The Sunday List of Dreams

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Also by Kris Radish

  Connie’s Latest List of Dreams

  If you loved Kris Radish’s

  Addy hits the wall…

  What I should have said to Addy…

  Copyright

  Dreams are the lively and lovely desires of the heart, soul, mind and body that should propel us through every moment of our lives. The Sunday List of Dreams is for every woman who wishes and lusts and laughs and yearns and wonders and imagines and who dares to make her own list. Don’t just write it—live it.

  Getting there is never easy to do alone.

  What are you thinking? That there is more than doable but writing a book alone? Well, my sex-toy store in the literary world is a wonderful maze of people who hold on to the very edges of my life so that I do not fall over and hurt myself any more than I already have.

  And let me tell you, the research for a book about empowering women to exalt their sexual selves as much as they have every other part of themselves was sheer hell. I had to go to sex-toy stores, watch videos, read sex books, travel to cities and towns to talk with women about sex and ask them intimate questions, and then ponder my own sexual self in ways that were, believe me, trying, sometimes laughable, but terribly rewarding.

  Sigh. Sometimes it’s hard to stop writing a book like this.

  But when I did, and then looked up, several Sunday heroines rose to the surface, and one hero, who I pray has not been maimed for life.

  My hat, and anything else these wonderful women want, is off to Keely Newman and Kelli Savage, co-owners of Tulip, a luxe toy gallery based in Chicago and expanding across the country. Their openness, accessibility, and trusting hearts gave me a full view into their professional world and the women they work so hard to make happy. They were indispensable and patient in their explanations, demonstrations, and endless hours of interviews and thank the goddesses they have great taste in wine.

  Parts of this novel take place in New Orleans, and I was there just weeks before the tragic storm. In this novel I remain true to what New Orleans was before and what, I think, it will always be. The men and women who helped me, gave me a flavor for the real spice of Louisiana life, and remain a true and special part of the book—thank you.

  Countless women shared their sexual souls and stories with me during the writing of this sometimes spicy book. Their openness and trusting hearts gave me safe passage into secret and very private places that helped make this book real and true. You know who you are and I will always be grateful.

  My agent, Ellen Geiger, is a woman who gets women and who knows that those of us on this literary track cannot stop ourselves. She has made so many parts of my life easier and her trust in my vision is all the light I need.

  The support I receive from my Bantam Dell family often astounds me. Kate Miciak, Barb Burg, Shawn O’Gallagher, Elizabeth Hulsebosch, Cynthia Lasky, Irwyn Applebaum, Nita Taublib, Theresa Zoro, Carolyn Schwartz, Rachael Dorman, Gina Wachtel, Loyale Coles, and every soul under the Random House umbrella—you are all the air under my wings, and every single thing you do for me I appreciate.

  My daughter Rachel, and my partner, Madonna Metcalf, are wild and generous female hearts who continue to fertilize my life, my work, and my heart in ways that would fill up another entire novel. They help me write and create in numerous ways.

  And my son Andrew, a gentle, kind, and patient soul, deserves a special thanks for keeping his head above all the swirling female energy and for guarding his lovely testosterone with charm and good humor. As he leaves the nest and flies toward his own destiny and dreams, one of my main hopes is that I have given back to the world a boy turned man who addresses life with openness and acceptance.

  I know I have succeeded, and, Andrew, no matter what I write, what I create with my words—you will always be one of my two greatest accomplishments.

  1. Stop being afraid.

  Connie Nixon’s house starts talking to her at 9:51 P.M. on a Wednesday.

  She has just finished pawing through her heart and examining the long lines of desire that parade through her body like an endless roll of string and tangle in a knot inside her chest. Her left hand is holding the knot, loosened briefly by means of the pen in her right hand that has translated her dreams into the list. The 48th list. Connie Franklin Nixon’s list of dreams.

  Connie’s list-making tonight has been assisted by one and then two glasses of red wine—a really nice dry cabernet from Australia—and she is trying to decide if she should have another glass. This would push her way over the halfway mark, as far as her usual alcohol consumption goes, and into a semi-critical “what the hell” state that she associates with the early stages of drunken folly, Saturday nights on her sister’s back porch and the good old days, which did not last long enough.

  Three seconds of hesitation is enough and Connie Nixon rolls over, lets the pages of her list fold against each other, drops the pen, grabs the gorgeous dark red bottle off her book-laden nightstand and pours the wine into the rounded, clear glass so close to the top that she has to lean over and sip it before she can actually pick up the glass.

  That exact moment is when she hears the house speaking.

  “What?” she whispers out loud. As if she is answering the walls that seem to be speaking. “What did you say?”

