The Golden State

I follow her with my hominid shuffle my head throbbing at every plodding step and when I get to the kitchen I look through the door to the dining room and see Alice standing there, Alice, utterly forgotten, called in the night, Alice, holding one of the chicken-scratched “In case of my death please call this number” papers I am now mortified to remember spreading across the dining room table before smoking what I believed would be the last cigarette of my short span on earth. She looks at me and I cover my breasts and turn around and shuffle quickly back to the bedroom. “I’m early,” I hear her say. “One second,” I manage to cry out and I’m fumbling around the closet for a T-shirt and sweatpants which I pull on and then emerge. Honey is holding on to Alice’s leg.

“I thought I’d find out sooner rather than later whether you were alive,” she says.

I lunge to the kitchen sink and vomit up the water I drank. Alice stays where she is. I run the faucet and remove the hand sprayer and spray water ineffectually to wash the mess down.

“I’m hungover,” I say helplessly. “I’m sorry.”

“I thought you might be,” she says. “You sounded a little keyed up on the phone.”

I see her looking around the house presumably to see whether it’s a safe environment for a child. The essential tidiness and coziness of my late grandmother’s home overcomes the detritus of Honey that is strewn around the linoleum and carpet.

“You know you have to be careful at this altitude,” she says mildly.

“Can I get you some coffee,” I say and look around for a coffee machine filters coffee any of the things I would need to make the coffee, and she says “Tell you what. You are good for less than nothing right now.” She gently takes Honey’s hands off her leg and walks carefully gingerly frailly over to me and takes the dish towel from the handle of the refrigerator where it is tucked and opens the freezer takes out ancient frozen peas wraps them in the dish towel and says “Take this to bed with you and lie down.”

“What are you going to do?” I ask her, holding the peas to my burning eyebrow.

“I’ll mind the baby.” I look at her and somehow telegraph my concern that she won’t be able to corral Honey at her advanced age.

“I don’t move very fast but I think I know how to take care of a sweet baby,” she says, and looks down at Honey and says “Don’t I know how to look after a sweet baby?” and Honey shrieks “Daaaahhhhhh!” Alice looks at me with an eyebrow gently raised.

“I don’t get the feeling that you could move any faster than I could.” From my roiling stomach I am trying to muster up the will to be polite say no thanks I’ve got this but some slumbering self-preserving instinct wakes and I gesture at diapers on the coffee table and bananas in the fruit bowl and say “There are eggs in the fridge” and there is really nothing else for me to do but go into the bedroom close the door take off my clothes get into bed curl up on my side put the peas on my burning face pull the covers all the way over my head and cry until I fall asleep.

Sometime later I open my eyes and I’m under the sheet in a foul-breath-smelling pocket of warmth and the peas are a big wet spot on the sheet beside me. I have such a serious feeling of badness that I have to just submit to it, curl my knees up to my chest and let it wash over me like waves, waves that will ideally recede after they’ve spent their energy on my supine form, giving me a chance to stand up catch my breath. I have had a hangover in my life more times than I care to admit and so there is a part of me that knows that this particular body-mind-heart-spiritual-level, ethical-level feeling of badness is just the hangover and not a permanent state, but I also know that this hangover badness like all hangover badness is latching onto preexisting badness. Surely the tide of badness rising steadily higher over the last eight months is a sign that there is something to which I cannot acclimate. Engin’s green card, my job, Hugo and Meredith and the breast pump in the basement of Oberrecht Hall. And Maryam. And Ellery. Now instead of waking up to see a stranger’s back next to me as I might have done in the past and thus ushered in hangover-specific badness it’s the feeling of the grave injury I’ve done to my face, the egg on my eyebrow, being an unfit mother, not just to my own child but any other child that might cross my path.