by Alexis Smith
Daddy, why are your fingers going west? Isabel asked. Having just learned how to use a compass, she believed left was always west.
There was no answer. He thought he would never play guitar again.
Years later, in Portland, their father began to tell them his stories. They trickled out of him, as if his past were slowly melting: the early days of long winters snowed in at the homestead; his father shooting the first moose to wander down the driveway in the fall; moose sandwiches for months; working summers as a teenager, cleaning trash and outhouses in camp grounds (banging a big aluminum spoon against the garbage pails to frighten off bears); leaving home at sixteen to play music with feckless friends; his father getting their band a gig at a bar (brothel) in Kenai, not asking how his father knew the owner (madam); searching piles of fish heads for a human hand at the cannery one summer; the fishing boat he sank all his money into; the friend who sank the boat; and, eventually, working on the North Slope.
There were only two places to work, he said: the canneries or the Slope. He had worked both. It was an explanation and an apology. Though for what, Isabel still wasn’t sure. He always seemed to be flying away from them when they were little girls. Isabel thought that he believed this was the reason their mother stopped loving him. That was an easy explanation, but the apology was more complicated.
There was the pipeline and the oil that thrummed through it. There was evidence of harm all around—as close as the end of his arm. Beyond, there was the spill that coated the sea and the coastline and all the animals. Then there was the thaw, the threateningly deep, vast thaw: a lucid dream of a legacy for children who know better but cannot stop it.
Isabel cannot read magazine articles or books about the North. She cannot watch the nature programs about the migrations of birds and mammals dwindling, the sea ice thinning, and the erosion of islands. And she does not want to know what has happened to her great-grandmother’s house by the woods, sold years ago to people who let gutted cars rot in the front yard.
When she thinks about her northern childhood now, she thinks of her father, flying to the Slope with all the other fathers, toiling in permafrost. She sees him in his work coat and heavy boots, hardhat over a woolen skullcap, slipping coins into the slot of a vending machine, pressing the button and hearing the clink and the drop, reaching his undamaged left hand through the metal flap for the candy bar.
Rest and Gladness
She stares at the windowsill in his apartment: spores and insect husks. She hears him at the sink, then his footsteps across the room. He stops next to her and looks out the window and hands her his cold, scuffed metal water canister.
She smiles thanks.
Sorry I can’t offer you anything else, he gestures to the nearly empty room.
Where did you sleep last night? she asks.
Sleeping bag.
They sit on a camp blanket spread under the window, and look into the room together.
She drinks and hands the bottle to Spoke, who takes a long swig. Isabel watches the way his throat expands and contracts as he swallows. She is closer to him than she has ever been. She notices more about his face. He lets his beard grow a little, so that from a distance the skin beneath disappears. Now she is so close she can see the individual whiskers, which are brown and red and blonde, and the skin underneath.
He begins by telling her about his childhood in Wisconsin, and about his grandparents’ farm. He spent school holidays and weekends there, working with his grandfather in the shop or wandering the orchards and outbuildings with headphones and a book, sitting on lopsided degenerate farm equipment or under the trees. After his grandmother died, the remains of the orchard were left to the birds. Bushels of unpicked fruit withered through the fall and winter. Layers of apple rot, overcome by moss, made the ground pillowy.
His last summer at the farm was a compromise: his parents, college professors, wanted him to go to straight to college after high school, but Spoke hesitated—he had never enjoyed school, though he performed well, and he didn’t know what he would study. They let him take a year to make up his mind.
He was supposed to help his grandfather keep up the farm, fix things around the house, drive him to the store and church. But his grandfather died that fall. One morning, he wasn’t up before Spoke, who found his grandfather in bed and couldn’t wake him. He’d had a stroke in the night.
Spoke thought it was a sign, his grandfather dying. He decided to live on the farm and nurse the orchard back to health, tend to the place. He imagined marrying and starting a family there, becoming an iteration of his grandfather, but with more kids. Lots of fat happy kids, chasing chickens through the orchard.
Isabel lifts an eyebrow.
I was an only child, he explains with a sheepish shrug. No playmates.
Isabel’s eyes drift around the room as he continues, but she listens to every detail, trying to picture the farm and his grandparents, and a young Spoke, wanting to be grow apples and have babies.
He tells her about his grandfather, silent and stoic in a typically midwestern way, but gentle, and devoted to his wife. He remembers sitting at the kitchen table, eating a big slice of cake, his grandmother singing “O Day of Rest and Gladness” as she washed dishes. His grandfather came in for lunch, wrapped his arms around her waist, and kissed her, once, right behind the ear.
Isabel looks to Spoke and sees that he’s blushing. He glances back at her nervously. It’s such an intimate detail; she knows he has never told anyone. She can’t help but imagine him kissing her in the same place.
There was something secret between them, he tells her. Something that connected the two of them in a way no one else could ever understand.
His grandmother died when he was twelve.
