Bowlaway

by Elizabeth McCracken

  “Impossible,” said Bertha. “No, I refuse to believe it.”

  “It isn’t a matter of belief.”

  “I do not believe in the unseeable,” said Bertha. She heard the lie and decided to clarify. “I do not see a child and until I see a child I will not believe one exists.”

  At first the pregnancy was like an idea she had, present, indefinite, entirely hers. A wait-and-see thing. Doomed, maybe. A bad idea. Then it was like a train ticket somebody had folded into her hand without telling her the destination, and she’d been put on a train and had to keep her fist shut till the conductor came through. Then as though somebody else’s bag on the train—here, hold this—had been settled into her lap so she couldn’t move around the way she liked, the bag’s owner striding off into the next car. Soon enough it was as though that stranger had picked up the bag and had sat extraordinarily close to her, but in a clever way, so that she could not complain, call the conductor to have that person removed.

  Her bowlers looked at her sideways in the bowling alley. Her togs were designed for the ordinary fluctuations in her weight—all her life she was a pony, put on weight in winter to keep herself warm, lost it, lost most of it, in the summertime. Now her divided skirt was overburdened. She’d broadened all over. Mary Gearheart said it was a growth, her own mother had died of such a thing—

  “I don’t think so,” said LuEtta Mood. “That it’s a growth. I think Truitt’s going to have a baby.”

  “Banana oil,” said Mary. “Bullshit.”

  Mary Gearheart might say anything at any time. Nobody ever asked her questions: she spewed. She spoke of her own cramps and bleeding and bowel movements, of her husband—she wasn’t Gearheart any longer, but Phillips—she was so frank about the various ways her body ticked and dripped and gushed and gurgled and stretched and smelled that she appalled even Hazel Forest, who believed in medicine but had her limits.

  Mary Gearheart Phillips was pregnant, too. “See,” she said, and she lifted the white duck middy blouse she bowled in, and knocked her knuckles against her stomach. “Hard. My mother died of a growth big as an ottoman,” said Mary. “And it was soft. You could sink a fist in. I have hair on my toes, and my lip, and”—her voice dropped to a sizzling whisper—“nipples!” She talked about her own body as though gossiping about a girl at school she wished to humiliate.

  “It’s natural,” said Hazel Forest.

  “It’s disgusting,” said Mary Gearheart happily.

  “It’s not a growth,” said LuEtta Mood.

  LuEtta had recently decided she would be a wonder instead of a beauty. She had seen beauties go mad in middle age, as their beauty turned less live and more monumental, beauty still but mostly to mark the space where greater beauty once had been. But wondrous was wondrous, even when you outgrew it.

  Lu bowled. She bowled against women and men. One spring she bowled against Minnie Barden, famous in her own Massachusetts town, in a ten-string trolley tournament: five strings at Truitt’s, get on the streetcar to go to Ripton Lanes and finish it out. LuEtta won by seventy-eight pins. She brought the trophy back to Truitt’s.

  “One day you’ll bowl a perfect game,” said Truitt, stout, ungainly, who’d never been ungainly.

  “It’s not possible,” Lu said.

  “Of course it is,” said Bertha. “On tenpin lanes they do it regularly. This is why The Game”—when bullheaded she called it The Game, there was no other; when tenderhearted, Our Game, a private pleasure—“why Our Game is better. It is harder. It is arranged to disappoint. But LuEtta Mood, you must not be disappointed. The world is prodigious. There are more things than are visible to the eye.”

  “Truitt!” said Lu. “You mean God and spirits and such?”

  “I mean quite the opposite,” said Bertha. “I mean the natural and exhausting teeming world.”

  Well then. She would broach it. “When will Dr. Sprague be back,” she asked, for he was off on one of his walks. “How are you getting along?”

  “Lonely,” said Bertha, and as she said it LuEtta herself felt lonely as a rung bell, longing for the clapper’s strike again. “What’s that look on your face, Lu? I like to be lonely. I have been lonely for most of my life.”

  “I didn’t mean,” said LuEtta. “I’m sorry. I don’t like to be lonely. You do?”

