Still Points North

by Leigh Newman

  This conversation, unfortunately, will lead to only one thing—the mystery of lovely things. The English egg coddlers with the silver tops. The porcelain tea plates painted with fairy-tale bunnies. The cut-crystal goblets that gild the walls with butterflies of colored light.

  By age fourteen, I spent a good chunk of my time rolling my eyes every time Mom asked me to admire how the sunlight rippled off the golden jungle stripes in the tiger-maple lowboy—beginning with her use of the phrase tiger-maple lowboy. Mom loved to say the full names of furniture, drawing out each syllable, polishing the music in the words—camelback sofa, Queen Anne table, Windsor chair.

  The truth was, though, I did like to stare at the tiger maple, in the quiet of the afternoon after school. Just as I liked to stare at the little Chinese dockworkers scurrying along the painted interior of the Hong Kong punch bowl—their hair tied back in long braided ponytails, their backs bent over by packages. A whole world was painted on the inside of that bowl, filled with junks and tea and intrigue, nightingales in cages, crates of opium and porcelain.

  One afternoon, I ran my fingers over the faint bumpy brushstrokes of the wooden wharf buildings. The bowl was from the 1800s, and had just appeared one day on the sideboard—no deliveryman, no box. Mom had bought it at an estate sale, she told me, for a song.

  Rounding the billowed sails of a ship, my finger hit a sticker. I backtracked, figuring out why I’d never seen it before, because it blended in with the rigging. The sticker was a price tag. And the smudged number on that price tag was $1,500. I looked at it for a long time. Then I looked one mahogany table over, at the silver tea service that had just appeared one day, too—a gleaming, curvaceous, three-piece set with lion-footed legs and swooping cherry-wood handles. I turned over the sugar bowl. MADE IN WILLIAMSBURG.

  Mom kept all the Williamsburg catalogs stacked on the kitchen bookshelf. I leafed through the stiff, heavy pages: $985. I was too afraid to look up the prices for the new antique cedar hope chest that showed up last week.

  I sat down on the steps and waited for my mother to come home from her second job. I thought of all the horrible things I was going to say to her, about where my child support had gone, about the real reason she had so many jobs, and why I’d been sitting alone in a basement since age seven, because we couldn’t afford babysitting. I thought about all the times I’d asked for field-trip money or name-brand cookies and she’d called me selfish, and how I’d believed her, how I’d yelled at myself not to want anything and never to ask. I didn’t understand why, if this all of a sudden wasn’t true, I didn’t feel relieved.

  I felt nothing. I felt the lurch you feel when a plane stalls and you’re dropping out of the sky, waiting for the engine to catch. And then I thought of calling Dad. I’d tell him not just about the Hong Kong punch bowl, but about all the other stuff: the school shoes we supposedly couldn’t afford or the dress for my fifth-grade graduation, which I finally figured out how to pay for myself (using my winnings from a basement bingo game that Maybelle had taken me to, on yet another one of our visits down south to pay off her debts). He’d tell me that all that stuff about the IRS and him blackballing Mom from the banks wasn’t true, but it wasn’t that Mom wanted to hurt me. Mom had a problem. Mom got confused.

  Then I thought about the custody agreement and the contract and Dad’s lawyer, and what would happen. He’d take me away from Mom, and Mom had only me. Dad had Abbie and baby Daniel. If Dad knew, I’d have to go back to Alaska. I’d have to sit there at dinner, eating some fragrant, home-cooked caribou stew that Abbie had made for us, while Mom sat alone at a little table in Baltimore, eating a cold plate by herself and talking to nobody.

  Except, after all those years, how could Dad not know?

  Unless he did.

  This was so painful, I just had to rock for a while and wait for it to be over.

  On the wall above my head hung a clumsy drawing I’d done in kindergarten. Mom, who mistakenly believed I was a genius, framed it. It was full of little boxes. Above the boxes were little questions the teacher wrote out for us to fill in. What do you want to be when you grow up? A stewardess. Do you have a pet? I drew a picture of Baby, my old husky dog.

