I wash my hands and put on lotion to mask the smell of smoke which never really comes off and I remember on that same trip a Dutch couple from the hotel invited us to eat dinner with them and the man pounded on the table about immigrants. “They say I’m Dutch,” he yelled. “I’m black as my shoe but I’m Dutch.” I shake my head like my dad and go into Honey’s room touch her hand and she stirs. I touch her cheek and she stirs again and I say “Did we have a nice snooze” and she blinks at me and then her face wrinkles as though she will cry but then settles itself into more of a look of assessment, a serious look, and then she smiles, the way she has of what I think they call self-soothing; she is always adapting to her environments.
I put on more sunscreen and the hat and attach the Ergo for wearing her on my back which is challenging to do by yourself. I sit her on the bed and then squat down before her and sort of scoop her onto my back and hold her there with one arm behind my back while the other arm fumbles for straps and despite an instant and stabbing cramp in my side I manage to feed the buckle through the safety loop and then snap it tight and I adjust her and we look in the mirror and she smiles a big smile showing all her tiny teeth and I jump up and down to get her straightened out and she laughs and I put the backpack with her diapers etc. on frontways and say “We’re off!” and we set out for the long walk across town, all the way down Main Street almost to the other end. I hand Honey half a banana and we plod along until she says “Eh eh eh aaaaaah” in my ear and I give her the rest of the banana and there’s banana in my hair. Sal’s it turns out is closed at 9:40 on a Sunday but I huddle near the door and get out my phone and find I can still use its Internet. I ignore my flurry of WhatsApp notifications and open Skype. Engin is not logged on so I call his phone. He answers and I hear festive hubbub in the background. “Canım benim” he says, and I say “canım benim.” “You’re early,” he says, and I say “We’re, um, going out and so I’m calling you to say we won’t be able to call you at ten-thirty.” “Where are you going,” he asks, and it takes me a minute to remember the word “church,” so seldom have I used it. Like “ecclesiastical,” like French église. Ikliz, I say but no, he corrects me, kilise. “It sounds strange I know,” I say. He laughs. “Church! Why?” “I don’t know, Engin. We’re bored. You know I used to go with my mom.” “American religious fundamentalism is influencing my wife,” he says to someone, which annoys me. “Pelin says don’t go,” he says to me and I hear the voice of my sister-in-law in the background. “Where are you?” I ask. “We’re having beers with Pelin and Savaş on the Kordon. We decided to go to visit Dad. Tomorrow we’ll go to the beach.” The fucking beach. Pelin is beautiful beautiful beautiful and I wither momentarily thinking about her in a bathing suit, a sight I’ve been subjected to previously in a harmful manner, although jealousy isn’t quite right here since she is after all Engin’s sister, but even if he cannot lust for her exactly she can acclimatize him to the way that women are supposed to look and I know I do not look, and Pelin is the mother of a teenager and still looks the way she does. “How nice,” I say. “Let’s talk tomorrow, then.” Engin sounds bemused. “Okay. But I can still talk on the Kordon. How long is your church?” “I don’t know, I haven’t been in years. An hour probably.” Honey begins squawking. “It’s your baba” I tell her and hold up the phone by my shoulder so she can hear it from my back. She gets her mitts on the phone and tries to turn it to look at the screen as though to see his face. “No, sweetheart, he’s not on the screen, just his voice, my love.” “I’ve got to go,” I tell Engin. “Let’s talk tomorrow.” I feel unaccountably desperate to get off the phone, the futility of conversation alighting on me suddenly like a stinking, malevolent seabird. “I love you I kiss you bye bye,” and press the red button while he is still saying something.
We start up the march again and approach the street where we turn up for the church and I picture him on the Kordon, which I think must be the happiest place on earth or was the last time I was there, before Izmir became a way station for desperate people preparing to cross the sea. A wide patch of grass stretches a mile up and down the waterfront of the main part of Izmir, innocuously ugly concrete buildings faced by a strip of cafés and the grass, upon which families and young people and lovers sit and men walk up and down selling pumpkin seeds and collecting empty beer bottles for recycling. It’s obviously not Engin’s fault that he is having a beach day while I’m lugging a sweating toddler to a rural church service—it’s my fault for ensnaring him through marriage in the bureaucratic web of the evil empire, my fault for putting him in a position where his only chance to work was to go back to Turkey, my fault my fault. I know all these things but I am still full of fury.
I should look for a job in Turkey; I have no idea what is out there besides teaching English for which I have zero aptitude and hate doing and which does not pay well unless you do have aptitude, which is as it should be. I don’t want to float like an expat spouse, start some offensive blog, “My Life Among the Turks.” I want to make money, to have money. I don’t want to dig for bargain clothes in a seedy pasaj. And it makes me feel so mournful to think of Honey not speaking English at school, not to mention what they would teach her. Although why should I be suspicious of what she would learn in a Turkish school? God only knows what she would learn at school in Altavista. These are all problematic thoughts to parse at a later time.
