The Golden State: A Novel

by Lydia Kiesling

  Honey is trying to tear the head off a geranium and I say “That’s not what we do to flowers, gentle, gentle” and I suddenly feel so tired and I think how nice it is to be with her and how simultaneously not-nice. I did not have a thought in my head except go go go when I bundled her into the car yesterday and started the drive northeast but now I wonder if I just wanted to be not in the office and whether I might have achieved this by taking a day off work and going to the playground for god’s sake. Honey for ten hours during the day is a blank space to me, that’s how my brain treats her, as though she functionally ceases to exist when she is at daycare, until all at once I get desperately lonesome for her and look at the videos the daycare proprietor sends on WeChat and strain to hear her voice among the cacophony of little babies cooing together on the rug. But I have no knowledge of the texture of her days there. I have always found Honey to be a very sunny caring conscientious baby—a generous temperament—I wonder how much of this is the daycare and how much is me. I know the blank spot where those fifty hours a week should be is a blessing, surely it is the absence of worry that allows me to blot her out like someone who has been etherized, kind of like I do to Engin. Maybe it’s because I don’t care enough. I don’t think that’s it, though.

  When I went back to work Engin stayed home with Honey, which is undoubtedly what prompted him to decide to go back to Turkey to improve his prospects of employment. I remember I felt jaunty and efficient setting out for the office that first day, leaving him with a supply of frozen breastmilk I had been dutifully collecting since she was born. I answered e-mails while I pumped in Ted’s closet and put pictures of Honey up on my bulletin board and I ignored the fact that pumping took up roughly two hours of the workday and generally felt that things were going to be okay. But when I got home that evening I ran up the street to the house only to discover from Engin’s apologetic face when I opened the door that he had put Honey to bed.

  It’s pathetic but I don’t feel like I have spiritually recovered from that week somehow even though I went back to a beautiful glass office and not to a sweatshop or a goddamn Subway sandwich shop or to be a nanny in Westchester County. When I came back Meredith was trying to be supportive and talked constantly of how awful it is and told me how she used to pace like a wild animal when she was away from her children and I both felt guilty because I had not yet paced, and how odd it was that we should both be sitting there saying “yes, it is very bad” when we could instead be staging a revolt. But her kids are teenagers and she is over it and in fact grateful to come to a quiet beautiful office now so her moment for revolution has passed.

  And now I am here with Honey trying to eat a geranium and I’m, yes, extremely bored and I would love for her to tire herself out and go back into her Pack ’n Play and go to sleep for two more hours. It’s been one day. I hate myself.

  The only insight I have developed about parenting so far even though I always forget it is that when you feel like dying you should try to leave your physical location and go to another one. Blow the stink off, as my grandpa Burdock used to say. I think to myself what if we go to the Golden Spike and have a steak, and I immediately feel so buoyed by this idea my awareness of our bank balance notwithstanding that I grab Honey with renewed joy and say “Come on sweet pea we are gonna go out on the town,” which, ha. I say “Do you wanna take a bath with Mama” and she says “Yahh” and we go inside to the master bathroom with its cheap Jacuzzi tub and rotting sill and I pee and smell must rising up from between my legs and the bath is none too soon for either of us. I look in the mirror and I have flakes in my eyebrows and in my unfortunate little sideburns and around my hairline. I spray the mummified mosquito hawks down the drain and put Honey outside of the bathtub with the handheld shower and I get into it and spray myself down and do my shampoo and conditioner and then I step out dripping everywhere strip off her grassy pants and onesie and get her into the tub and do a mild hose-down while she vacillates between protest and glee. We sit down on our butts, she between my legs and facing me poking at my stomach. I look down at myself in the fluorescent light and see very white dough and moles and a giant thatch of hair, which has been more or less par for the course since I got pregnant. My understanding is that most Turkish women take it all off and when I was there I went with the flow and allowed myself to be thus denuded but I hate it and anyway now I don’t have the time or the money or a man on the premises. Engin and I have had only the most brief and strangely awkward conversation about hair and preference and he claimed not to care but this is probably a lie which makes me feel bad again until I think of the Golden Spike and how good it is going to be, not maybe in the food sense but spiritually.

  * * *

  The Golden Spike is just a short walk out of Deakins Park over the train tracks and along Route 235, or rather it’s a very very short distance in your Buick or your enormous pickup your Ford F-150 your Dodge Ram in which it’s a matter of moments to get there but like everything in town takes what seems like an unwarranted amount of time on foot, which I forget until we are at the tracks. Apart from the excessive space in this town, the pavement is so hard, the land is so flat, the air so thin, and the sun so strong even on the downhill slope to evening that your destination, visible though it may be, comes to feel like a mirage. The ground is hard on your knees and there’s no sidewalk out here by the tracks. I put Honey on my shoulders and grip her ankles tight and she claps her hands above my head. We see the big old sign of the Golden Spike in the near field and behind it the cinder-block box with an illuminated bar sign in its sole visible window.

