It was terrible to be only attendant to the beauty. She had to learn how to bowl herself. She needed a tutor.
Years later, Roy Truitt would wonder how his mother had managed to keep him from enlisting. He was eighteen years old! His decisions were his own! No, they weren’t, not then: his decisions were his mother’s. He wasn’t sure how she accomplished this. Radio waves. Hypnosis. The old-fashioned maternal apparatus, guilt, helplessness, guile. Candy. Arch made his own decisions, entirely bad, and Margaret didn’t care. Arch went out; Roy stayed home, listening to the Minna Sprague records he kept a secret from his mother, as she had kept Minna a secret from him. He’d bought himself a little player that could be stowed under the bed. One more month, thought Roy, one more year. He had registered for the draft and hoped it would take him. Meanwhile he’d turned himself into machinery: he could drop pins right-handed onto the deck perfectly while not losing his place in the book he was reading.
“Hey,” said the girl his mother had hired. “Roy. I have a favor to ask.”
He looked up from his book, volume five of a seven-volume history of the last war. Her voice was grave but her face was merry.
“Will you teach me how to bowl?”
“Sure,” he said. “What’s your average?”
“Zero,” she said.
“You’re either bad at math or bowling.”
“I’m excellent at math. Zero pins divided by zero games equals an average of zero.”
“You’ve never bowled?” asked Roy. The girl had rakishly rolled the cuffs of her coveralls, both wrist and ankle, and he found himself interested in her. Without looking he sensed that the bowler on his lane was winding up to roll the last ball of the frame.
She said, in a confidential voice, “I’m a quick study. Try me.”
Roy Truitt was underground, had been underground for years, so subterraneanly turned around that he could not figure out which way to look for light. Here was Cracker Graham. She was not a beam slanting down from heaven, not the gilded edge of the rising sun, but she’d do: she was the glow in a darkened theater above a door: EXIT. “Excuse me,” he said—something he’d never before said in his pinsetting life—and he hopped down to his lane.
Pinsetting was dull. He had fallen years ago into the habit of pretending people were watching him, stopwatches in hands, timing him and marveling, though who in real life would actually pay attention? Now someone was. He plucked the pins up and set them on their marks on the plate. He assessed in his head: the center of each pin had to be exactly one foot away from the center of its fellows. Then he rolled the balls back along the return to the waiting bowler, one-two-three, waltz time. By then Cracker Graham was in her own lane, setting the pins, too slowly but with care.
“OK,” he said when she’d finished. “Let us commence your bowling education.”
They met Saturday mornings, before the alleys opened and the leagues came in; they started on lane one and worked their way to lane eight before they reset any pins. Cracker would have rather bowled in the crowded afternoon, surrounded by strangers: bowling, like dancing, was one of those things more intimate in a crowd.
“Your form is better than fair,” said Roy.
“Are you flirting with me?” she asked.
“I don’t know how to flirt,” he answered.
Still, he was a good teacher, patient, scientific. “Here’s the handshake grip,” he told her. “Here’s the semihandshake. Here’s the overshoot.” She’d imagined he would get behind her in the way of a lecherous golf instructor, his body shadowing hers, arm to arm, leg to leg, his breath tucked behind her right ear. Instead, he stood next to her, appraised her stance, and lectured.
“It’s the dance of the pins and the ball,” he said. “That’s candlepin. Roll the ball and wait and see—the pins jump one way, you got a seven-ten split, you think the ball’s gone, but then it hits the wall and comes back and maybe you have a strike. Nothing is for sure. Look down the lane. Read it. Some other houses oil the approaches to soup up the scores. We don’t soup up the scores. OK, so roll. Good. Good. All right, you see how that broke at the end? That’s fine, to have a breaking ball, but it means you need to adjust. You can pin bowl, or spot bowl, or a combination. Now it’s time to play the wood. It’s trickier than you think. Trickier than most people think. What’s so funny?”
“You really don’t know how to flirt.”
At that he gave a dimpled smile of such promise any flirt would have paid money to learn it. “I told you,” he said.
