Still Points North

by Leigh Newman

  I look at his lips. His lips are blue. I laugh and laugh. I’m eleven years old. I never laugh with my dad anymore. I don’t let myself, especially when he tries dumb old tricks like stealing my nose or tickling my collarbone. I laugh some more. The altimeter hits eighteen thousand feet, twenty thousand. The height of Denali at the peak.

  “Boy,” Dad says, giggling. “If I pass out, you just turn off the power and we’ll drift down eventually. Got it?”

  “I feel great!” I say, holding out my hands, marveling at the blue of each finger, my skin the color of the veins on the dictionary map of the human body. It’s cold. The updraft doesn’t make one sound. It’s so silent, invisible, lifting us up and up like a tiny, dry snowflake.

  “We’re not going down,” says Dad. He reaches over and turns off the power. Then he pushes the stick all the way forward and points the plane directly at the ground. I’ve never seen him do this before. In general, in flying, you don’t want to see things you’ve never seen before. But nothing, not even this, upsets me. I feel great.

  “The bad thing about this is,” Dad says, “we’ll probably drop off this updraft, then have to stop our fall pretty quick.”

  I laugh.

  “If we can stop it.”

  I laugh.

  He laughs and laughs until it turns into a stream of giggles. “Lack of oxygen makes you laugh!”

  The altimeter is spinning again, but down this time, from twenty to eighteen to fifteen to twelve. It’s a gentle sinking—as silent on the way down as on the way up.

  “Wow,” Dad says. “We really should be falling right out of the sky.”

  “But we’re not!”

  “Nope.”

  I look out the windshield at the world getting closer and closer to us, slower and slower—trees, stream, ocean. There all of it is. There we are, flying above it, upright.

  “Leifer,” he says, “let’s not tell your mother about this … I mean … your stepmother.”

  Three months after the wedding, I’m thinking of this incident while lying on a futon in Massachusetts. I’m wondering why I wasn’t scared, even afterward when I had enough oxygen to understand that we almost died up there. The whole experience felt very drifty to me, natural and unreal at the same time. Because really, there was nothing we could do—no switch to flip, no choice, no struggle. We just had to ride it out. Everything—living, dying—it all was going to be decided for us.

  There’s such odd comfort in that.

  I’ve been looking, I think, for that same feeling all my life. I’m not sure how you get there without almost fatally crashing. And I’m pretty sure you can’t get there if you don’t get out of bed. But the futon where I’ve been lying for the past month is not some place that you just want to rush away from. It’s like sleeping on a silken down cloud. There’s a layer of thick luxury fluff strapped to it, known among bedding aficionados as a pillow top.

  The pillow top, the quilt, the sheets, the two soft pillows (one for me, one for Leonard) all came from the landlord who rented me the garage, which also came with pastoral French doors with a view of the woods. The garage is not called a garage, either. This is Massachusetts, where poetry grows on the trees, along with apples known as Ambrosias and Earliegolds and Royal Empires. In this state, a garage is called a carriage house.

  I’m here on a fellowship to grad school—an opportunity that presented itself a few weeks before Lawrence and I got married in the form of an acceptance letter. I’d always wanted to write fiction and I’d been thinking that, due the impending nuptials, I should probably stop traveling so much and spend some time with Lawrence. I applied to nine schools for creative writing (three of them in New York) and got into exactly one—in Amherst, three hours outside the city.

  “Well,” I said. “It’s closer than Switzerland.”

  “You’ll come down on weekends,” Lawrence said. “I’ll come up.”

  Neither of us brought up the subject of him coming with me. First of all, he has a job that makes a livable amount of income. Secondly, this was a schedule like our old schedule. Me away for a few days, then the two of us in our tiny homey dump for a few days, and so on … This arrangement, at least, would keep us in the same time zone.

  From the futon, the garage looks not unlike my childhood dream cabin in the woods. If I squint, Leonard is, roughly—although with a muskier, more violent body odor—a husky dog. Plus there’s a woodstove, crackling with propane flames—which means no Great Alaskan Chopping and Hauling and Stacking of Logs! It’s perfect, a fantasy come to life.

  Except that I’m here all by myself.

