Still Points North

by Leigh Newman

  Hop to is an all-purpose hunting-dog command for “get in the kennel!” or “get in the car!” or “find the goddamn duck!” It works very well on me, too. I grab a wheelchair from the hall, plus some sheets from a closet. Nana tries to sit up, but her arm won’t work. She almost slumps out of bed. I can’t hold her, either. A nurse bustles in. “What are you doing?” she says. Then she spots the wheelchair. “This woman can’t travel. This woman has had a stroke.”

  “Take me home,” says Nana. “Please.”

  My dad is looking at the floor, blinking and confused. I’m confused too. By him. My dad is my dad. He’s a doctor, a surgeon. He’s supposed to be telling this nurse to shut the hell up and help us get his mother into the wheelchair. Instead he looks at Nana. Her leg has flopped out from under the sheet, the skin torn up with welts.

  “Correct,” he says to the nurse. “Correct. The wheelchair is not an option.”

  “Take me home,” says Nana.

  “What we need is an ambulance. Can you get us an ambulance?”

  “It won’t be covered,” says the nurse.

  “Just get us the ambulance, will you? For Christ’s sake!”

  From here on out, all there is is action. And this is a relief. Dad and I don’t have to discuss or catch up or not argue or decide or plan anything. Talking of any kind—including marriage talk—is off the table. We just have to get to Nana’s little red cottage before the ambulance.

  Inside, the house smells of mildew and cat litter and the cold, dark Pacific Ocean, which is the view from the living room windows—dark green water to the horizon, broken up by the occasional barge. Everywhere there are Indian baskets and beach glass and Mexican pottery. There are Greek prayer beads and seashells and a whole shelf of cookbooks just on pasta. But there is, of course, no hospital bed or wheelchair or bedpan.

  Nana’s bedroom is right off the living room. We help the EMT guy roll her into her big, soft regular bed. She moans. The sheets hurt her. The fabric is too rough. I run to the closet to look for new sheets. There are stacks and stacks of towels and pillowcases in there—a lifetime of linens. I grab what I can and run back. She begins to scream. I drop the stuff in my arms and try to figure out how to prop her body off the bed.

  But she’s too heavy for me to lift. I can only manage one limb at a time. Dad runs for couch pillows. I try the bed pillows, one under her arms, one in between her legs, one under her head. She quiets. For about three minutes, she doesn’t hurt; she is so grateful, she holds on to my arm, saying thank you, thank you.

  Then she begins to scream again. It’s a deep, low scream—a sound from inside the body, a sound that has everything to do with pain, not fear. All I want is that sound to stop. I move the pillows, from under her elbow to under her hip, from under her hips to under her neck, unsure if it’s better to move them as fast as possible and hurt her in short, excruciating bursts or move them slowly and hurt her less but for long, extended periods. She screams again. I move the pillow back under her hips. This seems to work; she is quiet, dozing off. And then she screams. I move the pillows again, from under her hips to under her back. This goes on, over and over, for eight hours. I pass out on the floor. Dad takes over. Then he passes out on the floor. I take over.

  The next morning, the doorbell rings. It’s the hospital bed. We roll her onto it and break down all the other furniture in the room, leaning her old bed frame and mattress against the wall. The house is littered with Kleenex and receipts and bits of abandoned, uneaten toast. The lights are off, to keep the brightness from bothering her. It is so quiet, no Pavarotti or the Three Tenors, no TV, no talking. None of us has the energy to move our lips.

  Nana curls on her side, trying not to scream. She cries. I want to punch somebody; the hospital bed was supposed to fix everything, and it so clearly doesn’t. Dad is still wearing his coat. I think he slept in it. He jams that under Nana’s knees. “She’s got to drink,” he says. “We have to keep her hydrated.”

  I bring water in a small jelly glass, but she can’t sip. I tear though kitchen drawers and find a takeout straw. She tries to suck on it, but she can’t; she doesn’t have the strength. I cut the straw into a three-inch section. Dad holds her up and she pulls some water in her mouth, swallows. She goes quiet. It is wonderful, the most wonderful thing in the world when we get to the moment, for however long it lasts, when she doesn’t hurt.

