by Leigh Newman
“What way?”
“That he’s a bastard.”
But I don’t think my dad is a bastard. I don’t even know what the word means exactly; it’s kind of lumped in with bitch and motherfucker and all the other words that float over the playground or come tearing out of people’s mouths in movies. I don’t know why I didn’t just call him a cheater, either. That had been the word in my head. My head and my mouth just didn’t work together.
There is a pillow by my arm. I roll over on it and pretend to fall sleep until Abbie goes away. I see my dad, though, later that night, when he opens the door and peeks his head in, almost shyly, as if that big, loud Great Alaskan is somehow afraid of me.
One week later, Abbie and Dad get married in front of the fireplace on New Year’s Eve. I’m wearing my Gunne Sax dress, the lace-up bodice of which makes me look, I hope, like Laura Ingalls Wilder heading west on the wagon train, from Little House on the Prairie to By the Shores of Silver Lake. My hair is pulled back in a French braid, which has been braided at a real beauty salon, in the chair next to Abbie. My nails are painted. Only the bottom half of me lacks glamour. Dad and I forgot about shoes and tights—in Alaska, in December.
I walk down the aisle, which is just a cleared path through the living room, in bare legs and feet. Lou Gallagher, my uncle Steven, and I are the only witnesses. Not even Francy is invited. I’m glad about this. I don’t want anybody who knows me looking at me. I just have to focus on my immediate surroundings—the cold air on my toes, the warm of the fire, the droning of the judge, the stabbing of bobby pins that hold my hair stiffly in place—then smile.
There, finally: “I do.”
I smile some more. I look over at Dad—smiling!—as the photographer snaps the just-married picture. It’s funny. Dad is smiling, too, but a happy, terrified smile, as if the world might turn out to be a bubble and pop. Abbie, on the other hand, is floating on the bubble. She is the shiny rainbow on the soap skin of bubbles.
After the ceremony, all the families on Campbell Lake come over for a party, with exotic Mexican enchiladas and guacamole, plus a carrot cake for dessert. I hate carrot cake. I hate the thick cheesy frosting on it. But I eat it and get my picture taken eating it as proof. Then I sneak off with three neighbor girls and three stolen bottles of champagne. Two of the girls, Lynne and Amy, are sisters who only come up for Christmas. Their parents have been going through a divorce involving court actions and custody battles.
“She looked butt-ugly,” says Lynne. “Heinous.”
“You just wait,” says Amy. “She’ll steal all his money, then divorce him, too. That’s what all new wives do. My mom says.”
I nod, even though I know that none of this is true. I take a slug off the bottle and pass it to Christy, the youngest of us. Her mother has made her wear a nightgown to the party. “Maybe,” Christy says, “she’ll have a baby. Then we could play with it.”
Nobody says anything, not even anything about the baby being born deformed or retarded. I take the champagne back, and go into the bathroom alone. I shut the door, lock it. Then I drink and drink and don’t stop until I’m spinning. I wander through the party barelegged and weaving. Does anybody notice? The bricks in the mantel are going wibble-wobble. The spotlights on the ceiling are twinkle stars. I puke in a trash can in the garage and keep walking.
It’s midnight. Dad and Abbie are kissing as people clap. I can’t stop myself. My face is runny and it won’t listen to me. My face is crying and I’m crying and crying, just the way I trained myself not to. I’m huge and loud and stupid and obvious, wiping it off on the sleeve of my dream dress. I want my mother, that’s all I can think, I want my mother.
Luckily, nobody hears me. Nobody notices me at all. They’re either tipsy or standing outside, watching other fathers set up a firework station at the center of the lake, far from the shoreline and docks so that the falling sparks won’t explode and burn holes in anybody’s plane. Last fall, Dad went to Seattle and bought boxes and boxes of Roman candles and cherry bombs at the tribal reservation, then packed them in his suitcase and brought them back to Anchorage.
“Hurry it up,” a man shouts.
Dad runs onto the lake to set off the bottle rockets first, lighting the fuses with his cigar, racing back over the ice, slipping and laughing and crashing onto the dock.
