The Golden State: A Novel

by Lydia Kiesling

  I open Skype and click and soon Engin’s face appears on the screen and he and Honey become effervescent with joy. There are still tears and red blotches on her face left from the milk conflagration. “My sweet one. Are you helping your mother?” he asks. “Come on, kiss your daddy,” he says, and she kisses her hand and flaps it toward him, and smiles.

  I feel like I need to convince him that I am still a functional person so I begin with serious matters. “I have e-mailed the lawyer”—not true but I will—“to ask what we need to do now about the click-of-the-mouse.” I say “click-of-the-mouse” in English, it is now how we define the entire episode: “Engin is not here because of a click-of-the-mouse”; “we are working on my husband’s click-of-the-mouse.” He shrugs and I wonder if this is a bad sign—we’ve both just given up on it ever being resolved, which is probably what the Department of Homeland Security is hoping for, a general degradation of morale resulting in one fewer green card. I ask him what he is doing and he launches into a description of the project he is working on for the other friend who has the agency, not Tolga, and how the ad is in postproduction and while I don’t care I find this somehow comforting, Engin is working, Engin is making money, I am staying home with my child, I am not doing anything wrong, my only responsibility is to my child, this is a globalized world and families don’t always live under the same roof because they have to be where the opportunities are, it’s all normal in the world-historical sense.

  “You look beautiful,” Engin tells me, also a lie. This feels like his tentative hand reaching across my back when I’m halfway asleep; thank you Jesus that he is five thousand miles away and I don’t have to have sex, thank you Jesus.

  “Seni seviyorum,” I love you, I tell him, one of the first things I learned in Turkish, one of my least favorite things, alliteration only suitable for children, not for romance, to me it feels like you can’t attach weight to a phrase like that. I like seviyorum seni which moves the verb to the front, but this is colloquial; knowing what parts of grammar can be kickily rearranged is part of good style I always think. Spur-of-the-moment I say “I want to come to you,” and he says “Come, then” and then I have to think of all the reasons why it doesn’t make sense to do that and in eight words we’ve moved back to square one.

  Ayşe comes over to the screen and I valiantly endeavor to make pleasant chitchat with her and I wonder if she hates me. I wonder this all the time. I mean I assume that she finds me in some respects incorrigibly savage because I don’t wear socks in the house or dry my hair before going outside, but I like to think we get along. Then again the current situation is one to try any mother’s—any grandmother’s—patience.

  We click off, and then I hear it. “Seni seviyorum” the crone says. Ever since I started learning Turkish I’m always on high alert for people speaking Turkish, hear Turkish where it is not being spoken, and when it is being spoken put myself as close as I can to the speaker, and yet freeze when it’s my opportunity to speak, instead doing a strange thing where I am silent until the very last minute and then freak everyone out by revealing I understood what they were saying the whole time. Much like this woman has just done to me.

  “Merhaba!” I venture to her. “Siz Türk müsünüz?” She just looks at me. “Are you Turkish,” I ask in English. “I went to Turkey with my husband a long time ago,” she says curtly, as if she were not the one who just told a complete stranger I love you in a café.

  “Well, that’s quite a memory you’ve got,” I say in the voice I use with all elderly people and the insane. I am deciding whether to stay and draw her out and hear about how friendly the people were etc. but she looks off in the distance and says “I’m sure you want to be on your way” and there’s really no response to that but to say “Well, I guess so. Hope to see you again soon!” and start to roll Honey out and head in the direction of home where we’ll do god knows what for the rest of the day, but before I can put any distance between us she speaks again and says “It was the late 1950s, maybe 1960.” Jesus, I think, because that’s a long time ago, also a weird time, Turkey-wise—coup time, hanging time for what’s-his-name Menderes. I halt the stroller and start scooting it back over to her table, raising my eyebrows to her in an inquiry as to whether our continued presence is welcome or a hindrance. “He used to—my husband—he used to set a little alarm and study Turkish for fifteen minutes at a time,” she says. I lower myself into the empty seat at her table and roll Honey next to me. I’m worried she’ll immediately start freaking out which she sometimes does at the cessation of motion but she is looking very seriously, very gravely, almost the slightest bit skeptically at this new person. It is probably the oldest person she’s ever seen, I think, since Ayşe is under sixty and stunning and grandparents are an extinct species on my side of the family.

