The Golden State: A Novel

by Lydia Kiesling

  Anyway at the dinner I spoke English with my godparents and Turkish with everyone else and my hair was perfect and my makeup was perfect and my dress was an ivory shantung tea-length thing I extravagantly ordered from Neiman Marcus and had shipped to Uncle Rodney, who dutifully shipped it to me. When I was tipsy in the bathroom I looked at myself in the mirror and wondered if it was all real. And then I went back out and danced with Engin’s friends from the bar and with Pelin and with my godparents and it felt real, sort of. People had spent money to fly in an airplane to sit at a table with us; logistics had been wrangled. Sometimes I look back and wonder whether I was so hell-bent on marrying Engin because I wanted to play at being a cosmopolitan, but I’ve met a lot of men Turkish and otherwise and never wanted to marry any of them and that’s really the best answer I can give myself. It was real, if risky. Marriage is always a risk.

  Rodney didn’t come to this obviously but along with my dress he tucked a check for $500 into the package which made me sob like a child when I opened it, feeling so coddled by everyone. He officiated our official U.S. wedding, which took place in his backyard in Quincy at the very end of Engin’s tourist visa. Two of my friends from grad school who spoke Turkish flew to SFO drove up rented a cabin and ate tri-tip sandwiches and I wore my dress from the Istanbul party. I cried a lot more at that one because my family’s absence—Mom’s absence—felt so pronounced, and because I was terrified USCIS was going to suss out the lie.

  Sometimes I would feel the ground give way beneath my feet—on the henna night—or when we landed in SFO the first time and Engin was suddenly my responsibility as a U.S. citizen and wife to lovingly care for and squire around and make sure he was having a good time and secure the correct citizenship status for (a task I have so far failed dismally at). But throughout our various weddings and comings and goings, we would periodically ask each other if we were okay, and we were.

  I pull on my cigarette and look around at my çeyiz and get the feeling that sometimes comes over me when I think of Engin, one that has nothing to do with Skype, when my brain can manage to slough off the impedimenta of logistics and access the feeling of whole-body contentment and gratitude and need, the obvious core of everything I feel about him and which I can only hope will continue to be there existing at some unseen level, shaping decisions and material outcomes until we both die.

  I put out the cigarette. The smoke collecting in the garage has a soporific, mildly sickening effect and I stand up with effort and open a box full of what appear to be suzani pillowcases that I definitely want at some point but not now, having no decorative pillows to put in them, and another box with twenty-five different pomegranate things, glass pomegranates and ceramic pomegranates and actual dried pomegranates. For reasons unknown, my mom collected pomegranates. This box takes the wind out of me a little. I take one off the top, a rough-glazed rustic-looking clay one, and close the box. I’ll put this one in my office. Or in our bedroom. Or maybe I’ll carry it to Turkey. I don’t know. I go back into the house and set it on the nightstand and lie down on the bed.

  DAY 5     Today is Sunday and Honey is up at 5:40 which is excruciating but it is one of the mornings I love, where she can’t stop kissing me and hugging me and laying her face on my face and her eyes shine with joy that is summoned just by my very existence. Normally when she wakes up so early and I try to get her into the bed for a cuddle there’s nothing doing; she says “Nyo” in an indignant nasal tone and she windmills her body around so her legs jut off the bed and she inches herself off hits the ground and starts tearing around the house. But this morning I lift her from the Pack ’n Play get back into bed and kiss her all over and she laughs her little seal’s bark of a laugh, the laugh of a person who hasn’t fully learned how to laugh properly, and I lay her on top of my body and she is all love and melting hugs and rolls off me to rest her head on the pillow and put her arms and legs across the bed like a starfish, periodically doing little jumps and jolts as though making sure the energy filling her small body is evenly distributed, then letting me lay my arm across her and get cozy and think she is just such a nice little tiny person. I feel the greatest sense of well-being available for love or money and I think Thank you God or whoever for this moment. After forty-five minutes of more or less unbroken cuddles touching my face poking my eyes saying “DAH” into my mouth she scoots herself off the bed ready for the day and it is time for breakfast, an egg and a banana and when that is done it is 7:15. If we were at home this would be a very respectable time for us to have finished breakfast, and I might have a chance to actually bathe while she stood next to the bathtub holding the shower curtain and crying for me to come out. It might actually have given me a chance to select my outfit for the day with some modicum of care for the sheer pleasure of looking respectable or like an attractive woman in the waning years of her prime. Every day I envy Meredith her beautiful clothes, expensive clothes or unusual clothes she finds on her prodigious travels. But she is also eighty pounds, bird bones that can perch as they are meant to on precipitous heels, visible panty lines that look somehow louche and obscurely elegant but would look obscene on an ass like mine.

