The Golden State: A Novel Read online

  “We always missed your grandparents so much,” she says kindly. “They were real good people.”

  “Thank you,” I say. “I miss them too.”

  “Your mom was in Sac…”

  “She’s gone now too,” I say, and she nods. “I heard that. I’m sorry. Are you up here to stay?” she asks, with seemingly genuine interest.

  “Just visiting, you know, showing Honey the place. We’ve been trying to sell the house but it’s just sitting there.”

  “Yeah, the market’s no good right now, unless you got a land parcel to go with it. Where are you living now?” She darts her eyes over my hand and then her gaze moves and lingers on my face and I remember suddenly my ghastly eyebrow and how it must look. I put my hand to it and say “Ugh, I know, it’s awful—I tripped last night and banged it on the front walk.” And she says “Yikes” and I answer her question and say “Down in San Francisco. My husband is Turkish—he’s over there now finishing school. We had some mix-ups with his green card that we’re trying to deal with.” I hate how much of a shady business this makes it sound like our marriage is, not to mention my fucked-up face and the fact that she probably thinks I married a foreign wife-beater even though this makes no sense because I just said he was back in Turkey and I feel irrationally angry at Kimmy and her local boy and three children.

  “I remember when we were kids you always lived somewhere over there … was it Greece?” “Yeah,” I say. “Good memory!” Alice shifts beside me and I realize how rude I’ve been. “Uh, I’m sorry, Kimmy, this is Alice, my friend” and Alice nods and Kimmy says “Pleasure” with a huge smile.

  “How long are you here? We should get together. My kids love little kids. And they’re homeschooled so we love getting together with other families.” I feel equal parts suspicion and guilt at the word “homeschooled” but I say “That sounds really good” and it actually sort of does. She’s so cheerful and nice. She picks up a pen to take my number and I consider giving her the number which is functionally useless but then I think that’s hostile and I say “My phone doesn’t work that well here, and we cut off the landline. Maybe we ought to just pick a time.”

  “Gotcha,” she says. She looks inside her mind with the look all women get as they tally their forthcoming obligations. “How about Tuesday lunch?”

  “Great,” I say weakly.

  “You want to just save my address on your phone? It’s out on County Road Twelve” and rattles off a number that I type into a draft text message. Honey is still resting limply against my body and I am feeling so fatigued from this interaction that I start rocking from one foot to the other in my impatience to exit.

  “Well, see you then,” I say. An elderly man in a trucker hat hobbles up to the hostess stand.

  “Well, let me get you seated,” she says, and she puts us in the corner by the huge window looking over the swing set and the lake and lugs over a high chair for Honey.

  “Can’t wait to catch up,” she says, and I say “Yes, yes” and she goes back to seat the old man. I get Honey in the high chair and Alice slowly eases herself into her chair.

  “You found a friend,” Alice says drily.

  “It’s so strange. I hardly remember anything from when I was a kid,” I say. “Like I deleted most of my memories somewhere along the line. But I remember her face.”

  “They always come back when you least expect it,” she says. “Prime rib, rib eye, T-bone, New York strip, lamb chops, pork chop,” she reads. “Not an easy place to be a vegetarian.”

  “Oh god, I’m sorry,” I say. “You didn’t say.” I scan the menu. “There’s, uh, a Caesar salad. French fries.”

  “Oh, I’m not a vegetarian anymore,” she says. “It’s too hard on the road. Especially here in cow country.”

  I am distracted by Kimmy walking back to the hostess stand. “Three kids,” I say absentmindedly. “I literally cannot imagine.”

  “Well, some people take to it better than others,” Alice says and I feel a little resentful at the implication.

  Honey takes a soft gold-wrapped square of butter from the bowl next to the basket of dense white bread and mashes it onto her salad plate. I’m suddenly aware of the lingering upset of my stomach and the pounding of my head. “What am I going to do,” I say to Alice helplessly.

  “Order your prime rib,” she says kindly.

  A teenage boy comes to wait on us and we order. I ask for the inevitable Sierra Nevada which I am suddenly desperate for and Alice asks for a glass of red wine.

