It’s pathetic but I don’t feel like I have spiritually recovered from that week somehow even though I went back to a beautiful glass office and not to a sweatshop or a goddamn Subway sandwich shop or to be a nanny in Westchester County. When I came back Meredith was trying to be supportive and talked constantly of how awful it is and told me how she used to pace like a wild animal when she was away from her children and I both felt guilty because I had not yet paced, and how odd it was that we should both be sitting there saying “yes, it is very bad” when we could instead be staging a revolt. But her kids are teenagers and she is over it and in fact grateful to come to a quiet beautiful office now so her moment for revolution has passed.
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.
