An Amateur's Guide to the Night

by Mary Robison

  “And what does that mean?”

  “That any shift in the movement is a good sign. This is excellent for Van. A sure turn for the better.”

  “Okay, I’m convinced. But where is he? It’s midnight,” I exaggerated.

  I was lying in bed under the top sheet. I had been waiting and waiting.

  I had left a trail of lights: a spotlight so Van could navigate from the lane, where his uncle would deposit him, to our front porch; the porch light with the yellow anti-insect bulb; a standing floor lamp on inside the foyer; the stairs lit brightly from overhead; a table lamp on in the hallway, and I had removed the manila shade; a seventy-five watter in the reading lamp just inside the bedroom. I listed these for Shirley, and said, “I’m taking no risks.”

  “How would you feel about going to sleep?” Shirley asked me, which was weird because she had never before asked me how I’d feel about anything.

  “Forget it,” I said. “Suppose something happens. I’m the only one within screaming distance. We don’t have one neighbor.”

  “Maybe the real reason you’re staying awake is that you’re hurt and that’s got you charged up,” Shirley said. “Could that be it? The truth now, because you’re sharp enough to see that whether Van comes home or doesn’t, he’ll be fine. He’s going to be fine.”

  “Oh, hell,” I said, realizing. “You talked to Van. You know he’s not going to show.”

  “He’s not going to show,” the marriage counselor said.

  In Jewel

  I COULD BE GETTING MARRIED SOON. THE FELLOW IS no Adonis, but what do I care about that? I’d be leaving my job at the high school. I teach art. In fact, I’d be leaving Jewel if I got married.

  I have six smart students, total, but only two with any talent, both in third period. One of them might make it out of here someday. I don’t know. Jewel is coal mining, and it’s infuriatingly true that all the kids end up in the mine.

  One of my two talented students is a girl. She’s involved with the mine already—works after school driving a coal truck for them. I’ve had her in class since her freshman year. She’s got a ready mind that would have wowed them at the design school in Rhode Island where I took a degree ten or so years ago. “Dirty Thoughts,” she titles all her pieces, one after another. “Here’s D.T. 189,” she’ll say to me, holding up some contraption. She does very clever work with plaster and torn paper bags.

  Jack’s the name of the man I might marry. He’s a sharp lawyer. He looks kind of like a poor relation, but juries feel cozy and relaxed with him. They go his way as if he were a cousin they’re trying to help along.

  Jack’s a miner’s best friend. He has a case pending now about this mammoth rock that’s hanging near the top of a mountain out on the edge of town. And the mountain’s on fire inside. There’s a seam of coal in it that’s been burning for over a year, breaking the mountain’s back, and someday the rock’s going to come tumbling straight down and smush the Benjamin house, it looks like, and maybe tear out part of the neighborhood.

  The whole Benjamin family has seen this in their dreams.

  “Hit the company now,” Jack says. “Before the rock arrives.”

  JACK FIRST MET ME WHEN A STUDENT OF MINE WAS killed a couple years ago, and the boy’s parents hired Jack to file suit against the company. As I understood it, there were these posts every few or so feet in the mine, and the company had saved a buck skipping every third post. Well, Rick, the boy—he was a senior at school but he worked afternoon half-shifts in the mine—was down in the shaft one day, and some ceiling where there wasn’t a post caved in and he died on the spot. Rick was a kid who was never going to be a miner. His ceramics, done for me, weren’t bad, when they didn’t explode in the kiln.

  Jack asked me out for coffee one of those days when court was in recess. We blew a couple of hours at the Ballpark Lounge playing the video game Space Invaders.

  “You could win money at this,” Jack said. “You ought to have your own machine.”

  Don’t I wish. But that’s how Jack thinks: big.

  My gifted student who might get out of Jewel someday is Michael Fitch. “Maybe I’m nuts,” he said to me after homeroom had cleared out one morning. I have him for art and homeroom.

  “I don’t mind,” I said.

  “There’s a lot of noise because I won’t say the Pledge of Allegiance in assemblies,” Michael said. “I refuse.”

  “You got to stay alert from now on, Michael,” I told him. “For the next little bit, you’ll have to be on your toes.”

