The Sunday List of Dreams (3 page)

3.
Get rid of SHIT. Start with the garage.

T
he list.
The well-worn book of Connie’s dreams and thoughts and wishes that she has worked and reworked for the past 30 years. A scratched-up, tatter-edged, brown leather-bound notebook that has been Connie’s Sunday salvation before, during, and after her attendance at the traditional religious gatherings that she abandoned about the same time as she abandoned her marriage. The list was and remains Connie Nixon’s Prozac. Her unending bottle of champagne. Her escape. Her salvation. Her daily life raft. Her way to live in the present, to survive every part of the reality of now, and throw her climbing rope towards the future.

The list of dreams, as O’Brien has taken to calling it.

The little brown book fits into Connie’s hand like a favorite glove, molded into her palm, an extension of her arm, her heart, the invisible paths of her mind and the winding road of her soul that has changed directions, traveled through rough terrain and clicked into gear time and time again. The ride of her life, most days, is a challenge of accomplishment, survival, change, and the hard-earned right to pace herself however she wants—slow, fast or totally in neutral, idling however she wants to idle.

“Maybe I really am finished writing in this book,” Connie says aloud as she picks the list up from the ancient rocking chair and walks down the hall and back towards her friend. No more Sunday night musings, no quiet time on the chair or burrowed into her bed with her precious list like a frozen dog, no throwing her imagination into overdrive, no seemingly insane dreams and then wondering when she will actually get to them. And while she walks, the book resting in her hand as if it were a delicate heirloom, the house serenades her.

“The queen has arrived,” Connie shouts to the kitchen, the talking house, and her pal O’Brien.

“Sit and drink some royal wine, my darling,” O’Brien tells her, patting the dining room chair. “Let us discuss The Book of Lists and the grand noise that, I do confess, needs addressing in a professional manner.”

Professional manner, she begins explaining to her friend, because in the back of her own mind she has the wisp of a memory that reminds her of Connie’s talking-house story. A woman or a family or an entire apartment complex, O’Brien tries to remember, who also heard a house talking and the noise ended up being some kind of freak electrical problem that could have blown the entire place to hell and back again if they had ignored it and not called in the noise busters.

“Really?” Connie asks. “Are you making this up?”

“Nope,” Frannie responds, looking around the house as if she is frightened by the mere sight of the place. “I think we should call the Irishman. Really. He’ll check the wires, and anything else you can use a screwdriver on, and he can always call his friend Al, the electrician. He’s into us for about five grand. He’ll come running.”

“Can we wait a little bit longer and sit inside the serenade, just you and I, for maybe an hour or so? It’s weird but I have this goofy notion that the house is speaking to me.”

“Maybe it’s your list,” O’Brien tells her. “Your list telling you to hurry up or slow down or to include your best friend in these adventures.”

Adventures, Connie admonishes her, is hardly what they are called.
Dreams,
she emphasizes, saying the word just a little too loud, as if it had been stuck in her throat and had suddenly pried itself loose. “They are dreams. Wild dreams, O’Brien…”

“Dreams can be adventures,” O’Brien fires back. “Just simmer down, drink some wine, and tell me the story one more time before we call Mr. Husband and check this out. I am worried, you know.”

Worried,
Connie thinks.
Worried
is surely not the word she associates with Frannie O’Brien—the wild poker-playing black woman who has melted the hearts of grown men and savage patients, and the snarly attitudes of so many other human beings it’s impossible to remember half of them. Frannie O’Brien who helped her waltz her three daughters into adulthood, who helped her learn how to live alone. Frannie, who kicked her in the rear end when she slowed down or whined. Frannie O’Brien who sat with her during her father’s funeral and helped her direct the dismantling of the family home in North Chicago. Frannie at funerals and weddings and through one crisis after another at work. Frannie laughing her way up the front sidewalk, walking with her through twenty summers at Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, bravely helping her set up the tent each one of those twenty summers so they could camp out and her girls and Frannie’s boys could wake to the sound of waves. And Frannie’s “in your face” laugh, the one that erupts like a cap under pressure and sounds like a machine gun inside of a metal barrel. O’Brien’s tears, the size of golf balls, that are not plentiful but arrive to celebrate passion and loss and grieving and love during moments that are sweet and true—the heartache of losing her own mother; the patients who cannot seem to go on no matter what O’Brien and her doctors do; those burly sons, Ryan and Peter, who still ask their mama to sing to them and cook them lasagna, chicken, and cinnamon rolls when they cruise in from their lives in San Francisco and Chicago; her Achilles’ heel—a temper that flares like a rocket and can annihilate men bigger than the running backs on her favorite and occasionally awful and then suddenly brilliant football team, the Chicago Bears; that remarkable well of courage that allows her to walk through the halls of the psych unit as if she can cure the blind and heal the lame and soothe the fears and worries and terrors of every single person who has ever had to take shelter in its facilities.

O’Brien, who knows that Connie, in spite of her own often swaggering demeanor, is terrified of living her dreams, of what she might discover, of who she might become, of where the list she has been making might take her.

“Focus,” O’Brien tells her, snapping her fingers and throwing her legs up onto the table. “The list.”

The list.

Connie closes her eyes and pushes through the tangled mass of memories that are much dimmer towards the back, where the list was born. Years ago. A night before the first baby. A Sunday night, home alone. House dark. Sitting in the same rocking chair that is now about to fall into 45 pieces in her bedroom. A one-bedroom apartment only blocks from where she has lived ever since. Terrified out of her mind because of what she knows as a nurse about having a baby. Husband working second shift as a patrolman. Three years into her job as a hospital nurse. No mother. No Frannie O’Brien. No true friends since the move from Chicago and the university and the closeness of her now scattered family.

