The Golden State: A Novel Page 16

  “She’s a beautiful little girl,” Alice says and I say “thank you” rather than make a thing about it. I inspect the menu, a massive laminated sheet covered with smears of ancient salsa, and select a combo platter with one soft one crispy taco one enchilada rice beans sour cream and guac and I think this is just what we need to get back on our feet and I’m feeling good about what’s happening, Honey is chewing a chip she has fumbled from the red plastic basket before us and Alice is looking at me not unkindly and the window is open and the light is yellow and warm inside and growing purple outside.

  I catch the teen’s eye and I ask for the platter and a Dos Equis. “Thank you for letting us join you,” I tell Alice. “We were getting a little anxious for company.” “I know how that is,” she says. “We just went to a really weird thing,” I decide to say because I feel preoccupied by it again. “They are voting right now on whether the county should secede from California.” She raises an eyebrow. “Why would they want to do that?” “They think the cities run everything and don’t understand them,” I say. “And they are right-wing ‘live-free-or-die’ types.”

  “It’s a strange part of the country,” she says. “My husband always talked about it, long after he was up here.”

  “And your husband is no longer with us, you mentioned.” Why do I talk like this? There is no euphemism I won’t use.

  “Gone almost fifty years,” she says.

  “Wow,” I say, because what else are you going to say.

  At this moment Honey catches sight of her own reflection in the glass and says “Baby!” with friendly recognition. I have never heard her say this word and I am overjoyed. “Yes, you’re a baby!! That’s a baby! She’s never said that word before,” I say to Alice. “Really any words for that matter. I was starting to worry that she wasn’t going to talk.”

  “I remember that,” she says.

  “Was it the same with your kids?” I ask her, relieved that she has brought them up, I’m always scared to ask about people’s children. And she says “Well, they died young,” which is exactly why I usually don’t fucking ask.

  “I’m so sorry to hear that,” another platitude thrown futilely down a deep well.

  “Well, it was a long time ago. Almost twenty years for the third one.”

  “Three,” I can’t keep myself from saying. She sort of laughs, a sound like leaves scattering across an abandoned basketball court. She holds knife and fork in knotted hands, poised above beans smothered in oily cheese. “It does seem like a lot for one person, doesn’t it.”

  Normally I am Miss Questions, I mean this is where I shine. The worst thing about modern society is that people don’t understand that conversations need to be stoked by both parties to keep going. I usually try to stoke hard enough for everyone, but there is always a moment when I suddenly feel the effort, when I’m consumed with anxiety that it’s just not going to Go, that the conversation is going to founder and it’s going to have been my fault for letting it die. It feels like a grotesque wrong to let a conversation fade away into nothing. But there are no questions that feel right to ask Alice after this, and I feel suddenly so low so tired so fed up that my spine telescopes down a little farther into the seat and my shoulders sag and I actually put my elbow up on the table and prop my head in my hand. It’s not only the bad news that Alice has delivered about her own circumstances, which I haven’t really begun to index—were the children sick did someone take them did someone hit them with a car—but just the weight of the day, the weight of duties and time that suggests itself periodically since I had Honey, first I will cut up the enchilada I will be polite with this old woman with her unimaginable bereavement I will wipe Honey’s hands we will pay the bill I will put Honey into her stroller and we will leave the bereaved one and walk all the way back to Deakins Park and probably Honey should have a bath and definitely she must brush her teeth even though she hates hates hates it and then we will have milk and story and crib and it’s an hour away at least and then night and then the day begins and we do everything over again, and somewhere in there I will have to make decisions earn us money find my husband and at the same time absorb that this woman’s three children are all dead, and Ellery Simpson is dead and countless children all over the world I’ll never know about are dead.

  I hear the soft prangs of Alice’s silverware on Reynaldo’s scratched-up old platter.

  The thing came along that breathes some life into you and I have lifted my head off my hand and smiled at her. She looks at me a little owlishly, but kindly.

