Bowlaway

by Elizabeth McCracken

  Instead, he merely wanted to ban women. He’d come to the conclusion on one of his forays to the Woods in Maine.

  “Men need a place to come together in fellowship,” said Nahum. By now Joe Wear knew a few places where that happened. Once liquor got pushed into the basement he discovered that’s where Massachusetts kept a lot of interesting things, but he didn’t think that was what Nahum had in mind. “They need a place of recreation and exercise where they may speak their minds to one another without interference. Are we bowlers? Yes, we are bowlers, but we are also Christian men, and when Christian men gather in a place of understanding and decency, they may come to know God.”

  “What would your mother think?”

  Nahum frowned. “You tell me.”

  “She wouldn’t like it.”

  At that Nahum looked nearly moved. “Yes,” he said sadly. “She would hate it. That was like her. What would she say?”

  “She would say,” said Joe, trying to conjure her voice up. He could not even quite disinter her face from his memory, though he would recognize her particular lolloping walk from a distance. “She would say, The game is for all, Joe Wear.”

  “Not to you,” said Nahum. “What would she say to me?”

  But Joe Wear couldn’t imagine. At last he tried, “Nahum Truitt, let women bowl.”

  “We shall install a pool table,” said Nahum.

  “We shall?”

  “Get a pool table, Joe Wear,” said Nahum. “Get two, so that more men may commune. But first, clear out the gals.”

  The Angel of the Alleys

  Mostly the women had gone anyhow, home to their children and families, to speakeasies, to other hobbies. LuEtta Mood came every Saturday with her new baby strapped to her back so that you could only see his comically fat head. The first time, pregnant with Edith, she’d been unnerved that she had a living thing inside of her; the second time, a mortal one. She’d denied her imagination at every turn and so had been surprised by a boy who looked nothing like Edith, with the black hair and pug nose of a foreign prince. She did not feel as though she knew him yet, though he was six months old.

  “Sorry, Lu,” said Joe Wear, the first Saturday of Nahum’s reign. “New rules. No women.”

  “Rules? On whose authority?”

  “New owner. Mr. Truitt. Who else’s?”

  LuEtta Mood was taller than Joe Wear. She leaned over so she could rest her bust on the glass counter in a territorial way. “This is Bertha Truitt’s house,” she said. Her chin was substantial. It possessed a certain force when she pointed it at him.

  Then Jeptha Arrison was pattering down the gutter like a tightrope walker.

  “Lu!” he called. “Lu!”

  “Hello, Jep. Now, Mr. Wear,” said LuEtta, who’d never called him so, “you tell your new boss you informed me but I said no.” She pulled out her shoes from her satchel. “I came to bowl. I bowled here opening day and I will bowl closing day. Call the police if you like.”

  “I’m not going to call the police,” said Joe, irritated.

  LuEtta made herself tall as she could. She fluffed her bloomers to their full blossom. “I won’t go.”

  “Won’t she?” said Jeptha Arrison, in a voice of terror. “Won’t she? Joe, me neither, I won’t go neither, I’ll stay with Lu and the babby.”

  “Were you asked to go?” said Joe. “Are you a woman?”

  “Not so’s I noticed,” said Jeptha.

  “You’ll pinset for me,” said LuEtta, and Jeptha put his hand to his chest and said, “’Pon my honor and always.”

  Who’s that gal?” Nahum asked Joe that afternoon. “I recall saying no women. Our mission is a bowling mission, I remember distinct I told you this, and we preach to men. Men fail to speak their minds when women are around, for fear of contradiction. That woman there looks especial contradictory. She especial contradictory? She looks terrible contradictory and contrary.”

  “She’s all right,” said Joe. He disliked it when Nahum stood behind the counter with him: the man was an elbower and shoulder shover, a whisperer of confidences that added up to nothing, an animated overcoat who only wanted you to don it, no matter the weather. “Won plenty of trophies in her time. I wouldn’t bother with Lu. Worry about the cats.”

  “Cats and women,” said Nahum. “Which is worse? Both species cold as ice and fishy to boot. Gal! Gal! Gal!”

  Lu didn’t turn her head.

