The Golden State: A Novel

by Lydia Kiesling

  “Well, this one’s awake,” says Alice. “Probably needs a snack.”

  “Hi baby!” I say to Honey. “Did you have a nice nap on Alice’s lap?” and she kicks and strains to roll off Alice saying “Amee-amee-amee.” I kneel down to meet her and need to put my hand back to steady myself from mild spins. Alice stands up with effort, I can almost hear her back clicking, and then briskly straightens her skirt.

  “Well, then. I guess I’ll go and get my nap.”

  “Are we still on for dinner,” I say rather than ask, feeling bereft at the prospect of her absence.

  “Oh, sure, I guess,” says Alice.

  “I’ll pick you up at five at the Arrowhead,” I say. “We’ll go have the prime rib.”

  “Okay,” she says, and walks slowly to the door. I scramble up from Honey’s level and intercept her and lay a hand on her bony shoulder and she flinches and looks at me with what seems almost like hostility.

  “I just want to say thank you again, for what you did.”

  “Well,” she says. “What else was I going to do?” Honey tugs at my knees and raises her arms to be picked up. I reach down and bring her up, using her as a shield against some faint but perceptible disapproval I suddenly feel in the air of the mobile home.

  “Say bye-bye, Honey,” I say, waggling the baby’s hand. “See you soon.”

  Alice exits the screen door and makes her painstaking way down the deck stairs and I watch her get very slowly into a Dodge that I note with some concern is parked partially up on the curb, although in fairness to Alice it’s a rounded curb and easy to glide up onto. I feel very lonely and very unable to cope. It’s 2:20. I have the thought that I could put Honey down for a nap and then realize that she has just had one. So that’s two and a half hours to pass, my head faintly throbbing my eyebrow throbbing the residual rivulets of badness still lapping around my ankles poised to rise at any moment. The only good thing is that Engin and I seem to have restored somewhat the ideal of our life together, the mirage winking into something corporeal even if it’s just through Skype. I change the Band-Aid on Honey’s finger which she is mercifully still for and then I sit on the couch to gather strength and watch her run to and fro; into the guest bedroom and the little tiny study then back into the living room bashing into my knees laughing hysterically, then staggering back and spinning all the way around on unsteady little legs for what I think is the first time. I see suddenly how the little stores of fat that formed the rolls on her wrists and ankles are melting away and the slim lines of a child are starting to assert themselves in her body. She was never one of those gloriously fat babies with huge dimpled thighs but she had the minimum mandated squoosh that babies owe us, and hands that made dimples when they clenched into tiny fists. I want to take her out of her onesie and set her loose in the diaper so that she will read like my baby again, and not this lanky, wild-headed hoyden spinning around the living room. “Come cuddle with Mama,” I say to her, and try to grab her as she rushes past, and hold my head to her head but she struggles free and says “NYO” and is off springing. I lie down on the carpet and wait for her orbit to bring her back to me. She runs over and laughs and starts slapping my face, hard, and pinching my cheeks with her little talons and I have to say “NO, HONEY” and grip her hands and she struggles and moans and I’ve ruined it all. I remember the guidance of BabyCenter about demonstrating the positive rather than censoring the negative or something like that and I say “Nice, nice, gentle, gentle,” and mime stroking my face with her hands firmly in mine. She smiles and begins to do it herself and I say “very nice, very gentle” but then she’s pulling my hair with all her might, and I yell at her and pry her fingers off hard and stand up and my head throbs with renewed vigor.

  “How about a snack,” I say, and she says “Tsseeeee” and we go to the fridge and I pull out a string cheese and unwrap it for her and then she’s off running with the cheese waving like a floppy baton in her mitt. We need to go for a walk, I think. For once I am dressed and ready at the moment I have the impulse to go and I decide that Honey can wear her pajamas and first walk, then ride on me and we will walk a good long way. But then the prospect of covering the somehow interminable stretch required to get out of Deakins Park is so unappealing that I think no, we will drive the car to another location and start the walk from there. But then we’ll have to get in the car and get out of the car and Honey will scream when I put her into the car seat and I can’t bear to hear her scream right now and I scrap this idea and so we find ourselves on the pavement of Deakins Park again, taking big long strides to try and get out and over the railroad tracks and onto the road to somewhere.

