The Golden State: A Novel

by Lydia Kiesling

  “But what about her car,” says Yarrow. “How would we get the car back?”

  “You’re right,” I say. “I don’t know if Alice is up to the long drive” and Alice cuts me off and says “Just tell her to do that. I can make the drive.”

  “Alice is saying that the drive will be okay. And we can caravan and stop every so often on the way down.”

  “I mean getting the car back here,” she says and I’ve got nothing.

  “Tell her we’ll call her back tomorrow,” says Alice.

  “Yarrow, Alice is wondering whether we can all confer and then talk again tomorrow.”

  “Okay,” she says, obviously not okay. “But look, I don’t know how much she’s told you about herself.”

  “Not too much,” I say, looking sidelong at Alice and angling my body away from her.

  “She’s had a really hard time,” says Yarrow.

  “I have heard some of this, I think” I say, feeling very awkward with Alice watching me from against the bureau. I go toward the bathroom and poke my head in and see Honey sitting on the floor with an expression like she is trying to poop.

  “She lost her husband and three children and we’re all she’s got,” she says. “I mean there’s been some really really awful stuff in her life.”

  “Well, yeah, she told me just a little of it.” There’s a pause. “I don’t really know what else to say,” I say, which is true. I don’t know why the hard life should equal being trapped in your home for the rest of your days. I feel a little flare of indignation on Alice’s behalf. Why shouldn’t she go where she pleases, meet who she likes, be where she wants, power of attorney be damned. She’s not even driving the car. She’s her own woman.

  “Okay, well Alice and I will talk about the car situation and maybe you can confer with your husband and then we’ll call you back tomorrow,” I say, trying to sound adult and soothing and responsible.

  “Okay,” she says. “I guess that’s all we can do. Please take care of her. I mean you sound like a normal person but I don’t know you at all—no offense,” she says.

  “I totally, totally understand. This must seem super weird. But I promise I just want her to get where she’s going safely.” Alice is now in the bathroom door glaring at me and making a hang up gesture.

  “Okay, well, talk tomorrow, Yarrow. Nice to meet you.” I tap the phone to hang up.

  “Did you hang it up,” says Alice.

  “Yes, you just press the screen,” I say.

  “Make sure it’s hung up.”

  “It’s hung up!” Honey is hugging my leg and making tentative nips to my pants. “NO BITING,” I say, and she bursts into theatrical crying that I first assume is fake but I see a tear squeeze out and I have to pick her up and kiss her and say “I didn’t mean to scare you, Honey-pie” and nuzzle nuzzle. “But you know we don’t bite.”

  “I don’t know how reassured she felt,” I say to Alice. “She’s awfully protective of you, it sounds like.”

  “I want to lie down,” she says abruptly. “Okay,” I say.

  “When you wake up we can have the pizza and beer,” I say mostly because I really want this and hope she still does too and she smiles weakly. “That’s right.” I scoop up Honey who reaches her arms out to hug Alice and Alice smiles and reaches her arms back and we do an odd group hug with Honey squirming between our bodies and I feel her bony hands on my arms, the first person besides Honey who has touched me in a long time. Alice turns on her heel and walks out of the bathroom.

  I start to carry Honey to our room and then realize I don’t have the Pack ’n Play which I will need to put her to bed. I poke my head back into the room. “Actually, sorry, do you mind watching her,” I say. “I need to run and get her crib and so forth from the car.”

  “I don’t mind,” Alice says, and smiles at Honey who runs toward her skirt and buries her face in it and laughs. I walk briskly out of the room and down the corridor not insensible to the fact that this means I can smoke a cigarette. I get the Pack ’n Play and the various other things and I find my cigarettes and sit on the bench outside the front door of the motel looking out at the wagon wheel and the highway. Beyond is a row of mountains two of which have the slightest little bit of snow on them. I feel like seven minutes is a reasonable amount of time to leave them and while I recognize the addict’s brain serving forth this logic I don’t care and light the cigarette and as usual the first drag is both less and more satisfying than anticipated. Now that I am sitting still I realize I should call Engin and then I remember all of those notifications waiting on my phone to upset me.