  He took a pink stick of chalk to the blackboard and worked in thick, porous contours. Clouds, maybe. “I think the entire town’s afraid of me,” he said.

  “Probably,” I said.

  JACK AND I WOULD GO LIVE IN CHARLESTON IF WE got married. We’ve talked about being there by the end of August. He even has a house lined up. Actually, it’s half a house. The downstairs is a crisis center where they take “hot line” calls. Jack says I could work there if I want to work. He got me to spend an afternoon with the people, learning their procedure. They listen to these calls, I found out, and then they more or less repeat back whatever the caller’s just said. Such as “You discovered your dearest friend in bed with your husband.” Then they add something like “You sound angry.”

  Jack thinks I’d be terrific at this sort of thing. He doesn’t realize my worst moments as a teacher are when somebody confides in me.

  Brad Foley, for example. He confessed about some stuff he was going through with his dad, and when we were finished talking, Brad, crying, asked if he could kiss me. I said he could hug me, the poor thing, but just for a second.

  I wouldn’t mind waving good-bye to Jewel. But it would be tough leaving my family. Mom’s all right here, and so is Russell, my big brother. Russell recently got Mom a new clothes washer. He does things like that, and they’re a very contented couple.

  Russell’s nuts, though. I mean, here’s a guy working in three feet of coal every day, contending with a couple kinds of gases that are there, also the dust from the machines, but all he wants is to be allowed to smoke cigarettes. He says it isn’t because of methane that you can’t smoke in the mine, it’s dollars. Most of the miners roll their own cigarettes, you see, which takes a minute or two. So you figure a couple of dozen smokes would cost the company a half hour’s time, every shift.

  I get sad for Russell. The biggest achievement in his life is being respectable. He’d cheat and lie before he’d do anything that’s frowned upon.

  But I was always respectable, I admit. Two years in a row I won the Jaycees’ Good Citizenship award—women’s branch. Really, though, that was for my dad. I couldn’t like Dad, but I often pleased him. He was superstitious about women ever working in the mines, and very confident about his opinions, which weren’t backed by anything but his fears. He would hate that there are five women down there now. If he were alive, he’d be yelling about it.

  The women won’t last long. They’ll get sick or quit for some reason. You can’t blame them—it’s no fun making everyone nervous.

  My fiancé doesn’t get too excited or too blue. He won’t allow himself. He’s learned to take comfort in small things. Say if he finds a word he likes, he speaks it with relish. He makes you enjoy the word with him—its aptness or strength. “I like a shower head that throws an aggressive spray,” he says, and leans on that word “aggressive.” Or he tells you that for supper he can get by gladly with a plate of fresh yellow tomatoes and just a mug of coffee, so long as the coffee is “pitchy.” “Make mine tar,” he says.

  ONE THING THAT BOTHERS ME ABOUT LEAVING JEWEL is that I just wallpapered my bedroom at Mom’s. The wallpaper I put up has a poppy pattern that’s like Matisse.

  Charleston wouldn’t thrill Jack for long, I bet. He’s headed for growth—Atlanta, Houston, D.C.

  You name it and it went wrong for me up in Rhode Island. I got mangled or something. I was at the School of Design there. I finally did graduate, or some
version of me graduated. I really wasn’t present. I’d be walking on Thayer Street and all of a sudden realize I was looking for my reflection in every shop window.

  Those who say you can’t go home again haven’t been to Jewel. To me, it’s more like you can’t leave home.

  Back in Jewel again—surprise—I was fine.

  But imagine teaching at the same high school where you and your whole family went.

  It can’t be good.

  I figured out my dad was a freshman there in 1924.

  Some days, the Rhode Island thing seems like a dream. I’ll be pushing a cart around the market here, say, and it comes to me that I know all the people in the store—first and last names. I know the meat cutter. I was a Camp Fire Girl with Marsha, who works the checkout counter. I went through twelve grades with the milk guy, Lewis, who loads the dairy refrigerator. I even know what grief sends his family running to the therapist at the new guidance center. And, outside, those Leahy brothers, with their beef-red faces, on their bench on the courthouse lawn, I know, and Sue Forrest, pacing around carrying a sandwich board for her son’s bakery, and the guys crowding the Ballpark Lounge and the Servo Hardware.

