The Sunday List of Dreams (33 page)

They joke, but both women know they could live together in a second and that, no matter what Connie decides to do with this lively middle section of her life, they’ll always make time for the Wind Drift, these quick getaways, and each other. Those facts are without question. Everything else is hanging fire or, at the very least, smoldering lightly.

Connie loves the ebb and flow of the conversations at the restaurant where people listen in on each other’s discussions and then add what they think, buy you a drink and ask if they can eat your leftover bread without hesitation, guilt, or a second thought.

“There is some of this in Chicago and New York,” Connie stresses as they force themselves to leave so they can catch the sunset. “It’s easy to get seduced by a city but really, nothing’s like the Midwest, and the open charm that seems to pour from just about every place and every person.”

“Write that down,” O’Brien urges. “We need to keep tabs to help you make your decisions.”

“The decisions,” Connie says, faking self-strangulation with her hands as they get into the car. “The dreaded decisions.”

Frannie has managed to book a room at a small, old-fashioned-looking hotel right on the edge of the Indiana Dunes State Park that is deceiving on its faded exterior because the rooms have been gutted, fitted with new floor-to-ceiling windows, private decks, and new interiors that are small but as charming as anyplace they have ever stayed. Their favorite cabin, a rustic number right in the park, was swallowed up weeks ago during the rush to be near water in the middle of summer.

But first the requisite and very quiet drive down a road they had discovered years ago. It parallels a private patch of land leading out to what they call their ocean but what is actually the south end of Lake Michigan. The road is not on any map, and had probably been designated for abandonment, but has been lost in some kind of unique paper shuffle. And there it is every single time they make their homage—a narrow strip of asphalt that curves around a field, past a very old farmhouse, and ends abruptly behind a stand of sturdy pine trees that holds fast in the rising white sands that stretch for miles in either direction, and shifts just as much as the rest of the world around it.

Glorious solitude.

A lively summer breeze.

The still-warm summer sand.

A sun dropping like a slow rock.

The soft swooshing sound of bird wings.

Not another person in sight.

And wise O’Brien running back to the car for a special bottle of wine, two sturdy plastic glasses and a flashlight, before the sun turns the corner.

“Connie,” O’Brien finally says after she has opened the wine and passes a glass to her friend. “Guess what?”

“What, honey?”

“This is that Australian stuff you were drinking the night you heard the house talking.”

“Really?”

“I put a whole case in the car.”

“Are we expecting company or is this going to just be a wild, drunken weekend?”

“Just us, just for us and for the hours of talking, and because I couldn’t lift the damn thing out of the trunk by myself.”

Connie laughs and takes a sip and swears to God she immediately hears what sounds like a gaggle of singing sailors. She looks at O’Brien, who hears it too.

“What the hell?”

They turn towards the sound and see a long irrigation pipe sticking up, right into the wind, that Connie guesses immediately is whistling and echoing because their bodies have blocked some portions of the lake breeze.

“Shit,” they both say, laughing at once.

“It was on the list,” Connie says next.

“What?”

“A case of dry red wine. Or buying some really expensive wine. It was on my list of dreams.”

Connie brings the glass to her lips, takes a sip, and holds the wine inside of her mouth for a very long time before she swallows it. When she does, she tastes the rich tannins of a wine that likes to bite and slap taste buds on the way down. She filters a drop of earth, a pinch of the sky, a hint of lemon, and feels the breath of a baby on her neck, the wine floating towards her bloodstream, a warm ache at the very tip of her pubic bone.

“It is on the list.”

“It was pretty expensive, you know. I think you wanted it to be expensive.”

“Anything over ten bucks is expensive.”

“Thank God,” O’Brien says, feigning a fainting spell. “I just made it—this was twelve bucks a bottle and there was no discount for the case. This is a big deal, baby.”

A big deal, Connie repeats, as they launch into a conversation that will take them through another bottle of wine and into the slice of darkness that they can actually see riding across the lake on waves that get longer with each gust of wind. A big deal, as they shift their hips, lean into each other. O’Brien lights up one of her damn cigarettes and Connie grabs one and smokes it too and then puts it out after three puffs because she finds it as disgusting as sucking on a dirty sock. A big deal, as they talk about the list and life.

