Still Points North

by Leigh Newman

  Through the windows, the road smelled of wet salt and lizard. Little shells from the sandy soil popped and splatted under our tires. It was midnight or after. The only thing on in the house I could make out were the yellow windows, lit from the kitchen. My grandmother was inside, we could see by her shadow. But nobody came to the door, even when we banged and rang the bell.

  Finally, a neighbor-lady came over and talked to my grandmother through the mosquito screen. The door opened. Mom went in first, me behind her. Face-to-face, my grandmother didn’t look much like a grandmother. She looked sexy and scary and old, with curly black hair and a little bow-tie mouth and rubies in her ears that made me think of The Wizard of Oz. Her name was perfect: Maybelle.

  “Dolly girl,” said Maybelle. “You never come visit.” She had a thick, dippy accent like clear melted jelly all over her words.

  “Mom?” I whispered. “My name’s not Dolly.”

  “No,” said Mom. “Mine is. That’s my nickname from when I was a little girl.”

  In the dining room, a wall of dishes towered over the sideboard. Maybelle had been cooking for us for the last week: a pork loin, a whole turkey, a coconut cake, a lemon meringue pie, all of which she’d forgotten to put in the refrigerator. Flies swarmed over hard crusty gravy, a fan turned limply, and a hole gaped across the ceiling where the roofer had started to fix the roof then quit when Maybelle paid him in full on his first day of work, using my dead grandfather’s two-hundred-year-old Baltimore family silver.

  “It dated back to the Civil War,” Mom said. She kept staring inside the little coffin-looking box that the silver used to be stored in, touching the empty velvet. Then she started to cry.

  “Dolly girl,” said Maybelle, her voice suddenly turning from slurred and southern to sharp and flickering—a dark, smiling hiss. “What else was I supposed to do? You don’t want anything to do with me. You’d leave me to die on my feet.”

  Mom’s face went blank. “No, I wouldn’t, Mother.”

  Maybelle laughed. “I know all your ways. Your backhand tricks.”

  Mom just sat there, her face going blinky and trembly and preschool. Why didn’t she do something, I wondered. Why were her eyes so empty—like she wasn’t even there?

  “Shut up,” I said, but in a tiny, quiet voice.

  Maybelle kept laughing.

  I took a step forward, but Mom pulled me back. “Leigh,” she said.

  “Look at what you raised, Dolly! Look at that trash!”

  “Time to go to bed,” Mom said. But she came with me to the dark back room. We lay side by side in a fancy carved bed, which had also come from my dead grandfather’s family, kept awake all night by Maybelle wandering the halls talking about ingrates and muttering “Lord have mercy.” I snuck out to get a glass of ice water, but the freezer and refrigerator were packed with chocolate-covered cherries, hundred and hundreds of shiny gilded boxes.

  “Your grandmother has some spending issues,” Mom whispered.

  For the rest of the week, Mom went around town paying off credit card bills and talking to caseworkers and the bank, while I sat on the black vinyl couch with Maybelle watching Tic-Tac-Dough on television, eating chocolate-covered cherries, and looking out for “coloreds” who might want to come into our yard and “touch” me. Finally, we got back in the car and got out of there. I wanted to tell Mom that we should go back to Alaska, where it was too far away to see her mother ever again.

  But Mom was driving. She wanted quiet time. It was states and states and states before we stopped this time. I held my muscles or peed in soda cups. When I was hungry, I ate baked chicken from the cooler, wrapped in tinfoil. Mom kicked off her sandals and stuck her bare foot outside the driver’s-side window, so the fresh air on her skin would keep her from falling asleep and crashing. “I’m adopted,” she said, over and over. “Just so you know. You can’t inherit any of my mother’s mental issues. We’re immune.”

  Once we actually got to Baltimore, Mom bolted out of the car and kissed the street. “I’m home!” she said. “Hallelujah!” Back at the wheel, she honked at the brick buildings and opened the window to wave at strangers.

  I slunk down between suitcases.

  At the empty house, we unpacked the car. Mom showed up to her first day of work. I showed up to my first day of school, in February. And then Mom got a migraine. She had to lie down at night as soon as she got home. She had to lie down on weekends, too, to rest.