  “I remember when we went there he was so frustrated that he couldn’t talk to anyone.” She stirs her coffee and sips it. “That’s how I felt the first time I went there too,” I say. I have a curious feeling of both wanting to stay and talk to someone and wanting to leave, because conversations are work and the elderly are work and I’m just not up for work of any kind but then I remember again the extreme quiet of the house and Honey is after all sitting here so rapt. “I remember we went to a mosque in Istanbul,” she says it the American way, IS-tan-bool, instead of the Turkish way, “İ-STAHN-bul,” which I insist on saying now even though it sounds horribly affected when you are speaking English. “He was so excited because the mullah or whatever you call it spoke Arabic, and they could have a nice conversation.”

  “Oh,” I say, intrigued. “Is your husband an Arabic speaker?”

  “Was,” she says. “He’s gone now.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say, and while I’m trying to formulate my next question she begins again. “I remember I was so sick I just wandered off into a corner and drank a yogurt drink a little boy brought me.” She looks at Honey. “I was pregnant, is why.” “Ah,” I say. “Twins,” she says. “Jesus,” I say, my instinctive reaction to the possibility of twins. “That was before I knew it was twins, of course. It took me a long time to get pregnant. Almost ten years.” Like my parents, I think.

  “Was your husband American?” I ask. “Oh yes,” she says. I offensively assume she means he was not also an Arab so I ask “Why did he speak Arabic?” I’m always hugely admiring of anyone who can learn Arabic. I studied Modern Standard Arabic for two quarters and really, it’s so hard, but she just says “He needed it for his work” and I hesitate and say “What kind of work did he do?” and she says “Oh, he worked for different places” and it’s such a weird answer that it summons the ghost of my mother who I hear say “Spook” with derisive finality and I almost laugh aloud because it’s such a thing she would say, a judgment delivered upon anyone in an embassy whose role was not clearly defined. I decide not to press.

  “Where did you go in Turkey?” I ask. She is silent for a while looking at a point past Honey. “First we stayed in the city, with a lecturer from one of the universities.” She returns her gaze to me. “He had a beautiful wife named Gonul, I remember.” “Gönül,” I say reflexively, and years of vocabulary memorization kicks into gear like a tic (Gönül: heart; Gönüllü: with heart, volunteer). “It means ‘heart,’” I say. “That suits her,” the woman says. “She was very kind. They lived in a cold-water flat in one of those neighborhoods with the gorgeous wooden houses.” “Ah,” I say. “She had a little girl, I don’t remember her name. That’s who taught me ‘seni seviyorum.’” She shakes her head. “Imagine remembering that after all these years.” She smiles kindly at me, the first smile she has produced. “It must be something about hearing you say it.” Honey is still staring at her stupefied which is downright weird and I poke her. “Can you say hello?” I say. “This is Honey. Well, actually Meltem. Turkish.” “Pretty,” the crone says.

  Honey comes to life and starts kicking and wanting to be let out and as sometimes happens when I’m out with her I worry s
o much she’s going to make a big scene that I get a fight-or-flight thing and say “You know I’d really love to keep talking but I should probably get her home for a nap,” and the woman waves her hand toward the door and I say “I’m Daphne. What was your name?,” which is a weird verb tense, and she says “Alice” and Honey wails and I say “Alice it’s so nice to meet you, I hope we will see you again tomorrow!” and I fire the stroller out the door like a shot even though as soon as I leave I regret running from what is likely to be the most interesting conversation I have all day week month year.

  I let Honey out of the stroller and she does her spunky little run down the sidewalk until her head gets the better of her and she topples over hard and cries and I hustle to pick her up and cuddle her before she wants down again. While we walk home I think about what we are going to eat and I think she had Cheerios this morning which means she could have an egg which is nutritious and protein-filled and wouldn’t be a repeat and I think egg and berries and yogurt although that’s the last thing that I personally want to eat and wonder if I could somehow get a burger and shake from the Frosty and eat it away from her prying eyes.

