The Golden State

The clothes are dry. I pack up Honey in the stroller with her stuffed animals and we begin the walk to Sal’s Café. I have also read that you are supposed to talk constantly to small children, this being the major thing that separates the smart and successful ones from their unfortunate peers. I always found this difficult when Honey was a very small infant but now I get the impression that she is actually interested in my voice. She is calm now and reasonably cheerful so I say “Look at that, that’s Grandma’s birch tree” and “Look at that, that’s a pickup truck, and there’s the split-rail fence, and there’s the tumbleweed, and there’s the sage, and OH LOOK HONEY IT’S A LITTLE COVEY OF QUAIL!!! Oh, look at the quail, Honey!!! Do you know what a quail is? It’s a little bird, and in a group you call them a ‘covey.’” “App, app, app!” Honey says, straining to get out of her stroller. I take her out and set her down on her feet in the empty street, and she runs toward the quail screaming with untrammeled joy and they immediately swarm through the fence and into the waste beyond Deakins Park. Honey stands looking after them bereft and I put her back into the stroller. It is 9:30 a.m. “There’s a blue jay, and there’s another blue jay, and there’s the pile of garbage, and there’s the Mormon Church, which is brand-new, and there’s the railroad, and there’s the Golden Spike where we went two nights ago, and down the road is Manny’s Bar. Your daddy and I went there once and struck up a conversation with the guy who installed Grandma and Grandpa’s deck and he bought us a beer.” We don’t see a single human being, although there are cars briskly passing through the intersection where state route meets state route.

When we arrive at Sal’s the crone is there again in the same spot in the corner. “Good morning,” I say to her. I start out to say Merhaba but the word dies in my throat a little and I turn it into a cough because I have to assume I imagined that she said it yesterday because I am I guess losing my mind. I’ve forgotten to fill the sippy cup with milk so I buy myself a coffee and a thing of milk from Sal and sit at a table adjacent to the crone so as to allow for easy intercourse. I pour the milk ineptly into Honey’s cup, trying to fend off Honey’s paws. “Heh heh eh eh” she says, which is what she says when she wants something, becoming increasingly distressed and needful until she begins crying for the milk. I give her the milk. I wipe the spilled milk from the table with the edge of my sleeve. I take out the computer. I open the computer and glance furtively at the crone, who is taking very slow, very small sips from a cup of black coffee.

I have been thinking yearningly of Elmo who is sometimes utilized at home and how Elmo would really help Honey and me pass the time here and while I know it is wrong for them to look at screens it would just be so nice to set her down and have her stay in one place slack-jawed and not running around rifling through things and I could do something, like answer e-mails on my phone I guess. Get a book from the library and read it. I bite the bullet and purchase two episodes of Sesame Street from Amazon and begin the download and think, just to have them, just in case of emergency.

I open Skype and click and soon Engin’s face appears on the screen and he and Honey become effervescent with joy. There are still tears and red blotches on her face left from the milk conflagration. “My sweet one. Are you helping your mother?” he asks. “Come on, kiss your daddy,” he says, and she kisses her hand and flaps it toward him, and smiles.

I feel like I need to convince him that I am still a functional person so I begin with serious matters. “I have e-mailed the lawyer”—not true but I will—“to ask what we need to do now about the click-of-the-mouse.” I say “click-of-the-mouse” in English, it is now how we define the entire episode: “Engin is not here because of a click-of-the-mouse”; “we are working on my husband’s click-of-the-mouse.” He shrugs and I wonder if this is a bad sign—we’ve both just given up on it ever being resolved, which is probably what the Department of Homeland Security is hoping for, a general degradation of morale resulting in one fewer green card. I ask him what he is doing and he launches into a description of the project he is working on for the other friend who has the agency, not Tolga, and how the ad is in postproduction and while I don’t care I find this somehow comforting, Engin is working, Engin is making money, I am staying home with my child, I am not doing anything wrong, my only responsibility is to my child, this is a globalized world and families don’t always live under the same roof because they have to be where the opportunities are, it’s all normal in the world-historical sense.