I look at my remaining e-mails which are various things dealing with THE CONFERENCE. I already know that the end result of all these e-mails will be great personal frustration and the expenditure of $20,000 of endowment funds in direct costs and untold taxpayer dollars in person-hours. We will be left with a series of badly lit recordings wherein people either (a) deliberately ignore the exhortation not to read prepared papers and drone on at length from a journal article they are polishing up (b) talk in extreme generalities about things that any fool could read about online or (c) deliver a cogent and accessible statement on the topic at hand based upon a vast body of knowledge they have amassed in the course of their research. The latter people are typically about to be denied tenure or are in the middle of negotiations with another university and will be somewhere else within the year. The taxpayers are rarely in evidence at these events, although they are all ostensibly free and open to the public.
There is no e-mail about Ellery, but I know the voice mail from the Office of Risk Management is still sitting inside my office phone like an evil charm. I smoke one more cigarette and then I feel sick and then I go back inside and lie down on the couch. With the eight books for Honey I brought no book for myself, the TV has five channels, I don’t have my Turkish notebook or poor Sait Faik, I have literally nothing to do except mother my child who, thank god, is still in her Pack ’n Play giving me a respite from this obligation. I am thinking about how stupid I am and wondering when Honey is going to wake up and suddenly I am myself waking with a start, my hand over my face and the skin baking a little in the sun.
I dreamt people were queued up at the reception desk to see me and Maryam wouldn’t let them in. Prior to the accident Maryam sat at the front desk of the Institute between five and nine hours a week, answering phones and cheerfully dealing with Hugo’s bullshit and on slow afternoons going on Facebook to post memes about Palestinian liberation and watch tutorials for face contouring. I think about her broken fibula her broken occipital bone her concussion and then I am powerless not to remember the day she came into my office asking advice about summer research for her and her project partner, the offscreen Ellery, and I talked to her about Turkey and sent her to Meredith to talk about Syria and from what I understand Meredith told her “Of course to really dive into any substantive research you have to go abroad” and got Hugo to give the two of them an unofficial grant with Al-Ihsan money and had me write the ex post facto award letter and then I thought I might as well set them up with Pelin before they went east to Diyarbakır, and it was all so careless, so ad hoc, although I know that life is careless and ad hoc; as Hugo rather callously observed to Maryam’s parents on the phone, the truth is that she would be just as likely to get in a car accident in America. “In fact,” he told them, “the sad fact is that students are safer abroad than they are on U.S. campuses,” after which he was contacted by the Office of Risk Management and told not to have any further contact with the family without a representative present. I wrote the Institute’s formal statement of condolence to Ellery’s parents for him to sign.
Hugo excels at unwelcome true remarks. When he found me crying in my office after Engin’s green card was taken and Engin returned ignominiously to Istanbul he patted my back tenderly and said “I know this must be very hard,” before his innate didacticism was activated. “In some respects, Daphne, you are experiencing a sort of very mild form of Casualties of Capital!” (This is Hugo’s catchphrase; he has a very well-known book on South Asians in the Gulf.) “Just last week I read a dissertation chapter about Filipinas who leave their children to become nannies in the U.S. My student is doing her fieldwork in Westchester County. Imagine it!” This made me feel ashamed to feel so very sorry for myself, although Hugo has no kids and no fucking clue what that would really be like. “But I have capital, sort of,” I sniffled. “This is a casualty of militarized bureaucracy and nativism.” He laughed and patted me again. “Do you think those things aren’t related?” and then gave me the titles of two books I probably won’t read but will try to find summaries of at some later date. Hugo can be obscurely comforting on his better days.
I bury my head back in the couch cushion and count to twenty. I forgot how utterly quiet it is here.
Honey is still asleep, going on three hours, a miracle. Poor monkey. She must be very tired and mixed-up. I go back out on the porch to smoke. Cindy Cooper steps out onto her porch at the same time and we exchange a formal wave. “Hello,” I say. “Hello,” she says. “Haven’t seen anyone up at the house in a while,” and I say “I’m Jeannie’s daughter,” and she says “Yep I remember, I met Rodney a few times.” She lights what looks like a Capri 120. “What brings you up here?” “Well, I have the baby” and she nods and says “How old” just as I am starting to say “Well I just wanted to show her—” and I decide to forge ahead “—the place now that she’s a little bit older, check on the house. Ah, she’s almost sixteen months about.” Cindy nods. She looks to be in her late forties and has long thin brown hair and mild rosacea on her cheeks and some weight around her middle and slouches down into her lower back, one arm resting across her paunch, the other bringing her slim cigarette back and forth to her mouth. I am having a little pity party on her behalf until I catch a glimpse of myself in the sliding glass door, a pudgy apparition like a Cindy of yesteryear. In those first eight weeks or so after Honey was born I can’t believe how good I looked, I mean I never looked better in my life. The weight just incinerated right off, for one. They tell you that breastfeeding will ruin your boobs, but they don’t tell you that if you’re small-breasted they’ll first flare out into archetypal perfection and give you just long enough to become accustomed to filling out a dress properly. It’s not just your original body that you can’t get back—you can’t get your pregnant body back either. Since weaning I’m heavy across the shoulders and hips and thighs, and the pouch that Honey vacated has achieved greater prominence. And my boobs—now they are little coin purses, the overall effect being that my body is much smaller on the top and much bigger on the bottom.
Cindy’s placid reaction to my arrival is a good reminder that the exigencies of my situation may not be immediately clear to anyone else. It is anyway a true statement on its face. I am visiting the house, which is my house and Honey is my child. I have not stolen, except for the laptop, which I will at some point return. We are fine here. I know with my lizard brain that it is not my fault that a twenty-year-old girl is dead, even though other parts of my brain, say, the part that manufactures dreams, are still not sure. When my mom was mad at me in adolescence she told me I was a “hard creature” and sometimes I think that’s true and sometimes I don’t think I’m any harder than anybody else. But Cindy doesn’t need to know all this. I put out my cigarette and say “See you later” and step inside and Honey has started to coo and I feel a legitimate surge of happiness at the prospect of seeing her face searching for mine from within the closet dark.
I get her out of the Pack ’n Play and change her diaper and she kicks her legs and grins at me and I put my mouth on her stomach and blow and she grabs my hair and pulls hard. If she is confused about our situation she doesn’t show it. I like to think actually that she is having a nice time scooting across the wall-to-wall carpet. Moreover due to my smart forward thinking of the morning I have a nicely roasted sweet potato to feed her. I mush this up and fry her an egg and cut it into small pieces and wash some blueberries and arrange them around the side of the plate and set her in her high chair with her sippy cup of milk and the feast before her. She has very good motor control and uses her little spoon to scoop up the sweet potato and before long the plate is empty and I feel the atavistic pleasure of having provided a reasonably balanced meal for my child with things that I made or had, requiring no angst no digging no last-minute run to the store no cooking plain noodles with butter because there was nothing else in the house. Whenever I have this feeling which is maybe full force in one-third of meals and a faint glow in one-fourth, I think I could live on the feeling, like this could sustain me as a life pursuit, but it only lasts a few minutes and then there’s the next meal to think of by which time I’ve usually decided to go to the Chinese place around the corner where we go at least once a week.