We arrive at the cemetery sweating—or I’m sweating, Honey pink in the cheeks but shrouded by her stroller. The road slopes gently upward so that the cemetery is perched on a sort of plateau, with a view of the flat plain and the bird refuge and the mountains in the distance, and a little church made of black volcanic stone at its back. There are a number of modest mausoleums built out of this black volcanic stone, all the way to the mid-1800s which passes for old here. The Burdocks, that is us, don’t have a mausoleum, just flat stones, nothing flashy: my grandmother and grandfather and my grandmother’s grandmother and grandfather and that grandmother’s mother and father. We find my mom’s stone, next to her parents. My dad, weirdly, upsettingly, does not have a stone here but lives in an urn in the garage of the mobile home because my mother could never figure out where she wanted him to go, and she knew he hated Altavista and wouldn’t want to be up here, but also didn’t want to put him down below in the South Bay where he was born; his family was as small as hers. I pause to feel guilty that I have not repatriated him at least to my apartment. “Beloved Mother,” Mom’s stone says, my idea. I take Honey out of the stroller and she sits down on the grass next to Mom. “Hi Mom,” I say. Honey is pulling blades of grass out of the ground, delighted. “Do you see Honey?” I ask. “The last time she was here she was just a little squirt.”
I think back to that visit, which is when my mother-in-law came to visit a month after Honey was born, bringing along Engin’s niece, Pelin’s daughter, the teenaged Elifnaz who was wild to see America. This being Ayşe’s first visit not only to our home but to America I felt it could not simply be a meet-the-baby help-the-mother visit but had to be an elaborate exhibit of all the best America had to offer and I made it nightmarish by trying to cram in too many things. But first, when they arrived, I suddenly missed my mother so desperately I had to spend a day in bed, pleading illness, letting them take the baby and coo to her and whisper in hushed tones in the adjacent room. Then I recovered and it was showtime. Every time Ayşe and I have two glasses of wine together and I let loose the floodgates of my stilted Turkish we agree that there can be no ostentatious display of hospitality among family. But to me Ayşe’s default mode of just finding a few snacks around the house to put out feels so elegant, so finely wrought, that I cannot believe her when she says it’s no trouble at all. And she does this on top of running her own small but robust accounting business. My mother also reflexively put out snacks, prepared things, gave gifts, wrote notes, and I saw that those things were trouble to her, necessary trouble that gave her pleasure but took up her time, and the result was still less than what some Turkish women come up with when they are going all out. Whatever muscle I have in that department is weak and rubbery, but the urge is there—the worst combination. So that meant when they came there was the rental of an Airbnb in the City in a nicer neighborhood than ours, the price of which somewhat exceeded our ability to pay for it, and the arranging of a variety of outings, for wine tasting, for a boat to Alcatraz, for a hike at Point Reyes, and finally, although it boggles my mind and shames me to think of it now, a trip to Altavista so they could see “the real West.”