  Finally we are home, or back at the house, and I scramble us four eggs and split them between two plates and I slice up strawberries and put yogurt in a bowl and set her in the high chair and set myself down next to her and think once she goes down for a nap I can eat the bag of Lays.

  It takes her a very long time to go to sleep. I open the bedroom window so I can hear her outside and her shouts and moans echo around the deck while I eat the chips drink a glass of water and then smoke a cigarette. It’s 12:10, early for her nap but I decide to wait her out and finally the sounds stop and after ten minutes it’s safe to assume she’s out.

  Now I have peace and quiet but again it occurs to me that I don’t really have anything to do and I think I should force myself to go in the garage and see what’s there, all my parents’, really my mom’s, linens and books and art that I haven’t been able to bring myself to dispose of but which would require some more substantial dwelling than I have to display. They are an adult person’s things, rugs and engravings and whatnot, which would be absurd in our tiny apartment. It occurs to me briefly to unpack everything and just put it around the mobile home but imagining her things against the faux-wood panels makes me itch. Moreover I don’t trust the town’s youth—the meth kids imagined although in fairness not actually seen—to not eventually break in and trash the place. I collect my cigarettes and phone and go inside and poke my head in at Honey and she is sleeping with her cheek mashed against the floor of the Pack ’n Play and her hands by her sides and her butt up in the air, and I back out of the closet stealthily and make my way to the pantry and out the back door into the heat and down the steps and to the garage where I gird my nerves and then hoist up the door and step into the pleasingly dim cool space smelling faintly of something motor-related, or the kind of oil I imagine you’d put on a baseball mitt.

  And there it all is, my little Aladdin’s cave, the beautiful rugs piled in the corner on the side where the pickup truck used to go, a love seat and Mom’s prized formal settee beside them shrouded in a blue tarp, some smaller lumps that I think are a mother-of-pearl inlay coffee table and an ottoman wrapped neatly in butcher paper. Art boxes lean up against the Snap-on tools workbench, all the housewares boxed up into pyramids on the side where the Buick used to live. My parents had me late and there were eight years on the road before and eleven years on the road after I was born; ample time for Mom to collect treasures, the acquisition of textiles being almost a formal perk of foreign service wifehood. I walk over to the rug pile and run a hand over a deep blue and red kilim on the top and give it an appraising sniff and it is pleasingly devoid of damp. I pick one of the boxes and pull up its tape and open its flaps and inside see what are obviously dishes of various sizes wrapped up in tissue paper. Uncle Rodney and I packed up Mom’s bungalow in Sac and he uncomplainingly hauled everything all the way up here with his truck. I took their iron bedframe, lugged it to grad school, and now it’s in our apartment in the City. I unwrap the top dish and it’s a jewel-blue glazed ceramic ashtray, “Tunis” painted on its base in Arabic and the name of some hotel. I carry it over to the settee and throw off the tarp. Beneath it the strangely pristine white jacquard is protected by yet another nest of plastic, and I sit down on this and put the ashtray on its arm and put my feet on the ottoman-shaped lump and light a cigarette, relishing the taboo feeling of indoor smoking, even just in a garage. “Hi Mom,” I say to the stuff. “Hi Dad,” I say to the urn, which is perched where I left it on the top shelf of the steel shelving at the back of the garage, a terra-cotta number allegedly acquired in the village where my parents met in Corfu.

  I take my phone out of my pocket and snap a picture of the garage to send at some future Wi-Fi-enabled point to Engin with the caption “çeyizim.” This is a joke we made on his first visit, that all this stuff here in the garage is my dowry, my trousseau rather. Obviously it was a joke, although in Turkey it’s not strange for parents to feather the nest for newlyweds—I guess they do that in America too, if you’re lucky they just buy the whole nest. I do come to the marriage with an impressive hoard of housewares and no siblings to squabble over them, even though we have no grown-up-seeming place to put them.

