Still Points North

by Leigh Newman

  We found Maybelle strapped to a wheelchair. She still looked like the kind of person who should be talking about her past as a dancer at the Copacabana, wearing pancake makeup and a faded orchid behind her ear, which only made it all the more upsetting—her in a diaper and not much else, her staring at the air, as if she could see through reality into the combinations and recombinations of invisible oxygen molecules.

  I sat there patting her hand, trying to think of some possible way we could get her out of there. Nobody deserved this, nobody.

  “Baby girl,” she crooned, suddenly coming to. “Baby girl.”

  I patted her hand. “It’s okay, Grandma.”

  Mom was standing across the room. “Leigh,” she said. “Go get the nighties we brought her, will you?”

  Maybelle suddenly cocked her head. She sat up ramrod-straight and said in a sharp, clear voice, as if she had fully recovered, “Dolly girl! You git over here right now, you selfish little shit.”

  My mother froze, the way squirrels do, as if not moving might blend her into the surrounding linoleum.

  “You git over here,” Maybelle said.

  I took a step, moving in between the two them. But I didn’t need to. Mom wasn’t going anywhere near her mother. She was trembling, violently so, enough for her purse to jitter along with her. She seemed to kind of fade away from us. She was there, but she wasn’t there. Behind her eyes, the lights were off.

  Maybelle grunted and shook her head.

  The flat, vicious tone of her voice, the sight of my mother at age forty-five sinking into what amounted to a standing coma—I suddenly understood, the way that I couldn’t at age seven when I’d first seen it, that cruel and irrevocable things had happened to her as a little girl, things that she hadn’t gotten over and would probably never get over. For example, her crooked, broken teeth, which she’d always claimed were hurt in a fall off her tricycle.

  I was seventeen years old. But even then I understood that my mother wasn’t going to be able to explicate in tidy, revelatory detail what had happened all those years ago, and that I had to stop blaming her for not knowing about thermometers or dentist’s visits or how to take care of somebody. Nobody had taken care of her, I realized. Nobody had bought her a winter coat or given her advice on her wedding day.

  All of which I remind myself of—loudly, in capital letters—as Mom pulls us into the lot of the hotel where all the guests are staying. We park the car. We unload Baby and head into the hotel, which had looked cozy and rustic when I’d seen it buried in snow six months ago, but now looks like what it is: a dump, complete with a blinking VACANCY sign.

  Our room is a dark, dismal extravaganza of wood paneling and airborne mold. With forty-five minutes left to go before getting married, I sit on the bed, on the nubbed, discolored comforter, still holding the sugar bowl. Mom fusses with her bags, pulling things in and out of them: sweaters, toiletries, sandals, slippers. “What do you think of these?” she says holding up—

  Pajamas. She has bought herself pink Ralph Lauren mother-of-the-bride pajamas.

  If I were a better person, I would tell her how much I love the sugar bowl. If I were a better person, I would tell myself to be glad she disappeared for five hours, because that meant she didn’t have to watch Dad and Abbie and Daniel and Jack, the whole Newman clan doing what Alaskans do best, from commandeering a neighbor’s tractor to mow the field to setting up the electric piano. Four against one is just not fair. I’m not unacquainted with that feeling.

  But I can’t help it. I’m desperate for my stamp of approval. I want her to tell me what to do, and—this is the hardest part—for me to believe her. How do you stop longing for what you absolutely know you can’t get? Which really means: How do you absolutely know you can’t—and won’t—get it, not ever? How do you pinch out that wisp of feeble, ruthless hope?

  Mom, I suspect, struggles with the same exact question. She no doubt longs for a daughter who hugs her and drinks champagne with her on her wedding day, giggling and snapping pictures—instead of some silent lump sitting on a motel bed. This is a loss we both express by arguing vigorously about shower gel. Then we bicker about the dress I made her wear (just for the record: It matches her eyes).

  “Put on your own dress!” says Mom. “I don’t want to talk anymore.”

