The Golden State: A Novel

by Lydia Kiesling

  I put her in the Pack ’n Play and all the happy time on the bed vanishes without a trace and she is miserable again and I try to soothe her and then I say good night and leave while she wails with her hands on the netting of her cage. I remember that she is sixteen months old today.

  Then I remember the bottle of Popov and the orange juice and I make myself a screwdriver and sit in the Wi-Fi zone of the porch smoking and listening to her faint cries through the screen door. I send Engin a generic greeting on WhatsApp and then I google “banging head against ground,” the little wheel turning as the phone strains to hang on to Cindy’s signal in the Paiute night. I feel my anxiety reach through the screen to comingle with the anxiety of the BabyCenter mothers, various in its particulars but always with the same root—let it not be serious, let it not be serious. Or perhaps some of them do want it to be serious. When I was younger I used to wait for something dramatic to happen—my period to come, my mother to die. Both things eventually happened and neither of them brought any glamour to life I can say with certainty. But if something happens to Honey I will die I will die I will die.

  This line of thought leads me down the path of Ellery Simpson’s mother and I picture Ellery’s heavy eyebrows and brown eyes from the photo on an older woman lying in bed in a darkened room with her fist to her mouth. I know from one of the work-studies that Ellery has a younger sister and brother and I wonder if that makes any difference and of course not how could it, how could anything. There’s the math of it, two being more than zero, but this is capitalist thinking—my mind somewhat hysterically conjures Hugo. And I still live in the universe of a single child where the idea of reproducing that love, the same dimension and volume of it, twice, three times, seven times, ten times, is incomprehensible although it is an irrefutable fact of life. I start crying. Eventually I stop and I hear that Honey has stopped too and now I feel lonesome for her and in a while I go back into the house back into the closet and get her out of the Pack ’n Play, her body heavy and limp. I hitch up onto the big bed and lean against the pillows with her head on my chest, feeling her back rise and fall with her curly head in the place on my neck. We stay like this for a while in the nearly pitch-black room with me just trying to transmit love to her until I put her back gently into the Pack ’n Play and return to the porch where I smoke three cigarettes in a row staring into the dark, ranging my fingers over my face and into my scalp and picking away at anything that feels remotely like a flake or a protuberance and feeling both not good and good at the same time.

  DAY 3     We are finally going to call Engin. I put Honey in her stroller and we start the long walk down the highway that is also the main street leading out to the bird refuge at the far side of town. The sky is not so blue today as it was yesterday—it has a yellow tint and it is hot hot hot even at 9:45 when we hit the road after four stories and more pancakes. You think of heat having mass when it is humid but extremely dry heat has mass too unless you’ve got a good breeze or some shade, it is something you have to move against. Here and there I try to point out things to Honey—“there is the school where your grandma went” “there is the Elks” “that used to be a pharmacy” “that used to be the Tog-Shop” etc.—but once she is in the stroller her eyes basically glaze over and she lives in a strange place between sleep and awakeness but I’ll take it because I can basically think my thoughts and just be with her without having to do anything for her.

  There aren’t very many open businesses on Main Street anymore, except the High Desert Hotel and the Frosty and the Rite Aid which is only a few years old and sure enough has annihilated the two mom-and-pop pharmacies that had coexisted peacefully for decades. The Frosty has a sign rising high up over the plains like a forlorn palm tree. Just past the sign my phone buzzes as we wander into a patch of service, and I see a voice mail icon, which fills me with dread. But I tap and there is only one and when I hold the phone to my ear I register that it is the voice of Uncle Rodney, who is the least threatening person who could be leaving me a voice mail at this moment. I stop to marvel at how quickly the frayed grapevine of my Altavista life has communicated to him that I’m in the house. John must have called Rosemary must have called Rodney. “Heard from Rosemary you were up at the house,” he says on the voice mail sure enough. “Give me a call and let me know how it’s looking, when you get the chance.” I know this will be relatively painless but I decide I don’t have the energy.