  Honey seems to have entered a stage where her only direction is forward, fast, and yet she lacks the coordination to really run. So she does a sort of swift headlong forward walk as though she is running against a great wind, her arms mostly staying at her side, her head and shoulders leading as she moves forward forward forward, falling frequently onto her hands and knees and moaning and holding up her hands for me to dust them off. She hates to have mess on her hands and she’s not sure how to dispatch the mess, but I’m here and I wipe off the gravel bits and dust and kiss her palm and she’s off moving forward again until we finally cross the railroad tracks and I scoop her up and put her in the Ergo which has been hanging off my back like a tattered cape.

  I decide we have to do a loop. I think like I think every time we leave the damn house that the thing that makes me really crazy about being up here is that it is so draining to walk a great distance and then you have to just turn around and do it over again, reliving the same monotonously grand landscape in the same high heat and hot buffeting winds, with the same curious effort of moving your body at high altitude, the same slap of your flat feet on hard asphalt under the pale empty blue, the same nowhere to go.

  “We need a horse,” I say to Honey, strapped to my front and sitting heavily. “Horse.” “Hone,” she says. “That’s right!” I say. She is lulled by the heat and silence and motion of my body and I wonder like I wonder every time whether it is harming her that I keep putting her in these long-walk situations where she has no verbal stimulation, just her mother, a big silent broody anchor that she is attached to like a barnacle. But it is hot hot hot and my head and my eyebrow throb and I turn us back around and finally we are home and it is 3:45 and I give her milk and put her into the crib to see if she will take another nap and she seems to be thinking about it and I go on the deck and smoke a cigarette and collapse.

  Cindy emerges onto her deck with a terrible look on her face and then she sees me and we say Hi.

  “What happened to you?” she says, “My god, your face is all busted up.”

  “Took a little tumble down the stairs,” I say breezily. “Nothing serious!” She shakes her head. “What’s new with you,” I ask. “Did you all howl at the moon?”

  “We went over to Manny’s.”

  “You don’t look too happy.”

  “They arrested Chad Burns over that eighty-six grand.” There are so many things about this I don’t understand that I just say, “Wow.” “He’s sitting in jail right now, they’re trying to humiliate him.” “That’s too bad,” I say.

  “It’s fucking criminal, is what it is,” Cindy says. She puts out her cigarette and moves inside the house purposefully, the conversation disappearing with our smoke in the hot still air.

  * * *

  “Can I ask how your husband died?”

  We are in the car with Alice, having navigated with reasonable success and minimal badness the end of the nap the dressing the loading into the car of Honey and the drive to the motel to collect her. She looks over at me with a peculiar expression and says, “He wrote a long letter, packed up his briefcase, took the bus over to the city courthouse, sat down in front, opened his briefcase, poured kerosene all over his flannel, and set himself on fire.”

  I am stunned and I swerve the Buick as I look over at her and then back at the road.

&
nbsp; “Jesus,” I say. “Was he … protesting Vietnam?”

  “No,” she says. “Then … why,” I ask, and she says, “No, I mean, no, what I said isn’t true.” I glance over at her again and then back at the road.

  “Okay.”

  “He just died,” she shrugs. “His heart gave out when he was a young man.”

  “That’s so sad,” I say, and immediately start misting up because there’s so much sorrow sloshing around the world. “But why the new version?”

  “He was so good, it seems sad to me that he didn’t go out in a blaze of glory. He just worked and fretted himself to death.” I can see her look over at me out of the corner of my eye. “He was a very special person.” I make a sort of bullshit sad smile where your mouth extends flat across your face.

  “Anyway, there’s no one left now who knew him or the girls. I can test out all kinds of wild stories.” I look over again and she has an owlish expression.

  “I could see that,” I say. “I know it’s not equivalent but that’s sort of how I feel in Paiute. Everyone’s dead or moved on and I don’t trust the people who stayed behind with the historical record.”

  “But I can’t do it,” she says, as though I hadn’t spoken. “The things that happened, happened.” I feel brave enough to ask what I have been wondering.

