Still Points North

by Leigh Newman

  One chimpanzee, two chimpanzee, I count. A fish slaps out of the water, its mouth sucking up the bread ball and safety pin. I jerk back, softly. The fish is on, the fish that now appears to be a goldfish. A large goldfish. But a goldfish nonetheless. A pet. It doesn’t even know how to fight. It lets me pull it directly out of the water. It is hooked someplace wrong, too—not in the mouth, maybe inside it, in its stomach. It flops and splashes in the air, desperate.

  “Kid!” says a voice.

  I look around. There’s a police car behind me. I panic, throw the stolen rake into the water, where it, along with my poached fish, sinks into the bubbled mud and weeds.

  “Get over here,” says the voice, through the open window of the car. The policeman is an old fat man, with boiled skin and mustard on his breath. “What are you doing?”

  “I live here?” I whisper.

  “Get in the car. In the back.”

  I think about the fish at the bottom of the pond, still hooked and writhing and dying. I get in, anyway—shaking, my throat dry. The policeman says something to somebody on the radio. “Where do you live? Your parents and me need to have a little talk.”

  I direct him up the hill to our house. He parks in front and reaches for the door handle.

  “She’s at work,” I say. “My mother. But she’s coming home soon.”

  “I’ll have to take you down to the station, then. We’ll call her from there.”

  I know what the station is. It’s jail. I’m going to have to stay in jail with all the grown-up men with beards and raincoats. Because my mother isn’t coming home soon. And nobody can call her. She doesn’t have an office or phone. She works all over the city. And tonight is a meeting night, until 6 P.M.

  “She’ll be home in a minute,” I say. “Promise.”

  We wait and wait. Calls come in over the radio. The policeman taps his fingers on the steering wheel. “What about your dad? Why don’t we call him?”

  I start to cry. My dad is going to kill me. Not about the goldfish maybe, but about the stolen rake. Before Mom and I ever left Alaska, I stole more than Bonne Bell lip glosses. I stole Kraft caramels from the bulk bins at Safeway. I stole quarters from Dad’s piggybank. He found everything I’d taken when I was seven, hidden under the bed. “You can’t call him! He lives far away, in Alaska.”

  The policeman turns around “Look, kid. There’s no need to lie.”

  “But—”

  “Either your dad’s at work or your dad’s out of the picture. Which is it?”

  I gulp. “He’s out of the picture.”

  “Okay,” the policeman says. “Okay.” He burps, but cups it.

  I shrink down in my seat.

  “I’ll tell you what, your mom’s got enough on her hands. You go inside now. And you promise me never, ever, ever to fish in those ponds again.”

  “I promise.”

  “And knock off the stupid lies about your family. You don’t want to grow up to be a liar, do you?”

  “No,” I say. “Sir. No, sir.”

  “Go on, then. Run inside and let me see you lock the door behind you.”

  I run up to the front door and unlock it with my key and slam and relock it. I run down the stairs to the basement, which is a room that doesn’t exist in Alaska. There are cramped tunnels under the houses called crawl spaces, but those are full of insulation and mud and you can’t stand upright in them. To get into Dad’s crawl space, you have to climb down a hole in the floor in the gun closet. There are no gun closets in Baltimore, either.

  Our basement in Mom’s house is what Mom calls “finished.” It has indoor-outdoor carpet and our old leather sofa. I’m safe down here. I’m okay. As long as I keep the lights off and sit right in front of the television with the volume up as loud as it goes, loud enough to feel the hysterical Tom and Jerry music jittering against my face.

  Later that night, I don’t hear the scrape and click of my mother’s key in the lock or the thump of her footsteps on the ceiling. All of a sudden, she’s simply there, standing in front of me, blocking the TV. Her curls are saggy. Her glasses have left a deep, red dent over the bridge of her nose. “Do you want to sleep with me?” she says. “Just this once? Just in case you’re feeling a little lonely?”

  She says this every night. I try to look around her, to see the edges of the car commercial, playing on the screen. “I’m not lonely,” I say.

  “Okay.” She starts up the steps. She sighs. “Good night then.”

  “Wait!” I say. Then run up behind her. “Wait!”

