Lydia Kiesling - The Golden State

But now it is Honey and I and I am driving straight-backed right up against the wheel with my shoulders up by my ears, sweating and worrying over my precious squawking cargo and feeling so increasingly perturbed by her crying that soon I have to pull the car over again in a highway-adjacent dialysis center and cry into the steering wheel for three minutes along with her. Honey knows we have stopped the car and her crying becomes more urgent and her body begins straining against the straps of the car seat and she makes a glubbing sound and I look back at her and before I can do anything her mouth opens wide and her eyes open wide with the unmistakable panic of imminent barfing and I say “no no no” and a small torrent of milk water cheese pieces and noodle bites from daycare sprays forth onto her and the car seat and her eyes are terrified. I lunge back and am trying to unbuckle her as another torrent comes forth and then she recovers her breath and screams so I know she is not dying. I get out of the car and sprint around to her door and undo the restraints from which she is frantically trying to free herself and pick her up and first hold her at a shameful arm’s length before motherlove grinds into gear and I press her against me and cradle her hot head against my shoulder and smooth down her damp curls while she sobs. I grip her with one arm open the trunk dig in the tote bag find a T-shirt and a pack of wipes and a new onesie and I get her more or less wiped off and changed and sit her in the passenger seat and tackle the car seat with one eye on her and I am obscurely proud to see her return quickly to higher spirits and make a renewed effort with her cheese; she has a nice sense of equilibrium. I take my shirt off and put on one of Engin’s and we do a little walk around the parking lot and finally she gives me a smile and squawks merrily when I kiss her on the mouth and do a zerbert into her neck.

We have some water and she finishes the cheese and I put her back in the car seat and roll down the windows for the smell and as I move down the exit and wait for some window between the terrifying rush of enormous trucks pickups SUVs she has started up crying again. But once we get on the road and make our way through the perpetual snarl of traffic that surrounds Nut Tree and finally get through Davis and Sacramento and head into the Sierra, she is asleep, and as we say goodbye to the dusty median oleanders of the flatlands and begin to feel the incline signaling our ascent to the high country I have the slightest bit of that road-trip feeling, that opening up, the road rising up to meet us, the marginal loosening of cares.

The road is beautiful now, pine forests and limestone slabs and glimpses of Donner Lake in the distance. Once you get over the top of Donner Pass and some kind of geological divide, suddenly the forests are gone and the land is brown and stretching out for miles and miles and that’s Nevada. Then through Reno, its outer ring of subdivisions and lawns trying to be green, its downtown its modest multistory casinos and the suggestion of tree-lined neighborhoods just hidden from view of the highway. In Altavista this is the small-c city, four hours away, where Mom and Uncle Rodney bought their prom clothes and their dress-up shoes and had white-tablecloth meals at the regal art deco hotel they demolished fifteen years ago. Every time I see the trees and think of the home prices I think maybe Engin and I should try it out here, but Engin having grown up in the heart of the world’s greatest metropolis is ruined for two-bit cities, for him San Francisco is just a town, and I can’t quite picture him on this patch of desert.

Before Honey and I traverse the vast territory between Reno and Altavista we have to eat, so we stop on the Nevada side at a little tiny casino called State Lines which is where Mom and I always used to stop to get a cheeseburger for reasons that now escape me since it’s a low-lying unprepossessing building with tinted windows on a plateau overlooking the warehoused suburbs of Reno and a vast dry lakebed. When you open the door, on your left is the gambling section with indoor smoking and on the right is a diner. The people are friendly and the food is bad and the seats are vinyl and the art is mustardy paintings of waterwheels and gold-rush diggings. Honey sits on my lap and plays with the spoon and the fork and I order the jumbo hotdog and share with her, cutting her half into tiny pieces, but she whines and mostly wants to take bites off mine like a big girl.

Engin and I stopped here on our solo trip and I said as I had said for the days weeks leading up to it, “Prepare yourself for a lot of downtrodden white people.” And there were the customary white people saddled up to slots with oxygen machines and cigarettes smoldering in the ashtrays beside them, bearded men in shirts reading e.g. “Donkey Kong Is My Spirit Animal,” every one with his hat on, women with big legs and bad hair and rambunctious children. Now I am here, a white person not particularly downtrodden but with big legs bad hair and rambunctious child although she isn’t really that rambunctious, not really, and at this moment she is peaceful in my lap, happy to be out of the car happy to be smiling at the hostess who is not white but brown and who chucks Honey’s cheek and touches her curly fuzz and Honey points at a bronco in a painting and says “daggy daggy daggy,” the only real word she can say. She sucks ketchup off the French fries and I analyze her food intake today and it is unbalanced and I wonder how I will go about balancing it. I exchange smiles with two very old people sharing an enormous sandwich, he with a trucker hat and suspenders, the picture of my beloved Burdock grandfather, but this man looks menacing to me as everyone looks menacing to me lately. We finish our meal, my fingers already swelling from salt, and I stand and pluck my pants from my butt and haul Honey through the smoky side to the bathroom and I pee and there’s no changing table so I change Honey’s diaper outside in the back seat of the baking car. Zerberts zerberts and more zerberts and baby laughs and so docile getting into the car seat I think I can do this and trot around to the driver’s side with just the slightest bit of pep in my step.

We leave State Lines and Honey looks happy. I have the windows down and the hot wind is whooshing around the car and the fuzz on her head is standing up and I crane to make eye contact with her in the rearview mirror and I smile and she smiles back. I like this stretch here the most because this is the real way there, all the obstacles of Davis Sac Reno behind you and the sparse hills rolling away from the road like a moonscape and you understand you’re really going somewhere special. But it doesn’t last long before the road becomes long and monotonous and the distance starts to feel threatening and somehow irrevocable, the only movement the occasional flocks of sheep impossibly far from shelter. When Engin saw this part for the first time he said “My god, it’s like the steppe.” When I was a child we did this pilgrimage every year, hours and hours and hours in the plane and then stepping bewildered into the fog of SFO, only to get in the car and drive into this otherworld where my grandparents waited on the deck with drinks for my parents and ice cream for me. But now for me it’s only the memory that beckons, the strength of all the associations that still cling to the land and the road leading to it.

Honey is quiet and the Buick is devouring miles, the ride so smooth you don’t feel the road beneath. We are swiftly out of radio opportunities and I have to pee again but Honey is fast asleep so I press the pedal and we are flying on the empty road at ninety miles an hour until I can’t stand it anymore and find a dirt place to pull over, a forest service fire road or a rancher’s road with a cattle gate stretched across. I leave the car on and spring around to the side and pee right next to the car so I can peer in the window and keep an eye on the sleeping Honey. And then it’s back on the road, now passing the tiny depleted burgs before the Paiute border. In the distance I see a little shack with a big black flag reading “Kafir” in Arabic, which was here when Engin and I came up last time. “Bu ne yaa,” he said when he saw it. What is this? And I said, “It says kafir,” infidel, the same word in Turkish. “It’s for anti-Islam dickheads to show that they are anti-Islam dickheads.” He looked aghast and then laughed, I thought because it sounded so odd to hear the obscenity in my accent but then was informed that sik kafalı is way more obscene apparently than dickhead is in English—the type of thing where you might have to fight someone. I’m always miscalibrating profanity since you can’t learn it in a book.