  The one pesky, unfixable flaw of the garage is that it has no plumbing. In other words: no toilet. To relieve myself, I have to get out of the futon, exit the French doors, walk across the backyard, enter the landlord’s farmhouse, and climb the stairs to the one dinky bathroom. By week six on the pillow top, this is too much exertion. I can’t get out of the futon and go all the way over there. Fifty yards across the hard, stubbled grass is too far.

  In a single, Herculean effort, I get myself upright, drive to the store, and purchase an attractive, rustic-looking pail. It’s like an outhouse. But it’s inside the garage, right next to the futon. I make a rule—and this, too, takes effort—that I can only use the pail for a number one. I pull up the quilt. I snuggle in with Leonard. I can now lie on the pillow top in peace, admiring the backyard—the assorted high, overgrown boxwood hedges, the cardinals flashing by, the occasional suburban child’s birthday balloon.

  A note about garages: They are so dusty and silent and wonderful. Mine in particular comes with the advantage of emptiness. I own nothing here except for clothes and books. There are no boxes of wedding-present wineglasses. There are no piles of rotting periodicals. Nobody is watching me or photographing me or telling me, “It’s all about people,” as Lawrence did during the reception when I cried about the cold samosas and the missing trash can of champagne.

  He was laughing when he said this. He was trying to comfort me, to show me the light and truth in the universe beyond our tower of two hundred just-slightly melted cupcakes, and he was right. It was all about people … and yet what I couldn’t bear to tell him was what he already knew: People go away. They don’t mean to go away, they don’t want to, but they end up doing so, even if you build Indian silk tents for them and set off bottle rockets for them and bake a chocolate cake you don’t know how to bake for them, even if you make sure they catch a nineteen-inch rainbow on their first day fishing ever, and do all the rest of the heavy lifting, those expressions of love that are also lurching attempts to either distract or dissuade them from what is going to happen anyway—a good-bye, honey, said with great tenderness.

  Now that I’m alone, all that work seems like too much work. Because this is the first time in a long, long time that I’m not anxious or scurrying around with a shovel, passport, or a bunch of copper saucepans. I’m just lying here, drenched in cool, silent relief.

  A swift little river of logic whisks through me: People get married because they don’t want to be alone. But I’ve been alone for most of my life. I’m used to it. It’s not comfortable, but it is comforting. And it’s not exhausting, either. It’s like taking off your ski boots or climbing boots (which are really just ski boots but for climbing mountains) and easing your foot out of that toe-to-top-shin, plastic-and-buckle-prison. Your feet swell and breathe—and become feet again, blistered raw ones, but feet nonetheless, instead of two numb, dead stumps at the bottom of your body used for getting up shale slides or down a run of iced-over moguls.

  Lying here on the pillow top, when I shut my eyes, I can’t see Lawrence’s face. I can’t smell his smell or remember the color of his eyes, even though I know in a clinical way, as if reading off his driver’s license, that they are blue. Clearly, this is what happened every time I left my dad for my mom or my mom for my dad. But shouldn’t I have outgrown it? Because there’s nothing to stop me from standing up, packing my duffel, shovi
ng Leonard in a crate, and grabbing a plane for somewhere else—say, Seoul, where my friend from college has a job teaching English. I’ve always wanted to see South Korea—and North Korea for that matter.

  The same goes for Lawrence. He’s back in New York, not missing me, either, free to jet off to Brazil, the way he’s always talking about. And if I really think about it, this is our real problem—the problem curled up inside the hedgehog of fear during the wedding, a hedgehog I should have forced out of its hole long before getting married. Missing is longing. And longing is love. Which, according to this logic, I don’t know how to feel. And which he doesn’t, either.

  This is when it hits me, a kind of sweeping, inner updraft—ten thousand feet, twelve thousand feet, sixteen thousand. I look out the garage window, feeling a little panicked. But it’s a quiet, dull, familiar panic. All I have to do is not move. Twenty thousand feet. I hover there. I wait. I don’t have to decide. I just have to breathe. I know what comes next.

  Three hours south, there’s still some summer left in the fall. The leaves are yellowing on the linden trees. People rush down Clinton Street, wearing thick, complicated scarves, but with sunglasses on and shoes without socks. Manhattan.

