An Amateur's Guide to the Night

by Mary Robison

  “No one else to write to,” Bluey echoed.

  Greer pressed back in her chair seat, her neck stiffening. She spoke slowly and purposefully, as though Bluey were a stranger. “Then I shall read them. Sometime. Whenever it is to your liking.”

  “No, forget it. I don’t think so,” Bluey said.

  “Well, were you sort of kidding about their being written to me?” Greer asked.

  “They aren’t to anybody, really. Or they’re to every girl. Only I don’t deeply know any other girl. They’re to a fantasy I have in my brain.”

  “Aw, Bluey, wait awhile,” Greer said. “Lots of things could change for you. It doesn’t seem like it, but they’ve got to, don’t they?” Greer said. “Don’t they?”

  Coach

  THE AUGUST TWO-A-DAY PRACTICE SESSIONS WERE sixty-seven days away, Coach calculated. He was drying breakfast dishes. He swabbed a coffee cup and made himself listen to his wife, who was across the kitchen, sponging the stove’s burner coils.

  “I know I’m no Rembrandt,” Sherry said, “but I have so damn much fun trying, and this little studio—this room—we can afford. I could get out of your way by going there and get you and Daphne out of my way. No offense.”

  “I’m thinking,” Coach said.

  His wife coasted from appliance to appliance. She swiped the face of the oven clock with her sponge. “You’re thinking too slow. Your reporter’s coming at nine and it’s way after eight now. Should I give them a deposit on the studio or not? Yes or no?”

  Coach was staring at the sink, at a thread of water that came from one of the taps. He thought of the lake place where they used to go in North Carolina. He saw green water being thickly sliced by a power boat; the boat towing Sherry, who was blonde and laughing on her skis, her rounded back strong, her suit shining red.

  “Of course, of course, give them the money,” he said.

  Their daughter, Daphne, wandered into the kitchen. She was dark-haired, lazy-looking, fifteen. Her eyes were lost behind bangs. She drew open the enormous door of the refrigerator.

  “Don’t hang, Daphne, you’ll unhinge things,” her mother said. “What are you after?”

  “Food mainly,” Daphne said.

  Sherry went away, to the little sun patio off the kitchen. Coach pushed the glass door sideways after her and it smacked shut.

  “Eat and run,” he said to Daphne. “I’ve got a reporter coming in short order. Get dressed.” He spoke firmly but in the smaller voice he always used for his child.

  “Yes, sir,” Daphne said. She broke into the freezer compartment and ducked to let its gate pass over her head. “Looks bad. Nothing in here but Eggos.”

  “I ate Eggos. Just hustle up,” Coach said.

  “Can I be here for this guy?” Daphne asked.

  “Who guy? The reporter? Nuh-uh. He’s just from the college, Daph. Coming to see if the new freshman coach has three heads or just two.”

  Daphne was nodding at the food jars racked on the wide refrigerator door. “Hey, lookit,” she said. She blew a breath in front of the freezer compartment and made a short jet of mist.

  Coach remembered a fall night, a Friday-game night, long ago, when he had put Daphne on the playing field. It was during the ceremonies before his unbeaten squad had taken on Ignatius South. High School. Parents’ Night. He had laced shoulder pads on Daphne and draped the trainer’s gag jersey—number 1/2—over her, and balanced Timsomebody’s helmet on her eight-year-old head. She was lost in the getup, a small pile of equipment out on the fifty-yard line. She had applauded when the loudspeaker announced her name, when the p. a. voice, garbled by amplification and echo, had rung out, “Daughter of our coach, Harry Noonan, and his wife—number one-half, Daphne Noonan!” She had stood in the bath of floodlights, shaking as the players and their folks strolled by—the players grim in their war gear, the parents tiny and apologetic-seeming in civilian clothes. The co- captain of the team, awesome in his pads and cleats and steaming from warm-up running, had palmed Daphne’s big helmet and twisted it sideways. From behind, from the home stands, Coach had heard, “Haaa!” as Daphne turned circles of happy confusion, trying to right the helmet. Through the ear hole her left eye had twinkled, Coach remembered. He had heard, “God, that’s funny,” and “Coach’s kid.”