  “I’ll get her out,” said Nahum, darkly. “What’s that fool doing setting her pins? Hey! Hey! Pinboy! Don’t set her pins.” He elbowed Joe Wear in the elbow; it hurt. “Is he deaf?”

  “Might be, all these years. He’s all right.”

  Nahum looked at Jep. “If that’s all right I hate to think.”

  But Jeptha Arrison was not all right, he was struck, he was vibrating, he was pinsetting for LuEtta Mood, connected to her as though by piano wire. The ball, he swore, was still warm from her palm, faintly whiffish of her perfume.

  He loved her.

  Jeptha Arrison had not been kicked in the head, leastways not by a horse, not actually. His father had tried to make him a jockey but Jeptha didn’t care for horses, their oil derrick heads and black eyes, their mouths all the way at the bottom of their snouts. “I like cows,” he told his father at the Rockingham Track, where he’d been brought for employment. Jeptha’s father had looked around, shook his head. A skewbald mare sneezed and whips of sticky spit lashed from her mouth. “Well,” his father said, “I don’t know any of those ladies, you’ll have to find cows yourself. Marry a farm girl. I don’t know any of those, either.”

  “I won’t marry a farm girl,” Jeptha said.

  “Dear Jep,” said his father, “you won’t marry anyone.”

  But oh yes he will said his mother, and by the time Jeptha Arrison was twenty he was a married man and by the time he was twenty and a half he was a widower. His wife, Bessie, had been a schoolteacher, had loved him with an antiseptic, what-will-I-do-with-you love. She liked especially to tuck him into bed with fierce hands like hoes that jammed bedclothes around him. “You cozy, Mr. Arrison,” she’d say. They’d been married for six weeks when, while in Baskertop Square, they stopped to look at the men constructing the monument on top of Bledsoe Hill, one of the two hills that had survived the leveling of Salford. The monument was a tower to commemorate a Revolutionary War battle that Salford had supplied the guns for; it looked like a saltshaker. “Almost done!” said Bessie, and at that moment the masons on top of Bledsoe Hill lost their grip of a cart holding a block of granite. It roared down the hill and, in almost a deliberative way, took Bessie out of the square and married her to the tobacconist’s wooden Indian and sent them both—Bessie, the chief—through the tobacconist’s glass window in a calamitous shatter.

  Left-behind Jeptha gasped on the sidewalk. He’d been holding her pocketbook. He still held it.

  “Glory!” said a woman who’d seen it happen. She tried to take the pocketbook from him, as though he’d stolen it. For a moment he even thought she was Bessie, come back to claim what was hers: the purse, her Jeptha. About the same womanish shape, and Jeptha was awful at faces. Then he saw she was older, and redheaded, and herself: she tugged and he tightened his hold and they wrestled till the woman said angrily, “You’re bleeding!”

  His knuckles were scraped, one toe was broken, that’s how close he came to dying. He couldn’t even get dying right, he told himself later. He’d let her die alone.

  All his life Jeptha had confused the word widow and window and now here they were: he was a windower. He wanted the murdering block of granite as a headstone but the city wouldn’t let him. He would have carved it with the words BESSIE ARRISON. ALMOST DONE. Instead they trucked the stone back up and put it in place, and they trucked Bessie to the morgue and the cemetery. He didn’t know what happened to the Indian. Her people put up a little marble cenotaph that said:

  BESSIE

  BELOVED DAUGHTER

  & WIFE

  “B
eloved wife, too,” he told his mother-in-law, and she said, “Yes, that’s what it says.” She pointed at the BELOVED, then at the WIFE, as though grammar could explain. “Most beloved,” said Jeptha.

  Oh, he knew he upset people. Bad enough when he was Only Jeptha; troubling when he was Jeptha Married and sharing a bed with a woman; once he was Jeptha Bereaved he was untouchable. He worked at the track—his father had a friend—but in the canteen. He was a man apart and knew it. Even the horses started to look at him cow-eyed. To watch your wife die before you! People were suspicious of him so that they would not have to pity him. Even the horses. Especially the horses. In his grief he swallowed aspirin and was sent to the hospital, where he found Bertha Truitt. She took him in, built the bowling alley around them both.