  The sidewalks are completely empty except for a little group of youngish people in big T-shirts and short shorts for girls and big shorts for boys. Three kids are white and two are brown and I wonder if this is indicative of demographic change. There was one lone black family in town when Mom and Uncle Rodney were growing up but I don’t know what became of them. The kids move slow and laugh among themselves and Honey and I pass them and I give a little wave which yields a murmur of “Hi”s. We walk all the way through town to the Desert Sunrise, which is the Indian casino which is three conjoined trailers with slot machines and a few poker tables inside. I took Engin there on his inaugural trip to Altavista because I wanted him to see something he’d never seen before and I’d never seen the Desert Sunrise myself but it’s not like Las Vegas or even Reno where you can visit a casino if you aren’t gambling—there are about six grim-looking men and women at the Desert Sunrise, and everyone stares. Engin fancies himself a man of the people and gets into involved conversations I suspect he secretly regrets with old men and aunties in Anatolian gas stations but the Desert Sunrise does not create an atmosphere of folksiness so much as one of incipient murder. So we moonwalked out of the trailer and I noted the “Silly faggot dicks are for chicks” bumper sticker in the parking lot.

  I reflect on Engin’s first visit to Altavista that Christmas with Rodney and Helen. Engin I think made certain assumptions about my class background which combined with certain assumptions that any foreigner has about what America is, which are no less bizarre and misguided than any American’s assumptions about what another place is, led him to believe that a trip to my ancestral land would be something like the movie Father of the Bride, even though I tried to prepare him by using words like “village” and “cowboy” when I described the town. When he first came to California and we got married in Uncle Rodney’s backyard in Quincy first we went up the Sonoma coast and then took 128 back inland through the golden country which if you squint looks Mediterranean and then we went inland to 49 up the Yuba and the Downie and the majestic forests and the stone peaks of Lassen and then into the green valley around Quincy and Quincy itself with its beautiful false fronts and historic theaters and the sound of water wherever you go and I could tell wherever we went that he got it. But then you get up in the north and east and things just get a little scrubbier, the buildings flatter and the people less likely to have started a playhouse with a free library out front. The beauty here is the great slate sky the sound of the birds in the morning the color of the hills and the fields at dusk. Engin said it reminded him of Ang Lee. But I told him that’s not accurate, since Ang Lee trucks in the maximalist blue-sky beauty of Montana or Wyoming, blowsy hills like big green breasts, not the high, thin, stony West, full of volcanic stone washes and scrub oak. Then he pointed out that Brokeback Mountain was actually filmed in Canada and I said “How do you even know that” and he said “I googled it because I liked the scenery” and I laughed. Engin loves vistas.

  When Honey and I hit the turnoff for the Desert Sunrise we turn back around in order to find Wi-Fi to Skype with our Ang Lee fan and thus we find ourselves at Sal’s Café in the lobby of the High Desert Hotel on Main Street. It’s open and populated by two tank-topped blond white teen girls at one table and a very, very old white woman with a gray bob who sits at another with a cup of coffee staring vacantly ahead. I buy a coffee from the proprietress maybe Sal herself and unpack Honey from her stroller and take a banana from the bag and squeeze it into pieces and she begins shoveling them into her mouth and I set up the laptop. I open
Skype and put on the headphones but then realize Honey won’t be able to hear so I will just have to be rude and let him talk to the room. I click Engin’s face and it rings and he answers and there he is in the flesh or in the screen rather, his gray eyes pale skin brown hair and his newly clean-shaven face and I think how handsome he is and instead of feeling happy and proud I feel a pang because he has been unattended for eight months looking like that and I am here looking like this and then I remember that he is on the shorter side and his arms are also the tiniest bit too short for his body and maybe that will keep the women away and then I think God should just smite me we haven’t even exchanged three words.

  Behind him on the screen is his mother’s tidy apartment, which is where he stays. He says “Finally, Defne”—in Turkish I’m Defne—and I laboriously flip a giant rusty lever in my brain to speak Turkish again and I say “Look Honey it’s your baba look look” and she looks at me with some suspicion to hear the strange words and she looks at him and there is a pause and I am holding my breath and thinking please don’t cry please don’t squirm please don’t hide but she smiles and stretches out her arms to him and he says “My cub, my darling, do you miss your daddy,” and they coo back and forth at each other which puts off the moment when I have to apologize for running away and Honey touches the screen and says “Hi! Hi! Hi!” and I say “Say merhaba to your baba” and then my mother-in-law Ayşe is in the frame boxing Engin out entirely and there is a torrent of affectionate pitter-patter for Honey and it fills Sal’s coffee shop and I look around at the proprietress and the teens and the old woman but nobody seems to care very much. Ayşe brushes away a tear and blows a kiss to me and says “Come to us my love, we miss you,” and then she recedes and Engin lights a cigarette—it seems we’re both smoking—and addresses himself to me and Honey stares rapt at the screen. “Don’t smoke in front of the baby, yaa,” I tell him, I mean come on, and he stubs it out with a rueful look and I feel guilty and smile and say “How was Belgrade,” a sally whose fundamental insincerity he perceives and brushes off accordingly.

