Still Points North

by Leigh Newman

  “I know you don’t miss me. But I miss you … a lot, almost all the time.”

  We pass islands. We pass trees. We pass little cabins and docks. I pick up my paddle. I start to paddle. I sing the Native song Dad and I used to sing while canoeing; the song does what it’s supposed to do—fill up the agonizing silence while Lawrence decides; dip-dip and swing again, flashing like silver, fast as the wild goose flies, dip-dip and swing.

  “Okay,” he says, finally, and turns around. His face is serious.

  He knows what he’s agreeing to—us.

  “What took you so long?”

  “I was waiting for you to start paddling.” Then he smiles.

  So two years to the day after our wedding, Lawrence and I decide to give good old-fashioned living-together, staying-together marriage a try. This decision doesn’t come after one enlightening canoe ride across a lake. We work at it, visiting each other for weekends, then long weekends. Thanks to Bride-to-Be, we even go on an all-expenses-paid, second-honeymoon cruise through Tahiti. It’s wonderful. We bike up a volcano and race across peaceful blue lagoons on huge, crass, loud, shamefully exhilarating Jet-Skis.

  But New York is not Tahiti. For one thing, we won’t be living in a hut on stilts, with a personal valet to deliver fresh papaya with lime in a rowboat each morning. New York is real life: dog hair, freezer defrostings, deadbolts, chain locks, and window locks. When the time comes to move back in, I trudge up the steps with my two trusty duffels and nudge open the door.

  My homey apartment looks as if I’ve never left it. Leonard is farting on the bed pillows. The overhead light sparks when I flip the switch. The same deep bass, bongo-heavy Dominican song is thumping through the floorboards as it has thumped through the floorboards for the past eight years.

  “I took the left-side closet,” says Lawrence from behind The New York Times. “You can take the other.”

  “Good planning,” I say. Do I sound nervous? So what if I’m a little nervous … and suspicious. Lawrence was the youngest of three full-time siblings. He can’t help but measure our ice creams with his forefinger to see who got the larger scoop. He has, I have no doubt, taken the roomier closet.

  I throw open his door. An avalanche of paper—never-read issues of the Smithsonian and the Economic and Social Review: The Obscure Irish Issue, ripped clippings from The Observer, a ten-year-old real-estate newsletter, menus from a closed Mexican takeout, hotel matchbooks, ATM receipts, a hefty stack of light bills, a movie stub for The Matrix, coupon circulars, a scrap reading “Remember Wooden Beam!” and more and more and more sluices out all over my feet and the floor. I muscle the whole disaster back in and shut the closet door.

  Then open the door and let it all slide back out. This is Lawrence’s apartment now, too. A mature, loving, married thought that I handle well, I hope. At least on the outside. “You know what I think?” I say. “We should move.”

  Lawrence keeps his head in the paper: flip, rustle, rustle.

  “I mean, we need more room. We need more space. We need to go someplace—”

  Flip, rustle, rustle.

  “Like Montreal! We could rent a house. With a garden. I could speak French. You could speak English. We could ski. And eat those fries with cheese curds and gravy. Poutine. And—”

  Down goes the paper. Lawrence looks me over—his blue eyes moving briskly, scalping me into silence. “I’m a New Yorker, Leigh. I live in New York. I love New York.”

  I look down at the avalanche, now a drift of ragged paper at my feet. Hither and thither among the yellowing scraps wink other items—each a glittering little ruby of romance past. A seashell from the toxic-smelling beach in Queens behind JFK where Lawrence took me once to swim. A tiny swatch from his tattered, too-small khaki pants that I made him throw away in a Delhi hotel room. A single ski glove, circa 1985, kept with the all-too-understandable hope that one day the match (lost with me on a ski lift in Utah) might resurface. A dirty, gnawed, faded yet perfectly folded AAA map of Buffalo, evidently saved from the childhood Single Mom Mobile. All of which serves as a window into the mind of the beautiful man in the truly hideous golf shirt now lounging with my dog on my bed. “I’m a New Yorker, too,” I say.

  “No, you’re not.”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Name the order of the bridges,” he says. “East River, starting with the Queensboro.”

  “One of them is the Brooklyn Bridge. And the other one is … the Verrazano?”

