The grown-ups did.
For instance, her friend had an elderly aunt who died. This aunt had been renting a house on the Cape, in Dennis, and it had fallen to Cracker’s friend, Audra, to empty it, so Audra had cooked a week’s worth of food for her husband and children and had gone to clear away the years of the aunt’s retirement. Audra’s husband was a dentist. He, too, was named Dennis. Her two girls were sweet and contained, polite in a way that Cracker had found both enviable and unreal. “I was worried they would miss me too much,” said Audra. They were at the ice cream parlor. Audra angled her spoon under the dripping marshmallow. “And then I worried they wouldn’t miss me at all.”
“Did they?”
“Yes?” said Audra. Even her sundae was perfectly matched, stark marshmallow, off-white whipped cream, ivory ice cream, butterscotch. Audra’s hair was butterscotch, too, her lips maraschino cherry. “But do you know? Betty, I would only say this to you: I didn’t miss them. Not for a minute. I went for walks when I wanted. I swam in the sea. I ate whatever was left in the cupboards.”
“You weren’t lonely.”
Audra put one hand in the air, as though swearing an oath in court, but on an ice cream sundae. “Not once,” she said. “Betty, I knew I could tell you. You understand.”
Cracker was glad that she was the sort of person her friends could tell terrible secrets to—she imagined she presented herself as a kind of card catalogue, where all the entries sat next to each other, each precisely the same size as the next, arranged for ease of location and not importance. She also wished she were not that person. Her friends thought she forgot their confidences. She didn’t judge—mostly she didn’t judge—but she remembered. You understand, Audra had said, but Cracker didn’t. She didn’t understand Janis drunkenly sleeping with the young mortician the day of her mother’s funeral; she didn’t understand Gladys’s confession that she loved her littlest child, a son, better than all his lovely older sisters, and that the girls sensed this, and had become desperate to win her love, which turned her stomach. She didn’t understand not missing Audra’s nice Dennis, who fixed cars on the weekend and didn’t drink and had once played bass in a jazz quartet. Of course not all families were happy! But Cracker didn’t want to know the specifics. The visible world, that was fine, snappishness, ennui, misdirected flirtation. She would not turn away, but she wished to remain innocent of the causes.
She was known for her dislike of gossip and so everyone brought their gossip to her: they figured her for a lagoon. The affairs and the revenge affairs, the drunken incontinence, the lack of sex and the excess of it, the husband who cried for a month when his formerly secret mistress died, the woman who could not stand the smell of her child dying of cancer. “Like rotten cabbage,” the mother said, then, seeing the look on Cracker’s face, “I love her so.”
By then her own marriage was falling apart. The wonder was that it had lasted so long. She thought she’d be embarrassed but she wasn’t. All those things that she knew about other marriages, through confession and gossip, people likewise knew about hers, or made good guesses. Then one Saturday noontime she was watching Arch on Candlepins for Dollars, live television, and he absentmindedly reached out and palmed the round underside of the rump of the ladies’ champion, Anna Rzepka. Rzepka didn’t even flinch. The camera cut away, cut back. In the intervening moment Arch had understood what he had done. It showed on his face. You’d have thought he’d lost the tournament, and just afterward he did that, too. No instant replay, thank God. Still, in living rooms all over greater Boston, Arch Truitt had idly fondled Anna Rzepka. By dinnertime people remembered it happening in close-up and slow motion.
Cracker, in her own living room, had seen it clearly, the stroking upturned hand, one finger above the rest intimately tickling. She looked at her mother-in-law, who was crocheting some ghastly circular object: a turtleneck for disadvantaged serpents. Then Cracker turned to the telephone and waited for it to ring. Isn’t that what happened? No: in other houses, the phones were ringing, the chatter had begun. Did you see that? Poor Cracker, poor thing. Well, it’s no surprise.
Nobody would be calling her. She turned her head back to the television. She’d forgiven him before, invisibly, at all the other signs: the hotel bills for tournaments an hour’s drive away, the ringing phone with nobody on the other end, a sudden drop-off in their sex life, a new and startling expertise in bed. She’d known plenty and ignored plenty but they had never said anything. This was different.