  “Why are you in the steppe? Don’t you have work?”

  Although I have had plenty of time to ponder this I don’t have an answer for myself let alone a soothing lie for Engin, which would be a reason of some kind, any kind, and not just a sudden urge for flight.

  “Things were, ahh, not busy at work,” I say, in Turkish, always in Turkish, I loved Turkish before I loved Engin. “And I thought I haven’t been up to the house for a while and I should go look at it.” My grammar is distressingly lumpy. “Okay,” says Engin in English, but I can tell he thinks it’s weird, it is on its face weird, because had I been planning some recon mission I would have let him know in advance.

  “Are you okay?” he asks. I begin to cry so suddenly and so copiously it’s not a taktik or a refleks but more that my tears are a well-trained army and always mustered ready to unleash hell.

  “My love, my soul, don’t cry.” Turkish has lots of endearments freely deployed. “Come on, why are you crying?”

  I don’t want to make him feel bad by saying I am crying because I am here and I am here because you went to complete a certificate course on postproduction in Istanbul and when you came back halfway through to see us surrendered your goddamn green card to DHS under pressure and under false pretenses that contravene established immigration practice and U.S. law and are undoubtedly rooted in xenophobia not to say Islamophobia, and because you were then sent back to Istanbul on the next flight at our expense rather than spending three desperately needed weeks with your wife and child, and because your second application submitted through the even more arcane National Visa Center for overseas consular processing is stuck in limbo due to what I learned after twenty-six nonconsecutive hours of waiting on the phone and the eventual expenditure of a thousand more dollars may in fact be a “click-of-the-mouse error”—theirs—and which we have already paid an attorney to ameliorate and resubmit through the correct channels and will presumably have to pay more to stay on top of until it is seen through and I am alone with our child whose first steps and first words you are missing and I sometimes fantasize about meeting you at the airport with her and kissing you passionately and then throttling you until you die, so I just say “I’m feeling sad,” which is also true.

  Honey twists around, bored, with her last bit of banana in one hand, and gives my descending bun a yank. Engin smiles at her while somehow simultaneously frowning at me. She finishes the banana and starts putting her fingers on the screen of the Institute’s computer and I am still crying. The teens in the corner are openly staring. “How was Belgrade?” I manage to get out again. “Nice, actually,” he says, joining the folie à deux of normalcy. “Really nice. We should live there.” We are always opining about places we should live, which are always somewhere else than the place where either of us is living. “Tolga’s thing is shit, though—really disorganized” but now I am crying again and unable to take in Tolga and his endless dubious multipronged film and web marketing schemes. Engin in his heart of hearts wants to be a video artist—make outlandish Björk videos and such—but to make money he signs on to shoot Tolga’s promotional videos for private schools and Eastern European banking concerns instead.

  “Tell her to bring my granddaughter and come here,” his mother hollers from the kitchen. Engin smiles wanly and shrugs and says “You know you can come here” and I say “Do you want me to come there” and he says “Well you were staying there because you have a good job but if you are not going to work then I don’t understand why you wouldn’t come here” and I realize this probably cost him something to say because he thinks Hugo and Meredith are grifters but he knows also that work is important and that his work is feast or famine and not ideal for the maintenance of a family unit and then he says “As far as I know we hadn’t planned for you to live … there,” and he gestures at Sal’s behind me and I nod. “I know,” I say. “I thought maybe I’d go through some of my mom’s stuff in the garage to see what I can sell.” “By yourself?” and that leads us back to the fucking green card and I say “I’ll leave the heavy stuff for when you come” and then I just feel so done and tired of talking I take two deep breaths and say “Honey has to have her nap” and “Really I’m fine, just feeling down” (Moralim bozuk, my morale is spoilt) and “I’ll go back to work, I promise” and “Give your mother a kiss from me” and to Honey I say “Say bye-bye to your baba, give your baba a kiss,” and she finally brings the palm of her hand to her mouth and lowers it toward the screen extravagantly open and proud of herself and I blow a kiss too and shut the laptop more abruptly than I intend.

