The Golden State

Honey is happy enough when I put her in the car seat even though I do so with hideous pangs because she should be facing backward but faces forward. I switched it when her unusually long baby legs started to seem cramped and then read she should stay facing backward for many more months but couldn’t get it tight enough by myself when I tried to turn it back around. The idea of calling the fire department or one of the daycare parents to do it for me is so humiliating that for now I’ve abandoned her to her fate in a front-facing car seat which I secretly prefer anyway because now I can see her and at red lights I can reach back and squeeze her feet. I give her a string cheese but I panic at the first stoplight remembering that it’s a choking hazard in a moving car and first I scrabble my hand back ineffectually and then I pull over before the entrance to the highway so that she can eat the string cheese under supervision, but I have ruined it, and she throws the cheese and cries, and she cries all the way over the bridge and into the customary gridlock by the IKEA, the clogged highway branching off into miles of parking. I smell the foul bay-mud around the base of the bridge, and look across the water to Angel Island and the container ships making their placid hulking way through the Golden Gate and I say “look look look Honey, big boats, BIG BOATS” but she is still crying forty minutes after we’ve left the house and she is still crying forty minutes after that.

The Buick is a beautiful heavy boat built for long voyages, with soft taupe upholstery and a bench seat in the front with seat belts for three across. It is a 1997 LeSabre that I inherited from my grandparents before I inherited their house, and it is now pointing toward its place of origin like a giant beige homing pigeon. I wish I could put Honey up here next to me but that would obviously be a thousand times worse safety-wise than having her facing forward in the back. When Engin and I made this drive the first time, he drove the complicated part to get over the bridge and onto the open road and I sat in the middle seat nestled against him, pointing things out as we passed Berkeley passed El Cerrito passed Richmond until we were well into the golden hills scarred with cheap motels and roadside churches and housing developments. I showed him my favorite lone farmstead past Hercules, an 1800s beauty hunkering down amid a stand of poplars, beyond it rolling hills dotted with cows. It must have been one of the loveliest pieces of land on God’s earth and now it looks out at a highway lined with trash.

If Engin and I can be said to have anything in common, anything that forms the basis of a solid lifelong marital foundation that is, it’s a shared aesthetic, so that the landscape of California moves and offends us in equal parts. Thus he admired my farmhouse and the hills of the coast range, yellow as they were, and lamented with me the cheap hideous housing tracts around Vallejo Fairfield Vacaville, and then the god-awful Nut Tree, a township comprised entirely of big-box commercial establishments, mattress stores and Starbucks and fast casual dining a stone’s throw from endless choking traffic, the smell of exhaust faintly perceptible even in the padded coffin of the Buick.