God and Bowling and Children
Cracker did enter into marriage again, she already had. She was married to that parody bride, her mother-in-law. They went about planning a life together. Leagues, birthday parties, more pinball machines, move out the pool tables. Cracker hired more help, an evening manager named Walter, a weekend manager named Ida Jane. She bought a hot dog roller, a little oven, expanded the candy selection, got a new vending machine that dispensed not Eskimo Pies but Fudgsicles and Dreamsicles and Popsicles. She sold factory-made cookies that came stacked three to a round pack, wrapped in crackling cellophane, salty, awful, addictive. A bowling alley was a place for children now; children had trash taste. The balls were always sticky. The little hand dryers at the end of every lane blew up billows of powdered sugar and cheese popcorn dust.
“You’ll look after me?” Margaret asked Cracker, like the abandoned child she was.
“Of course.”
“Even if your own mother gets sick? Even if your own mother needs you?”
Cracker laughed. “My own mother will never need me.”
Her own mother—Arlene Levine Graham Buchsbaum—was still hale and cheerful in Boynton Beach. Mostly she required that her granddaughters be shipped down for summer visits; they came back brown limbed and green haired, with souvenirs from obscure and troubling tourist traps: Zarkland, Murray’s House of Snakes, Little Batavia. Occasionally Arlene came north for a visit. She was always amused by Cracker’s love for Margaret.
“When you were little,” she would say, smoking in the garden, “you had dolls of all nations. Now you have a little Catholic whose hair you comb.”
“I don’t comb her hair,” Cracker lied.
“You always were the motherly sort.” Then Arlene gave Cracker a folder with instructions: when her two-story house was too much, she planned to move to a nearby retirement village, and here was the pamphlet; when she needed more help, to the Jewish Home the next town over, pamphlet; when she died, to this cemetery here, where Mr. Buchsbaum, her second husband, was already interred. Pamphlet. Her first husband, Cracker’s father, was buried—like Bertha Truitt—in the pamphletless Salford Cemetery, but who would visit Arlene there? Shady Palms was the popular spot, among her set.
How could Cracker explain it to her mother? Margaret loved her. Margaret, who had been (according to her sons) an exhausting, shrieking mother; who’d been a grandmother concerned mostly with what might kill her grandchildren (chills, their own misbehavior, maternal neglect). Her relatives were doomed stocks in which she had better not invest, but she had come into love like a late inheritance. “You’re so wonderful to me,” she would tell Cracker, and she would stroke Cracker’s shoulder, or seize her hand and kiss it—shades of toddler Brenda! “I really love you, honey. You know that?” She had given up knitting for crossword puzzles and consulted Cracker. “You’re so smart, you’ll know this.” Her eyes were clear and blue. She called Cracker Honey honey and darling girl. A junk shop had opened up in the block over from Truitt’s, and Margaret liked to pick up presents for Cracker there—little bisque figurines of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, old windup monkeys who played the drums. “I thought this would appeal to your sense of humor,” she’d say, with something like admiration, as though the monkey, goggle-eyed and toothy, were a book in German she herself could never hope to understand. She started to clean more, she flew at the windows like a songbird, with Windex and a rag. She made lemonade with saccharine and biscuits that never rose. She set the table, all spoons.
Only later would Cracker recognize the love at the first glimmering evidence. She should have noticed when she shampooed Margaret in the kitchen sink with the slow-moving emerald Prell. Her mother-in-law had stopped dyeing her hair the childish brown she favored (the kind of brown nobody else would choose, that generally darkened after childhood into something more interesting). Here were her gray roots, like a kind of sadness radiating from her skull. Beneath the wet hair, Cracker could feel the seams of Margaret’s skull as it had come together in utero, infancy, and childhood, in the nineteenth century. She felt dents, too, and one ovoid lump. They would tell a story, if only you knew how to read them.