  Lawrence and I are sitting on the steps outside my old apartment. We’ve been married for three months. But I’m not changing my mind. I don’t want to go upstairs. I don’t want to go talk. I just want to sit here and say it fast: Lawrence can have my apartment. He can have the Le Creuset casserole and lobster-claw crackers. He can have the geranium I planted in a coffee can. He can have everything. He should have everything. Including Leonard. All this is my fault. I’m the one who shouldn’t have gotten married from the beginning. I should have known this, but I never know what I feel, which is the number one reason why I can’t be married. And quite frankly, since he is the one who brought up “fears and considerations and feelings and so forth” before we got married, he should have realized the failure-to-feel problems on my end. “You never wanted to get married in the first place,” I say. “I forced you into it. And now I’m letting you out of it. I’m sorry.”

  “But,” says Lawrence, his voice sounding oddly calm, almost puzzled, as if he doesn’t understand what’s being said.

  I can’t look at him. I just have to be clear and not get distracted. This is the down part, after the up of a decision. Consequences are always scary and rough. “I’m leaving. I have to go.”

  “But Leonard is your dog.”

  “But you should keep him.”

  “But he’s your dog.”

  “But you should keep him.”

  “But he’s your dog.”

  “But I’m leaving you and you’re going to need somebody so, please, just fucking keep the dog.” I start walking quickly down the street. Unfortunately, Leonard was abandoned at birth. He is basically my shadow with fur. He trots along behind me. I walk him back to the bench.

  “Sit, Leonard,” I say. “Stay!”

  Leonard sits on my shoe. Lawrence looks down at his hands, maybe to keep from looking at me. I wonder if he’s thinking of the dog trainer we hired from Slovenia last year, who kept confusing our names and screaming, “Stay, Leigh! Stay, Lawrence! Sit, Lawrence! Leonard, you must follow through with the treat!”

  We never talked about alliteration and the reality of having that many L’s in one house before getting married. We never followed through, either—not with treats or leases or electric bills in both our names. I throw the car in gear. Leonard tears down the sidewalk and jumps through my open window, clawing across my lap to the passenger seat. Lawrence looks up. He lifts his hand, looking so lost. “See you next weekend?”

  I don’t know what to say to that. I drive away.

  CHAPTER 13

  Boulder, Boulder, Paddle

  I know exactly no one in Massachusetts. Driving up there, this feels like a wonderful thing. I’m safe from caring, inquisitive friends in common. I’m pastless, open to new futures, speeding in my sturdy, all-wheel-drive vehicle through the college town of Amherst, which is a snug, steepled, brick-and-clapboard village for about one square mile. After that, it turns into mass-market America—a long, traffic-snarled highway lined with Jiffy Lubes and Dunkin’ Donuts.

  The grocery store, Super Stop & Shop, is larger than my whole New York apartment building. I push a cart down the endless, glittering aisles. All the choices, all the possibilities, all the applesauce and laundry detergent and fried fish sticks lie before me, flashily packaged. I’m not used to laden, appetizing shelves like this. I’m used to a dusty can of Pringles and a browning pile of plantains from the corner bodega. The air at the Stop & Shop smells so fresh, so chilled, not unlike waxed florist flowers.

  At a pyramid of juicy, fresh, symmetrical oranges, my newfound euphoria pops. There are too many oranges, too many kinds of soy sauce; there is too much choice—in the supermarket and in the rest of my life, the huge, looming rest of my life.

  Somehow I make it to the meat section. In the refrigerated case is a package of thirty-two chicken wings—all with pimpled, puckered, yellowed skin. Who on this planet could possibly eat that many chicken wings? Orphans. Sitting at a long sad wood table, with empty tin plates.

  The star-shaped sticker on the package, however, reads FAMILY SIZE!

  I have to dump the cart and run out of the store and get away. Lawrence and I were not a family. We were two people who got married. And we never talked about having children, the way we never talked about anything. How could I possibly ever raise a child—me who thinks of orphans, when the rest of the world apparently thinks of moms and dads and brothers and sisters, sitting together, eating chicken wings?

