The Golden State

And then four weeks into our courtship which wasn’t really setting the world on fire I found out Mom was sick, so I left Turkey to go back to California and that was it. I lived with her in Sacramento and did a bunch of random jobs and wrote in my Turkish notebook wistfully now and then and after three years she died. And then I decided I wanted to memorize more Turkish verbs and through some miracle I got into the Ph.D. program off a waitlist. And after the second year my advisor Murat had emergency gallbladder surgery and let me accompany a weeklong summer tour of Istanbul for rich university donors in his place. And on my night off I found that same bar in the backstreet of Nevizade and decided to go in, and Engin was sitting there like it had been a few weeks instead of five years. And my Turkish was much better, and what happened was so immediate so natural so inevitable that I decided to let Murat’s flock return home by themselves at the end of the trip and I didn’t go back to America and didn’t take intensive summer Persian that the U.S. government paid for and didn’t go back to school and thus ensured that I would max out at an M.A. rather than a Ph.D. but didn’t care because the thought of being apart from Engin for so long was physically painful. So I passed the most beautiful summer of my life and at the end it was all clear to me that I had to marry Engin and not get a Ph.D. but find a job have a baby start my life and who knows one day speak perfect Turkish and be a true cosmopolitan. So I dropped out with a sympathy M.A. and a lot of thinly veiled hostility and concern by Murat who felt in loco parentis but was also a snob about Engin’s academic pedigree although Engin is still what is fucked-up-edly known in Turkey as a “White Turk,” that is urban, educated, irreligious. Engin means “vast” or “endless,” incidentally. Maybe it was this sense of his being vast and endless in his capacity to surprise and delight, demonstrated by his sudden reappearance in my life after so long, that caused me to marry him so precipitously, with so little foresight.

There’s an unspoken competition among American grad students in Middle East and related studies to be the least Orientalist and problematic and obviously by falling in love with a Turk during a hot Istanbul summer I lost this contest fair and square. But we are not mismatched as far as tastes, ways of being in the world go. The flings I had before I met Engin—ending up in someone’s scandalized parents’ apartment all the way out in Avcılar and then being driven around to fancy cafés and given expensive perfume I wouldn’t wear and then trying to fade away and having to ignore dozens of increasingly tormented and then aggressive text messages—that was my main dalliance with the Other. But Engin rented his own tiny little apartment. We like the same minor-key indie rock, hold the same vague leftish politics, think succulents are the best plants. We are urban late-capitalist late millennials, as Hugo might put it; that shared vernacular counts for a lot. I think the moment I knew we would get married was when we visited his cousin, or his uncle’s cousin, or someone’s cousin, at a planned community outside a midsize town near Yalova. The cousin was a retired municipal employee who kept bees, and we were told it was baby bee season. We camped out next to the bee box and waited for the swarm of babies to appear because evidently if you don’t catch them and hive them right away, they fly away and are lost in the universe. So we spent the day picnicking in the sun, waiting for baby bees to emerge, feeling just as rustic as we’d ever want to feel.