The Golden State: A Novel

by Lydia Kiesling

  I finish my cigarette and look at the e-mails. I hear a reedy sound through the window adjacent. “That’s poison, you know.” It is the voice of Alice, presumably talking about my cigarette.

  “I know,” I say. “I’m quitting when we get back.” Her window slides shut.

  I write to Hugo awkwardly with thumbs, the cigarette perched on the bench beside me. “Dear Hugo,” I say. “Once again, I am sorry for the delay. The key box is in the bottom drawer of the reception desk—Meredith at one point knew this; perhaps she’s forgotten. My grandmother has passed away; I am settling some things at her home and I will be back in the office next week.” I cc Meredith and Karen and send the message and hope that it will be good enough. I write to Meredith. “Dear Meredith, I have written to Hugo and cc’d you. I am so sorry for the trouble I have caused. For your exception you will need to have Karen write a letter from you to the Acting Vice Provost explaining why the extraordinary expenditure was necessary, and then he will need to sign off.” I feel like I’ve dispatched these two items well, but I can’t ignore the electronic evidence of all the things I’m really supposed to do. There is an e-mail from our friendly local Gülenist organization with which we have agreed to plan an interfaith Iftar dinner and from which Hugo is always encouraging me to “raise money” although their office is absolutely threadbare and the manager applies for every job the University posts which indicates it may not be a likely avenue for fundraising. There are the reminder e-mails from the federal entity that grants part of our funding reminding that it is one month until our quarterly compliance report is due, a task that takes approximately one month of agony to dispatch correctly. I try to remind myself that I have successfully dispatched them in the past many times and that nothing will stop me from doing so again. I smoke another cigarette and try to think calmly about my calendars and spreadsheets and efficiency tools back in the office but for some reason they fail to calm me and then I go back inside the motel and illuminate our room with the screen of the phone to set the alarm.

  I pet Honey’s head—she is stretched out abandoned to sleep with her head squished up against the netting of the Pack ’n Play. I see for just one instant how long she is compared to the last time I was able to look at her with that rare flash of objectivity. Before she died my mother told me when she looked at me she saw me at every age I had ever been which makes me cry every time I think of it. When I tried to tell Engin I choked so hard I had to go in another room until I could come back and get out the sentence. I thought that this all-ages panoramic vision was something everyone got with motherhood, some new way of seeing. But whenever I look at Honey she is the age she is at this moment and I strain and strain to see her perfect tiny baby head the first time she crawled the first step she took and the only thing I can see are the photos we took, photos which unbeknownst to us at the time of taking them would obliterate all other records. I wonder whether I have stunted my memories of my child with the very tool I used to capture her various epochs, or if women who didn’t have cameras were left with nothing but the child they had at that moment, whatever age she happened to be. If in the absence of a camera the only way to recall the memory of holding your sweet baby was to have another, grasping at something by its nature out of reach and aging and exhausting yourself in the process by suddenly having a whole herd of them to look after, any number of which could still then die or find some other way to break your heart. I think about having another baby and feel the thrill of longing and dread, although more longing since it is the idlest of fancies, since there is no one here to impregnate me. I lie in the motel bed and concentrate very hard on Honey as a baby. I remember sitting on the bed, I am holding the small baby, I try to enter the memory and look down and see her in my arms, to be with my baby again.

  DAY 9     The next thing that happens is the sound of the alarm and the squawk of Honey who is exactly the age she is and no younger. I sit up and see her standing looking gleefully over the railing of the Pack ’n Play her curls twisted up in a peak above her high forehead. “Good morning, Miss Critter,” I say to her, and she beams at me. I crawl to the foot of the bed and reach into the Pack ’n Play and drag her up on the bed with me and lie back and she lies on me and puts her head under my chin and I am thinking Keep this moment, let’s keep this one and while I am trying to fossilize the moment or X-ray it or photocopy it or do something that will make it stay with me forever she is squirming thrashing rolling and she is off the bed, she is on the move and suddenly I have what I think may be my most important epiphany about motherhood which is that your child is not your property and motherhood is not a house you live in but a warren of beautiful rooms, something like Topkapı, something like the Alhambra on a winter morning, some well-trod but magnificent place you’re only allowed to sit in for a minute and snap a photo before you are ushered out and you’ll never remember every individual jewel of a room but if you’re lucky you go through another and another and another and another until they finally turn out the lights. I pack up our things and consider this while Honey uses the cord to pull the telephone off the nightstand onto her toes.