“He’s like his father.” Margaret was still crocheting, jerking her fingers, circling the air with yarn in a genuflective way. “He wears his arm on his sleeve.”
“Arm?” said Cracker.
“Heart,” Margaret corrected. “He wears his heart on his sleeve.”
“Yeah, well, look closer. That isn’t his heart.”
“Forgiveness is a blessing,” said Margaret, to her moving fingers. “Don’t forget that, darling.”
He came home that night with one of his twilight hangovers, his hair combed back, his clothes hanging from his shoulders, a paper doll of a man. He had his bag over one shoulder, the balls stamped with his initials, ACT. He saw the look on her face. Probably he didn’t want to be forgiven: you fuck up, you should feel like a fuckup.
“Sweetheart,” he said. Alone of the Truitts he had that flat Salford accent. Sweet-hot. He winced at something, toothache, headache, conscience. Already he was guilty, repentant, on his way, he believed, to absolution. “I’ll sleep at the alley.”
“You will not,” said Cracker. “That’s my place now. You have a mother, remember?” The mother was dozing on the davenport; the mother (thought Cracker later) was why they did not fight, or fuck, or do anything that might jolt their marriage’s fundaments, and save it.
She had children but she was not running off to Dennis, only down the street. She would come every morning and cook them breakfast, she would pack lunches and send them off to school. Like Audra she would not miss her family. She would not think anything until she thought the grand thoughts of her youth: she would imagine how she might be loved, how she might (through charity and hard work) be redeemed. That had been her plan, when she was a girl of fourteen. She was not the smartest girl in her class; she was only ordinarily pretty; she did not play an instrument; she could not sing. But she liked the idea of being good. Arch was guilty, there was no doubt about it, but maybe she was guilty, too. She planned to examine herself.
When she opened the door to the apartment she saw it hadn’t stood empty in all that time. Arch had brought people here. Women? Yes: there was a drift in the corner of womanly things, underpants and single stockings, cotton balls peachy with pancake, emery boards. But other people, too—beer cans and scotch bottles, the fat ashes of cigars, racing forms. It wasn’t utter ruin, just bad behavior, medium fresh. He was a careless man but not a disaster. Once a month he cleaned the place. He hadn’t slept with every woman who’d left a crescent lip print on a scotch glass. Really, only three or four over time. How many secret lives does one man need?
All of them, Cracker, all of them.
It felt like the sort of camp teenagers with a little money might pitch in the woods. She tried to clear things up. She got the old push broom from the alley and plowed the floor. This is my penance, she thought, still hoping she might attain goodness, but for what? Amid the garbage, the inevitable husks of insects and one twitching live one. The last drunk at the party. What kind of bug? She stepped on it. The crunchy kind. The worst of it: she’d been gone an hour and a half, and already she was lonely, she missed everyone. Amy, who was twelve, tall and pimpled and music-obsessed: her friends loved rock and roll but she was a folkie, perverse in the family way. Brenda, littler, little enough that she still let her mother pinch her bottom and sniff her neck. Who could Cracker confess to? One day I ran away from home and you know what? I had to run back immediately.
She missed Arch, too, but he had to go.
Every Man a Portmanteau
The four months Arch lived above the bowling alley, his women treated him like a visiting dignitary from an impoverished country. They wanted him to be comfortable and also grateful, dazzled by the richness of ordinary things. They got rid of all the old beds in the apartment and moved in the wooden mission bed from Arch and Cracker’s bedroom: she wanted a new one. She sewed him a quilt made of all the sheets and blankets of their married life. Cracker did not wish to sleep upon them or beneath them ever again.
“You could have just given them to me,” said Arch. “They would have done fine. Now they’re like—” He waved at the quilt, spread out on the bed. “It’s like a mausoleum of blankets.”
“Yes.”
“Oh. Ah. OK.”
