The Golden State

Before he was deported Engin developed a rapport with the elderly Chinese women who come by our house on Monday evenings to collect the cans from our recycling and who speak significantly less English than he does. One of the ladies gets on my nerves because once I was walking into the house with Honey in my arms and she indicated via hand signs that I needed to go inside and get the cans and I said “I’m sorry I’ve got my hands full” and she said “No English” and I thought For fuck’s sake and went inside saying “sorry” and then felt bad and barricaded Honey in her bouncer and went outside with the cans and she was gone and I felt worse. Engin would set cans and bottles into a separate bag and put them by the large can well in advance of the appointed hour and would sometimes be outside smoking a cigarette puttering with the succulents when they came by and they would exchange greetings. Once I looked out the window and he was exuberantly trying to shake the hand of the one that I let down. “My auntie,” he said when he came inside.

I have trailed off in my Turkish conversation time with Honey while I remember this and now we are at the gate of the house and I wheel her up and rush through all the things that were prophesied at Reynaldo’s, diaper jammies milk story teeth bed and it takes forty-five minutes and she lies down like a good girl as though she’s been yearning for her bed and finally at the end I am on the deck with my drink and my cigarette and it feels almost as good as a bar.

I am halfway through my cigarette looking up at the stars and down at my phone and sending Engin a loving WhatsApp message and feeling virtuous for not having spent hours scrolling through BabyCenter even though it’s only the Wi-Fi situation that has prevented me from doing so and not any abstemiousness on my part. I hear the sound of an engine in the distance and it grows louder and closer until a truck materializes in front of Cindy’s house and discharges Cindy and Ed. It seems decades since we were together in the courthouse.

“How did it go,” I call to her as they make their way up the cement walk next door. “We did it!” she says with un-Cindy-like enthusiasm, something like glee. “Five to one in favor.”

I feel big and full of love to spread around so I say “My goodness!” with a faint sense of secondhand victory on her behalf until I absorb the import of this, one small step gained for a crypto-racist dream of separateness and economic independence for what is probably the poorest county in the state and the largest per capita user of social services. At what point does neighborliness become capitulation cowardice etc. Too late. “Congratulations, I guess,” I say to them. “I’d, um, be sad if California split up, though, personally.” Cindy shrugs and Ed nods sort of sympathetically. “Well, we don’t know what’s going to happen,” Cindy says, and they go in the house and then five minutes later they are out again. “We’re heading down to the Golden Spike if you want to come,” Ed says, I daresay almost hopefully, or maybe I’m imagining it, and I point to the house and say, “Got the baby.” “Okay then. Have a good night.” “Good night, good night.”

I know that I have to be careful vis-à-vis my water intake relative to my screwdriver intake and I go inside and have two glasses of the airless mineral-tasting water that comes out of the tap. I get the Diamond ice cream out of the freezer and the Hershey’s out of the cupboard and I fix a huge bowl, making dense scribbles of syrup across the ice cream’s uncanny yellow. I carry it back outside and eat it while watching the videos of Honey from daycare on my WeChat app. I have videos on this app from her first weeks at daycare after Engin left for his course, when she was eight months old and at the peak of babyness and they are precious precious precious but I cannot figure out how to get them out of the phone and onto the computer where I might feel more assured that they will last and I spend a lot of time worrying about this. In the first one she is wearing a onesie I bought her at the consignment store that is covered with tiny planes trains and automobiles. “You are going to be a baby who goes places,” I told her, when we put her in it for her first day, although her dad is the one who was going places and so far she has mostly stayed right where she was born. In the videos Honey is wearing the onesie and sitting on a play rug next to another baby of about the same size. “Baby Bianca!” I say aloud as that is the baby’s name and now like Honey she is a rangy almost-toddler, with a little ponytail of black hair sticking up in a plume from her head. She speaks Chinese with her mom and maybe one day with Honey, I hope. Honey has a beatific smile on her face. The video is a fourteen-second loop and I play it over and over again while tears run down my face.