The Golden State: A Novel

by Lydia Kiesling

  By and by the ice cream is finished and I want to have a cigarette but know from experience that the fatty dairy scum on the inside of my mouth will be inharmonious with the cigarette and I think I can sluice it out with a final screwdriver to cap off the evening. I sashay inside and prepare this and come back outside and take a big swig and then see that the ashtray is brimming over and this is upsetting to my sense of orderliness because truly there is nothing worse than an overflowing ashtray on the deck of a mobile home and I set down my drink and pick up the ashtray and walk around the deck to the back of the house where the trash can lives.

  But somewhere along the three short steps off the deck I pitch forward and land with the full weight of an adult body in motion on my eyebrow and right shoulder. My head bounces off the concrete path that leads to the carport and I see black and hear rather than feel some concussive force inside my head. It is the kind of fall where people would normally surround you and hasten to pick you up look in your face dust you off hold up fingers and ask if there is someone to call but there is no one to call only a riot of stars that I see across my vision against the riot of real stars in the sky above me when I roll over onto my side and then my back, gripping my brow and wondering if there is blood. I lie there for a minute then roll back onto my side and then onto my front and I put one knee up and one hand, and then the other knee and other hand and I stand very slowly with one hand over my throbbing eye. There is a lot of pain and I stand there feeling it and I feel my wits shaking themselves off and swimming against the current of alcohol in my blood and after a minute or two they slowly congregate and say Well here we all are and what are the signs of concussion and shouldn’t we stay awake in case we should never wake up again and then I feel reassured and then I feel afraid.

  I slowly get up and take another moment to steady myself and on wobbling feet make my way up the stairs and back into the house and turn on the light in the other bathroom and inspect myself, a very white face and red weal around my eyebrow, but all in all the lack of evidence of what has happened is surprising given the clamoring inside my head. I go back outside to the corner of the deck where I can get Cindy’s Wi-Fi and google “what to do in a concussion” and apparently it is wait two hours before you go to sleep which is two hours I can spend reading about the percent of people who develop brain bleeding and blood clots and never wake up. What’s her name who was married to Liam Neeson fell down from a standing position and a few hours later she was gone. I consider what will happen in this contingency and it would be Honey trapped in her Pack ’n Play screaming and screaming into an empty room and I put my head in my hands.

  The problem is that if this happens no one will know for a very long time because Engin will give me a couple of days before freaking out and Uncle Rodney won’t think anything of it if I continue to not call and Meredith has no idea about geography and I am not in very good touch with my small assortment of friends from high school college grad school scattered across the earth. Cindy and Ed are out carousing. I could leave a note for Cindy but what if she doesn’t come home and spends the night howling at the moon with Ed. I could call the police but I don’t want to put it in anyone’s mind that I am an unfit mother a drunk etc. There is a dinky little medical center here thanks to a parcel tax of $200 a year that all the live-free-or-die types were persuaded to vote for because otherwise there would be no hospital for three hundred miles, but you can’t deliver a baby there or have anything but the most rudimentary of surgeries and it’s closed now anyway. Suddenly something emerges from the depths of my throbbing head and I consider Alice. Alice the crone.

  I look at the time on my phone and it is 10:30 which is egregious but hopefully not unforgivable. I remember she is staying at the passable-is-all-you-can-say-about-it Arrowhead and I take the chance that I can use Cindy’s Wi-Fi to make at least a voice call. I look up the number of the Arrowhead and copy it and then paste it into the Skype keypad, my right eye closed and my hand over my eyebrow which I feel forming a knot. I hear the click as Skype kicks into gear and the sound of a phone ringing. “Arrowhead,” someone says curtly. “I’m … trying to reach one of your guests, her name is Alice. An older lady. Really old. I know it’s late. I don’t know her room number … if you could just put me through. It’s a little bit of an emergency.”

  “One sec,” the man says and I hear another ring and another and another and I think of course she’s asleep and not going to answer a ringing motel phone but then I hear a click and clattering and a croaking hello.