  Alice is standing outside the door when I open it and she says “I was wondering when you’d wake up” and it is only 7:05 and I start feeling annoyed right off the bat but say “Good morning, Alice, I hope you slept well.” I leave Honey in her care to get her bag and ours and haul them down the corridor to the lobby where I confer with the attendant who is a young man with flaming red hair about breakfast. The Wagon Wheel does not offer a breakfast. I leave our bags and things and trundle back down the hall and say “There’s no breakfast, we can snack with our leftover picnic things or the manager says we can go to the Black Bear diner or we can go to the Safeway,” and she says, “You just feed her—I want to get on the road” and I say “Ten-four” and dig out a banana and peel it and give a piece of it to Honey along with a verbal contract for a string cheese when she’s finished. I ask Alice to wait with her and haul everything to the car but when I walk away Honey cries and toddles after me and I say “Wait with Alice” and she cries louder and I say okay and heft her up and take what bags I can with the remaining arm and we make for the car. The attendant trots out from behind the desk and grabs the Pack ’n Play and I feel so indebted so grateful so helpless so guilty and I hate this feeling but I just say thank you.

  We hit the road. It’s two hours to the camp and I try to suss out the plan on the way there, because I realize we still have no plan.

  “Is there a museum or visitor center or something we can go to?” I ask and Alice says “No” and she sounds irritable and I say “Sounds good” and think about what I am going to do, then, because now that we are away from Altavista I know with great certainty that we can’t go back, we can’t go back to the mobile home, we can’t go back to the High Winds Market. We have to go Elsewhere. Alice doesn’t make a peep and Honey doesn’t make a peep and I’m thinking why did I sign on to chauffer this person around who I don’t even know, etc. But I’m bored and I’ve had so little conversation in the last week, the last eight months, that I decide to make some.

  “Can you tell me about this camp thing? I don’t know about it.” She turns from gazing out the window and faces ahead. “During World War Two they let conscientious objectors do public works instead of putting them in jail or making them take office jobs in the army. But they gave ’em awful jobs, working in mental institutions and doing heavy labor, like where we’re going. He liked it, though, the harder the better.”

  “Was this the thing where they sent Depression guys to plant trees?” and she raises her eyebrows at me. “No, that was before, but they used the same camps. The ‘Depression guys.’ Huh. What do they teach young people? It was three million people,” she says. “It’s why you have all these nice parks and the country didn’t just blow away with the dust storms.” She frowns. “It was segregated, though. So my husband disapproved. But the CO camps weren’t.”

  “You said you came
out here to see him?” and out of the corner of my eye I see her nod. “When I got out of the service,” she says. “We had been writing letters. I met him in school. Quaker college. I joined up halfway through school, after he left, but I was only in for a year. I came and visited him and then I went back to school. We waited for each other.”

  I don’t know whether she means sex or just generally waiting. “How long were you apart.” “A couple years, all told,” she says. “And now fifty years.” I look over at her.