  Upstairs in her room, though, in her four-poster Colonial bed, I lie facing the wall instead of her—letting her wrap her arms around my waist, but holding myself separate from the familiar comfort of her breath heaving softly against the back of my neck.

  CHAPTER 5

  Snowslide or Glacier?

  I’m a little scared about the polar bear. He himself is not scary. His coat is pee-colored. His tongue is a rubber rage of pink that’s supposed to look evil and ferocious, but only makes you feel kind of sorry for him, standing on his slab of fake glacier rock, roaring at airplane passengers. His towering glass case, on the other hand, is a little worrisome. It’s not at the end of the gate. It’s always at the end of the gate. Unless I’m at the wrong gate. Unless the airport people changed the gate and Dad doesn’t know and there won’t be anybody to pick me up at security.

  I turn at a bend in the hall, past The Last Frontier Gift Shoppe, displaying joke paperweights made from shellacked moose turds right beside a pyramid of canned coho salmon. I should have never ditched my stewardess chaperone. People stream by. Knees. Suitcases. Ankles.

  I hunch down by a trash can and try not to cry.

  “Leifer!” says Dad from the back of the crowd. Beside him is the polar bear. And beside it, Abbie. Abbie is officially now Dad’s girlfriend. He told me last week over the phone. While he hugs me, I give her the once-over. She looks just like she always did while working at his office—slender, pale, her long straight hair falling in loose, curling-iron waves around her face. Her nose has a slight, snorty flare at the tip. Her chest looks bony. But these are cheap details to notice, even for me. She is pretty, the soft, gentle pretty of kindergarten teachers. She smells like mints and roses-of-milk lotion.

  Behind her stands Francy Gallagher in pedal pushers and a blue satin roller-skating jacket. She sticks her tongue out at me, stained watermelon red from Jolly Ranchers past. I stick out mine, then grab her hand. If Francy is here, we are going fishing straight from the airport or—please, God, make it true—going to Baskin-Robbins for double dips.

  Our first step is loading into the Suburban, Dad’s shockless, semi-brakeless Great Alaskan Dad Tank, a Neanderthal version of the vehicle that will one day be the SUV. A heady cloud of antifreeze fumes and WD-40 hangs in the air. Construction dust billows from the heating vents. Francy and I sit in back, wearing no seat belts and bouncing almost up to the ceiling every time we hit a bump in the asphalt.

  On we go down Jewel Lake Road—past the turn onto Dimond Boulevard, which hasn’t changed, past the Taco Bell that hasn’t changed, and the Quik Stop that hasn’t changed, either, even if somebody misspelled it. The streets are big wide boulevards, with sexy-lady bars and supermarkets and trucks bouncing all over. Everything is exactly the same as always, exactly perfect as far as I am concerned, down to the black, scrawny Alaskan spruces on the sides of the road instead of East Coast oaks and maples.

  The only thing that could make this moment more sublime, in fact, is … a cat. Francy has a cat, a white fluffy cat. She has white cat hair on her satin jacket right now, squiggling all over it. I know my dad and pets, and I know I’m not going to get one. Because even if Francy’s dad and my dad are best friends, they’re different kinds of dads, meaning that Francy gets to drive her own snow machine (sometimes without a helmet) and open all her presents on Christmas Eve instead of Christmas Day (sometimes before calling aunts and uncles). Nevertheless, I begin to chant “
Can we get a cat, Dad? Can we? [bump on the road] Can we? [bump, bump] Can we [bump] please?”

  “Let’s talk about it later,” he says. But in a tone that’s almost angry-sounding instead of just annoyed. He’s in the driver’s seat. I can’t see his face. Or Abbie’s face, either. She’s in the passenger seat, but studying the road. Something in the car feels tight and hard to breathe.

  “Can I get a cat,” I say, my voice trailing off. “Can I please?”

  “Well,” Dad says, in a flat, determined voice, “Abbie has a cat. And she lives with me now. She’s going to be my wife. So you have a cat already.”

  I look at the back of his seat, at the pocket where the driving maps are stored. Then I look at the floor and at the carpet on the floor and the crumbs in the carpet. And then I make the mistake of looking at Francy, who, despite her freckles and baby-fat cheeks, is looking at me as though she is a grown-up. She knew about Abbie and the marrying already. Plus other things that she’s trying to tell me now by staring.