  When I was sick, Mom covered my forehead in a damp cool washcloth and left me fizzy Cokes on the beside table. It was she who drove me to ballet, she who bought me tickets to Evita and encouraged me to perform it, complete with props and costumes, in the living room, over and over, and she who did not fall in love with somebody else and ruin everything. She was my mother. I was her copilot, “the best thing,” she always said, “I ever did.”

  I got up off the steps. There was a sign on the window of a children’s bookstore near school. HELP WANTED. There was another sign in the Pennysaver for a blind lady who needed someone to read her newspapers. I said responsible, clean, punctual things on both interviews.

  Two part-time jobs would never be enough, I knew. But I’d find another way, without talking to Mom about what she was doing with the Hong Kong punch bowl and everything else—a confrontation that would be pointless anyway, since she didn’t seem to understand what she was doing. Then again, how could she not? She knew what Maybelle did, filling up her house with cartons of ketchup-and-mustard dispensers and racks of winter coats that didn’t fit, leaving us to pay the bills. Wasn’t that kind of the same thing, only more obvious and identifiable to the rest of the world?

  Right then, the thought occurred to me: Dad wasn’t the only person who could take me away.

  And with that, I cut off the internal discussion. It wasn’t such a big thing to work. I had grown up loading firewood, pumping plane floats, pitching tents. Waiting tables, busing tables, holding down dogs at a vet clinic, running a grocery-store register—none of this was all that rough. All I had to do was get older, get a car, get a better-paying job, get a third or a fourth job and not get fired, not get lazy or show up late, not let my grades or my face slip, never get caught drinking or smoking or sneaking out of school, never oversleep or skip a test, never get too overweight or underweight, never let a teacher or a neighbor or a boss or a friend or Dad or Mom or anyone suspect that I was on that desert island Dad always talked about when I was little, the one that you pretend you’re on when you have to do something hard and you have to do it alone. Only this time I was on an island far, far away from both Alaska and Baltimore, far, far away from everybody who might know where I was, or where I’d been.

  Twelve years later in New York, facing down that pile of sleep-packed clothes, toiletries, and assorted kitchen condiments, I want to tell myself, Hey, don’t worry. This is just some kind of throwback habit. There’s nothing you need to run away from. The evidence supports this, doesn’t it? My life—and job—are literally an escape, complete with room service and the occasional cliffside infinity pool.

  But if there was one thing I learned about the day I found the price tag, it’s that you have to watch yourself. Because when something starts going off inside, you probably won’t realize it. Mom didn’t. Maybelle didn’t. And it’s not like anyone will tell you that it’s happening, either, especially when you’ve arranged things so there’s never anyone there to see.

  I remake my mattress on the floor with the sheet. “Don’t move,” I order the dream-me, wherever she is inside my brain.

  She doesn’t answer, the sneak.

  CHAPTER 9

  Homemarks

  Over the next few months, I go to Nepal and sleep with an extra cot in front of my tent flaps to keep me from stumbling out the door into the jungle (home to tigers and irritable rhinos). I go to Lisbon and research a medieval castle recently taken over by a Frenchman and converted into a decadent mid-century mod hotel. Then I go to Milan. My job is to write about osso buco, the classic veal marrow dish, but my time is limited, and I have to pack in two four-course lunches a day, plus a five-course dinner.

  It’s a little uncomfortable, dining luxuriously in Italy, alone. Eating here is supposed to be about warmth and fami
ly—passing plates of primo and secondo and, my favorite, contorno. Here in the industrial north, the odd businessman will sit by himself at a nearby banquette, working his way through a saffron risotto and a carafe of wine, but I lack his newspaper and Old World confidence. The waiters try to be professional with me, but end up rushing over at every other bite—fretful, asking if the meat is tender enough, the bread fresh. Sometimes they inquire tentatively, but with great kindness, as to why I’m not finishing my food, which in Italy is social code for: Who didn’t love you? And by the way he was a fool.

