The Golden State

Sometimes I stop to consider that there is something wrong with both Engin and me, because of my many Turkish colleagues in graduate school none of them married Americans; two of my male Turkish friends told me they wouldn’t consider it. Engin is different from those friends. I mean he is educated but not like they are—he went to Yıldız Technical University and took a longer-than-customary time to graduate, and they went to Robert College and then on to Bosphorus University or Harvard and wrote lengthy and beautiful treatises in English on materiality in Ottoman culture. I didn’t speak Turkish with them because to do so would feel like an insult to their English. Engin’s English is functional, let’s say, I have heard him speak very shyly to my uncle Rodney, who is hardly a chatterbox. Maybe it’s one of those things that keeps a marriage fresh. Back when I first met Engin, when I worked in the school, I had a different sort of Turkish colleagues, polished young women who spoke excellent English and were earning teaching credentials and dressed up beautifully every day. I could tell they found Engin vaguely troubling—some youthful caste and gender difference I never stopped trying and failing to translate to its American equivalent. He lived alone and slept with wayward Americans; they lived at home and married young, half of them divorcing right away as though the relief of being out of the house was enough. “He works in a bar?” One of them laughed when I told them about Engin the first time. Aman aman. Oh my. They always talked about setting me up with their brothers cousins friends, but never did.

Now I look at Cindy’s sign across the fence and I think Engin, you poor bastard. I get up to go in and check on Honey who has now been sleeping a very long time and my first thought as always as I approach the door is that she has probably died in her sleep. I trip over the screen door on my way into the cool house and I think I went to Turkey and was careless careless careless about everything and now I have a pretty good life and my very own sweet baby, and Ellery went with a friend and a humanitarian research agenda and a 4.2 GPA and a suitcase full of modest clothing and small gifts to pass around and she is dead before her twenty-first birthday and I can’t believe I told Maryam it was going to be the most meaningful experience of their lives.

Honey is not dead but alive and I hear her make the cry that indicates she has napped too long and deep and that returning to consciousness is like clawing the way back from death. I know this because this is how I nap too. Waking up hurts.

DAY 4

I wake up from a vivid sex dream before Honey starts making noise. If I do the math it probably means I can expect my period in a certain number of days. Since Honey turned four months old and my period came back my sex life—sex imaginary, I should say—has cleaved to a schedule. How else to explain three weeks of deadness in every nerve ending, and then about twenty minutes when I feel like a physical threat to every man I see, when the act of tracing my finger across the dirty BART window feels charged with sexual possibility, when I imagine sleeping with men with whom I’ve had only a cordial work-related e-mail exchange? Or even, gah, Hugo (but never Ted). And then when the mania passes you get a new e-mail or sit across from them in a meeting and they are just ordinary even repulsive people and you understand that sex is a trap.