  “Me neither,” I say. I pick through the suitcases, the bags, that great cashmere heap of Mom’s accessories. No dress. We search the closet, the bathroom. No dress. And it’s not in the back of the car, either. I have nothing to wear to my wedding, which, according to the digital bedside clock, is due to take place in thirty-two minutes.

  Something in me cracks—and gives. I slump down on the carpet. I’m out of panic. I’m out of rage. For the first time in my life I just can’t race out of the room and find that dress, right goddamn now. I’m too tired. I’ve ruined my wedding day being crazed and rude and unfeeling. And now I just want to shut the door to the room and stay here for the next twenty years. I rest my head in my hands.

  Mom, however, is suddenly karate-chopping down doors, interrogating housekeepers, while I sit on the floor, blank and useless. One hundred and twenty-five people are waiting on the lawn. Plus the other ten who didn’t RSVP and whom we have no chairs for.

  “Stay here,” she announces. “Don’t move!”

  And off she commandos in her car, her progress identifiable by the clouds of dust rolling on either side of the wheels as she tears up and over the mountain between the hotel and farmhouse. All this speed and violence is so immediately reassuring. It hits me, with absolute, total conviction, that Mom knows what to do; she will find that dress.

  Because there are people out there in this world who might not know how to do regular life so well, but in a crisis will leap over small country mountains and break land-speed barriers. Maybe because they grew up knowing only that.

  It occurs to me that for the rest of my life, I need to remember this moment—waiting for my mother, infused with the kind of deep, old faith that goes back to who we used to be together, who we could be once again maybe—me at the sink on tiptoe, her combing my hair in long, slow, uneven strokes, the smell of her skin like the world’s original perfume. This is what my mother can give me if I let her, love in the form of rescue.

  When she returns twenty minutes later, having ransacked the falling-down farmhouse until she found the friend who had “tidied” up the wedding dress by storing it in a hallway closet, I’m still sitting filthy and useless on the motel floor. She spreads the dress gently across the bed. Part of the train swoops down to the carpet.

  I stare upward at the gauzy hem. It’s like looking at a swan from the bottom of a weed-choked pond. Mom runs the hot water. She puts me in the shower. She washes my hair. And she takes care of me, my mother.

  By the time my baby brother Jack—now age sixteen—begins playing the wedding march on the piano, Lawrence is waiting in a shockingly suave suit on the farmhouse porch. The minister stands beside him, adorned in casual interfaith raiments. Daisy garlands and twinkle lights distract from the broken boards and gutters. A bugbomb jammed down the pump has wiped out the wasps.

  Dad and I wait at the top of the hill by the barn. It’s a long country march to the farmhouse. All the people down below look like little pastel flowers in the grass. This is happening, I realize. I’m getting married. I wobble a little, visibly.

  Dad, too, is in a shockingly suave suit. He hugs me. He hugs me again. All that bitter, rusty, unsaid stuff may still stand between us. We may not see each other that often, and when we do see each other, we might both simultaneously revere and dread it. But the fact remains, whatever differences we’ve had, I will never lose faith in the law of Great Alaskan Dads and Daughters: Whatever he says to do, I will do. And whatever he doesn’t say to do, I will also do, because if he’s not saying it then he’s just assuming that I know enough to imitate his actions (crawl on the ground, save your water, walk down the aisle) and keep myself from dying senselessly in a
patch of alders due to some danger I don’t yet have the wisdom to comprehend.

  In other words, for me, my father is about as all-knowing as it gets. He could give me that red stamp of APPROVAL right this second. He is a doctor; he may just have some kind of authoritative, diagnostic pen in his pocket with which to scribble the word on my forehead. I almost ask, Dad, tell me the truth, should I get married?

  But he hugs me one more time. He’s floating, the Cinderella of fathers. I’ve never seen him like this. The median age of a Great Alaskan Bride is 22.5. I am thirty-one. It’s been a long, anxious wait for him, a wait that is now officially over. Why ruin his big, beautiful moment—one of the few I’ve ever been able to give him?

