The Golden State: A Novel

by Lydia Kiesling

  We walk toward home, Honey sweaty and limp and heavy on my back, and I worry about how hungry she must be since it is lunchtime and I try to pick up the pace to the extent possible in the heat. But halfway there I feel the buzz in my pocket that means service and I look at a photo of Engin and the gang on the Kordon at dusk and then I think I ought to call Uncle Rodney back and tell him how much I liked his letter but I decide I’m not up for it, favorite uncle, only uncle though he may be.

  We straggle the rest of the way home and I’m ready to collapse, it’s so hot, but finally we mount the steps to the screen door and I lay Honey down on the floor turn on the AC take my shirt off and rub the red grooves of my flesh. I decide against frozen pizza because of the oven and make a quesadilla instead even though that’s basically another fucking string cheese sandwiched between carbs and I stuff her full of blueberries too and try to get her to eat some browning avocado. She goes down docile for her nap and I stretch out on the bed and fall into a sleep so deep I wake up with drool on my chin.

  * * *

  Honey wakes up at the same time and I decide against Antelope Meadows because I don’t feel like getting her into the car seat but then I think the light is turning pink and it would be nice to go for a drive. That’s what my mom did with Rodney and her parents when she was little, she told me—they’d get in the pickup and drive out to someone’s ranch and drop in unannounced and be received with coffee and a piece of cake and normally that would sound horrible to me, that’s the one thing about Turkey I can’t really deal with, there’s a lot of visiting, but right now it sounds so so nice and I wish I knew someone to do it with.

  I’m rummaging in a cupboard looking for nuts when I find Grandma’s cocktail napkins printed with cattle brands and delighted with this discovery observe her sacred five o’clock cocktail hour on the deck, where Honey is more or less penned in with the books I set down for her. I can’t find the nuts but I have two petite screwdrivers and the better part of a bag of Lays. I would like to have a cigarette out here in the thin air but I do not smoke in front of Honey because that is the worst thing you can do to your child according to experts. I am not used to drinking liquor instead of beer and I thrill a little at the heat it sends across my limbs and then when I think about dinner I decide we might as well just walk over to the damn Golden Spike again. The bank account must be closer to $200 now, but I vow that I will do a thorough investigation of our finances in due time. This is a kind of emergency, I say, and norms are set aside during an emergency.

  “We’re going out,” I say to Honey, and I prattle cheerily to her as I tote her around the house, squatting down to pick up her changing pad and put it on the table and pick up her diapers and put them on the table and pick up her wipes and put them on the table and pick up her two sections of The Very Hungry Caterpillar which she tore in half the other night when she was damp from her bath and put them on the table, and then put all the things into the bag. She chortles every time I squat down and say “WHOA” and stand up and say “WHOA.” And then I get her string cheese from the fridge and put it into the bag, and find her socks on the floor and set her on the counter and put on the socks and shoes and then we are finally ready to go and I think about what drink I am going to get when we get there to keep the festive feeling going.

  Honey is reasonable on the walk over, holds my hand over the hillocks and listens when I tell her we have to look both ways crossing the train tracks, so I am cautiously optimistic that there is no fractiousness on the horizon and we can have a nice dinner.

  The restaurant has a dark bar off the main dining area through a beaded plastic half-curtain, one I’ve only ever been in for my grandmother’s wake. Tonight I hear a cheery “Hi” from its depths as I wait at the hostess stand and look through to see Cindy Cooper and a big be-mustached man I don’t know sitting in one of the leatherette easy chairs in the bar area. She waves us over. “On Sunday they’ve got Picon punch for four bucks,” she tells me, this is a horrible Basque drink with almond liqueur but four bucks is four bucks, and she says “Sunday” like Sundy too. I ask her whether she thinks it’s okay to have Honey in the bar area and the bartender looks at me like This is America ain’t it so I pull up a chair and Honey sits on my lap and I give her a string cheese from my bag and she smiles happily at Cindy and the man who it turns out is Cindy’s boyfriend Ed van Voorhees, who I’ve heard about from Uncle Rodney and I realize must be the brother of Sal, she of the café. Ed comes from a big ranching family but is I think a Pepsi distributor spreading Pepsis across the west so there’s got to be a story there, gambling or whatnot.