  “So how much longer are you planning to be on the road,” I ask Alice, while Honey tears up her bread and stuffs it into her mouth.

  “Well, the map says it’s just a few more hours to the place I’m trying to get to.”

  She looks out the window. “I’ve been stalling. It hurts so much to drive honestly, I’m not sure what to do.”

  “And then you’re supposed to drive all the way back once you’ve gotten there?”

  “Something like that,” she says. Honey grabs a fistful of the polyester tablecloth and yanks, and I put both hands on the surface of the table to stabilize it and say, “We don’t do that,” while keeping one eye on Alice.

  “The last day before I got here I could hardly stand an hour in the car.” She looks at her little bird wrist and gnarled hands. I remember that I left my child unattended with a ninety-two-year-old woman all morning and the chorus unfit mother unfit mother resumes in my head. I pull Honey’s hand away from her mouth into which she is trying to stuff a piece of bread. “Slowly, please,” I say, and she pulls free and jams the bread in.

  “Ha,” Alice says drily.

  “What are you going to do, then?”

  The food arrives, the expected enormous slab of prime rib hanging off my plate, run through with stringy fat. Honey starts flapping her arms and saying “Heh heh eh eh” and lunges over to scrabble her fingers across the surface of the meat. “Wait just a minute please, Honey. Please be patient. Please do good listening,” etc. etc. I cut some little tiny pieces and put them onto her plate and she starts shoveling them into her mouth forming a meat wad and then spitting it out. A really uninspired salad is set down in front of Alice, cubes of cheese and kidney beans from the can on iceberg lettuce.

  “So really, how are you going to get back?”

  “Well,” she says. “Mark and Yarrow and I had talked about one of them flying out to drive me back. Or fly me back. Or some combination of things.” She rummages around in her leather purse and pulls out a burner cell phone.

  “I call them every day with this,” she says. “Tell them where I am and assure them I’m eating and taking my medicine.” She rolls her eyes.

  “Makes sense,” I say. She begins pulling little orange pill bottles out of the bag, and one of those Monday Tuesday Wednesday AM/PM pill boxes with flaps like my grandparents used to have.

  “Maybe you could help me, actually,” she says. “I wasn’t supposed to be gone this long and all the pills they set up for me in my box are gone. It’s a little difficult for me to open the bottles.”

  “Well sure,” I say, delighted to be useful to someone, and reach for one. Honey is very interested in anything that has other things inside it and she lunges for one of the bottles and shakes it vigorously before I wrestle it away. I squint to read the instructions.

  “This one says take with food,” I say.

  “Yes, yes.” She sounds irritable. “There are three that I need to take now.”

  “Okay,” I say, feeling some instinct of care and competence spring into action. I reach across Alice and take hold of the pills, briskly lining them up in front of me. “No,” I say preemptively to Honey, and deposit some bread and potato and broccoli and carrots next to the chewed gray wads of meat on her plate. When was the last time she ate a green vegetable, I think, my brain scans the calendar and it was broccoli sometime in the preceding week and that’s not so bad but obviously could be better, although she did have a sweet potato and that is
fibrous and nutritious at least. I read every label and isolate the meds Alice is supposed to take now into one group and the others in another, both out of the reach of Honey. She reaches both arms out in front of her and I make a move to stop her but she grasps with two sure hands my water glass, which I’d unthinkingly moved closer to her to make way for all the pills. She slowly brings the glass to her lips and slowly tilts it up until her lips meet the ice and water. She flips the glass up a little too swiftly and water sloshes out and fills her silicone bib. “Uh-oh! Uh-oh!” she says, looking at me with concern.

  “Good job!” I say to her. “What a good girl!!!!” I leave Honey to splash more water over her bib and return to the pill counting. I put three pills in front of Alice to take and carefully dole out the rest into her box.

  “All set,” I say, and look to the wet ruin of Honey’s outfit. Water pools around the pieces of prime rib on her plate. I tilt it back into my glass. Alice slowly pops pills into her mouth and swigs her wine. A wet spot creeps from under Honey’s plate.

