An Amateur's Guide to the Night

by Mary Robison

  “I can do something,” I said to Mom. “I can name the fifteen brightest stars. Want me to? I can give them in order of brightness.”

  Mom seemed stunned by the offer and her face slackened. The concern went out of her eyes. She looked twelve. “Can you do something like that? Did you have to learn it in school, or on your own?”

  “I did it. Here we go. They are Sirius, Canopus, Alpha Centauri, Arcturus, Vega,” I told her, and right on through to old reddish Antares.

  Mom was both smiling and grave, like a person hearing a favorite poem.

  “Mom,” I said, after a minute, “before commencement tomorrow, there’s the Senior Tea. It’s just cookies and junk, but I told them maybe you’d help serve. They wanted parents to be guards for the tables, just so nobody takes a hundred cookies instead of one or two.”

  She was surprised, I could tell. I wondered if she was flattered that I wanted her to be there.

  “Honey, I couldn’t do that,” she said, as though I had asked her to leap over our garage, or jog to Kansas. “I couldn’t do that.”

  The trip to Terre Haute was all the way beside a river. Sometimes, the river was just a large ditch and sometimes it was an actual wild river. Today, it was full to the banks, and we were rolling along in the bus at the same rate as the current.

  In the corner of my sight, I saw Mom fussing with the jumbo purse she had brought. I peeked down into it, and there were her toothbrush and plastic soap box and her cloth hair-curlers. So I knew she was thinking of getting off at Platte and seeing if they had a bed for her at the Institute there. I thought maybe her Dr. Goff, whom she saw, had decided she ought to check in for a bit again. Or, more probably it was her idea.

  THE HOSPITAL WAS MOM’S IDEA, I FINALLY LEARNED from Grandpa, but it turned out they didn’t have space for her, or they didn’t think she needed to get in right then.

  She wasn’t at my graduation ceremony, which was just as well, in one way—I didn’t do a great job, since I had missed rehearsal. During the sitting moments, I wondered about her, though, and I decided that graduation had been one of the chief things upsetting her. She was scared of the “going forward into the world” parts of the commencement speeches.

  Grandpa lied to me. He said he was certain Mom was there, just back in one of the cooler seats, under the buckeye trees. Graduation was outside, see. He said Mom wanted shade.

  LATE THAT NIGHT, WE WERE ALL THREE WATCHING the Fright Theatre feature. A girl in the movie was married to a man who changed into a werewolf and attacked people. Sooner or later, you knew he was going to go after the girl.

  “That poor woman,” Mom kept saying.

  “She’s got it tough, all right,” Grandpa said. “Trying to keep her husband in Alpo.”

  I was exhausted from work. I was nibbling the black kernels and oily salt from the bottom of the popcorn bowl.

  “She has to make sure he’s got all his shots. He’s got to be wormed. Here she comes now, going to give him a flea collar,” Grandpa said.

  I liked being as dragged out as I was. My new apricot robe that Grandpa had made for me was across my legs, keeping them warm. My other graduation gifts, from Mom—really Grandpa—were all telescope related.

  There was a pause in the movie for a commercial. “Take a reading on this,” Grandpa said. He flipped a big white card to me. The card said, “Happy Graduation, Good Luck in Your Future.” It had come from my dad.

  I was still looking at the signature, Your father, when the movie started back up again. “What if Dad were back living with us?” I asked Grandpa and Mom.

  “It would cut down on your mom’s dating,” Grandpa said.

  Mom, concentrating on the television, said, “Uh oh, full moon!”

  “But just suppose Dad were to somehow come back here and live with us,” I said to Mom. I had put down the card and was pulling on my short hair a little.

  “He better not,” she said.

  “You’re damn right, he better not,” Grandpa said.

  I was surprised. He even sounded angry. I guessed I had been wrong, thinking Grandpa missed having Dad as a crony so much.

  I stuffed a pillow behind my head and sat back and listened to the creepy music from the television and to a moth that was stupidly banging on the window screen. It would take a lot for my dad to understand us, and the way we three did things, I thought. He would have to do some thinking.

  “Ah, this couch feels good!” I said. “I could lie here forever.”

  I didn’t know whether or not Mom had heard me. But she was beaming, either way. She pointed to the TV screen, where the werewolf lay under a bush, becoming a person again. She said, “Shh.”