  “What’s the big street in Brooklyn? With all the Arab grocery stores?”

  “I’ve got this one …”

  “Atlantic Avenue. You’ve never even been to Brooklyn, have you? Except that one time I took you, and you ate an entire tub of hummus.”

  I pause. I have nothing. I growl at him, and Leonard jumps off the bed.

  “You’re not a New Yorker,” trumpets Lawrence. “But—you get to live in New York.”

  “You mean I get to live with you.”

  “That is correct.”

  “Well,” I say. “I can live with that. As long as we find a storage facility.”

  So this is our first legal, signed-on-paper home together, Room 3610 at City Mini Storage. It’s a cozy, studio-sized cement room—a place made for people who can’t let go of a taxi receipt from 1991 or a camera they found on the sidewalk; people who hang tenaciously on to matchbooks, canceled checks, and—let’s not forget—a certain confused, difficult, overly independent, yet completely fearful wife.

  Luckily, Room 3610 is also made for people who can easily let go of all these things, who can joyfully shove them all into boxes and shove the boxes inside, fitting them up to the ceiling (as if the cement room were the cramped back of a Cessna 185, where every millimeter of available space must be filled with possible survival gear), then whip that combination lock shut before a certain husband throws his coffee all over the wall, demanding his childhood coin collection back … or just his recent clippings (note the plural) regarding Niagara Falls.

  The couple who lives in this charming, windowless, heat-free room has a lot of work do. They are not what one might consider emotional connoisseurs. He knows how to give the silent treatment. She knows how to yell. He likes to storm out. So does she. They will bump into each other storming out, then storm back in.

  “Can’t lives on won’t street, Leigh!”

  “It all happened so fast? You spent seven hours at the grocery store and came back with Grape-Nuts and a bottle of cumin! What the hell is cumin? I’m definitely on won’t street! I am on will not street! I will not go out there and buy us food for the week when it’s your turn.”

  Off he goes behind the latest issue of Charge! The Civil War Newsletter. Off I go to jump on the bed and annoy him, until he agrees to order Indian takeout for dinner. Because in this little family of two, we don’t give up, most especially not on the really dumb issues. We overeat and underlisten. We ignore the obvious and daydream the improbable. We dare and double-dare and solve multiple problems with a stare-down, in which the first to blink has to do the laundry. When in doubt or fear, we repeat the wisdom of our elders: “Point that shotgun at the ground! The other ground, the one with dirt!”

  But if you’re looking for somebody to tell you that she adores you by dragging you up off the ice after a long, terrifying fall halfway down a slide-for-life couloir in Montana, only to confirm that adoration by ordering you to plant those poles and turn those skis and make it down the mountain, then I’m your woman. If you’re looking for somebody to tell you that he adores you by absolutely forbidding you to go to Nairobi while eight months pregnant, then promising that after the baby is born, he will take you and the newborn to see the naïve gorillas of Gabon, all of which is a lie (a total lie!) just to shut you up, then Lawrence is your man.

  Because talking is not always what is being said. Sometimes, there’s a story underneath the words of husbands and wives—and fathers and mothers and grandmothers and dogs and children—and, in my small, inglorious e
xperience, regardless of how it ends, regardless of every indication that seems so emphatically to contradict it, that story is almost always a love story.

  Epilogue

  Thirty years ago, I dreamed my mouth and my throat were full of water. It was cold water. It was dark and salty and thick. I opened my eyes, spit, thrashed. Water was in my mouth. Water was all around me … and around my father, still asleep in the tent beside me. And more water was rushing in, over our clothes and duffel bags.

  I screamed.

  Dad grabbed for the gun, then dropped it. “We’re flooding! Out! Run! Now!”

  The Kvichak River, where we were camped was—evidently—so near the ocean it was tidal. The river swept up the beach, carrying off our coffeepot and cooler and most of our tent. We sloshed toward higher ground, shivering in our underwear, just as our plane drifted past us on the river, turning in circles, headed toward the open sea; the force of the tide had pulled the tie-downs off the tree branches.

  “Jesus Christ,” said Dad running, leaping, diving into the current. He popped up on the surface in a panicked crawl. The plane was drifting fast. Dad swam even faster. He’ll catch it, I chanted to myself. He’ll catch it. And just then he grabbed the painter and heaved himself onto the float, screaming, “Save the goddamn gear!”

