Still Points North

by Leigh Newman

  Oddly enough, in a state whose population averages 65 percent male, all my father’s friends have daughters. Lou has the one and only son in the group, a six-year-old boy named Timmy. But he knows which of his kids causes most of the excitement when left unsupervised. “Mary-Frances,” he roars. “There’s enough goddamn pantyhose for everybody to catch a minnow. Share the wealth! Or no firecrackers after dinner!”

  Lou’s wife, Caroline, calls me over with a little wave. She smells of bath oils and perfumes in curvy glamorous bottles with jeweled stoppers. Her hand feels soft on the back of my neck—creamed and cool. “How is your mother?” she whispers.

  Before the divorce, she and Mom were best friends. Are they still? How can they be when Dad and Lou are also best friends?

  “She’s great!” I say.

  “She told me she bought you guys a nice house.”

  “It’s white,” I say. “And black.”

  Caroline seems unimpressed.

  “It’s got a lazy Susan. And—” I’m not sure what to say next. That Mom misses her? That Mom is sick a lot now? That we have been away since January, but I’m pretty sure that if Caroline called her up and told her to come home, Mom would do it? Except I don’t know if Mom would. She loves Baltimore.

  Caroline gives me a hug and nudges me downhill toward the other kids. “Go on,” she says. “They’re all waiting.”

  I trudge down—struck mute by shyness as always, only more intensely now that I no longer go to school up here. While the other girls dare one another into eating mud or plot how to get the ducks drunk on gin-soaked corn, I stand on the edges, pretending interest in the dog-kennel trash cans.

  “Let’s get our dads drunk instead,” says Francy, which is her name whenever her parents aren’t mad. She, like her father, is smarter and wilder than the rest of us. Her brown ringlets bounce down her shoulders. Her lips jut at a naturally flippant angle. Before the divorce, we were also best friends. Caroline and Mom dressed us in matching outfits—terry-cloth short-shorts, rainbow-embroidered jeans. We’re sisters, Francy and I always told people.

  Like any good sister, Francy doesn’t ask me if I missed her in Baltimore or if I like my new school. She bosses me into stealing the beer. I sneak up through the woods and over the fence, and grab a six-pack from a cooler. Then another.

  The rest of the girls turn themselves into eight-year-old waiters, nudging fresh full beers into our fathers’ hands the instant their cans go empty. Soon Lou is lurching over the yard. Soon my dad is joining him. “Now,” they say, their slurs overlapping, “what about those flipperabuggits? Those whatchmacallits turnoverupsand-arounds?”

  “Round-offs?” says Francy, sweetly. “Or cartwheels?” She executes two perfect demonstrations, straight out of gymnastics class. Swaying and tumbling, we all follow her—upside down and right-side up, men and girls and dogs—across the rubble and grass.

  Night comes on. Bottle rockets are set off, their exploding colors invisible in the white sky. Ornate, never-to-be-realized plans are made to dynamite, then trap, then poison the weasels that keep stealing the wild duck eggs down by Lou’s dock.

  The Gallaghers are living in a trailer while their new house is being built. I sneak into the back bedroom and hide underneath the windbreakers on the bed. There I lie very still, as if I might be mistaken for one of the white feral cats that hang around the building site looking hungry and lost, until they are eventually adopted as part of the family. But this is an old trick of mine. My father feels through the pile of coats and finds me. Time to go home.

  One week later, Dad and I start building smokers out of three old refrigerators from the Anchorage town dump. If we don’t have enough room in the freezer to store all our fish, we can do like the Natives do and dry it out for jerky. We saw holes in the tops of the refrigerators to let the smoke escape, insert pans of burning hickory chips in the produce drawers. On the racks, we lay out strips of fresh raw red salmon. That thinly sliced, the meat turns jeweled and see-through. I hold a piece over my eyes, thinking it will turn the world pink like sunglasses.

  “You’re going to go next door and spend some more time with kids your age,” says Dad, shaking his head. “You’ll play there tonight. And I’ll pick you up at eleven.”

  He uses shampoo that evening. And combs his mustache. And pulls on a sweater. I watch him in the mirror. Where did my father get a sweater? It is a soft, fancy sweater in a fancier lord-and-lady color that he refers to as “burgundy.”

