The Golden State: A Novel

by Lydia Kiesling

  And what do we have here? This house, such as it is. My uncle Rodney, such as he is. My mother, although she’s in a buried urn in the grass in the high desert cemetery. We have her things—all her beautiful rugs and tablecloths and dishes packed away in the garage where the Buick ought to be. One of Engin’s and my future projects has been the combing through and disposition or keeping of these when the mobile home sells, but it doesn’t sell and doesn’t sell. I have my job, sort of. I have the smell of juniper and the dew on the fescue, which seemed so urgent just two days ago. But I don’t have the sound of seagulls by the Bosphorus, the clink of glasses, the sound of human enterprise and activity in the heart of the world. I don’t have my husband, the father of my child. Honey doesn’t have her dad and he doesn’t have her.

  Among things I generally choose not to think about is the absence of my own parents. When I envision my soul, such as it is, I picture a big pink lump of gnarled flesh, healed-over wounds that don’t smart anymore so much as they tug painfully depending on which direction my thoughts travel. My dad was a weird dreamy man who worked for the government and died when I was eleven. He and my mom met overseas. She left Altavista to go to the same university that employs me now, and being an adventurous frontierswoman type, she graduated and saved her money and went with her girlfriend to Corfu, where my dad was enjoying R&R from his post in Romania, and they were both from California so they got married, and eight years later they had me and named me Daphne after the Greek myth, the nymph who turned into a tree. When I was born we lived on Cyprus where it was my dad’s job to do things like assist with the forging of agreements between the hostile governments of Greece and Turkey while maintaining the sacred bewildering U.S. ratio which required that for every $7 million of military aid and muscle the U.S. government gave Greece it give $10 million of the same muscle to Turkey.

  Then we spent four years in a humid house in Arlington, VA, before he was reassigned to Athens. And then one home leave, while Mom and I were visiting my grandparents in the mobile home Honey and I are occupying now, he took a little holiday after squiring around a delegation of some sort—Greek? American?—to Bulgaria, and got on a bus which somewhere between Sofia and Varna careened off the road with him inside. Mom and my grandpa flew to Sofia, where a hapless consular officer on his first tour, whose job was typically limited to issuing visas and consoling the pickpocketed, who had a tiny piece of toilet paper stuck to his razor-scraped face in my mother’s vivid retelling, handed over a small canvas duffel with urn inside and held her hand and cried. We vacated our government-provided housing but stayed in Athens for two more years in a kind of paralysis until she sold the house in Arlington and moved back to the Golden State. His federal death benefit sustained her while she went back to school for her M.A.; the house money almost paid for me to go to an expensive high school and college in the muggy-in-summer-frigid-in-winter northeast; everything else covered her expenses when she was sick. I got a benefit too courtesy of Uncle Sam, and I spent it mostly unwisely, except it did buy my first plane ticket to Turkey.

  Hence my remaining inheritance is the stuff in the garage, and the mobile home, which my grandparents quietly vacated by their deaths two years before my mother died, all of those deaths—their deaths and hers—taking place in my early-to-mid-twenties, which blurs together now as a time of both dealing with things and not dealing with things, a lot of logistics, the logistics of death mostly, and various bad jobs and blackouts and bad flings, until I started the stupid Ph.D.

  I think, but don’t know, that my father would have appreciated my marrying a Turk, although his personal feeling always lay with the Greek side; he and Mom were modern-day Philhellenes. It was Constantinople to them. My mother I suspect would not have appreciated it since when I first went to Turkey she explicitly instructed me not to marry a Turk, as though that were the likeliest outcome of any trip. She believed in “East” and “West,” what we at the Institute know to be false categories, like “Clash of Civilizations,” like “Middle East.” She thought like ought to marry like, I think. But Engin and I are like, sort of, and she would have gotten over it, I know it. She would have liked him. She would have liked Ayşe and Pelin. And Honey! Well. The ideal child.

  Honey isn’t her real name, I sometimes do and sometimes do not explain to the people who ask about it. Her real name is Meltem, which is a summer wind that blows in Greece and Turkey alike. When Engin and I decided to get married I was in my secret heart of hearts very excited to be able to have a baby with a beautiful Turkish name. I know this is Orientalist but I think anyone who learns Turkish is helpless against the names, because often they mean things, and not like English where you search Babynames.com and find out a name maybe possibly meant “Brave” in ancient Frisian or whatever, but tangible everyday meanings, like “Sea” or “Life” or “Horizon” or even phrases—Engin has a friend named “Take revenge.” Anyway, we came up with Meltem, which is geographical and allegorical and alliterative. Meltem Mehmetoğlu. But when she was a baby I started calling her Melly in my singsong new-mom voice, and meli means “honey” in Greek, and then somehow I started calling her Honey, and Engin started doing it too sometimes, so now the baby I was so eager to name in Turkish has an American stripper name. But it’s a secret tribute to my parents, who both spoke Greek. And it suits her. She is full of warm golden light. Although she is forceful too, I guess, like a wind. Honey Mehmetoğlu. You aren’t going to forget her name, at any rate.

