The Golden State

Whatever misgivings my mother might have harbored about my irrevocably tying my fortunes up with a foreigner I knew she would have helped me finesse the visit, she would have pointed out the folly of taking them to Paiute, would have instead had them to her rented bungalow in Sacramento, would have suggested a weekend in Tahoe rather than two awkward nights in the mobile home and a chilly picnic lunch at Fort Bintner, where, I explained, by no means clear any longer on the details, how my great-great-great-grandparents cruised down the Emigrant Trail, got turned around between Shasta and Lassen, and for some reason decided to stay. In middle school I had to do a report about my hometown and since I didn’t really have one I picked Altavista, and my grandmother mailed me copies of all her historical society tracts and some in retrospect extremely one-sided accounts of the Indian Wars and I stood in front of the class with my poster board and my diorama showing rodeo riders and told them my problematic inherited narrative of the west. Some details from the report stay in my mind and I attempted to reinterpret them for Engin’s family. “No European saw this land until the 1820s,” I told them, which now seems remarkable, that we colonizers are such a waterbug on the surface of this territory, temporally speaking, yet so destructive. For the whites it was meant to be a way-crossing, more people coming through the pitiless basins on the way to something else than sticking around. The ones who did stay wanted to be left alone except when they needed the army to subdue the Paiutes the Modocs the Pit River the Klamath the Hat Creek upon whose land they were squatting. And once the Paiutes etc. were murdered or shipped to Oklahoma or crammed into the nation’s smallest reservations, the victors couldn’t even agree what to call the land or how to apportion it—Utah, Nevada, Mormon Deseret, California, endless territory names, endless proposed states and administrative divisions, endless skirmishes, with the fractious settlers rejecting every tax levy until they wanted something. The land was always being renamed and redrawn. Finally they carved off this tiny, least-inhabited county, assigned it once and for all to California, and gave it the name of their one-time enemy, out of scorn or fetish I don’t know.

During the Mehmetoğlu visit I was gripped with anxiety about making some hospitable tableau out of the limited tools available, torn between warring inclinations: to try and re-create some approximation of the warm casual “drop in any time” of my grandparents, who had vodka and chips and peanuts on the deck every evening at five, or trying to do it nicer, with wine and cheese and an elegant home-cooked meal, and to arrange it all without making some careless cultural blunder. But Honey was also six weeks old, and nursed all the time, and really all anyone needed was to sit and hold her on a couch, could be any couch, and the realization that I had brought them all this way essentially for no reason paralyzed me with embarrassment for the entire time we were there. Fortunately Ayşe is an adventurous woman and an excellent sport, and Elifnaz, her whole life spent in the great navel of the universe, served as a kind of comic teen Greek chorus of one, constantly exclaiming “I can’t believe anyone lives here,” which finally allowed me to relax my strenuous efforts at historical interpretation and apologia and laugh along with Engin and his family, because it was, yes, absurd how long it took to get anywhere.

Engin indicated to me later that the visit was actually a stroke of deranged genius, because his mother and Elifnaz now have a sort of trump card of insights into America when the topic is brought up. I can see beautiful Ayşe, with her coiffure and her rakı and her occasional cigarette, sitting on the balcony in her apartment block in Kadıköy, trying first to describe the encampments of homeless people around San Francisco’s City Hall, then trying to find the words to communicate the vastness of the high desert, the unsmiling plains, the pink sponge of tomato that graced her salad at the Golden Spike. “The main thing you must understand about America is its barbarism,” she probably says.