  “It’s so funny to meet you here,” I say to her. “Since my husband’s from Turkey and everything.” “It is a strange coincidence,” says Alice. The teen brings our food and Honey begins rhythmically banging her fork on the edge of the plate. “No, please, Honey, we don’t bang,” I say to her. She reaches her hand out toward my beans. Our beans. I spoon them onto her small plate.

  “I loved going to Turkey,” she says. “I always loved going places. That’s why I joined the navy.” “The navy!” I say. “I thought your husband was a pacifist.” She smiles. “Well, he still served. He worked harder than I did, manual labor type things. They put them in Roosevelt’s old camps, from the what’s-it-called, the Conservation Corps. And anyway,” she says, “I didn’t do it for patriotic purposes. I just wanted to get out of town, and there was the navy saying it would take a woman and put her at a desk for a decent salary.”

  “My grandmother was in the navy too,” I say. “It was the first time she ever left the state.” She keeps talking like she doesn’t see me.

  “I know that young people now are used to living all over the place but it wasn’t the sort of thing my parents did or their friends or anyone they knew did. I don’t suppose anyone dies in the town they were born anymore but that was the idea back then.”

  She puts a forkful of rice into her mouth with the gnarled hand. I try to picture her behind the wheel of a car.

  She looks at Honey eating her beans.

  “Good eater,” Alice observes. “Yes, thank god,” I say. “She gets it from me.”

  “Well, you’re still pretty trim, at least,” Alice says. “You should get rid of that baby weight before it settles in, though.”

  I am stunned by this remark but it’s also so oddly familiar. It’s not just Hugo; women are birds of prey. I mean you are sitting minding your own business and then they descend on you from a clear blue sky with their talons out. I pray I won’t do this with Honey, please god don’t let me do this. In Turkey it’s considered fine to note if someone has gained weight but since all the women I know there are svelte and gorgeous the custom does not feel like a toothless observation. And observation is violence, anyway, as any Orientalist knows.

  “It’s true, Alice. I’ve got some weight hanging around,” I say a little more drily than I intend. I spoon beans into Honey’s mouth, Honey the good eater, may it never bring her extra weight.

  The girl brings the check and Alice reaches for it while I’m gathering up a spoonful of beans for Honey. “Let me,” I say when I notice and she shakes her head with authority. “You can’t take it with you,” she tells me, and rummages in a serviceable black leather purse with a single strap.

  “You know, I’m sorry I said that,” she says next.

  “It’s all right,” I tell her.

  I think bizarrely that it might be nice to say hello to Cindy over the deck, we can have a cigarette and be soft around the middle together, despite the events of the supervisors’ meeting and her ideological shortcomings.

  I am wiping up smeared beans from the table with a napkin and Alice reaches out and puts a dry hand on mine. “Really, I’m sorry,” she says. “You and Honey remind me a little of being around my own girls again.”

  “What happened to them,” I say.

  “They were all born sick. Two died in childhood and the third one died later,” she says. “Oh god,” I say and she just says, “Yes.”

  She shrugs. “A doct
or told me later it’s a one-in-a-billion chance that two people with that set of genes would meet and have children. And those children have a twenty-five percent chance of being born with the gene. But if they do, they don’t have a chance. Unfortunately we didn’t know that. And he was the only man I ever wanted to be with.”

  Honey is turning her body into a board straining against the back of the high chair starting to yell and I lift her out. I try to think of what else there is to say but she says “You go on. Get that little one to bed.”

  “Will you be at Sal’s tomorrow?” I ask her.

  “Inshallah,” she says. I laugh. Engin absolutely hates it when I say this but it’s like the first thing that foreigners learn in Turkey and it covers such a multitude of scenarios.

  “Inshallah,” I say. “Well, God willing Honey and I will be there around ten-thirty.”

  I wheel Honey out and up Main Street. I am thinking about how you could have three babies and all of them die and my brain worries the thought a little like a dog with something between its teeth and I have the thought I always have first that there must be something extenuating something that makes it less sad what thing she could have done that made her deserve it what thing could they have done what way could they have died that would make this situation acceptable, but there’s never anything like this and I wonder if that’s the source of all the world’s sorrows, that everyone assumes everyone else did something to deserve it because otherwise the things that happen to people are just too horrible to bear.