“You teach me to bowl,” she said, setting the ball on her shoulder, her opposite hip cocked, “I’ll teach you how to flirt.”
“As though you know how.”
She laughed. “Very good. See, you’re improving already.”
He looked at the pins uncomfortably. The four horsemen, right, three pin knocked over in front: if she hit the pin on the left, it would go spinning without touching the standing pins; straight on it might do nothing; on the left, it should convert the spare. That he understood. Flirtation flummoxed him, but so did ordinary conversation, which only sometimes obeyed the rules of physics. He looked at Cracker Graham, who seemed like a capable translator.
“Don’t you have a boyfriend?” he asked.
“I did. He joined the navy. Just shipped out.”
“And you’re not waiting for him? Shame, shame.”
“I don’t wait,” said Cracker.
“What if I joined the service?”
She looked at him. There’d been no question of waiting for Davey Cotter, who’d taken her virginity after-hours at Grover Cronin, in Intimate Apparel, and had apologized afterward, as though he’d accidentally eaten her lunch. She’d vowed to take it exactly that seriously. Roy was something else again. Roy was gravity. He was a big kid, with a kind of galumphing shape that Cracker found comforting and alluring, as though he might be her palisade. Davey Cotter had been a little guy with neat curls. Roy Truitt was large, both soft and muscular, with his uncombed red hair and battalion of cowlicks.
“I could try,” she said.
She was what he needed, he understood: cemented to the bowling alley by duty, he needed an even greater duty to blast him free.
Early morning, Margaret in the alley alone, she thought. Unlock the door, lock herself in. Her shoulders went down. She was capable and by herself, nobody angling for a favor or money. Then, in the shadows over lane seven, legs dangling down. The deck was empty of pins. Four legs: two people sitting up on the ledge together. She had a sense that Arch had snuck girls in before, but late at night. After sunrise it seemed more debauched. As though they heard her think this, the boy dropped down, put his hand up to help the girl. They sat right down on the metal deck. It made Margaret’s flanks cold to see. By then she’d walked to the foul line, picked up a ball. Not Arch: Roy.
They didn’t hear her. Roy sat on a hip, one knee aimed at the girl, the other leg behind him, his foot in the gutter. They kissed. It wasn’t their first kiss, Margaret could tell.
Margaret was a moviegoer. She went by herself to the Salford Theater every Saturday afternoon, hoping to see Minna again, contenting herself with love stories. The movies bruised her, then pressed on the bruise. That moment when the celluloid lovers, in profile, looked at each other, a minuscule tick of their heads, oh!, as though a kiss were something that needed to be tripped, like a bomb, another moment of suspense before the kiss. The mechanics of movie kisses were nothing that Margaret had ever experienced; movie kisses are all in profile but your own kisses are head-on. Movie kisses looked like they’d hurt. She couldn’t get enough of them. They made her feel alive—not in any expansive resurrected way, but assessed, her pulse taken, a rubber mallet to the knee that made her kick.
Not this kiss.
Did it make Roy Truitt feel alive? Lifted from his misery, pulled into the air? He wasn’t sure. It was his first day of kissing if not his first kiss. He had a sensation of watching his mouth from the back of his skull. Was that
her tongue? No (he would realize in a week), her lower lip, which he seemed to have been thoughtfully sucking on for several minutes. For years he would suddenly remember that—he’d sucked on a human lip, believing it a tongue—and his brain would contract in unhappiness.
Why is he doing that? wondered Cracker, who had kissed plenty. She thought of Davey Cotter in Intimate Apparel, rubbing his steel-wool chin across hers, thrilling her, irking her, ouch, no, this (too much thinking, Betty) is better—
Roy wrenched his mouth away; Roy’s mouth was wrenched away, bitingly—and he shrieked, and at the end of the lane Margaret Truitt shrieked: without thinking, she had bowled. A fast ball, sixty miles per hour. It struck Roy in the ankle, which was lucky. A bowling ball in the wrong place could rupture you. Could make you a genealogical dead end.
He was going, he was going, he was headed out the door. What his mother didn’t know: this time he’d already packed his bag.
