The Golden State

This line of thought leads me down the path of Ellery Simpson’s mother and I picture Ellery’s heavy eyebrows and brown eyes from the photo on an older woman lying in bed in a darkened room with her fist to her mouth. I know from one of the work-studies that Ellery has a younger sister and brother and I wonder if that makes any difference and of course not how could it, how could anything. There’s the math of it, two being more than zero, but this is capitalist thinking—my mind somewhat hysterically conjures Hugo. And I still live in the universe of a single child where the idea of reproducing that love, the same dimension and volume of it, twice, three times, seven times, ten times, is incomprehensible although it is an irrefutable fact of life. I start crying. Eventually I stop and I hear that Honey has stopped too and now I feel lonesome for her and in a while I go back into the house back into the closet and get her out of the Pack ’n Play, her body heavy and limp. I hitch up onto the big bed and lean against the pillows with her head on my chest, feeling her back rise and fall with her curly head in the place on my neck. We stay like this for a while in the nearly pitch-black room with me just trying to transmit love to her until I put her back gently into the Pack ’n Play and return to the porch where I smoke three cigarettes in a row staring into the dark, ranging my fingers over my face and into my scalp and picking away at anything that feels remotely like a flake or a protuberance and feeling both not good and good at the same time.

DAY 3

We are finally going to call Engin. I put Honey in her stroller and we start the long walk down the highway that is also the main street leading out to the bird refuge at the far side of town. The sky is not so blue today as it was yesterday—it has a yellow tint and it is hot hot hot even at 9:45 when we hit the road after four stories and more pancakes. You think of heat having mass when it is humid but extremely dry heat has mass too unless you’ve got a good breeze or some shade, it is something you have to move against. Here and there I try to point out things to Honey—“there is the school where your grandma went” “there is the Elks” “that used to be a pharmacy” “that used to be the Tog-Shop” etc.—but once she is in the stroller her eyes basically glaze over and she lives in a strange place between sleep and awakeness but I’ll take it because I can basically think my thoughts and just be with her without having to do anything for her.

There aren’t very many open businesses on Main Street anymore, except the High Desert Hotel and the Frosty and the Rite Aid which is only a few years old and sure enough has annihilated the two mom-and-pop pharmacies that had coexisted peacefully for decades. The Frosty has a sign rising high up over the plains like a forlorn palm tree. Just past the sign my phone buzzes as we wander into a patch of service, and I see a voice mail icon, which fills me with dread. But I tap and there is only one and when I hold the phone to my ear I register that it is the voice of Uncle Rodney, who is the least threatening person who could be leaving me a voice mail at this moment. I stop to marvel at how quickly the frayed grapevine of my Altavista life has communicated to him that I’m in the house. John must have called Rosemary must have called Rodney. “Heard from Rosemary you were up at the house,” he says on the voice mail sure enough. “Give me a call and let me know how it’s looking, when you get the chance.” I know this will be relatively painless but I decide I don’t have the energy.