Lydia Kiesling - The Golden State

I gesture at the sign in her lawn. “What’s sort of the main thing?” I ask. “About the State of Jefferson?”

“The ‘main thing,’” says Cindy, subtly rearranging herself as though to start a recitation, “is that the people in Sacramento and Los Angeles don’t know damn anything about the North State, not to mention the feds. They take our water for down south, and tax the hell out of us, and then they keep us from using our timber and land and tie us up in regulations. The feds just told Ed’s cousin Chad Burns up in Oregon he owes eighty-six grand for grazing his damn cattle.” I am curious about the “us” since if I have chosen correctly from my small and dwindling store of local knowledge Cindy does the books at the Flintlock, Paiute County’s unexpected tiny municipal golf course where the clubhouse is a trailer and antelope run across the ninth hole. I can’t imagine this is a full-time job but maybe it pays whatever bills you are likely to accrue here. Or maybe it doesn’t, and that’s why Cindy is so fired up about the return of extractive industries to the North State. My grandmother played at the Flintlock until she was eighty-four years old, in visor and immaculate white socks with little pom-poms.

But then Cindy says “Where’d you meet him, your husband I mean?” and I laugh and say “In a bar” and she laughs in her throat and says “I met my sweetie in a bar too.”

She finishes her cigarette and grinds it out in a polished shell on her deck railing and says “Well, see you later” and I wave.

I sit down in a deck chair under the shaded part of the deck and light another cigarette and remember the fateful bar. Engin was the upstairs bartender and he had a lot of blurry tattoos and a proto-hipster mustache and he was rather tunelessly singing along with the Smiths who were blaring from the speakers into the summer night. We made desultory chitchat in my struggling Turkish and when I left I gave him a piece of paper with my phone number on it, the only time in my life that I have done this. I was thin and attractive at that time so I received an SMS from him the next day, and we began a relationship that mostly involved sitting in bars in the little tributaries that flow off İstiklal. I spent most of the time asking him what words meant and writing them down in my notebook. We had rather awkward sex and then sat in the living room with his friend Ali, a Kurdish guy who slept on Engin’s couch and the rest of the time discoursed vigorously about politics, and I nodded along although in reality I had almost no idea what he was saying.

And then four weeks into our courtship which wasn’t really setting the world on fire I found out Mom was sick, so I left Turkey to go back to California and that was it. I lived with her in Sacramento and did a bunch of random jobs and wrote in my Turkish notebook wistfully now and then and after three years she died. And then I decided I wanted to memorize more Turkish verbs and through some miracle I got into the Ph.D. program off a waitlist. And after the second year my advisor Murat had emergency gallbladder surgery and let me accompany a weeklong summer tour of Istanbul for rich university donors in his place. And on my night off I found that same bar in the backstreet of Nevizade and decided to go in, and Engin was sitting there like it had been a few weeks instead of five years. And my Turkish was much better, and what happened was so immediate so natural so inevitable that I decided to let Murat’s flock return home by themselves at the end of the trip and I didn’t go back to America and didn’t take intensive summer Persian that the U.S. government paid for and didn’t go back to school and thus ensured that I would max out at an M.A. rather than a Ph.D. but didn’t care because the thought of being apart from Engin for so long was physically painful. So I passed the most beautiful summer of my life and at the end it was all clear to me that I had to marry Engin and not get a Ph.D. but find a job have a baby start my life and who knows one day speak perfect Turkish and be a true cosmopolitan. So I dropped out with a sympathy M.A. and a lot of thinly veiled hostility and concern by Murat who felt in loco parentis but was also a snob about Engin’s academic pedigree although Engin is still what is fucked-up-edly known in Turkey as a “White Turk,” that is urban, educated, irreligious. Engin means “vast” or “endless,” incidentally. Maybe it was this sense of his being vast and endless in his capacity to surprise and delight, demonstrated by his sudden reappearance in my life after so long, that caused me to marry him so precipitously, with so little foresight.

There’s an unspoken competition among American grad students in Middle East and related studies to be the least Orientalist and problematic and obviously by falling in love with a Turk during a hot Istanbul summer I lost this contest fair and square. But we are not mismatched as far as tastes, ways of being in the world go. The flings I had before I met Engin—ending up in someone’s scandalized parents’ apartment all the way out in Avcılar and then being driven around to fancy cafés and given expensive perfume I wouldn’t wear and then trying to fade away and having to ignore dozens of increasingly tormented and then aggressive text messages—that was my main dalliance with the Other. But Engin rented his own tiny little apartment. We like the same minor-key indie rock, hold the same vague leftish politics, think succulents are the best plants. We are urban late-capitalist late millennials, as Hugo might put it; that shared vernacular counts for a lot. I think the moment I knew we would get married was when we visited his cousin, or his uncle’s cousin, or someone’s cousin, at a planned community outside a midsize town near Yalova. The cousin was a retired municipal employee who kept bees, and we were told it was baby bee season. We camped out next to the bee box and waited for the swarm of babies to appear because evidently if you don’t catch them and hive them right away, they fly away and are lost in the universe. So we spent the day picnicking in the sun, waiting for baby bees to emerge, feeling just as rustic as we’d ever want to feel.

Sometimes I stop to consider that there is something wrong with both Engin and me, because of my many Turkish colleagues in graduate school none of them married Americans; two of my male Turkish friends told me they wouldn’t consider it. Engin is different from those friends. I mean he is educated but not like they are—he went to Yıldız Technical University and took a longer-than-customary time to graduate, and they went to Robert College and then on to Bosphorus University or Harvard and wrote lengthy and beautiful treatises in English on materiality in Ottoman culture. I didn’t speak Turkish with them because to do so would feel like an insult to their English. Engin’s English is functional, let’s say, I have heard him speak very shyly to my uncle Rodney, who is hardly a chatterbox. Maybe it’s one of those things that keeps a marriage fresh. Back when I first met Engin, when I worked in the school, I had a different sort of Turkish colleagues, polished young women who spoke excellent English and were earning teaching credentials and dressed up beautifully every day. I could tell they found Engin vaguely troubling—some youthful caste and gender difference I never stopped trying and failing to translate to its American equivalent. He lived alone and slept with wayward Americans; they lived at home and married young, half of them divorcing right away as though the relief of being out of the house was enough. “He works in a bar ?” One of them laughed when I told them about Engin the first time. Aman aman. Oh my. They always talked about setting me up with their brothers cousins friends, but never did.