  We arrive at the cemetery sweating—or I’m sweating, Honey pink in the cheeks but shrouded by her stroller. The road slopes gently upward so that the cemetery is perched on a sort of plateau, with a view of the flat plain and the bird refuge and the mountains in the distance, and a little church made of black volcanic stone at its back. There are a number of modest mausoleums built out of this black volcanic stone, all the way to the mid-1800s which passes for old here. The Burdocks, that is us, don’t have a mausoleum, just flat stones, nothing flashy: my grandmother and grandfather and my grandmother’s grandmother and grandfather and that grandmother’s mother and father. We find my mom’s stone, next to her parents. My dad, weirdly, upsettingly, does not have a stone here but lives in an urn in the garage of the mobile home because my mother could never figure out where she wanted him to go, and she knew he hated Altavista and wouldn’t want to be up here, but also didn’t want to put him down below in the South Bay where he was born; his family was as small as hers. I pause to feel guilty that I have not repatriated him at least to my apartment. “Beloved Mother,” Mom’s stone says, my idea. I take Honey out of the stroller and she sits down on the grass next to Mom. “Hi Mom,” I say. Honey is pulling blades of grass out of the ground, delighted. “Do you see Honey?” I ask. “The last time she was here she was just a little squirt.”

  I think back to that visit, which is when my mother-in-law came to visit a month after Honey was born, bringing along Engin’s niece, Pelin’s daughter, the teenaged Elifnaz who was wild to see America. This being Ayşe’s first visit not only to our home but to America I felt it could not simply be a meet-the-baby help-the-mother visit but had to be an elaborate exhibit of all the best America had to offer and I made it nightmarish by trying to cram in too many things. But first, when they arrived, I suddenly missed my mother so desperately I had to spend a day in bed, pleading illness, letting them take the baby and coo to her and whisper in hushed tones in the adjacent room. Then I recovered and it was showtime. Every time Ayşe and I have two glasses of wine together and I let loose the floodgates of my stilted Turkish we agree that there can be no ostentatious display of hospitality among family. But to me Ayşe’s default mode of just finding a few snacks around the house to put out feels so elegant, so finely wrought, that I cannot believe her when she says it’s no trouble at all. And she does this on top of running her own small but robust accounting business. My mother also reflexively put out snacks, prepared things, gave gifts, wrote notes, and I saw that those things were trouble t
o her, necessary trouble that gave her pleasure but took up her time, and the result was still less than what some Turkish women come up with when they are going all out. Whatever muscle I have in that department is weak and rubbery, but the urge is there—the worst combination. So that meant when they came there was the rental of an Airbnb in the City in a nicer neighborhood than ours, the price of which somewhat exceeded our ability to pay for it, and the arranging of a variety of outings, for wine tasting, for a boat to Alcatraz, for a hike at Point Reyes, and finally, although it boggles my mind and shames me to think of it now, a trip to Altavista so they could see “the real West.”

  Whatever misgivings my mother might have harbored about my irrevocably tying my fortunes up with a foreigner I knew she would have helped me finesse the visit, she would have pointed out the folly of taking them to Paiute, would have instead had them to her rented bungalow in Sacramento, would have suggested a weekend in Tahoe rather than two awkward nights in the mobile home and a chilly picnic lunch at Fort Bintner, where, I explained, by no means clear any longer on the details, how my great-great-great-grandparents cruised down the Emigrant Trail, got turned around between Shasta and Lassen, and for some reason decided to stay. In middle school I had to do a report about my hometown and since I didn’t really have one I picked Altavista, and my grandmother mailed me copies of all her historical society tracts and some in retrospect extremely one-sided accounts of the Indian Wars and I stood in front of the class with my poster board and my diorama showing rodeo riders and told them my problematic inherited narrative of the west. Some details from the report stay in my mind and I attempted to reinterpret them for Engin’s family. “No European saw this land until the 1820s,” I told them, which now seems remarkable, that we colonizers are such a waterbug on the surface of this territory, temporally speaking, yet so destructive. For the whites it was meant to be a way-crossing, more people coming through the pitiless basins on the way to something else than sticking around. The ones who did stay wanted to be left alone except when they needed the army to subdue the Paiutes the Modocs the Pit River the Klamath the Hat Creek upon whose land they were squatting. And once the Paiutes etc. were murdered or shipped to Oklahoma or crammed into the nation’s smallest reservations, the victors couldn’t even agree what to call the land or how to apportion it—Utah, Nevada, Mormon Deseret, California, endless territory names, endless proposed states and administrative divisions, endless skirmishes, with the fractious settlers rejecting every tax levy until they wanted something. The land was always being renamed and redrawn. Finally they carved off this tiny, least-inhabited county, assigned it once and for all to California, and gave it the name of their one-time enemy, out of scorn or fetish I don’t know.