He never went to war, Roy. He never married. He wasn’t the sort of guy for whom love trumped everything, who would have let his broken ankles mortar his affection for Cracker Graham. Indeed, whenever he saw her, his ankles ached. They’d been trained. Roy Truitt always learned his lesson. He would have made a good soldier, or bomb-sniffing dog.
Good thing he never married her. Shame Arch did.
4
All Over You
On the boat to Italy, Arch dreamt. His mother was right, he was sleepy, congenitally, chronically. This was an advantage on the boat, the USS Montrose, which was so overcrowded the soldiers stood, lay, sat in shifts. Eight hours of each. A lot of the guys got anxious when it came for their turn in the belowdecks bunks. Their chance to sleep: What if they couldn’t? Standing came next. Some of them, just out of bed, fainted from exhaustion. You could sleep when you sat down, but if you overindulged in sitting sleep, you might be too rested to sleep on your sleeping shift.
Not Arch. He dreamt in any position. He could fall asleep as a party trick. He made bets. “How can we tell you’re not faking?” his shipmates asked, but once he’d fallen asleep—in seconds—there was no question. Look at him. He didn’t snore. His mouth didn’t hang open. He looked bigger asleep than awake, as though an equestrian statue, except a bunk instead of a horse. Standing he could doze and not tip over, and then he’d dream of otherworldly quotidian things, a grocery store that sold pulled teeth, a trolley line that took a sudden left turn into the ocean. Sitting dreams were about the unmet war: having to shoot only to discover that your rifle operated like a concertina, with buttons and bellows. Prone, he dreamt of his family—Roy, his mother, his long-gone father. He dreamt of Cracker Graham riding a penny farthing through the bowling alley, and wrote to her to say so.
All his life, insomniac friends would regard him with jealousy, his wakeful wife with loneliness, his children, alone and conscious, pining. He was the object of more hard feelings over his sleepfulness than any other of his bad habits.
Sometimes he thought Italy didn’t wake him up. He dreamt through it. What else could explain setting up a hospital in a deserted fairgrounds, an enormous allegorical statue of a seated woman watching over him as he humped sacks of sugar into the kitchen? The Prima Mostra Triennale delle Terre Italiane d’Oltremare di Napoli—the first triennial exhibition of overseas Italian territories. First and last and never recurring no matter the interval. The allegorical woman in the central hall was Ethiopia, conquered by the Italians in 1935, already returned to Haile Selassie by the time Arch passed by her with his sacks of sugar—Arch, who had never met a statue he didn’t suspect of being animate, biding its time, no matter how big, how misshapen, how dead-eyed or spraddle-limbed. Wax figures were alive to Arch, department store mannequins, the tractor-pelvised women of Henry Moore. Ethiopia would at any moment stand up and snuff Arch out with her helmet as though he were a candle.
The Mostra delle Terre Italiane d’Oltremare had been designed to strike awe, like the harpoon in Ethiopia’s hand. Arch had been staring up at her when he met Joan, who had sidled up beside him and whispered, “Look on my works, you mighty, and despair.”
“Ye,” said Arch. “Ye mighty.”
“Yeah, thanks,” said Joan. She wore the brown seersucker uniform of the hospital staff. She looked like she should be doling out chocolates at a Fannie Farmer’s. She said, “I stole something.”
The uniform came with a wraparound skirt, in case the dress got dirty, reversible, in case the skirt did. She pulled aside one flap to display a white tablecloth.
“There are hundreds of them,” she said. “I can show you where.”
“I don’t need a tablecloth. Where?”
They’d come ashore at the same time but hadn’t seen each other—later Arch would speak of storming a beach, but Naples didn’t need storming. There was nobody there. Even an abandoned cottage is eerie; even an abandoned bicycle. They waded, waddled, onto the sand, then began to set up the hospitals in the fairgrounds—three hospitals, plus another down the road at the thermal spa.
