The Golden State: A Novel

by Lydia Kiesling

  “Where are you from?” I venture.

  “I’m from a little town in the Rockies. But now I live on a farm near Lake Michigan.”

  “By yourself?” I wonder aloud.

  “More or less. I have some friends who kind of look after me. Family friends.” She looks down at her hands and there’s a long pause. “They are in a snit with me about this trip. I drove all the way out here myself, if you can believe it. They didn’t want me to do it.” This genuinely shocks me, and it registers on my face which is always registering things and she gives a kind of harrumphing laugh.

  “How long did that take you?”

  “Something like two weeks. First I stopped in my hometown.”

  “And why … here,” I say, I mean of all places.

  “During the war my husband worked not too far from here, in a forestry camp.” I must have looked quizzical. “He was a conscientious objector. A pacifist, you know. They had camps for them out here.” “Huh,” I say. The only camp I know of that is near here is the Tule Lake internment camp where they put Japanese-Americans which nobody here ever talks about I don’t think. Honey stirs but then settles back in, her body dragging down on the straps of the Ergo.

  “I visited him one time before we were married, before our kids. It was maybe the nicest trip we ever took together. I just got a yen to see the place again, I guess.”

  “But your friends didn’t want you to come.”

  “No,” she says. “It took me weeks to convince them. They have medical power of attorney, so they might have been able to stop me, but we finally came to an agreement. I’m supposed to take my medicine and call them every day,” which seems fair to me. She looks over at the counter where Sal has produced a coffee and a hideous slab of brownie. I stand and trot up to get them, taking care not to jostle Honey. My new friend spears a corner of the brownie with a fork and brings it to her mouth with an incredibly gnarled but reasonably steady hand. I wait. There is something odd but not unpleasant about what’s going on. She doesn’t seem to care whether I’m there or not and for once I have no anxiety about divining whether that is the case. Honey is asleep and work thinks I’m bereaved and things seem just fine in this particular moment. Sal comes around and wipes a table adjacent with a rag and as she passes by I smell vinegar from the rag.

  “There was a while when driving a car was the only thing that didn’t hurt,” the crone says. I want to ask how old she is but that seems rude. “I’m ninety-two,” she says, as though I had spoken aloud. “I went to the library and had the librarian search the Internet for ‘old people’ and ‘road trips’ and she found an article about some hundred-year-old fool jogging across the country. I showed Mark and Yarrow the printout.” I laugh aloud. She looks disdainfully at the rest of the brownie. “Those are my caretakers,” she adds. “Mark and Yarrow.”

  “Like the flower,” I say. I must know that from my mom. “Yes, just like,” she says. “They have a little boy named Rain. They are hippie types, you might say.” She chips more of the brownie off and pushes the debris onto the tines of her fork.

  “I’m kind of stalled out now, though,” she says. “I seem to have run out of steam for getting in the car. It hurts a lot more. So I’m here taking a break before pushing on.”

  “What a place to take a break,” I say. “The end of the earth!” She looks around at the café.

  “It has changed a lot from what I remember. We would have been here around forty-five.”

  “That’s what everyone says,” I say.

  The door to Sal’s opens and the teens I saw walking a few days ago come in and elevate the level of noise in the place and Honey stirs against me.

  “What brings you here?” she asks.

  “My mom was from here. She’s gone now and I inherited my grandparents’ house. I just came up to see how everything was looking.”

  “My hometown was kind of the same way,” she says. I love the extemporaneous way she talks, she’s like an Oracle breathing fumes from a vent. “I knocked on the door of my old house—a woman was there living with her son. It was a mess, pizza boxes everywhere. Slatternly, my mother would have said. There had been a tree out in the back that I just loved, I used to sit on a swing tied to its big branch, but it was gone.” She pushes the plate with the brownie toward me and says “You can have this if you want” and I pull it toward myself because I always need a treat. “They seemed very unhappy in the house. I guess my family wasn’t very happy either, but my mother always was one for housekeeping.” She dabs her mouth with her napkin. “What’s the line, ‘Unhappy families are unhappy in their own way’?” I scan my brain. “Tolstoy,” I say. Or Dostoyevsky? I should know. She nods. “Anyway, I saw the house and I just decided to keep on going till I got somewhere I wanted to be,” she says. “Westward ho!” She grins a surprisingly vital and grin-like grin for such an old person. She’s beautiful, I think.

  “Where are you staying?” I ask.

  “The Arrowhead Motel, it’s called.” She raises her eyebrows. “It’s passable.”

  Her eyes focus on me. “Where do you live when you aren’t here?” she asks.

  “We live in the City—San Francisco,” I say. Honey is suddenly awake and squirmy. Her body is strong enough that she can put considerable strain on the Ergo when she decides she wants to be free and I have to stand and dance and hush her.