I rub my face with a handful of snow and slip on somebody’s boots. A small box of kids’ fireworks lies by the grill, full of ladyfingers and spinning flowers and little paper tanks. I light all the tanks, one after another. They’re my favorites. They’ve always been my favorite. They roll along the deck, shooting sparks from their cannons, falling off into the snow, where they keep going still—upside down and burning, their paper wheels turning hopefully in the air, until you stomp them, flat and ashy, with your boot.
CHAPTER 6
Summon the Strength
The door to the headmistress’s office is made of dark, heavy, dragon-looking wood. I knock, but the handle is also complicated: brass and scrolls and a keyhole that makes me think of the grim-toothed jaws of a Christmas nutcracker. Somehow, fumbling, I get it to turn.
Mrs. Geiger stands up, all six feet of her, her hair streaked with gray, her face hard and carved, masculine. I have never spoken with her alone before. She is like a fountain statue that comes to life in order to shake hands during graduation ceremonies. “May I help you, Miss Newman?” she says, in her low, deep, Swiss-German accent.
Can she help me? I have no idea. Next year, I’m going to be twelve. Next year is the year I’ve been waiting for—the year I will go back to Alaska, the year I get lost in the bush or Dad gets his hand cut off in a propeller, the year I take up downhill racing and do so well the coach orders me to remain in an alpine climate to train for the Olympics or I fall through the ice while skating and, though suffering no long-term brain damage, lose my eyesight or short-term memory. All of which makes my returning to Baltimore, once that year is over, impossible—no matter what the divorce contract stipulates.
Now, however, living in Alaska means living with Dad and Abbie.
A fly pinballs off the lead glass in the window. Outside, a weed whacker throbs along the hedges below the sill. Mrs. Geiger glances at a wing chair in front of her, one eyebrow raised into a gray-streaked lightning bolt. I sit down. I open my mouth. Alaska is an easy word. I can make my lips say it. But there is the Alaska made of letters, the one that comes out of your mouth with rich, snappy a and k sounds. And then there is the one in my head now, the one that isn’t a place or even the-place-where-Dad-and-Abbie-live.
Alaska is me—in scrapbook pictures, in daydreams, in family stories I can’t remember, in memories I mix up probably, but believe all the same. The baby in a beaded Native papoose on my dad’s back, taking the ferry to Sitka. The toddler in a red velveteen parka, sitting on my mom’s lap at Christmas. The loudmouthed girl, pedaling her pink Schwinn through the brand-new subdivision of Chugach Foothills, all the way to where the brand-new streets ended at half a million acres of pristine, federally protected forest.
I’m not very loud anymore. Mostly, I try to survive on mute at this school and up in Alaska, too. But I can remember being loud. I can remember screaming all the way down the driveway on my bike, then hopping off at the end of our asphalt cul-de-sac. First came the meadow tufted with fireweed and high wild grasses. Then came the trees, the endless trees where kids were always waiting—ready to burn twigs or play tag in the shadows, all of us rulers of the neighborhood wilderness.
In our pockets lay the survival essentials: pinecones, rubber bands, firecrackers, granola bars, feathers. Across our legs bumped the white faded scars of raspberry thorns and picked-open mosquito bites. Only our smell harked back to civilization: the comforting reek of deet and Vaseline, and the lingering perfume of no-more-tears shampoos.
In the summer, we fished the drainpipe creek, wandering into rushing, shoulder-high water—and didn’t drown. In the fall, we raced out into the chilled cle
ar daylight, jumping up to slap the duck carcasses strung across our garages, aging like laundry drying on a line. A poof of falling dead feathers and we were gone—building a spruce-bough tepee, kicking the can, longing for winter and the Iditarod when we cheered the sled teams on from the end of the street.
The whole neighborhood lined up every February to watch those slender, wolfish dogs. When we grew up, we told the adults, we were going to be mushers. After school, we jerry-rigged leashes into whips and tied our trusting but witless family mutts to our Flexible Flyers, forcing them to pull us for a few glorious dreamlike feet whereupon they immediately flipped us, dragging us underneath our sleds across the snow.