“Gnawing at your leash,” her sister Kimberly told her when she would call crying, lonely, scared. Kimberly with three kids in five years, a husband with an exploding career at IBM in Rochester, Minnesota, and no time for any sympathy for a baby sister who had a tendency to “be too liberal and want it all.”

“Up yours,” Connie told her sister, whose next bit of advice that night was to tell her, “This is just how it is.” Their relationship never swayed from that point and when Kimberly’s husband took off one miserably cold winter day when they had three kids in high school at the same time and that darling little oops baby in fourth grade, Connie almost bit a hole in her lip to keep from saying, “He must have been gnawing on that leash a
really
long time.”

Frannie sits silently through the telling of this story. She has heard it only twice. Once when two of Connie’s daughters were home just last year, as Connie was beginning her retirement plans. Connie’s youngest two daughters—Sabrina, 27, the suburban Chicago mom, and the baby, Macy, 25, a “way too young” married mom herself who refused to work, lived in Indianapolis with her graduate student husband, and who had made a hobby out of criticizing her mother—had come to visit for the weekend. The impromptu gathering did not include their older sister Jessica, who never even returned a phone call asking if there was any way she might make it home for two days. Connie and Frannie had huddled in Connie’s bedroom, listening to Sabrina and Macy’s voices rumble through the tiny house, and that night, while her daughters caught up, Connie shared the story of the list. And again six months ago, during a long quiet weekend when the Irish husband was out of town and Connie and Frannie had a slumber party.

The telling of its creation sounded powerful and beyond poignant but it was that night, nine months pregnant and rocking alone, wondering how the course of her life had veered so far to one side, afraid, angry and wanting to stop the forward movement of time, to push it in a new direction, that Connie Nixon claimed the right to create her list. She rocked and wrote and as she did so she placed her life—all the hard parts, the giving, the wanting, the sacrifice, mistakes, unspoken words, inappropriate reactions, lost chances, expected behaviors—every single thing that she regretted, into a deep cave that was temporarily inaccessible from her position on the chair.

And she rocked and the only thing she took with her on her rocking chair voyage was a brown leather notebook, a pen, and every dream she could capture. Connie wrote until her ankles, already the size of large, ripe tomatoes, swelled another inch. She wrote until her back tingled and her baby shifted so that her weight was directly on top of Connie’s already minimized bladder. Sometimes, during her two-hour dream ride, she closed her eyes and imagined that she was doing exactly what she wrote about. Some things simple, some complicated, some hilarious, some selfish, some just an exercise in physical, joyful abandonment.

Sleeping in without an alarm clock.

Never cooking dinner at the exact same time every single day ever again.

Having the entire bed to myself.

Moving into a real house with a backyard.

Having the perfect baby.

Sometimes one idea covered an entire page and included wild drawings, scraps of food, drops of wine, milk or tea. Sometimes a page just contained one word—
“sleep”
or
“exercise”
—and sometimes it detailed in precise form how something would happen—
“Sleep in very late. Walk through the house without stepping on anything and notice immediately that a maid has been in to clean the entire place—
TOP
to
BOTTOM
.”

Connie Nixon kept the book for a long time in a drawer that no one else bothered to open. Sometimes, when her one baby had turned into two, and then two became three, and when she realized that the burdens of married life, because of her husband’s rotating police work schedule and his addiction to fishing, would keep the division of family labor tilted towards her side of the ledger, she would simply open the drawer and touch the brown book, as a lover would touch the arm of a partner in passing, and then keep going.

And there were always Sundays.

The only day of the week, at first, when she reserved a small space of time, sometimes only fifteen minutes, when she could fall into her own dreams, see what they looked like when they turned into words and imagine the reality of what she would do someday when they danced to life. And the list changed as her life and needs and own direction changed.

My own bathroom.

One lesbian daughter so I do not have to worry about boys ever again.

Make that two lesbian daughters.

A trip to New York City.

A convertible the color of Paul Newman’s eyes in
The Hustler.

A place to be alone where no one can find me.

At least one of my daughters to be my friend, my real friend, someday.

Sometimes, when the house was a crowded maze of kids and friends, Connie would spend an hour in her bedroom and write only one item for the list. Sometimes she would doze off and wake up hours later to realize that no one had died, the house had not burnt down, the fish were still biting and her daughters were figuring out how to live one moment, and another one and the one after that, without her. There were weeks when she could not retreat into the bedroom and work on her list—work schedules, kid schedules, exhaustion, a vacation, or someone was ill. And there was the period of time before, during, and after the divorce when the tone of the list changed to reflect loss, yearning and a sweet desire for simplicity.

One day without yelling.

A maid.

Someone else to drive the two girls who do not have driver’s licenses to the three thousand places they need to be every single damn week.

Just one daughter telling me that she has decided to remain a virgin and dedicate her life to saving orphans, the sick, lame, and poor of the world.

Someone to say “sorry”—so I don’t have to.

O’Brien smiles while Connie tells her this part of the list story because she remembers each one of the dreams. She remembers because Connie would talk incessantly about what she wanted, how she was counting the days until the divorce was finalized, as if something magical would happen at the very moment the judge ruled that the marriage had been irrevocably broken, pounded the gavel and sent the newly divorced couple on their separate ways. Nurse Nixon, she also recalls without saying so, was exhausted during those months. Exhausted from the idea of change, from facilitating it, from managing the girls and work and the trembling and frightened heart of a husband who had grown accustomed to a life that was guided by the lifting of a single finger, his occasional presence, and the automatic depositing of his check into the family bank account.