  Twenty minutes for stories and milk on the couch, although Honey is increasingly reluctant to sit through an entire story now, even the ones she loves, and begins rifling through the pages faster and faster until I can’t even rapidly paraphrase the illustration. I hope she is not hyperactive requiring treatment. Twenty minutes of taking all of the pots pans melamine bowls out of the kitchen cupboards. If we were at home leaving the house at five minutes to eight with my hair clean my minerals powdered across my face a little blush a cardigan and skirt and somewhat stylish sensible shoes we would be in excellent shape for an eight-o’clock deposit of Honey at daycare and a corresponding 9:30 workplace arrival. We would be off to a very good start, all things considered. But here we have no project for which this early waking and breakfast and stories-and-milk represents a smart and auspicious beginning, and no minerals to powder on my face.

  So I decide we will go for a walk, a real walk, no stroller, while it is still cool and the birds are chirping and the heat of the day is a hint not a promise. We can buy a newspaper at the High Winds Market. I gather Honey put her into pants and shirt cover her face and chubby wrists and arms and hands and ankles with sunscreen and it gets in her hair and we set out on the move. The High Winds Market is closer than the Holiday but small small small and all the fruit is wax and shipped in from Ecuador and in the deli it’s baloney city. We stop to watch two deer and two perfect fawns in the undeveloped scrub lot next to the original Deakins place. The mothers look at us and Honey shouts “Daggy daggy daggy” until they tense up and bound away, the fawns wobbling behind them. Then it’s ten minutes before we’ve made it out of Deakins Park and that’s with Honey hustling her buns. This land is made for getting across on your horse or your wagon or the railroad. My mother told me that my great-grandfather used to ride a horse two days west every time there was a Freemasons’ meeting in Cassidyville, stopping to camp on the plains to break up the trip. That’s the way to do it. By the time we’ve reached the railroad Honey is lifting her arms to be picked up, and forgetting always the slow rate at which ground is covered in the high desert I don’t have the Ergo and so have to carry her on my own steam the rest of the way to the store. I hoist her up onto my shoulders and we stride through the scrub on the highway that leads to the market, and she puts her mitts on my head and sort of caresses my hair, what a funny thing she is. We are panting when we arrive.

  I buy the Recorder for fifty cents and feel that a treat is in order so I also buy a Starbucks Frappuccino in a bottle and Honey gets a string cheese even though she has twenty-six string cheeses at home and I curse myself for not bringing one but she holds the new one in her fist and gleefully bites the head off and smiles at me with a mouth full of cheese. I put her back on my shoulders to take the highway back to Deakins Park and the knowledge that we have seen what there is t
o see and there is no new route, no new view, adds length to the twenty minutes it takes to get back home. Once we leave the anxieties of the highway and the trucks that barrel down it I put Honey down to walk and I scan the headlines of the paper. The county supervisors are scheduled to vote on whether Paiute should join the fifty-first State of Jefferson and lobby the capital to secede, I read. I find it stunning that Cindy and her lawn sign are a viable political movement although I guess supervisors can vote on anything. What I understand to be the sentiment at the State of Jefferson’s heart is that nameless legislating fat cats in big cities cannot properly represent the interests of the sparsely populated rural counties. Which is probably true. But it seems that this probably true thing is also what dooms this movement to irrelevancy, it’s like if the Greeks and the Bulgarians started agitating to leave the Ottoman Empire but there were only ten Greeks and five Bulgarians. Moreover based on the way the main street looks it’s hard to believe anyone is just waiting for liberation from the yoke of the state to rise up and prosper. “Casualties of Capital!” I say aloud in Hugo’s pompous voice, and Honey pats my head quizzically.

