Lydia Kiesling - The Golden State

In the parking lot Honey is frankly obstreperous. The absence of sidewalk on the highway back to the railroad tracks makes me anxious about the prospect of navigating it with Honey on her uncertain legs but when I pick her up she loses her mind, struggling and crying and pushing against me with her small fists. I put her back on the ground and she sits down abruptly and then flings her head straight back onto the pavement and then screams furiously in pain and rage. I scramble to pick her up and put my hand on the back of her head saying “No no oh no.” I hold her tight while she struggles against me, her sobs eventually giving over to little yells issued at an interval of three or four seconds. I turn to face the fields to the east of the Golden Spike should anyone come out and see me having not the least amount of success controlling or comforting my hysterical baby who is still trying to hit me. “Be a calming presence for your distressed toddler,” some baby blog whispers to me, and even though I reject categorically the idea that she is yet a toddler I hold her body to me and rub my hands on her hot back and say as soothingly as I can, “Hey. Hey, Honey. I know, sweet baby,” and it actually seems to be working, first she stops struggling and then she finds the place to put her wet face in the crook of my neck while I whisper to her and dust the gravel off the back of her head and I feel she is tired, that’s what it is, she is very very tired. Then she leans away from my body and smiles into my face, plucking at the front of my shirt where the stew is with both hands. “Daaaaah,” she says to me, her eyes wide and wondering. “Daaaaaah,” I say to her. I carry her home, heavy heavy, too heavy for me to carry with my flabby muscles atrophied by administrative tasks, but we make it over the train tracks into Deakins Park and she keeps one arm slung around my neck and her eyes on the horizon like a princess alert on her palanquin.

She is sticky with stew and dust and so she goes back into the bathtub and then she goes into her almost-too-small pajamas and before she goes into the Pack ’n Play in the dark of the closet we scramble up onto the big bed with her milk and Goodnight Moon and I lean against the pillows with my knees up and she leans against my knees with her legs on either side of my waist and she begins to chat happily and conspiratorially to me in non-words, just babbling cheerfully like a brook. She puts her hands on my breasts and pulls at my shirt and pats my face and tells me all sorts of things I don’t understand and I think this is the happiest moment of my life not only because of the smile on her face the smallness of her body the love for me she communicates with her entire being but because of the almost erotic knowledge that soon she will be in bed, the whole evening ahead of me without her.

I put her in the Pack ’n Play and all the happy time on the bed vanishes without a trace and she is miserable again and I try to soothe her and then I say good night and leave while she wails with her hands on the netting of her cage. I remember that she is sixteen months old today.

Then I remember the bottle of Popov and the orange juice and I make myself a screwdriver and sit in the Wi-Fi zone of the porch smoking and listening to her faint cries through the screen door. I send Engin a generic greeting on WhatsApp and then I google “banging head against ground,” the little wheel turning as the phone strains to hang on to Cindy’s signal in the Paiute night. I feel my anxiety reach through the screen to comingle with the anxiety of the BabyCenter mothers, various in its particulars but always with the same root—let it not be serious, let it not be serious. Or perhaps some of them do want it to be serious. When I was younger I used to wait for something dramatic to happen—my period to come, my mother to die. Both things eventually happened and neither of them brought any glamour to life I can say with certainty. But if something happens to Honey I will die I will die I will die.

This line of thought leads me down the path of Ellery Simpson’s mother and I picture Ellery’s heavy eyebrows and brown eyes from the photo on an older woman lying in bed in a darkened room with her fist to her mouth. I know from one of the work-studies that Ellery has a younger sister and brother and I wonder if that makes any difference and of course not how could it, how could anything. There’s the math of it, two being more than zero, but this is capitalist thinking—my mind somewhat hysterically conjures Hugo. And I still live in the universe of a single child where the idea of reproducing that love, the same dimension and volume of it, twice, three times, seven times, ten times, is incomprehensible although it is an irrefutable fact of life. I start crying. Eventually I stop and I hear that Honey has stopped too and now I feel lonesome for her and in a while I go back into the house back into the closet and get her out of the Pack ’n Play, her body heavy and limp. I hitch up onto the big bed and lean against the pillows with her head on my chest, feeling her back rise and fall with her curly head in the place on my neck. We stay like this for a while in the nearly pitch-black room with me just trying to transmit love to her until I put her back gently into the Pack ’n Play and return to the porch where I smoke three cigarettes in a row staring into the dark, ranging my fingers over my face and into my scalp and picking away at anything that feels remotely like a flake or a protuberance and feeling both not good and good at the same time.

We are finally going to call Engin. I put Honey in her stroller and we start the long walk down the highway that is also the main street leading out to the bird refuge at the far side of town. The sky is not so blue today as it was yesterday—it has a yellow tint and it is hot hot hot even at 9:45 when we hit the road after four stories and more pancakes. You think of heat having mass when it is humid but extremely dry heat has mass too unless you’ve got a good breeze or some shade, it is something you have to move against. Here and there I try to point out things to Honey—“there is the school where your grandma went” “there is the Elks” “that used to be a pharmacy” “that used to be the Tog-Shop” etc.—but once she is in the stroller her eyes basically glaze over and she lives in a strange place between sleep and awakeness but I’ll take it because I can basically think my thoughts and just be with her without having to do anything for her.

There aren’t very many open businesses on Main Street anymore, except the High Desert Hotel and the Frosty and the Rite Aid which is only a few years old and sure enough has annihilated the two mom-and-pop pharmacies that had coexisted peacefully for decades. The Frosty has a sign rising high up over the plains like a forlorn palm tree. Just past the sign my phone buzzes as we wander into a patch of service, and I see a voice mail icon, which fills me with dread. But I tap and there is only one and when I hold the phone to my ear I register that it is the voice of Uncle Rodney, who is the least threatening person who could be leaving me a voice mail at this moment. I stop to marvel at how quickly the frayed grapevine of my Altavista life has communicated to him that I’m in the house. John must have called Rosemary must have called Rodney. “Heard from Rosemary you were up at the house,” he says on the voice mail sure enough. “Give me a call and let me know how it’s looking, when you get the chance.” I know this will be relatively painless but I decide I don’t have the energy.

The sidewalks are completely empty except for a little group of youngish people in big T-shirts and short shorts for girls and big shorts for boys. Three kids are white and two are brown and I wonder if this is indicative of demographic change. There was one lone black family in town when Mom and Uncle Rodney were growing up but I don’t know what became of them. The kids move slow and laugh among themselves and Honey and I pass them and I give a little wave which yields a murmur of “Hi”s. We walk all the way through town to the Desert Sunrise, which is the Indian casino which is three conjoined trailers with slot machines and a few poker tables inside. I took Engin there on his inaugural trip to Altavista because I wanted him to see something he’d never seen before and I’d never seen the Desert Sunrise myself but it’s not like Las Vegas or even Reno where you can visit a casino if you aren’t gambling—there are about six grim-looking men and women at the Desert Sunrise, and everyone stares. Engin fancies himself a man of the people and gets into involved conversations I suspect he secretly regrets with old men and aunties in Anatolian gas stations but the Desert Sunrise does not create an atmosphere of folksiness so much as one of incipient murder. So we moonwalked out of the trailer and I noted the “Silly faggot dicks are for chicks” bumper sticker in the parking lot.