  So, I like feeling at home. I just wish I didn’t feel it here.

  Little Brad Foley sent me a note of congratulations when he found out from the newspaper that Jack and I got engaged. “I hope for your sake you’ll be moving,” Brad wrote me.

  The note’s still on the shelf of my secretary.

  I don’t throw anything away.

  No, worse—I don’t put anything away. All that I’ve ever owned or had is right out here for you to look at.

  The Nature of Almost Everything

  TELL YOU, AT THIRTY-SIX, MY GOALS ARE TO STAY sober and pay off my MasterCard bill. Right at the moment I’m parked in my boss’s Jaguar on a road above the glen, with CBU-FM rattling bluegrass and the heater on all the way because Yellow Springs is taking a hammering this winter. I have a view of some kids doing a combination kickball and keep-away: genderless children, robotian because of their square bundling, a little spooky in the moon’s skimpy light. I am having a rough time.

  I try meditating, concentrate on the number one, envision a one, chant: “One, one, one, one, one, one, one, one.” It doesn’t help a bit. What baloney.

  I’m an employee of Rad Cookerman, who owns the Cookie’s Convenience Marts, and who runs for mayor every four years but never wins. Cookie just likes himself advertised. If he could get his head up on one of those lighted revolving buckets like Colonel Sanders, he probably would.

  I live on Cookie’s property, in a big bland house behind his small elaborate one, a couple of miles from the Antioch campus here.

  I write speeches for Cookie, only he’s almost never invited to speak, so the job is a real comedown from when I wrote for Senator Secrest, whom I wrote for until he died. I wrote his famous “Tonight, the lights will dim . . .” anti-execution speech, in fact.

  But mostly you’d have to say mine is a cosmetic addition to the Cookerman campaign. I can look classy. For instance, I deeply admire this Chesterfield I’m wearing, and it’s a good thing I stuck it on, because underneath I feel pretty defenseless. I feel stripped of about everything but the unchangeables—like height and eye color. We had a confrontation, Cookie and I, kind of severe.

  He’s made of money, and he pays me well, but he pays me monthly. By now, minus what I had to send the MasterCard folks—my worst charges over the years were for a brass bed frame, a harpsichord, and then, to get over my senator dying, a round-trip to Italy—I’ve practically finished my funds. There’s no dining out for me, and the deal with dining in is that whenever I do, Cookie notices and strolls on back to my place to help me eat my food. This evening, for one, he not only appeared, glad and happy to sup, he dragged along a pal.

  He had, more than once recently, insisted, “Gardenia, you’re going to go gaga over my new night manager.”

  I’m actually called Gardenia.

  Now, I saw instantly why Cookie would assume I’d be compatible with his night manager. If I had a twin, this fellow would be it. Nordic; same crooked nose, and big-boned like me; blond hair probably even cropped by Freddy at Hairsnips. I can’t figure why people want to put you together with an opposite-sex version of yourself, but experience says they do.

  Cookie, through the entire first half hour of supper, held forth on the hero of his youth, Rod Serling. I should get three college credits for the times I’ve listened uncritically to Cookie tell about Mr. Serling’s days at Antioch. And Cookie’s voice is a trial—way down there in Waylon Jennings land, and slow! His sentences take forever.

  This Jag seat has the odor of newness and Cookie’s first-choice scent, Bay Rum.

  So, eventually, Cookie must’ve deduced I wasn’t leveled by his night manager, who, if he possessed the gift of speech, kept it secret. Night manager would point north up the table, say, so that I’d pass him the three possibles before he’d indicate— nod—he had meant the sesame breadsticks.

  Jesus.

  I’m leaning hard into the car door here. The heater’s making contact with only my lower parts. My feet and calves are roasted, the rest of me’s chilled to pain. This sad feeling that’s got me has a manic ass-ugly flip side, I know, and there’s an icy little limbo you get to go through in between.