  I decide to get the worst over with and look at the Institute e-mail and whatever is going on with Hugo and Meredith. It is calming to first delete all the things that do not matter so I select everything that falls under this category, all the cheery euphemistic updates from the University’s head cheese, all the e-mails about various sexual assaults that have taken place on campus, all my mass mailings from the Council on American-Islamic Relations. This leaves behind several e-mails from Purchasing which portends that my reimbursements are probably not forthcoming because I need to submit a different form than the form that was initially provided to me by Purchasing. There are twenty-two e-mails from Hugo one of which reads EMERGENCY, and twelve from Meredith. There is one from Karen that says “Are you okay” in the subject line so I know that she must be back from vacation and that things must not be going very well. I smoke more of my cigarette and then I open EMERGENCY and it says “This is not acceptable, Daphne—we have lost the key box and need to be able to give keys to our visiting scholars. I understand you have your family situation but you need to get in touch.” Six months ago I would have composed a florid apology outlining all the ways I was going to solve this problem and ensure that no other person ever have to face anything like this ever again but now I don’t care. The last e-mail from Meredith says “Hugo is on the warpath, you probably need to check in soon” which is pretty decent from Meredith all things considered but then I see the e-mail preceding it which is her asking for me to get her an exception for a travel expense since Karen is swamped and I decide that was the real emergency. I consider writing them now but I remember Honey is with Alice and Alice is frail and Honey is a wiggleworm a grenade a timebomb and I pull down the last of the cigarette and stand up feeling lightheaded and hurry back into the motel with the bag and Pack ’n Play and various other things.

  Inside Alice’s room Honey is sitting in the hard little chair that goes with the desk and Honey is painstakingly trying to pull Alice’s shoelaces out of her sensible shoes. “Hi hi,” I say, “Mommy is back. Sorry it took me so long,” and I realize I didn’t do gum or wash hands or anything and now Alice will know I smoke but what’s it to her and I drove her across state lines and am now probably under investigation by a concerned and concern-causing but not concerning hippie named Yarrow Passafarro.

  “Do you need me to help you with anything,” I ask Alice, looking around at her suitcase and the bed and wondering whether she will need to be lifted into it or anything like that.

  “No,” she says irritably. “I’m fine, thank you.”

  “What about your shoelace,” I point out, and she rolls her eyes and nods and I bend down and return the sturdy lace to its eyes and tie it in a firm knot. Then I pick up Honey and carry her to our room and realize she hasn’t had a lot of fun or edification today and I decide to do the bed-jumping thing and clutch her tight and run and fly onto the bed which groans alarmingly and she laughs and pats my face so hard it hurts. I pull back the nasty comforter pull Goodnight Moon out of the bag and give it to her to look at while I set up the Pack ’n Play. While I shake the sides of the thing until they finally become rigid I realize that I am thinking about the damn e-mails and that I will have no peace until I can resolve them. Once the cattle gate of distressing reminders is open the thought that I have not spoken to Engin today barges in. It is three o’clock now so it is 1:00 a.m. there but I think
Okay must prioritize let’s call him and I find the Wi-Fi info on a ratty postcard in a rattier motel binder and open the phone and gather Honey unto me and show her her own face on the screen as Skype does its customary ringing song which I once found comically monotonous, it’s fake music, it’s anti-music, and which I now hear as ominous. Honey scrabbles to touch her face on the screen and I hold her with one arm and stretch the other arm out so that she can’t hang up the call. The British woman’s voice comes on and says “The person you are trying to reach…” and I decide to gratify Honey on this one single thing and hold the phone close and guide her tiny finger to the red circle. “Bye-bye,” I say, and she says “Bye-bye” and while she knows how to wave I don’t think she’s ever said that before.