  “So Mark and Yarrow,” I say. “Are they your relatives?” “No,” she says. “I don’t have relatives to speak of. I’ll probably leave my money and things to them. They already bought my house, I think I told you that. I live in a cottage on the property now. It’s sort of a commune. My husband and I wanted it to be that kind of place, when we bought it. But he never got to live in it.”

  Honey starts pulling at her wet seat and caterwauling. I shhhh her and get her bag from under the chair and pull out a pair of baby pants, congratulating myself on having the foresight to bring a change of clothes. I reach over and pull her out of the high chair and onto my lap, and hold her legs together to keep her from kicking. I take up the patter of talk that I’ve convinced myself works to soothe her. “Don’t worry big girl we’re just going to put some new pants on, we don’t want to be a cold wet baby sh sh sh” and I tug the pants off over her shoes and wiggle the new pants onto her, wipe up the damp on her high chair with my totally nonabsorbent green napkin and set her back in place. Alice is chewing meditatively on a piece of the airy nothing bread.

  The hum of conversation in the dining room is broken by big guffaws, and I look behind to see two enormous red-faced white men, not fat, just huge like tree trunks, in matching camouflage hats, their heads thrown back, forks gripped in big fists. Nancy Pelosi and Spotted Owl, I think to myself, perhaps unjustly. Honey looks too and one of them sees her and lights up and starts waving and then peekabooing behind his paws, and she looks up through her eyelashes and puts her chin to her shoulder and I roll my eyes.

  “How do they learn this,” I say to Alice, who looks confused. “She’s so flirtatious with strangers.” I point to the baby. “I just wonder where that comes from.”

  “Mine were like that, the twins at least, until they got sick. Before the little one got sick too she needed attention so bad she didn’t flirt so much as throw herself on people.”

  “When did they get sick,” I venture.

  “They were a little older than Honey.” I want so much to ask what it was how did they get it what were the symptoms and I notice I’ve put my hand on Honey’s curls without realizing. I hadn’t even considered that she might already have an illness that will kill her.

  “Sorry,” she says. “I don’t mean to scare you.”

  “That’s okay,” I say. “I think about bad things happening to her all the time.” Honey is looking over her shoulder at the big men. “I mean I spend a lot of time trying to be prepared for something awful to happen.” She shakes her head. “You can’t prepare.”

  “I know,” I say. “But I still try. Hedging, I guess.”

  “You can’t prepare for seeing your children wasting away. Or when they’re gone, but you’re still their mother, with all that love and nothing to use it on.” Her nose wrinkles and my mustard fog immediately gathers behind my eyes.

  “I’m so, so sorry,” I say, pointlessly. I want to do a laying-on-of-hands, but where. Her hand sitting forlornly on the table? Her ax-head of a shoulder blade? There’s no right place. I keep my hands on my silverware.

  “How old were they when they died?”

  “The twins were young,” she says. “Their sister was grown, a little younger than you. I was already old.” We just sit there together in silence. She looks ahead, out the window at the swing set at the edge of the lake, the series of black mole holes that dot the expanse of dried grass.

  With whatever emotional intelligence she has Honey looks bemusedly at us but stays quiet.

  “I’m so sorry,” I say, again.

  “You’d think there’s an age when you get used to it, but you don’t.” What to say here? I understand, I don’t; I imagine, I can’t; so I just say “I believe you.” I blow my nose into the napkin.

  “It’s nice, actually,” she says in a creaking voice. “To be around Honey. I remember things I forgot before, about taking care of little children.” She takes her fork and spears a single bean with shaking hand. “Today I thought about the twins being born. I remembered being pregnant again when they were just Honey’s age, right before we knew they were sick.” Honey drops her fork on the carpet and moans and I pick it up and wipe it off and hand it back without looking. “If I could freeze a moment I think it would be that one. We took them on hikes every weekend, a pack and a baby on each of our backs.” I stifle a sob and she looks almost affectionately at me.

  “My husband always wanted a whole bunch of kids. I just wanted one who wasn’t sick, even though I felt bad to think about it that way. But he died before we could have another. And it probably would have been sick anyway.” She puts a single kidney bean into her mouth. “I was a teacher, you know.”