  “I read your letter in the paper,” I tell her. Ed slaps Cindy’s back and hoots and Cindy looks defiantly at me even though I think my tone of voice is neutral and she says “Well I’m not really one to write a letter to the paper but I just felt it was right now that the supervisors are gonna put it to a vote.” “You know my Grandma Cora worked for the BLM,” I tell her, intending it as a mild rebuke. “Damn near everybody worked for the BLM in this town,” Cindy says. “But the head honchos don’t live here and they can’t keep telling us how to run things.” “My uncle Rodney wrote a letter too,” I say. “He says the North State needs a lot of government support.” “Well Rod works for the Forest Service don’t he,” says Ed, just as Cindy says, “If we had some industries up here we wouldn’t need the state’s money.” Ed nods. “We can’t all be pencil pushers,” he says, which is unjust to Uncle Rodney who is outside or in his truck about half of most days. Ed must see me narrow my eyes because he then says, “Hey—I love Rod. We go all the way back to kindergarten.”

  Everyone’s sense of propriety spurs us to move on. I ask Cindy where she’s from intending it to be a courteous neutral question but she’s from San Bernardino, way south, way way south. Flatlander, I think, with the tiniest tribal thrill, and she obviously is sensitive to notions of authenticity herself because she adds, “Been up here ten years, though,” and I say, “Ah,” and she says, “I came up with my ex. He’s gone now but I knew this was home as soon as I got here” which strikes me as remarkable, to have that reaction on your first visit.

  Ed asks me what I do and Cindy tells him that I work at the University. “You teach down there?” he says, which is what most people justifiably think might be the primary activity at the premier public university in the state but is not in fact the case. “Not exactly,” I say. “I work at a research institute for Islamic societies.” “Like ISIS?” he asks me. Which, Jesus. At the University it is basically considered indecent to mention ISIS unless it is in the form of a question like “Whither Transnational Movements in the Age of ISIS?” “No,” I say. “You know, like any country where there’s a shared Islamic past. Like Turkey or Morocco or, uh, Jordan,” trying to name places where there will be fewer bad associations. “Or Indonesia,” I add, since this is technically part of our mission along with manifold places in sub-Saharan Africa which are all horribly underrepresented in the Institute’s programming due to the many swirling complex currents of religious studies area studies history anthropology political science and how they do and do not interact and do and do not reflect and refract aspects of scholarship and society.

  “Well what do you-all think about ISIS?” he asks. I wish we were on campus and I could defer to Hugo or Meredith since it is really against protocol for me to talk about Issues as opposed to Programs. I am supposed to plan and find funding and administer, not have Ideas, although paradoxically I would never have been hired without a demonstrated interest in Ideas, since Hugo and Meredith are terrible snobs about credentials and need someone to write their research proposals and keep them company and Karen was a marketing major and has never left the country. That said I don’t really know anything about ISIS, what I do know is a hundred Turkish verbs that begin with k, but I have half-listened to many lectures and panels that I try to recall now. “Well, a lot of people don’t think that ISIS really counts as an Islamic group,” I say as I suck down my
drink, quickly because the taste of almonds makes me gag. “They kill a lot of people who are Muslim.” “But they’re running a whole country on Islamic Law,” Cindy tells me. “That’s the whole thing they want.” “There are a lot of different interpretations of what Islamic Law means,” I say. “Some people think they are actually operating more like a nation state, like they decide what they want to do and then they find the justification for it later. Like, the uh, U.S. does.”

  I can feel the booze zip like a friendly fire through my veins. “It’s kind of like if we want to blow up some person in another country we do it and then we do some law thing to make it legal afterward.” This feels like the wrong tack. There is a litany anyone who is interested in the “Muslim world” aka a huge swath of the known world knows: Without Islam we wouldn’t have algebra or astronomy. Or Plato, whom the Arab scholars brought forth from obscurity for the Europeans to froth over. Not to mention we wouldn’t have Hafez or Rumi or Yunus Emre or Ibn Khaldun. We wouldn’t have the Registan or the Dome of the Rock or the Umayyad Mosque—well, that’s gone now I think. I go with “Muslims consider Jesus a prophet too, you know.” Cindy rolls her eyes but Ed says “Well, that’s interesting. Huh. I did not know that.” But I’m not done, I’m drunk and I must now issue my verbal Facebook meme. “There are over a billion Muslims including my husband’s family and the majority of them don’t want anything to do with ISIS or even know what ISIS is about,” I say, with a pang as I picture again his wounded expression, his onetime Barış Manço mustache or maybe it’s Erkin Koray who had the mustache. But what I know from my deceased dad is that diplomacy is hard and requires dissembling and betrayal.

