Lydia Kiesling - The Golden State

I am wiping up smeared beans from the table with a napkin and Alice reaches out and puts a dry hand on mine. “Really, I’m sorry,” she says. “You and Honey remind me a little of being around my own girls again.”

“What happened to them,” I say.

“They were all born sick. Two died in childhood and the third one died later,” she says. “Oh god,” I say and she just says, “Yes.”

She shrugs. “A doctor told me later it’s a one-in-a-billion chance that two people with that set of genes would meet and have children. And those children have a twenty-five percent chance of being born with the gene. But if they do, they don’t have a chance. Unfortunately we didn’t know that. And he was the only man I ever wanted to be with.”

Honey is turning her body into a board straining against the back of the high chair starting to yell and I lift her out. I try to think of what else there is to say but she says “You go on. Get that little one to bed.”

“Will you be at Sal’s tomorrow?” I ask her.

“Inshallah,” she says. I laugh. Engin absolutely hates it when I say this but it’s like the first thing that foreigners learn in Turkey and it covers such a multitude of scenarios.

“Inshallah,” I say. “Well, God willing Honey and I will be there around ten-thirty.”

I wheel Honey out and up Main Street. I am thinking about how you could have three babies and all of them die and my brain worries the thought a little like a dog with something between its teeth and I have the thought I always have first that there must be something extenuating something that makes it less sad what thing she could have done that made her deserve it what thing could they have done what way could they have died that would make this situation acceptable, but there’s never anything like this and I wonder if that’s the source of all the world’s sorrows, that everyone assumes everyone else did something to deserve it because otherwise the things that happen to people are just too horrible to bear.

But now I’m selfishly mercifully distracted because the air has that indescribably wonderful summer feeling that used to make me feel like I could go anywhere, do anything, have sex with anyone. The thing I miss most about a city is the feeling that something is always happening, a festivity at all times, a restaurant with people eating, a place to hear music, even if I’m not doing any of those things, maybe I could be. But now that I have Honey the possibility is functionally zero and when she is old enough to be left alone for days at a time assuming I could ever find someone I would trust to watch her for days at a time I will be too old to go to a rave meet someone at a bar look really good have sex with a stranger, not to mention that I am married.

But on balance I have been so lucky, not only did I once meet an objectively beautiful man at a bar in a beautiful city but I married him and he gave me a beautiful child who will speak two languages, maybe more. And maybe one day when his papers are sorted and our finances are more in hand I will go and do yoga lose the weight around my middle and get a good haircut buy some nice makeup have someone put it on me buy a good dress and Engin will think Aman what a beautiful woman I married even if she is a neurotic woman from a benighted country.

Thinking about Engin gives me the customary pang of guilt that I am not speaking Turkish to Honey; not speaking Turkish at all. She’s got those dazed half-open eyes she gets when she’s rolling in the stroller and she’s had hardly any nap today and I think it’s a good time to try and let her take in her father’s tongue. “Honey my love,” I say to her in Turkish. “Your mama is going to speak to you in Turkish a little.” She cranes her head back to look at me.

“Since your daddy is a Turk he speaks Turkish,” I say to her. “Your mama is American but I am speaking Turkish. She speaks Turkish rather.

“In Istanbul live your grandmother and your paternal aunt and your uncle. In Izmir lives your paternal grandfather.” I hope I have these right, there are parent-specific names for relatives which seems excessive although I guess in English we spend a lot of time saying “My mother’s sister,” etc.

“In the summer we will go with Daddy to visit your paternal grandfather and we will sit on the pier and have Coke and pumpkin seeds. Won’t it be nice?” I say.

“Your paternal grandmother in Istanbul misses you very much. She wants us to come visit her. When we go your daddy will take you to get a fish sandwich and to see Miniatürk.”

I am floundering. The distance between myself pushing a stroller along the side of the road in Paiute County and Ayşe and Mini Turk World feels apocalyptic.

“Your daddy loves you very much,” I tell Honey, and then in English for emphasis.

“And your daddy loves cats very much. He likes to draw and cook and he makes delicious salami and cheese sandwiches. When you were in my womb”—gross but I love that word, rahim, must be Arabic, no vowel harmony. I pause to think if there’s a more modern word than this, and then realize that’s a problematic way to think about it, latent anti-Arab prejudice rising forth, rahim it is—“I ate one almost every single day.” We cross the railroad tracks with a bump.

“He loves to watch movies and when we watch them…” I stop here to parse the grammar because in Turkish you have to know what you are going to say before you start speaking, since the end comes first, or what is the end in English anyway. I think about trying to explain this to Honey but feel exhausted. “… when we watch them if I get either scared or bored and look at my phone he gets mad.” It takes me nearly two minutes to get this out. I can’t believe that something once so relatively easy is deserting me now.

I wonder if Engin is bored when he talks to me. Learning Turkish is no less than what’s expected if you are for example a Chechen and you immigrate to Turkey but it’s a bonus if you are American, Americans having managed to forge a dual impression worldwide of hopeless stupidity and national superiority that exempts them from learning other languages. Turks are also convinced that Turkish is an impossible language to learn, although English is the one that has no inherent logic and is all irregular verbs and phantom letters and bizarre plurals. Engin doesn’t ever talk to me in particularly complex English sentences and that doesn’t bother me so hopefully the reverse is true too.

Before he was deported Engin developed a rapport with the elderly Chinese women who come by our house on Monday evenings to collect the cans from our recycling and who speak significantly less English than he does. One of the ladies gets on my nerves because once I was walking into the house with Honey in my arms and she indicated via hand signs that I needed to go inside and get the cans and I said “I’m sorry I’ve got my hands full” and she said “No English” and I thought For fuck’s sake and went inside saying “sorry” and then felt bad and barricaded Honey in her bouncer and went outside with the cans and she was gone and I felt worse. Engin would set cans and bottles into a separate bag and put them by the large can well in advance of the appointed hour and would sometimes be outside smoking a cigarette puttering with the succulents when they came by and they would exchange greetings. Once I looked out the window and he was exuberantly trying to shake the hand of the one that I let down. “My auntie,” he said when he came inside.

I have trailed off in my Turkish conversation time with Honey while I remember this and now we are at the gate of the house and I wheel her up and rush through all the things that were prophesied at Reynaldo’s, diaper jammies milk story teeth bed and it takes forty-five minutes and she lies down like a good girl as though she’s been yearning for her bed and finally at the end I am on the deck with my drink and my cigarette and it feels almost as good as a bar.