  It was my mom who was adopted—not me.

  But somehow, even the basic family stuff escapes me. While in college, I went up for summers to Alaska, just to make sure my brothers would know me, even if I was away for most of their day-to-day lives. The summer Daniel was six—and Jack three—their babysitter quit. Overnight, at age nineteen, I was in charge of child care. I had a lot of love for the boys, but not a lot of ideas. Much of our time was spent playing “Eat Froot Loops” or “Dance to Abbey Road” or “Nap.” By five o’clock we were all collapsed on the carpet, stupefied by sugar and praying intensely that Abbie would walk through the door.

  I didn’t understand my stepmother at all. She felt no need to bellow at us, even when Dad tracked most of the red, clam-digging clay in the state of Alaska all over the kitchen floor, which she’d just swept. Did this make her a wimp? Or did this make her some kind of mind-control warrior? I wasn’t sure. But hers was a different way of doing things, especially with my brothers. When they mouthed off, she reacted in a strange and wondrous way: She sent them upstairs to their rooms to sit by themselves for two minutes.

  Even more astonishingly, my dad began doing this, too. In the evenings, I watched him in the backyard, either working with his bow and arrow, shooting bales of hay, or practicing C-casts with one of his new fly rods. One night Daniel was out there with him, throwing rocks into the lake. He picked up a rod. “Careful,” said Dad, continuing to cast.

  Daniel starting using a rod as a sword, jabbing it at the bushes, then looking over to see if Dad saw he was jabbing.

  “That’s a delicate rod,” said Dad.

  “I know,” said Daniel—jab, jab.

  “That’s Daddy’s. It was a gift from a friend and very, very expensive.”

  Jab, jab.

  “The rod, son.” Dad put his own rod down and started over, but Daniel smiled tauntingly and jabbed one last time, at the alder bushes. The rod bent. Snap went the tip. Dad grabbed him by the shoulders.

  Twenty feet away, I flinched.

  But Dad only knelt down and said very calmly, “You were not listening to me, son. Now the rod is broken. You’ll have to have a time-out.”

  I backed away, confused, furious. Why hadn’t Daniel gotten whapped? That rod was bamboo, custom-made. If it had been me, I would have been flat on my back, my hea
d reeling and the world gone tilted. I grabbed my jacket from off the deck chair—but stopped by the path at the edge of the yard. What kind of person was I, that I could wish that on my brother? I loved Daniel. I should be glad that Dad was being different with him. I should be glad that Dad was being different overall. I knew he was trying, and I knew how hard it was to change yourself. It was pretty much impossible, but he was doing it—while look at me, running off again.

  The differences in the house struck me so much that I began taking field notes in an old spiral notebook. Like: hitting kids, not effective. bribe them with stickers?

  Then came the incident with Star Wars cards. Abbie, Daniel, Jack, and I were strapped into the minivan, headed for home from a late playdate. Daniel was in the way-way back. His arms were crossed. He did not want to play with his friend Ronny ever again. “Why not?” said Abbie.

  “Ronny did not share his Boba Fett.”

  Abbie pulled the car over—right there on the shoulder, on busy Jewel Lake Road, despite the fact that we were late for swimming class. (Newmans are not late for things.) “How did that make you feel?” she said, turning around.

  “Mad,” Daniel said.

  “Well … are you sure you were mad? I usually feel something else when my friend isn’t being a good friend.”

  I stared at Daniel. Then at Abbie. What was she thinking? Daniel was six years old. He thought you could find dinosaur fossils among the frosted detritus of his breakfast cereal.

  “Actually,” he said (his favorite word, pronounced act-chooo-ally), “I am sad. I love Ronny and he doesn’t like me.”

  Holy crap. I went home and wrote this in my notebook. Ask kids about feelings. Specific ones. Mad. Sad. Broken Heart.

  Back at the garage, without groceries or Lawrence or the children we didn’t have, my daily vitamins now come from cigarettes. I smoke all night and day. I’m turning into smoke, free and light and drifty. You’re okay. You’re okay, I say to myself over and over, wandering around, picking things up: sock, dog nail clippers, glass of water, phone.