  I wanted to see if Dad could get the plane turned around; we had no way home without it, no radio and no food and nobody to know we were out here alone. But … the gear. I fished out a sleeping bag, then dragged the heavy sodden mass up to higher ground. Next a tackle box, lures flashing up from the underwater mud and ooze.

  Behind me, finally—a chuff of propeller. The engine roared on. Dad forced the plane upriver, and retied it to a tree this time, a tree deeply rooted into the ground. “Well,” he said, trudging up the beach, “I guess we learned something about the reliability of a half hitch.” He laughed.

  I laughed, too. I was nine. I laughed when Dad laughed. Besides, we were always learning something in the wilderness. Usually it involved being cold and wet.

  We laid out what was left of the gear to dry, then cobbled together our rods and started fishing. The sun ricocheted across the river in little crackling bits. The air smelled of salt and ocean and bait. A few seagulls swooped in, cawing frantically overhead.

  I cast over to a still patch behind a boulder. “Dad?”

  “Yep.” His reel clicked and set.

  “What do I do if you get sick in the bush, or die or drown?”

  “There’s an SOS beacon in the back of the plane. You flip it on.”

  “But what if the plane floats away?”

  “You settle in and figure out what to do about food.”

  “I could fish.”

  “Yep.”

  “But what if the rods floated off?”

  “You’d make one. Or trap one of these stupid seagulls.”

  “But what if the seagulls don’t come?”

  “Well, if there aren’t any seagulls and there aren’t any fish …”

  “And there aren’t any lemmings or caribou or berries that I know I can eat?”

  “Well, then, I guess you’ll have to eat me.”

  “Dad …”

  “Do you want to live?”

  “I’m not going to eat you.”

  “It’s not me. It’s protein, plus some fat. You just look at me like a seagull. You make a nice long incision up the back, butcher out the shoulder, then the legs and arms. Avoid the abdomen, though, too many gut issues. Remind me: We really need to show you how to field dress.”

  “But you’re my dad.”

  “Correct. And your dad would want you to live. And you would want you to live. And sometimes you just have to do things that you don’t want to do to live.”

  “Okay.” I looked over my shoulder at the alder bushes, as if someone were hiding there, waiting to watch me feel scared or disgusted. But all I felt was relieved. I had a plan of action now—one that went along with my plan of action for what to do if we crashed into the ocean (leap out of the spiraling, falling plane at fifty feet above the water), or what to do if we got hit by an avalanche (ride out the tidal wave of snow with my ski pole stuck up so that rescuers can spot it later, poking out of a drift). I knew what I needed to know to not be scared; I was safe.

  Thirty years later, my plans of action are so different I sometimes wonder who the hell I am. I live in a New York universe full of speeding cabdrivers, terrorist alerts, and—once—a tornado. I have a plan of action against my beautiful but strong-willed eleven-month-old baby slipping in the bathtub and hitting his head on the faucet (a nonskid mat in the shape of a crocodile). I have a plan of action against my three-year-old preschooler choking on a hot dog (cutting the meat lengthwise into tiny pieces). I have a plan against either of them growing up in two distant geographically incompatible homes or even more than one home (a house that we can’t afford to leave, a loving, calm husband who has taught me—God help me—how to trust even if, quite honestly, it doesn’t seem like a particularly intelligent idea). Considering the dirty-handed, seismic vicissitudes of life, these plans are as unreliable and cockamamie as any other—but still as comforting in the middle of the night.

  Day to day, I run after my whole family with toothbrushes and permission slips and nutless cupcakes slathered in a bonanza of sprinkles, all too often mistaking my desire to make their world orderly and stable with my desire for them to not end up alone on Christmas Eve in Madrid, mugged at knifepoint by a transvestite (long story, another book). I have little to no idea how to teach them what I really want to teach them, which is that though this planet is vast and rambling, though people are flawed and sometimes leave you, the choice is never between two worlds or three worlds or not picking a world and drifting, drifting until you end up on camelback at the border of Libya (long story, another book).

