“My boys. Train Roy and Arch to pinset. We must make some changes here.”
The changes Margaret brought to Truitt’s Alleys meant it survived the Depression, the way all cheap entertainment did: by its very cheapness. For ten cents you could bowl; for nothing at all you could sit and watch. Mornings men went out to look for work but by the afternoon the lanes were full. Margaret put in leagues, held exhibitions, money games that went on all day, or all week, or all month, best of three or ten or a hundred games. Cocked hat bowling, where only three pins were set at each corner of the pin triangle. Food, too. Margaret never did get far from the ham dinners she cooked for Bertha Truitt and Dr. Sprague, but within the ham arena she was a minor genius—of thrift if nothing else. She roasted the ham in her little kitchen over the alleys, then filled her icebox with ham sandwiches wrapped in wax paper. If she really liked you, she’d offer to run up and fix you a plate of ham and eggs. Three times out of ten the eggs were perfect, frilled and brown on the edges, and the ham nearly hot through; mostly, she pummeled the eggs as she fried, spilled the yolks and tore the whites. Leftover ham was deviled, or turned into hash, used to flavor potato salad, served over spaghetti in a ketchup gravy, chopped into pots of beans. Some people thought she stirred minced ham into her wacky cake, though that was almost certainly not true: she merely used cups of flour in everything she cooked, so that any recipe had a hint of cake to it. Finally the coda to the ham, a pot of split pea soup flavored with the bone, served with dry brown bread. When pea soup showed up for lunch at Truitt’s, the men knew that actual ham was coming soon. Margaret was vain about her cooking, she required compliments and gratitude, which she then batted away. “Ah, no,” she said, “no, no,” but you could tell how pleased she was. She never charged a cent. Everything that involved men was a war, to Margaret Vanetten Truitt: you had to feed your troops.
If asked about her husband she would shake her head and say, “Gone.” Let people interpret that as they might. It was as much as she knew herself. She knew they thought she was embarrassed.
She wasn’t. Not embarrassed but alight. Chronic, debilitating, volatile: how love always manifested in her.
She might be anywhere at all when it happened, the intimations of his body crawling over her, his breadth and warmth, his fiddle and grasp. The shaggy fog that had always let her know they were in the same building, even if she were upstairs at the sink and he just back from the bank, walking through the alley doors. Now he was gone but they were in the same building, if she could just find the right door, which would open into the right corridor, which would lead her to his bed, no matter where in the world. But if there were another woman in it! No memory of a living man could have that power. He had to be a ghost, come to worry or comfort her.
She could not get over him. Any day now, he might return! Then she would kill him. At night, in the same way she’d been staggered to discover, once married, the force of her desire, now she was staggered by her bloodthirst. At night she knew he was alive. She would murder him. Obliterate him. With her hands, with a candlestick, with a bowling pin hidden in the pleats of her nightgown: she’d bludgeon him, stump him, take him apart. Then she’d go back down the hallway to Massachusetts and burn her nightgown in the furnace.
Once she’d read about a woman whose husband had been killed in battle. His heart was taken from his body, delivered from the battlefield to her, and she placed it in a glass box and stared at it seven hours a day. With love? Yes, but of the furious kind. How else could you stare at a heart?
She wanted his. He’d left no relics except his sons, and those she knew she couldn’t keep.
It’s noble work, setting,” said Jeptha Arrison. He’d grown portly; in the striped alley coveralls, he had a prow like a ship’s. Roy and Arch wore coveralls, too. Impossible, thought Arch, not to feel great in uniform. Impossible, thought Roy, to feel like anything but an idiot dressed in the same outfit as other people. His own weight was spread around his body, and he disliked how the coveralls made him aware of his undershorts. “Noble,” said Jeptha again, as though contradicted. “What’s that you have with you, Archie?”
Arch was eleven. For his first day of work he had packed a comic book—Favorite Funnies—and a ham sandwich on a folded-over piece of bread.
“You’re not going camping,” said Roy. “It’s not an overnight trip.”
Arch saluted him with the deckle-edge of his sandwich.
“I see no harm in it,” said Jeptha.
Roy hated the bowling alley and the bowlers, grown men who called him names. They called him Spot for his freckles, and Tubby and Doughnut and Speedy. They called him Tiny and Babe. In bed he could suck his stomach into concavity and tell himself it wasn’t so bad. He could strum the wings of his rib cage, feel the muscles in his thighs. At the bowling alley, though, he was just a fat kid, a sullen boy with odd ears, one gibbous, one flush. His freckles were the splotchy sort. Nobody else in the family was fat, nobody bookish or sour. Where had he come from?
But his brother, Arch: even years later, when he was dead of misadventure, what people said of Arch was that he was fun. He loved fun. He had his father’s bristling hair, his father’s hooded eyes though bigger, and limpid, and blue.
For a while Roy and Arch sat on the pinboys’ shelf and watched Jeptha as he set the pins with an educated air. Some life in him yet! Training the Truitt boys to pinset gave shape to his weird head, made him light on his feet again.
“One pin,” he said, pointing to the front of the steel deck, where the first pin was to be stood up. “Two pin. Three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.”
“All right,” said Roy. “I know how to count.”
Jeptha turned and frowned; his white hair had comb marks in it. “The pinbody’s the boss. Nobody thinks of that. No bowler’s so good she can overcome a bad pinbody. You set the pins perfect, every pin where it ought be, just in the middle, then it’s science for the bowler: she’ll know how the pins’ll fly. But a sloppy pinbody means there’s no telling. Even just a little off changes the whole game. Some bowlers know it. Some bowlers’ll offer you money to set one way for them and another for the other bowler. Cheats, I mean. Don’t take money.”
“Pinbody?” said Roy.
“What Bertha called us and so me, too, I say pinbody. Now, she was a bowler, Bertha Truitt. This,” he said, and he indicated the alleys, the men at the approaches, their mother the only thing female in the place. “Truitt’s was for women. Even your mother bowled in her day.”
“Mom?” said Arch.
Jeptha nodded. “So then. You set the pins fast as you can but part of the job is you must feel and feel the pins and balls, looking for wrongness. The cracked or wobble footed. The chipped or unbalanced. Honor in bowling is the pinbody’s job. Yes, your mother,” he said to the boys. Nobody thought Jeptha kept much of anything in that lopsided sack of his head. Sawdust. Folk songs. It was best that way. Nahum Truitt wouldn’t have tolerated him there otherwise. But he remembered everything. “She was not the finest of the ladies—bowlingwise, I mean—but she was good, and game. Now, boys, to your stations.”