51/50: The Magical Adventures of a Single Life

by Kristen McGuiness

  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.

  My father gets out of the car, and I shocked again by how old he has become. I have my father’s image embroidered in my mind from the photos I hold so dear from when I was young. Though skinny and short, my father cut a dashing figure. He had a wild mass of black curly hair, piercing hazel eyes, and the type of big nose that you just don’t fight with. He wore beautiful Ralph Lauren clothes and though there were times he looked like the seventies drug smuggler he was, there was always an element of stylish class to his demeanor.

  The man who gets out of the car is old. He has straight white hair and a busted-up nose, and he wears a Hawaiian shirt with shorts and a fleece vest. He is not the father I remember. He gets out and grabs me in a huge embrace, but it’s awkward for me. I hug my uncles all the time because they are mi famiglia. But I realize in that moment, that though I know my father in many ways, I do not know him like this. I do not know him in the real world.

  We go into Noelle’s house, and we play with Rocky, who my father says looks a lot like Red Dog, and I warm a bit. He jokes, “Thank God we have this pup here; it certainly makes it less tense.”

  I laugh because it sounds like something I would say. Our similarities are real, and sometimes they’re kind of nice. I drive my father to the stables because he was the man who introduced me to horses. He meets Arrow and as we walk away he grabs my hand and says, “Thank you, K, for bringing me here.”

  We go to my apartment before dinner so he can see where I live, and we look through old photo albums, and he touches these pictures of me growing up, of his parents who both died while he was still in prison, of the lives he never got the chance to be a part of, and
he begins to cry. At one point in the night my father quips to me, when I press him about being back in the business, “That’s just who I am, babe. No changing me.”

  But as he sits there, shaking over a photo of his own mother and father, I know there is a part of him that wishes he had gotten the chance to change. I bend down and hold him. This man who has offered me nothing but a fantastical love and many very real disappointments; this man who pretends that he is who he is, and we ought to just be fine with that; this man whose life is shot through with a thousand forms of fear and pain and loss; this man is real, and he hurts. He cries, and I whisper, “It’s okay, Daddy,” and I realize this night might not actually be about my closure. It’s about his.

  We go out to dinner, and he stares at me like I am the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen. It makes me uncomfortable, but I also know my dad never quite knew who I was. We get gelato at Pazzo, and he puts his arm around me as we walk to the car. For all my family’s jokes about being the Corleones, my father actually looks like a Mafioso, and I wonder what my friends would think if they ran into us. That I was using again, and this was my dealer. That my dad is creepy and cool, all at once. That I look rather awkward next to this man who is my blood, my love, and my oldest sorrow.

  We drive down Sunset, and the opera Cavalleria Rusticana comes on. It is my favorite opera, so I turn the music up. The notes swell, and my father holds my hand. I look over at him and smile. And for a moment, for one brief moment, he is my dad, and I am his daughter, and the scales fall from my eyes, and the truth becomes clear, and I am guided back to him. And the big picture, and the present moment, and the faith that we are to each other exactly what we are supposed to be, fills my heart. Because as much as I know this will probably not happen again for a very long time, I am so glad it is happening now. Just this moment with each other, this things of ours, or as they say in Sicily, la cosa nostra. There is no fear or pain or loss. Just the two of us driving down Sunset Boulevard in my Honda Civic, listening to Cavalleria Rusticana, holding each other’s hand.

  I say goodbye to my father that night, and though it might not be the relationship for which I waited my whole life, I know that our lives are as they should be. And I do not question. I feel good. I feel blessed. And the next morning, I board a flight, and I walk into the loving arms of the Corleones.

  Uncle Tom makes dinner, and I spend the evening lying on the shoulder of one uncle or another. And they both tell me consistently how much they love me, how proud they are of me, and I know that this is what I am looking for in a man. Someone who looks at me like I’m the most beautiful woman in the world but who also shows up time and time again to be there for me.

  As I counsel Uncle Tom about his heartbreak and spend the next two days working with Uncle Vic on his depression, I know that I will be there for the right man too. Because I am for these men.

  The next day, I walk from my grandmother’s house to the condominium where I grew up. I skip along the railroad tracks that I wandered down so often when I was twelve and angry. I listen to The Velvet Underground, and I enter the world of my childhood. I am walking along the creek bed where I spent a good deal of my youth pouting when I see a tree house on the other side.

  And the next thing I know, I am leaping from rock to rock to cross the creek, monkey-barring my way to the other side, and landing relatively gracefully on the opposite bed, after a swinging jump bigger than I have performed in years. I climb up into the tree house, lie down, and begin the energy work I know so well. I listen to the creek, and I reach out to the ten-year-old who gets scared inside. It doesn’t take long as she is right there, and the fact that I have made this vision quest in her honor is almost enough to make her happy and whole. Because this is a little girl who just wanted to be loved. She wanted her daddy home; she wanted everything to be okay; and so I get to go to her, and I get to tell her that it is.