Margaret was wild in her mind. Bowling took over everything. Hadn’t it already? Worse. She dreamt of bowling, she told long stories about bowling to strangers, to her fellow parishioners at St. Elias’s, the moral of which was always: gravity brings down all things eventually. In her own head she heard the sounds of the pins. She knew it was boring but she couldn’t help it. The Bowl-Mor pinsetter, it’s still the best, it breaks down but I know how to fix nearly anything by now, you wouldn’t think an old woman like me would be so clever at mechanics but it’s like those machines are my children, I know they’re about to get a fever or a jam or a crazy notion and just like that I’m there to fix and soothe, I put those babies to bed. A candlepin ball weighs 2.5 pounds. The pharaohs bowled. Bertha Truitt introduced the sport of candlepin bowling to the people of Salford, Massachusetts. A curious woman. She could bowl for hours and never improve.
Margaret you are crazy if you think people want to hear about bowling. But bowling and God, that’s all it was with her. The people at church were driven round the bend. Bowling or God or both. Or dark predictions about children, or murders from her pulp magazines. She believed in the everlasting light of God and in the darkness and depravity of mankind. She had read the Bible three times in her life cover to cover, and hundreds of murder mysteries and true-crime books. That’s a lot of murder, Margaret. Sure and murder has been with us since the beginning or directly after: Cain and Abel, funny how she couldn’t remember who was the murdered one. There is more to life, Margaret, than murder and bowling and God and children. O yes then what.
Just cuddle the baby, don’t tell the new mother—Amy this time, she married young and had a son, she lives in Salford—don’t tell her all the ways her neglect can lead to his death. Just lock the door, don’t explain how a man intent on slitting your throat can climb a trellis and open a window and get to you as silent as slicing a cake. Just watch the leagues bowl. People bowl for the bowling of it, not because they wish to hear about the history of bowling, who invented it, who refined it, what it means.
At the bowling alley Margaret narrated her own movements with the calm detail of a wildlife documentary: “I’m standing by the corn popper. Why am I standing by the corn popper? I was looking at the league schedules, and now I’m here.” More than once when she retraced her own steps she ended up in the men’s room, making nobody happy.
“The Little Sisters is a nice place,” Cracker reminded Margaret. “You used to say so yourself when you volunteered there.” If only she could speed up the process of Margaret losing her mind, so that Cracker could get her into the nursing home without her noticing it. Slide her in sideways.
“They tell you when you can get out of bed,” said Margaret in a passion. “They tell you when you walk and eat and—everything. They own your body.”
“They don’t own your body, Mother.”
“Possession is nine-tenths of the law,” said Margaret darkly. “You’re their slave. It’s slavery. Except nothing gets done.”
“It’s not—”
“Is money exchanged?”
“Yes.”
“When I was little it was called baby-farming. I don’t know what you call it now. I will be sold for parts.”
Cracker only wanted Margaret out of the house, to pace at the Bowlaway away from the stove, the bathtub, the iron, the steep backstairs. All the deaths that Margaret had predicted for the children seemed to be gunning for her: drowning, burning, the horrifying attentions of unscrupulous strangers.
“Everyone asks for you,” Cracker would say.
“Who’s everyone?” asked Margaret, already anxious.
Margaret, neglected, was found in her nightgown on the porches of neighbors. “Ah, Margaret,” said the neighbors, next door, across the street, “it’s nice to see you.” No it wasn’t. They wan
ted to call the authorities, but they weren’t sure what authorities to call.
The neighbors believed themselves to be good people, sympathetic, of course they would save the life of a poor soul adrift. The first time somebody took Margaret into their living room, offered her a cookie and a cup of tea, listened to her tell a story about bowling, oh, it was wonderful. Poor old woman, and such a teller of tales! They’d certainly remember this day! She got home safe eventually, it was a pleasure to have her. No trouble at all. Goodbye, Margaret! Come back anytime.
But she would. For the same visit, with variations: a different nightgown. Different next of kin: “I am looking for my husband. I am looking for my Minna. I am looking for my mother, I misplaced her, have you seen my mother?”