  He walks me next door and drops me off at the Bardells’ porch. The Bardells have four kids—all one year apart—and a wall-sized TV in its own wooden cabinet. They are louder, older, far wiser children than myself, and have rigged up their antenna with elaborate tinfoil antlers in order to capture porn off an unsubscribed cable channel. As we study various body parts thrashing through a blizzard of static, the oldest boy, Shawn, leans over my way and says, “So. Have you met your dad’s girlfriend?”

  Legs writhe over the screen. Moans filter through the crackles. “Girlfriend?” I say, staring at the TV, swallowing hard. “Yeah. Her. Sure.”

  But I begin counting chimpanzees until it’s time for my father to pick me up. One chimpanzee equals one second. Sixty seconds equals one minute. Sixty minutes times sixty seconds equals thirty-six hundred chimpanzees, which equals an hour. Dad won’t be late, will he? He promised to come at eleven o’clock. Luckily, nobody can hear my mumbles over the blasting sex sounds and the crunching mouthfuls of Jiffy Pop.

  My father is late—by 1,789 chimpanzees. I don’t speak to him. I pretend to be asleep in his arms and let him carry me home and tuck me into bed. In the morning, over our matching vat-sized bowls of oat bran, I finally figure out how to ask him about the girlfriend without embarrassing myself. “If there’s some girl you like,” I say, slow and casual. “You could take her out maybe. Like on a date.”

  “Actually,” Dad says. “I’ve seen a very nice lady a few times. She works with me.”

  I spoon through my cereal. I think about how much I hate oat bran and how it gets gritty and soggy as soon as you pour on the milk. My dad’s girlfriend doesn’t like it, either, maybe. And right then I invent him a girlfriend. She is perfect. She lives in an apartment. She has short dark hair and diamonds in her ears and looks a lot like the figure skater Dorothy Hamill, which is how I want to look, too. The best part about my invented girlfriend is, however, that she is a stewardess. She flies away to foreign countries all the time, and stays there for months and months.

  The last week of August, hot black clouds billow over the roof of our house and our backyard starts sliding into the lake. The smokers are going full blast on the driveway, puffing salmon grease into the cool, autumn-smelling wind. Meanwhile, the muddy lot on which our house is built keeps slipping inch by inch into the water. We forgot to plant grass. Or trees. Or anything with roots to prevent erosion. As the mud moves, long thin cracks split up our kitchen walls. The tiles on the floor buckle.

  My father puts me in charge of the smokers, then goes back to the dump for railroad ties. He drags them one by one—each an eight-and-a-half-foot-long tie weighing about 250 pounds—down to the lake himself, rolling them into the water off the bank.

  Up in the garage, I sit around lonely and bored. My hands stink of rotten fish. Flies bite my ankles. “The smoker door is stuck!” I call out to Dad, who is now diving into the lake, trying to lift the railroad ties on top of one another, underwater, to build us a retaining wall. “I can’t find the spatula!”

  “Look by the ice auger.”

  “I can’t find the bag of hickory chips!”

  “Honey,” Dad says, standing up with weeds hanging off his ears. “For Christ’s sake, imagine you’re on a desert island.”

  I stomp off to the kitchen, leaving all our fish to burn. My father is stupid. My father is a jerk. I look up at the fridge. My airplane ticket is still there, under the calendar magnet, where it has been all summer.

  Dad and I are already on
a desert island, aren’t we? We’ve been there for a while, fishing and flying and eating and smoking and grilling and piling railroad ties into walls. While the rest of the world has been buying new backpacks and hemming new jeans, plus doing all the summer reading that I haven’t even looked at yet.

  I jump up and slide the ticket down to eye level. NORTHWEST ORIENT, it says across the thick red packet. In a few days I will be going back to Baltimore, back to my mother and school and my new life Outside. And Dad will be staying here in our house, sleeping in his down bag, eating all our salmon, all winter, all by himself.

  Inside the packet is a bundle of thin, bound, smeary carbon paper. The ticket. I sniff it. Then lick the purple-black ink that rubs off on my fingers. The ticket cost a thousand dollars. If I rip it up, I’ll have to pay Dad back that thousand dollars, the way I had to pay him back the nine dollars for the Bonne Bell lip glosses that I stole one time when I was seven.

