The Golden State: A Novel

by Lydia Kiesling

  This reminds me that my breast pump is still sitting in the basement of Oberrecht Hall. I remember this approximately once a week but while I was on campus I couldn’t bring myself to go down the three flights to get it. It’s in Ted’s server closet, which is tiny and full of whirring machines and one office chair and kept at sixty-three degrees. Ted and I had a system, which was that I would go in there and turn off the AC and lock the door and disrobe and attach myself to the pump and if he needed to come in and check on the servers he would knock which thank god never happened. Sometimes I would go in there and find an orange or a little stack of paper napkins on the table, and know that Ted had shortly beforehand been sitting in the seat and eating his lunch and futzing with his servers. Ted has very long fingernails, which I imagined digging deep into the skin of the orange. I thought about this when I was half naked in his chair with plastic hoses attached to my breasts, and the little bottles of milk placed around his desk and on his papers and next to his servers.

  Honey has stopped screaming and it is now very, very quiet and dark. A light pops on in the house behind us, neighbors I don’t know.

  The issue with the breast pump was that the things it came with, flanges they are called, were too big for my nipples. A whole great chunk of my breast was pulled in along with the nipple, and the skin blistered against the plastic as it was chafed by the motion of the pump. I found online a smaller insert, 22.5 millimeters, but the insert wasn’t compatible with the tube thing that the flange stuck in, so that I had to stick it into the original too-large flange, and then stick that into the tube, and some of the milk sort of stuck between the insert and the flange and dripped all over the table when I took them apart. Invariably during the assembly or de-assembly one of the flanges would fall on the linoleum and I’d pick it up covered with hair and fuzz, and I would wipe it off with my clothes and the hand sanitizer that sat on Ted’s desk, or one of his napkins. I asked Engin if I had in his estimation smaller than usual nipples, and he asked why and I got waylaid looking up the Turkish word for flange and I never found out about his estimation of the relative size of my nipples.

  When I was in the hospital after I had Honey I told the nurse I wasn’t sure the breastfeeding was working and she held my hand and looked into my eyes meaningfully and said, “You have all the tools you need.” She was in her late forties and had very white, likely false teeth and tattooed eyeliner and lustrous black hair. I asked if she was from Paiute County because she pronounced the word “Sunday” just like my grandmother, “Sundy,” but it turned out she was from Southern California with a mom from Okinawa, not like my grandmother at all. Her parents must have had a cross-cultural marriage, I think now. I should have asked her about that, not the breastfeeding which is in the scheme of things a very small part of life. I light another cigarette in honor of this woman, who reassured me that I could do it, feed Honey that is.

  But once I went back to work, less and less started to come out of the tubes, and when I looked online about how to sustain the milk it seemed like an insane project—feed the baby, pump after feeding the baby, wake up and pump every two hours, etc., even if the baby is sleeping. So then I gave her formula, and the more formula I gave the less milk I made, and all the things that I read on BabyCenter came to pass vis-à-vis my “supply.” I used to lie on the couch after work and look at pictures of nursing mothers on my phone and cry.

  Engin’s mother begged me to take more time off work for the good of the baby, but the standard leave policy of the University is six weeks off at 50 percent of your salary, and after many bewildering and misleading conversations with the morons in HR I elected to pay twenty-eight dollars out of every paycheck from the time I started work so that I could instead receive 70 percent of my salary, and then I took the additional six unpaid weeks that were my right by federal law, except Honey was born two weeks late and so that ate up two of those precious weeks and no one in HR ever told me I was legally entitled to tack them on later. I seem to always meet University staff who are just coming back from their second or third six-month absence but those are unpaid and in any case at the discretion of your supervisor. Hugo earnestly counsels his female graduate student against procreating and I felt that he felt that spending any additional time away from work would be frowned upon but to be honest I never even asked so I don’t know and thus I went back when she was a mere ten weeks old. I felt so certain that the Institute truly could not function without me because there were grant reports to file and federal compliance to ensure and events to orchestrate and nobody knows how to do any of this but me and it all felt so important it would make me laugh now if I weren’t so furious.