  Only then do I realize about her nightgown. It’s bunched around her chest, almost to her neck—a classic Nana bed garment: creamy JCPenney satin with a froth of French lace at the neck. She has drawers and drawers of them; they’re her trademark, along with the kimonos and martinis and hot-silver hair. Many years ago, she’d gone to Paris with her friend and bought tickets to opening night at the opera. She didn’t have a formal couture dress—and so she strode into the Palais Garnier in elbow-length gloves and a silky full-length nightgown, heavy on the ruffles.

  Nana catches me looking at it. We both know what has to happen. The fabric is like fire on her skin. I get the scissors out. I look her in the eyes and start at the hem, cutting slowly over the folds, the scissors suddenly so loud in the room—so final.

  Somehow, she moves her one working hand onto mine. “You make me so happy,” she says. “You make everybody happy. That’s your gift, Leigh. You fill people with joy and life.”

  I stop, scissors still mid-cut. What she’s saying—it’s impossible for me to think this way about myself. It is so alien, so at odds with the sadness and cruelty I have been inflicting on Lawrence for the past three months, so at odds with the person I think of myself as, which is some kind of distant, invited but not really invited guest—not unlike a plus-one at a glittering grown-up party who hangs out over by the cold buffet, picking at the shrimp and looking down at her watch as if she were really, really late for someone or something instead of just hovering hopelessly, waiting for anyone at all to come over and save her, even when no one will because everyone thinks (due to the watch-checking) she is about to leave.

  At times, I know, I can fake confidence and even fabulousness at least enough to make people laugh—but that isn’t filling them with joy, that’s filling them with ease. At times, I can listen to people and make them feel better, but that’s not filling them with life, that’s understanding their lives, even though I don’t know how to share my own.

  On the other hand, there are so many, many times Nana filled my life with solid, unstoppable joy: dressing up with me in wigs and sunglasses from the 1960s and going out for dinner in these outfits, teaching me how to roast a chicken and how to pry limpets off the beach rocks, slathering my hot dogs with her secret condiment (butter). And I wonder why she’s bothered to waste her strength on saying such a beautiful thing to me, something I will think about for the rest of my life, when what she really needs to be is quiet, to save her energy, because—

  Everything in my mind, in the room goes still and quiet. It’s so suddenly and absolutely clear: Nana is dying. I’m here to help her die. We sit together for a while, without saying anything, holding hands. It is the most intimate silence of my life.

  Dad comes in. He’s brought washcloths, a heating pad. He’s made calls. I pull the nightgown slowly off Nana, inch by inch. It’s so good to be with him, just working and watching, each of us knowing that the other is there. Nothing between us has changed in the old, important ways. We work together. We do together. And I’ve missed it.

  Soon my father’s brothers and sister will arrive, and there will be decisions to make and a chicken that I’ll decide that I can cook for everybody but forget to turn the oven on. I’ll try to repair this mistake by sticking the whole bird in the microwave, where it explodes, leaving us with a few shreds of dry chicken shrapnel to eat, which we wash down with Scotch. The next morning, Nana will ask me to go home. I’ll refuse. She’ll pass out and wake up and no longer know who I am. I’ll finally leave the house in a taxi wishing I’d left when she asked me to. A few hours later, while sitting in the old
familiar molded plastic chairs of Sea-Tac, where Nana used to meet me and walk me from the Alaska gate to the Baltimore one or the Baltimore one to the Alaska one, it will hit me like a club to the head: She’s gone. And then my uncle Mark will call me and tell me she really did die; she died forty-five minutes after I left the house.

  But right now, lying on the floor of Nana’s room, waiting for the next round of screaming, I think back to when I was a child, staying with her for a few months, right after my mother left my father. This was when my boils first broke out. Most of them were on what Nana called my derriere, making it very hard to sit. I think about how she used to pull off the bandages stuck to the open sores—slowly, with tiny, soft, delicate lifting motions, working the gauze off the skin, as I begged and begged her to go even slower—which she did. This indulgence was not at all like Nana. She’d lost her whole family before the age of twenty. She doesn’t do good-bye; when she leaves your house, she just walks out. When she feeds her dog, she tosses him a chunk of hamburger wrapped in plastic, forcing the poor guy to figure out how to get to his food, often by choking down the wrapping along with the meat. By all rights, she should have pulled my bandages off with a sudden, fast, excruciating rip.

