The Sunday List of Dreams Page 2

  The welcome-home-from-college parties, two bridal showers, new in-laws’ footprints. The three horrid dates she’d had in 13 years. A few of those damned basket parties and one of those surprise marketing level meetings that Connie thought was supposed to be a candle party. Lots of laughter, tears enough to irrigate a field for one season, and increasingly more laughter than tears as the years wore on and the pace of life settled into something routine but pleasant, right and pretty damn wonderful. Connie listens, kicking her feet back and forth, and decides to forgo traipsing into the basement, which she has already pretty much gutted, because she knows there isn’t anything down there besides a water heater, furnace and the requisite Midwestern dehumidifier. In her Indiana town—a community of 48,000 noteworthy only because it is close to something else—an entire house can rot from the basement up if you don’t have a dehumidifier in the humid 20-second summer months and a humidifier in the dry winter months that make up the rest of the year.

  When she realizes it’s closing in on midnight and that she’s already waltzed herself out of an hour of sleep because of the humming house and two extra glasses of wine, Connie decides to go back to bed. She has a full load in her intensive care unit, three new nurse assistants to finish breaking in, and a young doctor who needs a lesson in bedside manners, respecting battle-weary nurses, and the importance of kindness as a therapeutic tool. And there is also the training of a new clinical nursing director, community liaison, and ICU head nurse. Her left hip starts to hurt just thinking about her last week of work as she hops off the counter and smiles at the murmuring kitchen wall.

  When she tumbles into bed, with the soft whispers of singing voices blending in a chorus of confrontation, Connie reaches for her tattered list. She rests its cold leather cover against her cheek and tries to remember when she last cried. Connie pulls her knees towards her chest and remembers one patient and then another before that who died in her arms, their last breaths of life a soft curl of air against her face and her tears falling like slow drops of warm spring rain into their hair.

  And before that, how long before that did you cry for yourself? Connie asks herself this question as a rising wave of unexpected emotion washes through her. Was it when Jessica left? Was it the last time a man touched you? Was it the day you divorced? How long, Connie? How goddamn long has it been?

  Connie cries so quietly and for so long that the walls become silent and the center of night turns a wide corner towards morning. Her unexpected emotional dive paralyzes her with a kind of fear that has grown into something huge, something terribly frightening and real, and just before she finally drops into sleep she promises herself, promises the walls, promises anyone or anything who might care, that she will start tomorrow.

  She will.

  Tomorrow she will start living the list of dreams.

  She will.

  2. Let go. Stop holding on to things so tightly. Loosen your grasp. Be honest.

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

  The house sounds continue with an occasional pause—as if the voices are taking a breath—the next day, the day after that, and throughout the weekend. The noise has pushed Connie to do something she has put off for so many years. She reminds herself that her house started speaking because it was time for her to take action, to stop dreaming, and to start living.

  Start living the dreams.

  “So easy to say,” she says aloud. “Not so easy to do.”

  Nurse Nixon now carries the first three items on her list in her front pocket. Numbers one, two, and three are on a white piece of paper, written in black ink. She takes the paper out of her pocket 15 times before she leaves for work that day, swallows the words, slips the paper back into her pocket, and thinks right away that she may have to switch from the top to the bottom of the list or maybe to the middle if she is going to get anything done.

  Nurse Nixon works part of the second shift on Saturday night when someone calls in sick, then comes home, hears the walls talking and leaves the house for a few minutes to see if there isn’t a power line down, or some strange meteorological phenomenon, or a neighbor boy perched on a telephone wire with a hanger in one hand and a Geiger counter in the other. She sees nothing. She decides to cruise over to Frannie’s house to tell her about the talking walls—which she is beginning to answer on a regular basis.

  “Nixon, did you find one of the girls’ hidden stashes of dope when you were cleaning out their rooms?” O’Brien asks her when Connie finally tells her about the talking house. They are leaning against the long counter in the center of Frannie’s huge and gloriously organized kitchen.

