Bowlaway

by Elizabeth McCracken

  He was woken in the dark by Cracker tripping over his toes.

  “What are you doing here?” Then, “She’s crying.”

  “I know she’s crying.”

  “Then why are you asleep.”

  He stood up in the sleeping bag then let it fall around his ankles, stepped out of it. Sleepy whimpering in the other room, and Cracker’s familiar shushing, ssh, you’re all right, I’m right here. He went in. His mother was in the covers up to her neck. She had the puppety look of the dentureless, and he thought if there was life on other planets, and they did come to take us over, they would look for the sad creatures who kept their teeth outside their bodies at night.

  “She didn’t even wake up,” said Cracker. She slept in the same sort of long loose nightgown she always had, which concealed the shape of her body with its shape and revealed it with its sheerness. White, with one pale pink rose at her breastbone. “Why were you sleeping on the floor, funny man?”

  The funny man said, “I missed you.”

  In north Salford, by the fens, lived a woman who could not stop adopting wild animals. This was in the olden days. As a child she took in frogs and snakes and pantry mice. Then rats. A raccoon, a possum. She eyed a skunk but drew the line. The animals chewed the walls of her little house. It was their house, too. The neighbors called the police.

  “Humans were not designed to live with animals,” the visiting policeman said to the woman.

  “That’s exactly what they were designed for!” the woman said.

  That policeman didn’t understand. He had never fallen asleep with the bulk of a raccoon in his bed. That humped heat off the humped back. The chatter. The weight of animals. Their tails. She wanted her own tail, she dreamt of it, and when she woke in her bed tailless she felt amputated, as though something that was by rights hers had been taken away. At least she could live with the tails of others. Sometimes there were two raccoons in the bed, and one spring a set of kits. If animals weren’t meant to live in houses, how come they learned to open the refrigerator, work the kitchen faucets? She wasn’t a bad-looking woman, said the neighbors. She could marry, have children. As though the dreams of other people were hers! As though what people found attractive was likewise attractive to a raccoon. She preferred animals. She dreamt, like animals did, of chasing things, and undeserved beatings.

  At the end of her life—she was not old, she was never meant to be—she found an animal on the edge of the fens, a sweet-faced wild cat, big as a German shepherd—or was it a wild dog? No, not wild, the animal had an air of domesticity. It must have been forsaken by another human. It came snuffling up, it reminded her of the possum she’d taken in ten years before, whom she in her head called Sugar, though she never said names aloud. Perhaps she was discovering a new species. It had human eyes, hunched therianthropic posture like a little accountant, a black damp nose. She had dreamt of owning a nose like that, too, a cold wet animal schnoz that telegraphed love and health. An understanding passed between the woman and the creature. She turned. It followed.

  Two weeks later she was found on her kitchen floor. Kicked to death. Throat torn out. Whatever had done the job broke down the kitchen door from the inside and was never caught.

  “We warned her,” the police told the newspaper.

  Cracker Graham had read this story as a young woman and took it to heart. When the authorities come to your house and say, No more, take it seriously. Listen to your neighbors, your relatives. Even so she respected the torn-apart woman. To have something you were willing not only to die for but also to be killed by. She imagined the woman on her kitchen floor, already knocked down and bleeding, offering her throat, thinking, Ah, you see, my townspeople? I am not dying alone.

  Cracker decided to take Arch in.

  The Old Woman of the Rooftop

  The marriage was not dead; the marriage had been buried alive. Look at it in its coffin. Stare and you can see it breathing. What’s worse than giving up on something or somebody you only think is dead?

  The bed was new. The drinking glasses were new, bought at the grocery story. The cats had died and not been replaced: Cracker was done (she thought, she thought) taking care of living things. The marriage was neither old nor new. They were not teenagers, they were middle-aged, and therefore grateful. Arch had forgotten the particular swing of Cracker’s limbs, the laugh that could sound dirty or childish. Cracker had forgotten the pleasure of telling somebody else to do things she did not want to do herself. There were no children in the house, only a hard-of-hearing old woman. They did not have to whisper.

