But now I’m selfishly mercifully distracted because the air has that indescribably wonderful summer feeling that used to make me feel like I could go anywhere, do anything, have sex with anyone. The thing I miss most about a city is the feeling that something is always happening, a festivity at all times, a restaurant with people eating, a place to hear music, even if I’m not doing any of those things, maybe I could be. But now that I have Honey the possibility is functionally zero and when she is old enough to be left alone for days at a time assuming I could ever find someone I would trust to watch her for days at a time I will be too old to go to a rave meet someone at a bar look really good have sex with a stranger, not to mention that I am married.
But on balance I have been so lucky, not only did I once meet an objectively beautiful man at a bar in a beautiful city but I married him and he gave me a beautiful child who will speak two languages, maybe more. And maybe one day when his papers are sorted and our finances are more in hand I will go and do yoga lose the weight around my middle and get a good haircut buy some nice makeup have someone put it on me buy a good dress and Engin will think Aman what a beautiful woman I married even if she is a neurotic woman from a benighted country.
Thinking about Engin gives me the customary pang of guilt that I am not speaking Turkish to Honey; not speaking Turkish at all. She’s got those dazed half-open eyes she gets when she’s rolling in the stroller and she’s had hardly any nap today and I think it’s a good time to try and let her take in her father’s tongue. “Honey my love,” I say to her in Turkish. “Your mama is going to speak to you in Turkish a little.” She cranes her head back to look at me.
“Since your daddy is a Turk he speaks Turkish,” I say to her. “Your mama is American but I am speaking Turkish. She speaks Turkish rather.
“In Istanbul live your grandmother and your paternal aunt and your uncle. In Izmir lives your paternal grandfather.” I hope I have these right, there are parent-specific names for relatives which seems excessive although I guess in English we spend a lot of time saying “My mother’s sister,” etc.
“In the summer we will go with Daddy to visit your paternal grandfather and we will sit on the pier and have Coke and pumpkin seeds. Won’t it be nice?” I say.
“Your paternal grandmother in Istanbul misses you very much. She wants us to come visit her. When we go your daddy will take you to get a fish sandwich and to see Miniatürk.”
I am floundering. The distance between myself pushing a stroller along the side of the road in Paiute County and Ayşe and Mini Turk World feels apocalyptic.
“Your daddy loves you very much,” I tell Honey, and then in English for emphasis.
“And your daddy loves cats very much. He likes to draw and cook and he makes delicious salami and cheese sandwiches. When you were in my womb”—gross but I love that word, rahim, must be Arabic, no vowel harmony. I pause to think if there’s a more modern word than this, and then realize that’s a problematic way to think about it, latent anti-Arab prejudice rising forth, rahim it is—“I ate one almost every single day.” We cross the railroad tracks with a bump.
“He loves to watch movies and when we watch them…” I stop here to parse the grammar because in Turkish you have to know what you are going to say before you start speaking, since the end comes first, or what is the end in English anyway. I think about trying to explain this to Honey but feel exhausted. “… when we watch them if I get either scared or bored and look at my phone he gets mad.” It takes me nearly two minutes to get this out. I can’t believe that something once so relatively easy is deserting me now.
I wonder if Engin is bored when he talks to me. Learning Turkish is no less than what’s expected if you are for example a Chechen and you immigrate to Turkey but it’s a bonus if you are American, Americans having managed to forge a dual impression worldwide of hopeless stupidity and national superiority that exempts them from learning other languages. Turks are also convinced that Turkish is an impossible language to learn, although English is the one that has no inherent logic and is all irregular verbs and phantom letters and bizarre plurals. Engin doesn’t ever talk to me in particularly complex English sentences and that doesn’t bother me so hopefully the reverse is true too.
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.