Tom Barbash - Stay Up With Me

“You were the only thing that kept me from jumping in front of a train. Got it? Do you?” I was twisting from her. Against my will, I laughed. She pressed against me, full weight. My mother is a very strong woman. Her hands were on my wrists, pinning me back.

“Come on, Lou,” she said, then raising herself. “It’s a beautiful night. The sky is clear now, absolutely clear, and there are a million stars. Let’s go howling.”

I peered around her, through the window, and I could see she was right. I could see the Big Dipper, Taurus, Orion’s Belt. My mother used to tell us stories about the stars.

“All right,” I said, and she released me. “Let’s go.”

I pulled on my blue jeans and a T-shirt that felt cold against my skin. I felt my mother’s eyes on me, felt her watching me lace my sneakers. I was startled by the attention, but I knew to take it when I could get it; I wanted her to take notice.

Like cartoon characters, we walked on our toes down the stairs, making exaggerated efforts not to wake anyone, holding fingers over each other’s mouths and giggling. She took a blanket from the living room couch and wrapped it around us.

We walked along the gravel road that crested the water and we kicked stones back and forth. Branches of high oaks and maples covered us like a long canopy. The crickets and owls and night birds screeched and I said, “It’s a jungle out here.” My mother made a sound like an ape, “ooo, ooo, ooo, ooo.” She puffed air beneath her lower lip for effect. She laughed. She was giddy.

At the old pier we walked out on the creaking planks and watched the moon shine phosphorescent over the black water. I skipped a flat rock, watched it fly across the sheen, dart about like a fly, then disappear.

My mother spread the blanket out at the end of the pier and we sat on it cross-legged. We were at the end of a wide rocky bay and the land jutted out a quarter mile on the other side. There were a few homes along there. One of them still had a light on.

We leaned our heads back and stared straight up. We made shapes with our minds and explained them to each other point by point, like the Rorschach tests the counselor made me take after the accident. I thought about something my mother told me once — that some of the stars you were looking at had burned to ash a thousand years ago. It dazzled me; that we were watching a galactic past that would never again repeat itself. I thought that if they were watching us right now through some sort of superlens, they’d be watching the Egyptians build the pyramids. Everything had changed. Nothing was like it had been before.

My mother craned her neck at the moon like a flower yearning for light and she howled, slow and mournfully. The sound hung over the water, then repeated itself two hundred yards away.

She did this again, the music of the waves and wind riding beneath her voice. Then she laughed as she’d done when we howled before, but the sound seemed to turn her mouth into something she hadn’t expected, thin and startling, as though she’d landed on the wrong key. She leaned over to kiss my cheek and I smelled the scotch.

“We should do this again,” she said. “Every full moon.”

She ran her hand along my back and I felt myself tense.

“We need to do things like this,’’ she said, as though it was just something to do.

I looked away from her to the water, black as ink. I am thirty-one now, with my own children, and live across the country from my mother and Norman. We see each other only occasionally, but even in a year when we did not speak at all I never felt so far from her as I did right then.

I waited for her hand to drop, then I howled, a long high moan that made my chest burn. I closed my eyes and let the sound carry into the damp night air. I howled for a long while there, her next to me, silent, listening, my ears and throat ringing.

T hey are both at the door when we walk up, the old lady in a hand-knit green pullover, the man in a gray cardigan that bleeds gray onto his undershirt. He looks just-risen from bed. His voice is hoarse, and he holds his wife’s arm as they make their way out to the front stoop. They look us over.

Eddie and I both have gum boots on, jeans, flannel shirts, and down vests. Upstate clothes. Eddie had them first and I followed, not deliberately — item by item — so it snuck up on me that I’d done it. Now here I am looking quite a bit like Eddie.

Eddie introduces us as new in town. True enough. Stopping by just to meet our neighbors, which is a stretch.

“Quite a layout here. What do you have, a hundred fifty, two hundred acres?” Eddie looks around as though searching for a boundary fence, though he already knows the dimensions of this place.

“Three hundred eleven,” she says. “All the woods there behind the creek and the hollow there, to the river. Right up to the Oswegatchie there.”

“Beautiful river,” Eddie says, like he’s complimenting her on a watercolor she’s made or a turkey she’s cooked. “Nice little town too. Pine. Nice place.”

The old lady tilts her head meditatively. “I guess it is.”

“Bit cold out here,” Eddie says. “You mind if we come inside a moment or two?”

Once inside Eddie finagles us tea and biscuits, and he starts playing therapist, nodding his head as the woman, Mrs. Berner, tells us about disasters in her life. She says the land has become a nightmare since her husband’s stroke two years back.

Eddie plays slow to agree.

“But you’ve got a real farm,” he says. “That’s the way to live, straight from the earth.”

“It’s too big for us. We haven’t been able to do a thing out there for years. It’s a waste,” she says. “And it’s not like we have a pension rolling in. We’ve got no income.”

He’s managed to get her to talk him into his pitch.

“You ever thought of selling the place, getting some smaller spot in town?” I ask.

Eddie shoots me a look: slow down. He’s training me so I can close this sale later on my own. He sips his tea, then places the cup on the table next to him so he can use his hands to paint the picture.

“What Randall means is that the two of you deserve to be living better,” Eddie says. “Lord sakes, you’ve earned it. What kind of life would you want if you could have anything you’ve dreamed of?”

“I’d say we’ve had… what we wanted,” the old man says, and he looks so pathetic it breaks my heart.

“Think big,” Eddie says. “Think of what you’d want if money were no object. I mean for me, I’d think of a new car, a speedboat, maybe a cruise to South America. You ever been to South America?”

The man lets out a sepulchral cough. Then he holds the handkerchief over his mouth and spits.

Eddie switches the conversation, to hunting and fishing, and finding no traction there asks Mrs. Berner about her children.

“Oh, they’re in California now,” she says.

“Think about visiting them,” Eddie says. “It’s a beautiful world out there.”

“I guess they’ve grown apart from us.”

She seems to want us to ask about this.

“Be nice to have a manageable place in town, don’t you think? And a little cash to take care of Mr. Berner,” I say.

“Sometimes I think that’s just what we need, and then we just can’t seem to say so long to this place. You know how that is. You go to sleep and you wake up, and you’re still here.”

I excuse myself to go to the bathroom. Mrs. Berner points the way and lets me loose in her house.

I think about us sitting there in the Berners’ living room and it makes me angry at them. There’s no reason to be so trusting in a world like ours. A couple of months ago I read an article about an old couple that let a man into their house supposedly to fix their stove. They didn’t even have a problem with their stove, but they trusted him, and when they let him inside, he pulled a pistol on them. He made them lie down on the ground. He took everything they had in the house, and before he left he must have thought they’d had a long enough look at his face because he shot them both dead. I wander through the cold drafty rooms of the Berners’ house and I think about us being homicidal maniacs. We’re invited guests, in their house, and there’s no one around to hear us or see us. No witnesses. And there’s plenty here to rob. I sold at an antique shop one summer, and the Berners have possessions lying around that would bring a decent price: old snow globes; a gilded music box, mahogany it looks like; a tall grandfather clock with Westminster chimes and the wrong time, standing in the corner like a forgotten cathedral; a 1950 Winchester 12-gauge in an otherwise empty gun rack; a reading lamp with a silk shade and glass bead fringe. I flick the switch but then I see — there’s no bulb. There’s beautiful stuff here that doesn’t look like it’s been touched for years. Would they miss it if it was all gone one day? In the drawers of a maple chest in the dining room there are dusty porcelain teacups so thin they might crack the instant you lifted them to your lips.