  We are taking the shorter route rather than the truly scenic one that would have wound around the big mountain and covered more California ground than Oregon. We pass farmland, pine forests, little tiny towns: population 54, 240, 300, 76. It’s good to have that feeling again of the endless west rather than the circumscribed plain of Altavista and the unrelieved sagebrush and juniper scrub. We are beginning to leave the monotony of the high desert and there are green hills like dells I think they are called, and the trees are different and when I press the switch to roll down the window I can feel the influence of the sea in the air just the slightest bit. This feels like Humboldt land, Del Norte land, the trees are taller, the air is wetter. Honey blats in the back and I crane my neck and catch her eye in the rearview and say “Hullo baby” and she kicks and grins at me and pants and doesn’t look the slightest bit ruffled. The sky, which has been foreboding since our picnic yesterday, is dark and ponderous to the west.

  “Looks a little unpleasant toward the camp, weather-wise,” I say.

  “I brought my umbrella,” Alice says looking ahead.

  We haven’t been driving for very long when she starts speaking extempore.

  “I keep thinking about that trip to Turkey, the one you made me remember.” I glance over at her and make a sound for her to go on.

  “We took a train all the way to the east part of the country, Diyarbakır it was called.” Diyarbakır where Ellery died, my mnemonic device until the end of time. “It was such a boring train ride—very long unbroken expanses of countryside.” She laughs. “I remember that’s what he said to me, ‘My goodness, this is a rather unbroken expanse of countryside,’ and then he flashed me a little look and suggested we pass the time by kissing and I said all right so we set about kissing, and it made a tremendous scandal. There was a lot of tsking from the ladies around us.” She laughs and her voice is rusty in her throat. “I was always such a prim young woman, I can’t believe now that I did it.” I’m honestly stunned by this story. “I’m amazed someone didn’t attack you. In 1960!” It’s hard to picture this woman behaving like a drunk Brit on a beach package tour, rolling around in the sand while the aunties and uncles cluck their tongues with scorn.

  She looks out the window again. “I remember when I first met him I thought he was nice looking. Someone introduced us at a potluck and I remember the feeling of waiting to be introduced, as though we were in a play. I liked the shape of his hands.” She smiles again.

  And now she is quiet and I wait to see if she will start again but she doesn’t. Her eyes are open. “The girl who died,” I say. “She was in Diyarbakır. I’ve never been there. I keep trying to picture what it was like.”

  “You should be thankful that you don’t have that in your mind’s eye.”

  “It seems like the least I can do, to sort of witness, I guess.”

  “You suffering won’t ease anyone else’s suffering,” she says drily and then she doesn’t say anything else and I don’t either.

  The drive is much longer than I thought and after a very long stretch of silence during which Honey is mostly sitting glassy-eyed we finally pass the sign for the camp, a regular state highway sign as you’d see for a town, and I make the turn. We travel a nicely maintained dirt road for ten minutes and then we turn onto a very bad dirt road and I have a pang like what if I can’t get the car back up what if we slide off the road and then we come to a small clearing in the trees with a ramshackle cabin and a very faded interpretive sign. “I think … this must be it.”

  I pull the car over near the sign and cut the engine and Honey is immediately squirming squelchily and cooing to be let free of her seat. There are no other cars to be seen. I can’t tell what kind of land we’re on. It doesn’t seem to be parkland but there were no Private or No Trespassing signs, but it also lacks the assiduously nicely kept signage of a national forest or state park or county forest or state point of interest or whatever they call the lesser administrative entities. I unbuckle and get out of the car and stretch and peer into the back seat where Honey is trying very hard to wake up and has a look on her face like it’s the worst thing she’s ever done. I leave my door open and walk over to the cabin, which is flaked and cobwebbed with a padlock on the door. I walk to the interpretive panel which is peeling up at the corner and faded all to hell, a mottled beige surface crisscrossed with scratches. I can make out “many original structures are no longer extant,” and I trot to the car to report back. She says, “I expected as much.” Unease is gathering in the trees and the gray clouds above. Honey cries in the back seat. “Hi buddy,” I poke my head in and say. “You just sit tight.” “This isn’t the camp,” Alice says. “It was down a hill,” and motions at the dirt road ahead and I marvel at her memory. She smooths her hair behind her ear and I’m stuck for a moment admiring the elegance of the gesture. “Okay,” I say. “Here we go.”

