The Golden State

Then we spent four years in a humid house in Arlington, VA, before he was reassigned to Athens. And then one home leave, while Mom and I were visiting my grandparents in the mobile home Honey and I are occupying now, he took a little holiday after squiring around a delegation of some sort—Greek? American?—to Bulgaria, and got on a bus which somewhere between Sofia and Varna careened off the road with him inside. Mom and my grandpa flew to Sofia, where a hapless consular officer on his first tour, whose job was typically limited to issuing visas and consoling the pickpocketed, who had a tiny piece of toilet paper stuck to his razor-scraped face in my mother’s vivid retelling, handed over a small canvas duffel with urn inside and held her hand and cried. We vacated our government-provided housing but stayed in Athens for two more years in a kind of paralysis until she sold the house in Arlington and moved back to the Golden State. His federal death benefit sustained her while she went back to school for her M.A.; the house money almost paid for me to go to an expensive high school and college in the muggy-in-summer-frigid-in-winter northeast; everything else covered her expenses when she was sick. I got a benefit too courtesy of Uncle Sam, and I spent it mostly unwisely, except it did buy my first plane ticket to Turkey.

Hence my remaining inheritance is the stuff in the garage, and the mobile home, which my grandparents quietly vacated by their deaths two years before my mother died, all of those deaths—their deaths and hers—taking place in my early-to-mid-twenties, which blurs together now as a time of both dealing with things and not dealing with things, a lot of logistics, the logistics of death mostly, and various bad jobs and blackouts and bad flings, until I started the stupid Ph.D.

I think, but don’t know, that my father would have appreciated my marrying a Turk, although his personal feeling always lay with the Greek side; he and Mom were modern-day Philhellenes. It was Constantinople to them. My mother I suspect would not have appreciated it since when I first went to Turkey she explicitly instructed me not to marry a Turk, as though that were the likeliest outcome of any trip. She believed in “East” and “West,” what we at the Institute know to be false categories, like “Clash of Civilizations,” like “Middle East.” She thought like ought to marry like, I think. But Engin and I are like, sort of, and she would have gotten over it, I know it. She would have liked him. She would have liked Ayşe and Pelin. And Honey! Well. The ideal child.

Honey isn’t her real name, I sometimes do and sometimes do not explain to the people who ask about it. Her real name is Meltem, which is a summer wind that blows in Greece and Turkey alike. When Engin and I decided to get married I was in my secret heart of hearts very excited to be able to have a baby with a beautiful Turkish name. I know this is Orientalist but I think anyone who learns Turkish is helpless against the names, because often they mean things, and not like English where you search Babynames.com and find out a name maybe possibly meant “Brave” in ancient Frisian or whatever, but tangible everyday meanings, like “Sea” or “Life” or “Horizon” or even phrases—Engin has a friend named “Take revenge.” Anyway, we came up with Meltem, which is geographical and allegorical and alliterative. Meltem Mehmetoğlu. But when she was a baby I started calling her Melly in my singsong new-mom voice, and meli means “honey” in Greek, and then somehow I started calling her Honey, and Engin started doing it too sometimes, so now the baby I was so eager to name in Turkish has an American stripper name. But it’s a secret tribute to my parents, who both spoke Greek. And it suits her. She is full of warm golden light. Although she is forceful too, I guess, like a wind. Honey Mehmetoğlu. You aren’t going to forget her name, at any rate.