Still Points North

by Leigh Newman

  “New York,” the man on the microphone says. “We’d like to welcome our first-class passengers and elite World Perks members to begin boarding.” I stand up. I even reach for my wallet. But once at the counter, I feel foolish. I don’t know what I’d say to Dad, and I can’t just show up at his door without calling—which, I know more than anyone, just means I won’t, because can’t does live on won’t street—just the way he always said.

  I get in line, along with the families and “passengers requiring extra time such as those with small children, disabilities, or unaccompanied minors.” I’m no longer in the latter category, of course, and the stewardess gives me the eyeball as I hand her my ticket. I give her one back. She stamps my boarding pass, and lets me on that plane.

  CHAPTER 10

  Street Wolves

  Back in New York, late at night, tucked into my mattress on the floor but too afraid of sleep-packing to sleep, I try to think over my options. It does occur to me that, rather than leave for yet another country, why not let somebody else into my own—literally, as in let them sleep here and do practical, companionable stuff like cook with me and watch TV with me (if I had a TV) and make sure I don’t stumble out the door at 3 A.M.?

  Having people over, though, as friends, roommates, lovers, or anything else, makes me exceptionally stressed and just the tiniest bit inhospitable. They can come over and enjoy a glass of wine or have sex, but then it’s time to go. I usually signal departure time with a lot of needless, loud dishwashing—as if this person and I have been married for thirty-five stereotypical years and one of us (not me!) has forgotten to take out the trash.

  This no doubt dates back to earlier times. In Anchorage, my reason for having friends was for them to get me away from Dad and his family—as fast and destructively as possibly. They did not come over for pizza or hang out in the family room on Friday nights.

  In Baltimore, the situation was similar, but for different reasons. Something had turned confusing and strange with Mom by the time I’d reached high school. I didn’t know what it was and I didn’t know who to ask and, even if I’d had somebody, I was too afraid to do it. Was it: Drinking? Pills? Exhaustion? Even I understood that being a single parent with three jobs will wipe a person out to the point of no return.

  Or did it have something to do with the mental problems that her own mother struggled with? Some nights, Mom screamed at me in a slurred, low voice, accusing me of ruining her life, then coming in to break a radio or a jewelry box—only to completely forget about what had happened the next morning, wake me up, and hug me and tell me I was her raison d’être, the most wonderful daughter in the universe. Other nights she smiled at me blankly when I asked for help with something like an SAT class or college applications, as if I were a stranger, speaking a Cantonese dialect, then wandered off to polish the furniture. The most unexpected issues made her obsessively attentive: I absolutely had to mend those holes in my jeans that made me look “like an orphan” or I absolutely had to drink a glass of orange juice before school to boost my immune system. Meanwhile, she turned off my alarm while I slept, claiming I looked tired. I was tired. But I also needed to take my exams to graduate, exams that I missed one after another.

  One night, right before all this started, I ended up in the back of a station wagon with a bunch of hugely glamorous fellow fifteen-year-olds whom I had attached myself to via various less-than-developed friendships. These high-school freshmen—some of them real, live boys—had no place to go to that guaranteed beer or even the smell of beer. I had no place to go, period. Somehow the words “We could go over to my house” came out of my mouth, and I couldn’t take them back.

  As soon as we arrived, I left everyone on the porch and ran into the kitchen for something to eat or drink. It was eight o’clock at night. Mom was sitting in the kitchen, wrapped in her pink flannel robe, with her hair sticking out, her eyes fixed on a lit candle on the table.

  “Mom?” I said.

  She jumped, startled.

  “I’ve got some friends here, okay? We’ll just hang out on the porch. Everybody will go home by ten.”

  “Friends?” she said. Already she sounded nervous, too fast, high-pitched.

  I grabbed my guitar and a pitcher of water. (Why, God, why did we not believe in soda or even mass-produced iced tea?) Back on the porch, it was dark already, the soft, crickety dark of late spring. Everyone was slouched over chairs at the wrought-iron table. There were five total—two girls from school and three boys whose names I didn’t know. The cute one with a chipped tooth took the guitar and started playing something delicate and plucked—a moth of a song from those stubborn, impossible strings.

