Tom Barbash - Stay Up With Me

I felt this was a cue for me to speak, to say something interesting or fresh, but I couldn’t think of anything to say. I felt disconnected. The fog outside was so thick I could imagine it rolling into the house, filling it completely like cotton in a bottle.

“Crummy day out, huh?” I said.

“I love days like this,” Nan said. “These are my favorite days.”

“I’m with you, Lou,” Walt said. “I hate this shit. Look out there. You can’t see ten feet.”

“Why do you need to?” Nan asked. “For a few days the world is a ten-foot bubble in front of you.”

I thought about walking around the island in a bubble, passing cars for a moment, then horses and dogs. I’d walk to the other side to the beach, seeing the sand only when it sprung from between my bare toes.

“Are you worried about what’s going to happen to you?” Deborah asked.

I said, “Yes, I am worried.”

Deborah laughed and then hushed herself. “I’m sorry, Lou,” she said. “I was asking Charles.”

That night I sat up late reading Lauren’s diary, the white quilt covering me in the cool damp room. I was beyond the sex scene to the day after and Lauren was filled with regret and angst. The boy had called her three times and she wouldn’t come to the phone. Everyone was to tell the guy she was out, or sleeping or gone for a run. She was confused by her feelings. She said she wanted to die or curl away for a month or so. She lay for hours in bed — this bed, under these covers, and sipped from a bottle of Bénédictine. I felt as though she was confessing to me, that it was just the two of us up late talking in her room and no one else could hear. I would tell her things. I would tell her about the accident. About Tim and my mother.

He was in eighth grade when he died. I was in fourth. To this day I do not remember resenting him, or envying him, or whispering beneath my breath or to anyone else that I wanted him killed. I believed I kicked the balls to spite my mother although I cannot remember why. That she would slip harder onto the accelerator and lose her steering, that she would brake too hard so the car would whir, like a loosed top, off the road into a tree, were not things I could have imagined. That I would see my brother twisted ghastly, suspended like a night-blinded bird in broken glass, was something I could not have dreamed.

My father had been gone since I was three, dead of a heart attack. But my mother said the sadness that she felt then was nothing like what she felt when Tim died.

For a few months we both saw counselors but we did not talk about that day or my brother. It was as though we had lost our history, as if time started the day after the crash. The counselor said we should have had a mourning period together, a time in which we could just sit and think of Tim and be sad. It was absolutely the healthiest thing to do, he said, to vocalize, to mourn out loud. It never came about.

Instead my mother joined a support group of people who lost sons or daughters and she began having friends from the group over for dinners and small parties that would end long after I’d gone to bed. One night, when she’d had a good deal to drink, she crawled next to me in my bed and smiling, I could see this in the half-light, told me I was her whole life, “kit and kaboodle,” and though she’d meant it as a gesture of intimacy, there was something false in that moment that made her seem distant as the stars from me and altogether unknowable.

I read more of the diary. There were other boys. One Lauren slept with at his house. His parents were away in California, so they set up a tent with sleeping bags on the front lawn. He chewed tobacco and kept a cup for spitting in the tent. Another one she danced with until six in a dorm room at his college.

I looked again at Lauren’s picture. I walked to the closet. I tried on one of her skirts and then I put her red sweater on over that. I was twelve then and knew this was the most intimate I would get with a girl six years older. I stood in front of the mirror and turned side to side. I ran my hands up the front of the sweater and down my sides, over my ribs and hips. I looked ridiculous. I ran to check the door, to see if it was locked. I flipped the radio on and I danced, the skirt swirling around me. Then I lifted the sweater off slowly, dangling it over the bed. The shades on my window were open, so I turned the lamp off and let the moonlight stream in. I slid the skirt down to my ankles and then kicked it high into the air. It floated like a parachute to the floor across the room. I danced on top of the quilt and the bedsprings shrieked. When my legs gave out, I sank exhausted into the bed and let the music spin the room.

The things my mother did alone before, she did now with Norman. They ran together. She taught him tai chi. He taught her to drink scotch and champagne — rather than the fruity rum drinks she drank before — although he said she taught him to moderate. They’d begun to gesture alike, share expressions, finish each other’s sentences.

“You know what it is about your mother?” Norman would say. And my mother would answer that with something different each day. Norman said he lost thirty pounds and twenty years being around my mother. They talked with and around me for ten minutes or so, asking me how I liked it on the island, whether I could get used to that kind of life, and then they’d disappear somewhere, carrying a blanket, a checkered tablecloth, a wicker picnic basket with wine bottles peeking out.

One time I was on my way over to visit and through their living room window I saw my mother walking on Norman’s back. He was agonized. His balding head was bright pink. He was completely naked, his flesh tanned and bundled at the base of his spine. She was in shorts and a T-shirt walking on top of him. She is a tall, strong woman, and, on top of Norman, she filled the room. I stared, fascinated, and then I saw my mother look over for a second. She caught my eye and smiled, a sly and heartless grin that scared the hell out of me. I tore from the window to the gravel road to the grass that ran down the coastline. I ran over wet rocks and seaweed and a long grass field until my face poured sweat and my lungs hurt.

After that I avoided her. I stopped my visits. When I heard her voice in the kids’ house, I locked myself in Lauren’s room or I escaped out the kitchen door. She left me notes and I didn’t respond. If Norman came by alone, to change a lightbulb or check the flower beds, I’d talk to him and try to act normal. I tried to forget my image of him, naked on the floor, grimacing in pain.

They kept to their routines, though. I still saw them in low crouches in the white light of morning. They still took boat trips in the afternoons.

In our last week, the fog had begun to scatter. At noon one morning I woke late and heard Walt playing a sad, dreamy song on the saxophone. I pressed my ear on the wall to hear. My ear vibrated. It surged warmth. I walked that morning to the general store with Charles and Nan. Norman had a charge account at Percy’s, and when we walked through the door, Percy jumped to attention as if we were something important.

“What can I do for you, Charlie?” he asked. Behind the glass at the front counter were fresh donuts, glazed and powdered, long twirling crullers and fat Danishes smothered in cheese or fruit, wild cinnamon rolls twirled around like long boa constrictors. And then there were meats: sausages, salamis, hams, and, on the shelf over them, hard crusty rolls and bagels and croissants. Charles pointed and Percy lunged to keep up, piling things with metal tongs into a sack. On the shelves behind Percy were pickled fish and imported crackers, tins of Danish cookies.