  Besides, Dad already tried to address this question. He invited Lawrence up to Alaska and put him through a series of grueling tests: a thirteen-kilometer cross-country ski in ten-below weather (check!), a trip to the shooting range to see if a guy from New York City could blast two clay pigeons out of the sky with two shells (check!), and a dinner to make sure that, despite any dopey phobia about broken teeth, that same guy could eat a whole roasted mallard, whose meat contains various molar-cracking bits of shot (check!). Then he took me aside and said, “I tell you what, honey. That Lawrence might make a pretty good Newman.”

  I didn’t have the heart to tell him that Lawrence wasn’t the one who was supposed to change his name. Besides, what Dad was really saying was: I like Lawrence. I approve. Which made me feel ecstatic at the time. I ran around telling everyone. Now, all of a sudden, the logic flutters and curls. Dad was approving of him and Lawrence and the possibility of all of us getting together for semi-annual fly-fishing trips, not me and Lawrence getting together and staying together for the rest of our natural lives.

  A butterfly whisks by. In the distance, the sound of a tractor. Dad and I start down the hill, toward the apple tree, where all those people wait, all those Alaskans, Baltimoreans, New Yorkers, Californians, Parisians, Russians, Pakistanis, New Zealanders, assorted family, old friends, new co-workers, dairy farmers from down the road, all clumped down there. It’s amazing, the love that vibrates off people during weddings, as if the ancient god of ceremonies has ignited a fresh glow stick through the inner being of everyone present.

  Wow. That’s a lot of people. And wow. They’re all looking at me. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do with my face. Am I supposed to look like I’m filled with love or just sacred, solemn convictions? Dad gives my arm a squeeze. I’m a little afraid we won’t make it to the minister without him stopping to hug a fence post.

  Mom smiles at me, equally euphoric. With Dad in his suave suit, they still look like they could be married. They have that matchy-matchy quality (in their case: small, loud, inexhaustible) that couples have, which makes strangers occasionally mistake them for siblings. You’d never know that inside they were so emphatically—and geographically—different.

  Lawrence and I also have this matchy-matchy quality. We, too, look similar, except for our eye color (him blue, me brown) and volume (him soft, me loud). Not to mention that we both love to swim and ski and laugh and travel and play Scrabble and eat too much food and draw without any talent or training in the art form whatsoever. In short, we have all the things in common that make for a life in common—something Dad and Abbie have always had, and they’ve been married for twenty-three years.

  It would be convenient if I could convince myself that this is what marriage is about: compatible choices. But isn’t there supposed to be something more than that, something twinkled and holy? If only my dad wasn’t my father, because then I could ask him—without feeling as if I were intensely and irrevocably betraying my mother—how the hell you know if you and another human being share this. Because Abbie and my dad must have something happening on a higher, less earthly plane. They don’t burn down the kitchen or long for other people or storm out of the house, sobbing, and drive straight to a Holiday Inn in East Anchorage where they ask their six-year-old daughter to go get ice from the ice machine every ten minutes so they can scream some more on the phone, without her hearing.

  It’s generally easier to articulate the disastrous than the miraculous. But I would like some hint at least, about the latter. After over two decades together, do Dad and Abbie still dream of each other or whatever it is that defines the reason why you need to—and should—spend the rest of your life with another person?

  Fifty yards from the minister and daisy arch, I start drifting off the aisle, into the vague, non-wedding grass. Dad follows my lead. The piano music stutters, then restarts. When out of nowhere, Leonard suddenly rips away from his snarling and muttering laps around the guests, and bounds joyfully toward me. He drops into step by my side. He is heeling. He is marching along like Lassie—my dog, the dog who ate my portable phone trying to defend me from a caller inside it, the dog who will not “sit!” unless you pull out a chair for him at the dinner table.

  I start bawling. Because here is my all-knowing person, here is the one who can actually yea or nay what I’m about to do, the one whom I can trust. Because Leonard likes no one and he likes Lawrence (save for one regrettable confrontation involving a slab of smoked salmon). And because Leonard is right here, stepping on my floor-length train, causing my head to yank painfully back.