  The crone reaches a hand out to touch Honey’s foot, which Honey swiftly kicks away, and I grab it and hold it tight and say “Gentle” and the crone’s hand stays hovering in the air, grasping at nothing. Then she pats around her person and her hair and then very slowly and stiffly stands up and says “Well, I’m off” and starts to shuffle away without so much as a by- your-leave. Normally I would wonder whether I offended her but there is Honey to deal with and I take Honey out of the pack and give her a string cheese and set her down, and she stumbles and puts both hands on the ground with her butt in the air and comes up with hair and fuzz all over the cheese. I dip a napkin into my water glass and wipe it off more or less and return it to her. We open the computer and Skype Engin. He clicks on and I see he is somewhere not his mother’s, appears to be smoking a cigarette on an unknown balcony with café lights and I wonder whose balcony what balcony and then I think Jesus he gets to have fun, and feel momentarily so pissed and bewildered that someone could be out there having fun at a party instead of drinking with Islamophobes and dealing with torn baby fingers but his face lights up when he blows kisses to Honey and she looks at him and waves furiously and they babble to each other and I again say a small prayer of thanks that she doesn’t break his heart by being indifferent to the sight of him on the screen. Then he looks at me and says “My love.” And I say it back and then he says “I was hoping when you opened the computer there would be some news but based on the view you haven’t gone home yet.” “No,” I say. “I’m paralyzed. I’m the nymph who turned into a tree.” I don’t remember the Turkish word for nymph so I say the latter in English and he looks puzzled but I decide not to clarify and say “I just need a few more days to make a plan.”

  “The church was depressing,” I go on. “Only six people. We left early.”

  “It’s depressing there,” he says. “You should go home.” He looks exasperated and despairing and I feel like screaming and I ask where he is and he says Sema his friend from high school is having a party and then I remember again how much he gave up to come and marry me, a whole life lived in one city and all the dense social webs thus accumulated, and what it must feel like when they are severed and now what it feels like to try and repair them all. “I’ll go back this week,” I say, and he communes a little longer with Honey and asks what happened to her finger and I tell him she fell and that’s it and then I let him go back to his balcony party, the lights of the city glittering behind him.

  I allow Honey to run around a little outside Sal’s on the wide empty sidewalk and then I hold her hand and we slowly walk to the little town park which is farth
er down the road from the hotel, just before the turn to the Desert Sunrise casino and which I had forgotten about until now. She runs into the grass and back in the trees is lo and behold a tiny playground and she screams, actually screams with joy and runs clumsily toward it and I laugh at the transformation and then immediately think Christ what an asshole I am that we haven’t just gone to the damn playground. I get her into one of the baby swings and push her and first she looks thrilled but then as she feels her stomach drop her face crumples and she cries and strains her arms toward me and I feel sad that she might be a physical coward like me consigned to hate amusement parks and I give her another little push to see if she will acclimate but she wails and I pick her up and hold her close and we stand together looking at the slide and agree we will try that one next time.

  I put her back in the Ergo and we start the walk home and I remember the library, a teeny-tiny cheerful brick-fronted building near the cemetery, and we detour there. An elderly woman with short white hair is sitting at a cramped desk inside and she greets us pleasantly and asks what we are looking for. I ask whether I can use my San Francisco library card and she says she’ll have to make up a new one for Paiute which takes five seconds since it’s a piece of paper she fills out with a pencil. I scan the bulletin board with notes about job placements and the “Tour of Europe” evening program. I check out some board books for Honey, so worn they feel like fabric, and I find Anna Karenina and check the line and I was right it is Tolstoy and I get that and Jurassic Park because I want something my brain can just kind of ooze over without effort.

  We get home and I want to give Honey a nap but she had the weird morning nap and she appears now to be full of beans so I let her run around the yard, and I sit against the base of the deck, immobilized by boredom and desperate for a cigarette. I remember my new books but I’m not feeling up for the unhappy families different in their own way so I start in on Jurassic Park darting my eyes up at Honey now and again and then I see Cindy come out of her house looking unusually spruce in a jacket and purple blouse tucked into her jeans.

  “How’s the baby’s finger,” she asks me, and I point to Honey on the grass, proof of life. “It’s fine. We cleaned it out and she has a nice Band-Aid. She’s being a big girl.” Cindy nods. “That’s good,” she says. “Nasty cut.”

  “Thanks again for helping us with that,” I say. “I was terrified,” and she just grunts.

  “Where are you off to looking so nice?” I ask. “Board of Supervisors,” she tells me. “It’s the vote today.”

  “Are they actually voting to leave the state of California today?” I was too interested in the letters in the paper to apprehend this fact. “No,” says Cindy. “This is the first in a series of steps,” sounding like she’s reading off a cue card. “It’s not a resolution or an ordinance, just basically the Board saying they will support our efforts this way and take it to the legislature and hopefully get them to pass a bill.”

  “And so they’re going to vote to see if they all agree to do this?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Down at the courthouse?” The courthouse is a rather incongruous temple on a street parallel to Main Street in the middle of town, visible from the playground we grumped around in earlier.

  “That’s right,” she says. I feel flickers of curiosity and concern. I have the rogue thought that I’m a property owner and thus have rights in this decision. Then I feel unconsulted and obscurely furious. “Maybe I’ll come too.”

  She looks impassive. “Well, I’m driving and I don’t have much room.” She’s so rude.