  “Ms. Alice,” I say, and start rushing so I can get to the end of this mortification. “I am so very sorry to bother you—I’m Daphne, from the restaurant tonight, with the baby, Honey?”

  I wait two beats for her to say “Oh, hello” and rush ahead.

  “I am so, so embarrassed to say this but I’ve had a fall and hit my head and I’m concerned about the possibility of a concussion and so while I’m sure everything’s fine I’m wondering if you could maybe check on me in the morning since they say you shouldn’t sleep with a concussion. I mean, that’s what I’ve read.” There is a pause.

  “Don’t you think you ought to call 911?”

  “Well I considered it,” I say, “but I actually feel okay and think I’m probably fine, this is just more of a contingency plan in case the worst should happen, I like to have all my bases covered and I don’t want to upset the baby with an ambulance, which would have to come all the way from the next county over probably.” A longer pause.

  “Okay,” she says.

  “Oh, thank you thank you thank you” I say. “I’m at Three Paiute Way in Deakins Park, the one with a Buick and big birch tree out front.” “Hold on,” she says, and makes me repeat it, which I think is a good sign.

  “What time do you want me to come?”

  “What time do you usually wake up?”

  “About six.”

  “Well I think if you were to come at seven that would be good. I’ll leave the door unlocked so you can get in.”

  “Okay then.”

  “I’ll, um, leave you some instructions on the very off chance that something bad happens.”

  “Okay.”

  “I really can’t thank you enough for this, Alice.”

  “Okay. Take care of yourself,” she says, and hangs up. I wonder whether she will really come.

  My head swims a little and I light a cigarette which I remember now was the precipitating factor and now the ashtray is out in the yard somewhere with cigarette butts strewn everywhere but I don’t dare brave the steps again to find it. I take a long drag to anchor myself to the bench and my head throbs. I will need to write the number for Uncle Rodney as he can take Honey if I die until Engin can get her but how he will get her is another question. I have to assume hope pray that there will be some way the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services can find their humanity if Honey is left motherless and her father needs to come and get her even without his papers in order but I’m sure they won’t. I google “mother dead father no green card” and after some grinding on the part of my phone an answer appears in the form of an applicant whose sponsoring sister died and evidently something exists called “Humanitarian Reasons” but it all hinges as usual on the submission of new and different forms and I think how the fuck will he ever be able to get through on the telephone to a person to say “MY FUCKING BABY is there in CALIFORNIA” and I just have to hope he has the good sense to go to the U.S. consulate in Istanbul and throw himself on their mercy and I think I need to make this list as simple as possible I need a process chart a job tree an org chart like I make at the Institute so first Alice calls Uncle Rodney and then he’ll need to come up from Quincy and get Honey and I guess he should be the one to call Engin and then Engin will need to call the lawyer and the consulate about what to do to get Honey and I realize I don’t have a will and wonder if I should make one and briefly hysterically I think that Engin’s only conduit to his child will now be a forest ranger in Plumas Cou
nty who calls him “Engine” like fire engine even though it’s Engin more like Angler and I don’t bother to correct Uncle Rodney anymore because it’s like he just cannot do it no matter how many times he hears you say it. I consider that if I really thought any of this was going to happen I would be crying but then I think no one ever really expects these things, you physically can’t anticipate them, so how I feel has no bearing on what will actually happen and I need to just make sure everything is organized and at least I have some life insurance through the University.

  I pour some of my melting ice on the cigarette and hear it hiss and put the butt on the windowsill and I go inside to find the small notebook I use to scribble Hugo’s various instructions in during our conclaves. I tear out several sheets and I consult the contacts list on my phone and I number one sheet “1” and write “In case of emergency please call my uncle Rodney Burdock at xyz. He should call my husband Engin Mehmetoğlu at xyz and our attorney at xyz.” I laboriously write out the link to the site explaining what to do about Humanitarian Reasons for the green card and I put all the pieces of paper in the middle of the dining room table and I unlock the front door and go outside and finish the screwdriver and smoke what I consider might be the last cigarette of my life so I try to make it count.

