Tom Barbash - Stay Up With Me

When Tim and I were little, my mother forced her way into a group of fathers who organized Scout trips and fishing weekends. “I’m their father and their mother,” she said. She took Tim and me to football games and karate movies and professional wrestling and she feigned interest until we told her we didn’t like them, and then she found other things for us to do. We quit Scouts and went on our own trips. My mother consulted a field guidebook that showed how to coax a fire, how to pick edible berries and avoid the poisonous ones.

One time, under the full moon, she taught us how to howl like wolves. We’d pitched camp illegally at a lakeside summer camp a half hour outside of town, but the season had ended and there were no cars parked in the spaces behind the cabins or at the foot of the slate gray mess hall.

“Point your lips straight out like this,” she said, and from the side she looked, I remember, like a fish. “Oooooooo,” we moaned.

“That’s it. Now like someone’s dropped a box on your foot. Oowwww! Wooooooooooo. Put them together.”

“Jeez. We know what a howl sounds like,” Tim said. I swung my fist down hard on his foot and he elbowed me harder in the arm. “Oowwww,” we both yelled.

And my mother answered, “Wooooooooooo.”

Long after my mother went to sleep, we didn’t let up. We howled for hours until our throats were hoarse and our eyes burned for want of sleep. Tim’s howl was loudest and sounded like a moose call. Our joke was that there were moose heading across the lake from Canada because of Tim’s howl.

After Tim died, I had a dream we were camping, the three of us crammed into our tent along the lake. We’d zip the sleeping bags together, and our heads lay in a line, like bowling balls on a rack. We glanced over at one another or stared straight up at the roof of the tent, listening for bears or moose or a wolf. We heard them and saw their shadows run along the outside of the tent. They whined and growled and they poked shapes into the pea green fabric. But we kept them out with our voices. When I awoke once from that dream, I walked the house for signs of him. I stepped into his room and saw my mother there and we looked at each other with the same face of disappointment and I knew that she’d heard him in my steps, or seen him in the shadows I threw on the walls before I walked through the door.

Two winters after the accident, my mother took cross-country ski lessons. She saved her money and went for a ski weekend in Stowe, Vermont, with four of her classmates. They stayed at the von Trapp family lodge, the place the Sound of Music family moved to, and it was there that she met Norman.

He came to our house six or seven times after that for weekends or short vacations, but he never seemed at ease. Ours is a depressed area even by upstate standards. He made promises to us when he walked through the living and dining room — about couches and tables he’d buy for us, and trips he’d take us on. He praised the simplicity of our town but he meant something else. He meant it was no place to live.

The day we arrived in Maine, my mother and Norman disappeared into what they called the adult house, really just a separate wing with its own entryway. I saw them for short snatches in the mornings or before I went to sleep, but during the first two weeks I think I had only one meal with my mother. She and Norman took long trips on Norman’s boat and went out for dinner. Sometimes I’d run into my mother in the morning on a walk and we’d look at each other surprised, like former neighbors glancing at each other across a restaurant floor, friends that had neglected to call each other or stay in touch. She would say, “I’m sorry, but Norman and I need this time together, to get to know each other. It’s very important.”

Everyone had a routine. Charles set his easel up in the living room at sunrise and painted watercolors of schooners, yachts, and lobster skiffs. He blasted the Beastie Boys while he worked, and by one he’d finished. Walt squalled sax for hours in his room, but never before noon. His eyes were vein red and his room smelled like cigarettes. He taught me how to play a few notes but his mouthpiece tasted ashy, and my stomach pitched. Around sunset, Deborah read scripts in the big back bedroom with the light violet walls. I could hear her alter her voice, crying, laughing, or rattling in anger. Twice I read parts with her and watched her forget for a while who I was. Nan stripped furniture on the porch in those late hours and sometimes when I helped her we could hear Deborah soliloquizing through the window.

If I was ever noticeably alone for too long, someone would sit beside me. They took turns taking me for walks.

One morning, when I’d been watching him paint, helping him mix colors and clean his brushes, Charles told me I was on an island and I needed a pair of big shorts. The ones I was wearing were too tight. He ran with me down the upstairs hall to a closet piled high with old clothes. He dug his head in like a wino leaning into a Dumpster and he handed me two pairs of shorts.

“Try these on,” he said.

I squeezed out of the shorts I had on and into the baggy pair he’d handed me. The legs were down almost to my knees and spread out like sails. The waist was loose, but Charles pulled a strap on the side and it contracted. He smiled. They were just like his.

“We’ve got tons more where that came from,” he said, and I could see it was true. There were old jerseys, lacrosse shirts, rugby sweaters, clothes I’d seen in a picture on Lauren’s walls.

“I’ve got T-shirts,” I said. “I don’t need any more.” I had one of Lauren’s on that said CALIFORNIA with a picture of a wave.

“Well, they’re here if you want them. They’re right in the closet there and you can take whatever you want.”

When he left, I picked out an old gray shirt that said PROPERTY OF DARTMOUTH ATHLETIC DEPARTMENT. I liked the idea of belonging to an athletic department. It seemed like an honor, a sign you’d caught the passes or done the required push-ups. I carried the shirt and shorts to Lauren’s room and slipped them into my bag.

I was in the bathroom washing my face when I heard muffled voices from Nan and Deborah’s room, then laughs, a room full of laughs. Everyone was in that room. I walked to the doorway.

Walt and Deborah were under the covers in one bed, Nan was in the other fixing a cassette tape with a pencil. There were bags of Oreos and bottles of pop strewn about and serious books, opened on their spines, then abandoned. A music box sat on the nightstand surrounded by tapes separated from their cases. Charles was flitting about the room imitating someone.

I watched this scene for a while and for a moment I imagined Tim telling the story. He would be near Charles’s age and I would be sitting there listening.

The woman Charles mimicked was someone he’d waited on the night before, someone he spilled wine on. She wanted Charles fired. She told him she would write a letter to the owner of the restaurant about Charles’s ineptitude.

“Oh, there’s nothing you can do now. Not now ,” he said in a mock falsetto.

Charles said he offered to buy a new shirt and to give the couple their meal on the house. The woman said that wasn’t the point. The shirt was from Indonesia and it was irreplaceable.

He told the woman to try cold water and salt. “Oh, what’s the use?” she said. “What the hell is the use?”

I saw Nan glance at me. I felt I was peering through someone’s window.

“How long have you been there, Lou?” she said. Then everyone looked at me.

“Just a couple of seconds.”

“Well, get your butt in here,” Walt said. “We need some new discourse. The air’s getting stale in here.” He nodded his head toward Charles.