The Golden State: A Novel Read online

  I give her the rough outline of the unlawful relinquishment of his green card in the bowels of the San Francisco airport. So far the only thing worse than dealing with the green card situation has been explaining the green card situation to other people, even to know its full madness firsthand requires a graduate seminar in the Department of Homeland Security’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services unit and then the Department of State’s National Visa Center and all associated forms and procedures and phone menus, menus where you press 3 to be hung up on after an hour of holding; numbers that due to the high volume of callers must be called back between the hours of 1:00 and 4:00; numbers that ring and ring and ring into the void, a human voice answering one in a hundred times; websites giving you instructions like “If you are granted an immigrant visa, the consular officer will give you a packet of information. Do not open this packet.” I just tell her that he had one and they took it under false pretenses.

  “There’s this rule you have to spend six months of the year in the U.S., and Engin—that’s my husband—went to do a course thing back in Turkey that was six months long, and when he came to visit us halfway through the course the border guys convinced him he was violating U.S. law by going back and forth, and that if he didn’t voluntarily give them the green card he would be banned from the U.S. for five years, none of which was true. And since we had a baby, he got scared and gave it to them and signed the form they gave him. And it was illegal. And now he has to reapply a completely different way through a different agency since he’s outside the U.S. And there’s not a lot we can do now except wait for a new one which they are apparently too incompetent to get done.” This seems almost to move Cindy, in some direction. She rolls her eyes.

  “It’s not very comforting,” she says. “If they could do that with some normal person who’s just trying to be with his family imagine all the terrorists they could just let in because no one was paying attention.” Jesus Christ, I think. “Yeah,” I say. “But I think the reason they did that to Engin is because some people think anyone with a possibly Muslim name is a terrorist, and now he can’t be with me and our baby, so that’s not a good policy either.” Nonetheless I allow myself to agree without difficulty with her assessment that the Federal Government is a godawful bureaucratic clusterfuck and can be counted on to heartily fail at many things it undertakes. I suspect I don’t want to hear whatever else she has to say about the Government, what she has to say about Barack Hussein Obama. I’m sure that’s how she says his name, emphasis on Hussein like that is A Sign of Something and not one of the most common names in the entire goddamn world.

  I gesture at the sign in her lawn. “What’s sort of the main thing?” I ask. “About the State of Jefferson?”

  “The ‘main thing,’” says Cindy, subtly rearranging herself as though to start a recitation, “is that the people in Sacramento and Los Angeles don’t know damn anything about the North State, not to mention the feds. They take our water for down south, and tax the hell out of us, and then they keep us from using our timber and land and tie us up in regulations. The feds just told Ed’s cousin Chad Burns up in Oregon he owes eighty-six grand for grazing his damn cattle.” I am curious about the “us” since if I have chosen correctly from my small and dwindling store of local knowledge Cindy does the books at the Flintlock, Paiute County’s unexpected tiny municipal golf course where the clubhouse is a trailer and antelope run across the ninth hole. I can’t imagine this is a full-time job but maybe it pays whatever bills you are likely to accrue here. Or maybe it doesn’t, and that’s why Cindy is so fired up about the return of extractive industries to the North State. My grandmother played at the Flintlock until she was eighty-four years old, in visor and immaculate white socks with little pom-poms.

  But then Cindy says “Where’d you meet him, your husband I mean?” and I laugh and say “In a bar” and she laughs in her throat and says “I met my sweetie in a bar too.”

  She finishes her cigarette and grinds it out in a polished shell on her deck railing and says “Well, see you later” and I wave.

  I sit down in a deck chair under the shaded part of the deck and light another cigarette and remember the fateful bar. Engin was the upstairs bartender and he had a lot of blurry tattoos and a proto-hipster mustache and he was rather tunelessly singing along with the Smiths who were blaring from the speakers into the summer night. We made desultory chitchat in my struggling Turkish and when I left I gave him a piece of paper with my phone number on it, the only time in my life that I have done this. I was thin and attractive at that time so I received an SMS from him the next day, and we began a relationship that mostly involved sitting in bars in the little tributaries that flow off İstiklal. I spent most of the time asking him what words meant and writing them down in my notebook. We had rather awkward sex and then sat in the living room with his friend Ali, a Kurdish guy who slept on Engin’s couch and the rest of the time discoursed vigorously about politics, and I nodded along although in reality I had almost no idea what he was saying.