He hoped he’d be let back in. That had been his life so far, old Arch, old dog—Cracker didn’t know how many candlepin houses had barred him for drinking or gambling, and they always let him back in. How could his own family be different?
She was done cooking for him. His mother brought him meals in covered pots.
“Soup of the day,” she said.
He peered into it, horrified. “It’s casserole.”
“Casserole’s what travels.”
He’d hidden some bottles in the alley mop closet, amid the sad faded feminine mops, because like his grandmother Arch liked to throw parties in the after-hours alley from time to time. The bottles were gone, dumped out by his mother, as all the liquor was everywhere else by his wife. Good, thought Arch. Otherwise he might unhinge his jaw and consume it all: vodka, bourbon, ginger ale, the pickled onions nobody ever requested. Mix the cocktails in his gullet. Anna drank beer, he drank beer with Anna, of the elastic muscles and sharp nose, the blood that pumped all through her body: Arch had never met a woman whose hands and feet were never cold. The climate of Anna was constant, warm in every region. It had all started with holding hands. He wanted to tell Cracker that.
He didn’t want to be forgiven. That was work you had to take on for yourself. You had to find the work and do the work. (In the family he was famous for his laziness. They didn’t know how he labored inside.) How would he manage it?
He decided to quit drinking. The decision came before the quitting, but he’d never considered it before. All his life he’d loved stories of solitary men against nature, Arctic explorers, round-the-world sailors, and this was how he convinced himself. It would be an act of bravery, one that might kill him. To set off on a life in which he would traverse Temperance. Perhaps he would sail off the very edge of it. One did not set off to cross the ocean thinking you might turn back. You had to make up your mind and go. He thought of the USS Montrose, how he sat and slept and stood in shifts, each day divided in thirds. Such order might help him now: eight hours of sleep, eight hours at the table, eight hours at the window staring out. In every attitude he shivered beneath the quilt Cracker had sewn him, as though condemned to it. A week passed.
Later a doctor would tell him he could have killed himself from such a sudden abstinence—this was in context of discussing all of Arch’s favorite and possibly fatal habits—but now it was his wall of ice and he was determined to get over it. The rumbling in his head was not distant avalanches, not a scuppering wave, but always, ever, bowling.
His mother came to see him twice a day. As usual her fury manifested in frightening good cheer. He made himself sit at the kitchen table just before the alley opened, when she would appear with coffee and a cruller. She believed in the medicinal properties of the doughnut shop. “Honey! You look good, you look good!”
“Thanks, Ma.” He turned up his collar. Awful, to be assessed by your mother. She reached over and turned his collar down. He wondered about asking after his wife and kids, but neither of them said a thing. She felt he was ruining his life. She didn’t think he could stop, and she felt sorry for him, so she might as well straighten his collar as he tumbled away.
Because he’d given up drinking he had to give up drinking’s Siamese twin, smoking. Instead, he ate. He consumed pounds of pistachios, which in those days came dyed red and dyed his fingers red, bought from Sutherland’s Market down the block. Cherries, too, which were in season, and which turned his fingertips a muddier red, black around the nails. Any kind of fiddly food eaten one at a time, to occupy his hands and mouth. Olives didn’t work for some reason. Grapes could but they weren’t time-consuming enough. The floor of the apartment was scattered with nut paper, cherry stems, the arboreal remains of grapes. Oysters were tempting but impractical. The expedition began its second month. It was too late to turn back, and more dangerous. In his cabin above the bowling alley, he kept on.
He visited the girls, took them on Sundays into Boston, when everything was closed because of the blue laws. He imagined that they’d demand he explain himself—how come he lived at the alley? When was he coming back?—but their questions concerned candy, and could they stop walking, and why couldn’t they see a movie. Those he could answer.