  I start the Buick and edge its nose down the road, which declines down past the cabin and is furrowed and rutted but dry. The shocks of the car absorb the bumps beautifully but I’m perturbed by how much the hood rises and falls with the changes in terrain. “Bumpy,” I say. I look at Honey in the rearview mirror. “Bumpy,” I say in a singsong for her benefit. It takes us a long time to wind our way down this dirt road, guessing on some unmarked forks, always choosing down, down, down. We inch our way down for probably twenty minutes, trees crowding us on either side, and then we are in a large clearing—a small valley, with tree-covered hills gallumphing up on all sides. Some collapsed wooden structures dot the clearing. I drive out into the middle of the field. “Wow,” I say. “Looks like this is it.”

  “Yes,” says Alice. She looks at me. “This is it.” She looks sad. “Now I’d like to get out and have some time by myself.”

  “Sure thing,” I say. “We’ll just hang back by the car and have a snack.”

  “No,” she shakes her head vigorously, hands in her lap. “I want to be alone. I don’t want anyone hovering around.” Shit.

  “Alice, I’m sorry, there could be all kinds of holes and uneven ground and I just don’t think you should be walking around here by yourself.” She looks at me and puts her hand on my hand, which is still on the steering wheel.

  “Please,” she says. “Go find us a motel and check in and then come back for me. I want to be alone. I won’t be foolhardy. I promise. Give me two hours.” She gives my hand a little squeeze. I agonize for a second. “Okay,” I say, hearing Yarrow’s worried voice on the phone. “But first I’m going to get out and do a lap and make sure there aren’t any big holes or snakes or anything. You’re going to let me do that.” I try to sound commanding. She nods. “And you’re going to let me pull some food together for you to keep in a dry spot. And you’re going to let me drive you over to the buildings.” “Sure,” she says. I go around to the trunk and get Honey a cheese out of the cooler and I collect the other leftover picnic materials crackers and cold cuts and put them into a couple of gallon Ziplocs. I put these on top of the car and give Honey her string cheese and think about getting her out of the car but then consider what it will then be like to get her back into the car seat. She is whimpering and straining but the cheese pacifies her for the time being. “Tseeeeeeeee,” she says. “Tseeeee.” I start a slow jog toward the buildings and am encouraged that the ground beneath the ankle-high grasses is dry and reasonably flat. I feel my lungs scratching and protesting and my ancient sports bra riding up over the underside of my breasts and I slow to a brisk walk. One of the lon
g, low bunkhouse-looking buildings is a ruin, not burned, just collapsed in at one corner, splintered planks raised in mute supplication. Some of the buildings are in better shape, but all appear to be padlocked. I try to shake off my overwhelming recent feelings of helplessness and try to be the person I am at my job during my most successful efficient and results-getting. I have written a multimillion-dollar federal grant, I think to myself. “What are the things I need to assess this situation,” I say aloud, but I don’t know, I just don’t know what exactly is the right thing to do. Some kind of bird of prey caws hoarsely above and I think For god’s sake. I go to the edge of the clearing, a hundred yards or so from the nearest structure, and there are some huge worn stumps right before the forest starts in earnest and I find the flattest one, about the height of my thigh, tucked under an enormous pine, and I say, “Okay,” and I run back to the car and point out the stump to Alice. “This is where I’m going to put the food and everything,” I say. “Do you feel like you can walk that far from the buildings? I’m going to drive you right up to them.” She nods. “Sit tight a little longer” I tell her and she is sitting there as is Honey who is crying now and she laboriously twists her back to try and wave a crooked finger at her and get her to smile. I get the food, and one of Honey’s blankets, and the trunk flashlight for good measure and scurry back to the stump and lay them out. Back at the car Alice raises an eyebrow. “It looks like you’re getting ready for me to live under that tree.”