  One of the girls lit a cigarette. Maryland was a tobacco state; most parents put up with smoking. Maybe my mother would, too. Or if she didn’t, maybe she would just ground me later, after everyone went home.

  I sat down.

  “Alec,” said the boy with my guitar.

  “Huh?” I said.

  “My name.”

  “Oh, right.” I sat back, slowly. Alec was just a name, I told myself. Get the dorky happy dance off your face.

  The storm door opened, Mom’s face peered out. “Are you youngsters all right out here? Wouldn’t anyone like a blueberry muffin?” Her voice, though, sounded trembled, frightened, young, as if she were a child who had just woken up from a nightmare. She was looking at the brick wall behind us, instead of at us. And blinking very fast.

  “No thanks, Mom,” I said.

  She let the door bang shut again. Alec picked out a Neil Young song. I knew the words. Kind of. Something about a maid. Or man.

  Creak, the door opened again.

  “Wouldn’t any of you youngsters like a blueberry muffin?”

  This time the whole porch went hushed. “No thanks, Mrs. Newman,” one of the girls said.

  I kept my eyes fixed on the green indoor-outdoor carpet. “We’re fine, Mom. Go inside.”

  This time, the silence after Mom had shut the door was absolute. Finally, a cough. Alec strummed through a broken chord. His friend practiced smoke rings. But every time people began to talk—the door creaked open. It was Mom again. Then again. And again. Asking in the same bewildered, eerie, child’s voice, the same blueberry question.

  By the tenth or eleventh time, all conversation had stopped. Inside, I was curled up into a tiny snail inside a little snail shell, waiting for it to be over. “Let’s go over to my house,” said one of the girls. “It’s cool actually. I don’t know why I didn’t say so in the first place. My parents are never around.”

  I didn’t know whether I was invited to leave with them or not. I got very busy cleaning up glasses until, finally, they wandered off without me.

  Outside in the New York darkness, a street alarm shrills on, ricocheting through the walls. I get out of bed and wander around the vast dingy blankness of my apartment. It’s true that owning things sends me into a panic about the possibility of my loving things and buying more things. But at the same time it’s hard to invite people over without owning a chair to sit on. Worse, the rat that lives in my oven is banging around in the walls and the last time I tried to scare him off, he chewed straight—but raggedly—through the broom handle, scaring me away from the stove in general.

  I might not know how to kick-start intimacy and all that “meaningfulness” that Nana was talking about, but I do know how to find a real estate agent in Manhattan.

  With her help, I get myself a new apartment, a clean, homey one-bedroom semi-dump with working electricity and heat. It differs slightly from the home I always imagined I’d have, which dates back to a collage I made in Scenic Park Elementary, circa 1976: a clumsily cut-out magazine picture of a glamorous lady (me) and a white fluffy canine (a husky dog), alongside a clumsily drawn picture of a log cabin because there were no photographs of log cabins in magazines.

  And yet I can see people coming over to this apartment for bowls of nurturing beef stew and games of Scrabble. I prescribe
myself some purchased furniture—purchased, yet used and very cheap, anti-lowboy, anti-highboy, anti—Hong Kong punch bowl furniture. I shove it all in there and eyeball it critically. If I were a documentary filmmaker, I would pan the camera across the sofa, the spatula, the toilet bowl scrubber and say, “Hey, there’s a lady who has a life!”

  Then I go out to a party, so as not to stay at home and end up throwing it all out.

  Far, far uptown, the party is taking place at the Mayflower Hotel on a wraparound terrace. On one side lies Central Park. You can smell the spring trees twenty stories below us, pollinating in the wind. On the other, cars comet up Broadway in vapored streaks of horn and light.

  A massive media titan is the host. He doesn’t believe in caterers. He made all his money himself, and he throws his own parties. His menu has one course: Veuve Clicquot. The bathtubs of the full-floor suite are filled with champagne bottles and deli ice, as are the sinks and mini fridges and multiple, scattered Styrofoam coolers. Even the planters have been put to use as chilling vats. The actual plants have been pulled out and dumped—their roots left parched and tangled on the carpet. Here a ficus. There a fern.

