The Golden State

“Hello” he says. “Hi there,” I say brightly, as if it were the most normal thing in the world to be attending a Sunday church service in an empty room. “I’m Daphne,” I say, extending my hand. “Benny,” he says, and shakes. I proffer up Honey, who gives him her signature and highly alarming come-hither look of downcast eyes sweeping lashes tucked chin and perfectly timed look up, it’s actually gross how cute and coy it is—nazlı, the word is in Turkish. “This is Honey.” “Hi there, little Honey,” he says and gingerly grasps two of her fingers. “Are… we going to be the only ones here,” I ask him. “Well, usually there are seven of us,” he says. At this the front door opens and a slightly ruddy wren of a woman rushes in, clad in flowing skirts and sleeves. “Everyone is sick,” she says, answering a question she didn’t hear me ask. “Randy is sick and can’t do the music, the Gates girls got heat stroke at the fairground yesterday, and I don’t know who-all.” “Hi,” she says and looks at me. “What a delightful sight the two of you are.” Honey begins kicking and I put her down to tear around again. “Yes, hi, well, I’m not sure how she’ll do. It’s the first time she’s been to church,” I say ruefully, as though our attendance were recorded in a central database. “Well that’s even better, then,” the woman says. “It’s a blessing to have you both. Do I know you?” I say my name and the name of my grandmother and she nods. “Yep, knew your lovely grandmother,” the first person I’ve met, I think, who has remembered her. “My name is Sarah and I’m our Worship Leader when Father H is out.” Two other women walk into the church, not old, but one walks with a cane. We are all white in the room. “Gladys, Mary,” Sarah says. “I’m thinking this is going to be it today.” I look at the rows and estimate that they could comfortably accommodate eighty people. Benny, Gladys, Mary, and I shuffle toward the pews and distribute ourselves as evenly as we can, Benny in one quadrant, Honey and I in another, and Mary and Gladys in a third, with the fourth quadrant empty. It looks like a plague has come through and we are the last people on earth and we are praying for deliverance.

Honey has toddled off and is squatting near a rack of ecclesiastical magazines at the back of the rumpus area and I think that might work and I move back to the second-to-last pew so I can keep an eye on both the pulpit and the child. The nave is lined with big open windows that make the building seem more spacious than it is. It is very clean and bright and airy, an illusion of bigness within relative to the squat brown building without. In my pew I set the Ergo the diaper bag the liturgy printout and a pencil I find in the bag. “Daphne,” Sarah says to me from the pulpit. “If you could just get behind you to the keyboard and press Play on the digital box.” I find the keyboard and a little box on it with a screen and buttons and I press the one that says “Play.” The canned organ of the processional sounds through the air and we assembled begin to sing. Honey pauses for a moment to marvel at us then runs down the aisle and climbs the stairs to the altar area. I run after her and scoop her up whisper “sorry” as though there were a hundred other people in the room rather than four and we trot down the aisle back to my pew where I put her up in a seated position and hand her the liturgy and the pencil and she stands on the bench and starts tearing holes in the liturgy with the pencil.

We didn’t have any kind of service here for Dad. He wasn’t religious and his family was Catholic, a suspect faith, and he wasn’t from here and it would have been utterly strange to have any kind of thing for him here in this building. But we did have one in our Anglican church in Athens, when we finally left Altavista and braved the reentry, the wives from the embassy ladies’ group flanking Mom as she unlocked the door of our apartment. I sit in the pew and try to put myself back inside that church, a beautiful stone building near Syntagma Square. A place for travelers and pilgrims since the nineteenth century, it advertises itself—for Philhellenes, for drifting colonials. I remember sitting in the pew thinking how strange it was that Mom and I were sitting there without him like we did every Sunday, but that this time it was his very absence that we were commemorating, marking that absence permanent. That we wouldn’t swallow cake and lemonade and make the hot walk home and find him waiting back at the apartment doing a puzzle. That he was just… absent. I close this window in my consciousness and think how odd it is that Honey has never been to that church with me. She’s never seen Syntagma, she’s never roamed the warren of the National Garden with its permanent fug of cat pee, its rusted playground equipment, the clamor of peacock screams and maybe a brass band sounding through the dusty foliage. She’s never been anywhere that matters to Engin or me, except here.