  The Wellman Twins

  “YOU NEVER LIE TO ME,” BLUEY WROTE BEFORE THE nose of his cedar pencil snapped. He shrugged, reread the page. He had meant to come off as someone firm, plain-minded, blunt; someone deliberate. He thought in the past he had too often seemed moony and fragile.

  He was on his hip, on the discreet floor matting. He was comfortable, with his elbow buried in a cushion he had filched from the great couch. He lay near a box speaker—one of six that was wired into the house sound system. The song that raged was “Take Her,” a twenty-minute song with locomotive rhythms, done by an English band called Island of Agathas.

  Bluey thought the music might warm him into his new attitude.

  He kept his writings, his “Letters to Ivy,” in a loose binder that was now so fat you needed two wide rubber bands to keep it square and manageable. There were seventy letters, something in the region of five hundred sheets. He wanted to finish this latest one with a lie. But his pencil was broken and, besides, the lie was so ill-conceived it dissolved in Bluey’s mind even as he was trying to frame it in words: “So I’ll tell you. I’ve met a girl who is lovely, who is a model, who is much older, who is much younger, but wise, and a mermaid in the moonlit breakers. . . .”

  There was noise at the front door—calling and banging. The family dog left his toy, a cherry-red plastic mouse, and went to answer. Bluey followed, shutting up the Island of Agathas as he passed the turntable.

  He opened one of the double doors to Greer, his twin sister, whose arms were busy with a nylon tote, a cased viola, a bottle of champagne, and a fountain of sweet rocket—flowers that were fitted into a tissue-paper cone. She had knee-thumped the door.

  “At last!” she said, and, “Guess what? Sixty-seven tax-free dollars I made! So there!”

  “Yeah, but you spent it on flowers and wine, right?” Bluey said.

  “Up yours,” Greer said.

  She was a street musician, or had been recently. She played to the lunch crowds in Newport. This was instead of having a real summer job, though neither twin had to work just yet. They were provided for by their mother, who was provided for by the life insurance, the stock portfolio, and the investment planning of her late husband, the twins’ father. He was Wellman of Wellman’s Valve in Kingston, Rhode Island. He had never seen his children. He had died during his wife’s pregnancy.

  The twins were one-month alumni of U.R.I., where they had graduated without honors, but had both been pre-med, and had both been accepted at University of Maine’s medical school.

  “You’re not really wearing all that eyebrow makeup. Tell me I’m seeing things,” Bluey said.

  “Lemme by,” Greer said. “Goddamn it, Deuce, stop!”

  Deuce the retriever was bounding at Greer. Bluey hooked the dog’s choke collar with a finger and took the champagne bottle from his sister with his free hand. He let Greer pass, though he gave her a look of impatience.

  Greer went right, to the kitchen.

  Bluey tapped the dog’s flat head very lightly with the bottle. “You get peaceful, I’m warning,” Bluey said, and then loosed the dog and went Greer’s way.

  SHE WAS WHISTLING, ALREADY STACKING TOGETHER a sandwich of raw vegetables on protein bread.

  “What do you do, comb your hair with a scissors?” Bluey said. “And what’
s with the survival wear?”

  Greer was in a shirt with a camouflage pattern. The shirt had deep pockets and long sleeves that were turned back in big rolls over her delicate arms.

  “Is that sandwich for you? It looks like rodent food. It looks like you’re making it for a gerbil or a ground chuck.”

  Greer said, “You don’t mean a ground chuck. Where’s the clover honey, please? Ground chuck is meat. You mean a woodchuck or a groundhog. Maybe a hedgehog.”

  “I mean it looks too dry for a human being to swallow— and, wow, will Mother do a back flip when she sees your hair.”

  The twins’ mother was having her summer in Hawaii, in a time-share condo she had bought into.

  “Are you listening at all, Greer?”

  “Go be someplace else. Give me my booze,” Greer said.

  Bluey did, but said, “You’re lucky you’re still young. Soon your body won’t be able to metabolize these ungodly amounts of alcohol.”

  “Oh, spare us. I’m allowed to celebrate.”

  Bluey remembered the letter he had been writing and hurried to put it away.