  “And your kids?”

  “Oh, they really died.” Okay. Honey blats in the back.

  To get to Antelope Meadows you drive out past the bird refuge out past the dump to the side of town where the rim rocks grow. Big brown rock formations shot through with pale and glimmering veins, they pop dramatically out of the flat earth here and there, sometimes a mantle of soil and grass draped along the top of them. I point at them to change the subject.

  “Rim rocks,” I say. “Pretty,” she says.

  “Somewhere around here there’s a set of them called Squaw Rocks”—I feel suddenly obligated to provide some kind of local representation and look around the horizon helplessly for the rocks in question, which I don’t think are actually anywhere close to here. “There’s a legend that the Pit River tribe came over and menaced the Paiute tribe—or maybe it was the Modocs, or maybe it was the other way around, the Paiutes menacing the Pit River—anyway the chief of the tribe that got menaced turned the opposing warriors into rocks as punishment.” Not only have I bungled the story like a horrible colonist but I am not even selling the bastardized version. But I liked the story because it’s sort of like Daphne and Apollo and the laurel tree, ostensibly without the rape, although I’d like to know why the rocks are “squaws.”

  “Hmm,” she says.

  I remember as we pass the first set of rim rocks that this is my favorite route out of town, but one you would only really take to get to Antelope Meadows since it doesn’t lead anywhere else I would want to go. I wish I hadn’t waited so long to drive out here when the trip could have eaten up just one of the blocks of time spent slapping my heels on the asphalt heading out of Deakins Park and sweating under the straps of the Ergo.

  I consider what Antelope Meadows will have on offer. The wine will be challenging but probably $5 or less. Beer will be Coors or Bud and Sierra Nevada if I’m lucky. I will have to make one count because I’m driving. The thought flits through my mind that I am thinking like a person with a Problem, a thought I dismiss, preferring not to add the challenge of achieving sobriety to the resolution of our immigration difficulties, the finessing of my job abandonment, the disposition of my mother’s household effects, the raising of Honey. Especially not with a lingering hangover and a black eye. I kindle a little flame of pleasure thinking about the food, such as it is, which like the Golden Spike is possessing a kind of awful majesty. I am fully intending to get the $21.99 prime rib dinner and damn the expense, and Honey can share this with me and eat the damp wrinkled foil-wrapped potato and reheated broccoli florets and crinkle-cut carrots that will accompany the slab of meat. The meat will have a lot of fat in it and they bring you a little dish of very hot horseradish if you ask for it and it makes my mouth water to think of it.

  The road that passes through the rim rocks is on an incline so slight you don’t feel it until you approach the turnout for Antelope Meadows and see a gentle valley spread out before you, the scattered houses of an ill-starred housing development that every year seems to recede further from the possibility of one day becoming a thriving community. There is, of all things, an overgrown airstrip in the vast basin, I have no idea why, maybe for the cattle gentry who were supposed to settle here and never did. Around all the structures plants and native grasses assert themselves, California fescue and Idaho fescue and a lot of other things I couldn’t name, soft and spiky and glinting silvery green in the late-afternoon light, covering the homes of mice and marmots whose holes and mounds are in evidence every few yards. Here and there Indian paintbrush glows red amid the green. In the spring Paiute is a riot of wildflowers, but now it’s more subdued.

  “Isn’t it beautiful,” I say to Alice, because it really is.

  “It reminds me of where I was born,” she says. “Our mountains are more impressive but your light is more interesting.” Like the Orientalists of yore I have a bad habit of categorizing, taxonomizing that I am trying to break myself of, to not say things like “That’s so Turkish,” etc., like someone after their first summer abroad. But now I feel a rare flash of possibly legitimate familiarity: women who have returned to the stony west for obscure personal reasons.

  We make the turn onto the long drive for the Antelope Meadows lodge, which is a wooden A-frame surrounded by some ratty log buildings. I feel a little thrill to see that there are cars in the parking lot. I look at Alice.