  The choice, in fact, is deciding between the world of your making and the ever-distant, ever-glittering, open-all-night never-never land of the supposedly wiser, happier rest of the world.

  My mother tried to teach me this. Every morning as she dropped me off at school, she yelled hopefully out the car window, “To thine own self be true!”

  I wasn’t a good listener, even to the wisdom of Shakespeare. I suspect my boys aren’t, either. None of us are. We learn by watching and trying and going splat—most especially, I believe, when the thing we’re trying to master is love.

  Which is why I find myself one morning at dawn in a bleak gray estuary in Maine. Everything about the last twenty-four hours has gone wrong. It’s pouring. It’s freezing. The night prior, we forgot to put a pull-up on Henry, our three-year-old son. We were sleeping on an inflatable mattress, which, due to our combined weight, had sunk into a deep trough at the center. At 4 A.M., when Henry released his bladder—with the complete and utter freedom of the dreaming—the trough filled up, and I woke up screaming, “Flood! Everybody out! Run!”

  That is, until I realized this time we were drowning in pee.

  As we trudge through the black, boot-sucking mud, I picture gold-flecked margaritas, a bungalow on an obscure Caribbean island called St. Way Out of Your Budget. Lawrence slumps under his poncho where the baby, Al (as in: Almanzo, the hardscrabble hero of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Farmer Boy), dangles in the organic fabric carrier around his chest, either asleep or silenced due to exhaustion. He was, after all, up all night screaming about the wet cold tent and wet cold sleeping bags and the whole ill-conceived plan that we go on a family camping trip four weeks after his birth.

  Meanwhile, Henry continues to weep, as we slog on, hand in hand, looking for the stream that feeds into the swamp we have been circling for forty-five minutes.

  “I want to carry Noodle Poop,” he says, between wails.

  Noodle Poop is Scooby-Doo, whose image is festooned all over the child-friendly fishing rod that Lawrence and I bought him for this camping trip. Like most kids, Henry has his own language: Juicy is cozy. High road is highway. Brocamole is guacamole. I
love that language. And yet when I hear myself saying, “You can’t carry Noodle Poop, Henry. The tip is too fragile,” I have to imagine how the other people at the campground must perceive us, listening from within their dry, warm RVs as we speak like lunatics—or foreigners, conversing in our intimate familial tongue.

  Is this what happens after a while—your family becomes not just your world, but your country? If so, I’m okay with that. I may just have been staggering around for most my life, waiting to be the middle-aged mom of two young citizens who like to play “baby cheetahs who lay eggs and live in a house made of couch pillows.”

  It’s only some of the national customs I question—such as this afternoon’s “adventure.” It’s hypothermically cold. I’m leaking breast milk. Lawrence’s face is a gray color and the baby might be suffocating under his poncho, not that we would ever know.

  And yet, Henry wants to catch a fish. I’m from Alaska—and I’m not going to give up until we have at least some kind of biggish minnow in hand. We’re going to find that stream, we’re going to fish it, and we’re going to have fun—right this second!

  On we trudge, slumping through the oozy black mud. “I want to play fishing,” Henry says. “You promised.”

  “You’re going to,” I say, grimly.

  His boot falls off, his sock gets wet, he has to pee, and there’s still no sign of the stream.

  “I want to play fishing,” Henry says.

  A gnat buzzes around my face and directly into my eye. I can’t help it. I unleash a torrent of curses so visceral that all the chirping seabirds flutter up from the bushes in terror. I’m officially my own Great Alaskan Dad, down to the H. in Jesus H. Christ and my aching desire for a machete with which to chop down all the surrounding saw grass. Henry—clearly of Lawrence’s stock—remains disturbingly undisturbed.

  “I want to play fishing.”

  “You want to play fishing?” I say and, ding-dong, suddenly hear him. As does Lawrence, who takes Noodle Poop from my hands. Right there, on the semi-dry ground, he casts as far as he can into the bushes for Henry to run, run, run after the mitten we have attached to the line as a lure. And when Henry tugs on the line, notifying his father that he’s “caught,” the open, golden delight on his face as he gets reeled in—no fears about falling in the river or tripping into the propeller, no anger about facing down the mosquitoes or the cold or the always hovering, undiscussed past—there is so much joy in this.