Still Points North

by Leigh Newman

  This was not unlike the training for Dad and Abbie’s wedding—a training that once started I couldn’t really deactivate. By this time, seven years had passed and I’d still said nothing about what had happened during the divorce. I might cry about having to pump the plane floats or pluck the ducks for dinner, but that was safe crying, I told myself, that just looked like a spoiled eastern prep-school fifteen-year-old crying about having to do her chores.

  Any time I couldn’t disguise my expression, I left the house. The Bardells—the family of four older, savvier kids who used to babysit me—still lived next door. I fled to their house of teenage wonders, complete with ZZ Top videos, unsupervised three-wheelers, and the occasional handed-down very berry wine cooler.

  That is, until Dad trapped me one night with a dinner at the Black Angus. I knew something was in the works. Dad preferred much more subtle, adult places to eat, places that served minuscule black coffees, with assorted bricks of European sugar. He had sophisticated tastes when it came to eating raw shellfish, playing Bach on the piano (every day), and collecting rare French wines (which he called Château Blow Your Dough and stored in the crawl-space cellar he built under the gun closet). A lot of Great Alaskan Dads and Moms were this way. They had passed through a lot of urban capitals before coming up north, gathering higher degrees and home libraries full of obscure novels—as well as an intense dislike of people who talked too much about these things or who made others feel badly for not having these things.

  I, however, like a lot of Great Alaskan kids, had been going to the Black Angus since age six. I loved it. It was tucked into a strip mall in downtown Anchorage. The wallpaper was saloon-style velvet, the chairs branded with cattle irons, and, to order, you got to pick your own cut from a platter of raw fatty steaks, displayed table-side on a cart by the waiter.

  Mostly Dad and I talked about fishing, as if we still did it together, or we talked about what dessert we were going to have: chocolate sundae versus key lime pie. Right before leaving, though, Dad announced he was worried: I was distant. I was moody. I was never home. “Are you a pot smoker?” he said, in a grim but tender voice. “If you are, you can tell me.”

  “Pot?” I said, laughing.

  “I’m serious. It’s natural, you know, to want to try drugs and so on. What I mean is … I’m your father. I don’t want you running around Anchorage, stoned out of your gourd. This is a rough town. Girls get raped here. They get killed! They get … you get the idea. What we could do is … I could get you some dope or some acid, what have you. You could invite your friends over and have a sleepover in the family room and do drugs—in a safe, controlled environment.”

  All I could picture was me and a few of the younger Bardells in nightgowns and pajamas, sitting cross-legged on down bags on the carpet, watching Flashdance on the VCR and tripping our eyeballs off while Dad patrolled the perimeter with a tranquilizer gun slung over his shoulder, in case any of us tried to jump out the window.

  It was so kind what he was doing, trying to help me. But it also gave me prickles all over. I didn’t know how to respond, other than to say, in a wooden, cheerful, completely nonbelievable voice, “Dad. I don’t get stoned.”

  Dad nodded, with a curt expression that let me know he knew I was lying. Everything would have been so much better if I could have just said, Dad, I’ve tried weed, but that’s not why I’m moody and never home. And by the way, why I’m moody and never home is—

  I couldn’t afford to name the thought, not even with myself. I knew I wouldn’t cry if I did. But I knew I’d sink, right there at the table—fast.

  Moody, on the other hand, was doable. Dad thought I was moody. I had to stop being moody. I smiled and slapped on my Alaska face—one that said It’s all okay, Dad, I love you and you love me, let’s just go shoot something and stop talking. But the Alaska face was different from the Baltimore one. The Alaska face was openly happy. It was not at all careless or blasé. And it was a lot harder, it took a lot more effort, because it used to belong to me. It used to be my real face.