  There, he was just big-headed Jeptha Arrison: who imagined he had a past? Always Jeptha, ever Jeptha. Only his parents saw, in his fastidiousness with the pins, his exactitude and grace, a man recreating the world, ten pins at a time and ten frames a string, all day long till the lights went out. A man born for love.

  LuEtta Mood, at home, nursing the baby, tried to conjure Bertha Truitt up: what she might have said to the man who insisted he was her son. There was no Bertha to him. He was leather and gristle, mean-eyed, lazy. Anyhow it was Dr. Sprague who’d left the alley to him. Bertha might object. She might have chosen somebody else. A woman. A collective of women. LuEtta herself, even. Why would Bertha Truitt allow her beloved bowling alley to be owned by a man? She only ever seemed passingly interested in the male sex: she loved her husband, and Jeptha Arrison. Ordinary male Salfordian bowlers she ignored so far as she could, though she had a soft spot for the men returned from the war, who’d lost part of an arm, all of their hearing. They were nearly noble enough to be women. When it came to most men, she took their money and turned down their advice. The former they were stingy with; the latter, profligate.

  “He says men need a place they can come together without women,” Joe Wear had said. But wasn’t that the whole wide world? Where did women have? Truitt’s had been hers for all her grown-up years, even if her teammates had fallen away. Indeed, perhaps women did not need a place to come together but to be alone. That’s what Truitt’s was to her: a thunderous place where she could think in peace. A place her husband hated.

  She was, still, an excellent bowler, the baby on her back where she couldn’t see him but could feel him breathe and so knew he was alive. She had forgotten how many minutes of motherhood were devoted to this question, even before Edith’s accident. Alive now? And now? The deeper Edith’s sleep the shallower her life, it seemed. The extraordinary stillness of a sleeping baby! Look for breath at the stomach, flush at the cheeks. Then LuEtta would leave the room, come back. She lost hours to the question. Alive now, now, now?

  These days she didn’t have hours. She strapped the rude baby to her back. Away from the bowling alley she dispensed love to him through every part of her body, her neck and face and breasts and stomach. At Truitt’s she let her disinterested back pick up some of the mothering. He was an animal, asleep. She bowled well. You should never have to give up something you’re good at.

  She met her old teammate Hazel Forest at Coop’s Tearoom. “It’s unbearable!” said Hazel. “I haven’t been in a year or more, but what would Our Bertha say?” Hazel was old, but with children still little: she had an exhausted air of experience, someone who thought a lot of things but actually knew very few. If you asked her how to make a cheese soufflé she would tell you about the rivers of blood running down the gutters of Paris during the French Revolution, as though you should be able to divine a recipe from that.

  “We’ll chain ourselves to the ball returns,” said Hazel.

  “You can’t bowl in chains,” said LuEtta.

  “We’ll take up space. We’ll interfere. They want a quiet place to gather as men? We won’t let ’em. We’ll get cymbals. Horns! Hatchets.”

  “Hatchets?” LuEtta said in a panic. “We don’t want to destroy it.”

  “Why not? It’s not ours anymore. Why preserve it?”

  Why not? It was Bertha’s place. She’d left it to them. Bertha was four years dead, and LuEtta’s love for her was spilled molasses. Before the spill she’d known she’d owned it, up on a shelf, contained and unopened. Now it was everywhere, it got everywhere, the stick and smell, the uselessness because spilled. You talk of that woman too much, Moses Mood told LuEtta as she read about the lawsuits against the Purity Distillery Company, owners of the burst molasses tank. She wanted them to pay for killing Bertha, though she didn’t want the exact dollar value of Bertha’s life calculated by lawyers. She’s dead, said Moses. That was true. And I am alive. LuEtta wasn’t sure. Some days she thought she’d married a man killed years ago by a bullet, dead but still talking.

  “What good does ruin do?” LuEtta said to Hazel at Coop’s Tearoom. “If we want to be allowed—”

  “I’ve seen that man. That is a man who hates women for their very womanhood. He is the Devil.”

  “We might change his mind.”

  “He would rip himself in two before changing his mind,” said Hazel. “Bertha marched.”

  “Not in her own house. In her own house she bowled. So we’ll bowl.”