  If I had just weaned her when I went back to work I never would have had to pump milk half naked and freezing in a closet with Ted’s servers and napkins and oranges. Then again if I hadn’t gone back to work at all I wouldn’t have missed days weeks months with my child that I will never have again in this life.

  My thoughts are finding their familiar melancholy groove of love for my child and sadness about our fleeting life together and then I think of Ellery whom I have assiduously avoided thinking about for most of the day, whose life on earth and with her own loving parents is now at an end, and I feel the mustard sting behind my eyes as her face and Maryam’s face are summoned up before me from the night air. I never actually met Ellery despite being circumstantially wrapped up in her doom. Two months ago Maryam sent me a cheery progress report, two days before the accident, two days after having dinner with my sister-in-law Pelin and her husband Savaş and their daughter Elifnaz, which I arranged so the girls—young women—could have some kind of cultural experience beyond carousing with hot guys from New Zealand in their Tünel-adjacent hostel. Attached to the e-mail was a photo, the two of them in the Rüstem Paşa Camii, Ellery a lively looking girl with great eyebrows white teeth huge smile, her face lit up with the secret joy game white girls feel upon donning a headscarf in a culturally appropriate context, and Maryam who is a Palestinian Christian from Bakersfield by way of Amman duckfacing with a worn mosque-provided paisley sheet wrapped around her short shorts and her arms wrapped around her friend. The memory of this photo, the thought of them setting out on their adventure with their backpacks and their water bottles and their bag of warm bread from Pelin’s favorite bakery, and then of these smiling girls being thrown into the windshield of their speeding taxi with no seat belts is several orders of magnitude too large and awful to contemplate and I shake my head hard in the dark, a dimly remembered gesture of my father’s whenever he wanted to stop thinking about something he didn’t want to think about.

  I have one more cigarette brush my teeth look in at Honey splayed out in her Pack ’n Play in the dark closet and stroke her head and cover her with the blanket and climb into bed. Then I think of all this big expanse of bed and Honey cooped up in the closet alone and get back out and gently lift her out and carry her over and put her next to me which I’ve always wanted to do but have not done because of all the things you read about sleep habits and people who sleep with their children until they are five. I’ve never had her in bed with me through the night, just mornings during the early weeks months when she hardly moved at all. Now I put my arm under her rear and sort of encircle her with my mouth against her fuzz. But she senses the change and squirms and wakes up and looks at me and smiles and starts fidgeting and says “da da daaaaaah” with curiosity and I feel her little hands on my face and I say “shhhhh sleeping” but when I open my eyes I can see the whites of her eyes in the darkness gazing at me like an inquisitive turtle and she kicks her feet and squirms toward the edge of the bed and I can’t get her to lie down and I know I’ve made a mistake and carry her back to the Pack ’n Play and she cries.

  My grandmother who slept in this bed with my grandfather lost her father before she was even born. He was twenty-one years old and was carried off by flu when my great-grandmother was six months pregnant. I thought about this all the time when I was pregnant
and Engin was home with us and when he was late coming home from the store or the studio he sometimes rented time in I would hold my stomach and know he was dead and he would find me crying over the kitchen sink. Now sometimes I have to remind myself that Engin is not actually dead, just in Turkey. I want to think good thoughts about Engin so I think about those magic weeks after Honey was born when Engin and I hung around the house with tiny her lying on her blanket. In the mornings we would tuck her between us like a hot dog, and we would loll around until 11:00 and Engin would fix breakfast. Then we would have a pro forma argument about the in my view mistaken Turkish belief in a forty-day sequestering period for babies and new mothers that I pointed out he only knew and pretended to care about because his mother told him he should, and finally we would bundle her up and take her for a long, slow walk around the City, and we would stop for ice cream or beers and hold hands and gaze at each other and at the perfect creature that we made.

  The last thought I have is that Engin is not in fact in Turkey at this moment, he is in Belgrade helping his friend Tolga shoot a commercial, and he’ll be back at his mother’s tomorrow night. I lie there feeling guilty that I have forgotten this, and also relieved that he likely hasn’t been sitting around his mom’s house waiting for Honey’s face to light up his screen, until I finally fall asleep.

