Lydia Kiesling - The Golden State

I have my dream I have all the time where I am in an office trying to talk to a Turkish person, not Engin, someone unknown to me, and I’m saying “Oh of course I speak Turkish,” in Turkish, preparing to launch into the explanation of what is wrong, a thing I don’t know in the dream, and find I can’t speak Turkish at all and can only force a few words out until they smile sympathetically and shake their head and I want to start screaming and I open my mouth wide to do it and nothing really comes out, just a tiny squeaking and I wake up feeling that there’s nothing a man can tell me about impotence.

But I wake up feeling surprisingly fresh given the dream and the egg on my forehead, just a gentle throb on my eyebrow. I wake up with the expectation of hearing Honey and realize I don’t. The clock reads 6:57. I move very carefully out of the bed and tiptoe around to the closet and peer in and she’s sprawled on her back, deep asleep, and I pause long enough to see her chest rise and her fingers move. I scurry away into the shower and take a long hot one listening for her cries. She’s still asleep when I emerge and I say the prayer of thanksgiving for how much I am about to get done unencumbered. Now that I am not really doing anything there is nothing I am really unencumbered from but it’s still easier to do anything when your baby is asleep. I make coffee. I put laundry in. I pick up the living room. I smoke a cigarette out on the deck knowing I need to call Engin and trying to see if I can pick up Cindy’s Wi-Fi which is recalcitrant this morning when I hear Honey beginning to chirp. I go in.

“Hello, sweet pea,” I say. “We’re going on a trip today!” She doesn’t really know what that means I’m assuming but she laughs and claps her hands and waves her arms up and down and I scoop her up do a running jump onto the king bed twisting in midair so that she lands on top of me as I land on top of it and she screams with joy. I put Cheerios banana a little milk into one of my grandmother’s glazed white bowls with its spidery gray cracks and she uses her spoon like a big girl and I say the whole time “We’re going to go in the car with Auntie Alice, we are going to a new state.” I put her on the living room rug with her milk and books and fly around the bedroom and the back porch throwing things into the duffel and the tote keeping up my singsong “Now we put the socks, now we put the comforter, now we pack the Pack ’n Play” until I realize we are packed, completely packed, as though we aren’t planning to come back and I’m shocked by how little impression we’ve made on the place. I notice I have been standing stock-still in the middle of the room chewing on this thought because I feel a silence in the place of Honey’s low hum and see her sitting in the corner of the room with her shoulders hunched, listlessly turning over the pages of one of her books. She does this sometimes when I don’t play with her or fuss over her for an extended period of time, just goes all mopey and quiet like she’s expecting no one to ever talk to her again and it makes me feel like a murderer. So I look at her and say “We could not come back.” And then I zoom over to her on my hands and knees and bury my face in her belly and she laughs and revives and gets that awful sad hunch out of her back and climbs all over me shrieking.

I decide to treat this excursion as a possible exit strategy and just put everything in the car and act like when we lock it up it will be the last time. I get the cooler from the garage and look at Mom’s boxes. I say “Bye Mom” softly to the boxed-up sleeping things with which she made all our dwellings a home, and then I say “Bye Dad” and before I can hang around and start to feel morose I get the cooler and close the garage behind me. I walk over to the front of the house and straighten Rosemary Urberoaga’s For Sale sign and smooth back its folded corner and brush off some caked-on dirt.

Everything is in the car now and we are in the car and we have gotten turkey salami cheese bread banana chips cutlery and two big jugs of water and are making our way to the Arrowhead Motel, which is just past the Golden Spike on the way out of town, when I remember I didn’t return the library books and I file this away. They’ve got a big sign soaring up to the sky like the Frosty, and the customary cattle skulls and old wagon parts with some geraniums and so forth planted around. At the end of the row of rooms and the parking lot is a ludicrous patch of very green grass that they must spend a fortune keeping wet all year around, but right now there are a group of deer on it finding tender morsels and Alice is sitting primly on a bench overlooking the patch and it makes such an oddly nice tableau you kind of see why they do it. I’m turning into the parking lot when I realize that I didn’t take a moment to call Engin before leaving and I’m not sure when I’ll be able to and say “Fucker” so loud that Honey startles in the back and drops her cup and says “Uh-oh” and I say “Mommy said a bad word sweet pea” and I think to myself I spoke with him yesterday, I spoke with him yesterday, I spoke with him yesterday, everything’s okay and then I drive over to Alice and roll down the window and say “Going our way?” and she says “You’ll have to get my bag from the room” and gestures at the open door. I unbuckle dart out and into the damp cave of her room and find a tidy little wheelie suitcase and tote and a big umbrella and see she’s left $20 for the maid, which is the ultimate mark of civility as far as I’m concerned. I get her suitcase into the trunk and hover over her while she navigates to the passenger side and onto the soft seat of the Buick. She’s holding a folder which she waves my way.

“I got the fellow at the front desk to print out some maps.” “Excellent,” I say, although it’s been years since I read a map that wasn’t on my phone. But I see he’s printed out the step-by-step directions from Google and I shuffle through these and say, “Okay, I think we’re good.” He’s mapped the route west and then north over the border once we’re closer to the coast and this means we can have the hoped-for picnic at Surprise Pass.

I look back at Honey who has her cup but is waving her arms like she wants to throw it and is whining and just generally has an ornery look as she strains against her straps. I say “We’re having fun” which my grandpa used to say and then look at Alice who is wincing a little and wriggling in her seat. “Are you sure you’re going to be comfortable,” I ask, and she says “I’ll manage.” Honey starts bawling openly so I just say “We’re having fun” again, with emphasis this time, and point the car out of the Arrowhead parking lot. Alice points at her car in a far corner spot and says “Goodbye, Rocinante!” and looks at me. “That’s the car’s name,” she says solemnly. I laugh with approval but then I feel my shoulders creep up to my ears as is their wont when Honey cries. Alice twists her narrow body to the extent possible and says “Now what” to Honey, and puts her hands over her eyes and does a creaking peekaboo, and the little internal combustion engine of joy that runs Honey makes a smile bloom on her wet cheeks.

“There’s not a thing wrong with this little baby,” says Alice. I notice she is wearing a wedding ring, a yellow gold band around her finger that wasn’t there yesterday.

“You’re wearing your wedding ring,” I venture.

“Sometimes I put it on.”

“You never got remarried?” She looks out her window at the scenery, which has given over to sagebrush and will soon climb into scrub pine. A jackrabbit runs across the road before I can even think to slow the car. “I never met anybody I wanted to get remarried with.”