  “Oh, I don’t mean with you. I’ll just wheel her in the stroller, it’s only twenty minutes.”

  “Well okay then.” I do not feel any particular warmth from Cindy and wonder if it’s the drinks and the blood at the Golden Spike or my crypto-Muslim husband or if she’s just not a very warm person or if it’s a reflection of the warmth that I am directing at her. I always forget that I am walking around and can be seen and heard just like everyone else. I remember how Sal said “She’s not nice but we love her anyway.”

  I get Honey into the stroller and it only takes us twenty-two minutes to get to the courthouse moving at a brisker pace than I can really handle. I’m panting when we get there and worried we’re late but I behold Cindy again, seated on the front steps smoking and looking impassive.

  “Hi again” I say, with the feeling of being at a party and clinging to the one person who will talk to you.

  “Smoke?” she says. “Later,” I say, gesturing at the baby. Honey wants to get out of her stroller so I take her out and set her on the lawn in front of the courthouse and give her a string cheese, how many string cheeses has it been today, I try to figure, too many in any event. She toddles and bites hunks off the cheese and then lets the macerated pieces tumble out of her mouth into the grass, from which she retrieves them.

  “Are you going to give a presentation?” I ask Cindy, who has the look of someone who is getting ready to give a presentation. “Not me,” she says. “Bruce McNamara’s supposed to say something. We’ve been writing ’em letters and I don’t know what all for weeks, as you know.” “Like your letter in the paper.” “And to the supervisors, and everyone else.”

  People are coming up the walkway now, and Cindy trails off. More people than I’ve ever seen in one place in Altavista—more people than I’ve seen, total, in the whole time I’ve been here. There is a group of elderly women with very short hair, and a group of middle-aged women with very long hair. Most everyone is white, there are four or five people who are brown but no one who appears to be black. Cindy nods hello to a clump of three gray-haired men in cowboy hats and mustaches who seem in a hurry to get into the courthouse.

  “There are so many people I don’t know here,” I say, because I can’t think of anything else to say.

  “Well, you know,” says Cindy. “Not everyone lives in town. Lot of ranchers came from Rigby and Sundown and those places”—tiny towns beside which Altavista is a metropolis.

  “Also I doubt you’d know many people in town now,” she says, not unkindly. “Haven’t really seen you up here that I can remember. Since your mom died, I mean.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “I guess you never met my husband’s family when I brought them up last year.”

  “Can’t recollect I did,” she says, sounding awfully like a cowboy for someone from San Bernardino. She pulls on her cigarette.

  A Ford truck pulls up and discharges a very tall, very thin woman in a red blazer with a sportswomanlike braid down her back. “Goddamn,” Cindy sighs, “it’s that cunt” and I visibly startle. “Sorry,” Cindy says.

  “What cunt?” I ask superfluously, just to feel the word, the little charge of tongue meeting teeth as the word goes out into the air. “She’s from way over the coast, big ranching family.” “Why is she, uh, a c-word?” I ask.

  “She was helping us to get organized for Jefferson but she won’t stop talking about the UN and some agenda they have that they are planning to do that she says is gonna have us all in chains by the year 2030. Don’t get me wrong I hate the damned UN but it’s a distraction when we need to be talking about our state.” “Oh,” I say, idly wondering why she hates the UN, my mom looked askance at the UN because the UN representatives always had the nicest house and biggest car of whatever posting they found themselves in. Honey runs toward me laughing, a sunburst, a comet, barking her shins on the first step and falling into my knees, still more or less laughing. I pull her up into my lap and kiss the top of her head with the puppy smell that she has after a while with no bath. She is writhing to get down and play again. She coughs and Cindy holds her cigarette up over her head. I’m desperate for a puff.

  The Cunt walks up the steps and into the courthouse, nodding coolly at Cindy who raises a surprisingly regal hand in its purple sleeve. “Hi, ladies,” says the Cunt. “Howdy,” I say for no reason I can name. “See you inside, Cindy?” she says cheerily. I gather Honey a
nd hold her wriggling like a big trout while I collapse the stroller which doesn’t fold over the diaper bag so I have to unfold it get out the bag throw it over my shoulder collapse the stroller while Cindy heaves herself up from the steps and straightens herself out. We walk up the stairs behind the Cunt, who strides purposefully up to the imposing paneled door.

  “Is she gonna do a presentation?” I ask Cindy. “That’s what I’m worried about,” says Cindy. “She doesn’t live here and she wasn’t at our last meeting when we planned out who was supposed to say what. I’m not good at public speaking so it was never gonna be me, but McNamara’s real good, and Donna Elkins, and Chad Burns.” I don’t think Cindy is really even talking to me—she’s muttering, and I don’t know who Donna Elkins is and have only the faintest awareness of Chad Burns, someone’s cousin.

  The courthouse is nice and cool under its friendly little rotunda. I unfold the stroller and put Honey back into it and wheel it after Cindy into one of the beige rooms in which municipal business is conducted and we see already fifteen or twenty people seated. Cindy spots her group and goes to join them. “We’ll just sit over there,” I say, gesturing to the back of the room.