Lydia Kiesling - The Golden State

The crone reaches a hand out to touch Honey’s foot, which Honey swiftly kicks away, and I grab it and hold it tight and say “Gentle” and the crone’s hand stays hovering in the air, grasping at nothing. Then she pats around her person and her hair and then very slowly and stiffly stands up and says “Well, I’m off” and starts to shuffle away without so much as a by- your-leave. Normally I would wonder whether I offended her but there is Honey to deal with and I take Honey out of the pack and give her a string cheese and set her down, and she stumbles and puts both hands on the ground with her butt in the air and comes up with hair and fuzz all over the cheese. I dip a napkin into my water glass and wipe it off more or less and return it to her. We open the computer and Skype Engin. He clicks on and I see he is somewhere not his mother’s, appears to be smoking a cigarette on an unknown balcony with café lights and I wonder whose balcony what balcony and then I think Jesus he gets to have fun , and feel momentarily so pissed and bewildered that someone could be out there having fun at a party instead of drinking with Islamophobes and dealing with torn baby fingers but his face lights up when he blows kisses to Honey and she looks at him and waves furiously and they babble to each other and I again say a small prayer of thanks that she doesn’t break his heart by being indifferent to the sight of him on the screen. Then he looks at me and says “My love.” And I say it back and then he says “I was hoping when you opened the computer there would be some news but based on the view you haven’t gone home yet.” “No,” I say. “I’m paralyzed. I’m the nymph who turned into a tree.” I don’t remember the Turkish word for nymph so I say the latter in English and he looks puzzled but I decide not to clarify and say “I just need a few more days to make a plan.”

“The church was depressing,” I go on. “Only six people. We left early.”

“It’s depressing there,” he says. “You should go home.” He looks exasperated and despairing and I feel like screaming and I ask where he is and he says Sema his friend from high school is having a party and then I remember again how much he gave up to come and marry me, a whole life lived in one city and all the dense social webs thus accumulated, and what it must feel like when they are severed and now what it feels like to try and repair them all. “I’ll go back this week,” I say, and he communes a little longer with Honey and asks what happened to her finger and I tell him she fell and that’s it and then I let him go back to his balcony party, the lights of the city glittering behind him.

I allow Honey to run around a little outside Sal’s on the wide empty sidewalk and then I hold her hand and we slowly walk to the little town park which is farther down the road from the hotel, just before the turn to the Desert Sunrise casino and which I had forgotten about until now. She runs into the grass and back in the trees is lo and behold a tiny playground and she screams, actually screams with joy and runs clumsily toward it and I laugh at the transformation and then immediately think Christ what an asshole I am that we haven’t just gone to the damn playground. I get her into one of the baby swings and push her and first she looks thrilled but then as she feels her stomach drop her face crumples and she cries and strains her arms toward me and I feel sad that she might be a physical coward like me consigned to hate amusement parks and I give her another little push to see if she will acclimate but she wails and I pick her up and hold her close and we stand together looking at the slide and agree we will try that one next time.

I put her back in the Ergo and we start the walk home and I remember the library, a teeny-tiny cheerful brick-fronted building near the cemetery, and we detour there. An elderly woman with short white hair is sitting at a cramped desk inside and she greets us pleasantly and asks what we are looking for. I ask whether I can use my San Francisco library card and she says she’ll have to make up a new one for Paiute which takes five seconds since it’s a piece of paper she fills out with a pencil. I scan the bulletin board with notes about job placements and the “Tour of Europe” evening program. I check out some board books for Honey, so worn they feel like fabric, and I find Anna Karenina and check the line and I was right it is Tolstoy and I get that and Jurassic Park because I want something my brain can just kind of ooze over without effort.

We get home and I want to give Honey a nap but she had the weird morning nap and she appears now to be full of beans so I let her run around the yard, and I sit against the base of the deck, immobilized by boredom and desperate for a cigarette. I remember my new books but I’m not feeling up for the unhappy families different in their own way so I start in on Jurassic Park darting my eyes up at Honey now and again and then I see Cindy come out of her house looking unusually spruce in a jacket and purple blouse tucked into her jeans.

“How’s the baby’s finger,” she asks me, and I point to Honey on the grass, proof of life. “It’s fine. We cleaned it out and she has a nice Band-Aid. She’s being a big girl.” Cindy nods. “That’s good,” she says. “Nasty cut.”

“Thanks again for helping us with that,” I say. “I was terrified,” and she just grunts.

“Where are you off to looking so nice?” I ask. “Board of Supervisors,” she tells me. “It’s the vote today.”

“Are they actually voting to leave the state of California today?” I was too interested in the letters in the paper to apprehend this fact. “No,” says Cindy. “This is the first in a series of steps,” sounding like she’s reading off a cue card. “It’s not a resolution or an ordinance, just basically the Board saying they will support our efforts this way and take it to the legislature and hopefully get them to pass a bill.”

“And so they’re going to vote to see if they all agree to do this?”

“That’s right.”

“Down at the courthouse?” The courthouse is a rather incongruous temple on a street parallel to Main Street in the middle of town, visible from the playground we grumped around in earlier.

“That’s right,” she says. I feel flickers of curiosity and concern. I have the rogue thought that I’m a property owner and thus have rights in this decision. Then I feel unconsulted and obscurely furious. “Maybe I’ll come too.”

She looks impassive. “Well, I’m driving and I don’t have much room.” She’s so rude.

“Oh, I don’t mean with you. I’ll just wheel her in the stroller, it’s only twenty minutes.”

“Well okay then.” I do not feel any particular warmth from Cindy and wonder if it’s the drinks and the blood at the Golden Spike or my crypto-Muslim husband or if she’s just not a very warm person or if it’s a reflection of the warmth that I am directing at her. I always forget that I am walking around and can be seen and heard just like everyone else. I remember how Sal said “She’s not nice but we love her anyway.”

I get Honey into the stroller and it only takes us twenty-two minutes to get to the courthouse moving at a brisker pace than I can really handle. I’m panting when we get there and worried we’re late but I behold Cindy again, seated on the front steps smoking and looking impassive.

“Hi again” I say, with the feeling of being at a party and clinging to the one person who will talk to you.

“Smoke?” she says. “Later,” I say, gesturing at the baby. Honey wants to get out of her stroller so I take her out and set her on the lawn in front of the courthouse and give her a string cheese, how many string cheeses has it been today, I try to figure, too many in any event. She toddles and bites hunks off the cheese and then lets the macerated pieces tumble out of her mouth into the grass, from which she retrieves them.