“Who’s your mother, darling,” said the around-the-corner neighbor, a weight lifter named Henrik who looked like a Saint Bernard to Margaret; she cowered, held her hand up so he could sniff her acquaintance. Instead he kissed it. “What’s your name, my love.”
“Margaret Vanetten,” she said, and then, dubiously, “Truitt.”
“Oh, Truitt,” said Henrik. “I know Truitts. Let’s take you home.”
They kept taking her to this house that was not hers!
The old woman wasn’t Cracker’s responsibility really, was she? Was possession nine-tenths of the law? That’s what children said on the playground, when finders keepers was no longer binding. Margaret had two sons. Surely it was their turn to pick up the weight. Where, for instance, was Arch? He was no longer on channel 5, not banned but beat for good. The last time she’d seen him was at Amy’s high school graduation, where he had worn a trench coat against the rain and also (thought Cracker) to disguise himself. He’d kept his hands in his pockets. Then Brenda had graduated and moved away, and there was no reason for Cracker and Arch to meet. Years ago now.
That left Roy.
She called Roy on a Saturday afternoon, and Arch answered. She recognized his voice instantly and hung up, her fingers on the kitchen phone’s hook. She counted to five and lifted her hand and listened to the inhuman dial tone, the voice of God telling you that you need not be alone.
She dialed again and this time when Arch answered—irritated, she had given him enough time to sit back down only to have to stand up again, it was a husbandly irritation—she said, “It’s Cracker. We need to talk about your mother. Is that Arch?”
“It’s Arch,” said Arch. “OK. Let’s talk.”
Return to Me
Cracker Graham sat in South Station, waiting for Arch Truitt. Would he be wearing a trench coat? Would he have his old familiar head? He might have aged hundreds of years, or not at all. Every time somebody about the size of Arch, as she remembered him, walked into the vast waiting hall, she stood up, though the person was not always even a man.
Then there he was, not in a trench coat but a denim jacket, blue jeans a shade darker. She’d wondered whether they would hug, which showed how she’d forgotten her once and future husband, who never hesitated in the face of an embrace. He hugged her. She felt the old brass button on the cuff of his jacket behind her left ear: what she needed. That sweet smell of him.
“Car’s this way,” she said. “You look good.” He did, ramshackle around the edges, but pink and not yellow, his long hair combed back.
“Roy takes better care of me.”
“Better than I did.”
“Better than me of myself. No one bosses like a brother.”
“Color in your cheeks. What are you doing these days?”
“We own a candlepin house. Me and Roy.”
“This candlepin house?” she said, pointing to the sidewalk by her old Impala. She unlocked the door for him, then opened it with a chivalrous flourish before going to the driver’s side.
“Thanks. No, not this one. We bought a house in Worcester. Got a little pro shop in it. I run that. People come to see me.”
“Laughing Arch Truitt,” she said across the roof of the car.
Laughter transformed his face in just the way it always had. “Yeah, well,” he said sheepishly. “You might not believe it but some people want to shake my hand.”
“I want to shake your hand.”
But they couldn’t reach across the car roof. Instead, she rattled the keys in an affectionate way. They both got in. Cracker started the engine, pulled into traffic.
“You don’t mind driving in town?” he asked.
“Not anymore. Not for ages.”
In the years of their marriage she’d been a nervous driver. Indeed, she had never driven a sober Arch anywhere; she only took the wheel when he was sodden with drink and cheerful enough to let her do it.
“You own an alley with Roy,” she said.
“Why not?”
“I would have thought he’d give it up. He hated it, didn’t he?”
“Our place is different.”
“You wouldn’t recognize our place,” she said.
“Oh, now it’s yours? Huh.”
They were at a red light. She ran her hands around the steering wheel in a caressing way. “You don’t have a car?”
“Don’t drive. Seizures.”
Maybe this was a lie to cover up drinking, or maybe it was the truth and the seizures were caused by drinking. Surely there was nothing about Arch that didn’t touch drink.
“You still drinking?” she asked.
“Nah,” he said, as though answering a different question.
“You ready to see your mother?”
