The Golden State

But maybe church will… do something for us. Maybe we’ll have a visitation. If nothing else by the time church is over and we go back home it will be time for lunch and then a long nap and if I’m honest a drink and maybe in the afternoon we can drive out to Antelope Meadows where I seem to remember there is a dilapidated swing set and a view of waving grasses and a man-made lake surrounded by spiky grass and gopher holes. A nice Sunday evening just the gals, and maybe I can convince myself to go back to work tomorrow or the next day or the next or the one after that.

Honey is silent now and I take a shower and the feeling of hot water on my skin and solitude and respite is so enormous I have a sensation that borders on randiness and take the head of the shower which is removable and spray it between my legs at varying distances and think about Tom Hardy until thirty seconds later I come in a painful, spasmodic way that feels incomplete, a misfired sneeze but I guess a sneeze nonetheless. I dry myself brush out my knotted hair put on jeans and the shirt I was wearing when I left the Institute. I lay out Honey’s hat and the sunscreen and clean diaper and pack away the changing pad into the backpack with a bag full of raisins and a sippy cup filled with water and two books and a spare pants and there are twenty minutes remaining to sit on the deck and be clean and fresh and smoke two cigarettes and stand up feeling light-headed and ethereal. There’s a breeze and it rattles the goat bell my mom brought my grandparents from Cyprus. I hear its unmistakable goat-summoning sound and I have suddenly the strongest sense memory I’ve ever had, so strong I touch the arms of my deck chair to know I’m here. Mom and I were on Chios, before the Syrian war, before the refugee crisis, doing a kind of Dad memorial trip to old haunts. I was a teen. We stayed at a village outfit called Aphrodite Rentrooms, a damp, spartan affair with austere beds side by side. We woke up from an Aegean afternoon nap to the sound of a hundred goat bells in the olive grove below, and we sat on the balcony eating pistachios and watched a sea of goats return home in the pink afternoon light. I try to remember the light, my mother in a white nightie in the little bed across from mine. The breeze dies and the goat bell is silent.

I wash my hands and put on lotion to mask the smell of smoke which never really comes off and I remember on that same trip a Dutch couple from the hotel invited us to eat dinner with them and the man pounded on the table about immigrants. “They say I’m Dutch,” he yelled. “I’m black as my shoe but I’m Dutch.” I shake my head like my dad and go into Honey’s room touch her hand and she stirs. I touch her cheek and she stirs again and I say “Did we have a nice snooze” and she blinks at me and then her face wrinkles as though she will cry but then settles itself into more of a look of assessment, a serious look, and then she smiles, the way she has of what I think they call self-soothing; she is always adapting to her environments.