“So that’s your bear?” I asked.
We both looked at Charles, so large and dark and beautiful. “Yes, he is.”
Lidia told me that it wasn’t easy. That she had been married to her husband for twenty years, and that in many ways, that man she just left was her best friend. She told me Charles was in a relationship too. But then she told me that once they knew they were in love with each other, there just weren’t too many other options than to live that truth.
“You took the bold path,” I said.
“Yes we did, honey. Sometimes life demands that we jump right in.”
As I sit across from Lidia in her new home I know that as much as the choice was difficult, as much as it was bold, it was also right. Her home feels right. We sit in a different room now, but the couch is the same, and her chair is the same. The tea cups are also the same, and so it feels as comfortable as ever. She asks me if I liked the sweat.
“I did. It was a little hard. The first time doing this work, I think it’s always a little removed. You have to get past the part where you think you’re crazy.”
“The hokeyness?” she asks.
And I love that she can see that, even in her life’s work. I explain to her that I went in with the intention to let go of perfection and fantasy. To move past these concepts of movie-star love and scripted romances and what men are supposed to be in order to have a new experience in this world. I know that I cannot be open to my Charles if I am not willing to see him.
“Ho,” Lidia says. I find out at the retreat that “ho” means a sort of “Right on” in the Native American culture.
And so I tell her. I tell her about Oliver. About Jimmy. About my father. And ultimately, about Ben.
I tell Lidia how the night before, I knew I was going to run into Ben at a meeting, and I knew that most likely we would hang out afterward to talk about our writing. We have been doing that more and more lately. Three times in the last week. We bring our work, sit down at coffee, and edit for each other. Last night, we were doing just that. Ben was talking about the chapter where I visit my dad in prison.
“I just don’t think you’re showing enough of you,” he told me.
“Really, I feel like it’s pretty honest.”
“It’s honest, but it’s not the full story. I want to know all of you, Kristen, not just pieces.”
“Okay,” I said. And I tried to ignore that the comment on my work is the one thing I have been waiting years for a man to say.
I still can’t figure out his intentions, but perhaps even more confusing, I can’t figure out mine. I often ask my friends when they start dating someone, if they like the guy because they like the guy, or if they like him because they think he likes them. I am not sure if I want Ben in my life, or if I just want someone. But then I remember about giving up on these fantasies and these demands for romantic perfection. Maybe I just need be open to Ben—open to who he can be, open to what we might be. But that is also terrifying.
I explain to Lidia that I had wanted to invite Ben over to my house to work instead of going to a coffee shop, but then at the last minute, I just couldn’t spit out the invitation.
“Why not?” Lidia asks me.
“Because I was worried he’d say no.”
“What if he said yes?”
“Then I was worried he would be too hot. My apartment gets hot. I don’t have air conditioning.”
Lidia just looks at me. I am in the most honest room in my world, and I am trying to tell her that my fear of rejection comes down to AC.
“I think it’s more than that, Kristen.”
“It’s the little girl.”
When I don’t invite Ben to my place, we get tea at a café up the street. We go over some of my work, and we talk about his, and we begin to ease into this new thing we’re doing called flirting. But I am not entirely there, and I know it, and because Ben knows me rather well by now, he knows it too. By not speaking up and asking him over, I have in my own way checked out, and insecurity has shown up in the void.
Lidia and I stand up to begin the work. We stand with our arms raised as Lidia opens with a prayer, “Great mountains, great sky. Stars and moon and sun and the gravity which keeps us rooted in sweet mother earth, thank you for being the truth. You are the evidence of the Great Spirit. You are bigger than our fantasies. You are bigger than my sister’s dreams. Please help her to have faith in the work of our ancestors. To believe in her own life, her paths, her truth.”
We kneel down, and Lidia brings out her stones. She asks, “So tell me about the little girl? How old is she?”
I don’t hesitate to say, “Ten.”
“And what was happening when you were ten?”
I remember being that confused little girl, playing teacher by myself in our garage with the colored chalk I had stolen years before. I remember stinging from some insult my grandmother had just tossed at me—some question about why I wasn’t more like Melanie, Missy, Sonia, or Sarah. And all I remember is thinking, “I wish I was someone else.” I explain to Lidia that I used to fantasize about getting abducted. We would go to the mall, and I would try to wander off in the hopes that some man would steal me and take me away.
“Well, you were missing your dad,” Lidia offers.
It’s funny how it can takes decades to connect the obvious.
She smiles at me. “You’re still missing your dad, Kristen.”
And though I wish she was wrong, I know she is right. I am still missing my dad. Because after he moved back to Connecticut, it became clear that he is back in his old business. He has been running drugs in and out of Nogales, Mexico, and it doesn’t take me long to figure out that he was doing that the whole time he was in Texas. That the farm and the Blue Tick hounds was all a front. That had I gone to visit him, I would have been going to visit a pot farm as much as a citrus one. And it hurts. It hurts that this man I was assigned as a father could be so untrustworthy.
We get on the floor, and when it comes time to pick out the stones, I reach for the big, shiny one that looks like a crystal ball. The one I wanted on my first visit. At first I hesitate, but then I tell Lidia, “The ten-year-old wanted the shiny one, but I wasn’t going to let her have it.”
“Why not?” Lidia asks, laughing.