  Our wedding, or the grouping of events that I think of together as “our wedding,” was dictated by procedural matters. His mother and aunt, with what was really extraordinarily good grace given that I was a foreigner and that we had only been together for a few months when we decided to get married—I mean we had been together before but as far as they were concerned I arrived out of a clear blue sky—threw us a sort of lite version of the engagement ceremony at his mom’s house and then later a really nice dinner in a restaurant. Part of it was I think they felt terrible for me because I had almost no family members and so everyone swallowed their alarm and conspired to make a fuss over us. And at least I spoke Turkish, not anything like flawlessly but I make an effort with my idioms.

  The restaurant thing was supposed to follow a Turkish civil ceremony in a municipal hall, the official wedding ceremony. Originally when I found out I got the Institute job we were going to do a legally sanctioned thing and get married in Turkey and then apply for the U.S. K-3 nonimmigrant visa from Turkey, which is kind of a combo fiancé/marriage visa which would have let us start the process in Turkey and let Engin come to the U.S. with me and then do the rest of the applying there. But then we were advised by acquaintances and the Internet that this visa was basically nonoperational. And the K-1 fiancé visa takes eons, up to a year, and you can’t be together in the U.S. while you wait. So then we decided that we would forgo an official Turkish marriage and just have a nice dinner and then commit what I consider to be mild visa fraud by taking advantage of a loophole in U.S. visa policy that allows you to apply for a fiancé visa as a sort of fait accompli. Your honey comes to the U.S. on a three-month tourist visa, and you get married right before the three months is up, the idea being that your passion is such that it can be satisfied only through immediate entry into the marital estate. You have only a few family and friends, which is conveniently how many family and friends I have, you take a few pictures, you file simultaneously the I-130 Petition for Alien Relative and the I-485 Application to Register Permanent Residence or Adjust Status for your spouse who has now overstayed the B-2 tourist visa, and you spend a thousand dollars in fees and throw yourself on the mercies of a sympathetic visa officer who asks you a bunch of invasive questions and wants to see your text messages and makes you swear up and down you had no intent to marry when your honey got his tourist visa, and then you avoid leaving the U.S. until the green card is secured. That’s how Engin got his green card, the one which let us make a baby and from which it should have been a sure thing to move to citizenship. The miracle is that we got that one effortlessly, and then lost it basically through a malicious fluke. It’s obvious from all of this stuff
incidentally, that they don’t want you to marry someone who’s not from the fucking United States, all you have to do is read the reams of alphanumeric gibberish on the relevant websites.

  Anyway although it was foolhardy from an immigration protocol standpoint we had a big dinner in Istanbul but we told everyone to assiduously avoid thinking of it as a wedding so we didn’t get nailed by USCIS if they found for example a Facebook photo that appeared marital. The night before the dinner Pelin threw me a semi-ironic henna night in her apartment—a relief since like all once-traditional events in late capitalist urban environments the henna night sometimes takes the form of a giant boondoggle with hotel, caterers, costume changes, god forbid a belly dancer, etc. But this was just her and Engin’s select relatives and friends and two women I invited from my teaching days and they all made jokes I didn’t understand and sang “Yüksek Yüksek Tepelere” or “To the High High Hills” which has lines like “I miss my mother, I miss my village” and I got drunk and cried and everyone laughed because crying was actually the thing to do since historically you were facing the loss of your hymen the onslaught of your mother-in-law and the advent of family life and everything that comes with it. Then we went out to a bar and met Engin and we danced to a terrible pop song called “Married, Happy, with Kids.”

  I loved the nonwedding dinner. My godparents who had been posted in Nicosia with my parents were now posted in Tbilisi and they came all the way to Istanbul in honor of my mom and dad and discreetly avoided consular discussion. Murat, his gallbladder healed and in Istanbul for a sabbatical, came in spite of his reservations about the marriage and the Ph.D., and though he was obviously still grumpy with me, he and his wife were charming with Engin’s dad who had been forced to buy a new suit and tame his beard for the occasion. Murat is married to a Dane and they are one of a handful of dual-national marriages I know, which all seem to follow one of two models, which is either both parties are super classy intellectual types who meet in some prestigious university setting, or summer-love style unions that take place between people who are highly mismatched class-wise, like a bluestocking and a villager, and are presumably predicated on very strong mutual attraction. Engin and I don’t seem to fit into either of these models.