  “Oh, people like all sorts of pain,” said Truitt. “I could tell you. They pay for it. They like to be footworn and exhausted. I know a woman who loved the feel of starvation.”

  “Truitt,” said LuEtta.

  “Bowl,” said Truitt.

  “You’re going to have a baby.”

  Truitt shrugged. “Perhaps,” she said.

  “Perhaps,” said LuEtta.

  “We will see.”

  “We will see.”

  LuEtta wondered whether Bertha Truitt would be overtaken by ordinary life. She wondered what she herself would do, if Bertha Truitt disappeared into motherhood. People were careful around her when they spoke of babies, but other people’s babies never made her miss Edith more. Edith was an organ that existed inside LuEtta, far away from all womanly organs, tucked up in her rib cage. For a while after Edith died LuEtta had wanted another child very keenly—Edith the Organ worried for her mother, had suffused LuEtta with that desire. Quick! Before this is the story of your whole life! Another child! But then Edith the Organ simmered down, and was herself.

  LuEtta wasn’t sure whether Truitt knew about Edith. She’d assumed so these years, assumed that Truitt’s extra affection for her—everyone saw it—was sympathy for the loss of Edith. It was pragmatic Bertha who allowed LuEtta to think—just some early mornings, just some lunchtimes—that one day she might leave Moses Mood. Walk away, on to the next life. The presents Bertha gave: a wooden toy brought back from somebody’s trip to Germany with two bears who took turns chopping at a log when you pulled a string; blouses made up specially, with coppery trim that matched LuEtta’s eyes. Truitt’s love for LuEtta lit up Moses Mood’s lack of it. His regard was for tools: hammer, wrench, awl, plane, rasp, angle, gun. A wife was a tool for the production of children, and LuEtta Mood was faulty. She would not leave him but she could believe she would.

  Truitt liked to name things without naming them. The game. The place. The bog. The place in the bog. The bog and the boglands. The gentleman. The ladies. The baby. The bowler. The ball. The wood: you must learn to read the wood. The world: the world stops for the game. The place. The city; the Commonwealth. The old pinbody. The dead. The afterlife. The time. The death of me. The almighty, the very death, the bitter end.

  They had been two childless women together. I had a baby who died, thought LuEtta, but she knew that the moment to tell Truitt had passed, if Truitt didn’t know.

  There was no name for Edith but Edith.

  When Bertha’s time had nearly come, Leviticus performed the Leopold Maneuvers, his hands on Bertha’s stomach. “Who’s Leopold?” asked Bertha. “Ssh,” said Leviticus. They were in their bedroom. She wasn’t aware of how much more of the bed she took up but she was clear about how much more of the world, and it was terrible. He was ascertaining how the—not child, she insisted, not baby, she didn’t want a word that suggested the future in any way. Well, not visitor, said Leviticus, not guest, nothing that suggested transience. They settled on stranger, which seemed equally wrongheaded to both of them. The Leopold Maneuvers were a way to ascertain certain things about the stranger: direction, presentation.

  Bertha lay back on the bed. She would have liked to discuss the peculiarities of a woman’s body with LuEtta. Impatience with husbands. Pregnancy, its terrors and pleasures. Bladders, blood. Women told these truths to each other. Bertha knew they did, but she had never told anyone and nobody had ever told her and she didn’t know how to start. Leviticus’s hands, cool and dry, were on her skin at the top of her abdomen. An intimate distance. He nodded, worked his way down. His left hand cupped the right side of her immensity, then he reached up and took her hand and laid it in the
same spot. She could feel a heaviness, a curve that was not her but beyond her. “The stranger’s spine,” Leviticus said in a fond voice.

  No, she thought, let us not. She didn’t hate certainty, she didn’t hate mystery, but she couldn’t bear the mongrel state between the two, knowing only some things—the stranger’s head was pointed downward!—but not everything—who? Who? Even to call the event the stranger—as soon as she got used to it, she hated it. Leviticus’s hands worked their way down. He was not really touching her but it still hurt. He pinched. She jumped. He’d covered her feet with the old quilt and she felt staked as a circus animal. The living being inside of her was an idea she’d had, her own dear idea, grown round and meddling. He tilted his face to the ceiling. In other examinations he had struck and sounded her, but now he just palpated, looking for shape instead of echo. His hands never left her body.