  “I’ll drop you off in front and park” and she says “I can walk across the darn parking lot” tartly. “I ran around after your baby all morning, didn’t I?” “Right,” I say, and park next to a behemoth pickup. Honey, who had fallen into her traveler’s meditative state, immediately starts clamoring to be released from her car seat. Alice struggles with the button of her seat belt but I don’t help her. I get out and get Honey out. I heft her up onto my shoulders and she laughs and shrieks and we monitor Alice as she steps effortfully out of the car. When she’s on her feet she straightens her skirt and adjusts her carriage, her shoulders just brushed by her dense and immaculate blunt-cut hair.

  She sees me staring at her and says, “What,” sourly.

  “Your hair is so beautiful,” I say to her without thinking.

  “Well, thank you,” she says. “It was always my pride and joy,” she says, and begins walking slowly around the car.

  As we approach the door to the lodge I glance at the assortment of bumper stickers in the parking lot. “Save a tree. Wipe your ass with a spotted owl,” says one. “Muzzle Pelosi,” says another, with a photo of the U.S. congresswoman in a Hannibal Lecter mask. They both have the State of Jefferson sticker with the flag with its stupid two crosses denoting being “double-crossed” by the Government according to the last Chronicle article I read. Whatever generosity of spirit the golden light and fragrant air have stirred in my breast snuffs out and I feel myself droop, looking ahead to a meal with a grumpy old woman in a room full of hostile good ole boys.

  I hold the wooden door for Alice and stoop to bring Honey down off my shoulders, and discover that she has taken hold of a fistful of my hair. “Ow ow ow,” I say and try to extricate it from below while holding the door open with my hip. Honey grunts as she yanks and Alice says to her, “OH miss! You had better let go of your mommy’s hair,” and pinches the top of her thigh with a gnarled hand and Honey lets go and is first silent in shock and then puts her hand theatrically on her thigh and cries out and I set her down on the floor and pick her back up. I think Alice ought not to pinch my baby but that’s an awkward conversation to have.

  The interior of the Antelope Meadows lodge has an air of abandonment notwithstanding the cars out front. There is a bulletin board with laminated informational sheets about the vari
ety of floor plans available for anyone who might still wish to purchase a plot in the development. There is a separate bulletin board for current residents, with yellowing cautionary notices about water scarcity and bears. A few dusty animal heads gaze out from above a cold fireplace. To the left of the main room is the bar/lounge with pool table and a sour smell that extends faintly to the lobby and to the right is the restaurant. I lead Alice to the hostess stand where there is a pretty peaches-and-cream-complected youngish woman in a T-shirt and ponytail with a rose tattoo peeking up near her collarbone. “Two adults and a baby,” I say, and she looks questioningly at me.

  “I know I recognize you,” she says, “but I’m trying to think from where.”

  “My grandparents used to live here,” I say. “Frank and Cora Burdock, over in Deakins Park.” Her face lights up.

  “We used to ride bikes!” she says. “My folks lived behind them on the other side of the circle for a few years.” “Kimmy?” I say after a moment of silence, remembering being five, seven, eight, eleven on home leave, and riding bikes with a moon-faced, smiling girl around and around the park.

  “I remember,” I say, marveling at how completely that tie had been severed over years of sporadic visits. I don’t know her last name; we aren’t Facebook friends. We ceased to exist to each other when we were teenagers and I’m surprised by how clearly her child’s face returns to me now. We hug around Honey and I say “Can you say hello to Kimmy” and she squirms against me. “This is Honey,” I say.

  “My goodness, how beautiful,” she says to the baby. “What is she, year and a half?”

  “Just about,” I say. I always feel impressed by how easily other women can do this. I don’t think I have any idea how old babies are from looking at them yet.

  “I’ve got three,” she says. “My oldest is twelve if you can believe it.” We are the same age or thereabouts, thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty-three. “Amazing,” I say, feeling truly amazed.

  “I know, I’m crazy! But we have a lot of fun.” She laughs. “I married a local boy, we live out over on the road to Rigby” and motions east. “I’m just helping out my sister tonight, so this is a real coincidence!” I shift Honey to my other hip and smile broadly wondering what I should say. She saves me the trouble. “My folks are down in Chico now.” “Great,” I say.