  Deuce was in the parlor, coiled on the center seat of the mammoth couch. “You’re not serious,” Bluey said to him. Deuce beat his tail and ducked his head.

  “Leave him alone, too!” Greer shouted.

  Bluey took his notebook and new pages to his room—what had once been his father’s study and at-home office. The walls were tacked over with blank watercolor paper, which was Bluey’s idea, and the furniture was white-painted cane. Matchstick blinds screened the window light. Bluey propped a side chair under the knob of his lockless door.

  DEUCE WAS ALLOWING HIS HAUNCHES TO BE USED AS a pillow for Greer’s head. They were on the sofa—both drunk, Bluey decided.

  “Good. Savor the fruits of your labor. I am jealous, I guess. Not about the money, but of the nerve you must have to stand up and perform in front of an audience. Real people who can react—good or bad—right there to your face. Did you give Deuce some Mumm’s?”

  “Oui,” Greer said.

  “Congratulations on the sixty-seven dollars,” Bluey said.

  “Who’s this different person from an hour ago, Deuce? Do we know this guy?” Greer asked the dog.

  “I like your clothes, too. I like the fatigue pants,” Bluey said.

  Greer did a leg raise. “These pants fought in the D.M.Z.”

  “Aha,” Bluey said.

  “Also, did you know Deuce has a girly friend? Yes, he does. She came calling while you were—whatever you were doing. Getting sweet. She’s a demure red spaniel.”

  “Unh,” said Bluey, sounding defeated and far away.

  “Say, if you’re at loose ends . . .” Greer said.

  “No, I just feel weird.”

  “Well, I was going to suggest you build a nice hangover like me and Deuce are doing. It’s all right. We’re twenty-one, all of us.”

  THE SKY HAD PINKED UP NICELY IN THE WEST, WAS going gray in the east. The twins were on the high back deck, playing canasta on a picnic bench with X-shaped legs. The view behind them, over a kind of porch of leaves, was of nice houses like theirs.

  The next lawn was big like a playing field, and it tilted steeply down. A bare-chested man was fighting the grade, shoving a green mower. His shirt was tied to the mower’s handlebars.

  “That’s Bing,” Greer told Bluey. “Bing Litzinger and his grinding machine kept me from napping, and not only that but Buh-Buh-Bing will get all the insects moving from over there to over here. Yes, he will. Triste but true.”

  “Knock off the French,” Bluey said.

  “Oh, no, Deuce, Bluey the crank is back. Hey, where is Deuce?”

  “I let him run,” Bluey said.

  Greer jumped from the table, went indoors, and was gone for a while. Bluey, wearing only swim trunks and a baseball cap, shuffled the cards as if they could warm him. He heard his sister’s shrieking whistle from the side of the house. Finally, Greer was back, carrying clothes.

  “Dog’s gone forever. Probably eloped,” she said. “Here. These’ll ruin your bad mood.” She traded Bluey’s cap for one of her straw picture hats. Its brim was enormous. She wrapped a long scarf at Bluey’s neck, telling him, “You were cold.” She draped his black blazer over his shoulders.

  “God, I wish you’d sober down,” he said.

  “Paging Dr. Wellman,” Greer said. “You’re wanted in Pre-Op. Stat. Code Blue.”

  “Dr. Wellman, you’re wanted in Detox,” Bluey said.

  Greer sat and dealt. As she fanned her cards, she nodded agreeably, acknowledging each one.

  Bluey watched her, re-aimed his gaze, fidgeted. He said, “I’m sorry, I can’t stand this.” He plucked the straw hat off and sailed it over the deck rail. “Why am I so jittery?”

  “It’s all right,” Greer said. “We’ll get bold. I’ve got some great things stored away.”

  Getting bold was the twins’ name—a name thought up when they were younger—for a session of truth-telling.

  “Let’s crowd the last available boundaries of decency and privacy,” Greer said.

  “Yeah, trample ’em,” said Bluey.

  “Okay, I’ll start. I read your letters to Ivy,” Greer said. “Good start?” she added after a minute.

  Bluey kept a long silence, and his eyes, Greer could see even in the dimming light, blinked too much.

  “Well, I’ll never forgive you. I can’t imagine forgiving you,” he said at last.

  “Naturally. Way to play.”

  Bluey said, “I’ve got to get Deuce.”