  When we are safely back at the house it is 8:45 and I think given Honey’s early start this morning perhaps she can be persuaded into a nap and I can read the paper and have a cigarette and recover from the walk to the store. I look at her until I find a gesture I can reasonably interpret as a rubbing of eyes and I tell her very cheerfully lovingly but authoritatively that she is tired and it is now time for a nap. I carry her to the closet close the curtains in the bedroom toss the comforter over the unmade bed put her into the Pack ’n Play with minimal ceremony say “It’s time to take a snooze” gently pass my fingers over her brow and in between her eyes and over the tip of her nose which sometimes makes her involuntarily close her eyes like a parakeet in a cage when you put a blanket over it. I crack the door and leave the bedroom and immediately her cries begin but I determine them to be a feint and not substantive. I pause to feel sad that this store of Honey-based knowledge I have been building up which is so insanely specific to this time and place and person will live and die with the versions of me and her that exist at this moment. And that Engin is missing his chance to amass this same knowledge, if indeed this knowledge has the same weight for fathers as for mothers.

  I drink a glass of water collect the cigarettes from the top of the grandfather clock and go onto the deck with the paper. I scan the letters to the editor which are all Jefferson-related in honor of the upcoming vote. I note with a start that Cindy Cooper has written one.

  Editor:

  The people in the North State do not have any representation in California legislation and we are trying to get equal representation and that’s the long and short of it.

  The truth is we are working to have less laws that keep us from living a better life, so our grandkids have a better life too.

  People want the government to stop charging them taxes for everything they do. Los Angeles does not pay the fire tax and they are the ones that pasted it on us and building the train and tunnels we don’t need or will ever use.

  We are working hard to make the North State a better place to live and have support from a lot of the people in it.

  Cindy Cooper, Altavista

  I would not have pegged Cindy as a community activist necessarily as she seems grumpy but sort of placid and immobile. There’s a dissenting letter:

  They say it is all about representation, when really it is about regression, anti environmental protections, anti immigration and the end of all progress made in the last century. Splitting the state is drinking poison and hoping the other person will die.

  This from Brian Hendricks of Fairmeadow, thirty-five miles west of us. Go Brian, I think. There are a few other Pros, Big Government, regulation, taxes, blah blah blah. And then at the very end I start to see a letter from by god my uncle Rodney and it is so terse and Rodney-like I wish he was here so I could give him a hug.

  People have been talking about this since the 1940s but it was true then and it’s true now that for every dollar the North State sends to Sacramento we get two dollars in services from the State.

  Rodney Burdock, Quincy

  I would be amazed if Rodney has ever strayed from the Republican Party in his life but I guess secession is a bridge too far. He does after all work for the Forest Service, which is the Government like the Foreign Service is the Government like the University is the Government, like every institution that has ever employed my family apparently. Honey’s cries have subsided to the point where I can assume she is happy enough being where she is and I look through the rest of the paper. There’s a rambling two-page op-ed from Davis Birgeneau concerning the benefits of letting cattle graze on a specific patch of scrub by a local water channel and the combination of the prose which is full of a cattleman’s reminiscences and my agricultural ignorance means that it reads like a foreign language, I mean I can’t even understand the basic terms of the debate at hand. But reading it, reading about the “Tour of Europe” night at the library and the hunting safety class and the Fourth of July parade gives me a comforting feeling, like things are happening and people know each other and do things and the social networks that hold the world in place are extant here even if I don’t have access to them and don’t know if I would want to if I could. There is a whole column of the paper for the churches and I’m astonished by the number of them relative to the size of the town, Mormon Catholic Baptist Seventh-Day Adventist and things with inscrutable denominations, Grace and Freedom etc. and this is not even to mention an actual full-fledged cult, not listed, that took over a neighboring town in the 1970s and started putting up life-size dioramas of biblical figures along the highway which are there still. Engin loved this town when we drove through and made me stop the car so we could take pictures.

