An Amateur's Guide to the Night

by Mary Robison

“First things first,” Dr. Grosh said. “Now. I need to talk to Angela for a minute or so. Margaret, your dad will want to keep you company here. And Ed, it’s a little effort for her to talk, so you’ll have to do more than just hold up your end of the conversation.”

  “Right, Sid,” Ed said. “We’ll be okay—won’t we, Margaret?”

  “Don’t be gone long, though,” Margaret said to Dr. Grosh.

  ANGELA WAS SNIFFLING INTO HER PILLOW. IT WAS two or three o’clock—Ed couldn’t see his watch—and she’d been sobbing off and on since Dr. Grosh and she had put Margaret into bed and made sure she was asleep.

  Ed was seated now on the end of the mattress, smoking, even though his mouth and tongue felt scraped and sore from too many cigarettes. “One more time, honey,” he said. “Could you try to explain?”

  Angela began to speak into the pillow in a small voice.

  “Again,” Ed said. “I can’t hear you.”

  Angela rolled onto her back. She’d gone to bed fully dressed, and Ed could hear her pearls clicking at her neck. “It’s worse than we thought. It’s worse than they thought at Saint Stephen’s even,” she said. “Margaret is hearing voices.”

  “I know, but what Sid told me . . .” Ed said.

  “Our Margaret is sick. That’s a very bad sign, hearing voices. It’s the worst. And the sad, sad thing is that we were so happy.” Angela’s voice broke.

  “I know, I agree. But what Sid told me is that it’s pretty normal, really. I mean it’s worrisome, and we’ve got to watch her, but it’s normal that if you don’t eat or sleep for a week you can hear things, or even see things.”

  “Sid’s a miracle worker,” Angela said.

  “Well, what I want to know is did he tell you something he didn’t tell me? Something that upset you?” Ed said. “Because I have a right to know. She’s my kid, too.” Ed felt the heat of his cigarette’s tip near his fingernails. He mashed the butt in the ashtray between his feet. “Because what Sid said to me finally was, ‘It’s normal.’ He said after she’s slept awhile, the voices will go away.”

  “He was protecting us,” Angela said. “I know what disembodied voices mean. He’s planning to go easy on us. That’s his way.”

  Ed crossed to the room’s single window and peeped out between the heavy drapes. A fine drizzle was putting a shine on the cars in the condominium parking lot. The light from the post lamps was misted and bleary.

  “Whew,” Ed said. “Going to be a foggy day in London town.”

  “What?” Angela said weakly.

  “Nothing,” Ed said. He turned from the window. “Margaret’s okay, honey. So we treat her with kid gloves for a while. We keep her away from the drinking. Make sure she takes those pills Sid wrote up for her. Feed her like a calf for the fair. That’s all we got to do. Isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Angela said.

  Ed looked out the window again. He tried not to part the drapes too much. He didn’t want to bother Angela with the light. “Well, then I don’t get it,” Ed said. “Honest, I don’t get it. I mean, I don’t see why we aren’t happier and why we can’t all get a little sleep around here.”

  An Amateur’s Guide to the Night

  STARS WERE SOMETHING, SINCE I’D FOUND OUT which was which. I was smiling at Epsilon Lyrae through the front windshield of my date’s Honda Civic—my date, a much older man who, I would’ve bet, had washed his curly hair with Herbal Essence. Behind us, in the little back seat, my date’s friend was kissing my mom.

  I could see Epsilon, and two weeks before, when I biked all the way to a veterans’ cemetery outside Terre Haute, I had been able to separate Epsilon’s quadruple stars—the yellows and the blues—with just my binoculars. I had been way up on the hill there, making a smeary-red glow in the night with my flashlight. The beam had red cellophane taped on it, so I wouldn’t desensitize my night vision, which always took an hour to get working well. My star chart and the sky had made sense entirely then, and though it was stinging cold for late spring, I stayed awhile.

  It was cold now, or our dates would have walked us away from the car for some privacy.

  Mom was with the cuter guy, Kevin. She always got the lookers, even though she was just five feet tall. She wore platform shoes all the time because of it. That was her answer.

  My problem was my hair. It was so stick-straight that I had had it cut like the model Esmé—a bad mistake.