  In fact Hazel did not want to bowl: her shoulder was bursitic. She was older than LuEtta Mood, and she’d been divorced eight years now. Golda Bastian, like Hazel a nurse at the hospital, had moved in to help, but it was clear that Golda hated children with the pure passion of a bigot. “I’ll bowl with you,” said Hazel.

  She lasted a single afternoon.

  Men came from all over by car, by trolley, to see the Angel of the Alleys. Time had blunted the point of her chin, and bowling, as Bertha Truitt foretold, had proved a boon to her form. She wouldn’t give up, LuEtta. She bowled alone. She got there in the morning and bowled till night, in white culottes and a blue-trimmed middy blouse. Bertha Truitt had bowled alone plenty and the men had never wanted to intrude on her solitude. LuEtta was different. Soon enough men started to challenge her. That is, they tried to flirt and she said, “We’ll play for it.”

  “Play for what?”

  “Conversation,” said LuEtta. “You lose, you leave me alone.”

  “All right,” the challenging man might say.

  She was a spectacle, just the sort of thing Joe Wear used to despise, but he found he didn’t mind so much. He even found a wedge of admiration for her.

  Thereafter, nearly any time of day, you could find LuEtta Mood taking a stack of cash off some frowning man, the frowning baby strapped to her back. That imperious baby! He seemed to disapprove of everything, though silently: he would issue his orders for your execution later, through his trusted ministers. Good thing he would never remember this, it was terrible to be so bound by duty and age, and soon enough the baby—did he have a name? nobody ever heard her mention it—kept his eyes averted, as though the sight of her pained him, as though she were dying in a hospital bed. Duty. You would sit close, you had to, but to watch your mother do something so grim and personal meant you’d remember her no other way.

  One afternoon Moses Mood met them on the sidewalk outside of Truitt’s. He had not been on the streets of Salford for a year or more. His assistants ran the hardware store; he stayed at home and worried. He’d had black hair once, so black that people wondered where it had come from. Now it was white. Turned white overnight, people said, from the shock, but it was only that they hadn’t looked at him in so long, not really. He’d lost weight, and the scar on his cheek had been laid bare. Lu wanted to touch it, as she had in the old days. He put his hand up to hide it.

  Moses Mood had thought the baby would make things better. Would eat up some of her affection for the dead Edith’s, so that his husband’s portion would outweigh either child’s. No: that gobbling baby ate up every bit of spare love and attention, and then she took him to the bowling alley and stayed away all day. He was a year old now, as baby a baby as ever, as gobblingly greedy
.

  “Lu-Etta,” Moses Mood said in his slow furious voice. “Lu-Etta.” He shook his head and chuckled. There was never such a man for chuckling. “Come on home, it’s dinnertime.”

  What was he wearing? Shirt and tie, he wanted to look good, but with a little shawl around his shoulders because he was cold. It was March. He had a pistol in his pocket, a little one.

  “I’m hungry,” he said, with a small awful smile, small as the hidden gun.

  “You know how to cook,” she answered.

  “You walked right out of the house, no food in the icebox. I looked for you. I yelled for you. Then Snodders calls me on the phone and says, She’s down at the alleys again.”

  Of course she had taken to the alleys, married to a man like that! For years she’d been trying to please him and he would not allow it. She had sewn or knitted or crocheted all of the baby’s clothing (she had made the very shawl that Moses Mood wore) to the wonder of her friends: nobody’s stitches were tinier, and Moses Mood could only say, Look at the little fellow in his ball gown. She had cooked him meals for years, and never a compliment. Had sung to the baby: Was that you caterwauling, Lu? No matter what she’d done over the years she could hear his response: Let me do that and you’ll ball it up and this house is a mess, no I’ll clean it, I’ll clean it, I always do. When he yelled, she could only make herself smaller on the couch. She’d had a father who hit her. Moses never did but she believed she was the one who stopped him, by her small stillness.

  He said again, “No food in the house. I looked.”

  “You said you were too sick to eat! You said you wanted to lie in bed alone!” For a moment she was a stranger listening to herself berate an old man on the sidewalk and she almost softened to him. The baby on her back turned.