  The Golden Spike is one of the family-style Basque joints you can find across the west, the California west, the Nevada west, where a hundred years ago the shepherds who left Spain settled. The model is “family style plus a meat,” so you get a lamb chop, or rib eye, or fish, and then there’s a large salad of iceberg highly dressed, and sometimes a chickpea and lamb stew—presumably a taste of the Basque past—and tomato soup with barley or noodles. It’s ruinously expensive and not really very good but it excites me in some kind of primal way. I like the carafes of chilled red vinegar wine and the huge slabs of beef.

  We reach the door of the cinder-block box and even though it’s 5:00 p.m. and the breeze has started up I’m sweating. We enter the vestibule that separates the dining room from the dusty parking lot, a strange, carpeted anteroom with an unused little piano pushed up against one wall, and then the main room and it’s almost empty and I feel immediately deflated at the discrepancy between the cozy hum I had pictured and this dark depopulated cave. The hostess says hello and leads us to a table and asks whether I’m just passing through and I tell her the name of my grandparents and she doesn’t recognize them.

  Then we are getting settled and Honey is in a high chair playing with a spoon rapping it on the plate and I’m pouring her the smallest little glass of water from the brown melamine pitcher and myself a glass of wine from the cold carafe that is already on the table and a cheery server arrives and clucks at Honey and says “What an absolutely gorgeous baby” and I say thank you because I think so too even though I try not to say so, try not to say beautiful try not to say pretty girl or any variation thereof. I order the rib eye with garlic which means they put six to eight cloves of garlic on top of a rib eye steak the size of a plate. There is going to be a baked potato too. Honey takes her cup of water in her hands and brings it to her mouth for a surprisingly tidy sip and maybe it’s the wine but I’m bursting with pride to see it. I spoon soup for myself and Honey who has in addition to her looks great talent with a spoon and she tucks in and I butter a thick slab of the pale crumbly house bread. While she’s eating her soup I listen to the hostess and the server both white women of a certain age shooting the shit and the server is saying “I tell you I got all frazzled yesterday—we had a fight, which I never seen here before. It frazzled me right up!” and the hostess makes moos of concern and asks what happened and the server says “You know that old guy wh
o comes in sometimes and gives himself a shot for his diabetes and he always leaves the needle on the table on a napkin? Normally I don’t say anything I just put it in a milk carton and throw it away. But yesterday Donna Dellomo is here and she hollers at him that us girls are gonna get stuck with that thing and he better throw it away himself, and he’s a mean old guy and tells her to mind her business and then her husband says ‘Don’t talk to my wife like that’ and then the old guy stands up and they just start trying to slug at each other. I was worried someone was gonna run out to his truck and get his gun.” They move to the far side of the host stand and carry on a stream of conversation I don’t quite hear but I hear the server say “I don’t even know which hole to put it in” and laugh and then as if she didn’t get the reaction she had hoped for or conversely wants to relive the nice reaction she did get says “I’m like ‘I don’t even know which hole to put it in’” but the hostess doesn’t really laugh and I am close enough I wonder whether I am part of the audience and whether I should laugh but I feel this would intrude and I hope the needle wasn’t at the table we are at now. Good for Donna Dellomo, whoever she is. Fucking men leaving their biohazardous garbage around for women to clean up.

  My steak comes and I cut up little pieces for Honey that she mostly doesn’t eat preferring the soup and the bread and soon I have demolished my portion and am feeling like a stuffed tick and Honey is tired of sitting and being a good girl and is now agitated, troubled by some unknown thing that makes her scramble to vacate the high chair so I pick her up and she stands on my knees, pulling up on my shirt with stew hands and starting to bleat, our window of relatively civilized fine dining dying without ceremony in the air-conditioned chill of the cinder-block.

  At this moment I see John Urberoaga stroll through the front door, the cousin or maybe brother of our Realtor, Rosemary. John looms large in my mythology of the town but I doubt we’ve had a conversation longer than two sentences. He was at Grandpa’s funeral and like almost all the men in the room I saw him wipe away a tear when Davis Birgeneau sang “That Old Rugged Cross” and played the guitar. I feel the tiny flair of feeling that comes from recognizing someone, but it fades as quick as it came.

