Stay Up With Me Read online

  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.

  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 d
idn’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.

  “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.

  Somebody’s Son

 
; They 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.