  “My children never smoked dope,” Connie declares with a make-believe British, aristocratic accent. “All three of them are nuns and working in hospitals, churches, and third-world countries.”

  “You are mad, woman,” O’Brien bellows back. “Do you want me to ask the Irishman to drive over with us and take a look?”

  “I kind of like it,” Connie admits. “The sounds make me happier. It’s terrific company.”

  “But don’t you want to know if you are losing your mind just days before you retire and get into that new life and all those plans you have? I mean, we know all about this. Aren’t we the ones who take care of people who have a heart attack the day after they retire or go crazy three days after their fiftieth wedding anniversary on the way to the Hawaiian Islands?”

  Connie tells O’Brien she feels fine, never better, is ready for the blue horizon, only has the garage and the living room and part of her bedroom left to sort through, and is way too afraid she might miss something to let herself dip into mental illness or to begin hallucinating at this stage of her life.

  They decide that O’Brien will hop into Connie’s car, ride back to Connie’s house nonchalantly, like she has about three thousand times, and then listen to decide if a band is playing or there are dwarfs living in secret passageways in the walls. If none of those things are happening, O’Brien will then rush her friend back to the psych unit at the hospital where she will install her in a private room, preferably facing the inner courtyard and the hospital gardens.

  “Give it a second,” Connie cautions as they quietly open the door from the garage after turning sideways to get through all the boxes. “And for God’s sake, stop laughing.”

  O’Brien cannot stop laughing.

  “I feel like I’m in a movie,” she says, snorting into her hand as she slinks into the kitchen with Connie. “We’ve done some pretty lame-ass things, Nixon, but if this is any indication of what lies ahead of us in your golden years, count me in, baby.”

  The two women stand with their hands on their hips in the center of the kitchen-dining room and hold their breath so they can listen.

  One second.

  Another second.

  Five more and O’Brien turns slowly towards Connie and mouths the words, Holy shit, I can hear it.

  Three more seconds, and into the first few lines of what sounds like a slow blues tune, they both exhale at the same moment and cannot shut up.

  “I told you!”

  “What could it be?” O’Brien asks, narrowing her eyes and looking around suspiciously.

  “I knew I wasn’t nuts.”

  “Let’s not get carried away. ‘Nuts’ is a relative thing, believe me. I hear something. But it’s just a noise to me. Something mechanical. Did you look everywhere?” O’Brien asks as she starts opening cupboard doors.

  “Almost, but I had this weird notion that I wasn’t going to find anything so I didn’t go into the basement or rip the paneling off the walls.”

  “Did you say you were drinking Australian wine that night?” O’Brien has opened the cabinet below the kitchen sink and runs her hands under the edge of the counter as if she is a homicide detective.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Connie asks her, starting to laugh all over again. “Do you think this is ‘CSI’ or something?”

  O’Brien glares at her friend and keeps
moving, hands roving as if she is searching for ticks on her mother’s ancient cat, until she has finished inspecting every inch of the kitchen.

  “Half of what I do at the hospital is detective work, you know that,” O’Brien tells her friend Connie. “I go through pockets, look for signs of drug abuse, run my fingers across arms to feel for old scars, search under mattresses. You never know. Someone could have slipped in here and done something weird to your house. Stranger things have happened. The world is full of fruitcakes.”

  Connie drops to her knees and then rolls over, laughing into her hands. She is on the floor, inches below the dent in the wall from the night of the pot-throwing incident.

  “Frannie,” she giggles, “I’m 58 years old, have not had a date in 8 years, I’ve let my hair go gray, I could care less what people think of me, I need to start a whole new life, I’m trying to pack up and leave my house, at least two of my daughters think I need to look and act like some grandmother they’ve seen in a magazine at the dentist’s office, and I’m about to embark on a retirement adventure that could end up maiming me, killing me, or validating what those two daughters think about me.”

  “Well, there’s always Jessica, the good liberal daughter who will probably never marry, so that’s something cheery to focus on,” O’Brien retorts as she pulls her head out of Connie’s oven. “That is if you ever see or speak to her again for more than five minutes.”

