Still Points North

by Leigh Newman

  “This is no fun,” Dad says, all of a sudden. “This is just surviving.”

  This time, unfortunately, I have no idea what he’s thinking. His is a general statement, maybe, about the rain and cold and almost dying but not actually dying, which as an Alaskan you can’t afford to talk about or you’ll never go back out in the bush. Or if you do go out, you’ll go out weak and the all-knowing mojo of nature will somehow sense it, and you will be picked out by a grizzly or wolverine or snowstorm and never make it back.

  But under the rain cover, which stinks of plastic and mildew that dates back to the 1970s, I’m thinking in broad, inappropriately thematic ways. I’ve been looking for a Chinese fortune cookie. And there it is. What we’re doing is just surviving. And Dad and I have been doing it for a very long time. All of a sudden I’m too tired to do it anymore. I want my dad back. I’m not doing so well without him.

  “I love you,” I say, still under the rain cover.

  “I love you, too.” Long pause. “Never stopped.”

  I crinkle around in the rain cover. Then crinkle a little more. Then finally I pull the rain cover off my head. “Are you cold?”

  Dad hunkers down in his camp chair. He looks cold. He looks gray. And he even looks a little old, or at least older than I want to acknowledge. “What do you say,” he mutters, “if we hike it the hell out of here?”

  It’s too late to hike, though. We break camp. We load up. And we run the five miles back to the plane, with full packs. The side benefit of running in full-body rubber chest waders being that we are now very, very warm.

  It’s 2003. Lattes, microbreweries, and a single Banana Republic—though not a Whole Foods or Macy’s or H&M—have finally arrived in Anchorage. Even more miraculously, a motel has been built in the bush, or, rather, moved from someplace in the Midwest, floated out in pieces on a barge and reassembled.

  From the plane, the motel appears as a long narrow shoe box along the fat, wide Naknek, the gray silted river now thundering down the tundra like some great six-lane interstate. Inside, the rooms are replete with hot water and fragrant, decadent, only mildly used bars of soap. The restaurant has whiskey. And food on plates.

  But not too much food.

  The waitress thunks down a bread basket. “We’re out of salmon.”

  “In the village of King Salmon?” I say.

  “Don’t you go New York,” says my dad, but only with his eyes.

  “No buffalo, either.”

  “What have you got?” says Dad.

  “The T-bone. And the risotto.”

  “One T-bone, one risotto. And just slosh gin all over the whole dinner. It’s been a long day.” Our table stands beside a giant picture window, framing the river and the motel dock where our plane is tied down for the night.

  “I left Lawrence,” I say.

  Dad takes a sip of his gin. “Well,” he says. He takes another sip of gin. “I’m sorry to hear that. I really am.”

  “I’m not sure what to do.”

  “Me neither, Leifer.” Enormous sip of gin. Correction: the whole glass in one gulp.

  “I think we’re getting divorced. I think that’s what’s happening.”

  “I’ll tell you one thing.” He looks at his ice, then at the bread basket. “At least you realized your mistake and got out quick. You know, I just kept hanging on, hoping it would work. For thirteen years.”

  I look down at my glass, at the snowflakes of light that the decorative cuts along the bottom cast onto the table.

  “I never wanted to end up without you.”

  I really wish he would stop talking. All this talking has been enough. But here it comes—no drumroll, no clearing of the throat, no pounding on the table. He is looking down at his empty drink. “When your mother and I split up, everything got very messy. I didn’t tell you what I should have. I didn’t know how to tell you.”

  A little squirrel of panic scurries through me.

  “Or how to ask you.”

  More scurrying. Lots more scurrying.

  “Like … how things were going with your mother.” Dad looks at me, as if I’m supposed to say something. But I’m managing the squirrel. The squirrel is going to go into a small dark cage with a big fat lock on it, because I need to hear what my father is saying next, because what he is saying is “Leifer, your mother and I didn’t break up over Abbie. I’m not that kind of guy. Your mother and I—”

  “Right,” I say, affecting my best completely over it, worldly voice. “You didn’t have a good marriage.”

  “No. Your mom and I had a horrible marriage.”

