COACH
by Mary Robison, 1983

"Coach," from Mary Robison's second collection, An Amateur's Guide to the Night, provides a particularly clear example of what many critics see as the basic flaw of the so-called minimalist narrative style, for it is a story that seems to be all realistic surface with no significant thematic conflict. In brief, the story is about a man, known only as Coach, who has just been bumped up from a high school job to the position as coach of a college freshman football squad. The story, which consists primarily of conversations he has with his wife and daughter and a young man who comes to interview him for the school paper, seems to move along rather aimlessly, with no obvious indication of depth in any of the characters and no overt suggestion that they face a crisis or conflict. The wife wants to rent a small studio where she can get away from the family to pursue her desire to be a painter, the coach is as yet untried in his new job, and the daughter is at a new school. None of these potential conflicts, however, is actualized.

Nonetheless, the reader gradually begins to sense a growing intensity of unarticulated problems that lie beneath the surface of the seemingly inconsequential dialogue, all of them subtly suggesting the coach's loss of an irretrievable past and the family's fear of an unpredictable future. Robison uses two basic narrative methods in the story to create and communicate the delicate and dangerous nature of relationships, even when they are not challenged by obviously disruptive changes and confrontations. The story opens with the potential for conflict as his wife, Sherry, discusses with the coach whether to give the people who own the studio the first month's rent. The coach, drying dishes, "made himself listen" and tells his wife, "I'm thinking." What he is thinking of is a lake he and his wife used to visit; he sees her being towed by a boat through green water, "blonde and laughing on her skis, her rounded back strong, her suit shining red." He says, "Of course, of course, give them the money." Although what could have been a conflict is avoided, the coach's memory is not just incidental; it suggests an unstated longing for something past.

When Daphne, the coach's teenage daughter, enters, she opens the refrigerator and blows her breath in front of the freezer compartment, a seemingly incidental gesture that makes the coach once more lapse into memory, this time of an autumn night when Daphne was eight years old and dressed in oversized shoulder pads and a jersey and helmet for a halftime show. He remembers seeing her left eye twinkling through the helmet ear hole and hearing people say, "Coach's kid." These memory images at the beginning of the story establish an underlying and unspoken preoccupation of the coach with an idyllic past that hovers beneath the surface throughout.

The predominant technique Robison uses to communicate the underlying tension and threat in the story is to put into the mouths of her characters pieces of dialogue about inconsequential activities that, as the story progresses, resonate with an impending sense of the possible breakup of the family. For example, when Daphne hangs onto the refrigerator door, her mother tells her not to, saying, "You'll unhinge things." When Daphne leaves the kitchen, saying that she will be right back, the coach says "to the space she left behind" that he will hold his breath and count the heartbeats.

When Daphne and the coach sit eating ice cream cones at the Dairy Frost and her ice cream melts and threatens to drop off the cone, the coach tells her, "You're losing it, honey." When she swings her legs and shakes the table, he says, "Quit rocking the boat." When Sherry tells the coach that the Dallas Cowboys are soaking their players in a sense-deprivation tank, a "place apart" like her apartment, the coach says, "I like that … A place apart." The coach tells one of his players that if they do not want to win badly enough there is nothing he can do: "That's the worst part about running a team—you can't climb down into your people's hearts and change them." In the final scene the coach is drunk at the kitchen table when Sherry comes in and asks if there is any beer left, for she wants to drown her disappointment that she cannot paint. When the coach says that she can, the story ends with her line "Let's face it … An artist? The wife of a coach?"

The theme of the story centers around personal identity: Sherry is the coach's wife, Daphne is the coach's daughter, and the coach is simply Coach. The story is about how we become the roles we play and never really know who we are. The theme is primarily embodied in the fact that Daphne is trying to find "her people" since the coach has his people (although he does not really know them) and the fact that Sherry is trying to "find herself." "Coach" suggests a significant truth about human experience—that conflicts are not always overt and on the surface but that the most dangerous conflicts, those that threaten to "rock the boat" and "unhinge things," are the ones that seem always to be just beyond articulation.

The coach is an appropriate metaphor for this theme, for as the head of the family, he strives to create a team but can never get inside the hearts of his players—wife and children—and make them change. A family is not a team, however, but a group of individuals who, even as they pull together, often pull apart when they try to follow individual needs rather than the team's needs. Robison knows that stories need not focus only on those times when an eruption takes place; they may legitimately and sensitively deal with the seemingly ordinary reality of the everyday, under which lies the always threatening volcano of human desire and disappointment.

—Charles E. May