Lydia Kiesling - The Golden State

“Tell her to bring my granddaughter and come here,” his mother hollers from the kitchen. Engin smiles wanly and shrugs and says “You know you can come here” and I say “Do you want me to come there” and he says “Well you were staying there because you have a good job but if you are not going to work then I don’t understand why you wouldn’t come here” and I realize this probably cost him something to say because he thinks Hugo and Meredith are grifters but he knows also that work is important and that his work is feast or famine and not ideal for the maintenance of a family unit and then he says “As far as I know we hadn’t planned for you to live… there,” and he gestures at Sal’s behind me and I nod. “I know,” I say. “I thought maybe I’d go through some of my mom’s stuff in the garage to see what I can sell.” “By yourself?” and that leads us back to the fucking green card and I say “I’ll leave the heavy stuff for when you come” and then I just feel so done and tired of talking I take two deep breaths and say “Honey has to have her nap” and “Really I’m fine, just feeling down” (Moralim bozuk, my morale is spoilt ) and “I’ll go back to work, I promise” and “Give your mother a kiss from me” and to Honey I say “Say bye-bye to your baba, give your baba a kiss,” and she finally brings the palm of her hand to her mouth and lowers it toward the screen extravagantly open and proud of herself and I blow a kiss too and shut the laptop more abruptly than I intend.

I wipe my eyes and blow my nose on Honey’s bib. I open the laptop again. I e-mail Meredith and Hugo to say that I am still sick. I message the daycare to say that Honey is sick. I need a treat of some kind and when a suitable interval has passed and I stop sniffling I hoist up Honey and leave our stuff at the table and buy a rice crispy thing from the basket next to the cash register. I wonder if the proprietor is going to ask whether she needs to call somebody but she just says “What language was that?” “Turkish,” I say. “My husband’s Turkish.” I never have any idea what that will mean to anyone.

“Oh, my son used to live over there,” she surprises the hell out of me by saying.

“Whaddayacallit, Injik, when he was in the air force.” İncirlik, she means.

“Oh wow,” I say. “Did he like it?”

“He loved it. Said it was just beautiful. Nicest people in the world.” Everyone seems to agree on this point. “Turkish hospitality is famous,” I say stupidly, aware of the clammy puff of my face and the crying hives and the runnels left by tears in my poorly moisturized undereyes. “Sorry,” I gesture to my face and smile ruefully. “It’s just hard to be apart sometimes. Gotta get him back here.”

“What are you doing all the way up in Altavista?” She has an incredibly kindly look on her face, a narrow tanned white face with bifocals on an upturned nose and I just want to tell her everything.

“My mom’s from here, Frank and Cora Burdock’s daughter?” She looks blank. “They lived over in Deakins Park.” “Oh,” she says. “My brother’s lady friend lives over there. Cindy Cooper.” “Oh,” I say. “My neighbor! She seems like a nice lady” and the proprietress laughs and says, “I don’t know about that. But we love her anyway.” Honey watches us talking and the proprietress says, “She’s a good little thing isn’t she,” and I say, “Most of the time.” “Pretty little thing,” she says. “Look at those eyelashes,” and Honey smiles at her out from under them.

I gather up our things and set Honey down and she toddles furiously toward the door and as we pass through it the crone who has been mostly motionless sitting at the table next to the door looks right at us. “Merhaba,” I could swear she says, which is Hello in Turkish. Even Honey stills for a moment, pausing midflight in her headlong rush toward the sidewalk. “Hello?” I say to her politely in English, sure I’ve had an auditory hallucination. She looks down at her hands, her mouth closed and shy and Honey reanimates and flies out of the doorway and I fly after her, trailing a hand behind me in valediction at the crone. I catch the collar of Honey’s shirt and stick my head back through the door to say something, but her head is still bowed. “Goodbye,” I say. Honey chokes a bit with the neck of her garment up against her throat. We exit.

I decide that we will take the long way home by the cemetery and stop to visit Mom, since I have not seen her in more than a year. The cemetery is south of Deakins Park, but like Deakins Park it sits out on the edge of inhabited land. Honey is quiet in her stroller lulled by the wheeling as usual and I think about Engin’s mother and what she said about us coming there to the small but airy matriarchal apartment in a nice neighborhood of Istanbul. This is the obvious thing to do, so obvious that we have danced endlessly around the idea, as though the idea were a slippery occult monolith upon which our minds can find no purchase. If you have two people and one of them is from what I believe is called an “emerging economy” and one is American you go to America, I guess is the usual thing, even though right now I am sitting in the middle of what you might call a demolished economy. (Casualties of Capital! Hugo says in my ear.) Plus I got the job at the Institute, and Engin did not have a stable income and was game to come to California, so this made sense. The whole trajectory of our marriage has been westward. It’s true that in Turkey there is Erdoğan the tyrant sultan and also that there are safety concerns of various kinds but the last incident was the woman from Dagestan who bombed the police station and that was months ago and America is no picnic on that score what with roomfuls of murdered kindergarteners lying in their own blood. Oh God. We talk about buying a stone shack on the Aegean coast sometime in the distant future, when we’ve made it in some way, the way being as of yet unclear. But I guess we assumed that at least the first location of our making it would be in America. It occurs to me that I created a sort of budget version of my own family situation where my dad’s work dictated that my mom live on foreign soil, and I’m now putting that on Engin, putting thousands of miles between him and his family and his friends not to mention momentous national events like Gezi, which he would have flown home for if we had the money and I wasn’t pregnant with Honey.

And what do we have here? This house, such as it is. My uncle Rodney, such as he is. My mother, although she’s in a buried urn in the grass in the high desert cemetery. We have her things—all her beautiful rugs and tablecloths and dishes packed away in the garage where the Buick ought to be. One of Engin’s and my future projects has been the combing through and disposition or keeping of these when the mobile home sells, but it doesn’t sell and doesn’t sell. I have my job, sort of. I have the smell of juniper and the dew on the fescue, which seemed so urgent just two days ago. But I don’t have the sound of seagulls by the Bosphorus, the clink of glasses, the sound of human enterprise and activity in the heart of the world. I don’t have my husband, the father of my child. Honey doesn’t have her dad and he doesn’t have her.

Among things I generally choose not to think about is the absence of my own parents. When I envision my soul, such as it is, I picture a big pink lump of gnarled flesh, healed-over wounds that don’t smart anymore so much as they tug painfully depending on which direction my thoughts travel. My dad was a weird dreamy man who worked for the government and died when I was eleven. He and my mom met overseas. She left Altavista to go to the same university that employs me now, and being an adventurous frontierswoman type, she graduated and saved her money and went with her girlfriend to Corfu, where my dad was enjoying R&R from his post in Romania, and they were both from California so they got married, and eight years later they had me and named me Daphne after the Greek myth, the nymph who turned into a tree. When I was born we lived on Cyprus where it was my dad’s job to do things like assist with the forging of agreements between the hostile governments of Greece and Turkey while maintaining the sacred bewildering U.S. ratio which required that for every $7 million of military aid and muscle the U.S. government gave Greece it give $10 million of the same muscle to Turkey.