  I could hear Mom telling her date, “I woke up this morning and the car was gone.”

  “Sounds like a blues song,” he said.

  And now she was saying, “It’s time for our beddy-bye. Sis has classes tomorrow.”

  MOM AND I PASSED FOR SISTERS. WE DID IT ALL THE time. I was an old seventeen. She was young for thirty-five. We would double-date—not just with these two. We saw all kinds of men. Never for very long, though. Three dates was about the record, because Mom would decide by the second evening out that there was something fishy—that her fellow was married, or running from somebody.

  So it was perfectly fine with me. But I knew she hadn’t pulled the plug on the evening because of my school, or the hour. I was late for school almost every day. Mom would say, “Why don’t you wait and go in at noon? That would look better, not like we overslept, but more like you were ill. I’ll write a note that says so.”

  As for studying, it was my practice to wait until the night before a test to read the books I was supposed to have read.

  And I was used to a late schedule because of my waitress job, and the stars, and the late movies. If there was a scary movie on, one with a mummy or a prowler, say, Mom had to watch it, and she made me stay up to watch it with her.

  “THANKS FOR THE GREEK FOOD AND FOR RIDING US around. Thank you for the beer,” we said to our dates. We had been let out on our front sidewalk.

  “Next time we won’t take you to such a dive,” said one of the men.

  “Adios!” I called to them. I threw an arm around Mom.

  “Until never,” she said, as she waved.

  We lived about ten miles north of Terre Haute—me, my mom, and my grandfather. We rented a stone house that was a regular Indiana-type house, on Burnside Boulevard, in a town called Phoenicia.

  “Greater Metropolitan Phoenicia,” my grandfather liked to say, the joke being that the whole town was really just two rows of shopping blocks on either side of 188.

  Grandpa was up, in the living room. We were all night owls. He was having tea, and he had on the robe that was embroidered with dandelions, in honor of spring, I suppose.

  “Girls,” he greeted us. “Something called The Creeper on Channel Nine. Starring an Onslow Stevens. Nineteen forty-eight. Sounds like your sort of poison.”

  “Did you tell Lindy about our croquettes?” Mom asked him, and laughed. She tossed her handbag onto the couch and pushed up the sleeves of her sweater.

  “I forgot all about telling Lindy about the croquettes. That totally slipped from my mind,” Grandpa said.

  “Well, honey, they poisoned Pop’s chicken croquettes. They got his dinner,” Mom said to me.

  “A narrow escape,” Grandpa said.

  Lately it had been poison Mom talked about, and who knew if she was kidding? She also talked about “light pills” a great deal.

  “This Creeper that’s on—it says in the Messenger—he’s half man, half cat-beast,” Grandpa said.

  “Ooh,” Mom said, interested.

  I asked them, “Would you like to go out in the back yard with me? I’ll set up my telescope and show you some stuff.”

  I had a Frankus reflector telescope I bought with my waitress money. It wasn’t perfect. I got it cheap. It did have motor drive, however, and a stabile equatorial mount, cradle rings, and engraved setting circles.

  Mom and Grandpa said no, as always. Not that they could have told the difference between Ursa Minor and Hunting Dogs, but I wanted them, just once, to see how I could pull down Jupiter.

  IT WAS LATE THE NEXT NIGHT, FRIDAY. I WAS IN MY unifo
rm and shoes, just off from work. The big concern, whenever someone giant-stepped over my legs, which were propped up on the coffee table, was to protect my expensive support hose.

  The job I had was on the dinner shift, five to eleven, at the Steak Chateau, Friday and Saturday evenings. Waitressing and bussing tables—I did both—could really wear you down. That evening I had been stiffed by a group of five adult people. That means no tip; a lot of juggling and running for nothing. Also, I had forgotten to charge one man for his chef’s salad, and guess who got to pay for it.

  Allen Tashman and Jay Gordon, accountants, were there at our place for popcorn and the Friday-night movie—one called White Zombie. They were there when I got home. Allen, the wimpy one, natch, I managed to talk into the back yard.

  “Over that mass of shrubs by the garage. See?”

  “I see,” he said.