  DAY 7     I wake up to the cooing of Honey and as soon as I achieve consciousness I feel my head in the hands of an unloving god and my mouth full of acid and ash despite a clear memory of brushing my teeth in the fluorescent light of the bathroom vanity and helplessly swallowing three expired Advil against the knowledge of what was coming. The red numbers on the hotel-style clock on the nightstand read 5:45 a.m. and I think please Honey, please Jesus, please go back to sleep, but her coos are becoming squawks and caws and I sit up and feel a wave of such profound dread that I have to lie down again and close my eyes. What unforgivable things did I do last night, I wonder, and try to still my pounding heart with the true fact that there is nothing unforgivable I could have done apart from the simple folly of drinking to excess at high altitude and falling down the stairs. Whatever devastation I’ve wrought I’ve wrought quietly in the privacy of my own mobile home. The pounding isolates itself to the upper-right quadrant of my head and I feel the egg on my eyebrow and think “I’m alive.” And then I think “unfit mother unfit mother unfit mother,” one of those word pairings of the sort my brain likes to get stuck in its gears.

  “Shhhhh,” I say to Honey in her closet wondering whether she might lie back down and soothe herself to sleep. “Shhhhh,” but the position of the tongue to produce the sound allows me to taste the full ruin of my breath. Her caws become shrieks. “Dadadada,” she says. I force myself up and place my legs over the side of the bed. I am wearing only underwear and I look down at my slack white belly and the long thin hairs growing around my bikini line. I lie back down; I sit back up. I shuffle around the enormous bed and into the bathroom and see my eyelid is so purple it is nearly black and it becomes red radiating out from my eye. I drink the glass of water that is sitting forgotten by the sink. I know I have but it feels like I have never had a hangover like the hangover I have now and I can only propel myself out of the bathroom by hunching forward sagging my shoulders like Early Man. Honey’s noises are insistent and I shuffle to the closet and see her bright face like a little night-light in the dark. “Ameeeee,” she says, and lifts up her arms to me. I have heard her say “Amee” before but she’s said it to several people and I’ve never been positive she is referring to me. But this seems very clear and my heart starts bleeding and I pick her up and she is incredibly heavy and I carry her back to the bed and lie down, trying to clutch her to my bosom while she squirms and writhes to sit up stand up try and jump on the bed and my stomach is full of water and baby bees. My head pounds so much I have to sit up and put it between my knees. She stops her frenzy and puts her arms around me and her cheek against my back.

  “I’m sorry,” I say from between my knees. “Mommy isn’t feeling very well.” “Ameeee,” she says and rears back and yells with laughter. She scrabbles around to my knees and I lift my head and she puts her hands on each side of my face and gives my mouth a big open-mouth smack and smiles so warmly and brightly that I say “Oh thank you my dearest one,” with genuine gratitude, and then she starts rifling her hands through my hair, grabbing hold of a big hank and yanking down. “Ouch,” I say to her. “Ouch ouch ouch” and I find her hands and extricate the hair and hold them very tightly. “We DO NOT pull hair,” I say, and she flails out of my reach and tumbles sideways off the bed with a loud thump. I spring off and around to the other side and she is trying to get her breath, her mouth open in preparation for what I know will be a tremendous cry. I pick her up and hold her against my body and lean my ass back against the bed and try not to throw up from all the jangling of my body parts and she screams. “My poor monkey,” I say to her. “Poor poor monkey. We got a bad bonk. Yes, that was a very bad bonk. Mommy has a bonk too. Poor lovebug sweet monkey, my little peach blossom.” I lean back to see her face and tears are running down and I wipe them away and wipe her nose with the scratchy white sheet and hug her again while she cries and wonder with desperation rising in my throat how in the loving fuck I will survive the morning. Soon she wants to get down and I set her on her feet and she takes off running from the bedroom into the kitchen.