  DAY 2     This morning while fixing Honey what I tell her and myself is a cowboy breakfast of warmed-up beans string cheese and cut-up apricots I look out the window and see Cindy Cooper, who lives in the lot kitty-corner from Grandma’s pansy bed. She has a green State of Jefferson sign on her front lawn, which means I believe that she takes a dim view of government activities and thinks the North State and southern Oregon should throw in their lot together and form a new state where there are no rules of any kind. They have something about it in the Chronicle from time to time. I never heard my grandparents say word one about it and I’ve never seen one of these signs in the wild before, but now that I see hers I realize they were dotted across homesteads the whole drive up, three or four counties’ worth.

  Cindy Cooper is I am pretty sure a Johnny-come-lately who came from I don’t know where and bought her lot in Deakins Park a couple of years before Mom died. As I watch her pick up her copy of the Paiute Recorder and peer skeptically at a mean-looking dog tied to a mailbox across the street I feel the thinness of the skeins that tie me to the town. My relation to Altavista is so glancing, so filtered through the perceptions of my mom, who spent her life establishing a safe distance between herself and here, that I really have no idea who is new and who is old.

  In their twilight years my grandparents’ friends broke up the weekly bridge and martini nights to spend winters in more temperate climates, Stockton or Sac. But my grandparents stayed right where they were, the Deakins Park house they bought when they retired. The house was a source of perpetual sorrow to my mother, who believed that only what you might call white trash lives in mobile homes.

  It does feel like the concentric circles that described social life in Altavista have expanded wider and wider until their essential structure has stretched and broken apart. My grandparents worked for the school, the Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, sundry local enterprises, but their friends were landholders, ranchers, outdoorswomen in pressed jeans, friendliness undergirded by the dignity of long years spent on a single piece of soil, and none of them seems to live here now. Uncle Rodney never criticizes the town but when Engin and I spent the one mournful Christmas here with him, he peered at every face we saw in the store and along the main street, looking for some sign of lineage, the innate quality of rootedness. It may be that just our family died out and moved on, and that everyone else is thriving in unknown houses. But even when my mom was alive she would point out the empty storefronts, the junk in the yards, and say it’s not the place it once was.

  Honey is chewing up her apricots and spitting them out and splatting her spoon on the surface of the beans to demonstrate that she is unimpressed by the offerings and I realize we will need to deal with the food situation. I sponge her off change her diaper get her dressed pull on the clothes I wore yesterday and hustle her out toward the back door. The morning is spectacular; it’s 7:15, and the sun is at a friendly low angle, and the sky is blue, and it’s cool cool cool and birds are cheeping in the birch tree.

  We drive over to the Holiday which is an honest-to-god grocery store on the edge of town. Everything is on the edge of town; the town is comprised of edges, the streets are so wide and haphazard beyond the tiny core grid of four blocks by four blocks. I’m pleased nay amazed to see the store has gotten a makeover since the days I helped my grandmother do her shopping—there is organic produce and a classier kind of frozen food. During my inventory of the kitchen this morning I spotted an almost-full bottle of Popov in the freezer where it must have been sitting since my grandmother died and I think what the hell and get a carton of orange juice. I get two feel-good frozen pizzas, I get noodles, yogurt, more beans, eggs, milk, apples, Cheerios, bananas, strawberries, blueberries, avocado, sweet potatoes, and a bunch of broccoli since it’s the only green thing I can get Honey to eat. I am wondering if this is all going to be enough or too much and then I realize I have no idea how long we are going to be here and the indecision this awakens in the aisle causes my heart to beat very fast. I have been eerily calm for twenty-four hours but I remember suddenly all the e-mails I need to write all the explaining I’m going to have to do and I almost wheel the cart out with Honey and our unpurchased produce in it. But then I think Meatloaf like a message from someone and I get ground beef and breadcrumbs and onion soup packets you can’t get at Whole Foods or the Chinese grocery at home. And then I go ahead and get a cardboard box of the cheap yellow vanilla ice cream we always ate after dinner with my grandparents, and a can of Hershey’s chocolate syrup to put on it, and then I think what else did Mom and Grandma make and I say “Pancakes” and I get flour vanilla extract baking soda buttermilk. The women at the checkout aisles are ancient and I wonder if they know anyone I know but I decide not to ask and they coo over Honey and she waves her little paw at them beaming and says “Hi! Hi! Hi!”