He reached over and touched the dashboard, like a painting on a wall he meant to straighten. “Remind me. She’s a little woman, right? Sweet in her way?”
“Sweeter, you want to know the truth.”
“Holy cow.”
“She’s forgotten all her grudges.”
“Nice for her,” he said. “I’m nervous. Can we stop for a drink?”
“I thought you weren’t drinking.”
“I’m not drinking drinking.”
“Not drinking drinking,” she said. “What is that in fluid ounces?”
“Forget it,” he said.
They crossed the bridge over the mouth of the Charles that would take them to Salford.
“Roy never married,” she said at last.
“No.”
“Lady friends?”
“Maybe. Look, I can’t talk to you about my brother.”
“Your brother. Why not?”
“Because you don’t know why not.”
“I didn’t break his heart,” she said.
“Sure,” said Arch, who wanted to protect Roy. Chiefly, how boring Roy was. Roy’s entire existence was devoted to boring things: locks, history. Not until those things became interesting, but until the dullness was so utterly mapped anyone could understand the topography: the heights of boredom, the depths of boredom, the bedrock, the gravitational pull. He was terrifically interested in grammar. He thought he might write a book on the representation of stained linen in Homer. Then he would start his magnum opus: a history of bowling. Even Arch didn’t want to read that. They would sell it at their bowling alley, which was called, simply, Bowl.
“Ah, Roy,” said Arch. “Listen, I gotta honor his wishes. You know?”
“All right. I invited Amy and Ben over for dinner, and the baby, Bobby. He’s wonderful.”
“I met the wonderful Bobby,” Arch said in a cheerful voice. “I met Brenda’s guy, too. Lars.”
“Oh.”
“Oh God my mother makes me crazy,” he said. “Will she know who I am?”
“Of course! Don’t worry.”
“Almost prefer it if she didn’t, you wanna know the truth.”
She looked at Arch then, his flinty blue eyes, his hair that needed cutting. They were in Salford. “Let’s get that drink,” she said.
Oh, the darling!” said Margaret when she saw Arch. “Oh my sweetheart! Lift me up! Lift me up so I can kiss you!”
He did. He scooped her up in the way of Rhett Butler, or the C
reature from the Black Lagoon. She kissed his cheek and beamed.
“Now I’m done for,” she said happily.
“Done for, Mother?” Cracker asked.
“Taken care of,” said Margaret. “Now we’ll be all right, won’t we.”
Years ago Amy had so relentlessly admired a neighbor girl’s canopy bed that it had been given to her, and it was here, after dinner with his mother, his wife, his daughter and grandson, that Arch Truitt was put to sleep his first night back in Salford. It struck him as unhealthy, or spiritually unsound, to sleep under a canopy. Your hopes would fester and choke you. Your nightmares would never dissipate. Eventually he got up, found Amy’s plaid-and-duck-patterned sleeping bag in her closet, and went to sleep in the little room between bedrooms that had once been the nursery.
Even he was not sure why he’d gone there. To be close to his mother, or to Cracker? Like a spy or a household pet? The sleeping bag was soft and musty, like a chrysalis. Perhaps he would bust out a new man. He could hear the noises of the women on either side of him, lights snapping off and on, creaking beds, sighs unintended for the ears of men, which he was stunned to realize sounded exactly the same as the other sort. All those years it wasn’t him that caused that exasperated noise he could never decode, the satisfied noise! It was life itself!
He hadn’t brought a pillow; he could feel the seams between the floorboards with the back of his head as he tilted back to look out the one window in the room. What he could see: tree branches and stars, the mobile light of satellites, or UFOs, or meteors. When he was a young man the mysteries of the world seemed like generosity—you can think anything you want! Now the universe withheld things. It was like luck. Luck once meant anything could happen. Now it meant he was doomed. But maybe it didn’t need to.
Maybe he could have this one thing he had loved and never stopped wanting. To be part of a family. To be loved by his wife.
Cracker snored. His mother cried in her dreams. He fell asleep, of course. He was Arch Truitt. Longest love story in his life.
Bowlaway Page 28
