Lydia Kiesling - The Golden State

“She’s a beautiful little girl,” Alice says and I say “thank you” rather than make a thing about it. I inspect the menu, a massive laminated sheet covered with smears of ancient salsa, and select a combo platter with one soft one crispy taco one enchilada rice beans sour cream and guac and I think this is just what we need to get back on our feet and I’m feeling good about what’s happening, Honey is chewing a chip she has fumbled from the red plastic basket before us and Alice is looking at me not unkindly and the window is open and the light is yellow and warm inside and growing purple outside.

I catch the teen’s eye and I ask for the platter and a Dos Equis. “Thank you for letting us join you,” I tell Alice. “We were getting a little anxious for company.” “I know how that is,” she says. “We just went to a really weird thing,” I decide to say because I feel preoccupied by it again. “They are voting right now on whether the county should secede from California.” She raises an eyebrow. “Why would they want to do that?” “They think the cities run everything and don’t understand them,” I say. “And they are right-wing ‘live-free-or-die’ types.”

“It’s a strange part of the country,” she says. “My husband always talked about it, long after he was up here.”

“And your husband is no longer with us, you mentioned.” Why do I talk like this? There is no euphemism I won’t use.

“Gone almost fifty years,” she says.

“Wow,” I say, because what else are you going to say.

At this moment Honey catches sight of her own reflection in the glass and says “Baby!” with friendly recognition. I have never heard her say this word and I am overjoyed. “Yes, you’re a baby!! That’s a baby! She’s never said that word before,” I say to Alice. “Really any words for that matter. I was starting to worry that she wasn’t going to talk.”

“I remember that,” she says.

“Was it the same with your kids?” I ask her, relieved that she has brought them up, I’m always scared to ask about people’s children. And she says “Well, they died young,” which is exactly why I usually don’t fucking ask.

“I’m so sorry to hear that,” another platitude thrown futilely down a deep well.

“Well, it was a long time ago. Almost twenty years for the third one.”

“ Three ,” I can’t keep myself from saying. She sort of laughs, a sound like leaves scattering across an abandoned basketball court. She holds knife and fork in knotted hands, poised above beans smothered in oily cheese. “It does seem like a lot for one person, doesn’t it.”

Normally I am Miss Questions, I mean this is where I shine. The worst thing about modern society is that people don’t understand that conversations need to be stoked by both parties to keep going. I usually try to stoke hard enough for everyone, but there is always a moment when I suddenly feel the effort, when I’m consumed with anxiety that it’s just not going to Go, that the conversation is going to founder and it’s going to have been my fault for letting it die. It feels like a grotesque wrong to let a conversation fade away into nothing. But there are no questions that feel right to ask Alice after this, and I feel suddenly so low so tired so fed up that my spine telescopes down a little farther into the seat and my shoulders sag and I actually put my elbow up on the table and prop my head in my hand. It’s not only the bad news that Alice has delivered about her own circumstances, which I haven’t really begun to index—were the children sick did someone take them did someone hit them with a car—but just the weight of the day, the weight of duties and time that suggests itself periodically since I had Honey, first I will cut up the enchilada I will be polite with this old woman with her unimaginable bereavement I will wipe Honey’s hands we will pay the bill I will put Honey into her stroller and we will leave the bereaved one and walk all the way back to Deakins Park and probably Honey should have a bath and definitely she must brush her teeth even though she hates hates hates it and then we will have milk and story and crib and it’s an hour away at least and then night and then the day begins and we do everything over again, and somewhere in there I will have to make decisions earn us money find my husband and at the same time absorb that this woman’s three children are all dead, and Ellery Simpson is dead and countless children all over the world I’ll never know about are dead.

I hear the soft prangs of Alice’s silverware on Reynaldo’s scratched-up old platter.

The thing came along that breathes some life into you and I have lifted my head off my hand and smiled at her. She looks at me a little owlishly, but kindly.

“It’s so funny to meet you here,” I say to her. “Since my husband’s from Turkey and everything.” “It is a strange coincidence,” says Alice. The teen brings our food and Honey begins rhythmically banging her fork on the edge of the plate. “No, please, Honey, we don’t bang,” I say to her. She reaches her hand out toward my beans. Our beans. I spoon them onto her small plate.

“I loved going to Turkey,” she says. “I always loved going places. That’s why I joined the navy.” “The navy!” I say. “I thought your husband was a pacifist.” She smiles. “Well, he still served. He worked harder than I did, manual labor type things. They put them in Roosevelt’s old camps, from the what’s-it-called, the Conservation Corps. And anyway,” she says, “I didn’t do it for patriotic purposes. I just wanted to get out of town, and there was the navy saying it would take a woman and put her at a desk for a decent salary.”

“My grandmother was in the navy too,” I say. “It was the first time she ever left the state.” She keeps talking like she doesn’t see me.

“I know that young people now are used to living all over the place but it wasn’t the sort of thing my parents did or their friends or anyone they knew did. I don’t suppose anyone dies in the town they were born anymore but that was the idea back then.”

She puts a forkful of rice into her mouth with the gnarled hand. I try to picture her behind the wheel of a car.

She looks at Honey eating her beans.

“Good eater,” Alice observes. “Yes, thank god,” I say. “She gets it from me.”

“Well, you’re still pretty trim, at least,” Alice says. “You should get rid of that baby weight before it settles in, though.”

I am stunned by this remark but it’s also so oddly familiar. It’s not just Hugo; women are birds of prey. I mean you are sitting minding your own business and then they descend on you from a clear blue sky with their talons out. I pray I won’t do this with Honey, please god don’t let me do this. In Turkey it’s considered fine to note if someone has gained weight but since all the women I know there are svelte and gorgeous the custom does not feel like a toothless observation. And observation is violence, anyway, as any Orientalist knows.

“It’s true, Alice. I’ve got some weight hanging around,” I say a little more drily than I intend. I spoon beans into Honey’s mouth, Honey the good eater, may it never bring her extra weight.

The girl brings the check and Alice reaches for it while I’m gathering up a spoonful of beans for Honey. “Let me,” I say when I notice and she shakes her head with authority. “You can’t take it with you,” she tells me, and rummages in a serviceable black leather purse with a single strap.

“You know, I’m sorry I said that,” she says next.

“It’s all right,” I tell her.

I think bizarrely that it might be nice to say hello to Cindy over the deck, we can have a cigarette and be soft around the middle together, despite the events of the supervisors’ meeting and her ideological shortcomings.