Lydia Kiesling - The Golden State

I think the lie will fly—I have never to my knowledge mentioned the deadness of my grandparents and in fact Hugo has already written back. “Take as much time as you need” and I feel an embarrassing surge of gratitude and shame. They are actually always very nice and accommodating to me. Then I just feel relieved about my reprieve, as though I have already absorbed my right to this caretaking time for a grandmother who has in fact been dead for years. When my grandmother actually died it was a relief because she had been married to my grandfather for almost sixty years and when he died it was obvious she had no reason to go on. The thought of Engin and me being married for sixty years and dying of grief at the other’s passing seems vanishingly small but I close my eyes for a moment and try to picture it, we are in our stone shack by the Aegean, Honey is there, she has a family, is her family Turkish? Is she? Do we have any other kids? I open my eyes, momentarily overwhelmed. Better to just picture an ancient version of Engin and me on a bench under an olive tree not saying anything at all. I briefly picture us on the couch in the mobile home and then I’m done daydreaming for the time being. I put my chin gently on the top of Honey’s head for a moment and give her hair a sniff.

The crone has come! She scoots the door open with one whole side of her body and is in by the time I make a half-hearted move to stand up and get it for her. She takes one very slow step at a time, holding a cane before her. Her back is ramrod straight, and she is very petite and wearing a white turtleneck and a navy skirt and white Reeboks with an ample sole. I am transfixed by her but when she reaches the table next to us I snap from the reverie and half-stand and pull a seat out for her. “The little one is sleeping,” she observes. “Normally she’s squirming around.” This seems like a promising acknowledgment of our past interactions. She goes up to the counter and orders something and shuffles back and sits down. “How old is she?” “Sixteen months last week,” I say very brightly. “Sweet little Turkish baby,” she says. “Well,” I say. “Half Turkish, half Californian!” She sits down at the table next to the one where I’m standing and I seat myself taking care not to jostle Honey who is still doing her little-big baby snores in my chest.

“Where are you from?” I venture.

“I’m from a little town in the Rockies. But now I live on a farm near Lake Michigan.”

“By yourself?” I wonder aloud.

“More or less. I have some friends who kind of look after me. Family friends.” She looks down at her hands and there’s a long pause. “They are in a snit with me about this trip. I drove all the way out here myself, if you can believe it. They didn’t want me to do it.” This genuinely shocks me, and it registers on my face which is always registering things and she gives a kind of harrumphing laugh.

“How long did that take you?”

“Something like two weeks. First I stopped in my hometown.”

“And why… here,” I say, I mean of all places.

“During the war my husband worked not too far from here, in a forestry camp.” I must have looked quizzical. “He was a conscientious objector. A pacifist, you know. They had camps for them out here.” “Huh,” I say. The only camp I know of that is near here is the Tule Lake internment camp where they put Japanese-Americans which nobody here ever talks about I don’t think. Honey stirs but then settles back in, her body dragging down on the straps of the Ergo.

“I visited him one time before we were married, before our kids. It was maybe the nicest trip we ever took together. I just got a yen to see the place again, I guess.”

“But your friends didn’t want you to come.”

“No,” she says. “It took me weeks to convince them. They have medical power of attorney, so they might have been able to stop me, but we finally came to an agreement. I’m supposed to take my medicine and call them every day,” which seems fair to me. She looks over at the counter where Sal has produced a coffee and a hideous slab of brownie. I stand and trot up to get them, taking care not to jostle Honey. My new friend spears a corner of the brownie with a fork and brings it to her mouth with an incredibly gnarled but reasonably steady hand. I wait. There is something odd but not unpleasant about what’s going on. She doesn’t seem to care whether I’m there or not and for once I have no anxiety about divining whether that is the case. Honey is asleep and work thinks I’m bereaved and things seem just fine in this particular moment. Sal comes around and wipes a table adjacent with a rag and as she passes by I smell vinegar from the rag.

“There was a while when driving a car was the only thing that didn’t hurt,” the crone says. I want to ask how old she is but that seems rude. “I’m ninety-two,” she says, as though I had spoken aloud. “I went to the library and had the librarian search the Internet for ‘old people’ and ‘road trips’ and she found an article about some hundred-year-old fool jogging across the country. I showed Mark and Yarrow the printout.” I laugh aloud. She looks disdainfully at the rest of the brownie. “Those are my caretakers,” she adds. “Mark and Yarrow.”

“Like the flower,” I say. I must know that from my mom. “Yes, just like,” she says. “They have a little boy named Rain. They are hippie types, you might say.” She chips more of the brownie off and pushes the debris onto the tines of her fork.

“I’m kind of stalled out now, though,” she says. “I seem to have run out of steam for getting in the car. It hurts a lot more. So I’m here taking a break before pushing on.”

“What a place to take a break,” I say. “The end of the earth!” She looks around at the café.

“It has changed a lot from what I remember. We would have been here around forty-five.”

“That’s what everyone says,” I say.

The door to Sal’s opens and the teens I saw walking a few days ago come in and elevate the level of noise in the place and Honey stirs against me.

“What brings you here?” she asks.

“My mom was from here. She’s gone now and I inherited my grandparents’ house. I just came up to see how everything was looking.”

“My hometown was kind of the same way,” she says. I love the extemporaneous way she talks, she’s like an Oracle breathing fumes from a vent. “I knocked on the door of my old house—a woman was there living with her son. It was a mess, pizza boxes everywhere. Slatternly, my mother would have said. There had been a tree out in the back that I just loved, I used to sit on a swing tied to its big branch, but it was gone.” She pushes the plate with the brownie toward me and says “You can have this if you want” and I pull it toward myself because I always need a treat. “They seemed very unhappy in the house. I guess my family wasn’t very happy either, but my mother always was one for housekeeping.” She dabs her mouth with her napkin. “What’s the line, ‘Unhappy families are unhappy in their own way’?” I scan my brain. “Tolstoy,” I say. Or Dostoyevsky? I should know. She nods. “Anyway, I saw the house and I just decided to keep on going till I got somewhere I wanted to be,” she says. “Westward ho!” She grins a surprisingly vital and grin-like grin for such an old person. She’s beautiful, I think.

“Where are you staying?” I ask.

“The Arrowhead Motel, it’s called.” She raises her eyebrows. “It’s passable.”

Her eyes focus on me. “Where do you live when you aren’t here?” she asks.

“We live in the City—San Francisco,” I say. Honey is suddenly awake and squirmy. Her body is strong enough that she can put considerable strain on the Ergo when she decides she wants to be free and I have to stand and dance and hush her.