  I slide the ticket back under the magnet and leave it on the fridge.

  When Dad takes me to the airport, he walks me all the way onto the plane and straps me into my seat. His face goes red and squishy. Huge, racking sobs burst out of him. He hugs me. He hugs me again. It’s not even like in the bathroom when he cried and it was only us two, and we could pretend it wasn’t happening. I look around the airplane. An old lady is staring at us. Another one is looking straight ahead so as not to stare at us.

  The stewardess tugs on his arm. I try to hug Dad back, but that only makes him hug me harder. I have a horrible feeling about what’s about to happen. Already, in fact, I can feel it happening—the smile widening across my face, a huge toothy zinger.

  The last—and only—time I ever smiled like this was two years before, the night our old house caught on fire from the stove and the kitchen burned down. Dad ran around, beating the fire out with blankets, while Mom cried in the corner and I smiled like a jack in the jack-in-the-box and didn’t move and didn’t run and did nothing to help. I wanted to help. A voice in my head was saying, At least stop smiling. You look like you think this whole situation is funny—or like you’re glad about it. But my face was rubbery and stuck, and when I tried to move I couldn’t figure out what to do: run to the closet for coats, or run to the bathroom for towels, or fill some cups and throw water, or hide from the fire and Dad and Mom in the family room, under the afghan on the couch.

  This time, though, I can do something. Because I’m coming back to Alaska—and not just for Christmas or next summer. There is a clause in the custody agreement that requires me to come up to Anchorage and live with my Dad for one full year when I’m twelve. After that year, I’m supposed to go back and live with Mom again. But I’m not going to. I’m not sure how yet. I’ve been working on some scenarios—like getting “lost” in the bush and then hiding out for a while, just long enough for everybody to give up looking for me. Except for Dad and Mom.

  A few of the specifics need ironing out. Fact one: Twelve years old is a long way off, four huge never-ending years from now. Fact two: I’ll have to get lost in early June, so I can get back inside a house by September. Fact three: I’ll have to figure out how to protect myself out there, with a gun maybe, which I don’t know how to use and I’ll have to steal from Dad. Not to mention, where in the bush should I hide? Somewhere like Chugach National Forest, outside Anchorage, which I can get to on my bike? Or someplace farther out, like Beluga, which means getting lost from Dad while we’re fishing? The latter seems a little too scary. Then again, it would be the ideal setting for Dad and Mom to realize—as they chop through the alders, calling out my name—that they made a mistake, that I have to live in Alaska, and Mom has to live here with me, and Dad has to live with the two of us, the way we did before.

  None of which I can tell Dad. Not while he is sobbing still. And I’m smiling, smiling like his crying is funny instead of loud and embarrassing and scary. I unbuckle my seat belt and stand up. I start to hug him one last time, but that won’t work; if I hug him, he’ll only hug me back and not let go. So I stick out my hand—an unconscious and unplanned gesture, a firm, welcoming handshake of the kind that my Swiss headmistress in Baltimore gives to each girl in the morning as we enter the double doors of school.

  CHAPTER 3

  Homeland

  It’s impossible to miss. Something wonderful happened to my mother while I was in Alaska. Before I left, she did two things: go to work and lie down to rest. Now that I’m back living with her in Baltimore, she buys daisies at the grocery store again. She lemon-polishes the furniture. Our first weekend together, she wants to walk through our neighborhood instead of staying in bed with the blinds pulled down.

  “What we need,” she says, “is some fresh perspective.”

  I’m looking at the sidewalk, not breaking her back on the lines between the squares of cement. Sidewalks don’t exist in Alaska. There are gutters. But nobody walks on them. Everybody drives. Things are too far apart there, miles and miles and miles—usually interrupted by patches of unpaved gravel road or ice-splintered asphalt.

