The stories in Tom Barbash's wondrous and evocative collection explore the myriad ways we try to connect with one another and with the sometimes cruel world around us. The newly single mother in "The Break" interferes in her son's love life over his Christmas vacation from college. The anxious young man in "Balloon Night" persists in hosting his and his wife's annual watch-the-Macy's-Thanksgiving-Day-Parade-floats-be-inflated party while trying to keep the myth of his marriage equally afloat. "Somebody's Son" tells the story of a young man guiltily conning an elderly couple out of their home in the Adirondacks, and the narrator in "The Women" watches his widowed father become the toast of Manhattan's midlife dating scene, as he struggles to find his own footing in life.
The characters in Stay Up with Me find new truths when the old ones have given out or shifted course. In the tradition of classic story writers like John Cheever and Tobias Wolff, Barbash laces his narratives with sharp humor, psychological acuity, and pathos, creating deeply resonant and engaging stories that pierce the heart and linger in the imagination.
Stay Up With Me
By Tom BarbashHarperCollins Publishers
Copyright © 2013 Tom Barbash
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-06-225812-0
Chapter THE BREAK
It was her son's second night home for Christmas break, and
the mother had taken him to a pizza place on Columbus Av-
enue called Buongiorno, their favorite. The boy was enjoying
all the attention. The conversation revolved around him and his
friends. He was talking about someone in school who had lost
her mind, a pale, pretty girl who'd been institutionalized and
who sent a scrawled-over copy of The Great Gatsby to a friend of
the boy's. In the margins, she had pointed out all the similarities
between the character's situation and what she believed to be
hers and that of the boy's friend. She had earmarked pages and
scrawled messages. you are gatsby, she wrote on the back of the
book. i am daisy.
The boy's mother pictured the girl in a hospital ward, align-
ing her fortunes with tragic heroines, ripping through the clas-
sics with a pen. At least, the boy's mother thought, the insanity
was literary. They were taking school seriously, she thought, and
she liked that her son seemed to have some compassion for the
2 Stay Up with Me
woman (more than she did; she was simply glad it wasn't he who'd
been the target).
She liked the person he was becoming, liked the way he
treated others. He'd had a girlfriend in the spring and then an-
other over the summer and the mother had liked how he opened
doors for them, how he listened to what they said, and how he
talked of them when they weren't around. Now both of those
were over and done with. She didn't know much about how they'd
ended, only that he'd kept in touch with one and not the other.
From time to time the boy glanced toward the front door of the
restaurant at the hostess station. The hostess smiled over at them.
The boy's mother was getting used to this. Her son had begun to
fill out in the last year, his sophomore year at college, and had be-
come the sort of young man women smiled at, and not only girls
his age. Recently one of the mother's friends saw a picture of him
in a T-shirt and jeans and had said, “Look out.”
The pizza was good and the boy ate a lot of it. The mother
looked over and caught the eye of the hostess. A good ten years
older than the boy, and not what you'd call pretty. Though thin
and busty, she had a somewhat pinched nose and a dull cast to her
eyes. The mother imagined that she often went home with men
she met at the restaurant. The girls the son had dated were smart
and pretty and charming. This woman was not. Her son didn't
seem to notice her but was talking about the coming summer
and how he wanted to travel around Eastern Europe, Romania
maybe, or Hungary. He'd work half the summer and then take off.
He wasn't going to ask for any money, he said. “How's the book
going?” he asked the mother.
She had been writing a book about Hollywood in the 1950s.
She told him about the last three chapters, one on the advent of
television and the other two on the end of the studio system. He
The Break 3
asked good questions, made suggestions. He was funny. He was
her friend.
He left for a moment for the bathroom. The mother watched
the hostess watching her son as he crossed the room, as though he
were a chef's special she was hoping to try. The hostess walked
back toward the kitchen. The mother couldn't see either of them
now. It's nothing, she told herself.
But then she was peering around the partition to see what
was happening. The hostess was lingering eight or ten feet from
the men's room. How incredibly pathetic, the mother thought.
The boy stepped out. She said something. He said some-
thing. Then he was back at the table.
“Should we get dessert?”
“What did that woman say to you?”
“Nothing.”
“I saw her say something.”
“Oh, you know, How's it going? How's your meal?”
She was acting like a jealous wife, she thought.
“I think she likes you,” the mother said, though not encour-
agingly.
The boy smiled, then changed the subject.
They stopped at an ice-cream place on the way home, a store
the boy had worked at three summers before. Back home they
watched the second half of Anatomy of a Murder on TV, then the
mother said she was going to sleep. The boy stayed in the family
room to watch more TV.
The mother read for a while. She thought of calling her hus-
band, but then didn't because she would probably bring up the
hostess, then feel ridiculous for doing so. She'd make it a bigger
4 Stay Up with Me
deal than it needed to be. It had been a nice night, she thought.
They'd have a few weeks of these and then he'd be gone again,
and she'd be alone in the house. She liked his company, and lately
she'd been starting to understand that this was the reward for all
the work you did, these years of friendship. You watched them
become the sort of people you wanted to know.
In the middle of the night she heard voices and she wondered
if he'd turned the volume up too loud. She walked back to the
family room. The doors were partially open. She peered in and
there was the hostess, her shirt off and one of her considerable
breasts in her son's mouth. Her son's shirt was off, and his eyes
were closed. The hostess was straddling the boy's lap, her chin
resting atop his head as he nursed and nuzzled.
She stepped back out and closed the door.
“Shit,” she heard the boy say.
The mother was surprised by what she felt then—not em-
barrassed, even for him. She
(Continues...)Excerpted from Stay Up With Me by Tom Barbash. Copyright © 2013 Tom Barbash. Excerpted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
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