The Golden State

I wake up to the cooing of Honey and as soon as I achieve consciousness I feel my head in the hands of an unloving god and my mouth full of acid and ash despite a clear memory of brushing my teeth in the fluorescent light of the bathroom vanity and helplessly swallowing three expired Advil against the knowledge of what was coming. The red numbers on the hotel-style clock on the nightstand read 5:45 a.m. and I think please Honey, please Jesus, please go back to sleep, but her coos are becoming squawks and caws and I sit up and feel a wave of such profound dread that I have to lie down again and close my eyes. What unforgivable things did I do last night, I wonder, and try to still my pounding heart with the true fact that there is nothing unforgivable I could have done apart from the simple folly of drinking to excess at high altitude and falling down the stairs. Whatever devastation I’ve wrought I’ve wrought quietly in the privacy of my own mobile home. The pounding isolates itself to the upper-right quadrant of my head and I feel the egg on my eyebrow and think “I’m alive.” And then I think “unfit mother unfit mother unfit mother,” one of those word pairings of the sort my brain likes to get stuck in its gears.

“Shhhhh,” I say to Honey in her closet wondering whether she might lie back down and soothe herself to sleep. “Shhhhh,” but the position of the tongue to produce the sound allows me to taste the full ruin of my breath. Her caws become shrieks. “Dadadada,” she says. I force myself up and place my legs over the side of the bed. I am wearing only underwear and I look down at my slack white belly and the long thin hairs growing around my bikini line. I lie back down; I sit back up. I shuffle around the enormous bed and into the bathroom and see my eyelid is so purple it is nearly black and it becomes red radiating out from my eye. I drink the glass of water that is sitting forgotten by the sink. I know I have but it feels like I have never had a hangover like the hangover I have now and I can only propel myself out of the bathroom by hunching forward sagging my shoulders like Early Man. Honey’s noises are insistent and I shuffle to the closet and see her bright face like a little night-light in the dark. “Ameeeee,” she says, and lifts up her arms to me. I have heard her say “Amee” before but she’s said it to several people and I’ve never been positive she is referring to me. But this seems very clear and my heart starts bleeding and I pick her up and she is incredibly heavy and I carry her back to the bed and lie down, trying to clutch her to my bosom while she squirms and writhes to sit up stand up try and jump on the bed and my stomach is full of water and baby bees. My head pounds so much I have to sit up and put it between my knees. She stops her frenzy and puts her arms around me and her cheek against my back.

“I’m sorry,” I say from between my knees. “Mommy isn’t feeling very well.” “Ameeee,” she says and rears back and yells with laughter. She scrabbles around to my knees and I lift my head and she puts her hands on each side of my face and gives my mouth a big open-mouth smack and smiles so warmly and brightly that I say “Oh thank you my dearest one,” with genuine gratitude, and then she starts rifling her hands through my hair, grabbing hold of a big hank and yanking down. “Ouch,” I say to her. “Ouch ouch ouch” and I find her hands and extricate the hair and hold them very tightly. “We DO NOT pull hair,” I say, and she flails out of my reach and tumbles sideways off the bed with a loud thump. I spring off and around to the other side and she is trying to get her breath, her mouth open in preparation for what I know will be a tremendous cry. I pick her up and hold her against my body and lean my ass back against the bed and try not to throw up from all the jangling of my body parts and she screams. “My poor monkey,” I say to her. “Poor poor monkey. We got a bad bonk. Yes, that was a very bad bonk. Mommy has a bonk too. Poor lovebug sweet monkey, my little peach blossom.” I lean back to see her face and tears are running down and I wipe them away and wipe her nose with the scratchy white sheet and hug her again while she cries and wonder with desperation rising in my throat how in the loving fuck I will survive the morning. Soon she wants to get down and I set her on her feet and she takes off running from the bedroom into the kitchen.