  ON THE SUN PORCH NOW, HIS WIFE WAS DOING A SET of tennis exercises. She was between Coach and the morning sun, framed by the glass doors. He could see through the careless weave of her caftan, enough to make out the white flesh left by her swimsuit.

  “I knew you wouldn’t let me,” Daphne said. She had poured a glass of chocolate milk. She pulled open a chilled banana. “I bet Mom gets to be here.”

  “Daph, this isn’t a big deal. We’ve been through it all before,” Coach said.

  “Not for a college paper,” Daphne said. “Wait a minute, I’ll be right back.” She left the kitchen.

  “I’ll hold my breath and count the heartbeats,” Coach said to the space she had left behind.

  They were new to the little town, new to Pennsylvania. Coach was assuming charge of the freshman squad, in a league where freshmen weren’t eligible for the varsity. He had taken the job, not sure if it was a step up for him or a serious misstep. The money was so-so. But he wanted the college setting for his family—especially for Daphne. She had been seeming to lose interest in the small celebrity they achieved in high-school towns. She had acted bored at the Noonans’ Sunday spaghetti dinners for standout players. She had stopped fetching plates of food for the boys, who were too game-sore to get their own. She had even stopped wearing the charm bracelet her parents had put together for her—a silver bracelet with a tiny megaphone, the numerals 68—a league championship year—and, of course, a miniature football.

  Coach took a seat at the kitchen table. He ate grapes from a bowl. He spilled bottled wheat germ into his palm. On the table were four chunky ring binders, their black leatherette covers printed with the college seal—which still looked strange to him. These were his playbooks, and he was having trouble getting the play tactics into his head.

  “Will you turn off the radio?” he yelled.

  The bleat from Daphne’s upstairs bedroom ceased. A minute later she came down and into the kitchen. She had a cardboard folder and some textbooks with her. “Later on, would you look at this stuff and help me? Can you do these?” she asked Coach.

  He glanced over one of her papers. It was penciled with algebra equations, smutty with erasures and scribbled-out parts. “I’d have to see the book, but no. Not now, not later. I don’t want to and I don’t have time.”

  “That’s just great,” Daphne said.

  “Your mother and I got our algebra homework done already, Daph. We turned ours in,” Coach said. “This was in nineteen fifty-six.”

  “Mom!” Daphne said, pushing aside the glass door.

  “Forget it,” Sherry said.

  2

  TOBY, THE BOY SENT FROM THE ROOTER TO INTERVIEW Coach, was unshaven and bleary-eyed. He wore a rumpled cerise polo shirt and faded Levi’s. He asked few questions, dragging his words. Now and then he grumbled of a hangover and no sleep. He yawned during Coach’s answers. He took no notes.

  “You’re getting this now?” Coach said.

  “Oh, yeah, it’s writing itself, I’m such a pro,” Toby said, and Coach wasn’t certain if the boy was kidding.

  “So, you’ve been here just a little while. Lucky you,” Toby said. “Less than a month?”

  “Is that like a question? It seems less than less than a month—less than a week—a day and a half,” Coach said.

  For the interview, he had put on white sports slacks and a maroon pullover with a gold collar—the college’s colors. The pullover he had bought at Campus World. The clothes had a snug fit that flattered Coach and showed off his flat stomach and heavy biceps.

  He and Toby were on either end of the sofa in the living room of the house, a wooden two-story Coach had found and would be paying off for decades, he was sure
.

  Toby said, “Well, believe it or not, I’ve got enough for a couple sticks, which is shoptalk among we press men for two columns. If you’re going to be home tomorrow, there’s a girl who’ll come and take your picture—Marcia. She’s a drag, I warn you.”

  “One thing about this town, there aren’t any damn sidewalks, and the cars don’t give you much room if you’re jogging,” Coach said, standing up.

  “Hey, tell me about it. When I’m hitching, I wear an orange safety poncho and carry a red flag and paint a big X on my back. Of course, I’m probably just making a better target,” the reporter said.

  “I jog down at the track now. It’s a great facility, comparable to a Big Ten’s. I like the layout,” Coach said.

  “Okay, but the interview’s over,” Toby said.