  Now, in this Russian bathroom, so faraway and grown-up, it seems so clear what I’ve been doing. For the past decade, no matter where I’ve traveled or lived, when people ask where I’m from, the first thing I do is ask them where they’re from. If they say a city or town in the East Coast or Europe, I say, “I’m from Baltimore,” leading us to talk about history, museums, and people we might know via familiar schools and friends. If they’re from the Midwest or the West or another outdoorsy place like Chile or Tibet, I say Alaska, leading us to talk about sled dogs and fly-fishing. Dividing the world like this ensures that we’ll have things in common to discuss, that they’ll be more comfortable, which means I’ll also be more comfortable. There is, however, an added bonus: I don’t have to explain about me or my family.

  Your strength is your weakness, my editor in chief likes to say (usually referring to my ability to eat three hamburgers without getting ill). Leaning over the hotel sink, looking in that gilded, imitation Peter the Great-style mirror, I have to wonder if all my malleability has resulted in an upside as well as a down. I can fit in. I can move my face around. I can move my whole personality around.

  For the next two days, I chat about Nebraska with a pimply Russian teenager in charge of the spotlights who dreams of moving to Minneapolis. I trade knock-knock jokes with two ten-year-old girls auditioning for the Kirov, and discuss with adult corps members how to survive nine-hour rehearsals—and life in general—on one bowl of meatless borscht per day. I’m invited to parties in squats in dark, boarded-up, unheated palaces, and drink sixty-dollar-a-glass champagne in a dark, terrifying Mafia bar filled solely with men and exceptionally threatened hookers—many of whom, it turns out, love ballet. I have enough material to fill an entire magazine.

  On my last night, I walk into the opening performance of Gisele with the head of the company, a beautiful panther of a man. He’s in all black; I’m in all gold, finally having landed the chance to wear the one evening dress I always bring in my duffel, just in case. Every eye in the gallery swerves our way, and a murmur ripples through the crowd. It’s like something out of a fin de siècle Parisian opera, down to the actual opera glasses. He and I are not lovers. But we look it. I stand by his side like a part of the tsarist architecture—a haughty gold column with a strand of pearls around her neck. People keep stopping by and inviting “us” to gallery openings and drinks at their apartment.

  I’m standoffish about these invitations but gracious—the way I imagine one should be, if I were the kind of person who used one as a pronoun—cool but kind, in a vague, distant way. The head of the ballet guides me around by my elbow. He smiles and whispers introductions in my ear as if he finds the whole confusion a charming and possibly interesting avenue to pursue. At the end of the after party, I give him a fast good-bye and hop an illegal taxi back to my hotel.

  I tell myself that what I should really do is take this act back to New York. I need to be a haughty gold column at the office, and get my editor to fawn over me and give me a raise. I need to be a haughty gold column at a powerful media party and get somebody to give me a job at a magazine that people have actually heard of, a magazine that pays a livable salary, a magazine with a pirate chest of free Jimmy Choos and magical elves that bring you designer coffees. But as soon as I step off the plane and immediately apologize to my driver for being a half an hour late, I realize that the haughty gold column will remain in Russia, along with all her powers of glamour and intimidation.

  A dim, clunky idea occurs to me, quickly, like a rumbling of the mind: Was that gold-column girl merely a grown-up, Russian version of the girl I tried to be in Baltimore? And if she was, who is this New York person I’m playing now? Some Manhattan version of the girl I used to be in Alaska? The can-do girl? The girl who can build a fire out of wet sticks or an apartment out of a few stained white walls?

  It’s one thing to switch faces. And another to transform any two different places into th
e same two different places where you grew up. As if your life, even inside where you think and dream, is only some kind of cheesy historical reenactment of where you’ve been.

  CHAPTER 8

  The Mystery of Beautiful Things

  I go to Finland. I go to Denmark. Then, one night, just back from Switzerland, I wake up in the middle of my living room. It’s midnight or after. The moon glows sootily through the window, the floor tiles are pearled with cool New York light. All around me stand neat stacks of jeans and shirts, plus a folded bedsheet, three folded paper towels, a tube of toothpaste, and a jar of Dijon mustard.

  I’m in my underwear. I’m cold and sweaty. The apartment feels huge and dark and empty, which is the scariest part of sleepwalking. When you wake up, you feel like you’re still dreaming. Except that I haven’t been walking in my sleep, apparently. I’ve been packing in it.