  It was a little scary, the first time I saw her on the bed with a washcloth over her eyes. She looked dead, only breathing. Was she going to be this way forever? Was it Baltimore that had changed her? Or all the driving? Or Maybelle? She must be really tired, I thought. Because my mother in Alaska did not lie down. She made soggy moose meat spaghetti and vacuumed the house and hugged me even when I left wet glasses on the living room table. On the weekends she read thick James Michener paperbacks while Dad and I fished, and then, on the weekdays, she picked me up from school and—over and over—more times than anybody thought was possible, drove our car into the ditch on the way back home, missing the driveway to our house, as if she did not know where we lived at all.

  Now that I’m back in Baltimore, Mom listens to me talk about Dad and the salmon smokers. But she’s not really listening—or it’s too upsetting for her to listen, I can’t tell. Finally, she leaps up from the table and just starts measuring the dining room walls with my math ruler. All summer long, she says, she’s been thinking about French doors. We need a pick-me-up. We need to get our life back. What we need are a few subtle, sophisticated touches around the house and yard.

  “Hmm …,” she says, “I’m thinking, let’s play hooky and go to the National Gallery of Art? We’ll look at some books on architecture.”

  It’s September, the first tender month of fourth grade. I’m thrilled. I don’t want to go to school. Except that I also don’t want to not go to school. At the end of the year, the teachers there give out trophies—golden angels on marble bases. This year, I’m desperate to get one. Due to my poor performance in almost every area of study, the only hope I have of getting one is by showing up, the Perfect-Attendance Angel of Excellence. Not to mention, I’m worried about Mom’s job. She’s a social worker, and, as she says, just about to be laid off.

  “What about the federal budget cuts?” I say. Then add, in more specialized Mom-language, “Reagan’s administration has no compassion for the underserved.”

  “Honey, we need to recharge our batteries.” Mom sips from a fine-china mug from before the divorce, painted with English orioles. (On the bottom is a tiny gold stamp saying FINE-CHINA that I’ve tried many, many times to scratch off.) “Besides, I already called in sick.”

  I slump on some jeans. There’s no point in arguing, not with the new, improved, radically energized version of my mom—a version that I have finally come to realize is a product of the steamy viscous elixir that lurks inside her mug. Mom has discovered Taster’s Choice. Mom has turned into the Great American Instant Coffee Single Mom.

  I don’t know if there are other mothers out there in the world of this species. In Alaska, the other mothers were my friends’ mothers. They were married. They drank Tab and told us to go outside and wear a life jacket by the lake or we’d get grounded or drown. In Baltimore, I don’t know any other mothers, but the ones I see in the neighborhood do not drive hatchbacks and rant about free child care in Sweden. Mothers here drive station wagons. They honk in the car-pool lane at school and zoom off with girls stacked across the seats, sucking on Popsicles and bottles of Sunny Delight. If they drink coffee, I doubt it has to be black in order to keep them thin and ready to meet a fresh, exciting, romantic, imaginary man who doesn’t mind that they have a child or no time to date him. Nor does that coffee have to be instant due to the fear that if they take the five minutes needed to wait for coffee to drip through the filter, they’ll fall asleep on their feet, get a concussion, and end up in the hospital, leaving their child without a parent to superv
ise her.

  On any given day, Mom is now up at 5 A.M.—a flannel warrior in a lace-necked nightgown with a cup of Taster’s Choice and a bucket of vinegar, washing the floor to keep our kitchen looking like my friends’ houses with housekeepers, allowing me to have friends over and not be ashamed. By seven fifty-five, she’s at the wheel of the car, with me in the seat beside her, holding her second cup of Taster’s, the scalding liquid sloshing onto my uniform as she weaves into and out of traffic, veering through yellow-red lights (because the police should give working mothers a break in this day and age). By nine fifteen, she’s at her desk, gulping Styrofoam cup after Styrofoam cup, the brims of each smeared with kisses of work lipstick, as she races to different Head Start centers to do her job, saving preschool kids from ignorance and worse—sometimes their own mothers, who lock them in closets or try to burn them with cigarettes. By six twenty, she’s back at home, scooping cottage cheese onto a plate, lighting candles at the table so that we will have a family dinner just like any other family. Then she’s back on the road at eight thirty to work her second job at a nursing home, where usually I come with her—sitting in the lobby, with old people who want to touch my hair (until 10:30 P.M.).