  We go home and stop at our childhood McDonald’s for an ice cream cone. We hug Don Corleone and know that as much as we wish we could change others, we cannot. And the only way out of our insecurities is to believe in change for ourselves. I can be confident. I can hold the gaze of a man and smile. But more than that, I can be the strong and loving woman, and the healing force my future partner will need. I don’t need to turn into that little girl, but I don’t need to ignore her either. Because she is the keeper of the light and the source of so much of my love, and she’s on my side. She is on my side.

  51

  Date Fifty-One: The Sparkling Ribbon of Time, Act III

  I find myself standing in the Griffith Observatory, reading again the passage about the Sparkling Ribbon of Time: “From the earliest moments of the universe, the pattern was set for the structure we see today, that structure is revealed by glowing galaxies of stars. Galaxies congregate in clusters which form webbing that extends throughout the universe. This webwork is the ultimate structure of reality.”

  This webwork is the ultimate structure of reality, and I am just one teeny little speck of dust in the infinite life of God. Just little ole me, looking for romance. I walk into Nat’s bridal suite this morning wondering whether I will have gotten what I seek by the end of the night. Immediately I am greeted by the makeup artist Vincent, who asks me, “Which starlet are you?”

  I smile and say, “I’m Grace Kelly.” Nat asked all of us which Old Hollywood star we wanted to be styled like for her wedding, and I didn’t even need to think about it. At first she protested, “You don’t even look like Grace Kelly.” But it didn’t matter to me. I knew there was no one else I could be.

  I tell Vincent this, and he laughs. “Honey, even Grace Kelly had to fight to be Grace Kelly.” And I know he’s right. Because I’ve had to fight to be me too. But then Vincent works his magic, and I slip on my bridesmaid dress, and I know my fight is over. I may not look like Grace Kelly, but I look like me, and I’m happy with that.

  I saw Ben on Wednesday night after our meeting, and we were talking about the wedding when he realized that it would be occurring at the same time as one of the playoff games for the L.A. Dodgers. At first he was joking that if he got offered tickets, he might not be able to make it to the wedding. I laughed. “Well, I guess neither of us will be going then.”

  “I’m not kidding, Kristen. If someone gives me tickets, that’s going to be a tough choice.”

  John is standing there, appalled. John is Reggie’s sponsor and is also in the wedding party, so he’s gotten a chance to see this burgeoning and questionable relationship up close.

  “You can’t cancel on Kristen,” he tells Ben.

  “For the Dodgers, I can,” Ben shoots back.

  John looks at me and back to Ben, “But it’s Kristen.”

  Ben shrugs, “No. It’s the Dodgers.”

  “Whatever,” I say, turning around and walking off.

  It doesn’t take long for Ben to follow me and tell me he will be there. That he has made the commitment and that he won’t ditch out. I try to be jokey and grab his arm. “It’ll be fun, Ben. Besides, it’s with me, and I’m actually quite charming.”

  We laugh, and he walks me to my car, and we say goodbye, and I wonder if that’s what I want. Someone who isn’t excited to hang out with me. I stand in the ladies’ room, waiting for Ben to begrudgingly show at the wedding, and I wonder again whether romance will be mine by the end of the night. And if so, do I even want one with Ben?

  I do a final primp and then go join the bride in her dressing room. She looks perfect, and she is so happy, and excited, and ready to go and embark on this adventure with her new husband, and I feel nothing but joy for her. We walk out to the sunroom, from which the procession will start. Everybody files out, and I am the last one standing with the bride.

  She looks at me nervously, and I kiss her cheek. “You’re going to have a beautiful marriage.”

  And I mean it.

  The wedding is perfect. And the bride and groom are perfect. And I know that though I may not be ready to have one
of these affairs right now in my life, I do look forward to having one someday. The bride and groom kiss, and we all head back inside for photos and mingling. I find Ben, and we get some coffee. The wedding is taking place in an old castle in which a wealthy family once lived, but like all great buildings too big for their ancestors, this one has now been converted into artists’ residences above the spaces used for weddings and other receptions.

  There is a staircase leading up to the rest of the building with a sign that clearly states, “Residents Only.”

  But Ben and I venture past the sign and up into the rest of the castle. The halls remind me so much of the Chelsea Hotel that it’s a little eerie. I could spend hours looking at the art hanging in the hallways and listening into people’s spaces, but Ben likes to cruise through. I lead us to the top floor because I think there might be something interesting up there, and Ben follows.

  I like this. I like doing this with Ben. The fact that he instigated the expedition and is quick to follow my lead, makes me forget that he doesn’t often seem so interested in doing so. And as I bound up the staircase, I lose sight of the fact that he doesn’t open doors, that he failed to tell me that I looked pretty tonight, and that he seems to look at me only as a buddy.