“Because I always want the bright shiny one, and I used to take it without earning it.”
She looks at me. “Kristen, you’ve earned it. She’s earned it.”
And we have. Nine months after that first visit with Lidia, I finally choose the crystal ball. Lidia decides where to place it, and I can feel the energy surge in my palm. It has craved that ball ever since we began here. As though she can hear my thoughts, I feel her place it in the palm of my left hand. I ask her, “What is the bright shiny one for?” And she tells me, “It is the source of femininity.”
And we begin. I don’t know what happens. It takes some time for me to settle into the spiritual netherworld that is this work. But then I can feel it. I can feel the energy flowing up through the ball, through my arms, through my body, and out through my open palm. I put it on my heart, and I go to meet that ten-year-old. And she wants nothing to do with me. She ignores my presence. She doesn’t want this healing. But then as we continue, I enter into my childhood. I go back to the condominium complex where I grew up. I walk outside, along the creek bed where she used to play, and I watch my ten-year-old self. I can feel her. And I know she can feel me.
The energy is moving. And then it hits me. I will be in Dallas next weekend, and I can go to my childhood home, and I can meet that child for real. And together we can leave the past behind.
50
Date Fifty: La Cosa Nostra
It’s a couple of days before my trip to Texas, and I am talking with Nana about whether Tom, Vic, and I should go boating. Three months ago, my uncle Vic’s house was foreclosed on, he shuttered his business, and moved into my uncle Tom’s house in Dallas. The Republican insurance agent and the gay florist might make for a great sitcom, but not for great roommates. They have been fighting ever since, and I am reasonably concerned about being on a boat all day with a cooler of beer and two hot Sicilian temperaments.
“Oh, God. Nana, I’m afraid Tom might throw Vic overboard.”
“He does make Tom mad,” she says, sounding disappointed.
“Well, Vic is kind of like Fredo.”
Nana asks, “From
The Godfather
?”
“Yeah, I mean, he’s cuter. But still. And Tom...Tom is just like Sonny. Good looking, charismatic.” I think about it for a second. “Which makes me Michael.”
“Yeah, you are Michael,” she admits, which I’m pretty impressed she agrees with because Michael’s kind of the star, and Nana normally likes being the star.
“And you, of course, are the Don,” I tell her.
“I’m not fat,” she argues.
“Well, you’re not a man either, Nana. Come on, stick with the game.”
“What about Mom, then?” she asks.
“Mom? Mom is Tom the Consigliere, the reliable one we all go to for counsel.”
“She is reliable,” Nana concedes, though I think she wants that title too. And that is how I go to visit the Corleones in Dallas. Sonny, Fredo, and the Don want to take me on my fiftieth date, and I readily agree. I have the day off before I go and am house-sitting at Noelle’s before I leave.
I am at work getting some last-minute things finished up before my trip when the phone rings. It is my father. The last time we spoke, my father attempted to send me money for my birthday. Money I ultimately declined. Because I didn’t know the source, and it was too much, and sadly, I know that once my father gives you money, he thinks you’re his. And $1,000 thirty-one years after the fact is just a little too late to claim this property overnight.
“Look, Dad, if you want to make things right, come and visit,” I explain to him. “Take me to dinner. But I don’t need this money. Not this way.”
Five days later, I get that call at work, and I find out my dad is in Arizona.
“I’d like to come visit you,” he tells me.
“Okay, I’d like that too,” I reply because I need this date with my father.
“How about next week?” he asks.
“Okay, that works.”
And then we get off the phone, and I realize that doesn’t work at all. That we have spent our whole lives making plans for next week. I call him back and tell him, “Dad, every time we say next week, it never happens. How about you come tomorrow? I leave for Dallas on Saturday, but we can have dinner, spend some time together, and I’m afraid if we don’t do it now, we’ll never do it.” I don’t take a breath. I don’t need one.
“Okay.”
The next night I wait at Noelle’s house for my father to arrive. I talk to Mom, and she asks me why it matters so much that I get to see him, and I know instantly that if I don’t, I will regret it for the rest of my life. Because this will be the first time I have seen my father outside of prison walls since I was five years old. Because my dad is currently making bi-monthly trips to Nogales, one of the most dangerous cities in the world. Because though I find it terrifying that this man is in the middle of the double-crossing world of the Mexican drug trade, he is still my dad, and if he died, and I didn’t get to have one dinner with him outside of prison walls, a part of me would die too.
I don’t drink so I can’t steady my nerves. I don’t smoke, so that one is gone too. I eat a little bit of cookie dough, and I do the set of prayers I have learned from Lidia. I pray to Sach’amama that I might shed these scales of my old relationship with my dad, to let go of who my father is and who I am as his daughter. I pray to Otorongo that I am able to speak the truth tonight, to live the truths my father cannot. I pray to my ancestors that he and I are guided into a place of love and understanding. I pray to Lidia’s great condor that I may be kept safe from his darker sides and see the big picture of who we are to one another. I pray to my mother Earth to keep me grounded in my flesh and in the present. And I pray to the universe, to the stars and the moon, that I be given the faith in this relationship, in my father’s and my journey. I know that whatever happens, it is all part of that great plan of which I have very little knowledge. And by the time my father pulls up in his black Cadillac, I am calm.