Lydia Kiesling - The Golden State

I see the name of my grandparents’ Episcopal church, where I was baptized lo these many years ago. Services Sunday at ten and for no reason I can name I think we should go and just see what it’s like and pass the time. It will take half an hour to walk there so I think we can leave at 9:20 and stop at Sal’s so that we can communicate to Engin that we will not be available for our scheduled call until later in the day. I pause for my daily feeling of annoyance at the difficulty of communicating overseas and while the difference between what is available now and what it used to be like for example when we lived in Nicosia it is somehow more annoying now, the Skype calls with an echo or video but no sound or sound but no video or work in one room but cut off when you wander into an electronic shadow or the Wi-Fi relies on ancient copper lines that don’t really work. I should get an iPhone so we could FaceTime but my non-iPhone is half the price. I could theoretically get the Institute to pay for it; the Institute, meaning the taxpayers and the Saudis, pays for absolutely everything Hugo and Meredith put their hands on, but I don’t like the idea of HR somehow listening to my phone calls and what if god forbid I wanted to send Engin a sexy photo, should that urge ever happen to arise. Maybe the thing really is that now we have these tools there’s the expectation that you will always be in touch. Overseas we called my grandparents every two weeks and we wrote letters and that was it and it was just easier than doing this Skype dance with all its awful reminders that the person you want to be here is not here. But Honey has to see her father’s face as much as she can while he’s not here, I think, and start crying, and I’m proud of myself because I think it’s been about two days since the last time I cried.

But maybe church will… do something for us. Maybe we’ll have a visitation. If nothing else by the time church is over and we go back home it will be time for lunch and then a long nap and if I’m honest a drink and maybe in the afternoon we can drive out to Antelope Meadows where I seem to remember there is a dilapidated swing set and a view of waving grasses and a man-made lake surrounded by spiky grass and gopher holes. A nice Sunday evening just the gals, and maybe I can convince myself to go back to work tomorrow or the next day or the next or the one after that.

Honey is silent now and I take a shower and the feeling of hot water on my skin and solitude and respite is so enormous I have a sensation that borders on randiness and take the head of the shower which is removable and spray it between my legs at varying distances and think about Tom Hardy until thirty seconds later I come in a painful, spasmodic way that feels incomplete, a misfired sneeze but I guess a sneeze nonetheless. I dry myself brush out my knotted hair put on jeans and the shirt I was wearing when I left the Institute. I lay out Honey’s hat and the sunscreen and clean diaper and pack away the changing pad into the backpack with a bag full of raisins and a sippy cup filled with water and two books and a spare pants and there are twenty minutes remaining to sit on the deck and be clean and fresh and smoke two cigarettes and stand up feeling light-headed and ethereal. There’s a breeze and it rattles the goat bell my mom brought my grandparents from Cyprus. I hear its unmistakable goat-summoning sound and I have suddenly the strongest sense memory I’ve ever had, so strong I touch the arms of my deck chair to know I’m here. Mom and I were on Chios, before the Syrian war, before the refugee crisis, doing a kind of Dad memorial trip to old haunts. I was a teen. We stayed at a village outfit called Aphrodite Rentrooms, a damp, spartan affair with austere beds side by side. We woke up from an Aegean afternoon nap to the sound of a hundred goat bells in the olive grove below, and we sat on the balcony eating pistachios and watched a sea of goats return home in the pink afternoon light. I try to remember the light, my mother in a white nightie in the little bed across from mine. The breeze dies and the goat bell is silent.

I wash my hands and put on lotion to mask the smell of smoke which never really comes off and I remember on that same trip a Dutch couple from the hotel invited us to eat dinner with them and the man pounded on the table about immigrants. “They say I’m Dutch,” he yelled. “I’m black as my shoe but I’m Dutch.” I shake my head like my dad and go into Honey’s room touch her hand and she stirs. I touch her cheek and she stirs again and I say “Did we have a nice snooze” and she blinks at me and then her face wrinkles as though she will cry but then settles itself into more of a look of assessment, a serious look, and then she smiles, the way she has of what I think they call self-soothing; she is always adapting to her environments.

I put on more sunscreen and the hat and attach the Ergo for wearing her on my back which is challenging to do by yourself. I sit her on the bed and then squat down before her and sort of scoop her onto my back and hold her there with one arm behind my back while the other arm fumbles for straps and despite an instant and stabbing cramp in my side I manage to feed the buckle through the safety loop and then snap it tight and I adjust her and we look in the mirror and she smiles a big smile showing all her tiny teeth and I jump up and down to get her straightened out and she laughs and I put the backpack with her diapers etc. on frontways and say “We’re off!” and we set out for the long walk across town, all the way down Main Street almost to the other end. I hand Honey half a banana and we plod along until she says “Eh eh eh aaaaaah” in my ear and I give her the rest of the banana and there’s banana in my hair. Sal’s it turns out is closed at 9:40 on a Sunday but I huddle near the door and get out my phone and find I can still use its Internet. I ignore my flurry of WhatsApp notifications and open Skype. Engin is not logged on so I call his phone. He answers and I hear festive hubbub in the background. “Canım benim” he says, and I say “canım benim.” “You’re early,” he says, and I say “We’re, um, going out and so I’m calling you to say we won’t be able to call you at ten-thirty.” “Where are you going,” he asks, and it takes me a minute to remember the word “church,” so seldom have I used it. Like “ecclesiastical,” like French église. Ikliz, I say but no, he corrects me, kilise. “It sounds strange I know,” I say. He laughs. “Church! Why?” “I don’t know, Engin. We’re bored. You know I used to go with my mom.” “American religious fundamentalism is influencing my wife,” he says to someone, which annoys me. “Pelin says don’t go,” he says to me and I hear the voice of my sister-in-law in the background. “Where are you?” I ask. “We’re having beers with Pelin and Savaş on the Kordon. We decided to go to visit Dad. Tomorrow we’ll go to the beach.” The fucking beach. Pelin is beautiful beautiful beautiful and I wither momentarily thinking about her in a bathing suit, a sight I’ve been subjected to previously in a harmful manner, although jealousy isn’t quite right here since she is after all Engin’s sister, but even if he cannot lust for her exactly she can acclimatize him to the way that women are supposed to look and I know I do not look, and Pelin is the mother of a teenager and still looks the way she does. “How nice,” I say. “Let’s talk tomorrow, then.” Engin sounds bemused. “Okay. But I can still talk on the Kordon. How long is your church?” “I don’t know, I haven’t been in years. An hour probably.” Honey begins squawking. “It’s your baba” I tell her and hold up the phone by my shoulder so she can hear it from my back. She gets her mitts on the phone and tries to turn it to look at the screen as though to see his face. “No, sweetheart, he’s not on the screen, just his voice, my love.” “I’ve got to go,” I tell Engin. “Let’s talk tomorrow.” I feel unaccountably desperate to get off the phone, the futility of conversation alighting on me suddenly like a stinking, malevolent seabird. “I love you I kiss you bye bye,” and press the red button while he is still saying something.