  Nurse Nixon looks at her friend and feels a wound, never healed, widen just below the edge of her heart. The mere mention of her third daughter makes her ache all over. Jessica. The daughter who has managed to lose herself in New York City, who no longer has time for her mother, who has a life of mystery, a closet full of unshared stories and a load of secrets that she is unwilling to share with her family.

  “O’Brien,” Connie whispers, “I have to tell you something else. It’s big, baby, really big.”

  Her friend raises her hands, palms up, at the same time she raises her eyebrows. She waits. Could something be bigger than a house that talks?

  “I started the list,” Connie confesses. “The night the house started to talk, I had a little nervous breakdown, kicked myself in the ass, and look…”

  Connie digs into her pocket. She pulls out numbers one, two, and three without actually letting Frannie see them. She looks like a kid showing her report card to her mom.

  O’Brien walks over to Nixon, puts her hands out without saying a word, and Nixon reaches up like a child and is yanked to her feet before she has a chance to shift her weight. She springs up like one of those little rubber balls attached to a paddle.

  Frannie laughs and tells her she’d better get used to rough landings and jumping and moving fast and weird noises and running naked into the desert and, she adds, “maybe making love” as if she is swearing and her mother is about to catch her.

  Connie is silent. Glaring. Nostrils flared, she takes a step back from her friend.

  “Did you peek at the list?”

  O’Brien does not hesitate.

  “Of course I didn’t peek at the list. Are you kidding? That would be like…”

  She stammers, trying desperately to think of something that would be as horrid as looking at the list before Connie was willing to share it.

  “Stabbing a baby,” she finally sputters. “Sleeping with your husband’s brother. Slapping your mother. Come on, I’d never peek at your list. We’ve talked about your list for years, Connie. We’ve talked about it all. I don’t have to actually see it.”

  Connie Nixon looks into the dark eyes of the tall, strong woman standing across from her and thinks that she has never in her life trusted or loved anyone like she trusts and loves O’Brien. They have fought and disagreed and kissed and battled and made up and held hands through weeping sessions. They have traveled roads of friendship that some unfortunate women never get to travel. And she knows, just as she knows her house is speaking to her, she would die for this woman and she is suddenly compelled to tell her just that, without even having the correct number from the 48th draft of her list that suggests professing her love to those who deserve it rambling around in her pocket.

  “You know I love you,” Connie whispers, totally reversing what O’Brien thought she was about to get. “If anyone ever hurt you, or bothered you, I’d kill for you. I’d throw myself in front of a train or truck or bus for you.”

  “If this was a movie, we’d kiss now,” O’Brien says, not able to stifle her wit, even at this precious moment when the house is singing and her best friend is voicing the exact same thoughts she’s thinking. “I love you too, even if you live in a house that speaks to you. Aren’t you glad it’s not speaking in French or German?”

  Frannie redeems herself by opening her arms and bringing Nurse Nixon into the space, her “inner sanctuary,” as she calls all the inches within arm’s reach where she likes to think she protects everyone and everything that comes there. They hug for a moment and Connie feels the heat from her friend rising towards her, the fragrant smell of her earthy perfume, the patterns of her breathing—and the familiarity of every inch of Frannie O’Brien makes her smile.

  “Honey,” Frannie whispers into her tangle of gray hair, “We’ve talked about that damned list of yours, I know what you are up to with it, where you keep it, what it means to you, but I’ve never once even touched that ratty thing, let alone read it.”

  “I know,” Nurse Nixon whispers back. “You know me better than I know myself, but I had to ask.”

  “You’ve got this space of time coming up and I was afraid you’d just shutter the house, keep writing down stuff on your list you want to do but never will, and turn into an old, divorced, and retired nurse who still walks around in her stinky work shoes,” O’Brien says. “It’s about time you did something besides write the damned thing.”

  “‘The damned thing’ is right,” Connie agrees, closing her eyes just as Frannie closes hers.

  The list, they both think at the same moment. The list.

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

  The 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.