  But now I’m selfishly mercifully distracted because the air has that indescribably wonderful summer feeling that used to make me feel like I could go anywhere, do anything, have sex with anyone. The thing I miss most about a city is the feeling that something is always happening, a festivity at all times, a restaurant with people eating, a place to hear music, even if I’m not doing any of those things, maybe I could be. But now that I have Honey the possibility is functionally zero and when she is old enough to be left alone for days at a time assuming I could ever find someone I would trust to watch her for days at a time I will be too old to go to a rave meet someone at a bar look really good have sex with a stranger, not to mention that I am married.

  But on balance I have been so lucky, not only did I once meet an objectively beautiful man at a bar in a beautiful city but I married him and he gave me a beautiful child who will speak two languages, maybe more. And maybe one day when his papers are sorted and our finances are more in hand I will go and do yoga lose the weight around my middle and get a good haircut buy some nice makeup have someone put it on me buy a good dress and Engin will think Aman what a beautiful woman I married even if she is a neurotic woman from a benighted country.

  Thinking about Engin gives me the customary pang of guilt that I am not speaking Turkish to Honey; not speaking Turkish at all. She’s got those dazed half-open eyes she gets when she’s rolling in the stroller and she’s had hardly any nap today and I think it’s a good time to try and let her take in her father’s tongue. “Honey my love,” I say to her in Turkish. “Your mama is going to speak to you in Turkish a little.” She cranes her head back to look at me.

  “Since your daddy is a Turk he speaks Turkish,” I say to her. “Your mama is American but I am speaking Turkish. She speaks Turkish rather.

  “In Istanbul live your grandmother and your paternal aunt and your uncle. In Izmir lives your paternal grandfather.” I hope I have these right, there are parent-specific names for relatives which seems excessive although I guess in English we spend a lot of time saying “My mother’s sister,” etc.

  “In the summer we will go with Daddy to visit your paternal grandfather and we will sit on the pier and have Coke and pumpkin seeds. Won’t it be nice?” I say.

  “Your paternal grandmother in Istanbul misses you very much. She wants us to come visit her. When we go your daddy will take you to get a fish sandwich and to see Miniatürk.”

  I am floundering. The distance between myself pushing a stroller along the side of the road in Paiute County and Ayşe and Mini Turk World feels apocalyptic.

  “Your daddy loves you very much,” I tell Honey, and then in English for emphasis.

  “And your daddy loves cats very much. He likes to draw and cook and he makes delicious salami and cheese sandwiches. When you were in my womb”—gross but I love that word, rahim, must be Arabic, no vowel harmony. I pause to think if there’s a more modern word than this, and then realize that’s a problematic way to think about it, latent anti-Arab prejudice rising forth, rahim it is—“I ate one almost every single day.” We cross the railroad tracks with a bump.

  “He loves to watch movies and when we watch them…” I stop here to parse the grammar because in Turkish you have to know what you are going to say before you start speaking, since the end comes first, or what is the end in English anyway. I think about trying to explain this to Honey but feel exhausted. “… when we watch them if I get either scared or bored and look at my phone he gets mad.” It takes me nearly two minutes to get this out. I can’t believe that something once so relatively easy is deserting me now.

  I wonder if Engin is bored when he talks to me. Learning Turkish is no less than what’s expected if you are for example a Chechen and you immigrate to Turkey but it’s a bonus if you are American, Americans having managed to forge a dual impression worldwide of hopeless stupidity and national superiority that exempts them from learning other languages. Turks are also convinced that Turkish is an impossible language to learn, although English is the one that has no inherent logic and is all irregular verbs and phantom letters and bizarre plurals. Engin doesn’t ever talk to me in particularly complex English sentences and that doesn’t bother me so hopefully the reverse is true too.