  And then four weeks into our courtship which wasn’t really setting the world on fire I found out Mom was sick, so I left Turkey to go back to California and that was it. I lived with her in Sacramento and did a bunch of random jobs and wrote in my Turkish notebook wistfully now and then and after three years she died. And then I decided I wanted to memorize more Turkish verbs and through some miracle I got into the Ph.D. program off a waitlist. And after the second year my advisor Murat had emergency gallbladder surgery and let me accompany a weeklong summer tour of Istanbul for rich university donors in his place. And on my night off I found that same bar in the backstreet of Nevizade and decided to go in, and Engin was sitting there like it had been a few weeks instead of five years. And my Turkish was much better, and what happened was so immediate so natural so inevitable that I decided to let Murat’s flock return home by themselves at the end of the trip and I didn’t go back to America and didn’t take intensive summer Persian that the U.S. government paid for and didn’t go back to school and thus ensured that I would max out at an M.A. rather than a Ph.D. but didn’t care because the thought of being apart from Engin for so long was physically painful. So I passed the most beautiful summer of my life and at the end it was all clear to me that I had to marry Engin and not get a Ph.D. but find a job have a baby start my life and who knows one day speak perfect Turkish and be a true cosmopolitan. So I dropped out with a sympathy M.A. and a lot of thinly veiled hostility and concern by Murat who felt in loco parentis but was also a snob about Engin’s academic pedigree although Engin is still what is fucked-up-edly known in Turkey as a “White Turk,” that is urban, educated, irreligious. Engin means “vast” or “endless,” incidentally. Maybe it was this sense of his being vast and endless in his capacity to surprise and delight, demonstrated by his sudden reappearance in my life after so long, that caused me to marry him so precipitously, with so little foresight.

  There’s an unspoken competition among American grad students in Middle East and related studies to be the least Orientalist and problematic and obviously by falling in love with a Turk during a hot Istanbul summer I lost this contest fair and square. But we are not mismatched as far as tastes, ways of being in the world go. The flings I had before I met Engin—ending up in someone’s scandalized parents’ apartment all the way out in Avcılar and then being driven around to fancy cafés and given expensive perfume I wouldn’t wear and then trying to fade away and having to ignore dozens of increasingly tormented and then aggressive text messages—that was my main dalliance with the Other. But Engin rented his own tiny little apartment. We like the same minor-key indie rock, hold the same vague leftish politics, think succulents are the best plants. We are urban late-capitalist late millennials, as Hugo might put it; that shared vernacular counts for a lot. I think the moment I knew we would get married was when we visited his cousin, or his uncle’s cousin, or someone’s cousin, at a planned community outside a midsize town near Yalova. The co
usin was a retired municipal employee who kept bees, and we were told it was baby bee season. We camped out next to the bee box and waited for the swarm of babies to appear because evidently if you don’t catch them and hive them right away, they fly away and are lost in the universe. So we spent the day picnicking in the sun, waiting for baby bees to emerge, feeling just as rustic as we’d ever want to feel.

  Sometimes I stop to consider that there is something wrong with both Engin and me, because of my many Turkish colleagues in graduate school none of them married Americans; two of my male Turkish friends told me they wouldn’t consider it. Engin is different from those friends. I mean he is educated but not like they are—he went to Yıldız Technical University and took a longer-than-customary time to graduate, and they went to Robert College and then on to Bosphorus University or Harvard and wrote lengthy and beautiful treatises in English on materiality in Ottoman culture. I didn’t speak Turkish with them because to do so would feel like an insult to their English. Engin’s English is functional, let’s say, I have heard him speak very shyly to my uncle Rodney, who is hardly a chatterbox. Maybe it’s one of those things that keeps a marriage fresh. Back when I first met Engin, when I worked in the school, I had a different sort of Turkish colleagues, polished young women who spoke excellent English and were earning teaching credentials and dressed up beautifully every day. I could tell they found Engin vaguely troubling—some youthful caste and gender difference I never stopped trying and failing to translate to its American equivalent. He lived alone and slept with wayward Americans; they lived at home and married young, half of them divorcing right away as though the relief of being out of the house was enough. “He works in a bar?” One of them laughed when I told them about Engin the first time. Aman aman. Oh my. They always talked about setting me up with their brothers cousins friends, but never did.