  Instead, against all common sense, she used tenderness.

  I’m no expert, but maybe we all can be different with different people. I would like, more than anything, to be the person she described—the joy-giving person, the life-giving person, which must have been the person I was to her. How will I ever be that person with myself? She was the one person I might have asked.

  By the time I land at Bradley Airport in northern Connecticut, I have one hour before class. It doesn’t occur to me to blow off grad school. In Amherst I leave my luggage in the car and go directly into the classroom, where everyone is discussing my story. It’s a meandering tale about a girl whose parents get into an ugly screaming fight, which causes her father to drive off and her mother to go on a crazed, manic shopping spree in the grocery store, during which this mother urges her daughter to live it up, to be free, to do whatever she’s ever wanted, filling up cart after cart with wheels of Brie and hunks of roast beef and pricey triple-crème ice creams from Sweden.

  The story is sappy and boring and far too long. “The characters aren’t believable at all,” says a guy at the table. I estimate his age: twenty-three. “That woman sounds like a character from a Lifetime movie.” Which is unfortunate. Because, this time, of course, I realize the story is about me. I could be any one of the three of them: the girl blinking between her parents or the mom longing to escape or the dad driving off. In fact, I am all three characters as they chow down on Swedish ice cream at the end until they’re sick, not unlike Dad and I did during the summer of the all-the-humpy-you-can-eat grief buffet.

  Now, of course, I’m at my own grief buffet. I buy Double Whopper value meals (with bacon and cheese) and can’t get down more than the first two bites because as soon as the food hits my mouth, I’m not hungry, which is karmic payback. I don’t deserve to eat anyway, I tossed my life—and Lawrence’s and Leonard’s—into the garbage disposal and hit the switch. And, as of today, the one person I could confide in is dead. I almost climb over the classroom table and punch out the guy, with his industrial intelligentsia glasses and smug asswipe smile.

  But the whole experience has a quivering, unreal quality—bubble voices, bubble people, bubble table and chairs and brick bubble collegiate buildings, pop. I drive back to the garage. I drag out my duffel. I repack my duffel. I have four hours to make my flight to Bermuda.

  And I’m not going to pee in a goddamn pail. I march into the main house, which used to be a farmhouse in the days before suburbs and fences. My landlord has rented a room on the second floor to a beefy guy with a baseball hat. The guy has a rottweiler, also beefy and far larger than me, which usually lives in a wire cage from where he looks at me through the door, swinging his heavy head to check where I am in the hallway.

  But not tonight. The dog is in the living room, curled up on the sofa. I head for the stairs—casually, because if you’re calm with dogs, they’re calm. One time, in the remote hills of Umbria, an entire pack of feral dogs descended on me as I walked down the trail. With no time to move, what I did was stand very, very still, as if I were a tree, and what they did was flow around me—a stream of heat and musk and teeth—then flow on, continuing toward the unsuspecting chickens and lambs that lay ahead.

  The rottweiler, though, pads after me, stopping on the landing to nuzzle my leg. I stop. I bend down and pet him, just so we both know that I’m a friendly, kind human, not at all scared, not at all aggressive or bothersome. On I go, petting him slowly and evenly, even though I’d prefer to get just the tiniest bit away from him, because, to be honest, he has always made me a touch uncomfortable. Living in a cage—dog or no—is never good for your head.

  He nuzzles my leg again and then out of nowhere, almost lazily, as if he wasn’t really committed to the plan—he noses up and bites deeply into my arm just above my wrist. I hold up my arm; blood is leaking out a hole, a tooth hole. The rottweiler cocks his head, as if he, too, is surprised. Then something hardens in his eyes. The decision has been made. He jumps. I put my hands out to stop him, but he lands on my chest, and whap, knocks me on my back.

  For a second, all I see is the bottom of the bathroom door, the flaked green paint, the nailed brass strip that separates the end of the hallway carpet and start of the tile floor. The dog isn’t barking or growling. He’s not making any sound at all. He’s just going for my throat and he’s too heavy and my hands don’t move fast enough, I’m screaming, trying to kick him off me. When somebody finally rips him away.