  This is something I used to do as a teenager in Baltimore. I once woke up with the entire linen closet folded into neat piles on the Oriental carpet beside Mom’s bed. Sometimes I made it to the top of the stairs and would come to, feeling something holding me back, holding on: Mom’s hand. Another time, I got all the way to the front door before she stopped me. It was horrible, waking up, realizing that my mother had had to watch me try my best to leave her.

  Awake, I’d never let myself consider the idea. Mom had no other kids or family save for Maybelle, not even a boyfriend. I was her only child. I was her only everything, and yet, in my sleep, I walked out. Just like Dad.

  Now that I’m an adult, I wonder what I’m not admitting to myself this time. Am I trying to leave myself, which is impossible? Or leave my life, which is ridiculous? In two weeks, I’m headed to Nepal to a luxury safari camp, and, after that, it’s off to Lisbon, and then Milan. Sleepwalking, however, hasn’t been my only unconscious gesture. In the past year, I’ve lost my passport four times, leaving it on a table in Prague and a bus seat in Madrid and a hotel room in Delhi, as if my mind had made the decision for me: No more going back home.

  Which is maybe not such a bad conclusion for my mind to make without me. What’s really here for me in this blank, dingy apartment, where the electricity shorts if you turn on more than three lights? At this stage, aren’t I supposed to have had a real boyfriend, the kind that says he loves you and to whom you say I love you, too—and feel it? This guy doesn’t even have to be the marrying variety. I just want to join the legions of women who have had college sweethearts, prom dates, nights at the movies, Chinese noodles in bed.

  When it comes down to it, I’d even skip the man part and settle for a friend, regardless of the gender. For a few years, I was lucky. Stanford happened to be full of the nicest people on the planet—most of them Californians or Midwesterners, the rest New Yorkers who had decided not to go to schools with ancient secret drinking societies and mahogany-paneled cafeterias. Everybody greeted one another, not with nods or witticisms, but side hugs, during which people swoop an arm around your shoulders, squeeze hard, then—openly and unmistakably—invite you to go eat frozen yogurt or go mountain biking.

  I was flabbergasted by these West Coast rituals—and grateful. I made a lot of friends. These friends invited me to come home with them for Thanksgivings, seders, Easters. A few months later, when their parents visited campus, they would take me along with their child to dinner at an Italian restaurant or drive to Target to buy me, along with their child, toiletries for my room. These parents would redo the locks on my door, just in case, and give me lectures about the free credit cards sent to college students. I would often explain that my own father lived in Alaska and had two young kids, so he couldn’t exactly whisk right down to California and put in a dead bolt. Or that my mother had three jobs and couldn’t afford to come. But these explanations were usually in my head, because I was too busy reading the Mexican novel that these parents had mentioned to me or thanking them for guaranteeing my lease or basking in the glow of the nickname they had given me: HJ (Honorary Jew) or Second Daughter We Never Had. Until that day would come when those parents would buy four tickets to a musical, and leave mine taped to my door with a reminder to: Bring a sweater! The theater will be cold!

  And I would have to break up with that friend. I would have to distance myself physically by attending another college for a bit, or changing my living situation, or just find another friend who ran in a philosophy-studying circle instead of a volleyball-playing one. I was acutely aware of one of life’s ugliest paradoxes: Getting a taste of what you long for is usually more painful than just going hungry.

  My friends didn’t understand these abrupt dismissals. Ten years later, however, men seem less perturbed. I cheat on them before they can cheat on me, and then they go away. There is one guy in particular whom I do this with over and over. Tonight, I think of calling him, but he’s with his new love, a Brazilian who understandably loathes even the idea of me.

  I think of calling Dad. But it’s midnight in Alaska and he’s got two kids who wake up at 6 A.M. Not to mention, we just don’t have the kind of relationship where we talk about our loneliness, sleep habits, and possible mental instability. We haven’t even talked about what happened when he and Mom broke up twenty years ago—or why I think about the whole story as him walking out on us, when I know, factually, that it was Mom and me who jumped in a car and drove away. Instead we talk about his new dog, my total lack of retirement savings, and snowblowers. About these subjects, we agree on everything. There is no need to get upset.