  I’m sitting at a table, a table with a tablecloth, for God’s sake, which, in the bush, is pretty much a pink polyester miracle. And I’m watching my dad talk. And I’m watching his mouth move, talking about all the times they separated, separations I have no memory of. And I’m also sliding down a wide black hole that tunnels through time and space and memory and leaves me dumped in the living room of our old house.

  The Dukes of Hazzard is on TV. I’m in the family room, watching. I’m six years oldish. I’m hungry. I smell french fries. The kitchen is actually part of the family room separated by a high table with stools that Mom calls “the breakfast nook” even though we eat dinner and lunch there, too. In the kitchen, somebody has left a frying pan on the stove. Flames are roaring up from the pan. I run to the living room, but stop just at the edge of the carpet.

  Mom is sitting in one of the Queen Anne wing chairs. Dad is in the other. They’re drinking martinis in the glasses that always spill. They’re talking, their mouths moving quiet and scary and mean. Mom laughs a sneery laugh and grabs the cigar out of Dad’s hand and takes a puff.

  “Guys,” I say. “The kitchen is on fire.”

  Mom hisses something to Dad; Dad yells something to her. I hear how loud they talk but, for some reason, I can’t understand their words.

  “Guys?” I say. “The kitchen is on fire?”

  Dad yells something to Mom, then Mom to Dad.

  I’m so sick of them. They never listen. I stomp back to the family room and sit down in front of the TV. I watch and watch. From the sofa, I can see the breakfast nook and the stove behind it. But I keep my eyes on the TV. It’s their fault if the fire just keeps burning.

  Then, all of a sudden, Dad is in the kitchen screaming, “Jesus Christ!” Mom runs through the family room. I follow her. Now the whole kitchen is on fire—the ceiling, the walls, the stove, the pan of french fries. Mom tries to throw a pot of water. “No!” says Dad. “Not on grease! Get blankets!”

  Mom runs for our coats. Dad runs upstairs. Mom throws on her parka and Dad’s parka and my snowsuit with the mittens clipped to the wrists. I stand there, watching, as Mom comes back with her monogrammed hand towels from the downstairs bathroom. She throws those on the fire. But they just catch and get eaten by flames. The fire is moving and huge, a fast and blue wall.

  Dad comes tearing in, a mass of blankets in his arms. He doesn’t have any off my bed, though. He has the ones off his and Mom’s bed—including the new bedspread that Mom calls a duvet. It’s a cream-and-blue Colonial print of peacocks and floral vines that she had custom-made in the Lower Forty-Eight. It matches the drapes and pillows and bedroom chairs, all of which came up on the cargo barge just last week.

  Dad runs to throw it on the fire, but Mom throws herself in front of him. “Not the duvet! Jim! Please!”

  He pushes her out of the way—hard. He starts beating the flames out with the duvet. Almost immediately, it catches on fire. Mom starts sobbing in the corner. Black greasy smoke is curling all over. “Leigh,” he says. “Towels!”

  I stand there—a big fat jerky smile on my face. I can feel the smile. I know the smile is wrong. But I can’t do anything about it. I’m just smiling and smiling. Dad strides over—boom—and slaps me on the face. I reel around. But still, I don’t move. He goes on beating the fire and beating the fire. Mom goes on crying. Until the fire is finally out—our winter coats and
dish towels and the duvet and the afghan off the sofa and the sleeping bags and other blankets that Dad must have gotten while I did nothing, all of them smoking and gray, heaped all over the kitchen.

  An engine wails in the distance. Firemen storm into the room. One of them picks me up. I’m in my nightgown. I have no shoes on. “Don’t worry,” I say. “My dad put out the fire.” I hide my head on his shoulder. I’m smiling still, and I don’t want my dad or mom to see it.

  There it all is, in that one incident—everything that played out over the next twenty-six years, everything that led up to me and Dad at this table.

  Meanwhile, Dad is wrapping up his own story about the past. “The point was, you looked up at me; you were five or so, my Leifer. And you said, ‘Daddy, I don’t like separations.’ So I moved back in. And it was awful. Your mom and I—”

  “It’s okay, Dad.”