  Mostly Cracker had left things alone in the house, but she had let things build up. In the kitchen there were too many little tables and carts—a cart for spices, a cart for measuring cups and spoons—because every drawer was filled with a different category of detritus: menus and rubber bands in one, broken spatulas in another, baby clutter in a third. Arch imagined turning the whole house over and giving it a shake to see what fell from its pockets.

  Whenever he suggested getting rid of anything, Cracker said, “No, I like that. Leave it be.”

  Leave it be meant Margaret, too. They forgot they’d thought they might put her in a nursing home.

  “I’ll clear out some of the stuff in my mother’s room,” Arch said.

  “That you’re welcome to. I’ll take her to the alley, get her out of your way. Who knows what you’ll find?”

  “The Truitt Gold,” said Arch.

  “Yeah, right,” said Cracker. “Please, try and find the Truitt Gold.”

  In the closet, in the nightstands, beneath the bed: years of presents. Margaret had put them there, all those tokens of good intentions. Enormous loafs of soap wrapped in patterned paper, little shell-shaped guest soaps, bath oil in bottles, bath oils in little plastic capsules that were meant to melt away in water, everything lavender, hyacinth, violet. They must have thought she was very filthy indeed. Evidence of both love and disappointment. What would you like for your birthday, Grandma? Oh, nothing, she would say. Or, I’ll love anything you give me. A lie. Since childhood she’d only ever wanted one thing: a box filled with a substance she couldn’t imagine that would change her life.

  Now Arch found it all, boxes and tubs of soap and bath oil, drifts of embroidered handkerchiefs. She never used anything and she never threw anything away. He could not tell what it all meant. Why had she kept it? Sentiment or reproach? He filled a plastic garbage bag, then another.

  Beneath the foot of the bed was a suitcase filled with old family papers. A sheaf of old tax returns over some rubber-banded letters from his father, still in their envelopes. His handwriting was terrible. Arch drew one out. My dearest pink and cream girleen, it began, and wincing, he put it back in the envelope to read later, or to hand down to the girls. Brenda loved that sort of thing. He imagined calling her at college on Sunday and telling her. Beneath the letters was an ancient document that said on the outside of the fold, LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT.

  Old, New, Last Will and. It looked that ancient and consequential. Like anyone pinched for money, Arch Truitt had dreamt of inheritance from somebody he’d never heard of, wouldn’t mourn. And why not? There were sawed-off limbs in every direction on the family tree. A rich relative wasn’t out of the question: a Truitt they’d never heard of, Margaret’s birth family, even a Sprague who’d run out of descendants.

  He unfolded the paper and read it.

  I leave my worldly possessions to my husband, Dr. Leviticus Sprague, with one exception. Truitt’s Alleys and all contents I leave to Joe Wear, as promised so long ago. I am Bertha Truitt, age fifty-seven, April 7, 1918.

  He ran to the Bowlaway.

  Here you go, Mother,” said Cracker. They set her by one of the unused lanes—Tuesday mornings they gave senior citizens a discount, it was a quiet time—and handed her hot coffee from the vending machine that also dispensed chicken soup and cocoa. The light from the fluorescent bulbs showed all the fingerprints on her eyeglasses. She looked daft.
She was daft. The line of gray in her hair was nearly around her temples now.

  “Ma,” said Arch. “How did you end up owning the alley.”

  “The family business,” said Margaret, fiddling with her paper cup. “I should say it ought to come to me. And to you.”

  “But—how did Papa come to own it?”

  “He inherited it from his mother.”

  It was hard to know how to accuse your mother of grand theft. (Was it grand theft? He wasn’t sure what made a theft grand in the eyes of the law.) Arch took a sip of his own coffee. It tasted—like all the drinks in the machine—faintly of chicken soup. Why would a human being want such a thing? He was filled with anger toward the disgusting coffee and the ridiculous machine that had made it. He tried, “Was there a will?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “But did you see it?”

  She shook her head and laughed. “I’m under interrogation!” she said, then, “what kind of place is this anyhow?”

  Cracker put her hand on Margaret’s shoulder. “We’re not interrogating.”