  I follow her with my hominid shuffle my head throbbing at every plodding step and when I get to the kitchen I look through the door to the dining room and see Alice standing there, Alice, utterly forgotten, called in the night, Alice, holding one of the chicken-scratched “In case of my death please call this number” papers I am now mortified to remember spreading across the dining room table before smoking what I believed would be the last cigarette of my short span on earth. She looks at me and I cover my breasts and turn around and shuffle quickly back to the bedroom. “I’m early,” I hear her say. “One second,” I manage to cry out and I’m fumbling around the closet for a T-shirt and sweatpants which I pull on and then emerge. Honey is holding on to Alice’s leg.

  “I thought I’d find out sooner rather than later whether you were alive,” she says.

  I lunge to the kitchen sink and vomit up the water I drank. Alice stays where she is. I run the faucet and remove the hand sprayer and spray water ineffectually to wash the mess down.

  “I’m hungover,” I say helplessly. “I’m sorry.”

  “I thought you might be,” she says. “You sounded a little keyed up on the phone.”

  I see her looking around the house presumably to see whether it’s a safe environment for a child. The essential tidiness and coziness of my late grandmother’s home overcomes the detritus of Honey that is strewn around the linoleum and carpet.

  “You know you have to be careful at this altitude,” she says mildly.

  “Can I get you some coffee,” I say and look around for a coffee machine filters coffee any of the things I would need to make the coffee, and she says “Tell you what. You are good for less than nothing right now.” She gently takes Honey’s hands off her leg and walks carefully gingerly frailly over to me and takes the dish towel from the handle of the refrigerator where it is tucked and opens the freezer takes out ancient frozen peas wraps them in the dish towel and says “Take this to bed with you and lie down.”

  “What are you going to do?” I ask her, holding the peas to my burning eyebrow.

  “I’ll mind the baby.” I look at her and somehow telegraph my concern that she won’t be able to corral Honey at her advanced age.

  “I don’t move very fast but I think I know how to take care of a sweet baby,” she says, and looks down at Honey and says “Don’t I know how to look after a sweet baby?” and Honey shrieks “Daaaahhhhhh!” Alice looks at me with an eyebrow gently raised.

  “I don’t get the feeling that you could move any faster than I could.” From my roiling stomach I am trying to muster up the will to be polite say no thanks I’ve got this but some slumbering self-pre
serving instinct wakes and I gesture at diapers on the coffee table and bananas in the fruit bowl and say “There are eggs in the fridge” and there is really nothing else for me to do but go into the bedroom close the door take off my clothes get into bed curl up on my side put the peas on my burning face pull the covers all the way over my head and cry until I fall asleep.

  Sometime later I open my eyes and I’m under the sheet in a foul-breath-smelling pocket of warmth and the peas are a big wet spot on the sheet beside me. I have such a serious feeling of badness that I have to just submit to it, curl my knees up to my chest and let it wash over me like waves, waves that will ideally recede after they’ve spent their energy on my supine form, giving me a chance to stand up catch my breath. I have had a hangover in my life more times than I care to admit and so there is a part of me that knows that this particular body-mind-heart-spiritual-level, ethical-level feeling of badness is just the hangover and not a permanent state, but I also know that this hangover badness like all hangover badness is latching onto preexisting badness. Surely the tide of badness rising steadily higher over the last eight months is a sign that there is something to which I cannot acclimate. Engin’s green card, my job, Hugo and Meredith and the breast pump in the basement of Oberrecht Hall. And Maryam. And Ellery. Now instead of waking up to see a stranger’s back next to me as I might have done in the past and thus ushered in hangover-specific badness it’s the feeling of the grave injury I’ve done to my face, the egg on my eyebrow, being an unfit mother, not just to my own child but any other child that might cross my path.