  Before he was deported Engin developed a rapport with the elderly Chinese women who come by our house on Monday evenings to collect the cans from our recycling and who speak significantly less English than he does. One of the ladies gets on my nerves because once I was walking into the house with Honey in my arms and she indicated via hand signs that I needed to go inside and get the cans and I said “I’m sorry I’ve got my hands full” and she said “No English” and I thought For fuck’s sake and went inside saying “sorry” and then felt bad and barricaded Honey in her bouncer and went outside with the cans and she was gone and I felt worse. Engin would set cans and bottles into a separate bag and put them by the large can well in advance of the appointed hour and would sometimes be outside smoking a cigarette puttering with the succulents when they came by and they would exchange greetings. Once I looked out the window and he was exuberantly trying to shake the hand of the one that I let down. “My auntie,” he said when he came inside.

  I have trailed off in my Turkish conversation time with Honey while I remember this and now we are at the gate of the house and I wheel her up and rush through all the things that were prophesied at Reynaldo’s, diaper jammies milk story teeth bed and it takes forty-five minutes and she lies down like a good girl as though she’s been yearning for her bed and finally at the end I am on the deck with my drink and my cigarette and it feels almost as good as a bar.

  I am halfway through my cigarette looking up at the stars and down at my phone and sending Engin a loving WhatsApp message and feeling virtuous for not having spent hours scrolling through BabyCenter even though it’s only the Wi-Fi situation that has prevented me from doing so and not any abstemiousness on my part. I hear the sound of an engine in the distance and it grows louder and closer until a truck materializes in front of Cindy’s house and discharges Cindy and Ed. It seems decades since we were together in the courthouse.

  “How did it go,” I call to her as they make their way up the cement walk next door. “We did it!” she says with un-Cindy-like enthusiasm, something like glee. “Five to one in favor.”

  I feel big and full of love to spread around so I say “My goodness!” with a faint sense of secondhand victory on her behalf until I absorb the import
of this, one small step gained for a crypto-racist dream of separateness and economic independence for what is probably the poorest county in the state and the largest per capita user of social services. At what point does neighborliness become capitulation cowardice etc. Too late. “Congratulations, I guess,” I say to them. “I’d, um, be sad if California split up, though, personally.” Cindy shrugs and Ed nods sort of sympathetically. “Well, we don’t know what’s going to happen,” Cindy says, and they go in the house and then five minutes later they are out again. “We’re heading down to the Golden Spike if you want to come,” Ed says, I daresay almost hopefully, or maybe I’m imagining it, and I point to the house and say, “Got the baby.” “Okay then. Have a good night.” “Good night, good night.”

  I know that I have to be careful vis-à-vis my water intake relative to my screwdriver intake and I go inside and have two glasses of the airless mineral-tasting water that comes out of the tap. I get the Diamond ice cream out of the freezer and the Hershey’s out of the cupboard and I fix a huge bowl, making dense scribbles of syrup across the ice cream’s uncanny yellow. I carry it back outside and eat it while watching the videos of Honey from daycare on my WeChat app. I have videos on this app from her first weeks at daycare after Engin left for his course, when she was eight months old and at the peak of babyness and they are precious precious precious but I cannot figure out how to get them out of the phone and onto the computer where I might feel more assured that they will last and I spend a lot of time worrying about this. In the first one she is wearing a onesie I bought her at the consignment store that is covered with tiny planes trains and automobiles. “You are going to be a baby who goes places,” I told her, when we put her in it for her first day, although her dad is the one who was going places and so far she has mostly stayed right where she was born. In the videos Honey is wearing the onesie and sitting on a play rug next to another baby of about the same size. “Baby Bianca!” I say aloud as that is the baby’s name and now like Honey she is a rangy almost-toddler, with a little ponytail of black hair sticking up in a plume from her head. She speaks Chinese with her mom and maybe one day with Honey, I hope. Honey has a beatific smile on her face. The video is a fourteen-second loop and I play it over and over again while tears run down my face.