He remembers waking one morning in his dad’s childhood bedroom—months after his grandmother’s funeral—the house was silent, cold. He pulled on an overcoat and boots and wandered out into the yard. It was spring—the final thaw over, everything muddy and green and steaming in the morning sun. When he got to his grandfather’s shop he stopped. He could see his grandpa through a crack in the door, sitting on his work stool, crying, quaking. He had never seen him cry—not in all the weeks that had passed, not even at the funeral. There was a box of letters open on the workbench. He assumed they were from his grandmother, from during the war, before they were married.
He snuck back to the house and just stood in the kitchen, staring at the sink. Everything was different with her gone. It wasn’t even like half of his grandparents was gone, it was like his grandmother took part of him with her. Spoke didn’t know what to do. There wasn’t a pot of coffee on—she always made it, even though she didn’t drink it—so Spoke pulled the big can down from the cupboard and made a pot in the percolator. He didn’t know how, so he filled the basket with grounds—it came out thick and muddy. But when his grandfather finally came in from the shop he poured a cup and drank it all, sitting at the table with Spoke, not saying anything.
After his grandfather died, Spoke spent one last night in the house. When he woke in the morning he made coffee for himself in the percolator and sat at the kitchen table, drinking it alone. Then he pulled on his grandpa’s old denim and sheepskin coat and went out to the shop. He searched for close to an hour before he found the box of letters his grandfather had read after his wife died. It was an old wooden cigar box, with a tiny rusted lock that Spoke had to jimmy with a small screwdriver. But they weren’t letters from his grandmother. They were letters to her. His grandfather’s regiment was at the surrender of Dachau. He described grisly scenes—what everyone now learns from history books and documentaries, but worse, because it was in the words of a naïve farm boy. He compared the prisoners to veal calves and the heaps of the dead to an immense pile of horse bones he once witnessed, outside a rendering plant.
But they were love letters. Spoke’s grandfather wrote about her—his random thoughts, remembering the dress she wore the last evening they spent together,
how he thought of her every night, intensely, shutting out everything around him just to imagine her face and hands and voice, but when he woke she wasn’t there with him. All of it—the war and the carnage and his love for her—it was all in that kiss Spoke witnessed as a boy. His grandfather survived the war and woke up every morning afterward to his dream.
Spoke falls silent, leans back into the wall, and rubs his hands over his face.
What happened to the farm? Isabel asks softly, but her voice fills the room anyway.
Spoke sits up and looks at her.
My dad sold it, he says bluntly. I signed my enlistment papers the day they closed probate.
Isabel looks at her hands in her lap. She thinks about her great-grandmother’s homestead, the little house by the woods, long ago sold off by her grandparents, and she realizes that she is about to cry.
She stands up suddenly and stumbles, her knees aching and weak from sitting on the floor for so long. Spoke jumps up and puts out a hand to steady her.
She grasps him, rests her forehead on his chest.
Don’t go, she says into his shirt.
Then she looks at him, closes her eyes and kisses him. It startles her, how warm he is, how much breath the kiss takes. He places his hand on the back of her head and cradles her head in his palm. She reaches for the hem of his shirt, slips beneath it and slides her hand over his belly. She navigates the crenellation of his ribcage slowly until she feels the burst of flesh that must be his scar, soft, tender folds around a stippled center, like a pressed flower. He kisses her neck and his beard leaves thousands of tiny abrasions on her skin.
Exit, Glacier
Isabel walked right up to the glacier. She could hear it sighing and dripping. She put her warm, plump hand on the heaving lung of it. She could feel its breath and the minute spaces inside filling with water and the great creases pulling in the sky.
It was their last camping trip before they left Alaska. Isabel and Agnes had each invited a friend, and they played the usual games: hearts and war, for cards; and a divining game with paper and pencil, called MASH, which stood for “mansion apartment shack house.” MASH revealed a girl’s future husband, car, city of residence, and abode. Isabel would be married to Matt Jones (a catch, by fifth-grade standards), who would drive an El Camino to their house in Nashville. They played these games into the waning hours of the day, when the low, late sun cast their long shadows into each other. When they tired of games, they told the same scary stories over and over.
Isabel played the games and told stories, but she felt too old to enjoy them. She felt outside of herself, removed from her childhood, as if watching it all from behind a tree several feet away. Sometimes her sister looked at her from across the campfire, and Isabel understood that Aggie felt the same way.
They toasted s’mores and looked out into the dark woods and up at the every star in the northern sky. Their mother and her friend Pam drank warm beer by the fire. The girls finally fell asleep, berry-stained, mosquito-pocked, hands cold.
On the last day, Isabel begged to make the hike to the glacier again—it wasn’t far. They drove to where the dirt road folded into itself at a rusted red gate, then walked the rest of the way over the path through the woods. After a few minutes, the trees suddenly drew back and there it was: Exit Glacier, like a ghost in the mirror. As uncanny and startling as anything, even for an Alaskan girl. Isabel clambered over centuries of rocks and stood beneath it, wobbly knees and pink windbreaker, for a photograph. Then she turned, spread her goose-pimpled arms wide, and pressed her warm lips to the glacier.
Adrift
In her bedroom she tosses her shoes to the closet floor and opens the window to let in a breeze and a wash of light. The cat perches on the sill.