  She will not be defeated, not by ex-husbands or poverty or Republicans or budget cuts or her feet—which I rub with Bengay at night as she moans into her pillow. So me and my stupid Angel of Excellence trophy versus a day at the National Gallery of Art? I’m toast. I get in the car.

  She revs the engine. “I feel so free!” she says. “Don’t you?”

  I smile, then look out the window as we blast out of Homeland.

  Every species of creature has its subspecies, of course. And though my mom is now a Great American Instant Coffee Single Mom who can hang up a picture frame with dental floss and a tack (“See? We don’t need a handyman!”), what she can’t or won’t or doesn’t seem to know how to do is all the Great American Boring Parent stuff: toothbrushing, high fevers (we don’t even own a thermometer), bake sales, school play costumes, helping with homework, or even nagging about homework.

  We don’t go shopping together for school clothes or talk about friends over chocolate shakes. I don’t have to go to bed or come home at any time in particular. I have never been grounded or sent to my room. Not that all this started after the divorce, either. At age five, I used to wander around in our old Alaskan neighborhood thinking, Where is everybody? Why are they always taking a nap? Wait … am I supposed to be taking a nap?

  At the time, this seemed like a pretty good deal. I usually found some kind of left-loose, open-minded dog wandering around to play with. But that’s the thing about Baltimore: Nothing wanders. Even the squirrels hustle by as if they have a piano lesson to get to.

  “Now that we’re no longer stuck in know-nothing Anchorage,” says Mom, shifting gears and powering over to the fast lane on the Baltimore-Washington Parkway, “I want to show you a few things.”

  As it turns out, my mother has artistic interests, thwarted by all those years of hunting and fishing. She wants to educate me, specifically about: Puccini Operas, Civil War Battlefields, Volkswagen Beetles, Chippendale Furniture, Fabergé Eggs, Jungian Philosophy, Siamese Cats, Girl Detective Mysteries, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Civil Rights, Frank Lloyd Wright, Swedish Films, Emily Dickinson, and the historic city of Williamsburg.

  Today, however, we will start with the National Gallery of Art.

  It takes me about 42.7 seconds to fall in love with this particular interest of my mother’s. The National Gallery of Art is huge, towering and marble, with a tearoom at the center featuring a harp player and splashing fountain. It’s beyond a fairy tale. It’s England or some other place that’s black-and-white with grown-ups wearing gloves.

  I float through the rooms, ignoring Mom’s mandate to look for “classical architectural details,” stopping mostly at scenes of French court life—young, wigged girls on swings, pushed by counts in frock coats. If only I lived there, in the painting; if only I got to wear a corset and serve as Lady of the Hairbrush.

  There was only one museum in Alaska. It had baskets and totem poles. Mom and I went a lot, mostly on crafts day, when the curator gave us a bar of Ivory soap and showed us how to carve it into a little Native man in a kayak. The Ivory was supposed to look like ivory.

  “My parents never took me to museums,” says Mom. “I was eighteen before I saw one.” Her eyes go distant and dreamy. “I took the bus. I remember it took me so long to get there. I don’t think I’d ever have known such things existed if it hadn’t been for my girls’ school.” Her father, she explains, came from an elite, dead Baltimore family. They disowned him when he married Maybelle. But they paid Mom’s tuition until she was eighteen. “Just like your father,” says Mom. “He’s going to pay for your school. Don’t think he wriggled out of that.”

  I slide over to another painting: a bowl of fruit with what looks like a caterpillar creeping over a pear.

  “You’ll see it all,” she announces. “Art, ballet, culture … you’ll experience everything!” Then she gives me a long, squeezing, eyeball-popping hug.

  Right then a thought flops through me. It’s the wrong time for such a thought. But I bring it up anyway. I ask about Dad. If Mom was off at museums all the time, how did she and Dad ever meet and get married?

  Mom laughs. “You don’t know?”

  “Know what?”

