Lydia Kiesling - The Golden State

I pet Honey’s head—she is stretched out abandoned to sleep with her head squished up against the netting of the Pack ’n Play. I see for just one instant how long she is compared to the last time I was able to look at her with that rare flash of objectivity. Before she died my mother told me when she looked at me she saw me at every age I had ever been which makes me cry every time I think of it. When I tried to tell Engin I choked so hard I had to go in another room until I could come back and get out the sentence. I thought that this all-ages panoramic vision was something everyone got with motherhood, some new way of seeing. But whenever I look at Honey she is the age she is at this moment and I strain and strain to see her perfect tiny baby head the first time she crawled the first step she took and the only thing I can see are the photos we took, photos which unbeknownst to us at the time of taking them would obliterate all other records. I wonder whether I have stunted my memories of my child with the very tool I used to capture her various epochs, or if women who didn’t have cameras were left with nothing but the child they had at that moment, whatever age she happened to be. If in the absence of a camera the only way to recall the memory of holding your sweet baby was to have another, grasping at something by its nature out of reach and aging and exhausting yourself in the process by suddenly having a whole herd of them to look after, any number of which could still then die or find some other way to break your heart. I think about having another baby and feel the thrill of longing and dread, although more longing since it is the idlest of fancies, since there is no one here to impregnate me. I lie in the motel bed and concentrate very hard on Honey as a baby. I remember sitting on the bed, I am holding the small baby, I try to enter the memory and look down and see her in my arms, to be with my baby again.

The next thing that happens is the sound of the alarm and the squawk of Honey who is exactly the age she is and no younger. I sit up and see her standing looking gleefully over the railing of the Pack ’n Play her curls twisted up in a peak above her high forehead. “Good morning, Miss Critter,” I say to her, and she beams at me. I crawl to the foot of the bed and reach into the Pack ’n Play and drag her up on the bed with me and lie back and she lies on me and puts her head under my chin and I am thinking Keep this moment, let’s keep this one and while I am trying to fossilize the moment or X-ray it or photocopy it or do something that will make it stay with me forever she is squirming thrashing rolling and she is off the bed, she is on the move and suddenly I have what I think may be my most important epiphany about motherhood which is that your child is not your property and motherhood is not a house you live in but a warren of beautiful rooms, something like Topkapı, something like the Alhambra on a winter morning, some well-trod but magnificent place you’re only allowed to sit in for a minute and snap a photo before you are ushered out and you’ll never remember every individual jewel of a room but if you’re lucky you go through another and another and another and another until they finally turn out the lights. I pack up our things and consider this while Honey uses the cord to pull the telephone off the nightstand onto her toes.

Alice is standing outside the door when I open it and she says “I was wondering when you’d wake up” and it is only 7:05 and I start feeling annoyed right off the bat but say “Good morning, Alice, I hope you slept well.” I leave Honey in her care to get her bag and ours and haul them down the corridor to the lobby where I confer with the attendant who is a young man with flaming red hair about breakfast. The Wagon Wheel does not offer a breakfast. I leave our bags and things and trundle back down the hall and say “There’s no breakfast, we can snack with our leftover picnic things or the manager says we can go to the Black Bear diner or we can go to the Safeway,” and she says, “You just feed her—I want to get on the road” and I say “Ten-four” and dig out a banana and peel it and give a piece of it to Honey along with a verbal contract for a string cheese when she’s finished. I ask Alice to wait with her and haul everything to the car but when I walk away Honey cries and toddles after me and I say “Wait with Alice” and she cries louder and I say okay and heft her up and take what bags I can with the remaining arm and we make for the car. The attendant trots out from behind the desk and grabs the Pack ’n Play and I feel so indebted so grateful so helpless so guilty and I hate this feeling but I just say thank you.

We hit the road. It’s two hours to the camp and I try to suss out the plan on the way there, because I realize we still have no plan.

“Is there a museum or visitor center or something we can go to?” I ask and Alice says “No” and she sounds irritable and I say “Sounds good” and think about what I am going to do, then, because now that we are away from Altavista I know with great certainty that we can’t go back, we can’t go back to the mobile home, we can’t go back to the High Winds Market. We have to go Elsewhere. Alice doesn’t make a peep and Honey doesn’t make a peep and I’m thinking why did I sign on to chauffer this person around who I don’t even know, etc. But I’m bored and I’ve had so little conversation in the last week, the last eight months, that I decide to make some.

“Can you tell me about this camp thing? I don’t know about it.” She turns from gazing out the window and faces ahead. “During World War Two they let conscientious objectors do public works instead of putting them in jail or making them take office jobs in the army. But they gave ’em awful jobs, working in mental institutions and doing heavy labor, like where we’re going. He liked it, though, the harder the better.”

“Was this the thing where they sent Depression guys to plant trees?” and she raises her eyebrows at me. “No, that was before, but they used the same camps. The ‘Depression guys.’ Huh. What do they teach young people? It was three million people,” she says. “It’s why you have all these nice parks and the country didn’t just blow away with the dust storms.” She frowns. “It was segregated, though. So my husband disapproved. But the CO camps weren’t.”

“You said you came out here to see him?” and out of the corner of my eye I see her nod. “When I got out of the service,” she says. “We had been writing letters. I met him in school. Quaker college. I joined up halfway through school, after he left, but I was only in for a year. I came and visited him and then I went back to school. We waited for each other.”

I don’t know whether she means sex or just generally waiting. “How long were you apart.” “A couple years, all told,” she says. “And now fifty years.” I look over at her.

We are taking the shorter route rather than the truly scenic one that would have wound around the big mountain and covered more California ground than Oregon. We pass farmland, pine forests, little tiny towns: population 54, 240, 300, 76. It’s good to have that feeling again of the endless west rather than the circumscribed plain of Altavista and the unrelieved sagebrush and juniper scrub. We are beginning to leave the monotony of the high desert and there are green hills like dells I think they are called, and the trees are different and when I press the switch to roll down the window I can feel the influence of the sea in the air just the slightest bit. This feels like Humboldt land, Del Norte land, the trees are taller, the air is wetter. Honey blats in the back and I crane my neck and catch her eye in the rearview and say “Hullo baby” and she kicks and grins at me and pants and doesn’t look the slightest bit ruffled. The sky, which has been foreboding since our picnic yesterday, is dark and ponderous to the west.