The Golden State

I put on more sunscreen and the hat and attach the Ergo for wearing her on my back which is challenging to do by yourself. I sit her on the bed and then squat down before her and sort of scoop her onto my back and hold her there with one arm behind my back while the other arm fumbles for straps and despite an instant and stabbing cramp in my side I manage to feed the buckle through the safety loop and then snap it tight and I adjust her and we look in the mirror and she smiles a big smile showing all her tiny teeth and I jump up and down to get her straightened out and she laughs and I put the backpack with her diapers etc. on frontways and say “We’re off!” and we set out for the long walk across town, all the way down Main Street almost to the other end. I hand Honey half a banana and we plod along until she says “Eh eh eh aaaaaah” in my ear and I give her the rest of the banana and there’s banana in my hair. Sal’s it turns out is closed at 9:40 on a Sunday but I huddle near the door and get out my phone and find I can still use its Internet. I ignore my flurry of WhatsApp notifications and open Skype. Engin is not logged on so I call his phone. He answers and I hear festive hubbub in the background. “Canım benim” he says, and I say “canım benim.” “You’re early,” he says, and I say “We’re, um, going out and so I’m calling you to say we won’t be able to call you at ten-thirty.” “Where are you going,” he asks, and it takes me a minute to remember the word “church,” so seldom have I used it. Like “ecclesiastical,” like French église. Ikliz, I say but no, he corrects me, kilise. “It sounds strange I know,” I say. He laughs. “Church! Why?” “I don’t know, Engin. We’re bored. You know I used to go with my mom.” “American religious fundamentalism is influencing my wife,” he says to someone, which annoys me. “Pelin says don’t go,” he says to me and I hear the voice of my sister-in-law in the background. “Where are you?” I ask. “We’re having beers with Pelin and Savaş on the Kordon. We decided to go to visit Dad. Tomorrow we’ll go to the beach.” The fucking beach. Pelin is beautiful beautiful beautiful and I wither momentarily thinking about her in a bathing suit, a sight I’ve been subjected to previously in a harmful manner, although jealousy isn’t quite right here since she is after all Engin’s sister, but even if he cannot lust for her exactly she can acclimatize him to the way that women are supposed to look and I know I do not look, and Pelin is the mother of a teenager and still looks the way she does. “How nice,” I say. “Let’s talk tomorrow, then.” Engin sounds bemused. “Okay. But I can still talk on the Kordon. How long is your church?” “I don’t know, I haven’t been in years. An hour probably.” Honey begins squawking. “It’s your baba” I tell her and hold up the phone by my shoulder so she can hear it from my back. She gets her mitts on the phone and tries to turn it to look at the screen as though to see his face. “No, sweetheart, he’s not on the screen, just his voice, my love.” “I’ve got to go,” I tell Engin. “Let’s talk tomorrow.” I feel unaccountably desperate to get off the phone, the futility of conversation alighting on me suddenly like a stinking, malevolent seabird. “I love you I kiss you bye bye,” and press the red button while he is still saying something.

We start up the march again and approach the street where we turn up for the church and I picture him on the Kordon, which I think must be the happiest place on earth or was the last time I was there, before Izmir became a way station for desperate people preparing to cross the sea. A wide patch of grass stretches a mile up and down the waterfront of the main part of Izmir, innocuously ugly concrete buildings faced by a strip of cafés and the grass, upon which families and young people and lovers sit and men walk up and down selling pumpkin seeds and collecting empty beer bottles for recycling. It’s obviously not Engin’s fault that he is having a beach day while I’m lugging a sweating toddler to a rural church service—it’s my fault for ensnaring him through marriage in the bureaucratic web of the evil empire, my fault for putting him in a position where his only chance to work was to go back to Turkey, my fault my fault. I know all these things but I am still full of fury.