The Golden State

If I have learned anything from my twenties it’s that rather than fight against hangovers you have to let the badness wash all over you, this is bad, this is the worst, this is the worst feeling, things are bad, and then perform a quick reckoning and giving of thanks. I am of sound body reasonably sound mind I have a treasure of a child who is healthy and loving and makes eye contact I have $1,847 in savings a loving husband and all that’s standing between us is some administrative bother some paperwork and it’s all going to be fine. I get myself into child’s pose on the bed which is the only thing I can remember from my brief tenure in yoga but then I think of the pictures of the little children on the beaches I used to visit with my parents, the little boy in the red shirt in a pose just like this, and the badness is back but now it’s world-historical badness, all the dead women and children on every continent on the planet and I have to stuff them all back with apologies so flaccid and pointless they become their own source of badness in the room. I lie flat on my stomach with my legs straight toes pointed and clasp my hands together under my chin and my chin to my chest and I say the Lord’s Prayer making sure palms touch, a remnant of my childhood marked by ritual gestures conforming to specifications mandated only by myself. Then I smell toast and hear the sounds of cupboards opening and closing and have such a strong sense memory of being in my mother’s house that I try and place the child I hear until I realize it’s my own.

I’m simultaneously desperate to cuddle and unable to deal with her so I lie there for a while longer and doze until the absence of sound wakes me again. I sit up. The room swims but the awful clamoring of my head has died down to the point where the pain of the fall speaks louder than the noise of my parched and alcohol-wounded brain cells. It’s 1:10 by the nightstand clock which means incredibly that I have been sleeping for around six hours and I wonder what in god’s name she can have done with Honey all this time. I stand up and slowly maneuver around the bed to the pile of clothes outside the closet door and I put on my stained white shirt my pants and pull my hair into a bun and shuffle to the bathroom splash water on my face brush my teeth and look at my mangled eyebrow again. I slowly move out of the bedroom into the kitchen and from the kitchen I see the back of Alice on the couch, and Honey’s feet stretched out beside her. Miracle of miracles, my child is sleeping on a lap, something she has not done since she was just a small baby.

“Hello,” I say to Alice in a whisper and she cranes her head around to see me, smiling faintly. “This little one was very tired,” she says. “I can’t believe how long I slept.” I raise my hands in an odd rueful gesture and let them drop limply. “Has she been putting you through the wringer?”

“Not too badly,” she says. “We read stories”—pointing to the pile of books on the floor—“and we learned nose eyes mouth fingers toes and we went for a walk around the front of the house.” What, I think to myself. How. She looks me up and down. “We walked very slowly” and I nod.

“Are you better now?” she asks.

“I feel more like a human being,” I say. “Thank you so much for doing this, you really don’t know what it means.”

“I know what it means,” she says. “Didn’t I tell you I had three small children and no husband to help me?”

I want to ask what happened to her husband but I feel very raw and tender and wish to spare myself further bad information for just a little longer. So I just say “You’re an amazing woman,” which seems likely to be true even apart from the amazing favor she has done me by coming here to care for the child of a potentially dead stranger. Her hand holds one of Honey’s hands; Honey’s other hand is flung out and dangling off Alice’s knees.

“I made some tuna fish if your stomach can take it,” she says, and behold there is a sandwich on the kitchen table with a little pile of chips next to it.

“Bless you,” I say. I pour myself some coffee from the pot and take the coffee and the plate gingerly over to my grandfather’s La-Z-Boy, facing Alice on the couch.

“Why isn’t your husband here?” she asks me. I sip the coffee and it’s thin but it’s coffee.

“After Honey was born and much agonizing we decided he should finish his certificate in video postproduction so that his employment prospects would be better, and it was going to be cheaper and easier to do it in Turkey, so he went back to Turkey for what was supposed to be a total of six months, but when he came back to see us midway through, under sinister and it turns out illegal pressure he was made to relinquish his green card at the San Francisco International Airport and go back to Turkey and is now waiting indefinitely to obtain a new one, a process which has been slowed by bureaucratic incompetence.”

“That sounds bad,” she says.

“It is bad,” I say.

“How long has he been gone?”