Lydia Kiesling - The Golden State

Now I look at Cindy’s sign across the fence and I think Engin, you poor bastard. I get up to go in and check on Honey who has now been sleeping a very long time and my first thought as always as I approach the door is that she has probably died in her sleep. I trip over the screen door on my way into the cool house and I think I went to Turkey and was careless careless careless about everything and now I have a pretty good life and my very own sweet baby, and Ellery went with a friend and a humanitarian research agenda and a 4.2 GPA and a suitcase full of modest clothing and small gifts to pass around and she is dead before her twenty-first birthday and I can’t believe I told Maryam it was going to be the most meaningful experience of their lives.

Honey is not dead but alive and I hear her make the cry that indicates she has napped too long and deep and that returning to consciousness is like clawing the way back from death. I know this because this is how I nap too. Waking up hurts.

I wake up from a vivid sex dream before Honey starts making noise. If I do the math it probably means I can expect my period in a certain number of days. Since Honey turned four months old and my period came back my sex life—sex imaginary, I should say—has cleaved to a schedule. How else to explain three weeks of deadness in every nerve ending, and then about twenty minutes when I feel like a physical threat to every man I see, when the act of tracing my finger across the dirty BART window feels charged with sexual possibility, when I imagine sleeping with men with whom I’ve had only a cordial work-related e-mail exchange? Or even, gah, Hugo (but never Ted). And then when the mania passes you get a new e-mail or sit across from them in a meeting and they are just ordinary even repulsive people and you understand that sex is a trap.

I feel very cheerful and businesslike this morning—there are some mornings that just start out like that, where I transact matters of household or professional importance in an efficacious way. I remove the furze of orange juice and cigarettes from my teeth and I think Today things are going to be better. I am wearing the white shirt with the stew on it from dinner two nights ago. I strip naked and change Honey’s diaper. She is cheerful too and she takes great amusement in my naked body, pulling at my boobs and poking at my nipple and giving me big smiles showing all her little tiny teeth. “Nipple,” I say. I take her into the bathroom and put her down on the mat and shower with the curtain open so I can see her. She plops onto her butt and hauls herself back up and toddles over to the side of the bathtub and puts her hands into the water and cries. It is a very quick shower but it does the job. I tear through the house picking up all of our clothes and blankets and her stuffed animals and bedding from the Pack ’n Play and the dish towels and the bathmat for good measure and I stuff them all into the washing machine and wash them on hot. I feed her Cheerios and banana with a towel knotted around my body and I fill up the dishwasher with our modest dishes. I hazard a guess at the workings of the coffee machine. I read The Runaway Bunny . I put the things in the dryer. I take Honey out of her romper and put her into a clean pair of pants and a T-shirt. “It’s important to get dressed and go out into the day,” I tell her. We read three more books while she drinks milk. She prances around the living room and I watch as she learns how to step over the rags taped over the brick base of the wood stove. I’m so interested in her progress that she has gotten to the stove itself before I remember to tell her No. Not that the stove is on, of course, but it seems like stoves should always be avoided in case they are on. I have read on BabyCenter that you should not say “No” to everything that children want to do, but should instead make some other sound of guidance, like “Uh-uh,” or “Mm-mm,” and save the “No” for really bad situations. The stove does seem like one of those nonnegotiable things, so I look at her and say, gently, “No.” She puts her hand onto the little handle of the stove and yanks at it. “NO,” I bark at her, and she whips her hand back as though she’s been struck. She starts to cry. I scoop her up and put her a safe distance from the stove. “We don’t play with the stove,” I tell her. She slams her head back into the ground and starts up the desperate wailing of two evenings ago. The golden hour of morning success comes to a close and I feel the endless day stretching out before me. I try to gather up her little flailing limbs into a hug and she bites me on the shoulder, very hard. “NO” I yell and I feel like biting her back and throwing her onto the carpeted floor but instead I lay her down a little too firmly and feel very marginal.

We go outside and I set still-crying Honey down on the grass so I can look at the laptop. I see many e-mails from Hugo about THE CONFERENCE but decide not to read them. It’s Saturday, for one, I determine after a brief calculation. And enough brooding about the damn Institute, I think. I take Honey back inside. She is still oddly fussy and she wants to be put down and then she wants to be picked up and then she flails and then she’s back down and then she’s back up. Maybe she’s getting new molars, teeth are always the explanation for everything it seems like. I don’t have very many toys up here for her to play with so I get out a bunch of Grandma’s wooden spoons, which are still in the ceramic pot by the sink where she kept them. Honey promptly hits herself in the forehead with one of them and cries again when I take it away so I pick her up and coo.

The clothes are dry. I pack up Honey in the stroller with her stuffed animals and we begin the walk to Sal’s Café. I have also read that you are supposed to talk constantly to small children, this being the major thing that separates the smart and successful ones from their unfortunate peers. I always found this difficult when Honey was a very small infant but now I get the impression that she is actually interested in my voice. She is calm now and reasonably cheerful so I say “Look at that, that’s Grandma’s birch tree” and “Look at that, that’s a pickup truck, and there’s the split-rail fence, and there’s the tumbleweed, and there’s the sage, and OH LOOK HONEY IT’S A LITTLE COVEY OF QUAIL!!! Oh, look at the quail, Honey!!! Do you know what a quail is? It’s a little bird, and in a group you call them a ‘covey.’” “App, app, app!” Honey says, straining to get out of her stroller. I take her out and set her down on her feet in the empty street, and she runs toward the quail screaming with untrammeled joy and they immediately swarm through the fence and into the waste beyond Deakins Park. Honey stands looking after them bereft and I put her back into the stroller. It is 9:30 a.m. “There’s a blue jay, and there’s another blue jay, and there’s the pile of garbage, and there’s the Mormon Church, which is brand-new, and there’s the railroad, and there’s the Golden Spike where we went two nights ago, and down the road is Manny’s Bar. Your daddy and I went there once and struck up a conversation with the guy who installed Grandma and Grandpa’s deck and he bought us a beer.” We don’t see a single human being, although there are cars briskly passing through the intersection where state route meets state route.

When we arrive at Sal’s the crone is there again in the same spot in the corner. “Good morning,” I say to her. I start out to say Merhaba but the word dies in my throat a little and I turn it into a cough because I have to assume I imagined that she said it yesterday because I am I guess losing my mind. I’ve forgotten to fill the sippy cup with milk so I buy myself a coffee and a thing of milk from Sal and sit at a table adjacent to the crone so as to allow for easy intercourse. I pour the milk ineptly into Honey’s cup, trying to fend off Honey’s paws. “Heh heh eh eh” she says, which is what she says when she wants something, becoming increasingly distressed and needful until she begins crying for the milk. I give her the milk. I wipe the spilled milk from the table with the edge of my sleeve. I take out the computer. I open the computer and glance furtively at the crone, who is taking very slow, very small sips from a cup of black coffee.