  Now I look at Cindy’s sign across the fence and I think Engin, you poor bastard. I get up to go in and check on Honey who has now been sleeping a very long time and my first thought as always as I approach the door is that she has probably died in her sleep. I trip over the screen door on my way into the cool house and I think I went to Turkey and was careless careless careless about everything and now I have a pretty good life and my very own sweet baby, and Ellery went with a friend and a humanitarian research agenda and a 4.2 GPA and a suitcase full of modest clothing and small gifts to pass around and she is dead before her twenty-first birthday and I can’t believe I told Maryam it was going to be the most meaningful experience of their lives.

  Honey is not dead but alive and I hear her make the cry that indicates she has napped too long and deep and that returning to consciousness is like clawing the way back from death. I know this because this is how I nap too. Waking up hurts.

  DAY 4     I wake up from a vivid sex dream before Honey starts making noise. If I do the math it probably means I can expect my period in a certain number of days. Since Honey turned four months old and my period came back my sex life—sex imaginary, I should say—has cleaved to a schedule. How else to explain three weeks of deadness in every nerve ending, and then about twenty minutes when I feel like a physical threat to every man I see, when the act of tracing my finger across the dirty BART window feels charged with sexual possibility, when I imagine sleeping with men with whom I’ve had only a cordial work-related e-mail exchange? Or even, gah, Hugo (but never Ted). And then when the mania passes you get a new e-mail or sit across from them in a meeting and they are just ordinary even repulsive people and you understand that sex is a trap.

  I feel very cheerful and businesslike this morning—there are some mornings that just start out like that, where I transact matters of household or professional importance in an efficacious way. I remove the furze of orange juice and cigarettes from my teeth and I think Today things are going to be better. I am wearing the white shirt with the stew on it from dinner two nights ago. I strip naked and change Honey’s diaper. She is cheerful too and she takes great amusement in my naked body, pulling at my boobs and poking at my nipple and giving me big smiles showing all her little tiny teeth. “Nipple,” I say. I take her into the bathroom and put her down on the mat and shower with the curtain open so I can see her. She plops onto her butt and hauls herself back up and toddles over to the side of the bathtub and puts her hands into the water and cries. It is a very quick shower but it does the job. I tear through the house picking up all of our clothes and blankets and her stuffed animals and bedding from the Pack ’n Play and the dish towels and the bathmat for good measure and I stuff them all into the washing machine and wash them on hot. I feed her Cheerios and banana with a towel knotted around my body and I fill up the dishwasher with our modest dishes. I hazard a guess at the workings of the coffee machine. I read The Runaway Bunny. I put the things in the dryer. I take Honey out of her romper and put her into a clean pair of pants and a T-shirt. “It’s important to get dressed and go out into the day,” I tell her. We read three more books while she drinks milk. She prances around the living room and I watch as she learns how to step over the rags taped over the brick base of the wood stove. I’m so interested in her progress that she has gotten to the stove itself before I remember to tell her No. Not that the stove is on, of course, but it seems like stoves should always be avoided in case they are on. I have read on BabyCenter that you should not say “No” to everything that children want to do, but should instead make some other sound of guidance, like “Uh-uh,” or “Mm-mm,” and save the “No” for really bad situations. The stove does seem like one of those nonnegotiable things, so I look at her and say, gently, “No.” She puts her hand onto the little handle of the stove and yanks at it. “NO,” I bark at her, and she whips her hand back as though she’s been struck. She starts to cry. I scoop her up and put her a safe distance from the stove. “We don’t play with the stove,” I tell her. She slams her head back into the ground and starts up the desperate wailing of two evenings ago. The golden hour of morning success comes to a close and I feel the endless day stretching out before me. I try to gather up her little flailing limbs into a hug and she bites me on the shoulder, very hard. “NO” I yell and I feel like biting her back and throwing her onto the carpeted floor but instead I lay her down a little too firmly and feel very marginal.

