Inside Alice’s room Honey is sitting in the hard little chair that goes with the desk and Honey is painstakingly trying to pull Alice’s shoelaces out of her sensible shoes. “Hi hi,” I say, “Mommy is back. Sorry it took me so long,” and I realize I didn’t do gum or wash hands or anything and now Alice will know I smoke but what’s it to her and I drove her across state lines and am now probably under investigation by a concerned and concern-causing but not concerning hippie named Yarrow Passafarro.
“Do you need me to help you with anything,” I ask Alice, looking around at her suitcase and the bed and wondering whether she will need to be lifted into it or anything like that.
“No,” she says irritably. “I’m fine, thank you.”
“What about your shoelace,” I point out, and she rolls her eyes and nods and I bend down and return the sturdy lace to its eyes and tie it in a firm knot. Then I pick up Honey and carry her to our room and realize she hasn’t had a lot of fun or edification today and I decide to do the bed-jumping thing and clutch her tight and run and fly onto the bed which groans alarmingly and she laughs and pats my face so hard it hurts. I pull back the nasty comforter pull Goodnight Moon out of the bag and give it to her to look at while I set up the Pack ’n Play. While I shake the sides of the thing until they finally become rigid I realize that I am thinking about the damn e-mails and that I will have no peace until I can resolve them. Once the cattle gate of distressing reminders is open the thought that I have not spoken to Engin today barges in. It is three o’clock now so it is 1:00 a.m. there but I think Okay must prioritize let’s call him and I find the Wi-Fi info on a ratty postcard in a rattier motel binder and open the phone and gather Honey unto me and show her her own face on the screen as Skype does its customary ringing song which I once found comically monotonous, it’s fake music, it’s anti-music, and which I now hear as ominous. Honey scrabbles to touch her face on the screen and I hold her with one arm and stretch the other arm out so that she can’t hang up the call. The British woman’s voice comes on and says “The person you are trying to reach…” and I decide to gratify Honey on this one single thing and hold the phone close and guide her tiny finger to the red circle. “Bye-bye,” I say, and she says “Bye-bye” and while she knows how to wave I don’t think she’s ever said that before.
“Baban seni çok özledi,” I say which means Your dad misses you very much. In fact it means Your dad missed you very much which is one of the mysteries of Turkish I will never figure out, why some verbs never take the present continuous even though they are describing an act that is ongoing, that cannot be put away in the past, like Missing or Liking, but not Loving, which Turks recognize as a present continuous situation, although Falling in Love is something that is always behind you in the simple past. Honey just looks at me and I think about how I am denying her her father tongue and then I think Will you take a nap and then I think probably not and then I think I need to take a nap. I realize there is a television with cable which is a novelty and I turn it on and click away until I find Dora the Explorer and sit Honey on the bed and I put a pillow behind her back and one between her and the edge of the bed and I lean over her curly brown head and run my hands over her back which is warm and small and slightly hunched like mine and I stretch out next to her and curl my arm around her butt and she stares rapt at the television and I doze.
A knock on the door and I am up only after I register that the knocking has been going on for quite a while. Engin is not like this, he has insane cat reflexes and when the smoke alarm erroneously goes off which it does periodically because we need to get a new one he flies out of the bed before I even open my eyes which leads me to believe that maybe he has more anxieties than he lets on about home invasion things, disaster things, and I feel sad thinking that he might be thinking anxious thoughts on the other side of the world. Honey is slumped against the pillow behind her with her eyes half-open and an advertisement is blaring on the screen and my next thought is that my plan actually worked and I got a nap and Honey stayed in one place although at the expense of rotting her brain. “Just a second,” I say and I look at the clock and see that it’s almost five o’clock which is incredible, that she would sit still for so long. I sit up and see my wan face in the mirror my purple eyebrow my hair nest and I pick Honey up and say “Hi little buddy” and walk over to the door and open it and Alice is standing there and she looks at me and says “I’m hungry.” “Me too,” I say, which is always true, and I say “Let me put on my shoes and change her diaper” and I hurry back into the room leaving her standing in the doorway.
“Come in,” I say.
“I asked the girl up front where to get pizza and beer and she told me about a place called Berwin Pies.”
“Excellent,” I say. I deal with Honey’s diaper and get her diaper bag and reach for my phone to see where this place is and then remember all the e-mails Engin etc. and think Fuck fuck fuck but find the map type in the place and say “Ten minutes away” and she says “I guess that thing can tell you everything” and I say “When it has service.”
Berwin Pies is on the other side of town and we drive there past more boxy warehouses, Altavista on a grander scale, but with more check-cashing and more big parking lots. We drive past the beautiful lake we missed on our entrance to the town and Alice keeps her own counsel while I attempt to parallel park and then give up and pull into one of the big empty lots kitty-corner from the pizza joint. It is what you might expect, neon sign pleather booths the light a little too bright, just needs a bulb three notches warmer and it would be homey instead of bald and flea-bitten but I see they have several beers on tap and I smell pizza and we find a booth and a friendly rotund lumberjack type brings us a high chair for Honey. Alice who has been mostly silent the whole drive looks at him almost flirtatiously and says “We want beer and lots of it” and he laughs and says “Well I think we can take care of that for you” and asks what kind of beer we want and Alice says “Whatever you got” and I intervene and ask for some Oregon thing and we order a large supreme pizza and sit back and wait for all this bounty to flow in.
I expect a town of this size to feel less depopulated than Altavista but there are only three sat tables in the restaurant. I reflect that almost everyone I’ve seen since we came north besides Kimmy has been a teen or the aged or aging.
The beer comes and I cheers Alice and she says cheers but then sits there silently and I am not sure whether or how to make a conversation go. Honey is shredding napkins and banging her spoon gently and she is occupied and before I know it the pizza arrives and I serve all of us and cut up Honey’s piece.
Alice tries to pick up her piece and then sets it down again.
She drinks some of her beer. I’ve almost finished mine and realize I need to pace myself if I’m going to drive us home.
“I wanted to be a playwright, you know,” she says out of nowhere. I don’t really know what to say so I say “I thought you were a teacher” and she says “Yes but in my spare time I wrote plays.” She goes again. “Do you want to be a teacher?” She looks at me. “Since you work at the University?”
“No,” I say. “I don’t know what I want to be exactly. I was going to get a Ph.D. but I never really had a plan for after. I just like to know things and feel useful.”
“You should be sure you have a way to support yourself,” she says.
“My mom always said the same thing,” I say. “When my father died it was like we lost the thing about our family that said what our family was and then she had to make herself over.”