The Golden State

“I have to go outside where I get a signal and try to call my husband,” I tell Alice, and she nods, and I surreptitiously get the cigarettes and the lighter from the cupboard and head outside to the deck corner and try Engin on a voice call. He answers right away and the first thing he says is “What’s going on?” and I say “I tripped and fell,” pointing to my forehead even though there’s no video. “I hurt my eyebrow pretty badly.” Then I wonder why I told him this since it will just make him worry.

“Where’s Meltem?”

“She’s inside with a nice auntie I met here. Sleeping.”

“What auntie?”

“Just an old lady we met in the coffee shop. She’s a stranger here too. She’s my new friend, I guess.” “Great,” he says, and he sounds sour. “She’s been to Turkey,” I say brightly as he says, “Did you go to the doctor?”

“No, it’s fine.”

“I’m worried about you.”

“I know,” I say. “I’m sorry. I think I’m just having a meltdown,” I say in English. I start crying. “I’m also sorry that every time we talk I start crying,” I say to him. “I don’t know why we thought this would be a good idea, to have you leave to take the course.” I realize how much of the time he’s been gone that I’ve been trying to assure him that everything is going really extremely well. I think I can feel him starting to ruffle, preparing to launch into “So I could get a better job and earn more money” but he stops and just says “Biliyorum.” I know.

I have the feeling which never fails to destabilize me, a sudden reminder of the faith I’ve placed in the strength of invisible bonds, ties stretching across the ocean like the fiber-optic cables or whatever it is that allow us to Skype. Spending the summer in Turkey, abandoning my Ph.D. program, marrying Engin, these were not so much decisions as they were realities that quietly but ecstatically asserted themselves at the time. Every so often this thought comes and knocks me on my ass, that we’re just building this whole castle on such a flimsy and hastily constructed premise that we love each other and want to be together raise our child together grow old together and how easy—how wrong but how easy nonetheless—it would be to walk away from it all, with nothing changing except I could stop worrying about the progress of a lot of expensive pieces of paper through a vast administrative machine, although I’m sure it would come with its own tortuous administrative processing. But then again I have Honey and if Engin feels even a tenth of what I feel about Honey he’ll never live without her.

Badness washes around my ankles on the deck, rising swiftly. I’m just crying into one hand and holding the phone with the other hand and Engin is silent on the other end. I have the distinct impression that we have entered a definitive moment, when Engin or I can say the thing that will snip apart the whole nest of skeins that tether us to each other. Now in this moment it seems incredible that such an apparatus, a child, all this paperwork, could have been born of something so careless as two people deciding to spend the night at the bar and never again be parted. But at the time all obstacles seemed to melt away with no resistance.

I wait for the word that will highlight what a disaster it’s all been. But he just says “I love you,” in English, and I say “I love you too” and I know it will carry us forward another day. “Listen,” I say, when I stop shuddering. “This is a Humanitarian thing, they have a category for it in Citizenship and Immigration. Maybe the lawyer can push it through on those grounds.”

“Okay,” he says.

“Are you mad at me?” I say in Turkish.

“No, my love. I’m not mad at you.” I want to ask what about your mother what about Pelin what about Savaş what about Gökay what about Özgür and Sema and everyone else you know but decide to stay with the answer that matters, the one that feels good. We stay on the line just listening to each other breathe and I take out a cigarette and light it and he says “Öfff” which is a sound expression that conveys all the frustration of the world and I say “Fucking hell” in English and he says “Fucking hell” too.

“I’m sorry that I made you do this,” I say.