  “See there,” said Margaret. “It’s yours now. I give it to you!”

  “We don’t want it,” said Arch. “What happened to Joe Wear?”

  “Joe Wear.” Margaret put her hand over her mouth. From the outside you could not tell whether she was remembering or failing to remember. Even inside she was not sure. She saw the very letters of his name but could not find his face. “Joe Wear,” she said again. “He got run off is my guess.”

  “By who?”

  “Anybody might have done it.”

  But Arch remembered the name. Joe Wear was the boogeyman who’d lived in the rooms above the alley before they did. When something inexplicable or inconvenient occurred, his father blamed Joe Wear. This damn bad knife Joe Wear left behind. This faucet never did work after Joe Wear balled it up.

  “Where’d he go?” said Arch.

  Margaret looked placidly at the candy in the counter. “Who? Oh darling,” she said. “I am tired.”

  He couldn’t stand it, her calm, the impossibility of knowing what had actually happened. “Maybe you should go back to Little Sisters of the Poor,” he said.

  Margaret turned to him. Behind the fingerprints and thumbprints, her eyes were panicked. “The orphanage?”

  “The old-age home,” said Arch. “Let them take care of you.”

  “I’d rather die,” she said.

  Arch shrugged. So she was forgetful: she’d forget this. He could say anything to her, at long last. “OK,” he said. “You’d rather die. That’s fine”

  “Betty!” said Margaret.

  “Leave her alone,” said Cracker to Arch. “It’s been fifty years, nearly. Jesus, Arch. You want more coffee, Mother?”

  “I always want more coffee,” said Margaret cautiously, though she hadn’t drunk a drop.

  Arch kept thinking that if he asked in the right way his mother would confess. Her memory wasn’t gone entirely, just illegible in spots, like a letter long-ago wept over. It was hard for Arch not to take it personally. It felt like forgetting things was something Margaret was doing to him.

  “You can’t take umbrage,” said Cracker.

  “Umbrage is all I can take,” said Arch.

  Just like his mother to hold on to her secrets till her memory failed. He kept looking at her. If his parents had stolen a bowling alley out from under somebody, what else might they have done?

  “I think she should go to Little Sisters of the Poor,” said Arch to Cracker. “I think it’s time.”

  “I thought you didn’t want to put her in a home.”

  He shook his head. “All I can think,” he said.

  “So we’ll see if we can find Joe Wear or his descendants.”

  “It’s not that,” said Arch. “It’s, who would I have been? I hated that place.”

  “Roy hated that place.”

  “I am not Roy!” Arch roared. “And I hated that place! He got out and I got swallowed up.”

  “You mean you married me.”

  “That’s not what I mean.”

  “You married me and you had kids. I guess I know you didn’t like that, you walked away from it.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” said Arch. “You’re not listening to me, nobody ever listens to me.”

  She was quiet. “Go ahead,” she said. “Here I am listening.”

  He said, “I don’t know. I don’t know. I feel like I got trapped and I only realized once I started to starve to death. And it’s nobody’s fault but that old woman’s, and she doesn’t even know what she did.”

  “She did her best,” said Cracker, because that’s what you said in these cases. “And we don’t know what she did, either. Nothing would make me happier than getting rid of the bowling alley. I mean, sell it. We can’t give it away, all the years we’ve put into it.”

  “I thought you were the moral one.”

  “I’m the practical one,” said Cracker. “We’ll sell it. We’ll move your mother someplace she can be looked after. Mass every day if she wants, volunteers who’ll play cards with her. Then we’ll decide what to do with the rest of our lives.”

  The next morning Margaret took the bus in the dark to the bowling alley and unlocked the door. Everyone thought she was past such things, buses and bus fare, keys and locks. One day you’d handled all the keys of your life and it was somebody else’s turn. She wore her nightgown and house slippers, but she carried her pocketbook. Nobody questioned an old woman, as long as she had the authority of her pocketbook.

  She locked the alley door behind her. The place was hers. Not everyone has the privilege of locking people out. She’d missed it. She closed the toothy key in her fist. She was headed home.

