Lydia Kiesling: The Golden State

Honey is starting to do high-wattage squawks that indicate she is way past tired and I know I have to hustle to try and get the sleeping situation configured in the most soothing routine-looking way possible. I decide we won’t sleep in my accustomed twin bed in the little side room overlooking the birch tree with the framed telegraph from my great-great-grandmother on the wall and my mother’s bronzed baby shoes on the dresser which I pause and consider weeping over but don’t. No, the “master suite,” my grandparent’s room.

I clip Honey’s high chair to the tiny laminate table in the kitchen and spoon her some of the baked beans and peas and she pats at them with her spoon and for a moment I worry about botulism and then stop worrying because I’m suddenly so desperate for her to eat something so I can get her into bed and smoke a cigarette and have a minute to figure things out. While she eats I set up the Pack ’n Play in the closet off the room with the king-size bed which eerily has clean sheets with military corners and the polyester floral cover spread over them smooth as cream and Grandma’s chest of worn Pendleton blankies at its foot.

Finally we sit in the big bed and have milk which is warm in the sippy cup from this morning because I haven’t brought a carton and we have two stories Goodnight Moon and Goodnight Gorilla, trying to emphasize the goodnight aspect and the sleeping aspect, and I decide to forgo brushing teeth and then think no no no it’s too easy to fail to establish good habits and I haul her into the bathroom and poke at her with the toothbrush and she clamps her mouth shut and cries and then I lay her in the Pack ’n Play turn on the sound machine say “I love you I love you I love you” and close the door and listen to her scream.

I find my phone which I know will not have service here for love or money and there is a mystery Michelob in the fridge and I take it onto the porch with my cigarettes and stretch out as much as I can in the plastic chair. I unbutton my pants which are creasing the fat of my stomach, my embonpoint I sometimes try to cheer myself up by calling it. I open the beer and light the cigarette and feel repose fill my soft anxious body.

When I unlock the phone it wheezes to life, tottering along on one bar and I see that I won’t be able to Skype Engin, something we will have to deal with tomorrow. I manage to load a few e-mails and I make a reflexive mental note to submit a reimbursement to the Institute for the overage this will undoubtedly accrue, datawise, and then make another mental note that I will not be reimbursed for anything going forward. I peck out a WhatsApp message to Engin that I’m in Altavista and will call him tomorrow and I watch the app labor to send the message for two minutes, my nerves chirping until it finally whooshes off and I have completed my major obligations for this day.

I haven’t had a cigarette since we left the City and I feel a little high sucking this one down in the frictionless air. I have secretly had a pack of cigarettes with me at all times for eight months now. I’d like to say that I’ve had them since after I weaned Honey but if someone is surveilling the search history on my Institute computer which I suppose they could be apart from visa questions they would find many variations of “nicotine” “breastmilk” “nursing” “damage” “bad” etc. The problem with reproduction is that it is stressful, I mean becoming pregnant having the baby raising the baby, and all the measures I employ to deal with stress involve some measure of self-harm, and once you have a baby in or around your body that body is no longer just your own to harm. Engin has some investment in it, of course, not wanting me to die an early death, and shortly after we got married he took what I consider to be a rankly hypocritical position about my smoking, since he has smoked since infancy practically and I’m sure he’s sucking them down on his mom’s balcony right this moment, that is, morning his time. Unfortunately for him, given the various demands on my physical person over the last two-plus years smoking is now what I consider to be a feminist issue and I take a big drag and watch the smoke go out in the cooling air and think how every time I quit smoking I invest that last cigarette with a lot of ceremony—big, weighty drags, clasped hands, heart lifted up in supplication to God. But I can’t remember the last time that I nursed Honey, and that really was the last time, the last time in the history of man that I had my baby at my breast.

This reminds me that my breast pump is still sitting in the basement of Oberrecht Hall. I remember this approximately once a week but while I was on campus I couldn’t bring myself to go down the three flights to get it. It’s in Ted’s server closet, which is tiny and full of whirring machines and one office chair and kept at sixty-three degrees. Ted and I had a system, which was that I would go in there and turn off the AC and lock the door and disrobe and attach myself to the pump and if he needed to come in and check on the servers he would knock which thank god never happened. Sometimes I would go in there and find an orange or a little stack of paper napkins on the table, and know that Ted had shortly beforehand been sitting in the seat and eating his lunch and futzing with his servers. Ted has very long fingernails, which I imagined digging deep into the skin of the orange. I thought about this when I was half naked in his chair with plastic hoses attached to my breasts, and the little bottles of milk placed around his desk and on his papers and next to his servers.

Honey has stopped screaming and it is now very, very quiet and dark. A light pops on in the house behind us, neighbors I don’t know.

The issue with the breast pump was that the things it came with, flanges they are called, were too big for my nipples. A whole great chunk of my breast was pulled in along with the nipple, and the skin blistered against the plastic as it was chafed by the motion of the pump. I found online a smaller insert, 22.5 millimeters, but the insert wasn’t compatible with the tube thing that the flange stuck in, so that I had to stick it into the original too-large flange, and then stick that into the tube, and some of the milk sort of stuck between the insert and the flange and dripped all over the table when I took them apart. Invariably during the assembly or de-assembly one of the flanges would fall on the linoleum and I’d pick it up covered with hair and fuzz, and I would wipe it off with my clothes and the hand sanitizer that sat on Ted’s desk, or one of his napkins. I asked Engin if I had in his estimation smaller than usual nipples, and he asked why and I got waylaid looking up the Turkish word for flange and I never found out about his estimation of the relative size of my nipples.

When I was in the hospital after I had Honey I told the nurse I wasn’t sure the breastfeeding was working and she held my hand and looked into my eyes meaningfully and said, “You have all the tools you need.” She was in her late forties and had very white, likely false teeth and tattooed eyeliner and lustrous black hair. I asked if she was from Paiute County because she pronounced the word “Sunday” just like my grandmother, “Sundy,” but it turned out she was from Southern California with a mom from Okinawa, not like my grandmother at all. Her parents must have had a cross-cultural marriage, I think now. I should have asked her about that, not the breastfeeding which is in the scheme of things a very small part of life. I light another cigarette in honor of this woman, who reassured me that I could do it, feed Honey that is.

But once I went back to work, less and less started to come out of the tubes, and when I looked online about how to sustain the milk it seemed like an insane project—feed the baby, pump after feeding the baby, wake up and pump every two hours, etc., even if the baby is sleeping. So then I gave her formula, and the more formula I gave the less milk I made, and all the things that I read on BabyCenter came to pass vis-à-vis my “supply.” I used to lie on the couch after work and look at pictures of nursing mothers on my phone and cry.