  Ed also did not know this and it prompts Cindy to give him the rough and basically sympathetic outline of Engin’s visa situation during which Honey begins kicking. She squirms off my lap and I give her half of The Very Hungry Caterpillar, the half with the one apple two pears three plums four strawberries five oranges. She sits next to my right foot and turns these pages and sticks her little index finger through the holes that the very hungry caterpillar made. I order a greyhound. It’s nice to be in a bar, it’s nice to talk to people, even these people, it’s nice when your baby is sitting nicely behaved on the floor of the bar.

  “So what do you think we should do about ISIS then?” Ed asks me and Jesus, ISIS, ISIS, ISIS, what fear we’re all living with. “I don’t think anyone has a good answer,” I say. “Sometimes I think we should just hammer the shit out of them and Bashar al-Assad too” and Ed laughs and we all cheers and I feel savage and parochial and bad, all this activated so quickly by $4 punch. Why do Americans always go back to the bomb. I feel my face bloom into a glorious Irish sunrise.

  Honey is on her feet and halfway out of the bar before I register her absence, mostly from Cindy’s expression, and I turn to see as she trips and falls over the hummock where the linoleum of the bar ends and the patterned floral wall-to-wall of the restaurant begins. She pops up like a top and begins brushing her hands anxiously the way she does now when she falls down, but I sense immediately through the Irish sunrise that something is different. Unlike with most of her falls she starts yelling, one anguished yell followed by a silence that I know portends real screaming. I lunge for her, knocking the table with my ass and sending the greyhound onto the seat where I’d been sitting. I run across the bar and squat down and try to wrap her up in my arms but she is frantically wiping one hand on my chest and screaming like I’ve never heard. A streak of blood appears on the placket of my white shirt and my stomach becomes a lump of plutonium. I cannot get her to hold her hand still. I see the hostess and Cindy hovering in my peripheral vision, the hostess holding out a napkin which I take without looking at her. “Oh my sweet baby my sweet Honey, show Mama your finger,” but I still cannot get her to hold still and finally have to grip her wrist very hard to see that the fat part of her tiny middle finger, her little grape, has torn open. Her sounds are no longer supported by the scaffolding of crying and are just awful rhythmic shouts. I look up and the hostess points to the corner and the bathroom. I bundle up the baby and smash her hand to my chest and run through the dining room where there are about five tables of people. I stumble on the way and hear the clatter of silverware as a man in a cowboy hat swiftly stands to intervene, but I right myself before he can take my arm and I say “Thank you” and keep running. I shut the door behind me and lock it set Honey on the counter and turn on the faucet. “Amee-amee-amee” she says, which I think is Mommy, and she looks at me with an expression that is equal parts puzzlement and pain, and she cries again and continues to wipe her finger on my chest as blood wells up again and again, and my body tenses as I imagine the flap tearing further through her agitation and I know that if I do not get a hold of myself I will throw myself around this bathroom like a terrible screeching missile and I have to settle and suddenly I do, I am calm, and I say “It’s okay.” “It’s okay, baby.” “It’s okay.” It occurs to me that she has never seen blood in quantity before, never had any kind of bleeding injury, and I see that after she wipes a new red gout onto my shirt she uses her other hand to try and wipe it off. I have to angle her body down and forcibly hold her arm straight to get it under the cold faucet and droplets of blood spatter as she flails. Someone I think is Cindy knocks on the door and says “I’ve got a first aid kit here” and I open the door with one hand on writhing Honey on the counter and take the proffered kit. Cindy muscles in and raises an eyebrow. “Think she needs stitches?” she says, looking at my shirt. “I … think with a cut like this you are supposed to do cold water and then see if the bleeding will stop.” The toilet paper mechanism rattles as I snatch a long trail of toilet paper. “I have this toilet paper,” I tell her moronically. I hold Honey’s arm hard enough there will certainly be a bruise and I endeavor to isolate the wounded finger from its mates, and see that blood continues to well out of the flap. Cindy puts a stabilizing hand on Honey’s shoulder and I twist the toilet paper around the finger in a lumpy, inelegant turban.