We walk the roads off Main Street to get to the church and some of the houses look okay but some of them are obviously hoarder houses, faded curtains pulled up at a corner to show dusty knickknacks and piles of nothing. I wonder if this is some specifically American disease or whether other places have it too. I have never met a Turkish hoarder to my knowledge. As we turn onto Second Street I consider the wisdom of bringing a child Honey’s age to church. It has been probably fifteen years since I attended a church service, around the time of the Chios trip probably, and I strain to imagine what the experience is like vis-à-vis babies. I assume that St. Mark’s follows the liturgy of my youth, although I imagine it will be less well attended by an order of magnitude. On the one hand, it seems unlikely that Honey will be able to cope with the mandate of spending one hour in silence. On the other, who will care if we get up and go?
The church is significantly less prepossessing than I remembered, a small L-shaped ranch building built of cinder blocks like the Golden Spike. The yard is torn up, just cratered dirt with small piles of rubble here and there. It’s on one of the last blocks up against a dirt hill that crests up to a rocky outcrop looking out over the scattered houses of Indian Town. I’m sure it can’t be called that anymore. I wonder if the church is functional and this possibility opens a door to turning back and going home and I desperately want to slip through it. There is a sign on the actual door that I hope says Church Closed but really says Pardon Our Dust so I open the door and it looks as I distantly remember from many years ago. One side of the L formed by the building contains what I think is called the nave, rows of neat wooden pews, all of them empty, leading up to a very respectable little altar area with pulpit flags crosses etc. The sun shines brightly down the aisle through the modest stained glass. The other side of the L is a mingling slash rumpus area with a large table and chairs and an open kitchen toward the back. There are tidy bookshelves lining the room and a bulletin board and a low-lying gray wall-to-wall carpet covers the concrete slab which is perceptible in the balls of your feet. It’s all very nice-looking.
I know, although I don’t know how I know, that for years the priest has been itinerant between three towns in the county, since the number of Episcopalians these days is such that one rural congregation could never support his care and feeding. The Mormons seem busy according to their parking lot, and the evangelicals too, out there on the road between Altavista and a hamlet called, incredibly, Brother’s Keeper. There appears to be no one else in the building. I knew the number had dwindled but I had not considered the possibility that we would be the only people here.
“Hello” he says. “Hi there,” I say brightly, as if it were the most normal thing in the world to be attending a Sunday church service in an empty room. “I’m Daphne,” I say, extending my hand. “Benny,” he says, and shakes. I proffer up Honey, who gives him her signature and highly alarming come-hither look of downcast eyes sweeping lashes tucked chin and perfectly timed look up, it’s actually gross how cute and coy it is—nazlı, the word is in Turkish. “This is Honey.” “Hi there, little Honey,” he says and gingerly grasps two of her fingers. “Are … we going to be the only ones here,” I ask him. “Well, usually there are seven of us,” he says. At this the front door opens and a slightly ruddy wren of a woman rushes in, clad in flowing skirts and sleeves. “Everyone is sick,” she says, answering a question she didn’t hear me ask. “Randy is sick and can’t do the music, the Gates girls got heat stroke at the fairground yesterday, and I don’t know who-all.” “Hi,” she says and looks at me. “What a delightful sight the two of you are.” Honey begins kicking and I put her down to tear around again. “Yes, hi, well, I’m not sure how she’ll do. It’s the first time she’s been to church,” I say ruefully, as though our attendance were recorded in a central database. “Well that’s even better, then,” the woman says. “It’s a blessing to have you both. Do I know you?” I say my name and the name of my grandmother and she nods. “Yep, knew your lovely grandmother,” the first person I’ve met, I think, who has remembered her. “My name is Sarah and I’m our Worship Leader when Father H is out.” Two other women walk into the church, not old, but one walks with a cane. We are all white in the room. “Gladys, Mary,” Sarah says. “I’m thinking this is going to be it today.” I look at the rows and estimate that they could comfortably accommodate eighty people. Benny, Gladys, Mary, and I shuffle toward the pews and distribute ourselves as evenly as we can, Benny in one quadrant, Honey and I in another, and Mary and Gladys in a third, with the fourth quadrant empty. It looks like a plague has come through and we are the last people on earth and we are praying for deliverance.
Honey has toddled off and is squatting near a rack of ecclesiastical magazines at the back of the rumpus area and I think that might work and I move back to the second-to-last pew so I can keep an eye on both the pulpit and the child. The nave is lined with big open windows that make the building seem more spacious than it is. It is very clean and bright and airy, an illusion of bigness within relative to the squat brown building without. In my pew I set the Ergo the diaper bag the liturgy printout and a pencil I find in the bag. “Daphne,” Sarah says to me from the pulpit. “If you could just get behind you to the keyboard and press Play on the digital box.” I find the keyboard and a little box on it with a screen and buttons and I press the one that says “Play.” The canned organ of the processional sounds through the air and we assembled begin to sing. Honey pauses for a moment to marvel at us then runs down the aisle and climbs the stairs to the altar area. I run after her and scoop her up whisper “sorry” as though there were a hundred other people in the room rather than four and we trot down the aisle back to my pew where I put her up in a seated position and hand her the liturgy and the pencil and she stands on the bench and starts tearing holes in the liturgy with the pencil.