  “Our story. Your father was in medical school at Johns Hopkins. He was from California.” She lets out a giggle. “You can’t imagine just how thrilling that was to a girl like me from Baltimore. I mean, I had the covers of my Bermuda bags dyed to match my sundresses. He didn’t know a napkin from a handkerchief, and he didn’t care, either. But we were set up on a blind date, then—two months later—engaged.”

  She’s still talking—she was twenty-three, Dad was twenty-one—but right there I stop listening. My eyes are closed. I want to see if I can see Dad—his face has to be in there somewhere, like a painting hanging in my brain. But the same thing happens to him as happened to Mom over the summer. He’s gone. All that’s there is black, and the sound of the echoing footsteps on marble.

  Back at our house, Mom patrols the yard, making more detailed renovation plans. She has a yellow legal pad and a ballpoint pen. She points to a window in back. “Right here!” she says. “We’ll put in the French doors.”

  I’m more than happy to follow her around outside. Why did nobody ever tell me about fall? It’s incredible, the magnum opus of seasons. In Alaska, the only deciduous trees are aspens and birches, the leaves of which turn a flat pale yellow and blow off in about two days. In Baltimore, the leaves turn red! A deep burnt red! And orange! For weeks! The brightest I’ve collected in a plastic bag, which I keep stashed under my bed like a bucket of Halloween candy.

  Our house is perhaps the smallest and most modest in Homeland, but made from white painted brick, and decorated with black shutters and a screened-in porch. My father gave us the down payment as part of the divorce settlement. In the backyard, Mom draws a deck on her pad. She makes a sweeping gesture—to indicate a tree that is not there. “Look at this greenery. Here’s where we can put in that patio. With wrought-iron loungers.”

  I try to see what she’s seeing, as she plants imaginary Japanese maples and springtime forsythia. But what I really see is her, gesturing to parts of our house. She is tiny, a hummingbird, her whole body vibrating with some kind of breathless, musical energy, her green eyes shot through with gold. She stops and looks down at her clipboard. Her face is so fragile, so delicate. You want to bundle it up in soft white tissue paper. You want to press your hand against all those graceful angles—the cut of her jaw, the narrow slope of her nose. My mother is beautiful, I realize for the first time.

  And now that I’m noticing, why is she wearing a fluffy pink sweater all of a sudden? I’ve never seen her in a fluffy pink sweater with little pearl buttons, or in a tweed skirt, either. She has frosted lipstick on. And a gold bracelet. She loo
ks like the mother from 217 St. Dunstans Road or the mother from 89 Homeland Avenue—both mothers I now regularly stop and watch on the walk home from school, spying on them from behind their boxwood hedges as they plant bulbs and order their kids not to dump each other off the hammock.

  I’m not sure what to make of this. In Alaska, my mother had droopy bags under her eyes, which are no longer there. She sang offkey, very, very loudly. She wore scarves over her hair—one greasy bang swooping out—and a baggy down vest and jeans.

  Where did she get shiny blond streaks in her hair? Where did she get a pair of shoes like velvet dancing slippers? Why does she get to change all of a sudden? Why does Dad? Where did all these sweaters on both of them come from—in burgundy and pink and all the other go-out-for-dinner colors that, evidently, my parents have owned all along?

  Not that Mom is dating. Yet.

  “After we get the Black Watch plaid cushions,” she says, jotting down something on her pad, “we’ll deal with the loungers and gutter issues.”

  “I hate Black Watch!” I say. “I don’t want any stupid cushions.”

  Her face falls. She stops dancing. “Okay. It was just an idea. You know, for next summer.”

  “I won’t be here. Do what you want to. You’ll be all by yourself.”

  “Thank you,” she says, “for that loving reminder.” Then she marches back into the house and shuts the door to her room—with a loud final click of the knob.

  A few hours later, I sneak in and stand by her bed, in the murky drawn-blind darkness. The air smells of bad coffee breath and sweat. Her chest moves rhythmically under the covers. A damp washcloth covers her face. She has a migraine, again, a bad one. I think about apologizing for giving it to her. Instead I go back to my room to pick at the rash scabs on my legs.

  CHAPTER 4