  I survey the blood on the counter and in the sink and the drops on the floor and point out to myself with the impeccable logic of the drunk and frazzled that there is more blood because I have been drinking and drinking thins the blood, before I remember that it is in fact Honey’s blood, and Honey hasn’t been drinking, only me. “If … if you could just bring me my bag I have some hand sanitizer and some wipes I can use to clean up.” Cindy looks at Honey, who has, thank sweet God above, restored some of her natural composure and is pointing at the little puddles of blood on the counter and saying “Dah! Dah! Dah!” and backs out of the bathroom. The sound of Honey’s cheery normal voice leaves me rubbery, the adrenaline flowing out like blood down the drain of a slaughterhouse. I perch Honey on my hip and hug her and say “What a good, brave girl, what a scary thing, so good and so brave.” She begins crying again but in a more controlled way when I try to look at the toilet paper to see if the blood has soaked through. A bird’s-eye inspection shows a bloom of blood on the inner layers, but none have breached the integrity of the outer layers.

  I say “shhhhhhhh” to her and I smooth the damp hair down at the back of her head and across her forehead and she puts her head against my neck and then rears it back to smile into my face and say “Eeeeeh,” pointing at my chest and the blood all over my shirt and the skin of my neck with a tiny adult kind of concern, as though she’s saying “Oh dear, Mommy, you’ve soiled your shirt.” I look in the mirror and I see a murder victim, a mugshot, my hair a nest and blood everywhere. I wish Engin could see. I want to take a picture but it would be too cruel to send him. But just for me to remember, I fish my phone out of my pocket and take a gruesome portrait of mother with daughter.

  Cindy is back at the door with the bag in one hand and the half of The Very Hungry Caterpillar in the other. I take the book first and set it on the counter away from the blood. I have been working to compose my face and as I reach for the bag I look at her and say “I’m so sorry—we crashed
your and Ed’s date and then made this big fuss.” I smile with the corners of my mouth turned down ruefully and hope for an answering smile but she just says “Kids are hard” and I realize I don’t know whether she has any. I set Honey down on her feet and she holds on to my legs and puts her face between my knees. I get out the wipes from the bag and the hand sanitizer and I wipe away the blood and then squirt little plops of sanitizer down onto the counter. “You oughta think about a tetanus shot for her,” Cindy says, which unaccountably annoys me, of course she has had her damn shots, I even know the exact date because that’s the kind of thing I remember. “She had her second TDAP shot on the sixteenth of last month,” trying to sound authoritative. Honey raises her little arms to me and begins making her “heh heh heh” want-want-want sound and I pat her head and swiftly wipe away the last smear of blood from the bowl of the sink and run the faucet and pack away the wipes and the sanitizer and the half of The Very Hungry Caterpillar and pick up Honey and put her on my hip and kiss her hand and put her backpack over my shoulder and brush past Cindy who holds the door open. “Thank you,” I say. “I’ll just settle up.” When I exit the corridor into the restaurant the tables of patrons and the hostess look in my direction and I remember that I am covered in blood. The martyred Honey smiles a big smile and waves her wrapped-up mitt in the air and there is scattered applause for the baby. I want to disappear from the surface of the earth, I want soft merciful darkness to envelop Honey and me both. “Sorry about that,” I say to everyone, “We’re okay!” and walk in measured steps to the hostess stand where I give her my debit card and ask if I can pay for one Picon punch one greyhound and Ed and Cindy’s drinks plus tip, approximately thirty dollars down the slaughterhouse drain too. “Better stay out here, ha ha,” I tell her, because I am not setting foot back in the bar. Ed waves kindly from his seat. “They got a carpenter’s nail sticking out of that carpeting,” he says. “Must have snagged the finger on that.” “Did we get a little booboo,” says the hostess, who is a majestic figure of a woman nearly six feet tall with broad shoulders blond hair and weathered pink skin. Honey is now in full lover mode, smiling and then ducking her face toward my neck and peeking up through lashes. Thank God. “That’s what I get for bringing her into the bar, haha,” I say, and scuttle out after signing my slip and putting my card into my pocket. “We’ll get Emilio to hammer that down, anyone could just trip over it, imagine me and my sandals!” says the hostess to my retreating figure. “You okay to drive, hon?” Cindy calls from the table. “We walked here—it takes five minutes. Thanks for your help!” Big smile, big smile and wave to Cindy and Ed, big wave to the folks.