  “Let me finish. When you’re in a marriage like that, it’s not livable. It’s not about your can-do or your won’t-do. The loneliness gets to be so that … well … you’ll do anything to end that feeling after a while. Even things you’re not proud of.”

  After all these years, this is a feeling I can understand. Not that I can tell him. He is looking at me with such sadness in his eyes, the whole lecture inside his mind marching across his expression like subtitles: what he could have done different, better, kinder, earlier, louder, softer. It’s too much to stand. Or maybe it’s just that I don’t want to stand it anymore, that whole greased trap of what we should have done—not just him, but all of us, me, Mom, him, Abbie—which is a trap not unlike the old bear traps we used to use at the cabin, the ones that snapped shut if you so much as cackled with glee over a winning hand of blackjack.

  I’m in my own marital mess. I need help with me. And Lawrence. And me and Lawrence. I need help with: How do you know when it is working? How do you know that you’re not just pretending to make it work so that you’ll be different from your parents?

  Lawrence and I fight over how far in advance to leave for the airport (me three hours; him twenty minutes), who is going to walk the dog, who swims faster or dances better or can ride the last, shaky, bucking car of the Cyclone roller coaster the most consecutive times without throwing up. He’s so competitive and stubborn and afraid of commitment. Then he jokes drily about it, as if laughing will fix it. Which it doesn’t, because even if I’m laughing, I’m also competitive and stubborn and—apparently!—immeasurably more afraid of commitment. I have no idea how we’ve lasted this long, except that we are so similar. And aren’t opposites supposed to be the ones to attract?

  Dad makes some kind of bring-food motion at the waitress, and I take a quick breath. “I can’t hurt Lawrence anymore, that’s for sure.”

  “In or out, I’m behind you either way. But you need to make up your mind.”

  “I will. I mean—”

  “Worse comes to worst, you can always move back up here. We’ll get you a condo. You can have the sofa bed in the upstairs den. We’ll move it over with the truck—and so on. We’ll figure out the rest.”

  A slow, warm wave rolls through me. I don’t know what the wave is, but the feeling is a little like swimming in a puddle of syrup, the exquisite, not-quite-maple kind that my mother used to heat up in a pot of hot water on her rare Saturdays off work. I want to cry but I’m not that evolved; I can’t undo the engrained idea that if I cry I might ruin everything; but I also know that a condo and a sofa bed are the answer I’ve been looking for. Because this is what it feels like, having somebody say they’ll take care of you, having somebody say hey, you don’t have to do this all by yourself.

  Of course, I just sit there, nothing inside me making it onto my face.

  Dad goes on, “You can write stuff about … well, about fish and … nature, that kind of thing. For the newspaper.”

  For a few, long, velvety moments, I see myself writing for the Anchorage Daily News, getting a Super Cub and living on the lake, down the street from Dad. Then, one day, meeting a bush pilot or an English teacher, and growing old together in my old hometown.

  “Or stay in New York,” he says. “I know a guy I can fix you up with! I went fishing with him in Wyoming. He loves books. And fancy musicals. And all that stuff. It’ll be great!” Then he collapses, all the desperate enthusiasm flattened out of him.

  “Thank you,” I say, trying to get everything into my voice—all that huge and clumsy gratitude. I want to come back, I’ve always wanted to come back, it’s just that I’ve gone so far away, I don’t know if I can.

  Dad studies the salt shaker, then the tablecloth.

  I study the tablecloth too. By some unseen hand of God, it has been starched as well as ironed. “I don’t want anybody else.”

  “We’re okay,” Dad says. “You’re okay.”

  “I’m not sure about that.”

  “Well. I wasn’t going to mention it, but you do have risotto all over your shirt.”

  I look down. Nothing.

  He grabs my nose, pings it with his finger. “I can still get you!” he says, laughing. Because, of course, it’s true.

  Three months later, Lawrence and I are canoeing uselessly in upstate New York. Except only one of us is canoeing. Long Lake was Lawrence’s idea. Long Lake is supposed to be our last trip together. This whole summer, it’s been just like the old days of endlessly dating. We’ve gone boogie boarding, pond swimming, art-gallery-hopping. We’ve dined in the limited range of restaurants that take dogs and camped in the limited range of creepy so-called wilderness parks that also take dogs. In short, we’ve kept moving, not really confronting September, when the divorce is supposed to happen.