Who were these kids? Even then, I wasn’t exactly sure. There was Karen Mayer and Dina Lipton and Rodney, the boy I kissed under his parents’ pool table. The names were always changing, the faces on the bus seats always different than the month before. This was Alaska, the land of the boom and the bust. Parents were moving out or moving in or moving on. They were coming to work the pipeline, or leaving to work construction in California or Oregon, or coming back to open a business that didn’t exist in the state yet (an exotic Volkswagen dealership or office supply store) or leaving again, transferred by the military or the oil companies to a new town in a distant state or country.
We kids moved as a fluid, anonymous mass of freckles and mittens, runny red noses and slightly frostbit fingers. Until some kind of neighborhood drama occurred, marking us as individuals—like the day we almost got trampled by a moose. We were waiting at the bus stop that morning, in the winter-blued dark. I was in kindergarten. I had on my trusty snowsuit and matching puffy boots.
Angela, an older girl, was the first to spot the cow. Our parents had warned us: Moose might look slow and peaceful, chewing on lawn grass, ambling along with a calf. But a moose will charge you, antlers first. Then finish the job with its hooves. Angela, though, had a savvy, sixth-grade toughness about her. It felt like she was always chewing gum, even when she wasn’t. A gang of boys stood behind her.
“I dare you,” they chanted.
She flung down her books, dug through the snow. The moose was lumbering along, moving down a line of mailboxes and trash cans, its massive antlers lumbering up from its head, dark weedy hairs dangling from its mouth. It got closer. Angela whizzed a rock at its knees, with a flicking motion, as if she were skipping it. The rock soared over the snow—but missed.
The moose ignored her. Angela got closer, skimmed another rock. The moose ignored her. Angela got even closer, threw another one. Hard. The moose lifted its head. And that’s all I had to see. I took off running for home, more afraid of my dad finding out that I had stuck around that long than of the moose. From the safety of my bedroom, I heard the sirens screaming down the street. Angela survived, but with broken ribs and legs.
“We might begin with why you are here?” says Mrs. Geiger, rustling some papers across her desk.
On the wing chair, I swing my legs, the piping on the edge of the cushion cutting into the back of my knees. I’m here because my dad loves Alaska and my mom doesn’t, because my dad loves Abbie and not my mom, because Abbie is a good-girl wife and my mom isn’t, because I am not a good-girl daughter (or not inside where it counts), because my mom loves me, because now my mom is the only one who loves me and maybe she was the only one who ever did … and because some of these thoughts are true and some aren’t, and some are and aren’t at the same time.
Mrs. Geiger is not going to understand that. Not even I understand that. I have a terrible, goofy feeling I might whip myself up to standing and stick my tongue out at her, or kick a crazy can-can dance around the room the way my mom used to do when Dad refused to go to a movie with Italian subtitles. “Every party has a pooper,” she used to sing (kick, kick). “That’s why we invited you. Party Pooper. Party Poop!”
Our family wasn’t all that awful, was it? Dad used to booby-trap the house, popping out from behind the couch or a door to pin down Mom and me during tickle fights. If Mom didn’t want to wake up in the morning, we poured water on her head. If Dad didn’t want to eat Mom’s chewy, tasteless, overcooked caribou stew, we tied him to a chair, stuffed a sock in his mouth, and hung a sign on his neck that said GONE FISHING. Then took a picture with me on his lap.
On the weekends, with no plane, we drove into the bush in our orange VW camper, casting with a crowd of other Alaskan newbies, elbow-to-elbow, for salmon. We rented boats in silt-covered villages and fished for halibut from the icy, kelp-woven ocean. When winter blew in, we cross-country skied, busting herringbones up the hills outside of town. Our Christmas picture: Papa Bear, Mama Bear, and Baby Bear, wearing hats with snowflake pins and corduroy knickers, drinking cocoa at the end of the day, arguing over who got the most mini marshmallows.
The only not-so-good moment I can remember was Portage Glacier. And even then we all got out of it alive. We even laughed and drank Tang with blue glacier ice (which turns white the minute you remove it from the glacier) in the tent afterward.
Portage Glacier was supposed to be our big family winter trip—a ski across a frozen lake, then camping in the snow in a tent. Only the lake was longer than expected. The clouds darkened, then whitened. A blizzard blew in. For hours, we slogged over the endless, flat expanse of the ice, the wind knifing in our faces. Dad went first, then me, then Mom.
