Amateurs (36 page)

Dear Ms. Crennel,

I've just finished reading your
God's Good Side,
and my partner can attest that its choicer passages often cried out for recitation. Eventually he moved to another room. Let's not be discouraged over that. I'm glad you came across Mr. Miller's mostly kind profile of me in
Poets & Writers.
You weren't the first to contact me in its wake, but you were the first to do so by traditional post. Perhaps you were pandering to my reported fustiness. I'm sure the young man meant only flattery by calling me “the last of a dying breed,” but still and all, it was an impolite memento mori. I've had a sore throat ever since.

Though I'm not beslobbered just yet from the jaws of Death, I am old, born long enough before your Janice that we wouldn't have overlapped at Palmerville High, had I been fated to attend. She and I are contemporaneous enough, however, for me to feel that I knew her and her milieux. Such an outstanding, easeful job your book does of evoking that period, without once exuding a malodor of mildew, unwashed army jackets, and whatever else might be redolent these days of libraries. Parts brought me back to
Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen, Kinflicks,
and some of those, though nothing feels loudly derivative. The HoJo's scene sings. I'm applauding you now with my frail, parkinsonian hands.

About the ending:maybealittlerushed. A captivating urgency there but something short of the encircling reality that pervades the preceding chapters. I hope we'll have cause to discuss.

I appreciate your candor concerning the Archer Bondarenko business. Tawdry, but it seems you were guilty only of a certain want of circumspection. Ah, but you were careful to save your truly exceptional, your truly original, work for yourself. So, onward! In defeat, defiance! If you are indeed still seeking
representation, we should talk. Normally my signature line excludes my telephone number, but I've made an exception for you, as I did for Menachem Begin. A good time to call would be tomorrow morning between nine and ten. Or suggest another.

Regards,

Richard Parlett

Parlett Whelpdale Kachru

New York, NY 10011

Karyn sat in her saggy lawn chair reading an Italian novel that, by being both genuinely lyrical and deeply boring, was conducive to reflection, to looking up frequently at the sunset, which from top to bottom was deep blue, light blue, pink, and orange. It was beautiful to the cusp of oversweetness. It might have crossed that point had it not been darkened by dragonflies, finches, and blackbirds, maybe some starlings and bats, all black in the early twilight and mingled so that you couldn't always tell if you were seeing a fairly close dragonfly or a distant finch. Maxwell's team, one of four practicing in different territories in the park, was scrimmaging, white helmets versus netted yellow ones.

The wind blew harder. Karyn buttoned up her raincoat with one hand while turning a page with the other, glad she hadn't brought her e-reader this time and could enjoy the dexterity of her fingers as she held the verso in place with her forefinger, turned the recto with her thumb, and quickly moved her finger to the next page, the operation more interesting than the book, though without the book's model she might not have noticed the operation.

There were a few weeks of the football season when sitting in the park during practice was the thing of all things she most wanted to do; when she only had to click on her insect-luring book light for the last half hour of the practice; when it wasn't chilly enough yet to nudge her into the car or to the characterless coffee shop down the road; when the coaches, having made their bracing first and second impressions (her favorite shouted command: “You've got to relax!”), were bending toward lower-volume motivation. She moved her chair from under one of the shade trees around the park's periphery to a spot closer to the scrimmage, wondering as she did if the new vantage would ruin the scene, ruin the moment, if it wasn't already ruined by her awareness that a moment was there to be ruined. But the new spot was fine, maybe better. Her phone vibrated with a note from a friend from her theater days. Yes, the friend said, she would love to work on
The Hangman's Daughter
for next year's Fringe Festival. That made three interested actors and a director. A production like that, Karyn had decided, wouldn't tarnish the play's “purity.” It could be fun.

Voices sounded all around her, of the birds and the variously aged players, of the lulling Italian novelist, the other parents talking to one another or on their phones, teenagers swearing and flirting in and around the skate park, laughing as they leaned against the chain-link fence surrounding the paint-chipped wading pool. Added to all that were sounds of shoulder pads hitting chest protectors, feet and bodies falling on grass, occasional whistles. It was noisy, but in a rounded, ambient way, the park imbued with the solitude and silence that somewhere Austen says only numbers can give, the peace that somewhere Auden says no bird can contradict.

She read a sentence, looked up, reread the sentence, looked up. A running play ended fruitlessly for the offense, and a mom yelled, “You gotta block! You
got
to block!” Some of the parents grew so inflamed, even during these scrimmages. During games, they didn't
always stop short of hectoring the volunteer coaches. Ridiculous, but at times Karyn felt guilty about her comparatively tempered responses, her single claps and pipping cheers, sometimes delayed or misdirected. She probably didn't care as much about the games as some of the other parents did, but she didn't want it thought that she cared less about her son. She didn't want Maxwell to think that, at least. One of her tenderest maternal moments had been holding him after his team lost its big game the previous year, lost it badly on a cold, wet night, the rain abetting fumbles and defeating cleats. He had held back his tears for two hours. They burst forth as he stood under the archway between their living and dining rooms. She could hear the belt of his football pants banging around the dryer in the basement. “I really wanted to win,” he said, “I really wanted to.” His head still tucked easily under her chin then.

Right up to the moment when the first pill was still floating in her mouth at the clinic, she felt a bit less than certain, but she knew that in a month or so it would be okay, that she had always wanted just one, that she wouldn't be lonely forever. Something about the sadness and indifference she'd felt in the hotel that night had given her clarity, an ability, for now, to know what she wanted day to day. She was figuring out how to cut her play to an hour if they were accepted into the Fringe; she was serving meals once a week at a downtown shelter; she and Maxwell were making experimental smoothies. When she needed to, she put on headphones, and Mike Heron sang, “
Me, I know you like I know the song in my soul / It's gonna be all right.
”

She looked down to resume reading, but a twitch of her leg unclipped the book light from the paperback, and when the light hit the ground, she closed the novel without marking her place. A mannish figure walking awkwardly in what seemed to be cycling clothes was scouring the park in the distance. Maxwell was lined up now as wide receiver, all spring-loaded and serious, his fingers drumming the air. The snap was high, but this time the erratic quarterback
responded smoothly, caught the ball in front of his face, surveyed the field, saw a yellow helmet advancing, and threw a spiral nicely attuned to Maxwell's route. Karyn hadn't learned the names of the routes, but she could follow this one's hairlike curve as Maxwell accelerated, his gait somewhat splayed, toward the arcing ball. He readied his hands as he'd been taught to, thumb touching thumb, forefinger touching forefinger, a position that, Karyn had noticed before, formed an interior shape somehow more like a Russian cathedral's onion dome than a mere onion. Right before making the catch, whether he needed to or not, he leapt.

Coffee House Press is an internationally renowned independent book publisher and arts nonprofit based in Minneapolis, MN; through its literary publications and
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www.arts.gov
. Special project support for this title was received from the Jerome Foundation.

Coffee House Press receives additional support from many anonymous donors; the Alexander Family Foundation; the Archer Bondarenko Munificence Fund; the Elmer L. & Eleanor J. Andersen Foundation; the David & Mary Anderson Family Foundation; the Buuck Family Foundation; the Carolyn Foundation; the Dorsey & Whitney Foundation; Dorsey & Whitney LLP; the Knight Foundation; the Matching Grant Program of the Minneapolis Foundation; the Rehael Fund of the Minneapolis Foundation; the Schwab Charitable Fund; Schwegman, Lundberg & Woessner, P.A.; the Scott Family Foundation; the US Bank Foundation; VSA Minnesota for the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council; the Archie D. & Bertha H. Walker Foundation; and the Woessner Freeman Family Foundation.