is a tall, blonde woman who models on the weekends and will eventually become a vascular surgeon, rolls her onto her stomach and touches her,
every
single inch of her, Jessica realizes that this is exactly what she wanted. Intimacy, someone to look at her, someone to touch her, someone to be soft, to focus, to give, to see her—really see her—as a woman, a sexual being, and this is when she cries for the first time. Romney is not selfish but, eventually, during the weekend, Jessica wants her to be. At the retreat, they miss so many meetings they end up having to write three extra papers and explain their behavior, which they do without blushing, or hesitation, or excuses.

And they go on. Not because Jessica is in love or because she desires women but because she feels safe, because she is more sexually satisfied than she has ever been, because she feels desire, because she has this wild line inside of her that started from a place or a person or an event or from an ancient goddess ancestor who says to deny even one part of who she is and wants to be and what she craves would be wrong. Even when Romney asks for more, even when she thinks that maybe Jessica could love her the way she loves Jessica, even when Jessica touches her lover’s cheek and says no without saying a word and feels a surge of tenderness that is as close to deep love as she has ever been.

“But…” Jessica finally tells her. “There is something.”

Romney, who could have any woman or man on campus by turning her head the right way. Romney, who is so smart that Jessica can hear her brain snap and pop like those buzzers that try and kill mosquitoes. Romney, who loves to please Jessica not only physically but also socially and mentally. Romney, who will hold on to her notion that Jessica will one day turn the corner and see another beautiful woman and feel the sag of her heart towards her knees and the quiver in her stomach and the stab of pain from breath that wavers and makes her almost faint on the sidewalk—that Jessica will realize that she was born to love women and come back to find her. Romney will do anything when Jessica says, “But…” Anything at all.

But,
Jessica tells her,
but,
she says, there is just one thing.

“What?” Romney asks her, panting, wondering, pleading. “Anything. What is it, honey?”

“I miss a penis.”

A penis.

Jessica says the word “penis” as if she has a wad of gum in her mouth the size of Georgia. A penis.

Jessica hesitates. She is waiting for Romney to slap her and grab her clothes and take her beautiful self out of the door, out of the apartment complex, out of the state, out of Jessica’s life.

Instead, Romney smiles a slow smile, the sun rising on Christmas morning, sweet smells from the sea all those miles before you see it against the blue Pacific sky, something you want really bad rolling like silk through your fingers, holding the baby for ten minutes and then the lovely feeling of not having to take her home to feed her, bathe her, raise her, send her to college, watch her fall in love with the wrong person.

“A penis.”

“What?” It’s Jessica who asks this time.

Romney smiles.

“Do you hate me?” Jessica asks.

Romney laughs and Jessica is instantly disarmed. She has worked for a long time to convince herself that she did not, could not, really love Romney. She has worked on that thought like a poor woman in a village linking together the broken threads of string to make the socks last just one more winter. Just one more week. One more second.

“I can get a penis,” Romney tells her, clearly in control, knowing that she has this woman she loves for at least another month, maybe longer, before she begins medical school on the other side of the country and Jessica begins her business internship and resumes her hunt for a man—
the
man.

“Get dressed,” Romney orders, slapping Jessica on the ass and strutting through the tiny bedroom to find her own clothes. “And I will get you a penis.”

Jessica is no sexual dunce. That’s what she tells herself as Romney orders her into the car, smiles at her sideways and drives through the center of Madison, Wisconsin, as if the rear tires are on fire. She turns the car towards Lake Mendota and then misses the clutch on her Toyota for the first time that Jessica can remember, and the car stalls in mid-traffic.