The Golden State

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.