How to explain to Cracker that he’d changed his life? Why, through television, of course. He went back on Candlepins for Dollars. He would not stray, never stray, to the women’s lanes. Drinking, he was baby faced; now he had a jawline, cheekbones, a pointed upper lip. “Laughing Arch Truitt,” the announcer still called him, but he did not laugh so much. He concentrated on the lanes. He spoke to the pins. One week he kicked the ball return and the station told him he was on probation. Drinking, he assumed that drink was what made him a bowler. It unknotted his shoulders. It made him forget grudges. But surely it kept him back, too. Sober, he thought, prayingly, Well now I’ll be champion. But it didn’t work that way. Lots of the game was luck, which was why he liked it. Every ball was a test of luck, every box, every string. He still thought that, but it was a long story. Your luck could worsen. You could keep failing, get worse, reveal yourself as a failure, a jinx. Your own jinx.
Cracker didn’t watch him. How could she? Instead she tried to think of him as merely a man who—like most of the men of the world—made their money mysteriously and elsewhere.
His fingers were dyed red from pistachios. His stomach hurt. He’d given up everything to get his family back and had forgotten that the first thing he’d given up was his family. What did she do with her days? She sat and waited for him to come home. He sat and waited to be invited.
He went back to work in the alley. Every morning he went downstairs and his mother said, “Good morning, dear!”
“Good morning!”
“How did you sleep?”
“Like a bear.”
“Brought you breakfast.”
“Coffee first.”
“Brought you coffee. Looks like a nice day. Oh, those shoes, somebody put ’em back any which way.”
People came to the alley to shake Arch’s hand. He wasn’t the best bowler on Candlepins for Dollars but he was memorable: his smile, those billboard cowboy teeth, straight and white; the way he’d been caught goosing that big Polish girl on local television. So he devoted himself to the Bowlaway. He gave lessons. He cleaned the balls and tended to the balky pinsetters. One day to his mother’s amazement he saddle-soaped every shoe in the place, including the numbers stitched on the heels: he used one of the stubby scoring pencils to work the soap through the seams.
Then he went upstairs and watched television and disassembled pistachios with his fingertips. Look at the shells! It seemed like there should be something to do with them. The thing to do, of course, was throw them away, but he couldn’t: they were evidence of the only progress he was making. He began to stack them. He would make an obelisk of pistachio shells. He said aloud, “I’ve gone mad.”
If you’ve gone mad you don’t know it. But what if you say it aloud?
He went to bed, got up, drank his mother’s coffee from the plaid thermos, ate his mother’s cruller. At noon she presented his lunch, saying, as she always did, “Soup of the day!”
This lasted until the Tuesday morning his mother said, “Good morning, dear!” and in ret
urn he burst into tears.
“You’re drunk,” she said, and—certain he had been seen for the first time in ages—he tearfully agreed. He remembered Roy saying the same thing to him, decades before. Maybe he was only truly visible when drunk.
He’d been good for so long! Four months! Not so long for most things but a world record for him and good behavior. The only way to make four months seem less like forever was to continue to be good for even longer and that was impossible, he couldn’t do it, not all by himself like this. There was booze somewhere in the apartment, he had realized, even though Cracker had hauled away most of the debauchery in her seven-hour tenancy: when he’d moved in it had smelled of piney soap; she even seemed to have had sunlight installed, which had never been a feature of his childhood. He’d let the apartment get so foul so quickly the place might have generated booze—or, more likely, she only cleared out the bottles where a nondrinker might look. At the very back of the under-the-sink cupboards in the kitchen, he found a half-filled bottle of gin. He sniffed to make sure it wasn’t cleaning fluid. Then he tasted it.
Once he’d loved gin, but then at fourteen a bottle had bit him pretty hard, and thereafter the smell reminded him of his torment, a vomitous night, how he and his friend Trevor Peters had to try to hose the puke out of each other’s hair at two in the morning, and how they woke up in the bathroom, Trevor in the tub, Arch flat out on the towel next to it. That’s what gin tasted like to him, complicated bare-bottomed humiliation. This gin was particularly foul, body-temperature, old-lady scented. It took the paint right off his soul. He kept drinking it. He ran his tongue around the lip of the bottle.
Bowlaway Page 26
