Lydia Kiesling - The Golden State

I look at my watch and once again we have missed the window to speak to Engin who is by now back in Istanbul but in bed probably after trying fruitlessly to Skype us again and again and I go limp and lay back on the grass staring up at the unsmiling blue sky and wonder when they are going to get some fucking cell service up here. I have at this point developed a shadow sense of time like two clocks on a banker’s wall, San Francisco and Istanbul, but so far having this shadow sense does not translate into actually timing my actions appropriately to contact him at the right time, and usually this just means that I am perpetually feeling harassed to make contact in our circumscribed window. During the week I am rushing too much to get to work to have a meaningful morning conversation. Engin is a night owl but Honey comes home at 6:00 and goes to bed at 7:00 which is 5:00 a.m. Engin time so typically we have a brief viewing on weekday mornings so he can at least look at her and exchange kisses, and then I call him before I go to bed and we can actually talk, which actually I hate, it’s boring to talk to someone on the phone every day. In the beginning there was a siege mentality—the Emergency had happened and there was the painful but necessary recounting and commiseration re: hours spent on hold with fucking USCIS and the NVC, there were action items and fact-finding and document checks and sharing of information. But now we are stalled waiting for something to happen and we talk about the future as though it’s a fantasy island we both know we’ll never see. I know that calls in these long-distance situations are not really about the sharing of news but about the maintenance of connection, the assurance that each party still exists and is living breathing in the world sending love across the sea, not to mention reassuring our child that her father still exists and giving him some glimpse of the true love of his life, but it’s come to feel like another fucking obligation. I know women who live apart from their men who keep Skype on in the background to chat while they cook or clean up the living room or paint their nails, but I do enough inane pointless narration at Honey. It’s easier to have TV shows on; the show doesn’t need anything from you. So I go about life thinking of Engin as something like my partner in a challenging and as-of-yet mostly unprofitable business venture, waiting for our ship to come in, until those moments when I really remember what he is like and would give anything to be sitting next to him on the couch, laughing with our shoulders together and Honey across our laps.

Honey is trying to tear the head off a geranium and I say “That’s not what we do to flowers, gentle, gentle” and I suddenly feel so tired and I think how nice it is to be with her and how simultaneously not-nice. I did not have a thought in my head except go go go when I bundled her into the car yesterday and started the drive northeast but now I wonder if I just wanted to be not in the office and whether I might have achieved this by taking a day off work and going to the playground for god’s sake. Honey for ten hours during the day is a blank space to me, that’s how my brain treats her, as though she functionally ceases to exist when she is at daycare, until all at once I get desperately lonesome for her and look at the videos the daycare proprietor sends on WeChat and strain to hear her voice among the cacophony of little babies cooing together on the rug. But I have no knowledge of the texture of her days there. I have always found Honey to be a very sunny caring conscientious baby—a generous temperament—I wonder how much of this is the daycare and how much is me. I know the blank spot where those fifty hours a week should be is a blessing, surely it is the absence of worry that allows me to blot her out like someone who has been etherized, kind of like I do to Engin. Maybe it’s because I don’t care enough. I don’t think that’s it, though.

When I went back to work Engin stayed home with Honey, which is undoubtedly what prompted him to decide to go back to Turkey to improve his prospects of employment. I remember I felt jaunty and efficient setting out for the office that first day, leaving him with a supply of frozen breastmilk I had been dutifully collecting since she was born. I answered e-mails while I pumped in Ted’s closet and put pictures of Honey up on my bulletin board and I ignored the fact that pumping took up roughly two hours of the workday and generally felt that things were going to be okay. But when I got home that evening I ran up the street to the house only to discover from Engin’s apologetic face when I opened the door that he had put Honey to bed.

It’s pathetic but I don’t feel like I have spiritually recovered from that week somehow even though I went back to a beautiful glass office and not to a sweatshop or a goddamn Subway sandwich shop or to be a nanny in Westchester County. When I came back Meredith was trying to be supportive and talked constantly of how awful it is and told me how she used to pace like a wild animal when she was away from her children and I both felt guilty because I had not yet paced, and how odd it was that we should both be sitting there saying “yes, it is very bad” when we could instead be staging a revolt. But her kids are teenagers and she is over it and in fact grateful to come to a quiet beautiful office now so her moment for revolution has passed.

And now I am here with Honey trying to eat a geranium and I’m, yes, extremely bored and I would love for her to tire herself out and go back into her Pack ’n Play and go to sleep for two more hours. It’s been one day. I hate myself.

The only insight I have developed about parenting so far even though I always forget it is that when you feel like dying you should try to leave your physical location and go to another one. Blow the stink off, as my grandpa Burdock used to say. I think to myself what if we go to the Golden Spike and have a steak, and I immediately feel so buoyed by this idea my awareness of our bank balance notwithstanding that I grab Honey with renewed joy and say “Come on sweet pea we are gonna go out on the town,” which, ha. I say “Do you wanna take a bath with Mama” and she says “Yahh” and we go inside to the master bathroom with its cheap Jacuzzi tub and rotting sill and I pee and smell must rising up from between my legs and the bath is none too soon for either of us. I look in the mirror and I have flakes in my eyebrows and in my unfortunate little sideburns and around my hairline. I spray the mummified mosquito hawks down the drain and put Honey outside of the bathtub with the handheld shower and I get into it and spray myself down and do my shampoo and conditioner and then I step out dripping everywhere strip off her grassy pants and onesie and get her into the tub and do a mild hose-down while she vacillates between protest and glee. We sit down on our butts, she between my legs and facing me poking at my stomach. I look down at myself in the fluorescent light and see very white dough and moles and a giant thatch of hair, which has been more or less par for the course since I got pregnant. My understanding is that most Turkish women take it all off and when I was there I went with the flow and allowed myself to be thus denuded but I hate it and anyway now I don’t have the time or the money or a man on the premises. Engin and I have had only the most brief and strangely awkward conversation about hair and preference and he claimed not to care but this is probably a lie which makes me feel bad again until I think of the Golden Spike and how good it is going to be, not maybe in the food sense but spiritually.

The Golden Spike is just a short walk out of Deakins Park over the train tracks and along Route 235, or rather it’s a very very short distance in your Buick or your enormous pickup your Ford F-150 your Dodge Ram in which it’s a matter of moments to get there but like everything in town takes what seems like an unwarranted amount of time on foot, which I forget until we are at the tracks. Apart from the excessive space in this town, the pavement is so hard, the land is so flat, the air so thin, and the sun so strong even on the downhill slope to evening that your destination, visible though it may be, comes to feel like a mirage. The ground is hard on your knees and there’s no sidewalk out here by the tracks. I put Honey on my shoulders and grip her ankles tight and she claps her hands above my head. We see the big old sign of the Golden Spike in the near field and behind it the cinder-block box with an illuminated bar sign in its sole visible window.