  I see the name of my grandparents’ Episcopal church, where I was baptized lo these many years ago. Services Sunday at ten and for no reason I can name I think we should go and just see what it’s like and pass the time. It will take half an hour to walk there so I think we can leave at 9:20 and stop at Sal’s so that we can communicate to Engin that we will not be available for our scheduled call until later in the day. I pause for my daily feeling of annoyance at the difficulty of communicating overseas and while the difference between what is available now and what it used to be like for example when we lived in Nicosia it is somehow more annoying now, the Skype calls with an echo or video but no sound or sound but no video or work in one room but cut off when you wander into an electronic shadow or the Wi-Fi relies on ancient copper lines that don’t really work. I should get an iPhone so we could FaceTime but my non-iPhone is half the price. I could theoretically get the Institute to pay for it; the Institute, meaning the taxpayers and the Saudis, pays for absolutely everything Hugo and Meredith put their hands on, but I don’t like the idea of HR somehow listening to my phone calls and what if god forbid I wanted to send Engin a sexy photo, should that urge ever happen to arise. Maybe the thing really is that now we have these tools there’s the expectation that you will always be in touch. Overseas we called my grandparents every two weeks and we wrote letters and that was it and it was just easier than doing this Skype dance with all its awful reminders that the person you want to be here is not here. But Honey has to see her father’s face as much as she can while he’s not here, I think, and start crying, and I’m proud of myself because I think it’s been about two days since the last time I cried.

  But maybe church will … do something for us. Maybe we’ll have a visitation. If nothing else by the time church is over and we go back home it will be time for lunch and then a long nap and if I’m honest a drink and maybe in the afternoon we can drive out to Antelope Meadows where I seem to remember there is a dilapidated swing set and a view of waving grasses and a man-made lake surrounded by spiky grass and gopher holes. A nice Sunday evening just the gals, and maybe I can convince myself to go back to work tomorrow or the next day
or the next or the one after that.

  Honey is silent now and I take a shower and the feeling of hot water on my skin and solitude and respite is so enormous I have a sensation that borders on randiness and take the head of the shower which is removable and spray it between my legs at varying distances and think about Tom Hardy until thirty seconds later I come in a painful, spasmodic way that feels incomplete, a misfired sneeze but I guess a sneeze nonetheless. I dry myself brush out my knotted hair put on jeans and the shirt I was wearing when I left the Institute. I lay out Honey’s hat and the sunscreen and clean diaper and pack away the changing pad into the backpack with a bag full of raisins and a sippy cup filled with water and two books and a spare pants and there are twenty minutes remaining to sit on the deck and be clean and fresh and smoke two cigarettes and stand up feeling light-headed and ethereal. There’s a breeze and it rattles the goat bell my mom brought my grandparents from Cyprus. I hear its unmistakable goat-summoning sound and I have suddenly the strongest sense memory I’ve ever had, so strong I touch the arms of my deck chair to know I’m here. Mom and I were on Chios, before the Syrian war, before the refugee crisis, doing a kind of Dad memorial trip to old haunts. I was a teen. We stayed at a village outfit called Aphrodite Rentrooms, a damp, spartan affair with austere beds side by side. We woke up from an Aegean afternoon nap to the sound of a hundred goat bells in the olive grove below, and we sat on the balcony eating pistachios and watched a sea of goats return home in the pink afternoon light. I try to remember the light, my mother in a white nightie in the little bed across from mine. The breeze dies and the goat bell is silent.