Lydia Kiesling: The Golden State

In their twilight years my grandparents’ friends broke up the weekly bridge and martini nights to spend winters in more temperate climates, Stockton or Sac. But my grandparents stayed right where they were, the Deakins Park house they bought when they retired. The house was a source of perpetual sorrow to my mother, who believed that only what you might call white trash lives in mobile homes.

It does feel like the concentric circles that described social life in Altavista have expanded wider and wider until their essential structure has stretched and broken apart. My grandparents worked for the school, the Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, sundry local enterprises, but their friends were landholders, ranchers, outdoorswomen in pressed jeans, friendliness undergirded by the dignity of long years spent on a single piece of soil, and none of them seems to live here now. Uncle Rodney never criticizes the town but when Engin and I spent the one mournful Christmas here with him, he peered at every face we saw in the store and along the main street, looking for some sign of lineage, the innate quality of rootedness. It may be that just our family died out and moved on, and that everyone else is thriving in unknown houses. But even when my mom was alive she would point out the empty storefronts, the junk in the yards, and say it’s not the place it once was.

Honey is chewing up her apricots and spitting them out and splatting her spoon on the surface of the beans to demonstrate that she is unimpressed by the offerings and I realize we will need to deal with the food situation. I sponge her off change her diaper get her dressed pull on the clothes I wore yesterday and hustle her out toward the back door. The morning is spectacular; it’s 7:15, and the sun is at a friendly low angle, and the sky is blue, and it’s cool cool cool and birds are cheeping in the birch tree.

We drive over to the Holiday which is an honest-to-god grocery store on the edge of town. Everything is on the edge of town; the town is comprised of edges, the streets are so wide and haphazard beyond the tiny core grid of four blocks by four blocks. I’m pleased nay amazed to see the store has gotten a makeover since the days I helped my grandmother do her shopping—there is organic produce and a classier kind of frozen food. During my inventory of the kitchen this morning I spotted an almost-full bottle of Popov in the freezer where it must have been sitting since my grandmother died and I think what the hell and get a carton of orange juice. I get two feel-good frozen pizzas, I get noodles, yogurt, more beans, eggs, milk, apples, Cheerios, bananas, strawberries, blueberries, avocado, sweet potatoes, and a bunch of broccoli since it’s the only green thing I can get Honey to eat. I am wondering if this is all going to be enough or too much and then I realize I have no idea how long we are going to be here and the indecision this awakens in the aisle causes my heart to beat very fast. I have been eerily calm for twenty-four hours but I remember suddenly all the e-mails I need to write all the explaining I’m going to have to do and I almost wheel the cart out with Honey and our unpurchased produce in it. But then I think Meatloaf like a message from someone and I get ground beef and breadcrumbs and onion soup packets you can’t get at Whole Foods or the Chinese grocery at home. And then I go ahead and get a cardboard box of the cheap yellow vanilla ice cream we always ate after dinner with my grandparents, and a can of Hershey’s chocolate syrup to put on it, and then I think what else did Mom and Grandma make and I say “Pancakes” and I get flour vanilla extract baking soda buttermilk. The women at the checkout aisles are ancient and I wonder if they know anyone I know but I decide not to ask and they coo over Honey and she waves her little paw at them beaming and says “Hi! Hi! Hi!”

We drive back home. It’s 8:15 a.m. Honey roams around the living room and I turn on the TV which has ABC, CBS, fuzz, fuzz, fuzz. I put it on some morning show. We don’t have TV at home and just watch shows on the laptop and the bright lights loud voices taut arms brassy makeup are just too much and I start to feel the very specific kind of deeply down-in-the-mouth existential despair brought on by network television and I turn it off and then I say to Honey, “I guess we could make pancakes.” This is the only thing I can make without consulting the recipe and I made them every Sunday when Engin was here. He is crazy for these pancakes. Most pancakes are garbage; the secret, which I learned from Mom, is you have to separate the yolks and whites and mix the yolks with the milk and beat the whites and then mix them into the finished batter. I do all this and Honey is more or less transfixed on the linoleum floor by some pots and pans I pull out for her and when it is all over we eat the pancakes and I am stuffed and she is stuffed and there is a huge mess and it’s 9:20. I lie on the couch and Honey rollicks around on my stomach and tumbles off the couch and lunges for my grandmother’s rawhide coasters and throws them all across the living room and zigzags around the house and I think we need to find somewhere with Wi-Fi and call Engin and then I remember he is flying back from Belgrade and I can’t yet muster the energy for a walk in any case and so instead I lie there and just will the hours to pass until lunch, which kills four minutes, with Honey standing by the couch pinching the fat around my elbow and laughing. I think how can I enrich her so I collect the books I brought, eight books, and I scoop her up and I read every single one and then I put a sweet potato in the oven to roast so she will have something nutritious ready to eat later on and then it is 9:57.

During Honey’s nap I discover that if I bring the Institute computer out onto the very end of the deck toward the back of the house, I can latch on to the ass-end of someone’s unsecured wireless network, maybe Cindy Cooper’s. This is excellent news because it allows me to smoke while I check e-mails. I try Skype and the connection is too weak to sustain video, although this gives me more time to figure out what I am going to say to Engin when I finally reach him. His response to my WhatsApp is short, or terse, I can’t tell which. “Call me.” I check the Check Visa Status portal and it’s At NVC, the same the same the same the same it’s been for five goddamn months. I see how far down I can draw my cigarette with one drag.

I e-mail Hugo and Meredith to say I am sick. Mercifully my work e-mail does not yet reflect my absence from the Institute, although my body does; I blow my nose and big green slabs streaked with blood shoot out onto the Kleenex. You can’t feel the altitude here right away, it comes on days two and three with the dramatic boogers and the cracked skin of your hands and the blistering sunburn you’ll get if you aren’t careful. I open the least threatening-seeming e-mail, which is from the head of the Social Sciences and Humanities Diversity Committee and informs me that the meeting to discuss our Diversity Action Plan is postponed indefinitely due to the Vice Provost’s recent resignation for sexual misconduct. My task for the Action Plan was to survey existing Action Plans on campus and summarize them for the group.

Ted sent me an e-mail too. I assume this would be some characteristically poky and roundabout Ted message about my stealing the Institute laptop, but it is only a reminder to do the overdue software patch on my office machine by clicking the “Agree” button instead of the “Snooze” button when the window pops up. This means he doesn’t yet know that I’m gone. Moreover, I’m fairly certain no one knows how many laptops the Institute has. The last person the University sent around to do an inventory was a hapless work-study asking about mystery machines no one had seen in years. “On whose authority are you conducting this survey?” Hugo had asked in his imperious way, and the boy stammered and went away with his clipboard hanging low. In addition to Ted’s e-mail there is a letter of recommendation portal login e-mail of the type that Hugo reflexively forwards to me, which means, importantly, that Hugo doesn’t know I’m gone either. I’ve gotten good at these letters over the last couple of years; I like to think that several highly desirable teaching positions and postdocs were secured for his students through my efforts. Ironically Hugo himself doesn’t have a Ph.D., although you would never ever know from the way he is lavished with lecture invitations and NPR appearances. But he was the last noncredentialed person into the academy and he barred the door on his way in. Meredith of course has one from Princeton but as Hugo never tires of reminding her she has no publications.