Tom Barbash - Stay Up With Me

Nan had a list out and she filled a cart with vegetables and fruit and fish. Then, as if they were afterthoughts, she dropped boxes and cans into the cart — cereal, crackers, pasta, soup — like the guy who wins fifteen minutes to pull everything off the shelves at the P&C.

“Whatever you want you should get it now, Lou,” she said. “This is our shopping for the week.” They charged two cases of beer and four bottles of red wine and asked that everything be delivered.

When I saw my mother and Norman walk through the front door of the store, I ducked back into the freezer room. I waited there in that cold metal box, watching through a crack. I saw Nan talking to them, saw them buy cheese and a loaf of bread, and then I watched them leave. By the time I left the freezer room I was shivering and my lips felt hard and brittle.

At the counter I bought a brownie and I walked with Charles and Nan down the road with it.

In the afternoon it began to rain and music streamed through the house. Walt drank a beer on the porch and I asked him for one.

“Hey,” he asked Deborah, “is it cool? Can Lou here have a beer?”

“I don’t know,” Deborah said. She looked at me from the side of her eye.

“Sounds pretty treacherous. First a beer, then what?”

Walt opened a beer for me.

“Here you go, Skipper,” he said.

He sprawled himself atop an old mattress. There were wicker benches and seats in the other corner of the porch, but no one ever sat on them. They were like roped-off museum pieces. Walt was bare chested and he wore what looked like a doctor’s green scrub pants. His face was flecked with patches of beard, like a comic book pirate. He sang along to “Wild Horses,” his vowels and consonants indistinguishable.

I walked with my beer to the front of the house where Nan rubbed sandpaper over an old desk.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“Nothing really, just trying to get some thinking done. Is that a beer?”

“Yup.”

She didn’t look at me or stop what she was doing.

“What are you thinking about?” I asked.

“Nothing important.” Her arm worked fast, as though she were driving something unspeakable out of the desk. I wanted to help her sand. I wanted to think alongside her.

“Can I sand too?” I asked.

“Lou? What’s the deal with your mom? What’s this all about?” she asked.

When I walked back to the porch, Walt and Deborah had switched from beers to harder stuff and they were saying nasty things about people I didn’t know.

The rain had let up a bit so I jogged down the road past Percy’s and then walked along the ocean. After a half hour or so, I headed inland through a wooded area, over patches of shrub and vine. Then I cut to the other island.

The downpour began soft and warm and the wind spread over my face. My high-tops filled with water. I decided not to care about anything.

When I made it back to town, I hung out in the video arcade. I played video games, one after another until I’d spent everything in my pocket — sixteen dollars. I played until it was one o’clock and they closed the place down.

When I arrived back at the house, I heard voices downstairs: Deborah’s and a male voice I didn’t recognize, a date, I guessed, because there was low jazzy music and the flicker of candles and incense. I sat on the newly varnished stairs awhile listening to the conversation floating through the air like cigarette rings, thoughts unfinished, questions not answered. It didn’t seem as if they were talking with each other at all. They were confessing, giving up parts of themselves.

The man talked about a sailing trip he took with eleven people, as part of Outward Bound. They stayed on the boat six days, no cabins or bathrooms.

“We hung our butts over these little white pails. We got to know each other, that’s for sure. There was nothing to do except get to know each other. I know a little about everyone on the boat, more than I know about most of my friends.”

“No bathrooms,” Deborah said, as if making a mental note on a house she might buy. “What did you sleep on?”

“We pulled a tarp over us at night to keep the wind off. There wasn’t a lot of room. When we finally got off the boat onto land, we stood for a moment in the shape of the boat. We hadn’t gotten used to the larger space.”

I could see his shadow pass over the wall teetering up and back.

“Did you fall in love? Did you find yourself?” she asked. “Did you merge with the breach?”

“You’re making fun of me. If you want to know, it was like the ark. I mean, there were older people and a few high school kids. We caught our food. Fish for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I did most of the cleaning and gutting. That was my job. And I found out a lot about myself.”

“In a play this summer I played the wife of a policeman who gets killed,” Deborah said. “When the play’s over each time, I can’t snap out of it. It’s not that I’m lost in my character. I don’t believe in that. It’s just that I’m aware at the end of each night that someone had died.”

I listened to Deborah and I didn’t buy it. It sounded like a lot of crap, that you could summon sadness like that. Or that you could arrive at it for a few nights, as though it were a hotel you stayed in.

Then she told this guy about my brother dying, the whole story. They sat silently a moment after she’d finished.

“He carries this around with him,” she said finally. “Can you imagine? It broke my heart.”

“My God,” he said.

I stayed there on the steps until the conversation started up again, hushed and affectionate. I could see their shadows merge, their voices springing from somewhere offstage, like lines in a puppet show, or growls and whines outside my dream tent.

When I headed back to bed it was 2:30. I thought about what Deborah said. I thought of that policeman as I tried to fall asleep. Though I tried to shut them out, I could still hear them, the clink of glasses being washed, the low murmur of the stereo, the rhythmic rise and fall of their conversation, which curled into the shape of my dreams.

When I opened my eyes again, I saw Lauren leaning over me. She was back early, I thought, and wanted her room. Her diary was opened and she’d probably seen it. I shrank back into my cover. “I can move. I’ll move out of here,” I said.

But it was my mother’s face. I bolted upright and she put her finger over my mouth. “Sssshh,” she said, and I could smell scotch on her breath. She smelled sour.

“There’s a full moon outside,” she said. “Let’s go howl at the moon.”

“Where’s Norman?” I asked.

“Sleeping,” she said. “He doesn’t do too well after midnight.” She lay down next to me and rested her head on her bent arm, like a sleepover friend. She put her hand on my shoulder. I hadn’t seen her close-up in four days. Her black hair was tied in a thick braid behind her head, like a teenager’s, like the pictures of Lauren.

“I’ve been talking with Norman about things, Lou,” she said. “I’ve learned a great deal.”

“And…”

“And he says I’ve been blaming you. I’ve been blaming you for everything. You told the kids something the other night.”

My head felt hot and still swollen with sleep. I began then to silently cry. I couldn’t control the muscles in my face.

She put her hands on either side of me.

“Well, that’s not right. It’s absolutely not right,” she said. She pulled a strand of hair off my face. “It’s as wrong as wrong can be,” she said, and she kissed my forehead. “Got it?” She kissed it again in the same spot. “Am I getting through?”

“Yes,” I said, and she tickled me.