We didn’t have any kind of service here for Dad. He wasn’t religious and his family was Catholic, a suspect faith, and he wasn’t from here and it would have been utterly strange to have any kind of thing for him here in this building. But we did have one in our Anglican church in Athens, when we finally left Altavista and braved the reentry, the wives from the embassy ladies’ group flanking Mom as she unlocked the door of our apartment. I sit in the pew and try to put myself back inside that church, a beautiful stone building near Syntagma Square. A place for travelers and pilgrims since the nineteenth century, it advertises itself—for Philhellenes, for drifting colonials. I remember sitting in the pew thinking how strange it was that Mom and I were sitting there without him like we did every Sunday, but that this time it was his very absence that we were commemorating, marking that absence permanent. That we wouldn’t swallow cake and lemonade and make the hot walk home and find him waiting back at the apartment doing a puzzle. That he was just … absent. I close this window in my consciousness and think how odd it is that Honey has never been to that church with me. She’s never seen Syntagma, she’s never roamed the warren of the National Garden with its permanent fug of cat pee, its rusted playground equipment, the clamor of peacock screams and maybe a brass band sounding through the dusty foliage. She’s never been anywhere that matters to Engin or me, except here.
We are onto the Confession of Sin now and Honey scoots down off the pew and is again running toward the rumpus area which I feel is fine except she is holding the pencil sharp side up and I run after her and take it away and she issues a “NYO” that echoes through the building. I return to the pew get her sippy cup trot back out hand her the water and she flings it and is back down the aisle, with a detour into Benny’s pew to pat winsomely at his knee and although I have misgivings I allow this to happen as it lets me get out the prayer book and hymn book and uncrumple the liturgy and try to figure out where we are.
We are in a Psalm and I see Benny handing his Book of Common Prayer to Honey as though she might follow along and then looking bemusedly at Honey while she tears a page from it and I spring across the aisle to his pew to collect her and say no no no and smooth the page and whisper “sorry” again to the room over the sound of Sarah’s incantations. I carry her into the rumpus area and set her down and give her a plastic cup from a sleeve of plastic cups on the table. I return to the pew. First Lesson is read by Benny. During Second Lesson read by Gladys or is it Mary I see Honey zip up the aisle and again begin climbing the stairs to the altar and again I zip down the aisle and grab her and whisper “sorry” and we have reached a point where I feel it would be equally rude to leave and to stay. I want someone to say something like “It’s all fine!” or “Bless the children,” but the service is proceeding with what seems like a lot of ceremony given the size of its congregation. Sarah asks me to press Play again for a hymn. Honey joins me in the pew and begins pulling things out of the diaper bag. Sarah begins her sermon which I listen to with one ear as Honey heads back to the rumpus area and I hear something about the troops but then I also hear things about American Exceptionalism and I think Huh, interesting, and I want to hear more and whether or not American Exceptionalism is something we support in the congregation—I don’t think I have ever heard the phrase used to connote something positive and I would be glad to know the spirit of dissent is alive in the small-town church, but Honey falls down and cries and I take her outside the building and then we come back in and I let her run in circles making small squawking sounds for the Apostles’ Creed and the Lord’s Prayer which is the prayer I used to say every night before I went to sleep. I recite the words and rather than a balm on my soul or the breath of God or something I just feel the relief of knowing the words to something without even having to think about it, knowing the beginning the middle the end, the way I want to speak Turkish, the way I want to raise my child, knowing and assured. In Tur
kish “fluent” is from the verb meaning to flow but I guess if I think about it that’s true in English too. Anyway, Dear God, let me be the one who flows.
I hear banging and run to the rumpus area and find Honey pulling bowls out of a cupboard. I collect her and return to the pew and Benny in my absence has been called to press Play for the Offertory hymn and I’m mortified to remember that offertory means offering and this is the time for the baskets and I don’t have even spare change to put into one. It feels so tacky to come as a guest to this moribund congregation and let my child wreak havoc and not even leave a dollar and I see with deep shame Benny pulling twenty dollars out of his wallet to put into the basket that he himself is carrying around. Mary and Gladys put their contributions in, even Sarah the Worship Leader, and when he comes my way I whisper “I’m so sorry, I forgot about this part,” and it seems clear that Benny has no children because he holds the basket in front of Honey as though it will be a fun diversion for her and Honey of course grabs the money and I have to wrest it from her and put it back into the basket and she begins her chorus of “NYO NYO” and kicks and writhes and I know that it is time to go.
I wave ruefully at everyone and scurry toward the door and I see Sarah look questioningly and put a hand up but I don’t stay long enough to see whether she is going to say “Wait” and we are back out into the heat of the day and I feel suddenly choked by the smell of juniper and I think I’m glad my mother my grandparents my grandparents’ grandparents aren’t here to see how small the church is now. I put two blocks between us and the church and then I sit down on a crumbling curb off Main Street and wrench another muscle deep in my side trying to get Honey onto my back into the Ergo.
The Golden State: A Novel Page 11