“Why?” said Margaret.
“We need the room for the house shoes.”
He’d already placed the order: eight dozen pairs of rubber-soled oxfords, each rentable for a nickel. Maybe that would convince Margaret to retire. She’d always been a persnickety woman, but her persnicketiness acquired teeth as she aged. She had a particular horror concerning the ground and the human foot. Feet were the lowest part of the human anatomy. She didn’t even like seeing a stranger’s anklebone.
“How wonderful!” Margaret said when the house shoes came in.
“You don’t mind?” said Arch.
“Keep the lanes much cleaner! We won’t have the general public dragging in who-knows-what on their shoes!”
The shoes meant that Margaret spoke to everyone, asked them a piece of personal information. Sometimes the men didn’t know their shoe size and had to defer to their wives, or asked Margaret to look and guess. (These numbers Margaret committed to memory, to show off the next time.) Afterward, she wielded a giant can of Shu-ke-Ko disinfectant, which she sprayed into the open mouths of the shoes. A smart shot left, a smart shot right, miraculous sanitation! What she loved most was the warm leather of the returned shoes, the dark mushroomy smell of their recent occupation. The big shoes of the big men were her favorite. When those came back, Margaret pinched them together at the instep and felt the snug heat off the insole before she chilled them with her can of disinfectant. If she could have got away with it, she would have slipped her feet into them, for foot-to-foot communion. She had always hated feet because she had always loved them.
The long bar along the left wall went next, and the gum-stained pool tables, and Arch put in machines in their place: cigarette; baseball; a red Coke machine with glass bottles that you pulled out longwise by the neck. A jukebox (a terrible choice, in such clatter); pinball machines, a whole line of them, with the newest invention, flippers, and a big sign that said FOR ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES ONLY: NO WAGERING. A new strength tester. A love rater. HOT STUFF, the love rater told Arch Truitt.
“Oh dear,” said Cracker, who turned out to be A COLD FISH.
“See, darling?” said Arch. “It’s broken, it doesn’t know what it’s talking about.”
What Arch wanted removed was not just the old oak, nor the unused and outdated amusements, but also the past entirely: the alley his father had presided over, all the possible ghosts. The Ghoster, K. D., had ended up publishing a small article in True Ghost Stories, illustrated with his inconclusive photos, undoctored, and including the story of Leviticus Sprague, M.D., an apparent victim of spontaneous combustion who one night had gone up. So the Bowlaway got some ghost tourists, witch-ridden and twitchy people who’d gone to Salem and figured they might as well make the trip south to Salford: the quiet sort who dressed like puritans themselves, as well as the loudmouths who liked horror movies. Ghost tourists rented lanes and then didn’t bowl, trying to keep the racket down. One day the Bowlaway was visited by a pair of women who called themselves combusters, a pair of sisters with tallow complexions and kerosene breath. You could tell they longed to burn, to be burnt, to burn somebody else. The brunette sister had sweet cutthroat dark eyes, the other was a champagne-cork blonde; the one as excitable as a book of matches, the other as still as unpoured accelerant. They’d brought a plaque they wanted to put up that said,
ON THIS SPOT
LEVITICUS SPRAGUE, M.D.
A VICTIM OF SPONTANEOUS COMBUSTION
“he is missed”
“No,” said Arch Truitt. No more of the past. No more of the forgotten past.
“Why not?” said the brunette. He felt a flutter of admiration for her. She seemed the sort of woman who might murder in the name of love.
“All right,” he said at last. But nobody knew where the spot was, and the plaque was installed behind the counter, where it could be hidden by the house shoes.
Cracker Graham wouldn’t live in an apartment over a bowling alley, though she understood that wherever they moved, her mother-in-law would follow. Her cousins owned a red empire sofa that could never be abandoned; she herself had inherited a clawfoot buffet with a cracked tilted mirror. Previously she’d thought of the buffet as an elderly relative who needed to be taken care of—it wasn’t its fault that it couldn’t converse with the rest of the furniture—but now that she had a mother-in-law, the mother-in-law seemed like a piece of furniture. She would have to be installed somewhere.
