Lydia Kiesling - The Golden State

The Golden Spike is one of the family-style Basque joints you can find across the west, the California west, the Nevada west, where a hundred years ago the shepherds who left Spain settled. The model is “family style plus a meat,” so you get a lamb chop, or rib eye, or fish, and then there’s a large salad of iceberg highly dressed, and sometimes a chickpea and lamb stew—presumably a taste of the Basque past—and tomato soup with barley or noodles. It’s ruinously expensive and not really very good but it excites me in some kind of primal way. I like the carafes of chilled red vinegar wine and the huge slabs of beef.

We reach the door of the cinder-block box and even though it’s 5:00 p.m. and the breeze has started up I’m sweating. We enter the vestibule that separates the dining room from the dusty parking lot, a strange, carpeted anteroom with an unused little piano pushed up against one wall, and then the main room and it’s almost empty and I feel immediately deflated at the discrepancy between the cozy hum I had pictured and this dark depopulated cave. The hostess says hello and leads us to a table and asks whether I’m just passing through and I tell her the name of my grandparents and she doesn’t recognize them.

Then we are getting settled and Honey is in a high chair playing with a spoon rapping it on the plate and I’m pouring her the smallest little glass of water from the brown melamine pitcher and myself a glass of wine from the cold carafe that is already on the table and a cheery server arrives and clucks at Honey and says “What an absolutely gorgeous baby” and I say thank you because I think so too even though I try not to say so, try not to say beautiful try not to say pretty girl or any variation thereof. I order the rib eye with garlic which means they put six to eight cloves of garlic on top of a rib eye steak the size of a plate. There is going to be a baked potato too. Honey takes her cup of water in her hands and brings it to her mouth for a surprisingly tidy sip and maybe it’s the wine but I’m bursting with pride to see it. I spoon soup for myself and Honey who has in addition to her looks great talent with a spoon and she tucks in and I butter a thick slab of the pale crumbly house bread. While she’s eating her soup I listen to the hostess and the server both white women of a certain age shooting the shit and the server is saying “I tell you I got all frazzled yesterday—we had a fight, which I never seen here before. It frazzled me right up!” and the hostess makes moos of concern and asks what happened and the server says “You know that old guy who comes in sometimes and gives himself a shot for his diabetes and he always leaves the needle on the table on a napkin? Normally I don’t say anything I just put it in a milk carton and throw it away. But yesterday Donna Dellomo is here and she hollers at him that us girls are gonna get stuck with that thing and he better throw it away himself, and he’s a mean old guy and tells her to mind her business and then her husband says ‘Don’t talk to my wife like that’ and then the old guy stands up and they just start trying to slug at each other. I was worried someone was gonna run out to his truck and get his gun.” They move to the far side of the host stand and carry on a stream of conversation I don’t quite hear but I hear the server say “I don’t even know which hole to put it in” and laugh and then as if she didn’t get the reaction she had hoped for or conversely wants to relive the nice reaction she did get says “I’m like ‘I don’t even know which hole to put it in’” but the hostess doesn’t really laugh and I am close enough I wonder whether I am part of the audience and whether I should laugh but I feel this would intrude and I hope the needle wasn’t at the table we are at now. Good for Donna Dellomo, whoever she is. Fucking men leaving their biohazardous garbage around for women to clean up.

My steak comes and I cut up little pieces for Honey that she mostly doesn’t eat preferring the soup and the bread and soon I have demolished my portion and am feeling like a stuffed tick and Honey is tired of sitting and being a good girl and is now agitated, troubled by some unknown thing that makes her scramble to vacate the high chair so I pick her up and she stands on my knees, pulling up on my shirt with stew hands and starting to bleat, our window of relatively civilized fine dining dying without ceremony in the air-conditioned chill of the cinder-block.

At this moment I see John Urberoaga stroll through the front door, the cousin or maybe brother of our Realtor, Rosemary. John looms large in my mythology of the town but I doubt we’ve had a conversation longer than two sentences. He was at Grandpa’s funeral and like almost all the men in the room I saw him wipe away a tear when Davis Birgeneau sang “That Old Rugged Cross” and played the guitar. I feel the tiny flair of feeling that comes from recognizing someone, but it fades as quick as it came.

He walks past our table and stops to cluck at Honey with big-man friendliness and I smile at him and say hello and he stares at me for a beat until I prompt him with my mother’s name. “Jeannie’s daughter. Frank and Cora Burdock’s granddaughter.” “That’s right!” he beams at me and his large presence his belt buckle are enough to subdue the bleating Honey. “You know Rosemary’s sure been workin’ on gettin’ that place sold.” “Well, no rush,” I tell him. “Rod up with you?” he asks. I feel suddenly threatened by being narced on but I don’t know why my taciturn uncle Rodney, patron of the mobile home, shouldn’t know I’m here, in fact I don’t know why I didn’t just call him to tell him myself. “Not this time,” I tell him, “but I thought it might be nice to get the, um, cobwebs out,” and he nods. The proper maintenance of immovable property or cars or livestock is a central concern to citizens of the high country. The great sorrow of my aging grandparents was seeing the disorder that crept into the town, shaggy lawns strewn with toy limbs and decaying copies of the Paiute Recorder . Rusted lawn mowers, sweatpants in the market, cars with rusted tailpipes—their lawn stayed pristine, their Buick polished, their small finances in impeccable order. I am looking a little down-at-the-heels myself, I realize. I am wearing a maternity shirt and Honey has smeared a substantial portion of the stew all over. But I am keeping cobwebs out of the house and the water moving in the pipes.

I shouldn’t be snide. The reason Honey and I are sitting pretty all things considered up in Deakins Park is that good old Uncle Rodney cares enough to keep the place maintained, to keep the water in the pipes, while my helpless disdain at the bourgeois mysteries of property maintenance would probably leave the town with another rusted-out mobile home. Uncle Rodney, never married, lives in a nice cabin outside Quincy, many basins south and west of here. He has worked for the Forest Service his entire life and has a very long-term off-and-on relationship with a surprisingly bubbly woman named Helen who works at a quilt shop of the sort that Quincy is cute enough to sustain. He and my mom had not a lot in common except their happy memories of summers at the lake and winters in the snow, girl scouts and boy scouts and high school hijinks and bridge nights with drunk parents letting the kids run free. In the end what she wanted was to get out, to get Elsewhere, and Rodney won’t even come to San Francisco except for when Honey was born. (“Not a city person,” he told Engin when we met him.) But he never made a peep when my mom got the house, and now he keeps the water in the pipes for me.

John Urberoaga doesn’t ask me where Honey’s dad is which seems curious and I wonder whether it is some sense of social nicety and not asking what don’t concern you or whether it just had not occurred to him to have any curiosity about my life which I suppose would justly match the general lack of curiosity I have about his and he ambles off to a table with his wife and Honey is now struggling so much to get down onto the floor that I know we’ve got to go and I crane around for the jokey server to bring us the check and she laughs at Honey and says “She’s feisty” and it soothes me. I hate being an archetype—woman struggling alone with fractious baby—but it really does feel horrible and a little humor delivered with a deft hand can go a long way. Too much sympathy and help is bad though, it’s very obligating.