  I can’t stand her kindness, or the pity in her eyes, either. I pick at the torn vinyl on the door handle, pick, pick, pick, digging a little hole there, a little channel, a stream. We pull into the driveway. Dad hits the garage door opener. Against the walls, all our tackle boxes and camping equipment has been shoved aside. Boxes marked CHINA and KNICKKNACKS and RECORDS stand piled by the freezer. But not in Dad’s handwriting.

  I make it past them and get inside. I still have to walk through the downstairs, though. I do it slowly, running my hands over Abbie’s rocking chair in the living room, Abbie’s crocheted afghan on the sofa, Abbie’s dishes in the cupboards. Our empty house is full now, full of Abbie’s spider plants and potpourri and mixing bowls and spices. Abbie’s china and knickknacks and records.

  I’m not as smart as Francy. But I understand all of a sudden that Abbie has been living here for a while, probably as soon as I left Alaska last Christmas. It wasn’t that bad of a Christmas, was it? Dad and I chopped down a tree in the bush and flew it home, tied to the plane struts. Abbie came over for goose dinner—because Dad had told me by then that they were dating. But just casually, nothing serious.

  Only six months have gone by since I left. How did Dad fall in love with Abbie so fast? I slip into the downstairs bathroom, where I turn the diamond faucet knobs on and off, on and off. They are thick round knobs, the size of my whole hands. On and off … on and off … oh. Maybe Dad has been in love with Abbie for a long time. Maybe, I realize, even before the divorce. Maybe Abbie is the real reason my mother and I had to leave Alaska.

  I rest my head on the cool, marble sink counter, all these conclusions just scribbling through me, scribbling and scribbling in a black, penciled scrawl inside my head. The faucet drips. Pans crash in the kitchen. Through the door, I hear Abbie and Dad laughing by the barbecue grill. But I don’t cry. And I won’t, either. Dad already picked Abbie over me once. And if I cry, if I yell, if I make a stink downstairs at lunch, he’ll pick her again.

  You know what you do to not cry? You picture patching a sleeping bag—holding the lighter up to the edges of the tear, watching the plasticky fabric curl up so that when you blow the flame out, all that’s left is a hard melted seal.

  I look in the mirror. My eyes are dry. There’s a lump in my throat, but you can’t see it on my neck. I turn the faucet off. I walk slowly out to the deck. And I sit down at the picnic table and eat my salmon and drink my Fresca, along with everybody else.

  Abbie’s cat is named Rita. I never see her. She stays upstairs, hidden under the bed.

  There are a lot of new rules in the house. I’m supposed to knock on Dad’s bedroom door before I enter now. And I’m supposed to knock on the bathroom door. And I’m not supposed to dig through the drawers in Dad and Abbie’s closets. This is about privacy, Dad says.

  I don’t remember there being privacy when Mom and Dad and I were a family. Everybody was always walking around naked or sticking their head into the bathroom while you were peeing to tell you to “Hurry up and get your hip boots on! God Bless America!”

  I feel pretty stupid at night after one of my nightmares. I never remember them but I always wake up sweaty and lost and cold. One night, I go right up to Dad’s bedroom door before I remember I can’t open it or crawl into bed with him and Abbie. I think about curling up in the hall, but it’s pretty open out here with all that carpet and the little face-nibbling things that might live in the carpet and come out when it’s dark and you’re alone. Going back to my room isn’t wise, either. My nightmare is hanging over the bed, waiting to suck me in.

  What I do is go outside and climb in the kennel with Chrissy, Dad’s old duck-hunting dog. She sleeps in a plywood doghouse filled with hay and a little red heat lamp mounted on the ceiling. It’s scratchy in there and stinky, but I don’t mind. Chrissy is warm. She lumps her heavy gray muzzle on the top of my head.

  I’m not sure if dogs can remember, but I’m remembering less and less. There are facts about our old lives that I’ll always know, pasted into my mind from what Dad and Mom told me or told other grown-ups who came over for dinner parties. In 1971, they moved up from Los Angeles so that Dad could do a community service job at the Native hospital and not go to Vietnam. When I was five, Mom started working, too, organizing the first chapter of Planned Parenthood in Alaska.