Cracker’s mother gave them the down payment to buy the house on Somefire Hill, a durable Victorian built around the time of Supersum but habitable. Margaret complained, and moaned, and declared she would miss her kitchen—really, just a hissing stove, an old refrigerator with a round rattling monitor top—and said she wouldn’t go, and when she finally walked into her room at the house, burst into tears.
“I’m sorry,” said Cracker.
Margaret shook her head. What she couldn’t say: all she had ever wanted was a room like this for her own, she had gone to work as a baby nurse for it, had married for it, had children for it—she’d wanted it so long she’d become afraid of her longing, as many a religious heart decides to spurn what it desires. Now here it was: a double bed with a new mattress and two feather pillows, a pale purple chenille bedspread, a nightstand with a glass lamp flush and lumpy as the bedspread, a rag rug, a window with a balustrade, which looked out over the garden filled with flowers—Margaret didn’t know what sort of flowers, she had always hated people who knew the names of things: birds, flowers, the constellations. Show-offs. Flowers themselves she loved, that flat-faced purple sort and the ones that looked like fireworks and the ones that smelled of lilac—why, they were lilacs, weren’t they, even she knew that.
“I’m sorry,” said Cracker again, and Margaret took her hand and squeezed it and in a voice of love and gratitude said, “You should be.”
A pair of inventors had installed some automatic pinsetter prototypes at Whalom Park in Lunenburg, and the Arch Truitts went to see them. The machine swept the pins into the pit, brought them up on a conveyer belt, flung the balls back to the bowlers the way the pinbodies always had, with one good toss and gravity. Breathtaking, in a way, and also frightening: they did not work with humans, as the pinball machines did, but replaced them. Afterward, Cracker wanted to ride the Whalom Park roller coaster, and Arch pointed out that she was pregnant.
True enough, but she said, “So?”
“No wife of mine—”
“How many wives you got? That makes it sound like more than one.”
“Sometimes it feels like it,” he said. He set his hand on the underside of her stomach, which was bossy with child. He knew how to run his hands over a woman’s anatomy—through clothing or not—as though his palm were magnetic, as though her soul were ductile, pulled around the surface of her skin. He did this now. Cracker shuddered. It astounded her that she’d fallen in love with him through the mail. He had a particular mesmerizing smell. She couldn’t tell where it emanated from. Breath? Lungs? The interior of his nose? It seemed to come in puffs, though she could also detect it in the shallow wells of his collar bones, behind his ear: clean heat, starch ironed into a shirt, the sun on bedsheets. She thought, I could find you in the dark. Maybe it was her, too. This was the scent of the spell they cast together, what people meant when they spoke of chemistry.
“No,” he said with certainty. “It’s not safe.”
She looked at the Flyer Comet in all its paleontological beauty. “I bet you can’t fall asleep on it. Not even you.”
He got a thinking look at that, then shook his head. “I have to put my foot down.”
Later, this would be one of her biggest grievances against him, though she couldn’t say why. Motherhood ruined her for roller coasters—it rearranged her inner ear, the nausea center of her brain: now when she looked at one she felt sick, though it wasn’t like some lost pleasures, what did I ever see in that? She knew exactly what she’d lost, the plunging exhilaration of being dropped, r
escued, dropped again, delivered to your beginning. She had wanted to ride the roller coaster. Arch wouldn’t let her. It’s amazing it wasn’t listed in her writ of divorce.
“So we’ll get them,” said Arch.
She nodded. He’d been right about everything so far, every machine and modernization. Still, she’d worked as a pinsetter as Arch had not, and she knew that while it was better to have a machine sweep up the pins, pour them into the apparatus, set them down, it was sadder, too. Hand-setting was backbreaking, dangerous work, appreciated by nobody, the quietest thing that happened in a candlepin alley, a collaboration between two people.
They had to smash apart the pinsetters’ shelf to make room for the machinery. The sound of the cracking wood was the most violent thing she’d ever heard, like bones, and she burst into tears. She’d loved that shelf and she had caused it to be broken.
“Why are you crying, honey?” Arch asked her.
She didn’t know. She wanted to write to Roy to tell him, to ask. He might understand but he might not care.
