“My mom’s from here, Frank and Cora Burdock’s daughter?” She looks blank. “They lived over in Deakins Park.” “Oh,” she says. “My brother’s lady friend lives over there. Cindy Cooper.” “Oh,” I say. “My neighbor! She seems like a nice lady” and the proprietress laughs and says, “I don’t know about that. But we love her anyway.” Honey watches us talking and the proprietress says, “She’s a good little thing isn’t she,” and I say, “Most of the time.” “Pretty little thing,” she says. “Look at those eyelashes,” and Honey smiles at her out from under them.
I gather up our things and set Honey down and she toddles furiously toward the door and as we pass through it the crone who has been mostly motionless sitting at the table next to the door looks right at us. “Merhaba,” I could swear she says, which is Hello in Turkish. Even Honey stills for a moment, pausing midflight in her headlong rush toward the sidewalk. “Hello?” I say to her politely in English, sure I’ve had an auditory hallucination. She looks down at her hands, her mouth closed and shy and Honey reanimates and flies out of the doorway and I fly after her, trailing a hand behind me in valediction at the crone. I catch the collar of Honey’s shirt and stick my head back through the door to say something, but her head is still bowed. “Goodbye,” I say. Honey chokes a bit with the neck of her garment up against her throat. We exit.
I decide that we will take the long way home by the cemetery and stop to visit Mom, since I have not seen her in more than a year. The cemetery is south of Deakins Park, but like Deakins Park it sits out on the edge of inhabited land. Honey is quiet in her stroller lulled by the wheeling as usual and I think about Engin’s mother and what she said about us coming there to the small but airy matriarchal apartment in a nice neighborhood of Istanbul. This is the obvious thing to do, so obvious that we have danced endlessly around the idea, as though the idea were a slippery occult monolith upon which our minds can find no purchase. If you have two people and one of them is from what I believe is called an “emerging economy” and one is American you go to America, I guess is the usual thing, even though right now I am sitting in the middle of what you might call a demolished economy. (Casualties of Capital! Hugo says in my ear.) Plus I got the job at the Institute, and Engin did not have a stable income and was game to come to California, so this made sense. The whole trajectory of our marriage has been westward. It’s true that in Turkey there is Erdoğan the tyrant sultan and also that there are safety concerns of various kinds but the last incident was the woman from Dagestan who bombed the police station and that was months ago and America is no picnic on that score what with roomfuls of murdered kindergarteners lying in their own blood. Oh God. We talk about buying a stone shack on the Aegean coast sometime in the distant future, when we’ve made it in some way, the way being as of yet unclear. But I guess we assumed that at least the first location of our making it would be in America. It occurs to me that I created a sort of budget version of my own family situation where my dad’s work dictated that my mom live on foreign soil, and I’m now putting that on Engin, putting thousands of miles between him and his family and his friends not to mention momentous national events like Gezi, which he would have flown home for if we had the money and I wasn’t pregnant with Honey.
And what do we have here? This house, such as it is. My uncle Rodney, such as he is. My mother, although she’s in a buried urn in the grass in the high desert cemetery. We have her things—all her beautiful rugs and tablecloths and dishes packed away in the garage where the Buick ought to be. One of Engin’s and my future projects has been the combing through and disposition or keeping of these when the mobile home sells, but it doesn’t sell and doesn’t sell. I have my job, sort of. I have the smell of juniper and the dew on the fescue, which seemed so urgent just two days ago. But I don’t have the sound of seagulls by the Bosphorus, the clink of glasses, the sound of human enterprise and activity in the heart of the world. I don’t have my husband, the father of my child. Honey doesn’t have her dad and he doesn’t have her.
Among things I generally choose not to think about is the absence of my own parents. When I envision my soul, such as it is, I picture a big pink lump of gnarled flesh, healed-over wounds that don’t smart anymore so much as they tug painfully depending on which direction my thoughts travel. My dad was a weird dreamy man who worked for the government and died when I was eleven. He and my mom met overseas. She left Altavista to go to the same university that employs me now, and being an adventurous frontierswoman type, she graduated and saved her money and went with her girlfriend to Corfu, where my dad was enjoying R&R from his post in Romania, and they were both from California so they got married, and eight years later they had me and named me Daphne after the Greek myth, the nymph who turned into a tree. When I was born we lived on Cyprus where it was my dad’s job to do things like assist with the forging of agreements between the hostile governments of Greece and Turkey while maintaining the sacred bewildering U.S. ratio which required that for every $7 million of military aid and muscle the U.S. government gave Greece it give $10 million of the same muscle to Turkey.
Then we spent four years in a humid house in Arlington, VA, before he was reassigned to Athens. And then one home leave, while Mom and I were visiting my grandparents in the mobile home Honey and I are occupying now, he took a little holiday after squiring around a delegation of some sort—Greek? American?—to Bulgaria, and got on a bus which somewhere between Sofia and Varna careened off the road with him inside. Mom and my grandpa flew to Sofia, where a hapless consular officer on his first tour, whose job was typically limited to issuing visas and consoling the pickpocketed, who had a tiny piece of toilet paper stuck to his razor-scraped face in my mother’s vivid retelling, handed over a small canvas duffel with urn inside and held her hand and cried. We vacated our government-provided housing but stayed in Athens for two more years in a kind of paralysis until she sold the house in Arlington and moved back to the Golden State. His federal death benefit sustained her while she went back to school for her M.A.; the house money almost paid for me to go to an expensive high school and college in the muggy-in-summer-frigid-in-winter northeast; everything else covered her expenses when she was sick. I got a benefit too courtesy of Uncle Sam, and I spent it mostly unwisely, except it did buy my first plane ticket to Turkey.
Hence my remaining inheritance is the stuff in the garage, and the mobile home, which my grandparents quietly vacated by their deaths two years before my mother died, all of those deaths—their deaths and hers—taking place in my early-to-mid-twenties, which blurs together now as a time of both dealing with things and not dealing with things, a lot of logistics, the logistics of death mostly, and various bad jobs and blackouts and bad flings, until I started the stupid Ph.D.
I think, but don’t know, that my father would have appreciated my marrying a Turk, although his personal feeling always lay with the Greek side; he and Mom were modern-day Philhellenes. It was Constantinople to them. My mother I suspect would not have appreciated it since when I first went to Turkey she explicitly instructed me not to marry a Turk, as though that were the likeliest outcome of any trip. She believed in “East” and “West,” what we at the Institute know to be false categories, like “Clash of Civilizations,” like “Middle East.” She thought like ought to marry like, I think. But Engin and I are like, sort of, and she would have gotten over it, I know it. She would have liked him. She would have liked Ayşe and Pelin. And Honey! Well. The ideal child.