  I wipe my eyes and blow my nose on Honey’s bib. I open the laptop again. I e-mail Meredith and Hugo to say that I am still sick. I message the daycare to say that Honey is sick. I need a treat of some kind and when a suitable interval has passed and I stop sniffling I hoist up Honey and leave our stuff at the table and buy a rice crispy thing from the basket next to the cash register. I wonder if the proprietor is going to ask whether she needs to call somebody but she just says “What language was that?” “Turkish,” I say. “My husband’s Turkish.” I never have any idea what that will mean to anyone.

  “Oh, my son used to live over there,” she surprises the hell out of me by saying.

  “Whaddayacallit, Injik, when he was in the air force.” İncirlik, she means.

  “Oh wow,” I say. “Did he like it?”

  “He loved it. Said it was just beautiful. Nicest people in the world.” Everyone seems to agree on this point. “Turkish hospitality is famous,” I say stupidly, aware of the clammy puff of my face and the crying hives and the runnels left by tears in my poorly moisturized undereyes. “Sorry,” I gesture to my face and smile ruefully. “It’s just hard to be apart sometimes. Gotta get him back here.”

  “What are you doing all the way up in Altavista?” She has an incredibly kindly look on her face, a narrow tanned white face with bifocals on an upturned nose and I
just want to tell her everything.

  “My mom’s from here, Frank and Cora Burdock’s daughter?” She looks blank. “They lived over in Deakins Park.” “Oh,” she says. “My brother’s lady friend lives over there. Cindy Cooper.” “Oh,” I say. “My neighbor! She seems like a nice lady” and the proprietress laughs and says, “I don’t know about that. But we love her anyway.” Honey watches us talking and the proprietress says, “She’s a good little thing isn’t she,” and I say, “Most of the time.” “Pretty little thing,” she says. “Look at those eyelashes,” and Honey smiles at her out from under them.

  I gather up our things and set Honey down and she toddles furiously toward the door and as we pass through it the crone who has been mostly motionless sitting at the table next to the door looks right at us. “Merhaba,” I could swear she says, which is Hello in Turkish. Even Honey stills for a moment, pausing midflight in her headlong rush toward the sidewalk. “Hello?” I say to her politely in English, sure I’ve had an auditory hallucination. She looks down at her hands, her mouth closed and shy and Honey reanimates and flies out of the doorway and I fly after her, trailing a hand behind me in valediction at the crone. I catch the collar of Honey’s shirt and stick my head back through the door to say something, but her head is still bowed. “Goodbye,” I say. Honey chokes a bit with the neck of her garment up against her throat. We exit.

  I decide that we will take the long way home by the cemetery and stop to visit Mom, since I have not seen her in more than a year. The cemetery is south of Deakins Park, but like Deakins Park it sits out on the edge of inhabited land. Honey is quiet in her stroller lulled by the wheeling as usual and I think about Engin’s mother and what she said about us coming there to the small but airy matriarchal apartment in a nice neighborhood of Istanbul. This is the obvious thing to do, so obvious that we have danced endlessly around the idea, as though the idea were a slippery occult monolith upon which our minds can find no purchase. If you have two people and one of them is from what I believe is called an “emerging economy” and one is American you go to America, I guess is the usual thing, even though right now I am sitting in the middle of what you might call a demolished economy. (Casualties of Capital! Hugo says in my ear.) Plus I got the job at the Institute, and Engin did not have a stable income and was game to come to California, so this made sense. The whole trajectory of our marriage has been westward. It’s true that in Turkey there is Erdoğan the tyrant sultan and also that there are safety concerns of various kinds but the last incident was the woman from Dagestan who bombed the police station and that was months ago and America is no picnic on that score what with roomfuls of murdered kindergarteners lying in their own blood. Oh God. We talk about buying a stone shack on the Aegean coast sometime in the distant future, when we’ve made it in some way, the way being as of yet unclear. But I guess we assumed that at least the first location of our making it would be in America. It occurs to me that I created a sort of budget version of my own family situation where my dad’s work dictated that my mom live on foreign soil, and I’m now putting that on Engin, putting thousands of miles between him and his family and his friends not to mention momentous national events like Gezi, which he would have flown home for if we had the money and I wasn’t pregnant with Honey.