  My own version, though, is more like a movie: Mom making me caribou stew in the Crock Pot and slapping FIRST COMES LOVE, THEN COMES CONTRACEPTION! stickers on my kindergarten book bag; Dad leaving for the hospital or Merrill airfield to get his pilot’s license; me wandering around the living room touching all the vases and lamps. All those years, Mom kept redecorating, adding more and more Baltimore stuff that I didn’t know was Baltimore stuff yet—embroidered fabrics and brass candlesticks and furniture with long, foreign names like ottoman and Chippendale that she had to get shipped up on cargo boats. Meanwhile, whenever he was home, Dad was ripping out our clipped subdivision grass and planting his own forest in the front yard with native trees and wildflowers.

  Looking back, the differences seem so clear. Mom was building a city in our living room—a city built of mahogany tables and Persian carpets and crystal salt-and-pepper cellars. And Dad was flying off into the wilderness in his new plane to get away from all cities, even Anchorage, the one where we lived.

  It’s too squashed in the doghouse to sleep for more than a few hours. Eventually, I go back inside, taking Chrissy with me. It’s not fair to leave her out there by herself. Being alone in the dark feels so much lonelier once somebody’s already been curled up with you.

  Over the next few weeks, I do some investigating. Abbie, I find out, has her own pilot’s license. She likes to fish the river, instead of sitting on the bank like my mother, reading books. Coming from Ohio, from a little paper-plant town with a drive-in and a penny-candy store, she claims she’s always dreamed of living in Alaska. She drove up in her Dodge Rambler American looking for excitement and adventure.

  I’m skeptical. What’s so exciting about Alaska? A drive-in sounds pretty cool. So does penny candy. Abbie will say anything to suck up to my dad. She is sucking up to me, too, the faker.

  Unfortunately, however, I happen to be a sucker for sucking up. All that June and July, Abbie is either in the kitchen, in an apron, showing me the secret to her chocolate cake recipe (mayonnaise). Or she is teaching me how to sew on a sewing machine, helping me make a clown costume in advance for Halloween, so that, for once in my life, I won’t have to march around in a torn, drugstore plastic Wonder Woman outfit. Or she is making me a lunch like the ones that the girls at school in Baltimore always have: ham and American cheese on white bread, wrapped in tightly cornered waxed paper.

  Or she’s kissing my dad—one afternoon, in particular, in the back of the Avon raft as we putter around Campbell Lake. I’m supposed to be practicing how to handle an outboard motor. I take my eyes off the reedy shoreline and glance in their direction. She has her hand on the fly of his jeans. She is
laughing. So is he. I take my eyes off them, quick, my face burning. They are disgusting—gross and disgusting and nymphos.

  But is that what people in love do?

  My dad is old. So is Abbie, not as old as him, but almost thirty. Dad bought her, as a surprise, the clunky kind of pottery cups she likes. She planted him raspberry bushes. At night after dinner, they sing lounge-song duets—Dad bashing the notes out on the piano, Abbie’s voice floating over his, soft and tinkled. Except for her blue eyes and his brown eyes, they even look alike: blond, tan, competent.

  Guiding the raft toward the dock, I think about my mother’s lunches: the two-inch-thick slab of peanut butter, topped by the two inches of runny historic crab-apple jelly (bought at the gift shop of a restored tobacco plantation) smeared on wheat-and-seed bread, massed into a bundle of tinfoil, positioned under an apple, where the sandwich gets pounded and scrunched into a kind of leaky PB&J meatball at the bottom of the paper bag.

  I love these lunches, I tell myself. They are original. They are spunky, independent, Democrat, social-worker lunches. Not vanilla-wafer, tongue-kissing, husband-stealing lunches. When I get back home to Baltimore, I’m going to eat them instead of throw them in the trash.

  From Judy Blume novels, I know what my newly divorced dad is supposed to do next: invite me over to his rental apartment where I get to eat all the sugar cereal and pizza I want. Clearly, this is not going to happen. Nor are he and I going to go fishing together alone anymore. Abbie fishes next to him, trying out every lure and fly he suggests. I fish as far down the river as I can. And I don’t really fish. I play openly with minnows, corralling them toward the shoreline with the looming shadow of my boot.