The sound of the Bowlaway, in the 1950s! It was like a piano tumbling down a flight of stairs, then panting in pain. Arch had a knack for fixing the various machines, so he loved them the way anyone loves something or someone who is easily humbled and easily cheered. Children screamed in the alleys because they could. Bowlers shouted conversation. Babies cried, and their parents laughed at them, said, do your worst, kid. One of these babies was Amy Truitt, Amy of the fear of falling and the depthless sorrow, hiccupping Amy, shrieking Amy, Amy who smelled like Arch did, sweet and clean. It was something that ran in the family, like eye color and the width of feet.
When had Cracker stopped bowling? She had started during the war—she was no LuEtta Mood; that is, she was mortal—but she understood physics. She could convert spares with the exactitude of a surgeon. The problem was that the game, the long game, didn’t interest her. Not the story of it. She didn’t care if she won, she didn’t care if she improved. (Later Arch would say, “That was the problem with you. You never wanted to win.”) She wished she could pinset for Arch, but a robot had taken her job.
Instead she watched, along with everyone else. When Arch rolled, it was as though he knew, strike or split, half Worcester or full. He didn’t make it happen, he foresaw it, turning away as the ball made its way down the alley. He smiled no matter what. LAUGHING ARCH TRUITT, the trade papers called him. He liked twenty-four-hour tournaments, tournaments to a thousand. The man could bowl forever. The automatic pinsetters kept up; as many people came to see them as the human bowlers. You could scarcely see the nineteenth century at the Bowlaway. Only the iron columns, the one doll high above. Elsewhere it was plastic, and ringing bells. Was Arch prescient, or simply a modern man who liked modern things? The game had changed, pins thicker, balls standard. A good bowler—Arch, for instance—could top 200 in a game, though it wasn’t easy.
The overnights he dazzled, like a character from a tall tale—some of the old-timers who came around remembered LuEtta Mood, and told stories grown Bunyanesque: she bowled six days straight and only quit to go to church. She beat every woman in the house then every man then all comers and they told her to stop. She would not stop.
’Course, they said, that was then, and she was a girl. Reckon Arch could beat her. My money’d be on Arch, for sure.
No surprise when the local television station came, wanting him to bowl in front of the cameras. Not at Truitt’s—the lanes were a funny length, dreamt up by a Victorian woman, they’d never do for a tournament—but at the new house in Boston, the Bowladrome. He bought handsome shirts it turned out he couldn’t wear on TV—he had a weakness for loud patterns, a way to look a little ridiculous on purpose instead of by accident—and got his hair cut once a week. Bowling was made for television: unlike football, baseball, basketball, you didn’t have to shrink it down to watch. It was already box shaped. It already had suspense; its quiet moments (the ball headed toward the pins) were as thrilling as its loud ones (their eventual meeting). On national television, it was all tenpin bowling, brutish and rewarding and sponsored by beer companies. New Englanders required candlepins. Candlepins for Dollars: a modest game for modest prizes, Saturday at noon. “I’m one step up from a test pattern,” Arch liked to say, but he loved it.
He loved bowling. He wished he didn’t: it felt like a family curse, one that Roy—who sent postcards from Lisbon and Belize and Tenerife, who had no dependents and no obligations—had escaped.
It is a curse to be good at something, Arch thought. He would take comfort where he could.
The Unrelenting Baby
All babies are beautiful,” said Margaret dubiously, examining hiccupping Amy Truitt, then five months old. “When’s the christening?”
“No christening,” said Cracker. The very verb! To turn a baby more Christlike.
“You were christened your own self.”
“No I wasn’t,” said Cracker. “I’m Jewish. That’s why we got married at City Hall.”
They were standing in the new kitchen then. Margaret closed the refrigerator as though it were a dirty book that had caught her unawares. “How are you Jewish?”
“Well, my mother is.”
Margaret closed her eyes and tried to remember Cracker’s mother, who lived now, already, in Florida. She reviewed the evidence—shortness, bad eyesight, a discombobulating glamour—and found it convincing.
“Well, that’s her,” she said. “My granddaughter will be christened. That’s how that works.”