  I don’t have the heart to tell them I’m not heartbroken exactly—just very full and a little discouraged about my prospects for future happiness. I, too, wish I was longing for some wonderful man from my past, or some tragic but impossible love. But I haven’t experienced those feelings yet. In fact, the only person I understand enough to miss is a woman who can put away as much frutti di mare as me, a woman who likes to fish in torn hip boots and glue rocks into bad homemade jewelry and call me a ding-dong when I’m being a ding-dong, a woman who knows more than anyone how to be happy, even when life is not turning out the way you had hoped.

  This would be Nana, who still lives in her little red cottage on a peninsula outside Seattle. One of the nicest things about being an adult with several hundred thousand frequent-flier miles at my disposal is that, once I’ve pushed the minibar in my grand hotel room in front of my door so that if I fall asleep watching CNN, I won’t wander down the gilded halls into the lobby and upset the concierge, I can call up Alitalia and alter my itinerary.

  At last, I have a plan. I love Nana. I trust her. I can tell her anything. What’s more, I’ve lived with her before, right after my parents got divorced, when Mom thought we might stay in Seattle instead of move to Baltimore. Not much has changed since then. I take the next available four flights (Milan to Rome to New York to Dallas to Seattle) and find Nana waiting for me in her living room stuffed with opera records and Indian baskets, wearing her musty silk kimono and her lipstick everywhere but on her lips. If you crossed a lumberjack with a silent 1920s movie star, you’d get her, down to her perfume-and-lighter-fluid-scented hug, which compresses your rib cage—and soul—into a small warm beating ball.

  “Nana?” I say, then pause, unsure what else to say: I’m not doing so well?

  She sighs, the ghost exhale of her last smoked cigarette, which she stubbed out twenty years ago. “Love,” she says, suddenly. “This house is a dump.” Her voice sounds so discouraged.

  “I could clean,” I say.

  “Everything’s broken.”

  She’s right. The door springs open each time you try to close it; the kitchen linoleum is peeling; the counters are cracked and bubbled. My feet stick to the floor, which is blotched with raspberry jam from breakfast spills long, long past. Nana has never been a housekeeper. I’m still afraid of the shower in the back bedroom that has a wet gooey drain that’s pretty much a Catholic home for wayward, hairy spiders. But something has tipped over into the realm of the just plain unhygienic.

  “Let’s get out of here,” she says, marching me out to the deck. The air tastes of sap and ocean. Her rhododendrons are in bloom, hugely so, bobbing like white floral ships to the end of the lawn. She plops down on a lounger. “Nobody tells you but after a certain point it’s not so much fun,” she says. “All this getting old.”

  I sit for a minute with this. Nana is eighty-five years old. But I’ve seen her, at age seventy-five, dig for clams on the beach a few miles away, carrying sand-filled buckets and a heavy, awkward shovel. On a hot August day in Alaska, I’ve seen her haul in a forty-pound king in fast-moving, waist-deep water. Let’s not forget, either, the day the two of us sat on a gravel beach on the Johnson Slough, pretending bravery to each other, inventorying the shotgun and cooler of soda that were all we had with us, counting down the nine hours that Dad didn’t come back and didn’t come back to pick us up in the plane—not, as it turned out, because he had crashed and died, as both of us had privately assumed after the first hour, but because the 185 had broken down and he’d been forced to get it fixed.

  Nana acting sad or defeated, though, I’ve never witnessed. I know that she must have felt these emotions, too many times to be considered fair. Her father died when she was eight, her mother when she was twelve, her brother when she was nineteen, her husband (my grandfather) when she was forty-nine and the mother of five kids under eighteen years old. Fourteen years later, her youngest daughter (my aunt) committed suicide, and fourteen years after that her grandson Henry drowned at his own high-school graduation party. Add to this: Her youngest son, Steven, who struggled for years with drugs and drinking, recently cut all ties with the family and disappeared somewhere in the Dominican Republic.

  As always, a shaker of martinis stands at attention on the picnic table. I pour her one, sloshing half of it out of the glass. “You’re just a little lonely, Nana.”

  “This wasn’t the plan.”

  “What plan?”

  “The one where I wasn’t supposed to live this long.”

