Lydia Kiesling - The Golden State

I dreamt people were queued up at the reception desk to see me and Maryam wouldn’t let them in. Prior to the accident Maryam sat at the front desk of the Institute between five and nine hours a week, answering phones and cheerfully dealing with Hugo’s bullshit and on slow afternoons going on Facebook to post memes about Palestinian liberation and watch tutorials for face contouring. I think about her broken fibula her broken occipital bone her concussion and then I am powerless not to remember the day she came into my office asking advice about summer research for her and her project partner, the offscreen Ellery, and I talked to her about Turkey and sent her to Meredith to talk about Syria and from what I understand Meredith told her “Of course to really dive into any substantive research you have to go abroad” and got Hugo to give the two of them an unofficial grant with Al-Ihsan money and had me write the ex post facto award letter and then I thought I might as well set them up with Pelin before they went east to Diyarbakır, and it was all so careless, so ad hoc, although I know that life is careless and ad hoc; as Hugo rather callously observed to Maryam’s parents on the phone, the truth is that she would be just as likely to get in a car accident in America. “In fact,” he told them, “the sad fact is that students are safer abroad than they are on U.S. campuses,” after which he was contacted by the Office of Risk Management and told not to have any further contact with the family without a representative present. I wrote the Institute’s formal statement of condolence to Ellery’s parents for him to sign.

Hugo excels at unwelcome true remarks. When he found me crying in my office after Engin’s green card was taken and Engin returned ignominiously to Istanbul he patted my back tenderly and said “I know this must be very hard,” before his innate didacticism was activated. “In some respects, Daphne, you are experiencing a sort of very mild form of Casualties of Capital!” (This is Hugo’s catchphrase; he has a very well-known book on South Asians in the Gulf.) “Just last week I read a dissertation chapter about Filipinas who leave their children to become nannies in the U.S. My student is doing her fieldwork in Westchester County. Imagine it!” This made me feel ashamed to feel so very sorry for myself, although Hugo has no kids and no fucking clue what that would really be like. “But I have capital, sort of,” I sniffled. “This is a casualty of militarized bureaucracy and nativism.” He laughed and patted me again. “Do you think those things aren’t related?” and then gave me the titles of two books I probably won’t read but will try to find summaries of at some later date. Hugo can be obscurely comforting on his better days.

I bury my head back in the couch cushion and count to twenty. I forgot how utterly quiet it is here.

Honey is still asleep, going on three hours, a miracle. Poor monkey. She must be very tired and mixed-up. I go back out on the porch to smoke. Cindy Cooper steps out onto her porch at the same time and we exchange a formal wave. “Hello,” I say. “Hello,” she says. “Haven’t seen anyone up at the house in a while,” and I say “I’m Jeannie’s daughter,” and she says “Yep I remember, I met Rodney a few times.” She lights what looks like a Capri 120. “What brings you up here?” “Well, I have the baby” and she nods and says “How old” just as I am starting to say “Well I just wanted to show her—” and I decide to forge ahead “—the place now that she’s a little bit older, check on the house. Ah, she’s almost sixteen months about.” Cindy nods. She looks to be in her late forties and has long thin brown hair and mild rosacea on her cheeks and some weight around her middle and slouches down into her lower back, one arm resting across her paunch, the other bringing her slim cigarette back and forth to her mouth. I am having a little pity party on her behalf until I catch a glimpse of myself in the sliding glass door, a pudgy apparition like a Cindy of yesteryear. In those first eight weeks or so after Honey was born I can’t believe how good I looked, I mean I never looked better in my life. The weight just incinerated right off, for one. They tell you that breastfeeding will ruin your boobs, but they don’t tell you that if you’re small-breasted they’ll first flare out into archetypal perfection and give you just long enough to become accustomed to filling out a dress properly. It’s not just your original body that you can’t get back—you can’t get your pregnant body back either. Since weaning I’m heavy across the shoulders and hips and thighs, and the pouch that Honey vacated has achieved greater prominence. And my boobs—now they are little coin purses, the overall effect being that my body is much smaller on the top and much bigger on the bottom.

Cindy’s placid reaction to my arrival is a good reminder that the exigencies of my situation may not be immediately clear to anyone else. It is anyway a true statement on its face. I am visiting the house, which is my house and Honey is my child. I have not stolen, except for the laptop, which I will at some point return. We are fine here. I know with my lizard brain that it is not my fault that a twenty-year-old girl is dead, even though other parts of my brain, say, the part that manufactures dreams, are still not sure. When my mom was mad at me in adolescence she told me I was a “hard creature” and sometimes I think that’s true and sometimes I don’t think I’m any harder than anybody else. But Cindy doesn’t need to know all this. I put out my cigarette and say “See you later” and step inside and Honey has started to coo and I feel a legitimate surge of happiness at the prospect of seeing her face searching for mine from within the closet dark.

I get her out of the Pack ’n Play and change her diaper and she kicks her legs and grins at me and I put my mouth on her stomach and blow and she grabs my hair and pulls hard. If she is confused about our situation she doesn’t show it. I like to think actually that she is having a nice time scooting across the wall-to-wall carpet. Moreover due to my smart forward thinking of the morning I have a nicely roasted sweet potato to feed her. I mush this up and fry her an egg and cut it into small pieces and wash some blueberries and arrange them around the side of the plate and set her in her high chair with her sippy cup of milk and the feast before her. She has very good motor control and uses her little spoon to scoop up the sweet potato and before long the plate is empty and I feel the atavistic pleasure of having provided a reasonably balanced meal for my child with things that I made or had, requiring no angst no digging no last-minute run to the store no cooking plain noodles with butter because there was nothing else in the house. Whenever I have this feeling which is maybe full force in one-third of meals and a faint glow in one-fourth, I think I could live on the feeling, like this could sustain me as a life pursuit, but it only lasts a few minutes and then there’s the next meal to think of by which time I’ve usually decided to go to the Chinese place around the corner where we go at least once a week.

I smear some sunscreen on Honey and take her outside in her T-shirt, her little diapered butt shuttling back and forth while she runs unsteadily around on the grass periodically sitting down hard on her butt. I make to chase her and she shrieks and I think good good this is fine and I run and scoop her up and fall onto my back squeezing her and cover her face with kisses and she screams with joy.

The proprietress of Honey’s home daycare speaks to the babies in Cantonese. Engin is very distressed that he is not here to speak to her in Turkish, and asks me every time we talk whether his linguistic interests are being represented. I have told him that based on my limited understanding of human speech development, it’s no good for a nonnative speaker to talk to a baby, because the essential somethingness of it won’t be transferred. Engin feels however that hearing something is better than hearing nothing. What’s interesting to me is that on the rare occasions when I do force myself to speak Turkish to Honey beyond the terms of endearment that I use to give our conversation at least a sort of Turkish affect, she looks at me with perceptible puzzlement. She knows enough to know that I’m doing something different from what I normally do, which makes me feel both proud of her for being so discerning and bad that I’m being an American imperialist parent and boxing her dad out of her cultural formation. It has always been my policy to speak English to her because I pride myself on my English and Engin’s English is good not great and frankly a bit of a mystery since he so seldom uses it. But I want Honey’s English to be native perfect because English is her mother tongue and mine and I’m helpless not to love it, full of senseless grammar and airless flat vowels though it is. I have to remind myself, Engin is her father and we are married and his interests must be represented and I want her to be fully bilingual, trilingual even. It’s a gift a gift a gift to speak another language, my deepest wish is that I could do it effortlessly, that I was born to it.