The Golden State

Anyway at the dinner I spoke English with my godparents and Turkish with everyone else and my hair was perfect and my makeup was perfect and my dress was an ivory shantung tea-length thing I extravagantly ordered from Neiman Marcus and had shipped to Uncle Rodney, who dutifully shipped it to me. When I was tipsy in the bathroom I looked at myself in the mirror and wondered if it was all real. And then I went back out and danced with Engin’s friends from the bar and with Pelin and with my godparents and it felt real, sort of. People had spent money to fly in an airplane to sit at a table with us; logistics had been wrangled. Sometimes I look back and wonder whether I was so hell-bent on marrying Engin because I wanted to play at being a cosmopolitan, but I’ve met a lot of men Turkish and otherwise and never wanted to marry any of them and that’s really the best answer I can give myself. It was real, if risky. Marriage is always a risk.

Rodney didn’t come to this obviously but along with my dress he tucked a check for $500 into the package which made me sob like a child when I opened it, feeling so coddled by everyone. He officiated our official U.S. wedding, which took place in his backyard in Quincy at the very end of Engin’s tourist visa. Two of my friends from grad school who spoke Turkish flew to SFO drove up rented a cabin and ate tri-tip sandwiches and I wore my dress from the Istanbul party. I cried a lot more at that one because my family’s absence—Mom’s absence—felt so pronounced, and because I was terrified USCIS was going to suss out the lie.

Sometimes I would feel the ground give way beneath my feet—on the henna night—or when we landed in SFO the first time and Engin was suddenly my responsibility as a U.S. citizen and wife to lovingly care for and squire around and make sure he was having a good time and secure the correct citizenship status for (a task I have so far failed dismally at). But throughout our various weddings and comings and goings, we would periodically ask each other if we were okay, and we were.

I pull on my cigarette and look around at my çeyiz and get the feeling that sometimes comes over me when I think of Engin, one that has nothing to do with Skype, when my brain can manage to slough off the impedimenta of logistics and access the feeling of whole-body contentment and gratitude and need, the obvious core of everything I feel about him and which I can only hope will continue to be there existing at some unseen level, shaping decisions and material outcomes until we both die.

I put out the cigarette. The smoke collecting in the garage has a soporific, mildly sickening effect and I stand up with effort and open a box full of what appear to be suzani pillowcases that I definitely want at some point but not now, having no decorative pillows to put in them, and another box with twenty-five different pomegranate things, glass pomegranates and ceramic pomegranates and actual dried pomegranates. For reasons unknown, my mom collected pomegranates. This box takes the wind out of me a little. I take one off the top, a rough-glazed rustic-looking clay one, and close the box. I’ll put this one in my office. Or in our bedroom. Or maybe I’ll carry it to Turkey. I don’t know. I go back into the house and set it on the nightstand and lie down on the bed.

DAY 5