Isabel pulls her dress out of the little cellophane bag from the vintage store. She lays the dress out across the end of her bed, skirt just falling down the side, then digs a pair of black open-toed heels from the closet and places them on the floor below, so that it looks like an invisible girl is stretched out, lounging there. The postcard girl. What did L do, Isabel wonders, the night her lover flew away? She imagines the postcard girl taking her place at the party.
She’s sleepy, after the long walk home. Heat in her head and limbs. She undresses down to her bra and underwear and climbs onto the bed next to the clothes to rest for just a moment, before she gets ready for the party. She sinks into the cool quilt.
It was an almost wordless goodbye. They stood on his stoop. He hugged her to him, and the tears in her lashes left wet marks on his plaid shirt. The pearly red buttons pressed into her cheek.
She took his face in her hands.
Then she let her hands fall to her sides, and she stepped away from him.
Bell, he says.
Hm?
You owe me a story.
When?
Whenever.
In her half sleep, she confuses the wanting of him and the missing of him. Too much of Spoke belongs to a place that does not actually exist, a city just like this one, except that in the other city they have been lovers for weeks, have had their first fight, and have eaten food from each other’s plates. It might as well be Amsterdam.
Her eyes close, and she begins to drift. She thinks of these things: Spoke and the war; the oil in Alaska and the oil in the Middle East; the glaciers melting; and the water that connects them all. The glaciers will melt and the water will rise. Everything will be washed through. All the young lovers in their hats and their party dresses. All the plane trees and the elms. All the tall houses. All the narrow brick lanes and city squares. Glaciers take the cities, cities take the architecture, the architecture takes the bodies.
When she wakes, she focuses on the chair and the cellophane bag, then clothes thrown over the foot of the bed, as inanimate as ever. Her eyes are salt-dried and she is thirsty.
She rises and lurches to the bathroom, where the sea-glass light through the frosted window tells her she has slept too long.
She draws a bath.
The cat perches on the back of the toilet.
A slip she washed in the sink a week ago still hangs from a towel bar, where it dried, bent at the waist.
She pulls her underwear off, lifting one bare foot then the other from the cold tile floor. She tilts, a hand lifting to steady herself, reaching for an anchor.
All Dressed Up
The bus pulls away from the curb and starts over the bridge. The sun has set behind the city, all shadows against what’s left of the light. The last wash of dusk behind the west hills and all the smaller lights (the rooftop gardens and office windows and neon signs) shimmering drunkenly in the river.
She has questions. For example: Can soldiers check their e-mail? Do they still receive packages from old ladies with notes of encouragement and hand-knit scarves? If I sent him a pair of my panties, could he trade them for booze and M&M’s?
The bus descends into downtown between the great neon MADE IN OREGON sign and the red and white shield of the Salvation Army.
She pulls the cord for her stop by the strip club that used to be a Cuban restaurant. She steps off the bus and avoids the pile of trash overflowing from a garbage can. The wind nudges her along, and the skirt of her new dress, the one that made the shopkeeper sigh, dances around her legs. She shoves her hands into the pockets of her sweater.
Blocks away, his apartment settles while Spoke waits in a terminal for a plane.
At the door she reaches for the bell, but draws her hand back. She looks up at the tall, narrow, brick building. Light spills out. It looks warm and sparkly. Laughter and conversation trickle from the windows above. A few words: gondoliers, capitalism, and tree horn.
Leo will be wondering. He relies on her to save him from regrettable trysts and morbid hangovers. She, on the other hand, could do something impulsive and hedonistic. Something he would wholeheartedly endorse. She could go back home, pack a suitcase, and call a taxi for the airport. She could put a plane ticket on her cred
it card. She could text him: gone to Amsterdam please feed cat don’t fret will call soon.
But no.
She raises her hand and pulls the bell. Footsteps down the stairs behind the ornate wooden door, closer and closer. She could still slip around the corner and out of sight. She knows these people, even if she has never met them. These people will make her dance, remorselessly get her good and drunk, and know nothing about the man who should be there with her. (She looks up at the sky, as if to catch a glimpse of an airplane passing.)
Then the door opens and here is Leo, happy to see her.
I knew it was you, he says.
He raises an eyebrow as if to say, Well, where is he? He looks around pointedly. But he knows better than to ask out loud.
I’m late, she says lamely.
You’re here, he says.
He holds the door and gives her a kiss as she crosses the threshold.
New dress? he asks.
Other People’s Stories
Isabel always forgets how much she loves theater people. And the party is rotten with them, as her mother would say. They fill her with drinks and converse in accents, faux and real. They are the only people she knows who have ever been impressed that she once met Harvey Fierstein’s mother. But the best part is the stories. They love to tell stories and to draw them out of others. Or maybe this only happens at Michael’s parties.
Michael calls his loft the Castle, though it was a casket factory until the 1970s. As Isabel and Leo reach the top of the stairs, he’s giving a tour to a wide-eyed young woman with bright red lipstick and a chic black dress.
The ingénue, Isabel thinks.
