Lydia Kiesling - The Golden State

It occurs to me now in full force that if I do in fact abandon my job I will lose my gold-plated university health insurance and I conservatively estimate that whatever alternate mechanism I take advantage of if I do not resume the job will be $700 per month if we stay here, and what if one of my dire nighttime imaginings comes true, what if we are sickened or maimed, what then?

I look at the Institute e-mail and see 165 unread e-mails which is actually better than I expected, it is 5:32 a.m. and I could conceivably read through all of these before Honey wakes up. I have the brief and insane idea that I could just work “from home” here in Altavista and not have to pay rent in the City but there are several reasons why that won’t work one being that Hugo would never allow it, he likes to have as many attractive and competent women bustling around his person as possible, and I’m still highly competent at least and Hugo assures me in his ludicrously inappropriate way that I will return to myself as long as I don’t have any other children. Two being Internet which is needed in order to access the VPN that will get me on the network drives. The final and most important thing is Honey because I obviously can’t sit in front of the computer while she just rolls around on the floor all day, although I often stare at my phone while she rolls around the floor. If I am going to work anyway and Honey is not going to have my attention she may as well go back to daycare and I may as well go back to the office and we may as well wash all the bedding and fold it up and sweep the floor and mop it and vacuum the carpet and make Grandma and Grandpa’s bed and tape some cardboard over the soft place on the bathroom windowsill and turn down the thermostat and set the timer on the lights and lock and close the doors behind us.

Or we could go somewhere else. There is something almost sexually pleasing about this thought. I could take thirty-five dollars from the checking and go to Joie de Vivre which is the town’s sole beauty establishment and have my hair washed and blown out and I could moisturize my face with the ancient cold cream in the bathroom cabinet and iron my white blouse and put on Grandma’s jet-black fur coat from Gray Reid’s in Reno circa 1972 and put Honey in her overalls and we could polish up the Buick and hit the road and go somewhere where we will step out and really be somebody.

I am feeling deeply criminal about my absence from work but the truth according to my lizard brain is that it is nearly impossible to be fired from the University, I mean various Vice Provosts are always groping their colleagues and it takes years before any action is taken. Moreover Hugo and Meredith are so divorced from the Deep Administrative State, HR and Purchasing and so forth—a sort of parallel army of administrators with less education who all the specialized administrators like ourselves loathe and condescend to—and since both Hugo and Meredith often contravene every employment rule by having me fill out their HR paperwork for raises promotions etc., not to mention my own performance evaluations, it’s highly unlikely they could get it together to file the piece of paper that would for example inform Payroll that I was gone.

When I think about all this some muscle in the exact center of my body constricts. I do not want to fill out any more paperwork of any kind. I do not want to be referred to as Assistant in anyone’s e-mail. I do not want to look at the CV of a stranger and google them and write a letter of recommendation based on this information and sign someone else’s name to it, someone who has known this person and read their papers and met with them privately and in classroom settings for seven years. I do not want to deal with THE CONFERENCE for weeks culminating in having to stand in front of a room full of people sweating trying to make someone’s PowerPoint work because they didn’t let anyone know in advance that they needed audio. I cannot manage both my own sense of being over- and underutilized and that of Karen who shares my every grievance but makes 40 percent less money. I cannot hear Brad our central campus fundraising guy exclaim “Salam Alaikum” with his arms flung open in wide embrace whenever a rich Muslim visits the Institute. I cannot escort the Al-Ihsan guy around the campus with his hand on my elbow. Crucially, I cannot go in and meet with the Office of Risk Management to give my testimony regarding the Simpson and Khoury families’ pending litigation regarding the taxi to the Fidanlik Park refugee camp outside of Diyarbakır. Another brain, not the lizard, tells me that this last one is the one thing that I actually have to do.

It is already 7:15 when I have done a rough inventory of e-mails and Honey will coo any minute so I go inside and wash my hands and slice a banana into very exact half-inch slices and get out two eggs, so many eggs we are eating, too many eggs, and fly around the house picking things up. We didn’t bring very much stuff up here but what we did bring has multiplied in the way of children’s things and there are single socks and stuffed animals I don’t even remember packing and books and the ubiquitous halves of The Very Hungry Caterpillar and the many bibs and wipes I use to wipe her nose which is always runny but which the pediatrician assures me is no cause for concern.

She wakes. Breakfast. Change the dressing of her finger, a circumstance to which she has already adjusted, the lamb.

Every time I get used to something with Honey it changes, which I am told by BabyCenter is normal, so I do not have a real sense of when her naptime is anymore—it used to be very regular back when she had two, but now I don’t really know if she has two still or wants to have them. Sometimes I put her in and she talks to herself for an hour and sleeps for thirty minutes and sometimes she sleeps for three hours. I don’t know. On our morning walk to Sal’s I put her in the Ergo frontways, she’s almost too big for this configuration and dangles off me like an overgrown appendage but I love carrying her like this, I feel so secure with her right on my front, and she rubs her eyes and rubs her eyes and yawns and looks grumpily drunkenly up at me and by the time we arrive at the hotel she has actually gone to sleep. I don’t want to deny her or myself this bonus nap so I wonder if I sit gingerly I might open the computer and see if I can’t answer one of the 165 e-mails. The crone is not yet here, only a tidy-looking man who looks exactly like my uncle Rodney with a beard and a tucked-in T-shirt and cell phone holster and definitely a gun somewhere, reading the paper and eating a muffin. I order coffee and a glass of water.

My phone buzzes to life in the Wi-Fi enabled sanctuary. Daycare writes to me on WeChat. “We were worried about Honey,” she says, and I feel a pulse of shame so strong I worry it will wake the sleeping baby in her pouch. “I’m so sorry,” I type. “She is fine. We went on a trip to my grandparents. We will be back hopefully next week,” I say, which I hope is true. “Please do not worry, she is fine.” She sends me an emoji of a cat holding a rose and a checkmark that says “OK.”

I decide to address Meredith and Hugo. I find the last of each of their e-mails and see something from Hugo about can I deal with getting his honorarium expedited from someplace where he went to give a lecture about Casualties of Capital which is not my job but Karen is on vacation. “Dear Meredith and Hugo,” I write. “I want to apologize for my absence of the last few days—Honey and I have been ill and now to compound this my grandmother is also very ill, so we are in her hometown trying to sort out her medical situation. There isn’t reliable Internet so I have been a little out of reach. I will of course be taking these days as sick time but will check over my e-mail and take care of anything that is urgent. Please let me know if either of you need anything at all.” I hope Karen is having a nice vacation from constantly upgrading Hugo’s flights against all state and institutional regulations and fighting to get justification signatures from the relevant authorities after the fact.