I was in a fugue state reading Lydia Kiesling’s The Golden State. I was safely inside the mood of the novel—inside the patterning of Kiesling’s sentences, the swish-swish of mother-child fiction that could have only been written by a mother with a child. Kiesling’s book is an escorting book. It is transporting fiction. I was reading and so I was floating—here and there and zigged and zagged, persuaded by its mood and movement.
Sometimes I’d fall asleep. Sometimes I’d wake up. Sometimes it was nearly impossible to distinguish between the mess of my own life and the provocations of the story.
Honey is not dead but alive, Kiesling writes, and I hear her make the cry that indicates she has napped too long and deep and that returning to consciousness is like clawing the way back from death. I know this because this is how I nap too. Waking up hurts.
Waking up hurts, I’d think. And I’d wake up.
In Kiesling’s story there is a mother on the run—a young mother with a toddler and a husband far from home. There are secessionists, too, and an old woman on a lonesome journey, and I am not young, and my son is grown, and I have not lately been accosted by Fifty-first Staters, but somehow Kiesling’s story was becoming my story. Somehow, as I read, I was being ferried away from the book and toward worry for my father who, after recovering from one illness, had fallen inside another. I was the daughter of my father passively reading Kiesling, and then (How does this happen when we’re reading? Does it always happen? Does it happen to you?) I was no longer passive. I grabbed a pen. I settled into better light. I began underlining and asterisking Kiesling, writing in the margins of Kiesling, pleading and pleaing and pleasing alongside Kiesling, overwriting and underwriting Kiesling and then turning to the white white white of her flyleaf blankness.
Dropping my commas and rushing. Confiding in myself because, it seemed, Kiesling, in her novel, was confiding specifically to me.
This will happen but it hasn’t happened yet, I wrote.
You want to be good but today maybe tomorrow you are not. Are you even a daughter anymore? Is a daughter only useful?
I lowered my pen and returned to reading Kiesling, to making room for Kiesling. I quieted myself, and so the room was quiet.
When I was younger I used to wait for something dramatic to happen—my period to come, my mother to die, I found, in Kiesling’s pages. Both things eventually happened and neither of them brought any glamour to life I can say with certainty. But if something happens to Honey I will die I will die I will die.
Exactly, I wanted to say to Kiesling. Exactly. If anything happens I will die I will die I will die. I flipped again to the book’s blank pages. I found more room. I scribbled.
Other people send flowers, I wrote. You bring his brown accordion file, his keys, his checklists, his checks, the paperwork for the notary, who fits her name, which is Grace. You bring instructions. You are instructed. You want the love part back. The merely flowers.
I lowered my pen. I read back over my own self-indulgence. I wondered what Kiesling would think if she read my words—if she read them scribbled into her story. Abashed, I flipped back through The Golden State, the riffling ripples of Kiesling’s story. I lay perfectly still, beneath a yellow blanket, my posture just barely accommodating the pain that had descended on my spine. I lay there reading the story backward and forward, sympathizing with Kiesling’s young mother, Daphne, who was momentarily warding off despairing desperation:
Writes Kiesling: I feel very cheerful and businesslike this morning—there are some mornings that just start out like that, where I transact matters of household or professional importance in an efficacious way. I remove the furze of orange juice and cigarettes from my teeth and I think Today things are going to be better.
I had to stop. It couldn’t be helped. Today things are going to be better. The words were right there, as if Kiesling were speaking to me, as if she were encouraging (very specifically) me to remove the furze of orange juice from my life and attach optimism to the moment. I thought of yesterday, beside my father. I thought of the nurse who had, with strategic precision, put me back into my place. I thought of how hard optimism can be, and I wanted to tell Kiesling just how I was feeling. I wanted to talk to her. I wanted her to hear me. I found room, still, in the book’s blank pages. I shared secrets about the shame that I’d been keeping.
But I am my father’s daughter, I had told that nurse, and she had said, The only thing that matters here is what your father wants, what he asks you to do; you are not in charge.
I wrote something like that inside The Golden State though there was hardly any room left now, in the book’s formerly blank flyleaf pages. I had ruined the artifact of the novel itself. I had confused its purpose. I had asserted my truth inside a brilliant writer’s fiction, and isn’t that okay, isn’t that all right, isn’t that what books want us to do? To shatter the wall and live within? To be there—alert and overt and active?
“You’re speaking but not listening, Defacer,” Ander Monson once announced, in Letter to a Future Lover: Marginalia, Errata, Secrets, Inscriptions, and Other Ephemera Found in Libraries. I wrote, too, in Monson’s book. I am a serial Defacer.
My spine hurt. I shifted beneath my blanket. I capped my pen and returned to The Golden State, where, at one point, Daphne packs up her child and arrives at a place called Sal’s, where the WiFi is good and where a very old lady (Daphne calls her a crone. A crone!) is stirring coffee, sipping.
Writes Kiesling, channeling Daphne (or is it Daphne channeling Kiesling?): I have a curious feeling of both wanting to stay and talk to someone and wanting to leave, because conversations are work and the elderly are work and I’m just not up for work of any kind but then I remember again the extreme quiet of the house and Honey is after all sitting here so rapt.
I looked up from the page in search of Kiesling. I wanted to know how she had anticipated my state in her Golden State. I wanted to know if she could see me lying on the couch, defeated and not up to much work in a house that was, indeed, extremely quiet. There was still just the slightest sliver of room in the inside back cover her novel. I lifted my pen. I wrote:
You are bucking around in your own head, unsaintly and impatient because so much caring for another has turned into so many years of caring for another, and you have lost the knack of caring for yourself.
It was a grotesquely uncharitable thought, but there it stood, in the black ink that no one would ever see (could Kiesling see it?) once I placed Kiesling on the shelf alongside all the other books I have marked and marred with my secret marginalia. I like to think—we like to think?—that we read to escape ourselves, but isn’t it true, or isn’t it truer, that we read to find ourselves inside other people’s stories?
I flipped back through The Golden State and stopped. Daphne has returned to her ancestral home following coffee with the crone and put Honey down for a little nap: Now I have peace and quiet but again it occurs to me that I don’t really have anything to do and I think I should force myself to go in the garage and see what’s there, all my parents’, really my mom’s, linens and books and art that I haven’t been able to dispose of but which would require some more substantial dwelling than I have to display.
Oh, Kiesling, I thought. Oh, Daphne. Take it from this crone. Do not leave your peace, your quiet.
I thought the thought but didn’t write it down. There was no more room for scribbles. I threw off my blanket and tented The Golden State and went to look for Monson on my shelf, Monson again—the part where he forgives the writers of marginalia, the part where he forgives me; I needed somebody’s forgiveness.
Make something from what you’re given, Monson had written.
Make something.
I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. I did.
We do.
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