The trick was, Cracker thought, keeping secrets from everybody. Margaret need never find out that because Cracker was Jewish (because her mother was), this meant Amy was, too. Her own mother need never hear of the christening itself.
Her own mother had been maternally standoffish, and Cracker had worried she would be likewise. Then she worried that she would be the opposite, she would crawl into their beds, watching them sleep, furious that she didn’t know the content of their dreams. She would demand to know every first-star, birthday-candle, wishbone-splitting, wishing-well wish. She would say, over and over, the thing she would never say to a man: Do you love me? It was all she ever wanted to know.
Cracker held still and waited. She always had. Once somebody came close, then she could love, she was a pond of love, a lake. Depthless, she believed. Maybe she was right. In high school when her friends talked of crushes and marriage, Cracker kept mum. It didn’t feel like fear, it was deeper, evolutionary, syncopal: talk of love lowered her blood pressure into the fainting zone. When Davey Cotter kissed her in the Intimate Apparel department of Grover Cronin, she had been surprised: she didn’t particularly like him, but how to send him away? She had an idea she wasn’t supposed to. She let him kiss her that day, and for months afterward.
Then Arch. Nothing cautious about Arch! Why everybody loved him: he was a spendthrift. Munificent. In his first letter: Had a dream with you. Want to hear it? You were making me toast, and laughing. You rode away on an old-fashioned bicycle, the kind with a big front wheel. You looked beautiful. I take this as a sign I should write.
If you came to her with love, she loved you. Even as a mother it was her way. That’s why you hold still. It’s a kind of camouflage, a blending into the native tree bark: I don’t care, I don’t care, love me or don’t.
You better love me.
It worked. The children, those preposterous foreigners, declared their love even before they spoke the language, came and lay upon her and kissed her, doe-eyed, serious, or laughing uproariously. “You’ll spoil them!” her mother-in-law would say. “They need a schedule.” A schedule meant not just bedtime and mealtime but love. Amazing Margaret didn’t want to check off affection next to diapers and baths.
Let them stay up all night. Let them eat when they want and what they want, wake up and pour a bowl of cereal, a glass of milk, mop up the mess.
It worked. First hiccupping Amy, who acquired a sense of humor, which she would later lose; then Brenda, th
e late arrival, always in that way an immigrant: determined to be accepted, do well, even when she didn’t understand the jokes. She suffered from spasms of love. She’d kiss her mother’s hand like a pantomime duke, sighing, murmuring mama [kiss], mama [kiss], mama, as though it were the only word of English she’d mastered. Cracker lay her hand on Brenda’s back and felt the buzz of her blood. She braided Amy’s maple hair and took such pleasure in the feel of it between her fingers, her daughter’s back against her shins, she wanted to weep. “Ouch!” said Amy. “Hold still, pet,” said Cracker in her gentling way.
(It worked for a while, anyhow. Once Amy and Brenda were out of the house they discovered the joys of a regular bedtime, hot breakfasts, bedroom slippers. All that stillness. They grew resentful. When they were children she had struck them as beyond reproach, entirely a mother, entirely theirs. Once they grew up and could see around the back of her the other parts, there all along, they felt duped. Her own desires! Her own ambitions! Hidden! She had been, they decided, a soundstage of a mother. They watched her friends, who adored her, who called her up and took her out to meals and fussed over her, who said Your mother is such a wonderful woman. You don’t know, Amy wanted to say. But she didn’t have any proof to the contrary, other than it had always been clear that it had been their job to love her, and they did. They still did.)
When the children were young, she was their mother. Not a full-time mother—she also worked as a wife and a daughter-in-law, did some mail-order work as a daughter to her own mother, off in Boynton Beach. She’d become a collection of other people’s secrets. “Mama, can I tell you something?” Amy would say, and Cracker, full of hope, said yes. “I don’t like Claire anymore.” Well, that wasn’t news. Who would like that pie-faced girl? She kept falling for it. Her children offered the most mundane facts prefaced by, Mama, can I tell you something? Yes, Cracker, said, every time, you can tell me anything. The children never confided anything she didn’t already know.
Bowlaway Page 25
