Lydia Kiesling - The Golden State

I reflect on Engin’s first visit to Altavista that Christmas with Rodney and Helen. Engin I think made certain assumptions about my class background which combined with certain assumptions that any foreigner has about what America is, which are no less bizarre and misguided than any American’s assumptions about what another place is, led him to believe that a trip to my ancestral land would be something like the movie Father of the Bride , even though I tried to prepare him by using words like “village” and “cowboy” when I described the town. When he first came to California and we got married in Uncle Rodney’s backyard in Quincy first we went up the Sonoma coast and then took 128 back inland through the golden country which if you squint looks Mediterranean and then we went inland to 49 up the Yuba and the Downie and the majestic forests and the stone peaks of Lassen and then into the green valley around Quincy and Quincy itself with its beautiful false fronts and historic theaters and the sound of water wherever you go and I could tell wherever we went that he got it. But then you get up in the north and east and things just get a little scrubbier, the buildings flatter and the people less likely to have started a playhouse with a free library out front. The beauty here is the great slate sky the sound of the birds in the morning the color of the hills and the fields at dusk. Engin said it reminded him of Ang Lee. But I told him that’s not accurate, since Ang Lee trucks in the maximalist blue-sky beauty of Montana or Wyoming, blowsy hills like big green breasts, not the high, thin, stony West, full of volcanic stone washes and scrub oak. Then he pointed out that Brokeback Mountain was actually filmed in Canada and I said “How do you even know that” and he said “I googled it because I liked the scenery” and I laughed. Engin loves vistas.

When Honey and I hit the turnoff for the Desert Sunrise we turn back around in order to find Wi-Fi to Skype with our Ang Lee fan and thus we find ourselves at Sal’s Café in the lobby of the High Desert Hotel on Main Street. It’s open and populated by two tank-topped blond white teen girls at one table and a very, very old white woman with a gray bob who sits at another with a cup of coffee staring vacantly ahead. I buy a coffee from the proprietress maybe Sal herself and unpack Honey from her stroller and take a banana from the bag and squeeze it into pieces and she begins shoveling them into her mouth and I set up the laptop. I open Skype and put on the headphones but then realize Honey won’t be able to hear so I will just have to be rude and let him talk to the room. I click Engin’s face and it rings and he answers and there he is in the flesh or in the screen rather, his gray eyes pale skin brown hair and his newly clean-shaven face and I think how handsome he is and instead of feeling happy and proud I feel a pang because he has been unattended for eight months looking like that and I am here looking like this and then I remember that he is on the shorter side and his arms are also the tiniest bit too short for his body and maybe that will keep the women away and then I think God should just smite me we haven’t even exchanged three words.

Behind him on the screen is his mother’s tidy apartment, which is where he stays. He says “Finally, Defne”—in Turkish I’m Defne—and I laboriously flip a giant rusty lever in my brain to speak Turkish again and I say “Look Honey it’s your baba look look” and she looks at me with some suspicion to hear the strange words and she looks at him and there is a pause and I am holding my breath and thinking please don’t cry please don’t squirm please don’t hide but she smiles and stretches out her arms to him and he says “My cub, my darling, do you miss your daddy,” and they coo back and forth at each other which puts off the moment when I have to apologize for running away and Honey touches the screen and says “Hi! Hi! Hi!” and I say “Say merhaba to your baba” and then my mother-in-law Ayşe is in the frame boxing Engin out entirely and there is a torrent of affectionate pitter-patter for Honey and it fills Sal’s coffee shop and I look around at the proprietress and the teens and the old woman but nobody seems to care very much. Ayşe brushes away a tear and blows a kiss to me and says “Come to us my love, we miss you,” and then she recedes and Engin lights a cigarette—it seems we’re both smoking—and addresses himself to me and Honey stares rapt at the screen. “Don’t smoke in front of the baby, yaa,” I tell him, I mean come on, and he stubs it out with a rueful look and I feel guilty and smile and say “How was Belgrade,” a sally whose fundamental insincerity he perceives and brushes off accordingly.

“Why are you in the steppe? Don’t you have work?”

Although I have had plenty of time to ponder this I don’t have an answer for myself let alone a soothing lie for Engin, which would be a reason of some kind, any kind, and not just a sudden urge for flight.

“Things were, ahh, not busy at work,” I say, in Turkish, always in Turkish, I loved Turkish before I loved Engin. “And I thought I haven’t been up to the house for a while and I should go look at it.” My grammar is distressingly lumpy. “Okay,” says Engin in English, but I can tell he thinks it’s weird, it is on its face weird, because had I been planning some recon mission I would have let him know in advance.

“Are you okay?” he asks. I begin to cry so suddenly and so copiously it’s not a taktik or a refleks but more that my tears are a well-trained army and always mustered ready to unleash hell.

“My love, my soul, don’t cry.” Turkish has lots of endearments freely deployed. “Come on, why are you crying?”

I don’t want to make him feel bad by saying I am crying because I am here and I am here because you went to complete a certificate course on postproduction in Istanbul and when you came back halfway through to see us surrendered your goddamn green card to DHS under pressure and under false pretenses that contravene established immigration practice and U.S. law and are undoubtedly rooted in xenophobia not to say Islamophobia, and because you were then sent back to Istanbul on the next flight at our expense rather than spending three desperately needed weeks with your wife and child, and because your second application submitted through the even more arcane National Visa Center for overseas consular processing is stuck in limbo due to what I learned after twenty-six nonconsecutive hours of waiting on the phone and the eventual expenditure of a thousand more dollars may in fact be a “click-of-the-mouse error”—theirs—and which we have already paid an attorney to ameliorate and resubmit through the correct channels and will presumably have to pay more to stay on top of until it is seen through and I am alone with our child whose first steps and first words you are missing and I sometimes fantasize about meeting you at the airport with her and kissing you passionately and then throttling you until you die, so I just say “I’m feeling sad,” which is also true.

Honey twists around, bored, with her last bit of banana in one hand, and gives my descending bun a yank. Engin smiles at her while somehow simultaneously frowning at me. She finishes the banana and starts putting her fingers on the screen of the Institute’s computer and I am still crying. The teens in the corner are openly staring. “How was Belgrade?” I manage to get out again. “Nice, actually,” he says, joining the folie à deux of normalcy. “Really nice. We should live there.” We are always opining about places we should live, which are always somewhere else than the place where either of us is living. “Tolga’s thing is shit, though—really disorganized” but now I am crying again and unable to take in Tolga and his endless dubious multipronged film and web marketing schemes. Engin in his heart of hearts wants to be a video artist—make outlandish Björk videos and such—but to make money he signs on to shoot Tolga’s promotional videos for private schools and Eastern European banking concerns instead.