  She pauses. Her top lip is swimming in wine and her bottom lip has wedged itself against the smooth glass, her breath in a holding pattern. Six years alone in this house have left her on more-than-intimate terms with every squeak, roof sway, late-night foundation-settling creak, gutter birds, falling limbs, and an assortment of other sounds that are as familiar to Connie as a rushing waterfall might be to someone on an enchanted vacation. Even before those six years, when the girls were still romping through the house, climbing in through unlocked windows after curfew and sliding their tricycles, bicycles, cars and motorcycles into the garage door from dawn to dusk, there was a rhythm to the sounds, a symphony of life, a ballet of movement that signaled a house settling in around its family, the arms of the walls wrapping them close and keeping the rain and snow off the beds and dressers and the kitchen table.

  The sound Connie hears now, however, is a distant voice, a faint indistinguishable rumble that tangos itself into a kind of hum. It is highlighted by a hint of music, as if someone has left a radio playing at the far edge of the basement. It echoes and sways as if it is about to snuff itself out and, when Connie pauses, unmoving, not frightened but a bit confused about its origin, the sound does not change or grow or stop or turn into something else. “Maybe,” she speculates. ”Maybe the list has started to speak.”

  Connie drinks half the glass in one gulp and swings her legs off the edge of the bed. Accustomed to
sleeping in whatever she happens to be wearing at the moment she falls into bed, Connie makes certain that if she has to avert disaster she can do so with at least partial dignity. When she looks down, she sees that she has on an old navy-colored t-shirt that will at the very least come to her knees when she stands up and, peeking out from the left side, where she has her foot raised, a pair of cotton underwear, original color unknown, present color something just this side of an old gray sock, frayed like hell along the edge of the stretched elastic.

  Peril, disaster, trauma, the unknown—none of those things totally frighten Connie Nixon. She adores silence, most unexpected events, the way the simple shift of the wind can change everything. Death rolls into her hands on a daily basis at her hospital—she says “her” as if she owns the place and indeed she has worked there as if she has owned it for 33 years, night and day, tirelessly, with passion and compassion. Her real fears, the ones she has acknowledged, have been translated into the list she now holds in her hand.

  “Ha,” she thinks, standing quietly at the side of her bed and totally focused on the sound she hears. “What could this be?”

  She pauses there, unafraid, hands on hips, listening. The whisper of sound returns. Connie smiles to herself because she thinks the walls may be singing. When she lifts her head, she can see her reflection in the mirror that has hung above the old black dresser for 28 years. “I’m not dead and just imagining this,” she tells herself out loud. Mystified by the now-constant humming, Connie listens hard. She decides to check every corner of the house.

  First she leans across her nightstand, missing the lamp and maneuvering past the books, places her hands against the wall, and then turns her head to press her ear flat against it. She listens. Hears nothing.

  Stepping over stacks of books, a pile of magazines, three empty water glasses and last week’s wine bottle, Connie manages to get to the door of her own bedroom without falling over a box or impaling herself on a coat hanger, one of her ex-husband’s leftover baseball trophies, or what she has decided to call “the endless stacks of shit.”

  “It’s a lifetime of shit,” her best friend Frannie O’Brien has told her 16 times since Connie started making huge donations to the local Goodwill store six months ago. “This purging isn’t going to happen overnight. Get used to it.”

  Connie counts on Frannie, or O’Brien, as she prefers to be called, to say it like it is no matter where they are, who is in the room, or whose feelings might get hurt. A psychiatric nurse who refuses to quit smoking even as she passes Connie’s intensive care unit and its coughing patients numerous times each week, O’Brien has worked with Nurse Nixon, as she loves to call Connie, for 26 years, swears like a Hells Angel or a high school junior, and plays poker with her nephews, the neighbor boys and six guys at the senior center three times a month. “Remember,” O’Brien is always quick to add, “even if it’s a lifetime of shit, it’s still shit and you need to get rid of it.” This from a six-foot-tall Afro-American woman who married a short Irishman named Daniel, throwing the entire redheaded Catholic Irish family and the entire blackheaded Catholic Afro-American family into parallel cultural comas; who attends church herself more religiously than her rosary-saying mother-in-law; who produced two strapping Afro-Irish sons; and who has definitely not thrown away so much as a toothpick or plastic bag in the last 15 years. “Shit,” O’Brien is quick to say in her own defense, “is shit only if you don’t think you will ever use it again.”

  The baseball trophies are obviously shit, Connie decides, as she pushes one over with her toe and turns into the hall at the end of her now trendy 1960s ranch house. “Go figure,” her real estate broker told her when she dropped off the papers five weeks ago. “Young couples love these houses. They turn them into art deco retro masterpieces and they want to live just like you did—you know, the June Cleaver kind of deal—when you first moved in here. They add a bathroom in the basement, get a Weber grill, and have another baby.”

  “June Cleaver, my ass,” is what Connie wanted to say. “June Cleaver didn’t put herself through nursing school by working full-time and trying constantly not to get pregnant. She didn’t suffer through the night shift for five years so someone would always be there with the kids, probably never mowed a lawn or shoveled the driveway in her life, and never realized until the mid-’70s that the Beaver was destined to be gay. My God, the kid wore patent leather shoes, parted his hair on the side and carried his books to school in his arms. Today the Beav would be on ‘Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.’”