  “Baban seni çok özledi,” I say which means Your dad misses you very much. In fact it means Your dad missed you very much which is one of the mysteries of Turkish I will never figure out, why some verbs never take the present continuous even though they are describing an act that is ongoing, that cannot be put away in the past, like Missing or Liking, but not Loving, which Turks recognize as a present continuous situation, although Falling in Love is something that is always behind you in the simple past. Honey just looks at me and I think about how I am denying her her father tongue and then I think Will you take a nap and then I think probably not and then I think I need to take a nap. I realize there is a television with cable which is a novelty and I turn it on and click away until I find Dora the Explorer and sit Honey on the bed and I put a pillow behind her back and one between her and the edge of the bed and I lean over her curly brown head and run my hands over her back which is warm and small and slightly hunched like mine and I stretch out next to her and curl my arm around her butt and she stares rapt at the television and I doze.

  A knock on the door and I am up only after I register that the knocking has been going on for quite a while. Engin is not like this, he has insane cat reflexes and when the smoke alarm erroneously goes off which it does periodically because we need to get a new one he flies out of the bed before I even open my eyes which leads me to believe that maybe he has more anxieties than he lets on about home invasion things, disaster things, and I feel sad thinking that he might be thinking anxious thoughts on the other side of the world. Honey is slumped against the pillow behind her with her eyes half-open and an advertisement is blaring on the screen and my next thought is that my plan actually worked and I got a nap and Honey stayed in one place although at the expense of rotting her brain. “Just a second,” I say and I look at the clock and see that it’s almost five o’clock which is incredible, that she would sit still for so long. I sit up and see my wan face in the mirror my purple eyebrow my hair nest and I pick Honey up and say “Hi little buddy” and walk over to the door and open it and Alice is standing there and she looks at me and says “I’m hungry.” “Me too,” I say, which is always true, and I say “Let me put on my shoes and change her diaper” and I hurry back into the room leaving her standing in the doorway.

  “Come in,” I say.

  “I asked the girl up front where to get pizza and beer and she told me about a place called Berwin Pies.”

  “Excellent,” I say. I deal with Honey’s diaper and get her diaper bag and reach for my phone to see where this place is and then remember all the e-mails Engin etc. and think Fuck fuck fuck but find the map type in the place and say “Ten minutes away” and she says “I guess that thing can tell you everything” and I say “When it has service.”

  Berwin Pies is on the other side of town and we drive there past more boxy warehouses, Altavista on a grander scale, but with more check-cashing and more big parking lots. We drive past the beautiful lake we missed on our entrance to the town and Alice keeps her own counsel while I attempt to parallel park and then give up and pull into one of the big empty lots kitty-corner from the pizza joint. It is what you might expect, neon sign pleather booths the light a little too bright, just needs a bulb three notches warmer and it would be homey instead of bald and flea-bitten but I see they have several beers on tap and I smell pizza and we find a booth and a friendly rotund lumberjack type brings us a high chair for Honey. Alice who has been mostly silent the whole drive looks at him almost flirtatiously and says “We want beer and lots of it” and he laughs and says “Well I think we can take care of that for you” and asks what kind of beer we want and Alice says “Whatever you got” and I intervene and ask for some Oregon thing and we order a large supreme pizza and sit back and wait for all this bounty to flow in.

  I expect a town of this size to feel less depopulated than Altavista but there are only three sat tables in the restaurant. I reflect that almost everyone I’ve seen since we came north besides Kimmy has been a teen or the aged or aging.

  The beer comes and I cheers Alice and she says cheers but then sits there silently and I am not sure whether or how to make a conversation go. Honey is shredding napkins and banging her spoon gently and she is occupied and before I know it the pizza arrives and I serve all of us and cut up Honey’s piece.

  Alice tries to pick up her piece and then sets it down again.

  She drinks some of her beer. I’ve almost finished mine and realize I need to pace myself if I’m going to drive us home.

  “I wanted to be a playwright, you know,” she says out of nowhere. I don’t really know what to say so I say “I thought you were a teacher” and she says “Yes but in my spare time I wrote plays.” She goes again. “Do you want to be a teacher?” She looks at me. “Since you work at the University?”