  I’m lingering by an assortment of popped corks when a man approaches. He is bouncy, jaunty, either married or a music producer or … married, married, married. “Excuse me,” he says. “But—”

  I look at his hand. Twinkle, twinkle little ring. He tells me his friend has been watching me all night. I respond the way I always do: a glazed, distant look over his shoulder, the equivalent of sliding an airplane bathroom OCCUPIED sign across my eyes.

  But this is the new me, I remember. The meaningful one. I have a homey apartment. I’m open to love and promising futures, even if I’m not really open to them, but only faking it as genuinely as I can until the openness becomes real. I trudge over to the other side of the terrace.

  “And this is my friend,” says Mr. Married.

  “Hello,” I say.

  His friend is looking down at the arches of Central Park. He’s blond. He’s blue-eyed. He’s wearing a suit—banker? hedge fund? management consultant? He begins to talk about arches and stone and Philadelphia brick, but I’m not listening. A general nimbus of tenderness and intelligence surrounds him. Soft puffy clouds float through his eyes. Prozac? A dreamer?

  What the—?

  Just like that, Tender Intelligent Man is kissing me—no warning, perhaps drunk, perhaps not, but who cares? I kiss back. Now he’s pulling me in, really kissing me. “I have to go,” he says. “You should come with me.”

  An ancient, embarrassing New York fantasy goes whooshing through me, the whole Brut cologne commercial: suave guy from the city, hick girl from the tundra, a terrace, sparkling lights, love at first sight. Instead I say, “I’m going to Canada.”

  Tender Intelligent Man looks at me a little funny. “Okay.”

  “Then some island in the Caribbean. I forget which one.”

  “If you don’t want me to call, it’s fine. No pressure.” He holds up a pen.

  I write on his arm. But as he leaves, I call out “Wait!” and chase him down. I grab his arm and scratch out the fake number I’d written. Not that he’ll call anyway. But technically, I managed to give him some real Leigh, at least in terms of seven specific digits, assuming a Manhattan area code.

  One week later, I’m driving through Canada. I’m in the happy, saltwater-taffy part of Canada, doing a story on 5 Old Fashioned Seaside Inns. Canada is so big it’s like a country off a McDonald’s menu. Vast distances lie between seemingly close points on the map. I forge on in my rental sedan, headed for golf greens and white resorts with lemonade porches.

  I talk to no one other than bellhops. I check into hotels, then wander the towns. There is no need to even interview people. Out of desperation Travel Time has changed its editorial direction. Instead of doing long evocative essays that examine art and culture, the magazine is now going to specialize in service-oriented list stories: The 10 Sweetest Salmon Restaurants in Scotland. 15 Romantic Irish Inns. We’re going to be the Lucky of travel. In other words: a fun, peppy, flip-through catalog-style magazine that generates lots of ad sales. Immediately.

  The last night of my trip, I arrive at an inn in Nova Scotia with an authentic whale-watching walk on the roof. It’s not an inn, though. Some kind of error has been made and I’m booked into a bed-and-breakfast. I walk into my oversized bridal suite—upgraded!—and flop down on the four-poster bed next to a teddy bear dressed up like Sherlock Holmes.

  Dreamy as this may sound, there are so many problems with the situation. B&Bs have no restaurant, which means no room service, which means I will have to drive to a seaside restaurant packed with happy vacationing families, and eat alone at a huge empty booth. B&Bs mean a communal breakfast table, where the minute I sit down, postcoital semi-in-love couples will suddenly begin to eat the banana bread off each other’s plates and call each other pet names, because I’m the epitome of their worst fears, I’m the black fate that might befall them—single! alone at a romantic B&B!—if they don’t fully, publicly fall completely in love right this minute.

  B&Bs also means no night clerk to stop me should I sleepwalk out of the room and try to sleep-drive away. I pick up Sherlock Holmes. He smells as expected—chemical potpourri. I punch him in the muzzle. I hate stuffed animals dressed as people. Real animals need no trench coat. They’re human in their eyes and expressions, not their wardrobe choices. This is why people own dogs; dogs stare right at you and understand.