  On the other hand, Mom and I still can’t get along for ten minutes. She, more than anyone, though, is the person I should call. She’s a social worker. She’s lived alone for long periods of time. She can tell if I’m upset just by the way I eat potato chips (me: stuffing them in by the handful, crunching away as if to make a sound barrier around my soul and person), just the way I can tell if she’s upset by the way she eats potato chips (Mom: in a corner, nibbling like a rabbit with a secret dirty bag of carrots).

  We’ve been through so much together, and survived. We’ve buried her mother at a funeral where we were the only attendees, surrounded by two hundred white folding chairs and a huge, completely empty peppermint-striped tent. We’ve looked up her birth parents, only to find out that they’d given up my mother but kept their three other kids. We’ve braved it through Father—Daughter Dinners where I went with my physics teacher because he was the only adult male I knew, and Mother—Daughter Picnics scheduled at noon, when my poor, exhausted mom rushed in for fifteen minutes, bearing a couple of tuna sandwiches in a paper bag, both of us too worried to eat for fear that she would get fired. We’ve run—as fast as we could—in the bullet-torn dark, from our car to the entrance of various Head Start centers in crack-infested downtown Baltimore neighborhoods, Mom working with the parents while I babysat the preschoolers, eating collard greens from a cafeteria tray and doing my homework with four- or five-years-olds piled all over my books and painting my algebra sets with ketchup and begging me to play hide-and-seek.

  And yet we fight over the hand mirror I broke in 1986 and still deny breaking. We fight over the one time she drank too much and couldn’t engage the stick shift, forcing me to drive home at age fourteen. We fight about why I don’t call her on Sunday nights the way she patiently asks me to and why she relentlessly fills up my answering machine with nagging messages to drink orange juice or invest in cloth napkins.

  She is not unaware, either, that underneath these trivial subjects lurk old, volcanic hurts. “Do you think,” she asked the last time we saw each other in New York, “it would have been different if we stayed in Alaska?”

  And I went silent. Because I still don’t know what she means. Different as in better? Stayed as in if we’d stayed with Dad or as in if we’d stayed in some discount condo down the street from him and Abbie?

  Without Baltimore, would I have found out about Tolstoy or the causes of the Iranian revolution? Would I have learned what a horse-country steeplechase was or how to play a mediocre but
functional game of squash? Because it took a while, but eventually I found my place at Roland Park Country—at least, academically. I turned into a hand-raiser, a homework-doer, the kind of girl who reads non-required Greek epic poems and wanders down to the boiler room to find the loving but exhausted English teacher who thought she was going to grab a few meditative puffs off a low-tar menthol but was now going to spend her one break of the day talking with me about “Hills Like White Elephants.”

  Saltcellars, aspic, bread-and-butter notes (with city and state and street names all spelled out, no abbreviations), all those Old Baltimorean graces—don’t laugh—have proven pretty useful in my life. For example, in France, where people judge you over whether you spear your bread with a fork before soaking up the sauce on your plate, or just smear your bread around with your fingers. (Correct answer: the former.)

  Then again, living in Alaska, would I have learned how to fly a plane? Would I have brought down my own moose? Would I have been president of the school, or a happy, well-adjusted hockey cheerleader with an adoring boyfriend who owned a king crew cab pickup?

  And Dad?

  This is where I left Mom at the too-expensive restaurant where she’d brought up the subject in the first place and took the train back to my apartment. Because I can’t bear to leaf through the family scrapbook of what might have been. I can’t even talk to Mom about what actually is. She doesn’t know where I live in New York. We meet in the dining rooms of luxurious uptown department stores, where we split the lobster club sandwich and never order the seven-dollar iced tea. I don’t want her to see my blank, empty apartment or my drug-bustling neighborhood, studded with heroin dealers, pit bulls, and users who float by like limp dead balloons. I don’t want to talk about my relief at owning nothing, or at least nothing that costs money.