  “Like head reading,” she said.

  “Nothing like,” said Leviticus.

  “Who are you examining?”

  “You,” he whispered to her immensity. In English it could be plural or singular. English was a fine language for prevarication.

  Later that afternoon, Bertha Truitt thought, I am heaving with child. Child, she thought again experimentally, the entity that ordinarily tried to kick and shoulder Bertha out of the way, though Bertha was all around. Now she could feel no movement, only a lightning pain that was her body and not what her body contained.

  The pain sent her to the spiral staircase to the belvedere, where Dr. Sprague had gone to smoke a pipe. A disaster is coming. Get yourself high up. The baby, too. The baby? Yes, she was starting to believe it. She wanted to see her husband’s reassuring face. The iron stairs were narrow and she had never liked them. Her frame did not bend. It marched, it bowled, but it did not bend. Even at the best of times if she dropped something she would not stoop to pick it up. Her bosom sometimes had to be moved around a tight corner like a chifforobe through a doorway.

  She assessed the staircase with fury and then thought, Dominate it, Bertha, give it no quarter.

  She went right up, paused only a moment, victory, to rest her breasts upon the floor of the belvedere, and took one more step, and stopped.

  “Leviticus,” she said, “I’m caught.”

  He was there reading a book. He put it on the little green table by his fringed armchair and regarded her.

  All her life her widest part had been her bustline, which she used, as a cat uses its whiskers, to gauge where she might fit. No longer.

  Oh, Bertha: wedged in the aperture of a belvedere.

  She hollered, a wild noise, and Dr. Sprague understood why she’d chanced the staircase. By her expression he could tell that she was now a different person, as all women are in the act of childbirth. That is the great change, Dr. Sprague knew, not the baby, who is the same object on either side of the experience. One hopes the same object: alive and mothered. Here in childbirth Bertha was somebody who would say—she was saying now, I will stay here forever if I must, get away from me, get away from me, leave me alone.

  He never was intended to deliver this child. That job belonged to Hazel Forest, who was bored by childbirth, and the hired girl, Margaret Vanetten, who was now in the kitchen. Dr. Sprague was too softhearted.

  “Turn, I think, to the right,” he said to her. “Perhaps—”

  “Hazel!” she said, and also, “get the hired girl!”

  He couldn’t shout down the stairs at a white woman who wasn’t his wife, hired girl or no. He would have to retrieve her in person. He went out the window, down the ribbed raked octagonal roof. Had he dropped his pipe inside? Had he remembered to douse the match? He almost went back in: he was terrified of fire. No time. Late winter, ice and snow. His insides leapt but he kept his feet careful down the exterior stairs of the octagon. The wet seeped through his leather slippers. Then he burst through the back door into the kitchen, where Margaret Vanetten was weeping with onion-cutting for supper.

  “Margaret,” he said. “My wife. If you wouldn’t mind. The time has come.”

  She looked petrified; she was a girl, only, big nosed and pale and fresh from the convent. She believed in God; she believed God was an old-fashioned man Who surely would turn His head away from childbirth. What would she need? She wiped the knife on her skirt and put it in her apron pocket in case. “Yes,” she said, “yes, but where did you come from?”

  He pointed toward heaven, but he took her through the house. The sky outside was darkening. The blue hour; l’heure bleu; but all hours are blue. “Follow me,” he said to the hired girl. “This may be tricky, but we will have gravity to aid us.”

  Bertha’s legs were still there, though she was naked from the waist down.

  “Mother of God!” said Margaret Vanetten. “Shall I get the lard?”

  Bertha was part of the house, the house was part of her, they were a mythical domestic creature. The structure had fastened around her like an exoskeleton. That was what happened when you had a baby, she told herself. (She was almost certainly going to have a baby.) You became part of the house.

  She felt her body a floor beneath her but near the ceiling. She could hear the voices below, too, humiliating, then not humiliating. She understood she might never feel mortified again. Then everything shifted, and it was as though the house were wringing out her torso: a tremendous unfastening fart, and her legs and feet were soaking, and she scuttled scrapingly up into the belvedere.