  “The big Joe is Capella, eye of the Charioteer. And the Pleiades is hanging around somewhere in the same vicinity—there you go. Six little clots.”

  “Whoopee,” he said.

  But I loved telling them that stuff, although sometimes I was guessing, or making it up. I was just a C student in school.

  “Hey, Lindy, by the way,” Allen said, “are people stealing cars, that you know of?”

  “Sis?” I asked. Mom and I were pretending to be sisters again.

  “Yeah, she told me she thinks there’s a car-theft ring in Phoenicia going on.”

  “Maybe there is,” I said.

  “She told me to park deep in the driveway and not out by the curb. Have you heard about it? A bunch of cars missing, from this neighborhood, way out here?”

  “It’s strange,” I said, as if it could have been possible.

  “I think your sister’s crazy sometimes,” Allen said.

  I didn’t bother to get the telescope. Oddly enough, on a clear night such as that, a star would have “boiled” in the viewfinder. The stars were too bright, was the problem. They were swimming in their own illumination.

  WE WERE TALKING ABOUT BREAKFAST, WHICH NOBODY wanted to fix. The weekend was over and it was Monday morning, getting on toward nine o’clock. I had intended to shake out of bed early, to see Venus in the west as a morning star. But Mom did something to my alarm clock.

  She had been sleeping with me, the nights she got to sleep, in the same room, in the same bed.

  She may have bashed my clock.

  She probably reached over me and cuffed it.

  So we were running behind. But I knew if I didn’t eat breakfast I’d get queasy. “Make me an egg, please, Grandpa?”

  “Poof, you’re an egg. I made the coffee,” he said.

  “Mom, then. Please?”

  She said, “Lindy, I can’t, honey. I’ve got to look for my pills. Have either of you seen them anywhere, I wonder?”

  “Not I, said the pig,” said my grandfather.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “That’s peculiar. Didn’t I leave them with the vitamins?” Mom said. “This is important, you two.”

  “Nobody’s got your medicine. Your medicine’s not here,” Grandpa said, causing Mom to be defensive.

  “Never mind. I remember where they are,” she said.

  I doubted it, I really did. I doubted such things as “light pills” existed. Whenever she brought them up, I pictured something like a planet, boiling white—a radiant pill. I pictured Mom swallowing those! At the pharmacy, when she was haunting them, fretting around the prescription desk, they told her they didn’t know what she was talking about, but if they did have such pills, she’d need a doctor’s order.

  “Just eat a banana. You’ll be tardy again, Lindy,” Grandpa said to me. “Harriet, they’re going to fire you so fast if you waltz in late.”

  “I quit, Pop. They didn’t like me there, so I quit,” Mom said.

  That was the first we had heard of it.

  Mom was a comptometer operator, and even though her mind was usually wandering over in Andromeda, she was one of the fastest operators in the state. She could get another job.

  Grandpa had enough money for us, so that wasn’t the worry. He had been a successful tailor, had even had his own shop. His only fault had been that he sometimes forgot to tie off his threads—so eventually, some of the clothes he made fell apart a little bit, or so he said.

  The problem I saw was that Mom really needed to keep occupied.

  Grandpa and she were still debating over who was going to fix breakfast when I stuffed my backpack and left for school.

  Our landlady—she was nice—was on the cement porch steps next door where she lived. “Hey, Carl Sagan! Give me a minute!” she called, and I obliged. She said, “A Mrs. H. of Phoenicia asks: ‘Why was there a ring around the moon last night?’”

  “Ice crystals,” I told her, thinking that was probably wrong.

  “Goodness, I didn’t realize it was that chilly,” she said.

  “Very high up,” I said, still guessing.

  It wasn’t just our landlady. A lot of the neighbors knew me, and knew what a star fiend I was. They’d stop me and ask questions, like, “When is it we’re getting Halley’s Comet again?” Or, “What’d you make of the Saturn pictures?”

  I never had to worry about security. When I was younger, for instance, when my mom wanted to go out, she would drop me way down the street at the movie theater. Then, a few times, either because I had sat through a second showing in order to resee my favorite parts, or because Mom accidentally forgot and didn’t pick me up, I had to walk home in the dark. I didn’t think a thing of it. There were these chummy neighbors all along the way.

