Lydia Kiesling - The Golden State

“I’m sorry,” I say from between my knees. “Mommy isn’t feeling very well.” “Ameeee,” she says and rears back and yells with laughter. She scrabbles around to my knees and I lift my head and she puts her hands on each side of my face and gives my mouth a big open-mouth smack and smiles so warmly and brightly that I say “Oh thank you my dearest one,” with genuine gratitude, and then she starts rifling her hands through my hair, grabbing hold of a big hank and yanking down. “Ouch,” I say to her. “Ouch ouch ouch” and I find her hands and extricate the hair and hold them very tightly. “We DO NOT pull hair,” I say, and she flails out of my reach and tumbles sideways off the bed with a loud thump. I spring off and around to the other side and she is trying to get her breath, her mouth open in preparation for what I know will be a tremendous cry. I pick her up and hold her against my body and lean my ass back against the bed and try not to throw up from all the jangling of my body parts and she screams. “My poor monkey,” I say to her. “Poor poor monkey. We got a bad bonk. Yes, that was a very bad bonk. Mommy has a bonk too. Poor lovebug sweet monkey, my little peach blossom.” I lean back to see her face and tears are running down and I wipe them away and wipe her nose with the scratchy white sheet and hug her again while she cries and wonder with desperation rising in my throat how in the loving fuck I will survive the morning. Soon she wants to get down and I set her on her feet and she takes off running from the bedroom into the kitchen.

I follow her with my hominid shuffle my head throbbing at every plodding step and when I get to the kitchen I look through the door to the dining room and see Alice standing there, Alice, utterly forgotten, called in the night, Alice, holding one of the chicken-scratched “In case of my death please call this number” papers I am now mortified to remember spreading across the dining room table before smoking what I believed would be the last cigarette of my short span on earth. She looks at me and I cover my breasts and turn around and shuffle quickly back to the bedroom. “I’m early,” I hear her say. “One second,” I manage to cry out and I’m fumbling around the closet for a T-shirt and sweatpants which I pull on and then emerge. Honey is holding on to Alice’s leg.

“I thought I’d find out sooner rather than later whether you were alive,” she says.

I lunge to the kitchen sink and vomit up the water I drank. Alice stays where she is. I run the faucet and remove the hand sprayer and spray water ineffectually to wash the mess down.

“I’m hungover,” I say helplessly. “I’m sorry.”

“I thought you might be,” she says. “You sounded a little keyed up on the phone.”

I see her looking around the house presumably to see whether it’s a safe environment for a child. The essential tidiness and coziness of my late grandmother’s home overcomes the detritus of Honey that is strewn around the linoleum and carpet.

“You know you have to be careful at this altitude,” she says mildly.

“Can I get you some coffee,” I say and look around for a coffee machine filters coffee any of the things I would need to make the coffee, and she says “Tell you what. You are good for less than nothing right now.” She gently takes Honey’s hands off her leg and walks carefully gingerly frailly over to me and takes the dish towel from the handle of the refrigerator where it is tucked and opens the freezer takes out ancient frozen peas wraps them in the dish towel and says “Take this to bed with you and lie down.”

“What are you going to do?” I ask her, holding the peas to my burning eyebrow.

“I’ll mind the baby.” I look at her and somehow telegraph my concern that she won’t be able to corral Honey at her advanced age.

“I don’t move very fast but I think I know how to take care of a sweet baby,” she says, and looks down at Honey and says “Don’t I know how to look after a sweet baby?” and Honey shrieks “Daaaahhhhhh!” Alice looks at me with an eyebrow gently raised.

“I don’t get the feeling that you could move any faster than I could.” From my roiling stomach I am trying to muster up the will to be polite say no thanks I’ve got this but some slumbering self-preserving instinct wakes and I gesture at diapers on the coffee table and bananas in the fruit bowl and say “There are eggs in the fridge” and there is really nothing else for me to do but go into the bedroom close the door take off my clothes get into bed curl up on my side put the peas on my burning face pull the covers all the way over my head and cry until I fall asleep.

Sometime later I open my eyes and I’m under the sheet in a foul-breath-smelling pocket of warmth and the peas are a big wet spot on the sheet beside me. I have such a serious feeling of badness that I have to just submit to it, curl my knees up to my chest and let it wash over me like waves, waves that will ideally recede after they’ve spent their energy on my supine form, giving me a chance to stand up catch my breath. I have had a hangover in my life more times than I care to admit and so there is a part of me that knows that this particular body-mind-heart-spiritual-level, ethical-level feeling of badness is just the hangover and not a permanent state, but I also know that this hangover badness like all hangover badness is latching onto preexisting badness. Surely the tide of badness rising steadily higher over the last eight months is a sign that there is something to which I cannot acclimate. Engin’s green card, my job, Hugo and Meredith and the breast pump in the basement of Oberrecht Hall. And Maryam. And Ellery. Now instead of waking up to see a stranger’s back next to me as I might have done in the past and thus ushered in hangover-specific badness it’s the feeling of the grave injury I’ve done to my face, the egg on my eyebrow, being an unfit mother, not just to my own child but any other child that might cross my path.

If I have learned anything from my twenties it’s that rather than fight against hangovers you have to let the badness wash all over you, this is bad, this is the worst, this is the worst feeling, things are bad, and then perform a quick reckoning and giving of thanks. I am of sound body reasonably sound mind I have a treasure of a child who is healthy and loving and makes eye contact I have $1,847 in savings a loving husband and all that’s standing between us is some administrative bother some paperwork and it’s all going to be fine. I get myself into child’s pose on the bed which is the only thing I can remember from my brief tenure in yoga but then I think of the pictures of the little children on the beaches I used to visit with my parents, the little boy in the red shirt in a pose just like this, and the badness is back but now it’s world-historical badness, all the dead women and children on every continent on the planet and I have to stuff them all back with apologies so flaccid and pointless they become their own source of badness in the room. I lie flat on my stomach with my legs straight toes pointed and clasp my hands together under my chin and my chin to my chest and I say the Lord’s Prayer making sure palms touch, a remnant of my childhood marked by ritual gestures conforming to specifications mandated only by myself. Then I smell toast and hear the sounds of cupboards opening and closing and have such a strong sense memory of being in my mother’s house that I try and place the child I hear until I realize it’s my own.

I’m simultaneously desperate to cuddle and unable to deal with her so I lie there for a while longer and doze until the absence of sound wakes me again. I sit up. The room swims but the awful clamoring of my head has died down to the point where the pain of the fall speaks louder than the noise of my parched and alcohol-wounded brain cells. It’s 1:10 by the nightstand clock which means incredibly that I have been sleeping for around six hours and I wonder what in god’s name she can have done with Honey all this time. I stand up and slowly maneuver around the bed to the pile of clothes outside the closet door and I put on my stained white shirt my pants and pull my hair into a bun and shuffle to the bathroom splash water on my face brush my teeth and look at my mangled eyebrow again. I slowly move out of the bedroom into the kitchen and from the kitchen I see the back of Alice on the couch, and Honey’s feet stretched out beside her. Miracle of miracles, my child is sleeping on a lap, something she has not done since she was just a small baby.