Joan was from Wyoming, a place that Arch had no notions about at all. She had brown hair with severe bangs, and a mole at the corner of her mouth that Arch found tragic: beautiful in its way but also unsettling. He never stopped noticing it. There was something mean about her that drew him, a wisp of cruelty that suggested she might push him down a flight of stairs just to see the look on his face. He went with her to the vast kitchens of the Imperial Hall, to the gleaming metal cupboards in the back. Hundreds of tablecloths in stacks.
“Take one,” she said.
“I don’t have a table.”
“So what? You got a mother? Your mother got a table?” She kicked him in the calf; she was a kicker. “Don’t be a chump.”
“I’m not a chump.”
“Don’t be one is what I’m telling you.”
In one of the outbuildings they came upon the dioramas celebrating the Italian military: boats, and mountains, and fields of battle, populated by miniature Italians in uniform. They each kidnapped half a dozen tiny servicemen.
What Arch really wanted: one of the many of commercial-grade espresso machines still wrapped in plastic, the Italian cousins of Bertha Truitt’s Stanley Steamer, though how would he smuggle it out? Could he ever get it to work? He stole other things: covered silver dishes, pepper grinders, tablecloths to wrap them in.
Why did he steal? Because Joan made him. Because he wanted things. He wanted things. For revenge, said Joan, against Mussolini. Because he was frightened of war and needed talismans. Because the war would end and he needed evidence that he had been there. Because he needed evidence that he wasn’t entirely good: the one sure way of dying in war was being a saint. The shifty would survive.
Because nobody was looking at him. Because Joan was looking at him.
They drove from Napoli to Sienna in a jeep, and the ash off Mount Vesuvius silvered their hair and eyebrows.
“This is how we’ll look when we’re old,” said Joan. “Oh dear.”
Arch pulled to the side of the road, beneath a tree with dripping lopsided pink blossoms that looked like lungs. They appraised each other.
“Yes,” said Joan, deciding. She was the one who unfolded the blanket on the side of the road. They could feel the dropped pink blossoms beneath them, hear the ticking of the jeep. She was little. That was clearer as they lay down.
“What if the volcano erupts?” asked Arch, “I mean, fully,” and Joan answered with a dirty laugh.
“Tell it not to,” she said. “Take off your pants.”
Later, he’d discover that he’d taken only silver lids and no bottoms to those covered dishes, and he told himself that this was because he’d felt guilty: he’d punished himself ahead of time. As he stole them, though, he did not feel guilty. He felt righteous. To feel guilty would have meant he was himself, watching himself do wrong. Deep down, said Joan, you’re a good guy.
What about you, deep down?
Ah! I’m bottomless.
He was not himse
lf. He stole because he was a thief.
All this time Cracker Graham wrote to him with news from home. Roy had left the alley, the apartment, Salford entirely.
I thought your mother would fire me, but she says with Roy gone she needs more hands anyhow, so here I am. I don’t hear from Roy. I can’t write to him because he’ll have nothing to do with me, so here I am writing to you. I am a stinker.
Cracker Graham was at the heart of it all, why his mother had broken Roy’s ankle. When Arch had first seen Cracker in her coveralls and ballet slippers, he thought he might ask her out. Then he found out she was a year older than he was. He’d never considered going out with anyone older, and for a while he lost interest, and once he’d come around Roy was interested and that was that.
The letters back and forth were the longest conversation they’d ever had. Arch’s stories were full of Italy, and no Italians; full of the war but no people; full of the bowling alley and full of Cracker Graham herself. He wrote everything he remembered about her: her father was dead. She hated the taste of peanuts. She loved egg salad. When she braided her curly hair, the plaits hung to her shoulders; loose, it came only to her chin. One day he’d been bowling with his girlfriend, Angela Cedrone, a little drunk, and when he saw Cracker he wanted her, Cracker, to throw him, Arch, over her shoulder and carry him off. (Angela was a tough girl. How else would he get away?) In a few months of writing he was signing his letters love.
That was all it took for Cracker to fall in love with Arch, for Arch to fall in love with Cracker.
How much of it was imaginary? They felt, reading each other’s letters, known; they believed that being known made them over into their best selves. They confessed.
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