  “I’ll wait. No, change that. I’ll wait inside,” Greer said.

  Bluey went barefooted down the deck steps, walking a little sideways to avoid splinters. He ducked through a five-tree orchard of crab apple his father had once devised.

  Bluey was slapping at mosquitoes when he saw the flash of the dog’s silky coat, and then he saw Deuce pile out of tall grass and galumph into Bing Litzinger’s yard. The dog lifted himself onto the birdbath there and drank.

  Bluey was sneaking up on him when Litzinger, who had finished mowing, came from his house.

  “Get him out!” Litzinger called.

  “I’m trying, damn it,” Bluey said. The dog bucked at the sound of Bluey’s voice and sprinted in a meaningless circle.

  “There’s a leash law. I can’t have a dog in the yard,” Litzinger said. He watched the contest as Bluey tried to capture Deuce. The dog was taunting, getting just beyond reach, his butt raised up, his front legs flat on the grass.

  “I know your mother,” Litzinger warned before heading back to his house.

  GREER WAS IN THE KITCHEN, WEARING THE PICTURE hat that she said she had climbed over the deck to retrieve. She was eating a bran muffin and a cup of lemon yogurt.

  Bluey had dragged Deuce with him. The dog’s nails scraped on the polished floor. His tail was stuffed down, his ears back.

  “You’re still purple with rage,” Greer said to Bluey. “Why don’t you crash a dish or two?”

  Bluey freed the dog, straightened, removed a brandy bottle from a cupboard. The ship calendar on the cupboard door flapped. Bluey measured out a full glass. “They do this in movies,” he said, and tried to drink it all. He couldn’t manage even a full swallow.

  “They probably have their stand-ins do it,” Greer said.

  Bluey gasped and breathed for a bit. He said, “Okay, where were we? Ivy, the girl I write to, I met at an Iggy Pop concert. You couldn’t know her; she didn’t go to school with us. She lives in Boston. We were both high when we met. I, you know, liked her. Really, tremendous . . .”

  “Got it,” Greer said.

  “I thought we were high. So we agreed, after that night, we’d keep in touch. Next day, phone call from her. I was very flattered. But the thing being, she wasn’t high the night before. She’s always like that. Babbling. She’s probably got maybe a brain tumor or a limbic disorder. She thinks her brother had something to do with killing Lenno
n. That kind of thing. I mean, I liked her for her looks, but what’s the use?”

  “Bluey, this all sounds like a lie. One of your lies,” Greer said.

  “So who I’m writing to is sort of Ivy, but sort of not, and what would be the point of mailing the letters? Most of all, they’re for me.”

  “Well, that’s a violently unpleasant story if it’s true,” Greer said in a summarizing tone. “Now. What’ve you got to crush me with?”

  The dog, under the table, charged Greer’s shoe—a pale moccasin. She crossed her ankles in halfhearted defense.

  “Nothing,” Bluey said.

  “Don’t be cruel,” Greer said.

  “I have nothing for you. Live with that one, Greer.”

  “Go ahead and gnaw off the whole heel. What the hell,” Greer said to Deuce.

  “Except this,” Bluey said. “Mom told it to me, though it doesn’t mean much. You were not expected. You were not prepared for. Your body was behind mine—in the womb, I mean. Shadowing mine. Our father died and never even knew you were there. Now I’m sorry I told you,” Bluey said.

  “No, don’t be. I think it’s interesting what’s going on. You hoped I’d feel unwanted?”

  “Somewhat. To pay you back for reading my letters,” Bluey said.

  “My, my,” Greer said, and sighed.

  Eventually she said, “I don’t think you’re playing this game well at all, Bluey. I mean, I don’t know which lie is bigger—Ivy of Boston or the shadow in the womb.”

  “Hey,” Bluey said, alarmed.

  “Or my lie. I never read your letters. Relax. I never saw them but for the ‘Letters to Ivy’ title.”

  “You didn’t read them? Never even looked through them?”

  “Nope,” Greer said.

  “Well, someday you were going to get to. You were supposed to,” Bluey said.

  “Look at what the moonlight’s doing to the grape trellis,” Greer said. “Out the window.”

  “You hear me? The letters are to you,” Bluey said.

  “You didn’t have anyone else to write to?” Greer said. She touched her sternum.