Lydia Kiesling - The Golden State

“Okay,” she says, and walks slowly to the door. I scramble up from Honey’s level and intercept her and lay a hand on her bony shoulder and she flinches and looks at me with what seems almost like hostility.

“I just want to say thank you again, for what you did.”

“Well,” she says. “What else was I going to do?” Honey tugs at my knees and raises her arms to be picked up. I reach down and bring her up, using her as a shield against some faint but perceptible disapproval I suddenly feel in the air of the mobile home.

“Say bye-bye, Honey,” I say, waggling the baby’s hand. “See you soon.”

Alice exits the screen door and makes her painstaking way down the deck stairs and I watch her get very slowly into a Dodge that I note with some concern is parked partially up on the curb, although in fairness to Alice it’s a rounded curb and easy to glide up onto. I feel very lonely and very unable to cope. It’s 2:20. I have the thought that I could put Honey down for a nap and then realize that she has just had one. So that’s two and a half hours to pass, my head faintly throbbing my eyebrow throbbing the residual rivulets of badness still lapping around my ankles poised to rise at any moment. The only good thing is that Engin and I seem to have restored somewhat the ideal of our life together, the mirage winking into something corporeal even if it’s just through Skype. I change the Band-Aid on Honey’s finger which she is mercifully still for and then I sit on the couch to gather strength and watch her run to and fro; into the guest bedroom and the little tiny study then back into the living room bashing into my knees laughing hysterically, then staggering back and spinning all the way around on unsteady little legs for what I think is the first time. I see suddenly how the little stores of fat that formed the rolls on her wrists and ankles are melting away and the slim lines of a child are starting to assert themselves in her body. She was never one of those gloriously fat babies with huge dimpled thighs but she had the minimum mandated squoosh that babies owe us, and hands that made dimples when they clenched into tiny fists. I want to take her out of her onesie and set her loose in the diaper so that she will read like my baby again, and not this lanky, wild-headed hoyden spinning around the living room. “Come cuddle with Mama,” I say to her, and try to grab her as she rushes past, and hold my head to her head but she struggles free and says “NYO” and is off springing. I lie down on the carpet and wait for her orbit to bring her back to me. She runs over and laughs and starts slapping my face, hard, and pinching my cheeks with her little talons and I have to say “NO, HONEY” and grip her hands and she struggles and moans and I’ve ruined it all. I remember the guidance of BabyCenter about demonstrating the positive rather than censoring the negative or something like that and I say “Nice, nice, gentle, gentle,” and mime stroking my face with her hands firmly in mine. She smiles and begins to do it herself and I say “very nice, very gentle” but then she’s pulling my hair with all her might, and I yell at her and pry her fingers off hard and stand up and my head throbs with renewed vigor.

“How about a snack,” I say, and she says “Tsseeeee” and we go to the fridge and I pull out a string cheese and unwrap it for her and then she’s off running with the cheese waving like a floppy baton in her mitt. We need to go for a walk, I think. For once I am dressed and ready at the moment I have the impulse to go and I decide that Honey can wear her pajamas and first walk, then ride on me and we will walk a good long way. But then the prospect of covering the somehow interminable stretch required to get out of Deakins Park is so unappealing that I think no, we will drive the car to another location and start the walk from there. But then we’ll have to get in the car and get out of the car and Honey will scream when I put her into the car seat and I can’t bear to hear her scream right now and I scrap this idea and so we find ourselves on the pavement of Deakins Park again, taking big long strides to try and get out and over the railroad tracks and onto the road to somewhere.

Honey seems to have entered a stage where her only direction is forward, fast, and yet she lacks the coordination to really run. So she does a sort of swift headlong forward walk as though she is running against a great wind, her arms mostly staying at her side, her head and shoulders leading as she moves forward forward forward, falling frequently onto her hands and knees and moaning and holding up her hands for me to dust them off. She hates to have mess on her hands and she’s not sure how to dispatch the mess, but I’m here and I wipe off the gravel bits and dust and kiss her palm and she’s off moving forward again until we finally cross the railroad tracks and I scoop her up and put her in the Ergo which has been hanging off my back like a tattered cape.

I decide we have to do a loop. I think like I think every time we leave the damn house that the thing that makes me really crazy about being up here is that it is so draining to walk a great distance and then you have to just turn around and do it over again, reliving the same monotonously grand landscape in the same high heat and hot buffeting winds, with the same curious effort of moving your body at high altitude, the same slap of your flat feet on hard asphalt under the pale empty blue, the same nowhere to go.

“We need a horse,” I say to Honey, strapped to my front and sitting heavily. “Horse.” “Hone,” she says. “That’s right!” I say. She is lulled by the heat and silence and motion of my body and I wonder like I wonder every time whether it is harming her that I keep putting her in these long-walk situations where she has no verbal stimulation, just her mother, a big silent broody anchor that she is attached to like a barnacle. But it is hot hot hot and my head and my eyebrow throb and I turn us back around and finally we are home and it is 3:45 and I give her milk and put her into the crib to see if she will take another nap and she seems to be thinking about it and I go on the deck and smoke a cigarette and collapse.

Cindy emerges onto her deck with a terrible look on her face and then she sees me and we say Hi.

“What happened to you?” she says, “My god, your face is all busted up.”

“Took a little tumble down the stairs,” I say breezily. “Nothing serious!” She shakes her head. “What’s new with you,” I ask. “Did you all howl at the moon?”

“We went over to Manny’s.”

“You don’t look too happy.”

“They arrested Chad Burns over that eighty-six grand.” There are so many things about this I don’t understand that I just say, “Wow.” “He’s sitting in jail right now, they’re trying to humiliate him.” “That’s too bad,” I say.

“It’s fucking criminal, is what it is,” Cindy says. She puts out her cigarette and moves inside the house purposefully, the conversation disappearing with our smoke in the hot still air.

“Can I ask how your husband died?”

We are in the car with Alice, having navigated with reasonable success and minimal badness the end of the nap the dressing the loading into the car of Honey and the drive to the motel to collect her. She looks over at me with a peculiar expression and says, “He wrote a long letter, packed up his briefcase, took the bus over to the city courthouse, sat down in front, opened his briefcase, poured kerosene all over his flannel, and set himself on fire.”

I am stunned and I swerve the Buick as I look over at her and then back at the road.

“Jesus,” I say. “Was he… protesting Vietnam?”

“No,” she says. “Then… why,” I ask, and she says, “No, I mean, no, what I said isn’t true.” I glance over at her again and then back at the road.