The Golden State

Now I have peace and quiet but again it occurs to me that I don’t really have anything to do and I think I should force myself to go in the garage and see what’s there, all my parents’, really my mom’s, linens and books and art that I haven’t been able to bring myself to dispose of but which would require some more substantial dwelling than I have to display. They are an adult person’s things, rugs and engravings and whatnot, which would be absurd in our tiny apartment. It occurs to me briefly to unpack everything and just put it around the mobile home but imagining her things against the faux-wood panels makes me itch. Moreover I don’t trust the town’s youth—the meth kids imagined although in fairness not actually seen—to not eventually break in and trash the place. I collect my cigarettes and phone and go inside and poke my head in at Honey and she is sleeping with her cheek mashed against the floor of the Pack ’n Play and her hands by her sides and her butt up in the air, and I back out of the closet stealthily and make my way to the pantry and out the back door into the heat and down the steps and to the garage where I gird my nerves and then hoist up the door and step into the pleasingly dim cool space smelling faintly of something motor-related, or the kind of oil I imagine you’d put on a baseball mitt.

And there it all is, my little Aladdin’s cave, the beautiful rugs piled in the corner on the side where the pickup truck used to go, a love seat and Mom’s prized formal settee beside them shrouded in a blue tarp, some smaller lumps that I think are a mother-of-pearl inlay coffee table and an ottoman wrapped neatly in butcher paper. Art boxes lean up against the Snap-on tools workbench, all the housewares boxed up into pyramids on the side where the Buick used to live. My parents had me late and there were eight years on the road before and eleven years on the road after I was born; ample time for Mom to collect treasures, the acquisition of textiles being almost a formal perk of foreign service wifehood. I walk over to the rug pile and run a hand over a deep blue and red kilim on the top and give it an appraising sniff and it is pleasingly devoid of damp. I pick one of the boxes and pull up its tape and open its flaps and inside see what are obviously dishes of various sizes wrapped up in tissue paper. Uncle Rodney and I packed up Mom’s bungalow in Sac and he uncomplainingly hauled everything all the way up here with his truck. I took their iron bedframe, lugged it to grad school, and now it’s in our apartment in the City. I unwrap the top dish and it’s a jewel-blue glazed ceramic ashtray, “Tunis” painted on its base in Arabic and the name of some hotel. I carry it over to the settee and throw off the tarp. Beneath it the strangely pristine white jacquard is protected by yet another nest of plastic, and I sit down on this and put the ashtray on its arm and put my feet on the ottoman-shaped lump and light a cigarette, relishing the taboo feeling of indoor smoking, even just in a garage. “Hi Mom,” I say to the stuff. “Hi Dad,” I say to the urn, which is perched where I left it on the top shelf of the steel shelving at the back of the garage, a terra-cotta number allegedly acquired in the village where my parents met in Corfu.

I take my phone out of my pocket and snap a picture of the garage to send at some future Wi-Fi-enabled point to Engin with the caption “çeyizim.” This is a joke we made on his first visit, that all this stuff here in the garage is my dowry, my trousseau rather. Obviously it was a joke, although in Turkey it’s not strange for parents to feather the nest for newlyweds—I guess they do that in America too, if you’re lucky they just buy the whole nest. I do come to the marriage with an impressive hoard of housewares and no siblings to squabble over them, even though we have no grown-up-seeming place to put them.

Our wedding, or the grouping of events that I think of together as “our wedding,” was dictated by procedural matters. His mother and aunt, with what was really extraordinarily good grace given that I was a foreigner and that we had only been together for a few months when we decided to get married—I mean we had been together before but as far as they were concerned I arrived out of a clear blue sky—threw us a sort of lite version of the engagement ceremony at his mom’s house and then later a really nice dinner in a restaurant. Part of it was I think they felt terrible for me because I had almost no family members and so everyone swallowed their alarm and conspired to make a fuss over us. And at least I spoke Turkish, not anything like flawlessly but I make an effort with my idioms.