  In Baltimore, the windows have little green doors hanging on either side of the glass, usually with designs of sailboats cut into the wood. Garages are whole separate miniature houses. I’m still not over the wonder of these “architectural details” as Mom calls them, leading us down Goodale Road, studying ground covers, debating ivy versus pachysandra. She points out French doors and hammocks and the elegance of a flagstone patio. She loves historically accurate touches. She grew up in Baltimore, which “for the record was founded in 1729, as a port for shipping tobacco and sugar.”

  There is another record, of course. Anchorage was founded in 1915, and only three thousand people lived there until World War II. The really old houses there were built in the 1960s. They are trailers.

  “Oh,” says Mom. “A portico!” I hang on her as she leads us left toward Springlake Way. She smells of a heady mixture of departmentstore creams and shiny, worn purse leather. Her sweater is soft against my cheek. We pick out houses to live in one day, ones bigger and better and more beautiful than ours—a witch’s stone cottage, a brick Colonial, a rambling mansion with a real Rapunzel tower, decorated with panes of rainbow-colored stained glass.

  “I find the Victorians a bit overdone,” Mom says. “Don’t you?”

  “Let’s get one with a tennis court!”

  When a car meets another car in our neighborhood, one of them has to pull over and let the other drive past, as if the streets were built for horses and carriages. When the wind blows, the air glitters gold with sawdust.

  The elm trees are sick, my mother says. The sawdust comes from cut-down stumps. But I don’t believe her. There is no visible evidence of it, other than the occasional pink slip from the city, nailed to a still-standing trunk.

  At the entrance to our neighborhood stands a wooden sign. HOMELAND, it says. In black, gilt-edged letters. On white land-marked paint. It looks like the title page to a book of Outside fairy tales—stories filled with bugs that light up like stars in the dark and flowers filled with edible honey and long, twisty slides that spit you into pools—outdoor pools, in backyards, with water the color of melted blue lollipops.

  That night, after a shower, wearing only a towel, Mom dances through the living room. She’s singing, “I’m going to wash that man right out of my hair.” I sing along, stumbling through the chorus I don’t know.

  Mom’s previous song was “Tea for Two.” She sang it sometimes laughing, sometimes crying as we drove off the ferryboat from Alaska to Seattle the previous January, when my parents’ marriage came officially to an end. Then she sang it as we headed across the country to Baltimore.

  This was a trip that, by most maps, takes 2,764 miles and forty-one hours. It took us five thousand miles and the entire month of January. We roared down into Mexico, up into Kansas, over to Louisiana—my mother at the wheel, muttering that we could not go the direct route because the direct route was northern and off-limits due to snow. “What if we
slide off a highway and end up in a ditch?” she kept saying, very fast, very loud, speaking into the rearview mirror. “What if we get stuck? We can’t get stuck, honey. Not now. No getting stuck. Full speed ahead.”

  I did not bring up all the times we’d driven in the snow at home. And she did not take her foot off the gas, zigzagging over the southern areas of the country—that vast anti-Alaska of waffle houses and sunshine, cattle ranches and swamplands. “Tea for two,” Mom sang in a trembling voice, looking out over the burnt plains of Oklahoma. “You for me. And me for you.”

  As the landscape and truck stops passed, I sat in the back playing with Kleenex—fashioning a head out of a ball of tissue, wrapping another loose tissue over that head, tying off a neck with a thin, torn strip. When my ghost was finished, I drew a face on it with a pencil. These were always girls’ faces, with curly eyelashes and pouty lips. As soon as we came to a hill, I released my girl-ghosts into the wind, watching them float for a moment in the hot, dead pocket of our speed, then spin off and drop behind us to the side of the road.

  Somewhere between Texas and Georgia, we stopped off to see my grandmother in the panhandle of Florida. Back in Alaska, she existed only as a picture in a silver frame on the nightstand. Mom didn’t talk about her very much and she lived too far away to visit. “Your grandmother is either a borderline personality or schizophrenic,” Mom said in the car as we turned down an unpaved road that bordered a bayou. “The doctors have never been able to make a clear diagnosis.” Long pause. “She’s also an alcoholic.” Long pause. “And there are some medication issues, but I expect you to be respectful.”

  I shuddered. I didn’t know what borderline meant, but schizophrenic had something to do with having dry white scaly skin, like the girl in my old school who had to take oatmeal baths and flaked all over her desk.