  “CAN’T WE GET OUT OF HERE? WHEN CAN WE GO?” Mom was asking me.

  It was a couple days later, a Wednesday afternoon. I had been extended on the sofa, my head sandwiched between throw pillows so I wouldn’t have to hear her carp. Our ironing board was set up—a nosy storky bird—aimed at me and waiting for me to press my uniform and something to wear to school the next day.

  “Come on, Lindy,” Mom urged me. “I need for you to explain to them.”

  She meant at the pharmacy.

  Her good looks were going, I decided. Her brown hair was faded, and since she had quit work, she hadn’t been changing her clothes often enough. I planned to iron a fresh something for her, and see if she’d wear it.

  “Do you have to do that? Before we can leave?” she said, whining almost. I was testing the nozzle of the spray-starch can.

  “What would happen if you didn’t get some pills?” I asked her.

  “I’d run out,” she said, and shrugged.

  First I did the collar on my uniform, which was a gingham check and not French-looking, as it ought to have been for a place called the “Chateau” anything.

  “And then what would happen? After you ran out,” I asked Mom.

  “Honey,” she said, and with a sigh, “I just should have told you. I should’ve told you and Pop. I have a little tumor. Like a tumor, and it’s high up in my brain. I can’t sleep well because of it, and I need sleep, or it’ll worsen and be too diminishing, you see. But the pills fix me right up, is all they do. They give me a recharge. That’s how you can think of it. So I don’t need to sleep as much.”

  I finished ironing my uniform. I folded it and put it into a shopping bag so I could take it to school with me on Friday and keep it in my locker. Friday was going to be hell, I knew. There was a school tea planned for the morning, and in the afternoon I would graduate. Friday evening, the Chateau Jimmy was expecting to get crowds and crowds of seniors and their families.

  Grandpa came in from the kitchen. His glasses were on from reading his newspaper. He wiggled a hand through the wrinkled clothes in my laundry basket, which rested on the couch.

  “Tell him about your brain tumor, Mom,” I said.

  “Yeah, brain tumor,” Grandpa said. “It’s sinusitis. It’s just from goldenrod.”

  It was like him to say that. If I ever had a headache, I got it from combing my hair
too roughly, or parting it on the wrong side, according to him. He sat down in his chair. It was a maize color, and had heavy arms. “How does one called The Magician sound? It’s the Fright Theatre feature this weekend.”

  I was thinking that Grandpa was a happier man when my father was around. I could completely forget about my father, these days, unless I was reminded. He had moved to Toledo, several years before, with his company. He had remarried. When he was still with us, though, he and my grandfather would trade jokes, and they’d make the telling of the joke last a long long time, which was the funniest part. Springs and summers, they would take Mom to the trotting races over at Geronimo Downs. They’d go almost nightly, in a white and red convertible they had between them.

  IT WAS THURSDAY, THE MORNING BEFORE GRADUATION. I was cutting school, since it was nothing, just a rehearsal, and getting class rings and individual awards at an assembly— class artist, class-reunion secretary—not anything that involved me. I planned to show up after lunch and maybe pick up my cap and gown.

  Mom and I were on the Shopper’s Special, a bus that ran from Phoenicia to Terre Haute on weekdays. I hoped Mom was going to get her hair done, or buy an outfit for tomorrow, but she hadn’t said she would. The other shoppers on the Special were a couple of lumpy women and a leather man in golfing clothes, and a guy in a maroon suit who had Mom’s whole attention.

  The bus shuddered at a light. Its engine noise and the tremor in the hard seat and the clear early sun were all getting to me, making me drowsy.

  The maroon suit was behind a Chicago newspaper. Mom glanced back at him. “What do you think he does?” she asked me.

  “Could be anything,” I said.

  “No, kiddo. That’s a plainclothesman. You can tell.”

  “He could be,” I said.

  “He is. I believe he’s on here for us.”

  I was very used to this talk, but today I didn’t feel like hearing it. “Please,” I said to Mom.

  “Forget it,” she said.

  She looked young again. “Don’t act up, girls,” the bus driver had teased us when we got on in Phoenicia.