  We drive back home. It’s 8:15 a.m. Honey roams around the living room and I turn on the TV which has ABC, CBS, fuzz, fuzz, fuzz. I put it on some morning show. We don’t have TV at home and just watch shows on the laptop and the bright lights loud voices taut arms brassy makeup are just too much and I start to feel the very specific kind of deeply down-in-the-mouth existential despair brought on by network television and I turn it off and then I say to Honey, “I guess we could make pancakes.” This is the only thing I can make without consulting the recipe and I made them every Sunday when Engin was here. He is crazy for these pancakes. Most pancakes are garbage; the secret, which I learned from Mom, is you have to separate the yolks and whites and mix the yolks with the milk and beat the whites and then mix them into the finished batter. I do all this and Honey is more or less transfixed on the linoleum floor by some pots and pans I pull out for her and when it is all over we eat the pancakes and I am stuffed and she is stuffed and there is a huge mess and it’s 9:20. I lie on the couch and Honey rollicks around on my stomach and tumbles off the couch and lunges for my grandmother’s rawhide coasters and throws them all across the living room and zigzags around the house and I think we need to find somewhere with Wi-Fi and call Engin and then I remember he is flying back from Belgrade and I can’t yet muster the energy for a walk in any case and so instead I lie there and just will the hours to pass until lunch, which kills four minutes, with Honey standing by the couch pinching the fat around my elbow and laughing. I think how can I enrich her so I collect the books I brought, eight books, and I scoop her up and I read every single one and then I put a sweet potato in the oven to roast so she will have something nutritious ready to eat later on and then it is 9:57.

  * * *

  During Honey’s nap I discover that if I bring the Institute computer out onto th
e very end of the deck toward the back of the house, I can latch on to the ass-end of someone’s unsecured wireless network, maybe Cindy Cooper’s. This is excellent news because it allows me to smoke while I check e-mails. I try Skype and the connection is too weak to sustain video, although this gives me more time to figure out what I am going to say to Engin when I finally reach him. His response to my WhatsApp is short, or terse, I can’t tell which. “Call me.” I check the Check Visa Status portal and it’s At NVC, the same the same the same the same it’s been for five goddamn months. I see how far down I can draw my cigarette with one drag.

  I e-mail Hugo and Meredith to say I am sick. Mercifully my work e-mail does not yet reflect my absence from the Institute, although my body does; I blow my nose and big green slabs streaked with blood shoot out onto the Kleenex. You can’t feel the altitude here right away, it comes on days two and three with the dramatic boogers and the cracked skin of your hands and the blistering sunburn you’ll get if you aren’t careful. I open the least threatening-seeming e-mail, which is from the head of the Social Sciences and Humanities Diversity Committee and informs me that the meeting to discuss our Diversity Action Plan is postponed indefinitely due to the Vice Provost’s recent resignation for sexual misconduct. My task for the Action Plan was to survey existing Action Plans on campus and summarize them for the group.

  Ted sent me an e-mail too. I assume this would be some characteristically poky and roundabout Ted message about my stealing the Institute laptop, but it is only a reminder to do the overdue software patch on my office machine by clicking the “Agree” button instead of the “Snooze” button when the window pops up. This means he doesn’t yet know that I’m gone. Moreover, I’m fairly certain no one knows how many laptops the Institute has. The last person the University sent around to do an inventory was a hapless work-study asking about mystery machines no one had seen in years. “On whose authority are you conducting this survey?” Hugo had asked in his imperious way, and the boy stammered and went away with his clipboard hanging low. In addition to Ted’s e-mail there is a letter of recommendation portal login e-mail of the type that Hugo reflexively forwards to me, which means, importantly, that Hugo doesn’t know I’m gone either. I’ve gotten good at these letters over the last couple of years; I like to think that several highly desirable teaching positions and postdocs were secured for his students through my efforts. Ironically Hugo himself doesn’t have a Ph.D., although you would never ever know from the way he is lavished with lecture invitations and NPR appearances. But he was the last noncredentialed person into the academy and he barred the door on his way in. Meredith of course has one from Princeton but as Hugo never tires of reminding her she has no publications.