  “Well, I came from high schools, remember. In Indiana and Ohio—good schools with good budgets, mind you, but high schools, nonetheless.”

  “Yeah, I got where you’re coming from,” Toby said.

  “Did you need to know what courses I’ll be handling? Fall quarter, they’ve got me lined up for two things: The Atlantic World is the first one, and Colloquium on European Industrial Development, I think it is. Before, I always taught World History. P.O.D., once or twice.”

  “That three-eighty-one you’re going to teach is a tit course, in case nobody’s informed you. It’s what we call lunch,” Toby said.

  “It’s, in nature, a refresher class,” Coach said.

  “Yeah, or out of nature,” Toby said.

  DAPHNE CAME FROM THE LONG HALL STEPS INTO the living room. Her dark hair was brushed and lifting with static. Her eyes seemed to Coach larger than usual, and a little sooty around the lashes.

  “You’re just leaving, aren’t you, buster?” Coach said to her.

  “Retrieving a pencil,” Daphne said.

  “Is your name really Buster?” Toby asked.

  “Get your pencil and scoot. This is Toby here. Toby, this is my daughter, Daphne,” Coach said.

  “Nice to meet you,” Daphne said. She slipped into a deep chair at the far corner of the long living room.

  “Can she hear us over in that county?” Toby said. “Do you read me?” he shouted.

  Daphne smiled. Coach saw bangs and her very white teeth.

  “Come on, Daph, hit the trail,” he said.

  “I’ve got a joke for her first,” Toby said. “What’s green and moves very fast?”

  “Frog in a blender,” Daphne said. “Dad? Some friends invited me to go swimming with them at the Natatorium. May I?”

  “You’ve got to see the Nat. It’s the best thing,” Toby said.

  “What about your class, though? She’s in makeup school here, Toby, catching up on some algebra that didn’t take the first time around.”

  Toby wrinkled his nose at Daphne. “At first, I thought you meant makeup school, like lipstick and rouge.”

  “I wish,” Daphne said.

  She slipped her left foot from her leather sandal and casually stroked the toes.

  “She’s a nut for swimming,” Coach said.

  “You’ll be so bored here. Most nights, your options are either ordering a pizza or slashing your wrists,” Toby told Daphne.

  “Oh,” she said, rolling her chin on her shoulder in a rather seductive way.

  “Take it from Toby,” he said.

  Coach let Toby through the front door, and watched until he was down the street.

  “He was nice,” Daphne said.

  “Aw, Daph. That’s what you say about everybody. There’s a lot better things you could say—more on-the-beam things.”

  “I guess you’re mad,” she said.

  Coach went to the kitchen, to sit down with his play-books again. Daphne came after him.

  “Aren’t you?” she said.

  “I guess you thought he was cute,” Coach said. He flapped through some mimeographed pages, turning them on the notebook’s silver rings. “I don’t mean to shock you about it, but you’d be wasting your time there, Daph. You’d be trying to start a fire with a wet match.”

  Daphne stared at her father. “That’s sick!” she said.

  “I’m not criticizing him for it. I’m just telling you,” Coach said.

  3

  “THIS IS COMPLETELY WRONG,” COACH SAID SADLY. He read further. “Oh, no,” he said. He drowned the newspaper in his bath water and slogged the pages over into a corner by the commode.

  His wife handed him a dry edition, one of the ten or twelve Rooters Daphne had brought home.

  Sherry was parallel to Coach on the edge of the tub, sitting with her back braced against the wall. “Oh, cheer up,” she said. “Nobody reads a free newspaper.”

  Coach quartered the dry Rooter into a package around Toby’s article. “Well, I wasn’t head coach at Elmgrove, and I sure wasn’t Phi Beta Kappa. And look at this picture,” Coach said.

  “What’s so wrong with it?” Sherry said.

  “Where did he get that you were at Mt. Holyoke? And I didn’t bitch about the sidewalks this much.”

  “You didn’t?” Sherry said. “That’s almost too bad. I thought that was the best part of the article.”

  Coach slunk farther into the warm water until it crowded his chin. He kept the newspaper aloft. “Oh, come on, give me some credit here! Don’t they have any supervision over in Journalism? I don’t see how he could get away with this shit. It’s an unbelievably sloppy job.”

