And now I am here with Honey trying to eat a geranium and I’m, yes, extremely bored and I would love for her to tire herself out and go back into her Pack ’n Play and go to sleep for two more hours. It’s been one day. I hate myself.
The only insight I have developed about parenting so far even though I always forget it is that when you feel like dying you should try to leave your physical location and go to another one. Blow the stink off, as my grandpa Burdock used to say. I think to myself what if we go to the Golden Spike and have a steak, and I immediately feel so buoyed by this idea my awareness of our bank balance notwithstanding that I grab Honey with renewed joy and say “Come on sweet pea we are gonna go out on the town,” which, ha. I say “Do you wanna take a bath with Mama” and she says “Yahh” and we go inside to the master bathroom with its cheap Jacuzzi tub and rotting sill and I pee and smell must rising up from between my legs and the bath is none too soon for either of us. I look in the mirror and I have flakes in my eyebrows and in my unfortunate little sideburns and around my hairline. I spray the mummified mosquito hawks down the drain and put Honey outside of the bathtub with the handheld shower and I get into it and spray myself down and do my shampoo and conditioner and then I step out dripping everywhere strip off her grassy pants and onesie and get her into the tub and do a mild hose-down while she vacillates between protest and glee. We sit down on our butts, she between my legs and facing me poking at my stomach. I look down at myself in the fluorescent light and see very white dough and moles and a giant thatch of hair, which has been more or less par for the course since I got pregnant. My understanding is that most Turkish women take it all off and when I was there I went with the flow and allowed myself to be thus denuded but I hate it and anyway now I don’t have the time or the money or a man on the premises. Engin and I have had only the most brief and strangely awkward conversation about hair and preference and he claimed not to care but this is probably a lie which makes me feel bad again until I think of the Golden Spike and how good it is going to be, not maybe in the food sense but spiritually.
The Golden Spike is just a short walk out of Deakins Park over the train tracks and along Route 235, or rather it’s a very very short distance in your Buick or your enormous pickup your Ford F-150 your Dodge Ram in which it’s a matter of moments to get there but like everything in town takes what seems like an unwarranted amount of time on foot, which I forget until we are at the tracks. Apart from the excessive space in this town, the pavement is so hard, the land is so flat, the air so thin, and the sun so strong even on the downhill slope to evening that your destination, visible though it may be, comes to feel like a mirage. The ground is hard on your knees and there’s no sidewalk out here by the tracks. I put Honey on my shoulders and grip her ankles tight and she claps her hands above my head. We see the big old sign of the Golden Spike in the near field and behind it the cinder-block box with an illuminated bar sign in its sole visible window.
The Golden Spike is one of the family-style Basque joints you can find across the west, the California west, the Nevada west, where a hundred years ago the shepherds who left Spain settled. The model is “family style plus a meat,” so you get a lamb chop, or rib eye, or fish, and then there’s a large salad of iceberg highly dressed, and sometimes a chickpea and lamb stew—presumably a taste of the Basque past—and tomato soup with barley or noodles. It’s ruinously expensive and not really very good but it excites me in some kind of primal way. I like the carafes of chilled red vinegar wine and the huge slabs of beef.
We reach the door of the cinder-block box and even though it’s 5:00 p.m. and the breeze has started up I’m sweating. We enter the vestibule that separates the dining room from the dusty parking lot, a strange, carpeted anteroom with an unused little piano pushed up against one wall, and then the main room and it’s almost empty and I feel immediately deflated at the discrepancy between the cozy hum I had pictured and this dark depopulated cave. The hostess says hello and leads us to a table and asks whether I’m just passing through and I tell her the name of my grandparents and she doesn’t recognize them.
Then we are getting settled and Honey is in a high chair playing with a spoon rapping it on the plate and I’m pouring her the smallest little glass of water from the brown melamine pitcher and myself a glass of wine from the cold carafe that is already on the table and a cheery server arrives and clucks at Honey and says “What an absolutely gorgeous baby” and I say thank you because I think so too even though I try not to say so, try not to say beautiful try not to say pretty girl or any variation thereof. I order the rib eye with garlic which means they put six to eight cloves of garlic on top of a rib eye steak the size of a plate. There is going to be a baked potato too. Honey takes her cup of water in her hands and brings it to her mouth for a surprisingly tidy sip and maybe it’s the wine but I’m bursting with pride to see it. I spoon soup for myself and Honey who has in addition to her looks great talent with a spoon and she tucks in and I butter a thick slab of the pale crumbly house bread. While she’s eating her soup I listen to the hostess and the server both white women of a certain age shooting the shit and the server is saying “I tell you I got all frazzled yesterday—we had a fight, which I never seen here before. It frazzled me right up!” and the hostess makes moos of concern and asks what happened and the server says “You know that old guy who comes in sometimes and gives himself a shot for his diabetes and he always leaves the needle on the table on a napkin? Normally I don’t say anything I just put it in a milk carton and throw it away. But yesterday Donna Dellomo is here and she hollers at him that us girls are gonna get stuck with that thing and he better throw it away himself, and he’s a mean old guy and tells her to mind her business and then her husband says ‘Don’t talk to my wife like that’ and then the old guy stands up and they just start trying to slug at each other. I was worried someone was gonna run out to his truck and get his gun.” They move to the far side of the host stand and carry on a stream of conversation I don’t quite hear but I hear the server say “I don’t even know which hole to put it in” and laugh and then as if she didn’t get the reaction she had hoped for or conversely wants to relive the nice reaction she did get says “I’m like ‘I don’t even know which hole to put it in’” but the hostess doesn’t really laugh and I am close enough I wonder whether I am part of the audience and whether I should laugh but I feel this would intrude and I hope the needle wasn’t at the table we are at now. Good for Donna Dellomo, whoever she is. Fucking men leaving their biohazardous garbage around for women to clean up.
My steak comes and I cut up little pieces for Honey that she mostly doesn’t eat preferring the soup and the bread and soon I have demolished my portion and am feeling like a stuffed tick and Honey is tired of sitting and being a good girl and is now agitated, troubled by some unknown thing that makes her scramble to vacate the high chair so I pick her up and she stands on my knees, pulling up on my shirt with stew hands and starting to bleat, our window of relatively civilized fine dining dying without ceremony in the air-conditioned chill of the cinder-block.