The list and life.

Think about it, O’Brien orders. Think about what is on your list, and what you have done the past few months, and what you could do in the next few months and all the months after those.

The sex and lust. New York. New Orleans. The convertible. Connie almost has the list totally memorized and when she realizes what Frannie is getting at she swallows her entire glass of wine and holds out her cup for a refill.

“You’ve been doing it all along,” O’Brien says. “I don’t know what you are so worried about.”

“I didn’t think of it like that,” Connie admits. “I had this plan, this way I thought everything was going to happen, how I wanted it to happen, and then everything became unexpected, wild, and, well, wonderful in a sometimes confusing way.”

“Jesus, it sounds like hell.”

They both laugh at everything. Sitting in the sand at midnight. Dancing in New York. Kissing men in swamps. Breakfast at the Algonquin. Selling sex toys. Diva-ing it up in Cyprus with women who are already so grateful they have sent Connie thank-you letters. The box in the garage. New hair. Men looking twice. More than a stretch of time. Worrying about one goddamn thing after another at their age.

Everything.

Every single thing.

And the wild notion that in order to live the list of dreams Connie not only needs to get rid of #1 but acknowledge that everything, even the almighty list, needs to change.

Connie lets the wind dance along the short edges of her hair when she turns and puts her face into the breeze. She closes her eyes and imagines a life without this—without moments of pause and pleasure, moments of wondering, the warm length of a good friend’s back nestled against your own back, wine dripping down your throat like melted gold, choices dancing within arm’s length like kites coming down from a high wind, knowing people in a way you never realized they existed, rising like a feather to meet your lover’s kiss.

It’s all there.

It’s all here.

It’s never been anywhere else.

“Unexpected choices,” O’Brien tells her, close to the last glass of wine. “They seem to be the best kinds of choices.”

“I thought I was so cool,” Connie admits. “I thought I was open and that I knew my daughters, knew who they were, knew where I was going, knew that sex was a minor chord in my life that I had decided to skip right over, knew how long to idle before the light turned green—everything. What the hell was I thinking?”

“Claiming your sexual self and giving other women the chance to do the same thing is a pretty big deal,” O’Brien replies. “You’ve lived an entire new life in just a couple of weeks. Just think what the next couple of years might be like. Think of that list as your diving board, baby.”

And, Connie adds, I still have to make just a few major decisions while a mess of people in my life hold their breath.

Oh, shit, Frannie says, pulling her friend up from the sand, there will always be a big decision and one after that and then just when you think you can see where the road stops, there’s a new frigging highway or a detour that will drive you nuts because you think—heavy emphasis here on the word “think”—you like the road just the way it is.

“I still need a decision in, like, 24 hours,” Connie complains.

“You’ll get one, baby, and believe me, it will be a complete surprise to someone.”

“Maybe lots of someones,” Connie shouts back, as the wind dances down her neck and bounces off the back of her legs and she races O’Brien to the car, gets her toe stuck under a log, and falls flat on her face.

“Get up, Nurse Nixon,” O’Brien shouts. “This is not an omen.”

They could have used two more cases of wine, and another week, but they only had until very early Sunday morning when Frannie had to get back to fill in during the second half of first shift and when Connie had to make her blessed call to New York so that about fifty people could get on with their lives.

No pressure, Connie joked most of the day on Saturday while they hiked up the beach and back around the dunes hiking trail, fought the urge to check their cell phones, lingered over a very long lunch at the restaurant two bluffs over, and then simply sat on their porch, exhausted, sunburned, and totally not ready to face an early-morning drive back to reality.

They had giggled away the remainder of Friday night, slept with the windows and door wide open, and woke early when a seagull walked into the room and then could not remember where the door was.

“Jesus,” Connie said, jumping from the bed with her pillow as a shield. “O’Brien, help me, there’s a bird on your suitcase.”