  The candy counter was full and lovely. She filled her pocketbook: lemon drops, her favorite, Mary Janes, though how would she chew them? Up the interior stairs to the old apartment. It had a forsaken smell, as though a pan had been forgotten on the burner over the tiniest flame, but for months. The quilt tossed over the sofa looked like the Sunday funnies—not jokes, but soap operas, Rex Morgan, M.D., Mary Worth, Smilin’ Jack, people in airplanes and under duress.

  She had a sense she was escaping but she was not sure from what. Cold storage. Betrayal. Arch was mad at her. He’d yelled, who never yelled. She found the hidden door in the front closet and opened it up. At first she despaired, the ladder was so far overhead, but then she saw an old suitcase and she used it as a step. She was a very old woman but she could climb a ladder, so little and light it took no more effort to move her body up the rungs than it had to cross the floor. At the top she found the slide bolt but could not budge it.

  Then she did. Not adrenaline but memory. As a young mother she had done this, come up to the roof. Old Margaret Vanetten Truitt got to the top of the ladder and realized this was the tricky part. The tops of ladders took scramble. Bertha gave birth at the top of a ladder! Nearly. Why had she ended up there? In emergencies you got yourself to the highest point.

  Margaret dragged herself out, unfolded herself. The lights of Salford! Not really. She was only two stories up, and it was five in the morning, the darkest time. Cold up here—Margaret was always cold—and she could only just see Phillipine Square, the dark of the movie marquee, Sutherland’s Market store across the street. Nobody knows where I am, she thought, though that wasn’t true: in the apartment building behind her, an old man in his living room looked out and saw her in her nightgown, then turned back to his television. She walked to the edge. There was a wine bottle here. Maybe one of the boys had found the roof.

  Windy higher up. What did that? The hatch slammed shut over the ladder. She would never be able to bend over and yank it back up. Anyhow, she’d lost the key somewhere and she was furious for reasons she could not remember except they were genuine.

  If I fall off the roof, she thought, and the idea filled her with pleasure. She put a lemon drop on her tongue and was surprised to find not a tooth in her mouth. S
he’d left them at home. She was so light she’d fall silent as any New England precipitation, and in the daylight whoever found her would wonder what height she’d fallen from, an airship or heaven, an addlepated stork. Dropped from the claws of the Salford Devil, flying down Mims Avenue. The Salford Devil herself, a flying woman, but old, weary. They’ll think I killed myself. That’d be a funeral! That’d show them! But she didn’t like to cause trouble and so she went backward onto the roof. Not so light after all. As soon as she fell the bruise began to form, dusk of skin pressed up against the dusky tar paper of the roof in the dawny light. Above her, some wooly clouds unraveled like a chewed sock. Not a cloud in the sky, she thought bitterly: how it ought to be. Joe used to sleep up here—he had told her so—and then she could see his face, squinty and sad. Alone, he made it sound, but she wondered. Not too many places a man like Joe Wear could go with a sweetheart, in those days or these, and her heart was filled with benevolence for him and then the benevolence drained away. Good. Drive ’em out. Let ’em find other neighborhoods to ruin.

  Oh, the wind would teach her a lesson for that, it grabbed the hem of her nightgown and pulled it up past her haunches to the underside of her tiny breasts. I’m not wearing underwear! she thought, as though somebody had stolen it, but she never did when she slept: even a pious woman needed airing out. There was the wind, puzzling over her lower anatomy. She began to weep with the shame and pleasure of it. Nobody had touched her below the waist since that old fraud her husband and nobody would, not even for purely sanitary reasons. She would not go to the home, to have immigrants wipe her bottom, no matter what her children said. She would not have her bottom parted and cleaned by strangers, or even by family, though here she was parted, the wind was parting her, her bottom in the back and in front what Nahum called, intolerably, her nelly. Old Mr. TV saw everything. I will die of exposure! Less embarrassing to be seen by someone her own age but also worse, worse, and with enormous effort she rolled underneath the lip of the roof as though under the sooty wing of one of God’s own angels.