  “Oh,” said Margaret Vanetten, “oh, oh, don’t worry, Doctor, we will get this settled.”

  The two of them went up the stairs and found her there, on the floor, stroking her own hair off her forehead, a comfort, a tic. She’d got up but there was no way to get her out except in two pieces. The pipe smoked, cupped safe in the ashtray.

  “All right, Bertha,” Leviticus said. He had found his doctor self, the one that was bored by childbirth, too. “Nothing to worry about.”

  “If all goes right,” she said. She wore a white smock hitched up around her hips.

  “Everybody on this earth was born,” he said. “It’s the one thing we all have in common.”

  “Not only,” said Bertha darkly.

  If all goes right, she said again and again. Every third time the words were flattened with fear. A bog was a woman; a woman was a bog.

  Margaret Vanetten the hired girl thought she herself might die of fright. She had never seen so much in her life, so much fluid and woman and marriage. It smelled of spilled whiskey up here. Something sterilized, surely. Then she thought: I will know this baby her whole life, I will love her more than anything or anybody. (She was certain it was a girl.) If we live through this—by we she meant only the baby and herself—I will love the child perfectly. “Don’t be scared,” she said.

  Bertha said, “But I am,” and Margaret Vanetten hugged her, and was flung away with such fury she skidded across the floor to the baseboards. “Don’t touch me!” Bertha Truitt commanded.

  “Onions,” whispered Margaret unhappily, smelling her own fingers. “Yes, ma’am.”

  In the belvedere Bertha Truitt hollered. It sounded to her like somebody hollering in the other room. Quiet that woman. I am trying to die. Her old self rolled around the boards of her brain; she couldn’t get at it; she had a sense it was about to drop off the edge.

  She was dying. Her soul was leaving her body. A soul was leaving her body. A body was leaving her body and it didn’t want to. A person.

  Who was it, this person?

  She thought, If the worst occurs I will leave. I will walk out of the house and into the city. Another thing she didn’t have in common with her husband. He would have disappeared into the countryside.

  She loved Leviticus but she’d left things she loved behind before.

  Things could go wrong. She knew that well. The sky around the belvedere had turned nacreous: pink, weak gold, blue in the hollow of clouds. “Go get a lamp,” said Dr. Sprague to the hired girl. The house had electricity but the belv
edere didn’t. The air smelled of salt and disaster. Bertha found herself thinking of Joe Wear. Why on earth? He was capable and unsentimental, unlike Leviticus, unlike the hired girl. He would solve this problem. Also he had survived his own birth, evidence you could escape utter calamity. He’d told Bertha his survival had been a question: “I was blue, they said. Cord round my neck. So that’s why.”

  The Salford Devil was only a woman, birthing or grieving, alone or plagued by company.

  She was a creature with two heads, half woman, half infant. “That’s good!” said Leviticus, as though she had said something. Then woman and baby were just two naked people in one room, same as the other two gaping, bloody, entirely clothed people. No, thought Bertha Truitt, you weren’t anybody’s mother till you looked that person in the face, and she waited, she waited, and then she thought, ah yes, the child was dead, the death was like hearing someone reading a bad-news telegram in the other room, and wailing, though the wailing was hers: she should have known not to count on any kind of luck in matters of love, so she said, “Leviticus,” and “Ah!” he said, “Bertha,” and handed her an object, it was a baby, a live one, beating like her heart, thatched top, broad shouldered as a bread box, “Our Minna.”

  They had agreed to name a girl baby Minna. She could no longer remember why.

  1907, February 22, Washington’s birthday. The date cannot be argued with: her birth was recorded at City Hall.

  The Darling

  The babies Margaret Vanetten had previously known had been such little dear dumb animals, but from her earliest hours Minna was peculiarly human. She had a look to her that communicated everything, and Margaret understood. There’s her hunger cry. There’s the wet. Hold her head, Miz Truitt, she doesn’t have the muscles to do it herself, she’s just a little loaf of ham.

  Margaret had originally been unsure about working in the strange house for the strange couple—was it natural, their marriage? was it right?—but Minna was the answer, a blessing, an amendment, an agreement, and also, as it happened, Margaret Vanetten’s purpose in life.