Frannie jumped up, screamed—which made the bird go to the bathroom on top of her suitcase—and then simply ran towards the bird with her red T-shirt flapping behind her and the poor bird took off and probably alerted every bird on the lake that a couple of strange women were at the dunes and to be on the lookout.

“Go figure,” Connie said, suddenly longing for a cup of coffee like she had never longed for coffee before.

“See?” O’Brien said. “Something else unexpected. This is your fault, Nurse Nixon. Now that you have learned how to fly at a new altitude, you sexy bitch, even the birds want you.”

The laughter could have woken the people across the lake and set the tone for a day that Connie thought had brought her inches closer to some necessary decisions.

Before their walk to the café for dinner, and what would end up to be a night when they stayed to close the joint, played poker with two guys from Bloomington named Hank and Dan, let some babe from Chicago buy them tequila, and had dessert at midnight, they had a very brilliant talk on the now-birdless porch.

On the porch, with the sun filtering through a wild stand of birch trees and a beach so white it looked as if someone from the linen store had placed a series of sheets on the ground for miles. The hotel manager, who drifted past and waved when she saw them, came back moments later with two cold beers and a wish for a happy night.

And what about that happy life?

“Connie,” O’Brien finally said. “Let’s just do this. Let’s have a quick triage, access the damage, the possibilities and then walk to dinner, which you are buying, by the way.”

Connie was way ready, and so they started.

They started simple. The Swamp Man cometh. And he lingereth in Connie’s mind. Terrific, wonderful sex which she hoped to have again—but a long-term, serious relationship? Not so much. Not yet. Those numbers on the list needed to simmer. She wanted to dance the rumba with the entire band, waltz with her new decisions, feel the power of her newly acquired sexual self in a way that did not limit her.

“Like a swinger?” O’Brien asks.

“No, sweetie. Like a woman who doesn’t want to make the same mistakes she made the last time. Great sex does not a relationship make. I’m pacing myself this time. Michael’s a terrific man but I can’t leap like that. I just can’t do it.”

See how easy this is, Frannie offers. Next.

The new job?

Connie hesitates. She could do the job, she could fill up the time, manage an entire medical universe, do the paperwork and still have time to play, but something happened when she went to the facility. Something telling.

“My heart sank,” she admits. “I could feel it fall into a memorized pattern of familiarity and when I left, my breathing changed. Honest to God. I felt better when I left and I never turned around. Not once.”

“Well, that pretty much answers all the other questions then, doesn’t it?”

“No.”

“Give me the rest of your beer if you are going to toy with me like this,” Frannie says. “What do you mean
no
?”

“Since we got here this idea has been swaying back and forth inside of me. It’s like taking a recipe and shifting around the ingredients and making something sort of the same, but totally different.”

Frannie, impatient as hell, grabs the beer out of her hand.

“The absolute most powerful, wonderful time I had, well, besides making love with Burt Reynolds, was talking to women about the toys, not just selling them, but here in Cyprus when we had the mini-Diva-sex-toy party, well, shit, Frannie, I loved that,” Connie confesses.

“It showed, baby. And this means?”

“Let me skip ahead just a second. I love the condo. I’m not ready to leave Cyprus, but I can’t stay there now like I would have, like I might have, if I kept the new job.”

Frannie leans over and gives her a hug. “This is good news so far, keep going.”

Connie’s short stint in the Diva world showed her that women were more than ready to move beyond the sexual limits they had accepted in their own lives. More than ready to rip open their sexual selves the way they had ripped open everything else. But sometimes, Connie had learned, they were not quite ready to do that in a store, or in public, or with someone they did not know or trust.

“Sex-toy parties,” Connie said. “That’s what I should be doing. Designing programs, and putting together a traveling van, and workshops, and intimate gatherings where women can look up and see someone with wrinkles and a few miles under their belt, have them explain how a dildo works, how to turn on a vibrator, and then share a slice of cake and a cup of coffee while their friends play with the toys. I have tons of ideas, including a big one that we have to call them something besides toys.”