  During the Mehmetoğlu visit I was gripped with anxiety about making some hospitable tableau out of the limited tools available, torn between warring inclinations: to try and re-create some approximation of the warm casual “drop in any time” of my grandparents, who had vodka and chips and peanuts on the deck every evening at five, or trying to do it nicer, with wine and cheese and an elegant home-cooked meal, and to arrange it all without making some careless cultural blunder. But Honey was also six weeks old, and nursed all the time, and really all anyone needed was to sit and hold her on a couch, could be any couch, and the realization that I had brought them all this way essentially for no reason paralyzed me with embarrassment for the entire time we were there. Fortunately Ayşe is an adventurous woman and an excellent sport, and Elifnaz, her whole life spent in the great navel of the universe, served as a kind of comic teen Greek chorus of one, constantly exclaiming “I can’t believe anyone lives here,” which finally allowed me to relax my strenuous efforts at historical interpretation and apologia and laugh along with Engin and his family, because it was, yes, absurd how long it took to get anywhere.

  Engin indicated to me later that the visit was actually a stroke of deranged genius, because his mother and Elifnaz now have a sort of trump card of insights into America when the topic is brought up. I can see beautiful Ayşe, with her coiffure and her rakı and her occasional cigarette, sitting on the balcony in her apartment block in Kadıköy, trying first to describe the encampments of homeless people around San Francisco’s City Hall, then trying to find the words to communicate the vastness of the high desert, the unsmiling plains, the pink sponge of tomato that graced her salad at the Golden Spike. “The main thing you must understand about America is its barbarism,” she probably says.

  The now beet-red Honey has been tiring herself out running through the cemetery grass in the heat and I see her approach the outer reach of the plateau and spring after her, catching her near the edge of the property where she’s looking as though transfixed by the expanse of sagebrush and patchy farmland of the basin. I pick her up and kiss her and plod back to the gravestones where our stroller is parked. I didn’t bring any flowers with me so I fold up Honey’s bib and put it on Mom’s stone. “Love you Mom,” I say. “I wish you were here,” and a slow leak of tears starts up again. “That’s your grandma,” I tell Honey, who is stomping her little foot on someone else’s stone. I pack her up in the stroller struggling and I’m suddenly exhausted and as I’m trying for the seventh time to buckle at least one of the buckles as she thrashes and strains resolutely forward to prevent me I say into the air “I’m going to fucking kill myself” which I sometimes do when I’m trying to cope with her equipage and I instantly feel bad since I’m sure we are standing on the final resting place of many untimely ends, shotgun blasts and death by drinking and getting rolled on by your horse. Finally I get her in and we roll down the hill to Deakins Park and I let myself think about Istanbul, about Engin and Pelin and Savaş and Elifnaz and seventeen million people or more humming along on either side of the Bosphorus in the June heat. She’s asleep when we arrive and I scoop her into the Pack ’n Play so easily that I think my ancestors are rewarding me for visiting them.

  I step outside to have a cigarette and Cindy Cooper is there on her deck and we each take a few steps in the other’s direction and exchange greetings. “What do you do down there in the City,” she asks me after a minute. “I work at the University.” I could leave it there but I am curious so I say “At the Institute for the Study of Islamic Societies and Civilizations.” As it happens Cindy has unreconstructed views about Islam and she begins airing them to me over the fence. “Gotta do something about them,” she says and I say “What do you mean?” and naturally she means beheading people, murdering at Charlie Hebdo, etc. etc. I think about stubbing out my cigarette and going inside but this is honestly the easiest hill of tolerance to ascend and moreover my job as an employee of the Institute for the Study of Islamic Societies and Civilizations not to mention as a member of God’s human family. “You know my husband is uh … Muslim,” I say, wincing inside, since he would take grave offense at this, since as far as he is concerned he is not a Muslim, if he has a religion it is Morrissey, and he is in fact so much not a Muslim that he won’t even say inshallah or mashallah or other things that warmly enfold the name of God into daily speech. I have heard Ayşe use what I am pretty sure but not positive is a pejorative term for heavily veiled women meaning “squished-head” but she is interested in spirituality and transcendental meditation and “Eastern” things although I do not know whether she actually does them. Engin’s father, who is divorced from Ayşe and lives in Izmir, is a somewhat dissolute Marxist, anti-Islam, anti-Erdoğan, anti-American for that matter. But their parents were Muslims so they are loosely speaking culturally Muslims and since Cindy is starting from “Muslims are bad” and America more or less treats “Muslim” as an ethnicity rather than a religious choice it does not seem like a time for nuance, so for now I decide to deploy them as pleasant cultural Muslims in the jihad of tolerance. “Well,” she says. “He’s from Turkey,” I say and she moves the corners of her mouth down as though to say Whaddaya know.

  “Yeah, and he’s stuck there now because the U.S. government has ant
i-Muslim policies.”