  “It’s just a dinky article in a handout paper, Coach. What do you care? It wouldn’t matter if he said we were a bright-green family with scales,” Sherry said.

  “He didn’t think of that or he would have. This breaks my heart,” Coach said.

  “Daph liked it,” Sherry said.

  Coach wearily chopped bath water with the side of his hand and threw a splash at the soap recess in the tiled wall. “I tell you, I’m going to be spending my whole first year here explaining how none of it’s true.”

  “What difference does true make?” Sherry said.

  4

  COACH WAS SEATED AWKWARDLY ON AN IRON STOOL at a white table on the patio of the Dairy Frost. Daphne was across from him, fighting the early evening heat for her mocha-fudge cone. She tilted her head at the cone, lapping at it.

  “You aren’t saying anything,” Coach said.

  “Wait,” Daphne said.

  She worked on the cone.

  “I’ve been waiting.”

  “If you two want to separate, it’s none of my business,” she said.

  They were facing the busy parking lot when a new Pontiac turned in off the highway, glided easily onto the gravel, took a parking slot close by. In the driver’s seat was a boy with built-up shoulders—a boy who looked very familiar to Coach. In back was a couple in their fifties—the boy’s parents, Coach thought—both talking at once.

  “Have I been spilling all this breath for nothing? Not a separation,” Coach said. “Not anything like it.”

  “All right, not,” Daphne said. She stopped in her attack on the cone long enough to watch the Pontiac boy step out. Dark brown ice cream streamed between her knuckles and down the inside of her wrist.

  “You’re losing it, honey,” Coach said.

  Daphne dabbed around the cone and her hand, making repairs.

  “Hell, real trouble your father wouldn’t tell you about at a Dairy Frost. This apartment your mom found is like an office or something. A studio for her to go to and get away every now and then. That kid’s in my backfield. What the hell’s his name?”

  They watched as the young man took orders from his parents, then went inside the Dairy Frost. He looked both wider and taller than the other patrons, out of their scale. His rump and haunches were thick with muscle. His neck was fat but tight.

  “Bobby Stark!” Coach said, and smiled very quickly at the parents in the Pontiac. He turned back to his daughter.

  “She wants to get away from us,” Daphne said.

  “Definitely not. S
he gave me a list, is how this whole thing started. She’s got stuff she wants to do, and you with your school problems and me with the team—we’re too much for her, see? She could spend her entire day on us, if you think about it, and never have one second for herself. If you think about it fairly, Daphne, you’ll agree.”

  Daphne seemed to consider. She was focused on the inside of the Dairy Frost building, and for a while she kept still.

  “That guy looks dumb. One of the truly dumb,” she said.

  “My halfback? He’s not. He was his class salutatorian,” Coach said.

  “He doesn’t know you.”

  “Just embarrassed,” Coach said. “Can we stick to the point, Daph? And quit rocking the boat. Look what you’re doing.” Daphne’s arm was on the table and she was violently swinging her legs under her chair.

  She made a sigh and marched over to a trash can to deposit her slumping cone. Then she washed up at the children’s drinking fountain and rejoined Coach, who had finished his Brown Cow but had kept the plastic spoon in his mouth.

  “What was on this list of Mom’s?” Daphne asked.

  “Adult stuff,” Coach said.

  “Just give me an example.”

  Coach removed the plastic spoon and cracked it in half.

  “Your mother’s list is for five years. In that time, she wants to be speaking French regularly. She wants to follow up on her printmaking.”

  “This is adult stuff?” Daphne said.

  Coach raised a hand to Bobby Stark. Stark had three malt cups in a cardboard carrier and he was moving toward the parking lot.

  “Hey, those all for you?” Coach called out.

  “I got a month to get fat, Coach. You’ll have five months to beat it off me,” the boy called back.

  The people at some of the tables around Coach’s lit up with grins. Bobby Stark’s parents were grinning.

  “Every hit of that junk takes a second off your time in the forty—just remember that!” Coach shouted.

  Stark wagged his head ruefully, his cheeks blushing. He pretended to hide the malts behind his arm.

  “Duh,” Daphne said in a hoarse voice. “Which way to the door, Coach?”