“Keep going,” Dad screamed back, over and over. The temperature was dropping. I slid forward on one ski, then the other, trying not to whimper or cry with tiredness. Mom, though, gave up. She tried to turn around. Then tried to get me to go with her, pulling on my ski pole.
“Keep going,” Dad said, skiing on.
I didn’t know what to do. I sat down in the snow.
Dad, at last, figured out what was happening. He skied back and pulled on Mom’s arm, hard, pointing toward the glacier up ahead. She pushed him off her. They were screaming at each other, two red faces in the blinding white.
As they went on screaming I waited and waited, getting colder, trying to stamp my burning numb feet, pinching my fingertips through my mittens. Until they stopped, finally. But not because they had made up. Darkness was falling and we were going to freeze out there in the open.
“Miss Newman,” Mrs. Geiger says distantly. “Miss Newman?”
I blink.
“You’ll have to summon the strength. Sooner or later.” She shuffles through more papers on her desk, dust hovering through the sunlight behind her.
I take a deep breath. Then say, very fast, as if by increasing the speed, I’m not really speaking—“According to my parents’ divorce contract, I’m supposed to spend the next school year in Alaska.”
“I see.”
“I’m not allowed, though, am I? To leave here and go to public school in Alaska for one whole year?”
She looks back down at her papers. My file, evidently. She leafs, frowns, leafs. “Essentially, you are functioning on par with your fellow students. As far as your grades indicate.”
“I am?”
“Yes.” She nods.
Hmm … functioning on par. That doesn’t sound too encouraging. Am I flunking like Lindsey Mumford? Does the school want me to leave? Now that I know how to do math and read, I keep getting moved to different classes. These are the smart-girl classes, the other girls say. But I’m still the dumb one among all the smarties, who not only have been learning and playing together since age five but also get picked for all kind of special “small group” science experiments and art projects. During recess, I watch them covetously, as they skip off wearing lab goggles or carrying paintbrushes. My ability to spend entire classes watching the shadow patterns of the leaves outside skitter across the ceiling no doubt has something to do with this oversight on the part of the teachers. But it’s not possible, is it—to get kicked out of school for daydreaming?
“However,” says Mrs. Geiger, “Roland Park Country adheres to a fast-paced, advanced curriculum. In a public school environment, you may fall be
hind.” Long meditative pause. “That would be unfortunate.” Longer meditative pause. “Should you choose to return.”
“Don’t I have to return? I mean, do you want me to return?”
“Let me consider the situation. Let me see what I can do.”
“So I’m allowed to go? There’s no clause in the handbook?”
She smiles at me—a kindly, shockingly marshmallow smile, as if I’m amusing. But all I am is confused. There has to be a clause in the handbook. Girls at Roland Park Country aren’t allowed to wear snow boots when it snows. We’re given written exams on the words of the school Christmas carols and condemned to after-school study halls if we don’t cross our ankles onstage during glee-club performances. Alaska—and, gasp, public school—has to be against the rules.
The whole plan was for the school to say no for me. That way, I wouldn’t have to tell Dad that I don’t want to live with him and Abbie.
Mom and I fight all the time. We slam doors. We chase each other around the house, throwing hairbrushes and the slippers with the hard soles. She’ll march right into my room at night and pull down the covers and yell at me for not vacuuming the steps after school and sucking the life out of her. And, the next day, I will march right into hers and break her porcelain hand mirror when she’s at work, then pretend a ghost did it—or maybe an intruder.
All this yelling and smashing and crying, though, is easier than sitting down at the picnic table, eating my salmon with Dad and Abbie, as if our Great Alaskan World is perfumed with happiness and blueberries.
I made a jerky mistake last time I was up in Anchorage. I put an old framed picture of me and Mom and Dad in Hawaii on my bureau. We were sitting with our arms around each other, smiling like the kind of stunned loonies you become when you go on vacation someplace sunny after eight months of twenty-hour-a-day darkness. Dad had sunglasses on. Mom had a painted umbrella behind her ear. I wore a muumuu and flip-flops. One day, not long after I’d put it up, the picture just disappeared.