  For other people out there in the world, this might have been more difficult. But the whole experience reminds me of the summer I spent with Dad, smoking salmon jerky, hauling railroad ties, not really registering that our lives together in Alaska were over. But only later—much later—does it remind me of this.

  Three days prior to our divorce, I’m more concerned about getting to the food bag with the granola bars. It’s ridiculously sunny, the sky a shot of straight watercolor. Leonard stands in the front of our boat, his chest puffed forward like the canine version of the buxom ladies curving up the prows of ships.

  Nevertheless, Long Lake is a very long lake, and an astonishingly strong, fair-weather wind is blowing directly in our faces. As we paddle forward, we do not actually move forward more than a few inches. In the bow, Lawrence—perhaps suspicious—suddenly swings around in his seat to check on me. I paddle madly for a few strokes. He turns back to navigate. I drop my paddle. Very quickly, this turns into a game: Him swinging around. Me paddling madly. Him turning back to navigate. Me dropping my paddle.

  Worse, having reached the food bag, I’m now eating all the granola bars, one after another. I can’t help it. The sun is shining; the birds are chirping; and, for God’s sake, should we not make it across Long Lake, we can take emergency shelter at one of the eighty-five cabins on the shoreline, perhaps fitting in a joyride on a stolen cigarette boat.

  My wrappers crackle. Leonard bounds back to investigate the possibility of dropped raisins and chocolate chips. Lawrence ignores all this, just as he ignores it when I stop even pretending to paddle and settle for making splashing noises. His back is straight and sure up there in the front seat, the wind ripping through his flannel shirt. “You’re not a good paddler,” he says. “Why did you not tell me this before we got married?”

  “Because I’m not very good at getting married,” I say.

  “Actually,” says Lawrence, in his non-bantering voice, a straightforward and openly hurt voice. “You’re awful at it.”

  Do the birds actually stop chirping? Does everything go huge and looming and still, or does it just feel like it? Luckily, Lawrence is still facing forward, paddling. I’m talking to his back, a back that is lean and muscular, but only by virtue of genetics, not gyms; it’s a back that I have held on to each night without getting up to pack a
jar of mayo and an extension cord into a bath towel, a back that is turned to me now out of love and consideration, because Lawrence understands what will happen if he swivels around to look me in the eye—the kitchen-on-fire smile, the wild, flailing inability to react the way the rest of the world reacts when it comes to really crucial, vulnerable moments.

  Most of my life requires explaining. But only to others. Never to Lawrence. And the same goes for him. I know why he can’t buy himself new shoes (fear of being old and poor). I know why he gets teary at highway historical markers (love for Mom). You can’t just undo that kind of knowing, even if you try.

  We pass a tiny island, clumped with bushes. We pass a catamaran lashed to a dock. The place where I grew up and how I grew up means I’ll never be able to get into a boat without evaluating how far I am from shore, not to mention how I’ll make it across the lake, should the canoe tip or the paddle break or my partner in front keel over due to a heart attack. It’s a gift, this self-reliance. I know I can swim and swim and swim until I get to land. It’ll just be miserable and cold and, like the last year of my life, dependent on my will not to go under, not anything else.

  Life, however, may just hide in that anything else. Life may be other people, especially the ones who will not give up and go away. I’m pretty sure you can survive without them, but surviving isn’t living, and once you’ve brushed up against the two conditions, you can’t pretend it’s not a choice either way.

  A mosquito buzzes onto Lawrence’s shoulder. He slaps it. I brush the granola bits off my lap and say, “Couldn’t we just stay married?”

  It’s a very long lake. It gets even longer while Lawrence thinks about this, saying nothing. Because, of course, this is how life goes; he has no doubt found somebody else, somebody he’s got squirreled away in his mind but has decided not to approach until we’re finally done, somebody younger and hotter and infinitely more mature who loves over-frosted doughnuts and listening to the Trinidadian cricket scores on the BBC while falling asleep in bed. Which is why it’s so crucial that I keep going, say something better, more revealing.