Lydia Kiesling - The Golden State

Anyway although it was foolhardy from an immigration protocol standpoint we had a big dinner in Istanbul but we told everyone to assiduously avoid thinking of it as a wedding so we didn’t get nailed by USCIS if they found for example a Facebook photo that appeared marital. The night before the dinner Pelin threw me a semi-ironic henna night in her apartment—a relief since like all once-traditional events in late capitalist urban environments the henna night sometimes takes the form of a giant boondoggle with hotel, caterers, costume changes, god forbid a belly dancer, etc. But this was just her and Engin’s select relatives and friends and two women I invited from my teaching days and they all made jokes I didn’t understand and sang “Yüksek Yüksek Tepelere” or “To the High High Hills” which has lines like “I miss my mother, I miss my village” and I got drunk and cried and everyone laughed because crying was actually the thing to do since historically you were facing the loss of your hymen the onslaught of your mother-in-law and the advent of family life and everything that comes with it. Then we went out to a bar and met Engin and we danced to a terrible pop song called “Married, Happy, with Kids.”

I loved the nonwedding dinner. My godparents who had been posted in Nicosia with my parents were now posted in Tbilisi and they came all the way to Istanbul in honor of my mom and dad and discreetly avoided consular discussion. Murat, his gallbladder healed and in Istanbul for a sabbatical, came in spite of his reservations about the marriage and the Ph.D., and though he was obviously still grumpy with me, he and his wife were charming with Engin’s dad who had been forced to buy a new suit and tame his beard for the occasion. Murat is married to a Dane and they are one of a handful of dual-national marriages I know, which all seem to follow one of two models, which is either both parties are super classy intellectual types who meet in some prestigious university setting, or summer-love style unions that take place between people who are highly mismatched class-wise, like a bluestocking and a villager, and are presumably predicated on very strong mutual attraction. Engin and I don’t seem to fit into either of these models.

Anyway at the dinner I spoke English with my godparents and Turkish with everyone else and my hair was perfect and my makeup was perfect and my dress was an ivory shantung tea-length thing I extravagantly ordered from Neiman Marcus and had shipped to Uncle Rodney, who dutifully shipped it to me. When I was tipsy in the bathroom I looked at myself in the mirror and wondered if it was all real. And then I went back out and danced with Engin’s friends from the bar and with Pelin and with my godparents and it felt real, sort of. People had spent money to fly in an airplane to sit at a table with us; logistics had been wrangled. Sometimes I look back and wonder whether I was so hell-bent on marrying Engin because I wanted to play at being a cosmopolitan, but I’ve met a lot of men Turkish and otherwise and never wanted to marry any of them and that’s really the best answer I can give myself. It was real, if risky. Marriage is always a risk.

Rodney didn’t come to this obviously but along with my dress he tucked a check for $500 into the package which made me sob like a child when I opened it, feeling so coddled by everyone. He officiated our official U.S. wedding, which took place in his backyard in Quincy at the very end of Engin’s tourist visa. Two of my friends from grad school who spoke Turkish flew to SFO drove up rented a cabin and ate tri-tip sandwiches and I wore my dress from the Istanbul party. I cried a lot more at that one because my family’s absence—Mom’s absence—felt so pronounced, and because I was terrified USCIS was going to suss out the lie.

Sometimes I would feel the ground give way beneath my feet—on the henna night—or when we landed in SFO the first time and Engin was suddenly my responsibility as a U.S. citizen and wife to lovingly care for and squire around and make sure he was having a good time and secure the correct citizenship status for (a task I have so far failed dismally at). But throughout our various weddings and comings and goings, we would periodically ask each other if we were okay, and we were.

I pull on my cigarette and look around at my çeyiz and get the feeling that sometimes comes over me when I think of Engin, one that has nothing to do with Skype, when my brain can manage to slough off the impedimenta of logistics and access the feeling of whole-body contentment and gratitude and need, the obvious core of everything I feel about him and which I can only hope will continue to be there existing at some unseen level, shaping decisions and material outcomes until we both die.

I put out the cigarette. The smoke collecting in the garage has a soporific, mildly sickening effect and I stand up with effort and open a box full of what appear to be suzani pillowcases that I definitely want at some point but not now, having no decorative pillows to put in them, and another box with twenty-five different pomegranate things, glass pomegranates and ceramic pomegranates and actual dried pomegranates. For reasons unknown, my mom collected pomegranates. This box takes the wind out of me a little. I take one off the top, a rough-glazed rustic-looking clay one, and close the box. I’ll put this one in my office. Or in our bedroom. Or maybe I’ll carry it to Turkey. I don’t know. I go back into the house and set it on the nightstand and lie down on the bed.

Today is Sunday and Honey is up at 5:40 which is excruciating but it is one of the mornings I love, where she can’t stop kissing me and hugging me and laying her face on my face and her eyes shine with joy that is summoned just by my very existence. Normally when she wakes up so early and I try to get her into the bed for a cuddle there’s nothing doing; she says “Nyo” in an indignant nasal tone and she windmills her body around so her legs jut off the bed and she inches herself off hits the ground and starts tearing around the house. But this morning I lift her from the Pack ’n Play get back into bed and kiss her all over and she laughs her little seal’s bark of a laugh, the laugh of a person who hasn’t fully learned how to laugh properly, and I lay her on top of my body and she is all love and melting hugs and rolls off me to rest her head on the pillow and put her arms and legs across the bed like a starfish, periodically doing little jumps and jolts as though making sure the energy filling her small body is evenly distributed, then letting me lay my arm across her and get cozy and think she is just such a nice little tiny person. I feel the greatest sense of well-being available for love or money and I think Thank you God or whoever for this moment. After forty-five minutes of more or less unbroken cuddles touching my face poking my eyes saying “DAH” into my mouth she scoots herself off the bed ready for the day and it is time for breakfast, an egg and a banana and when that is done it is 7:15. If we were at home this would be a very respectable time for us to have finished breakfast, and I might have a chance to actually bathe while she stood next to the bathtub holding the shower curtain and crying for me to come out. It might actually have given me a chance to select my outfit for the day with some modicum of care for the sheer pleasure of looking respectable or like an attractive woman in the waning years of her prime. Every day I envy Meredith her beautiful clothes, expensive clothes or unusual clothes she finds on her prodigious travels. But she is also eighty pounds, bird bones that can perch as they are meant to on precipitous heels, visible panty lines that look somehow louche and obscurely elegant but would look obscene on an ass like mine.