  I take a minute. Then I say—but it’s not so much speaking as warbling, because I realize not only that now is the time to bring up the reason why I’ve come here to see her, but also that I mean it—“What if I moved in and lived with you?”

  She gives me a hug, not of joy, but pride, as in: Leigh has been a good granddaughter. Leigh has been generous and kind and full of crap.

  “I mean it,” I say, the warble in my voice getting almost teary. “I could fix up the house for you. We could cook. We could read.”

  “Leigh,” she says. “There’s nothing I’d like better. But I live out here in the middle of the woods. How would you ever meet anybody? That’s no way for a person your age to live.”

  I pick at a splinter in the deck, thinking, The middle of the woods is what I know. I make a middle of the woods out of every place I go. It would be nice, for once, to be there in dark, isolated quiet with somebody I love.

  Nana is looking at me, though, with the most unexpected of expressions: need. “I always believed,” she says, “you were going to do something so … meaningful.”

  “Like?”

  “I don’t know.” More need; need all over the place. “Run for senator?”

  Hmm … I see what she’s doing, giving me a modern, relevant, professional goal, something with power and prestige and the ability to change the lives of millions, something we both know I lack the drive, squeaky history, and charismatic handshake to do. But at least Nana avoided bringing up the supposedly outdated goal that I know gave her whole life meaning—falling in love, raising a big, short, thunderously loud family.

  I hold her hand, which is difficult, due to all the boulder-sized rings. “If I am supposed to do something, I guess now is the time to do it, right?”

  “No hiding!” she says, once again in the bright, commanding tone of a female general. “I forbid it.”

  I sip, smile, and try not to gag. Martinis taste a little like a glass of chilled disinfectant. The only thing they have going for them is Nana—and the olives.

  Later, on the way to the bathroom, I stop by a picture of my dad hanging in the hall. He’s in kindergarten—1950s crew cut, dopey open smile, missing tooth. My face makes a moon on the glass over his face. All those losses of Nana’s were also his losses. All those missing people were his missing people: his brother, sister, father, grandparents, all gone by the time he was the age I am now.

  Over the years, he had tried occasionally to talk to me about what this was like. “We moved to Mexico when my dad died,” he said, when I first heard him speak Spanish—out of nowhere, fluently. “For a while. Then we came back and I started college in the fall.” Or, “After my sister died, nobody in my family said anything. We all just got in our cars and went home.” But his voice was broken up, as if it had cost him a supreme amount of effort to produce that sentence.

  I was never sure what to say back to him, except, “I’m sor
ry, Dad.”

  Maybe I should have asked him something, something along the lines of, What was your sister like? Maybe I should have told him what I remembered about his sister, making sugar cookies with her. Except that memory came from a photograph, the only one I’d ever seen of her—a soft, smiling woman with curly brown hair, about twenty-five, rolling out dough on the counter. Pink Hawaiian apron. Bead necklace. Dimple. I’m in the corner of that photograph, age five, there for a Christmas visit.

  “There are two reasons people come to Alaska,” Dad always used to say. “You’re either running to something or you’re running away.”

  Unless, of course, you’re doing both. My father went up to work as a young doctor in the Native hospital—but maybe he had to leave his old life behind as well. That’s the thing about parents, I’m beginning to realize. You don’t have to see them all that much to imitate them.

  Hustling to make my flight back to New York, dragging my duffel bag past a Gift Mart displaying canned Copper River salmon and souvenir miniature Space Needles, I’m struck by such a wave of nostalgia that I have to sit down. There’s a Starbucks in the Seattle airport now. But other than that, not much has changed since 1979—not the once-futuristic underground train shuttles, not the brown-and-orange earthy color scheme designed to inspire travelers to stop and visit the refreshing nearby forests of Washington State.

  Some kids look for the church or the graffiti-covered water tank that says you’re almost home. My landmark was the square-shaped Northwest terminal of Sea-Tac, where, for ten years, save for the occasionally rerouting through Chicago, I got off the flight from BWI and changed planes for ANC. Once there, I was as close to Alaska as was geographically possible from the Lower Forty-Eight. Only 2,280 more miles to go.