  I vault out of bed and grab the phone. I call my own number. I listen to my message, waiting for the beep, waiting to say Get a husky dog! so that I can’t blow off this idea when I get back to New York. Because a husky dog will fix everything. I knew this at seven years old, and then at nineteen, and then somehow, over time, stupidly forgot.

  But my machine is full. My machine, the computer voice says, is not accepting messages. I must have the wrong machine. I never have messages, except from myself. Everybody knows that I’m out of town. And even when I’m in town, they assume I’m out of town.

  “It’s me,” says the first recorded message. “From the terrace.”

  It’s been six weeks since the Brut cologne party uptown. I told Tender Intelligent Man that I was going to Canada, then the Caribbean. But apparently, he thought I was joking or playing hard to get. He has left four messages. None of them is needy or creepy or angry or refers to sexual positions. None of them was recorded after midnight. On the last one, he says, “Hey, I’m not going to call you anymore, but you should call me back. You seemed kind of different—in a good way. I had some stuff to clean up in my own life. I know I took a while. But we could go out to dinner.”

  I look at Sherlock Holmes.

  Soon, I will have a real husky dog. Soon the husky will look up at me and say, with his big emotive eyes, You’re sad. I’m a dog, so I’m sad, too. Why do you make yourself sad, which only makes me sad?

  I’m not a total jackass. I’m not going to make my dog-to-be depressed. I’m going to do the healthy, happy thing, and call Tender Intelligent Man … who is not home. Perfect! I leave a message. “What a great idea! Let’s go to dinner.” I suggest a date two months from now, in case he thinks I’m just sitting around, waiting to be asked out on a date.

  Back in New York, I do not have time to follow the humane course of action and buy from a real breeder. There are a lot of hours in the night. I need my husky dog now, who will bark at me if I get out of bed in the middle of the night. I leave the office in search of a pet shop.

  Our corporate magazine tower is located in Times Square, right next to a Mars-themed restaurant, which features a life-sized spaceship that takes off and lands, over and over, on the sidewalk. There, on a nearby street pole, hangs a flyer reading in raging Magic Marker, IF YOU DON’T HELP, THIS DOG WILL BE PUT TO SLEEP. There is no picture. I write down the address. Behind me, the spaceship takes off, enflaming the flyer in a panic of blue, blastoff light.

  In
Queens two hours later, a lady in a snowflake-appliquéd sweater answers the door. Her name is Denise. She is clean, middle-aged, and sane looking. Then she opens her mouth. “My dad has the allergies,” she says, going down the stairs to the basement. “It’s the worms. He’s dying of them. He went blind already. I told him not to go to Mexico.”

  I’m not sure about the basement. This seems like one of those moments when, in order not to be the idiot dead girl in the horror flick, you should break out your handy-dandy pocket hatchet—which, sadly, I failed to bring along with me—and announce to the hunchbacked bogeyman at the bottom of the steps, “Hey pal, I’m coming down.… with a hatchet!”

  But then I hear the sound of whimpering below.

  “I have the worms, too,” says Denise. “In my tooth. It’s not right. I like the carrots. I like the crispy food.”

  “What about the dog?”

  She shows me a huge leathery growth on her toe. She talks about “the lettuce issue.” Then finally, she pulls a very large dog out of a small wire cage. He is a brownish, blackish, shepherdish, beaglish, Labish, dachshundish, wolfish, foxish, rib-caged mutt, also known as a New York City street wolf. He is far too big to keep in my apartment. He trembles. He looks like he might throw up. Denise snaps on his leash. It’s a six-inch-long dog collar extended into a leash. She drags him out of the basement onto the brown grass. He pees in a bare puddle of dust. Then she drags him back toward the cage. “Twice a day!”

  “Great,” I say. “I’ll take him.”

  “He likes the cage. It’s safe. From the virus.”

  But we’re already out of there, running down the sidewalk. Except that the dog doesn’t know how to run. Or how to climb the stairs to my apartment. He gets an aggrieved, worried expression on his face, right before spraying liquid diarrhea all over my living room walls and bathroom.