  “No,” I say. “I don’t know what I want to be exactly. I was going to get a Ph.D. but I never really had a plan for after. I just like to know things and feel useful.”

  “You should be sure you have a way to support yourself,” she says.

  “My mom always said the same thing,” I say. “When my father died it was like we lost the thing about our family that said what our family was and then she had to make herself over.”

  “When I had all those babies they kind of railroaded the rest of my life.” She takes another long sip of her beer. “This just tastes so good,” she says, as though she had not just issued an utterly devastating statement in Berwin Pies. Honey is playing and spilling milk and I try to shovel some more pieces of pizza into her.

  “Why are you AWOL from your job now,” she asks.

  “One of our work-study students and her classmate got a grant from my Institute to go interview refugees in Turkey, and I helped them plan their trip and when they were there they got into a car accident and one of them was killed.” The mustard gas doesn’t accumulate behind my eyes like it normally does. She doesn’t say anything. “I don’t love the way my institution does things normally but, like, this girl died. I can’t cope with listening to everyone fall all over themselves to abdicate responsibility. Even though it was an accident and it technically isn’t anyone’s responsibility. We’re supposed to be in loco parentis.”

  “You’re never safe from bad things happening,” she says. This thought is so profoundly depressing I hope the earth opens and gently swallows everyone on it, right now.

  She seems to feel how despondent that makes me and she looks at me with some fond light in her eyes and she says “I want to apologize if I’ve been bad company for you,” and I say “Alice no, no” and she cuts me off and says “I don’t make friends easily. I say the wrong thing” and I say “Alice I don’t know what we would have done if we hadn’t met you” which is true because at the very least she got us out of the damn house.

  “I told you about our farm,” she says and I nod and she says “It was going to be a place for the girls to run around and catch fireflies” and I can just picture it something verdant and humid and the lightning bugs flashing. “There was a long time after they died where I was so angry I didn’t try to make the house nice, when I didn’t always behave nicely with people. I was in the … abode of pain.” I don’t exactly see what this has to do with being good c
ompany to us but I just say “I find you delightful to be with,” which is basically true.

  “Ever since I got in the car to come west I feel some of it falling away,” she says and I just say “I’m glad.”

  The air feels fresh when we get outside, I mean really really fresh. It must be the proximity of the lake because we are as high as Altavista here but something feels a little cooler, a little more moist, than the plain where Altavista sits. Honey struggles to get out of my arms and I say “Do you want to ride on my shoulders” and carefully put her up there and hold on tight to her ankles. My blood feels loose and I wonder momentarily whether I should drive but I think why not it was only one and a half beers and still holding tight to her ankles I touch my nose with one finger then the other and walk in a straight line and it all seems in order. I get her into the car get Alice into the car and drive very slowly back to the motel seeing maybe three cars on the way. Honey is asleep before we get to the motel—I remember she had no big afternoon nap and instead stared at television while I snoozed beside her. She stirs when I get her out of the car seat and then puts her head back on my shoulder and goes back to sleep, a rare event.

  “We can get an early start,” I say to Alice before we head into our rooms.

  “Seven o’clock,” she says.

  I keep the lights off and the door to the room open and find my way with the illumination from the motel hallway. I strip off Honey’s shoes and her socks and her pants and I leave her in the onesie underneath, none the worse for wear. I lay her gently on the pillow and cover her with the blanket and stare at her for a minute. I go over to the dense drape at the window and realize our room looks out at the bench which in turn looks out over the parking lot. I calculate that if I open the window it will take me about thirty seconds of negligent parent time to get from the room through the lobby and to the bench, from where I can smoke and look at all the e-mails and hear Honey if she cries out. So I open the window, collect the essentials, make sure I have the key, close the door gently behind me, and sprint down the hallway and out through the front door of the Wagon Wheel and confirm, from the window, that I can see my sleeping child through the gauzy second curtain. I move six feet to the right and light a cigarette and take the phone from the pocket. It’s still light out. I open Skype and press to call Engin. It rings and rings until the British woman is there. “The person you are trying to reach…”