  “What the fuck! What the fuck!” this somebody is saying. It’s beefy baseball guy. I think he’s asking me if I provoked the dog, if I did something. But I can’t be sure exactly and I can’t move. The cool air, the ease of breathing, the removal of the crushing weight and heat of the dog from my chest is too overwhelming. I lie there for a few minutes and just endure it—the understanding that I’m still alive. Then I stand up. I go downstairs, careful not to fall, holding on to the banister. The kitchen is warm and white. There’s a bucket of cleaning rags by the stove. I bend down and take one. Blood splats on the smudged linoleum. My head goes fuzzy. I hang there, ordering myself to remain vertical; there’s nobody to catch me if I fall.

  Then I swing upright and move onto the porch. I rip up the rag; it’s an old sheet, the fabric gives in soft, limp strips. I tie up my arm. There’s a break in the bushes between our yard and the next, where I see a neighbor standing on her own porch. She’s watching me—and my arm. “Are you okay?” she calls out.

  “Uh,” I say. “A rottweiler attacked me. I left my husband. And my grandmother just died.” My own voice sounds like it’s coming through one of the pneumatic tubes at banks, the words sucking off into wind and vapor.

  “I think you’re in shock. Wait there. I’ll come right over.” Now the woman is coming up the porch steps. She has a housecoat on, glasses. “I think you’re in shock.”

  A bolt of hard, screeching rage goes through me: I’m not in shock! I’m fine! Because, as I tell this neighbor, in a very loud, angry voice, “I helped my grandmother die, that’s all. It was a beautiful experience. It was a privilege. It was how anybody would want to die, surrounded by people who love you—not looking up at some bathroom door, lying by yourself in some hall in Massachusetts.”

  The neighbor’s eyes are big and blinky. She’s looking at my arm. I look down at my arm, too. Blood is seeping through the rag fabric. “Sorry,” I say. “I have to go to Bermuda now.”

  She nods, perhaps in shock, too. I get in my car and go—not to the hospital—but to the airport. Though I’ve never had stitches or a broken bone, it seems to me if you keep a tight seal on an open wound, it will close.

  This isn’t completely faulty logic. I spend the week alone writing about honeymoon cottages, pink-sand beaches, and Dark and Stormys
. I keep the hole in my arm dry and covered (no swimming) and swallow handfuls of the broad-spectrum antibiotics that I never travel without—not since my first trip to the Galapagos during which the entire boat got an overachieving stomach bug on the very day that the one onboard bathroom ceased to work.

  At this particular junction in my life, there is something tremendously comforting about staying on an island where everyone wears madras shorts without irony and pulls their socks up to their armpits as if their shins are too personal to display to the general public. Nobody in Bermuda asks about my bandage and I certainly don’t offer any witty, revealing backstory. I sit on the terrace of my rental cottage and type up my story before I even leave.

  My breakdown on the porch in Massachusetts has left me with one thought: Even hysterical, I was correct, my grandmother did leave the world surrounded by people who loved her. The way I’m headed, though, it seems unlikely that will happen to me.

  Back in Massachusetts, a few months later, Lawrence invites himself up for the weekend. This time, he promises, we will talk about lawyers. I’m ninety-seven pounds at this point. I have a thick, round, tooth-hole scar on my forearm. We drive around and around and around. As we do, I have time, lots of time, to think about why Lawrence may be putting up with me. He grew up with a father who used to get beer-drunk every night, tell a few wry jokes, then pass out in his saurekraut at the table—and that was before his parents got divorced and his father had to have both his legs amputated due to diabetes.

  Lawrence grew up with catastrophe. I am now the cherry on that catastrophe. He will keep on driving us around the highways of New England, just the way he kept drinking all of his milk and clearing all of the dinner plates except the one that his dad was sleeping in. Until I stop him. Now.

  I ask him to take the next exit. He does. Neither of us knows where we are: There is snow, then trees, a valley, a bookshop. A sign for hot dogs—our favorite kind, in the shape of a giant 1950s hot dog—juts up from the trees.