  Cookie loaded up on me, really. He put me against the ropes. He started by making insinuations about the chicken cacciatore—asking did I get the recipe from the back of a ketchup bottle and exactly how many bottles of ketchup had they told me to use? I can’t say I wasn’t injured. And he made worse remarks, and there began to be, behind his half smile, a look of strain, as if he didn’t want to crush me, but if he had to, he had to. Cookie has a wandering left eyeball, and ordinarily I forget about it. But during his barrage, the eyeball went rolling wild. So much worminess could not be healthy for Cookie, but that is his hard luck. Mine’s how extremely much I would like a margarita, please, or a hot buttered rum. I still have a tomato-y, yes, ketchupy, taste on my tongue, goddamn it.

  I’M OUT OF THE CAR NOW AND DOWN THE STEPS into the glen, though it’s that stark-still kind of cold, and pitch dark. Did I tell you there’ve been murders committed here?

  I’ve caused a sputtering of birds—just birds. I find a lacquered bench that’s so frosted over, my rump goes right-away numb.

  So quiet.

  I’m clenching myself and I’m, in my fashion, praying, because a drinking binge would be a very negative way for me to go, next.

  It’s weird. I’m a complete atheist, but I get a whoosh feeling and something flies off my chest.

  I’m all right, now.

  I wouldn’t take a drink if you forced me.

  Back to the Jag, only this time, no radio. I’ve got to perfect an apology to Cookie for swiping his car. I’ll summon my speech-writing powers. I’ll even enjoy it. The thing is, you take away the call of the cocktail, and I’m happy as a clam.

  Nothing’s It

  RIDING ON THE BACK BED OF THE TRUCK, HIGH ON top of the sacks of mulch, is Devon, wondering where to look. He has already exchanged smiles with the freckle-faced girl in the car following.

  Foss is below, driving in a cabin filled with boxes. Foss owns the nursery where Devon is a laborer. The truck’s headed cross-city, to Foss’s home and, on the way, to Devon’s Newbury Street apartment.

  Winter’s giving Boston a good one. Devon’s face is red, hardened from the cold. He gazes leftward at an impoverished lot of used motorcycles. There are two Suzukis and a worn Bonneville there that Devon regards with a longing growl. He switches his face at some passing brownstones, makes up an expression, and nods at a second-story window that has a Virgin Mother statue on the sill. A horn pips. The freckle-faced girl waves farewell as her Datsun veers into the turnoff lane. Devon grins helplessly, feeling dumb. Another car with another girl moves into position behind the nursery truck. Devon opens his hand on his thigh and stares at the fingers, studyin
g nothing.

  They reach Back Bay. Foss puts half the truck on the runner of sidewalk in front of Devon’s building and bumps to a stop. “All right!” he yells back as Devon drops easily down. “See you bright and early! Too damned early!”

  “Got you!” Devon says, and the truck guns off.

  Devon likes Foss, but supposes he shouldn’t. They are roughly the same age—both into their thirties—and Foss owns the business where Devon is only a worker. Today, they worked Haymarket Cemetery. Foss ran a backhoe while Devon shoveled and then raked litter.

  Inside the granite building where he has now lived a month, Devon checks the mail, takes the steps on the fly, feeds his key into the apartment’s lock.

  “It’s me, sorely cold,” he says to the front room. He closes the door behind him with a slamming kick, not because he is angry, but so Nobuko will know he’s home.

  From the bedroom comes the monotonous putter of the movie projector.

  Nobuko is on the bed, in her blue silk pajamas. Behind her, on a bureau, a Super-8 machine is running through a reel, spraying light. Nobuko, lying flat, has a square of laundry cardboard which she holds up into the fan of illumination. She catches a piece of face, a tangle of moving shrubs, part of a car in bright color on the card. They flicker away. She tilts the card and a laughing face distorts— stretching horizontally. She runs the image farther left, until the eyes and mouth tear, then lets the picture spill off entirely.

  “It’s me,” Devon says.

  “Hello,” Nobuko says, and sighs.

  THE MOVIES ARE FROM DEVON’S FAMILY. NOBUKO has spliced and cemented together ten or twelve reels—a Wyoming trip, Devon’s B.U. graduation, Devon’s grandfather’s retirement house, Devon lifting weights in a garage.

  “I’m aching with cold,” he says.

  He stands beside Nobuko. On the card now is a bit of sky from a movie of Devon’s new dog, made by Devon’s older brother when Devon was thirteen. Nobuko shakes her arm and the blue clouds undulate like water.