  The house murmured her out of the 1960s and into the short hall—nothing unusual there—past the two smaller bedrooms where more boxes of shit sat waiting for transportation to their new destinations, into the living room that was still untouched so Connie could make believe one part of her life was still intact. Connie went through the dining room, which she’d enlarged herself one rare afternoon off when, sick of the tiny kitchen, she had walked into the garage to find a sledgehammer, knocked a hole through the plaster and announced to her then-husband Roger, “Now will you knock out the wall like I’ve asked you to for the past three years?” Connie laughed whenever she stood in the spot where the wall used to divide the kitchen and the dining room. Sometimes she stood in that spot eight times a day and she laughed every single time. Sometimes, when she just needed to laugh, she stood there, too, and it always seemed to work.

  It wasn’t long after the wall-bashing incident that Connie realized she could have set up a couple of strengthening beams and knocked out the wall without asking for help from a single person, especially her husband. It was less than a year later, when she ripped out the old carpeting one Saturday night while Roger was fishing, as she was kneeling on the bare floor with carpet nails jammed between her lips and pounding in the new padding, that she counted up the hours she spent with her husband and without him. Something that felt like the size and weight of a bowling ball moved through her heart and lodged in her stomach. “Sex,” she told herself, spitting out the nails into her hand, “is the one thing left I thought I needed a husband for these past few years, but I can probably figure out how to do that myself too. He’s never even here, for crying out loud.” The rest of that afternoon, pounding, ripping, and working as a mother-referee to three teenaged daughters, she thought of nothing but her marriage and how it seemed as if she had suddenly passed through some kind of narrow tunnel that only had room for one person—just her.

  The demise of her marriage was not really quite that simple. “No divorce,” her therapist told her, “no matter how uncomplicated or seemingly agreeable it appears, is simple. It’s a life-changing decision, Connie. Along the way it will hurt like hell, leave a few scars, melt your resolve, leave you breathless and terrified and Roger will keep fishing and you can knock down your own walls or build a few new ones. It’s all up to you.”

  Standing at the lip of her old dining room, wondering if the humming walls were not some left-over, unsettled business from that momentous decision 13 years ago to divorce, Connie places her hand on the dent she refuses to plaster over from the flying pot Roger threw at her when she demanded that he leave the house. The dent had grown smooth over the years and she’d repainted it three times because she often stood there, as if the spot held some magic power, rubbing it with the palm of her hand and remembering how she’d willed him to throw something so she could threaten him with a police visit that would guarantee his departure. “Power,” she said out loud now, with her head tilted towards the ceiling. “I loved the feeling of power.”

  He did leave. Eventually apologized for being a crappy husband, a sort-of-okay father, and he even made a brave and fairly decent effort to be more a part of his three daughters’ lives…until he got remarried to a much younger woman and started the whole process again. Connie now called Roger a friend, an exclusive and very meaningful title in her world, and once she’d even asked him to help her when their first grandchild arrived. But now, with two toddlers of his own, she was prett
y certain his fishing boat had not moved from behind his garage in several years and if they spoke once a year it was close to a miracle.

  Connie leans in to put her ear against the kitchen wall, smiles as a flood of kitchen memories—birthday parties; the night Frannie danced on the counter; the week her sister Kimberly’s four kids camped under the long oak table; the times her own girls, Jessica, Sabrina and Macy, ate, worked, slept and lived there and told all the whispered secrets that circled throughout the room on a daily basis. The wall is quiet but there is still a voice somewhere, and Connie, glass in hand, throws her rear end onto the kitchen counter, dangles her short legs over the side, sips the wine and wonders if it just isn’t her leaving it that has the house talking.

  Most people know that Connie is planning on selling the house as soon as she gracefully slides through her retirement party the following week, makes it through her last days of work the week after that, and then ditches what she is calling the first half of her life for the second half. But only O’Brien knows how scared she is of all the changes that seem to have collided and are now whispering to her.

  Beyond the seemingly bold and broad boundaries of her life, Connie remains frightened of doing what she has promised herself she would do for so many years she cannot bear to add them up.

  Connie Franklin Nixon is terrified to stop writing and rewriting her list of dreams and to start living them.

  That’s why Connie is not calling 911 for help, even though her house is speaking to her, which might seem like a reason to panic for most people. She thinks the sound is the house urging her to begin something that has been in a holding pattern for what is now more than half of her life. The house, she thinks, trying to come up with something that seems only partially insane if not logical, is simply leaking out nearly thirty years of stories and swearing, parties and fights and girls sneaking in the back window and all the sex that apparently happened in hallways and bedrooms and even the bathroom when she wasn’t looking. The house is, for one last time, saying good-bye to Connie herself—if only Connie can bring herself to actually leave the physical house and the memories that seem to be leaking out of it now in an almost constant song.