The Golden State

My grandmother who slept in this bed with my grandfather lost her father before she was even born. He was twenty-one years old and was carried off by flu when my great-grandmother was six months pregnant. I thought about this all the time when I was pregnant and Engin was home with us and when he was late coming home from the store or the studio he sometimes rented time in I would hold my stomach and know he was dead and he would find me crying over the kitchen sink. Now sometimes I have to remind myself that Engin is not actually dead, just in Turkey. I want to think good thoughts about Engin so I think about those magic weeks after Honey was born when Engin and I hung around the house with tiny her lying on her blanket. In the mornings we would tuck her between us like a hot dog, and we would loll around until 11:00 and Engin would fix breakfast. Then we would have a pro forma argument about the in my view mistaken Turkish belief in a forty-day sequestering period for babies and new mothers that I pointed out he only knew and pretended to care about because his mother told him he should, and finally we would bundle her up and take her for a long, slow walk around the City, and we would stop for ice cream or beers and hold hands and gaze at each other and at the perfect creature that we made.

The last thought I have is that Engin is not in fact in Turkey at this moment, he is in Belgrade helping his friend Tolga shoot a commercial, and he’ll be back at his mother’s tomorrow night. I lie there feeling guilty that I have forgotten this, and also relieved that he likely hasn’t been sitting around his mom’s house waiting for Honey’s face to light up his screen, until I finally fall asleep.

DAY 2

This morning while fixing Honey what I tell her and myself is a cowboy breakfast of warmed-up beans string cheese and cut-up apricots I look out the window and see Cindy Cooper, who lives in the lot kitty-corner from Grandma’s pansy bed. She has a green State of Jefferson sign on her front lawn, which means I believe that she takes a dim view of government activities and thinks the North State and southern Oregon should throw in their lot together and form a new state where there are no rules of any kind. They have something about it in the Chronicle from time to time. I never heard my grandparents say word one about it and I’ve never seen one of these signs in the wild before, but now that I see hers I realize they were dotted across homesteads the whole drive up, three or four counties’ worth.

Cindy Cooper is I am pretty sure a Johnny-come-lately who came from I don’t know where and bought her lot in Deakins Park a couple of years before Mom died. As I watch her pick up her copy of the Paiute Recorder and peer skeptically at a mean-looking dog tied to a mailbox across the street I feel the thinness of the skeins that tie me to the town. My relation to Altavista is so glancing, so filtered through the perceptions of my mom, who spent her life establishing a safe distance between herself and here, that I really have no idea who is new and who is old.

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.