  He walks past our table and stops to cluck at Honey with big-man friendliness and I smile at him and say hello and he stares at me for a beat until I prompt him with my mother’s name. “Jeannie’s daughter. Frank and Cora Burdock’s granddaughter.” “That’s right!” he beams at me and his large presence his belt buckle are enough to subdue the bleating Honey. “You know Rosemary’s sure been workin’ on gettin’ that place sold.” “Well, no rush,” I tell him. “Rod up with you?” he asks. I feel suddenly threatened by being narced on but I don’t know why my taciturn uncle Rodney, patron of the mobile home, shouldn’t know I’m here, in fact I don’t know why I didn’t just call him to tell him myself. “Not this time,” I tell him, “but I thought it might be nice to get the, um, cobwebs out,” and he nods. The proper maintenance of immovable property or cars or livestock is a central concern to citizens of the high country. The great sorrow of my aging grandparents was seeing the disorder that crept into the town, shaggy lawns strewn with toy limbs and decaying copies of the Paiute Recorder. Rusted lawn mowers, sweatpants in the market, cars with rusted tailpipes—their lawn stayed pristine, their Buick polished, their small finances in impeccable order. I am looking a little down-at-the-heels myself, I realize. I am wearing a maternity shirt and Honey has smeared a substantial portion of the stew all over. But I am keeping cobwebs out of the house and the water moving in the pipes.

  I shouldn’t be snide. The reason Honey and I are sitting pretty all things considered up in Deakins Park is that good old Uncle Rodney cares enough to keep the place maintained, to keep the water in the pipes, while my helpless disdain at the bourgeois mysteries of property maintenance would probably leave the town with another rusted-out mobile home. Uncle Rodney, never married, lives in a nice cabin outside Quincy, many basins south and west of here. He has worked for the Forest Service his entire life and has a very long-term off-and-on relationship with a surprisingly bubbly woman named Helen who works at a quilt shop of the sort that Quincy is cute enough to sustain. He and my mom had not a lot in common except their happy memories of summers at the lake and winters in the snow, girl scouts and boy scouts and high school hijinks and bridge nights with drunk parents letting the kids run free. In the end what she wanted was to get out, to get Elsewhere, and Rodney won’t even come to San Francisco except for when Honey was born. (“Not a city person,” he told Engin when we met him.) But he never made a peep when my mom got the house, and now he keeps the water in the pipes for me.

  John Urberoaga doesn’t ask me where Honey’s dad is which seems curious and I wonder whether it is some sense of social nicety and not asking what don’t concern you or whether it just had not occurred to him to have any curiosity about my life which I suppose would justly match the general lack of curiosity I have about his and he ambles off to a table with his wife and Honey is now struggling so much to get down onto the floor that I know we’ve got to go and I crane around for the jokey server to bring us the check and she laughs at Honey and says “She’s feisty” and it soothes me. I hate being an archetype—woman struggling alone with fractious baby—but it really does feel horrible and a little humor delivered with a deft hand can go a long way. Too much sympathy and help is bad though, it’s very obligating.

  In the parking lot Honey is frankly obstreperous. The absence of sidewalk on the highway back to the railroad tracks makes me anxious about the prospect of navigating it with Honey on her uncertain legs but when I pick her up she loses her mind, struggling and crying and pushing against me with her small fists. I put her back on the ground and she sits down abruptly and then flings her head straight back onto the pavement and then screams furiously in pain and rage. I scramble to pick her up and put my hand on the back of her head saying “No no oh no.” I hold her tight while she struggles against me, her sobs eventually giving over to little yells issued at an interval of three or four seconds. I turn to face the fields to the east of the Golden Spike should anyone come out and see me having not the least amount of success controlling or comforting my hysterical baby who is still trying to hit me. “Be a calming presence for your distressed toddler,” some baby blog whispers to me, and even though I reject categorically the idea that she is yet a toddler I hold her body to me and rub my hands on her hot back and say as soothingly as I can, “Hey. Hey, Honey. I know, sweet baby,” and it actually seems to be working, first she stops struggling and then she finds the place to put her wet face in the crook of my neck while I whisper to her and dust the gravel off the back of her head and I feel she is tired, that’s what it is, she is very very tired. Then she leans away from my body and smiles into my face, plucking at the front of my shirt where the stew is with both hands. “Daaaaah,” she says to me, her eyes wide and wondering. “Daaaaaah,” I say to her. I carry her home, heavy heavy, too heavy for me to carry with my flabby muscles atrophied by administrative tasks, but we make it over the train tracks into Deakins Park and she keeps one arm slung around my neck and her eyes on the horizon like a princess alert on her palanquin.

  She is sticky with stew and dust and so she goes back into the bathtub and then she goes into her almost-too-small pajamas and before she goes into the Pack ’n Play in the dark of the closet we scramble up onto the big bed with her milk and Goodnight Moon and I lean against the pillows with my knees up and she leans against my knees with her legs on either side of my waist and she begins to chat happily and conspiratorially to me in non-words, just babbling cheerfully like a brook. She puts her hands on my breasts and pulls at my shirt and pats my face and tells me all sorts of things I don’t understand and I think this is the happiest moment of my life not only because of the smile on her face the smallness of her body the love for me she communicates with her entire being but because of the almost erotic knowledge that soon she will be in bed, the w
hole evening ahead of me without her.