The Golden State

“It’s so funny to meet you here,” I say to her. “Since my husband’s from Turkey and everything.” “It is a strange coincidence,” says Alice. The teen brings our food and Honey begins rhythmically banging her fork on the edge of the plate. “No, please, Honey, we don’t bang,” I say to her. She reaches her hand out toward my beans. Our beans. I spoon them onto her small plate.

“I loved going to Turkey,” she says. “I always loved going places. That’s why I joined the navy.” “The navy!” I say. “I thought your husband was a pacifist.” She smiles. “Well, he still served. He worked harder than I did, manual labor type things. They put them in Roosevelt’s old camps, from the what’s-it-called, the Conservation Corps. And anyway,” she says, “I didn’t do it for patriotic purposes. I just wanted to get out of town, and there was the navy saying it would take a woman and put her at a desk for a decent salary.”

“My grandmother was in the navy too,” I say. “It was the first time she ever left the state.” She keeps talking like she doesn’t see me.

“I know that young people now are used to living all over the place but it wasn’t the sort of thing my parents did or their friends or anyone they knew did. I don’t suppose anyone dies in the town they were born anymore but that was the idea back then.”

She puts a forkful of rice into her mouth with the gnarled hand. I try to picture her behind the wheel of a car.

She looks at Honey eating her beans.

“Good eater,” Alice observes. “Yes, thank god,” I say. “She gets it from me.”

“Well, you’re still pretty trim, at least,” Alice says. “You should get rid of that baby weight before it settles in, though.”

I am stunned by this remark but it’s also so oddly familiar. It’s not just Hugo; women are birds of prey. I mean you are sitting minding your own business and then they descend on you from a clear blue sky with their talons out. I pray I won’t do this with Honey, please god don’t let me do this. In Turkey it’s considered fine to note if someone has gained weight but since all the women I know there are svelte and gorgeous the custom does not feel like a toothless observation. And observation is violence, anyway, as any Orientalist knows.

“It’s true, Alice. I’ve got some weight hanging around,” I say a little more drily than I intend. I spoon beans into Honey’s mouth, Honey the good eater, may it never bring her extra weight.

The girl brings the check and Alice reaches for it while I’m gathering up a spoonful of beans for Honey. “Let me,” I say when I notice and she shakes her head with authority. “You can’t take it with you,” she tells me, and rummages in a serviceable black leather purse with a single strap.

“You know, I’m sorry I said that,” she says next.

“It’s all right,” I tell her.

I think bizarrely that it might be nice to say hello to Cindy over the deck, we can have a cigarette and be soft around the middle together, despite the events of the supervisors’ meeting and her ideological shortcomings.

I am wiping up smeared beans from the table with a napkin and Alice reaches out and puts a dry hand on mine. “Really, I’m sorry,” she says. “You and Honey remind me a little of being around my own girls again.”

“What happened to them,” I say.

“They were all born sick. Two died in childhood and the third one died later,” she says. “Oh god,” I say and she just says, “Yes.”

She shrugs. “A doctor told me later it’s a one-in-a-billion chance that two people with that set of genes would meet and have children. And those children have a twenty-five percent chance of being born with the gene. But if they do, they don’t have a chance. Unfortunately we didn’t know that. And he was the only man I ever wanted to be with.”

Honey is turning her body into a board straining against the back of the high chair starting to yell and I lift her out. I try to think of what else there is to say but she says “You go on. Get that little one to bed.”

“Will you be at Sal’s tomorrow?” I ask her.

“Inshallah,” she says. I laugh. Engin absolutely hates it when I say this but it’s like the first thing that foreigners learn in Turkey and it covers such a multitude of scenarios.

“Inshallah,” I say. “Well, God willing Honey and I will be there around ten-thirty.”

I wheel Honey out and up Main Street. I am thinking about how you could have three babies and all of them die and my brain worries the thought a little like a dog with something between its teeth and I have the thought I always have first that there must be something extenuating something that makes it less sad what thing she could have done that made her deserve it what thing could they have done what way could they have died that would make this situation acceptable, but there’s never anything like this and I wonder if that’s the source of all the world’s sorrows, that everyone assumes everyone else did something to deserve it because otherwise the things that happen to people are just too horrible to bear.