  “How long did you do that?”

  “Only got to do it for two years. Then I had my babies and that was just about it for me for a good long time.”

  I shake my head to disperse the little cluster of thoughts her report has brought on. Alice placidly chews salad. Honey is occupied with her bread. The burly men clink their forks. A thought announces itself and as is usually the case whenever I have a charitable thought I decide to immediately say it and regret it rather than stop to consider and then talk myself out of it.

  “What if we took you on to the camp?” I say. “You said it’s just a few hours. We can leave you there, or bring you there and come back here, or whatever you decide to do.” She frowns. I wonder whether I’ve offended her, and remember anew that any ship of that nature has sailed, since she saw me half naked this morning after having agreed to announce the news of my death should the occasion require. She has seen my boobs and held my baby. I forge on.

  “I can talk to Mark and Yarrow if you think it would help them feel less anxious.” Her hair is so smooth, it’s like gray onyx or something, if onyx can be gray, my eyes keep going back to it. I want to touch it, a bridge too far.

  “What about your job?” she asks.

  “I think as long as I keep e-mailing them they can’t accuse me of job abandonment.” I swallow another piece of prime rib. “So what do you think?”

  “I think it’s odd that you aren’t more worried about my plan. Mark and Yarrow were ready to have me committed. I have to admit the fact that you aren’t makes me wonder if I really am crazy.” I catch the implied rebuke and have to decide quickly whether to reveal some sign of how much it wounds me or whether to laugh it off.

  “Well, given my behavior since you met me that’s a reasonable fear, Alice,” I say, deciding to take the high road. “I probably seem like a nutcase.”

  “I don’t think you’re a nutcase,” she says. “Just highly strung.” I take Honey’s sippy cup full of milk out of my bag and give it to her. “Mut,” she says, and I am getting ready to launch into a spiel and almost don’t notice it’s the first time she’s said it.

  “Oh my goodness!!!” I cheer. “Yes, your milk! You’re going to drink your milk!”

  “Mut,” she says and I kiss her.

 
I notice movement by the door and glance over to see a large group of van Voorheeses enter, but not the Ed branch. I don’t know their names but I recognize them from the various funerals the last decade compelled me to participate in—the Elks Lodge, the Golden Spike, the Grange in Revival Junction. This is the old crowd, although there are a couple of young people with them and I wonder where the young people live and what they do. These are the people my mother could have gone up to and been hugged by and talked about ancient sled accidents with, long-ago horse rides, Girl Scout camp, waterskiing down in Gold Lake. She and Uncle Rodney always said they had the greatest childhood. My own legacy in the town is as a gloomy teenager, an eye-rolling waif. But when my grandfather died, then my grandmother, then my mom, I stood with Uncle Rodney and felt the town’s warmth as I sampled the enchiladas chilis bean salads potato salads accorded me as a bereaved daughter of Altavista.

  It occurs to me that going over and saying hello is an act of filial piety. They haven’t met Honey, who is the small but very present, very alive continuation of the Burdock line. I sigh and look at Alice.

  “I should go and say hello to those people,” I say. “They knew my mom and my grandparents.”

  “Fine by me,” she says.

  “You want another glass of wine?” I ask her. “Better not,” she says.

  “I’ll just be a minute,” I say, and extricate Honey from her high chair. “We’re going to say hello to the people who knew your grandma.”

  They have been seated on the other side of Spotted Owl and Nancy Pelosi and the latter wave again at Honey as I maneuver around their table. We arrive in front of the van Voorheeses’ long table and I address myself to the elderly couple on one end whose names have escaped me. “Excuse me,” I say, leaning forward to the woman. “I’m, um, Jeannie Burdock’s daughter. Frank and Cora’s granddaughter,” and they reward my filial piety by saying “Oh oh” and standing up and depositing napkins on the table and giving me a big hug and putting their hands on my shoulder and touching Honey’s hand. “And who is this?” they ask and I say “This is my daughter” and like that I just start crying.