  Dad eyeballs my dog. It’s clear he has a short-term plan, which is to toss Leonard on an iceberg and push him off to sea for the good of society. There’s a long pause, not unlike a gunslinging moment in a cowboy movie, where we all consider one another’s strengths and weaknesses. After which, to my surprise, Dad simply waits for Leonard to step off my veil, then adjusts the veil for me and leads us on—with great tenderness and grace. This goes on every three or four steps: yank, wait, adjust, walk on. It’s a long procession. He is the most patient father of the bride ever.

  At the pump, the minister-for-hire—a kind, slow-spoken woman with hair the color of a forest fire at sunset in Tahiti—begins the ceremony. Lawrence is holding my hands. He’s looking into my eyes. He’s been glow-sticked also. He’s beaming, but in his low-key, understated way—opalescent happiness.

  And it hits me, deeply, deep as the summer thunder that will roll through this valley in two hours and unleash torrential rain all over our tents and tiki torches and gifts, all of which we will have left out on the grass. Law is very, very, very sure about what we are doing.

  Where did he get that kind of confidence?

  I look at his face and suddenly understand—in gorgeous, full-color, slow motion—that when he told me he wasn’t ready for commitment, he really wasn’t. And when he told me he was ready, he was. Because he is one of those people who know what they are feeling.

  I’d realized this before—but only sloppily. I’d admired his calm and his ability to remain genuine in times of what should have been intimidation and duress. This happened frequently at loud, kissy-kissy New York parties, where very exceptional people (example: a nuclear physicist who developed the H-bomb) found him sitting alone in the corner, happily eating peanuts, and blew off their award-winning friends to spend the whole night talking with him, wading through hefty heated arguments about the Gaza Strip, followed by a discussion about their fears over having a mole removed from their chin. Because Lawrence might be intelligent and tender and funny but, mostly, people feel they can trust him. And this is because he trusts himself.

  The minister begins talking about meeting us for the first time (correction: the only time) and our mutual love of scuba diving. Lawrence takes my hand. He does realize, right? That I do not trust myself at all—not when it comes to people.

  A hideous, cold trickle of sweat begins to slink down my armpit and into the white netted silk of my dress. A moth lands on the pump. The wind picks up, smelling of pond and citrus. The minister’s mouth keeps moving slower and slower—a long, rolling O of lipstick and words and teeth. On she goes—saying things, lighting candles.

  “I will,” Lawrence finally says. He squeezes my hands.


  I look at him. I give myself a minute. Because as long as I’m looking at him, I have that feeling, the one I get when he and I are alone (without all these daisies and faces and candles and pomp and tiny, invisible, circling gnats), as if a cool creek were burbling up and down the length of my body.

  “I will,” I say.

  There is the sound of applause. There are stars, even when I know they are camera flashes. As long as I keep looking at Lawrence, I tell myself, it’ll all go quiet. It’ll go still and sunset-colored, just him and me. The years will pass, and eventually all that trusting-of-himself will rub off on my self, and I will stop staggering around and just know, with inner conviction, what I need to do and what I feel. We’ll sit together, old, gray, and rumpled, on some bench in rural Italy, full of twinkled and holy advice for similar not-so-young people, in similar confusions about love and life and the need for bug spray at a country wedding at dusk. That will be our life. Just as soon as everyone stops hugging us and crying on us and touching my dress as if it were made out of butterfly wings and finely woven, never-realized dreams.

  CHAPTER 12

  Riding Out the Updraft

  Here we go, a memory: Dad and I are flying back from Lake Iliamna in the 185. He’s in the pilot’s seat, I’m next to him, playing with my set of identical controls. It’s early evening. The plane is loaded with reds. The sky is silver and bright. All of a sudden the altimeter begins to spin in crazy circles. We’re at four thousand feet, then six thousand, then eight, ten, twelve, fourteen.

  “Well, that’s kind of funny,” Dad crackles over the headset microphone.

  “What?” I say.

  “A single-prop plane isn’t supposed to be able to fly at seventeen thousand feet.”

  I laugh and laugh. “Are we in trouble?”

  Dad laughs and laughs, too. “If your lips turn blue, then we’re in trouble.”