Lydia Kiesling - The Golden State

I’m rummaging in a cupboard looking for nuts when I find Grandma’s cocktail napkins printed with cattle brands and delighted with this discovery observe her sacred five o’clock cocktail hour on the deck, where Honey is more or less penned in with the books I set down for her. I can’t find the nuts but I have two petite screwdrivers and the better part of a bag of Lays. I would like to have a cigarette out here in the thin air but I do not smoke in front of Honey because that is the worst thing you can do to your child according to experts. I am not used to drinking liquor instead of beer and I thrill a little at the heat it sends across my limbs and then when I think about dinner I decide we might as well just walk over to the damn Golden Spike again. The bank account must be closer to $200 now, but I vow that I will do a thorough investigation of our finances in due time. This is a kind of emergency, I say, and norms are set aside during an emergency.

“We’re going out,” I say to Honey, and I prattle cheerily to her as I tote her around the house, squatting down to pick up her changing pad and put it on the table and pick up her diapers and put them on the table and pick up her wipes and put them on the table and pick up her two sections of The Very Hungry Caterpillar which she tore in half the other night when she was damp from her bath and put them on the table, and then put all the things into the bag. She chortles every time I squat down and say “WHOA” and stand up and say “WHOA.” And then I get her string cheese from the fridge and put it into the bag, and find her socks on the floor and set her on the counter and put on the socks and shoes and then we are finally ready to go and I think about what drink I am going to get when we get there to keep the festive feeling going.

Honey is reasonable on the walk over, holds my hand over the hillocks and listens when I tell her we have to look both ways crossing the train tracks, so I am cautiously optimistic that there is no fractiousness on the horizon and we can have a nice dinner.

The restaurant has a dark bar off the main dining area through a beaded plastic half-curtain, one I’ve only ever been in for my grandmother’s wake. Tonight I hear a cheery “Hi” from its depths as I wait at the hostess stand and look through to see Cindy Cooper and a big be-mustached man I don’t know sitting in one of the leatherette easy chairs in the bar area. She waves us over. “On Sunday they’ve got Picon punch for four bucks,” she tells me, this is a horrible Basque drink with almond liqueur but four bucks is four bucks, and she says “Sunday” like Sundy too. I ask her whether she thinks it’s okay to have Honey in the bar area and the bartender looks at me like This is America ain’t it so I pull up a chair and Honey sits on my lap and I give her a string cheese from my bag and she smiles happily at Cindy and the man who it turns out is Cindy’s boyfriend Ed van Voorhees, who I’ve heard about from Uncle Rodney and I realize must be the brother of Sal, she of the café. Ed comes from a big ranching family but is I think a Pepsi distributor spreading Pepsis across the west so there’s got to be a story there, gambling or whatnot.

“I read your letter in the paper,” I tell her. Ed slaps Cindy’s back and hoots and Cindy looks defiantly at me even though I think my tone of voice is neutral and she says “Well I’m not really one to write a letter to the paper but I just felt it was right now that the supervisors are gonna put it to a vote.” “You know my Grandma Cora worked for the BLM,” I tell her, intending it as a mild rebuke. “Damn near everybody worked for the BLM in this town,” Cindy says. “But the head honchos don’t live here and they can’t keep telling us how to run things.” “My uncle Rodney wrote a letter too,” I say. “He says the North State needs a lot of government support.” “Well Rod works for the Forest Service don’t he,” says Ed, just as Cindy says, “If we had some industries up here we wouldn’t need the state’s money.” Ed nods. “We can’t all be pencil pushers,” he says, which is unjust to Uncle Rodney who is outside or in his truck about half of most days. Ed must see me narrow my eyes because he then says, “Hey—I love Rod. We go all the way back to kindergarten.”

Everyone’s sense of propriety spurs us to move on. I ask Cindy where she’s from intending it to be a courteous neutral question but she’s from San Bernardino, way south, way way south. Flatlander, I think, with the tiniest tribal thrill, and she obviously is sensitive to notions of authenticity herself because she adds, “Been up here ten years, though,” and I say, “Ah,” and she says, “I came up with my ex. He’s gone now but I knew this was home as soon as I got here” which strikes me as remarkable, to have that reaction on your first visit.

Ed asks me what I do and Cindy tells him that I work at the University. “You teach down there?” he says, which is what most people justifiably think might be the primary activity at the premier public university in the state but is not in fact the case. “Not exactly,” I say. “I work at a research institute for Islamic societies.” “Like ISIS?” he asks me. Which, Jesus. At the University it is basically considered indecent to mention ISIS unless it is in the form of a question like “Whither Transnational Movements in the Age of ISIS?” “No,” I say. “You know, like any country where there’s a shared Islamic past. Like Turkey or Morocco or, uh, Jordan,” trying to name places where there will be fewer bad associations. “Or Indonesia,” I add, since this is technically part of our mission along with manifold places in sub-Saharan Africa which are all horribly underrepresented in the Institute’s programming due to the many swirling complex currents of religious studies area studies history anthropology political science and how they do and do not interact and do and do not reflect and refract aspects of scholarship and society.

“Well what do you-all think about ISIS?” he asks. I wish we were on campus and I could defer to Hugo or Meredith since it is really against protocol for me to talk about Issues as opposed to Programs. I am supposed to plan and find funding and administer, not have Ideas, although paradoxically I would never have been hired without a demonstrated interest in Ideas, since Hugo and Meredith are terrible snobs about credentials and need someone to write their research proposals and keep them company and Karen was a marketing major and has never left the country. That said I don’t really know anything about ISIS, what I do know is a hundred Turkish verbs that begin with k , but I have half-listened to many lectures and panels that I try to recall now. “Well, a lot of people don’t think that ISIS really counts as an Islamic group,” I say as I suck down my drink, quickly because the taste of almonds makes me gag. “They kill a lot of people who are Muslim.” “But they’re running a whole country on Islamic Law,” Cindy tells me. “That’s the whole thing they want.” “There are a lot of different interpretations of what Islamic Law means,” I say. “Some people think they are actually operating more like a nation state, like they decide what they want to do and then they find the justification for it later. Like, the uh, U.S. does.”

I can feel the booze zip like a friendly fire through my veins. “It’s kind of like if we want to blow up some person in another country we do it and then we do some law thing to make it legal afterward.” This feels like the wrong tack. There is a litany anyone who is interested in the “Muslim world” aka a huge swath of the known world knows: Without Islam we wouldn’t have algebra or astronomy. Or Plato, whom the Arab scholars brought forth from obscurity for the Europeans to froth over. Not to mention we wouldn’t have Hafez or Rumi or Yunus Emre or Ibn Khaldun. We wouldn’t have the Registan or the Dome of the Rock or the Umayyad Mosque—well, that’s gone now I think. I go with “Muslims consider Jesus a prophet too, you know.” Cindy rolls her eyes but Ed says “Well, that’s interesting. Huh. I did not know that.” But I’m not done, I’m drunk and I must now issue my verbal Facebook meme. “There are over a billion Muslims including my husband’s family and the majority of them don’t want anything to do with ISIS or even know what ISIS is about,” I say, with a pang as I picture again his wounded expression, his onetime Barış Manço mustache or maybe it’s Erkin Koray who had the mustache. But what I know from my deceased dad is that diplomacy is hard and requires dissembling and betrayal.