Lydia Kiesling - The Golden State

“The last day before I got here I could hardly stand an hour in the car.” She looks at her little bird wrist and gnarled hands. I remember that I left my child unattended with a ninety-two-year-old woman all morning and the chorus unfit mother unfit mother resumes in my head. I pull Honey’s hand away from her mouth into which she is trying to stuff a piece of bread. “Slowly, please,” I say, and she pulls free and jams the bread in.

“Ha,” Alice says drily.

“What are you going to do, then?”

The food arrives, the expected enormous slab of prime rib hanging off my plate, run through with stringy fat. Honey starts flapping her arms and saying “Heh heh eh eh” and lunges over to scrabble her fingers across the surface of the meat. “Wait just a minute please, Honey. Please be patient. Please do good listening,” etc. etc. I cut some little tiny pieces and put them onto her plate and she starts shoveling them into her mouth forming a meat wad and then spitting it out. A really uninspired salad is set down in front of Alice, cubes of cheese and kidney beans from the can on iceberg lettuce.

“So really, how are you going to get back?”

“Well,” she says. “Mark and Yarrow and I had talked about one of them flying out to drive me back. Or fly me back. Or some combination of things.” She rummages around in her leather purse and pulls out a burner cell phone.

“I call them every day with this,” she says. “Tell them where I am and assure them I’m eating and taking my medicine.” She rolls her eyes.

“Makes sense,” I say. She begins pulling little orange pill bottles out of the bag, and one of those Monday Tuesday Wednesday AM/PM pill boxes with flaps like my grandparents used to have.

“Maybe you could help me, actually,” she says. “I wasn’t supposed to be gone this long and all the pills they set up for me in my box are gone. It’s a little difficult for me to open the bottles.”

“Well sure,” I say, delighted to be useful to someone, and reach for one. Honey is very interested in anything that has other things inside it and she lunges for one of the bottles and shakes it vigorously before I wrestle it away. I squint to read the instructions.

“This one says take with food,” I say.

“Yes, yes.” She sounds irritable. “There are three that I need to take now.”

“Okay,” I say, feeling some instinct of care and competence spring into action. I reach across Alice and take hold of the pills, briskly lining them up in front of me. “No,” I say preemptively to Honey, and deposit some bread and potato and broccoli and carrots next to the chewed gray wads of meat on her plate. When was the last time she ate a green vegetable, I think, my brain scans the calendar and it was broccoli sometime in the preceding week and that’s not so bad but obviously could be better, although she did have a sweet potato and that is fibrous and nutritious at least. I read every label and isolate the meds Alice is supposed to take now into one group and the others in another, both out of the reach of Honey. She reaches both arms out in front of her and I make a move to stop her but she grasps with two sure hands my water glass, which I’d unthinkingly moved closer to her to make way for all the pills. She slowly brings the glass to her lips and slowly tilts it up until her lips meet the ice and water. She flips the glass up a little too swiftly and water sloshes out and fills her silicone bib. “Uh-oh! Uh-oh!” she says, looking at me with concern.

“Good job!” I say to her. “What a good girl!!!!” I leave Honey to splash more water over her bib and return to the pill counting. I put three pills in front of Alice to take and carefully dole out the rest into her box.

“All set,” I say, and look to the wet ruin of Honey’s outfit. Water pools around the pieces of prime rib on her plate. I tilt it back into my glass. Alice slowly pops pills into her mouth and swigs her wine. A wet spot creeps from under Honey’s plate.

“So Mark and Yarrow,” I say. “Are they your relatives?” “No,” she says. “I don’t have relatives to speak of. I’ll probably leave my money and things to them. They already bought my house, I think I told you that. I live in a cottage on the property now. It’s sort of a commune. My husband and I wanted it to be that kind of place, when we bought it. But he never got to live in it.”

Honey starts pulling at her wet seat and caterwauling. I shhhh her and get her bag from under the chair and pull out a pair of baby pants, congratulating myself on having the foresight to bring a change of clothes. I reach over and pull her out of the high chair and onto my lap, and hold her legs together to keep her from kicking. I take up the patter of talk that I’ve convinced myself works to soothe her. “Don’t worry big girl we’re just going to put some new pants on, we don’t want to be a cold wet baby sh sh sh” and I tug the pants off over her shoes and wiggle the new pants onto her, wipe up the damp on her high chair with my totally nonabsorbent green napkin and set her back in place. Alice is chewing meditatively on a piece of the airy nothing bread.

The hum of conversation in the dining room is broken by big guffaws, and I look behind to see two enormous red-faced white men, not fat, just huge like tree trunks, in matching camouflage hats, their heads thrown back, forks gripped in big fists. Nancy Pelosi and Spotted Owl, I think to myself, perhaps unjustly. Honey looks too and one of them sees her and lights up and starts waving and then peekabooing behind his paws, and she looks up through her eyelashes and puts her chin to her shoulder and I roll my eyes.

“How do they learn this,” I say to Alice, who looks confused. “She’s so flirtatious with strangers.” I point to the baby. “I just wonder where that comes from.”

“Mine were like that, the twins at least, until they got sick. Before the little one got sick too she needed attention so bad she didn’t flirt so much as throw herself on people.”

“When did they get sick,” I venture.

“They were a little older than Honey.” I want so much to ask what it was how did they get it what were the symptoms and I notice I’ve put my hand on Honey’s curls without realizing. I hadn’t even considered that she might already have an illness that will kill her.

“Sorry,” she says. “I don’t mean to scare you.”

“That’s okay,” I say. “I think about bad things happening to her all the time.” Honey is looking over her shoulder at the big men. “I mean I spend a lot of time trying to be prepared for something awful to happen.” She shakes her head. “You can’t prepare.”

“I know,” I say. “But I still try. Hedging, I guess.”

“You can’t prepare for seeing your children wasting away. Or when they’re gone, but you’re still their mother, with all that love and nothing to use it on.” Her nose wrinkles and my mustard fog immediately gathers behind my eyes.

“I’m so, so sorry,” I say, pointlessly. I want to do a laying-on-of-hands, but where. Her hand sitting forlornly on the table? Her ax-head of a shoulder blade? There’s no right place. I keep my hands on my silverware.

“How old were they when they died?”

“The twins were young,” she says. “Their sister was grown, a little younger than you. I was already old.” We just sit there together in silence. She looks ahead, out the window at the swing set at the edge of the lake, the series of black mole holes that dot the expanse of dried grass.

With whatever emotional intelligence she has Honey looks bemusedly at us but stays quiet.

“I’m so sorry,” I say, again.

“You’d think there’s an age when you get used to it, but you don’t.” What to say here? I understand, I don’t; I imagine, I can’t; so I just say “I believe you.” I blow my nose into the napkin.