  We go outside and I set still-crying Honey down on the grass so I can look at the laptop. I see many e-mails from Hugo about THE CONFERENCE but decide not to read them. It’s Saturday, for one, I determine after a brief calculation. And enough brooding about the damn Institute, I think. I take Honey back inside. She is still oddly fussy and she wants to be put down and then she wants to be picked up and then she flails and then she’s back down and then she’s back up. Maybe she’s getting new molars, teeth are always the explanation for everything it seems like. I don’t have very many toys up here for her to play with so I get out a bunch of Grandma’s wooden spoons, which are still in the ceramic pot by the sink where she kept them. Honey promptly hits herself in the forehead with one of them and cries again when I take it away so I pick her up and coo.

  The clothes are dry. I pack up Honey in the stroller with her stuffed animals and we begin the walk to Sal’s Café. I have also read that you are supposed to talk constantly to small children, this being the major thing that separates the smart and successful ones from their unfortunate peers. I always found this difficult when Honey was a very small infant but now I get the impression that she is actually interested in my voice. She is calm now and reasonably cheerful so I say “Look at that, that’s Grandma’s birch tree” and “Look at that, that’s a pickup truck, and there’s the split-rail fence, and there’s the tumbleweed, and there’s the sage, and OH LOOK HONEY IT’S A LITTLE COVEY OF QUAIL!!! Oh, look at the quail, Honey!!! Do you know what a quail is? It’s a little bird, and in a group you call them a ‘covey.’” “App, app, app!” Honey says, straining to get out of her stroller. I take her out and set her down on her feet in the empty street, and she runs toward the q
uail screaming with untrammeled joy and they immediately swarm through the fence and into the waste beyond Deakins Park. Honey stands looking after them bereft and I put her back into the stroller. It is 9:30 a.m. “There’s a blue jay, and there’s another blue jay, and there’s the pile of garbage, and there’s the Mormon Church, which is brand-new, and there’s the railroad, and there’s the Golden Spike where we went two nights ago, and down the road is Manny’s Bar. Your daddy and I went there once and struck up a conversation with the guy who installed Grandma and Grandpa’s deck and he bought us a beer.” We don’t see a single human being, although there are cars briskly passing through the intersection where state route meets state route.

  When we arrive at Sal’s the crone is there again in the same spot in the corner. “Good morning,” I say to her. I start out to say Merhaba but the word dies in my throat a little and I turn it into a cough because I have to assume I imagined that she said it yesterday because I am I guess losing my mind. I’ve forgotten to fill the sippy cup with milk so I buy myself a coffee and a thing of milk from Sal and sit at a table adjacent to the crone so as to allow for easy intercourse. I pour the milk ineptly into Honey’s cup, trying to fend off Honey’s paws. “Heh heh eh eh” she says, which is what she says when she wants something, becoming increasingly distressed and needful until she begins crying for the milk. I give her the milk. I wipe the spilled milk from the table with the edge of my sleeve. I take out the computer. I open the computer and glance furtively at the crone, who is taking very slow, very small sips from a cup of black coffee.

  I have been thinking yearningly of Elmo who is sometimes utilized at home and how Elmo would really help Honey and me pass the time here and while I know it is wrong for them to look at screens it would just be so nice to set her down and have her stay in one place slack-jawed and not running around rifling through things and I could do something, like answer e-mails on my phone I guess. Get a book from the library and read it. I bite the bullet and purchase two episodes of Sesame Street from Amazon and begin the download and think, just to have them, just in case of emergency.