Her name out front! Margaret was proud: Minna, Minnabean, her dreamchild. She went to see the movie six times. Oh, mothering would be easy if it could be accomplished by cinematic means! Look at Minna twenty feet tall on the movie screen, safe and singing, beautiful. Meanwhile her boys, the Truitt boys, were slipping away from her. Roy was threatening the army. Soon it might be his choice.
Maybe he should do it. He was a boy both hard and soft—hard in his affection, for her, for his brother. Also untested. Sickly of spirit in some way. Anybody might take advantage of him. She supposed she had coddled him, by employing him as a pinsetter. He rarely spoke to anyone. Archie was soft where his brother was hard, and hard where he was soft. Arch would break a girl’s heart and then cry to himself when he’d done it. He would kiss his old ma and then stay out all night. He drank. He drank so much that was the only way you could put it. Not, he drank too much or he drank too often. He drank.
They’d both been coddled, Margaret.
You spend a while thinking about ghosts and everything felt like a ghost, even your conscience whispering in your ear.
Now here was Minna, out in the world, and so happy. Her hair hot-combed glossy and straight, the front in bangs, the back caught in a snood. Her mouth wide and toothy. Of course it was a movie, but Margaret didn’t believe anyone could playact at happiness. Not like that. Not happiness that made other people happy.
Margaret placed a newspaper ad in the Bugle. Work for girls pinsetting. Please apply to Truitt’s Alleys. That was how they got seventeen-year-old Betty Graham, known as Cracker for her last name and because it suited her. She was sweet, but just, with a mouth kept bright with lipstick and a laugh like a rusty gate. People loved to make her laugh: nothing that unbecoming could be fake. Before the war, she’d worked at the Grover Cronin department store in Waltham, in Intimate Apparel. With gas rationing she needed a job closer to home.
“Do you bowl?” Margaret asked.
“Yes,” she lied. She waited to be quizzed. She’d memorized scoring, jargon, dimensions of pins and balls.
“All right,” said Margaret, “you’ll do. Arch will show you around.”
Cracker looked across the alley. There was a boy in striped coveralls sitting on a ledge at the end of the lanes. His hair was dark red. He had a dimpled chin and a cowlick she wanted to brush down.
“Ah, there he is,” said Margaret, pointing in the other direction.
The boy she meant had been sitting at a table by himself, reading a magazine. He looked up and smiled. It was a smile of such charm and breadth that Cracker felt instantly insulted. She hated charm, male charm, unoriginal and automatic as it was. Margaret beckoned him over.
“This is Betty,” said Margaret.
“Hi, Betty. I’m Arch.”
Up close he had a newsprint smudge on one cheek, clean hands with bitten nails. You could see adolescence wasn’t quite done with him, not at the jaw and shoulder line, though his blue eyes were grown-up, and tired, and fond of both her and himself. As though he was glad for her, that she got to talk to him. Lucky girl!
She did not like him.
“Betty’s going to pinset. Show her around.”
That made him frown. “Surely Roy—”
“Roy’s working,” said Margaret. “I’m asking you.”
One woman made a difference: one woman brought more women. Cracker’s friends came to watch her skip from pit to pit in her ballet slippers and then—because Margaret Truitt insisted—in a pair of old black boots with steel toes and ankle supports. It wasn’t that Nahum Truitt had ever put a sign in the window that said NO WOMEN, not that he had changed anything about the place, not that once Nahum had disappeared Margaret had done a thing to discourage any particular woman from coming across the threshold. It was only the usual story: a low place that has contained only men for a good long time is deadly dull to most women. You could take one look through the plate glass window and see for yourself that Truitt’s offered nothing that couldn’t be had elsewhere, in better and tidier company.
Once there were a handful of girls coming to bowl regularly, their mothers came, too. They needed some cheap entertainment and conversation, to visit some minor violence upon inanimate objects. They watched Cracker Graham set their pins and laugh while she did it.
She was laughing at the beauty of bowling.
The beauty surprised her: she hadn’t known. Maybe it wasn’t beautiful from the front of the house, where you’d face people’s posteriors, the soles of their lagging feet. Maybe it wasn’t beautiful at the foul line, where you could see only the bowlers on either side of you, left, right, yourself. On the pinbody’s ledge, you saw the whole chorus line of bowlers, intent, sizing up the pins, the lane, though it’s the seventh frame of their third string and the pins are the same, the lane is the same. They touch the ball to the underside of their chins, or they hold it on one hip, like a Greek statue. They bite their lips. They approach, and deliver, and the ball comes down the lane, and the bowlers hope or despair. And they do this not in unison but not out of it either. Candlepin is hard; perfection is impossible; and yet some people are devoted to it. Cracker might have once found it ridiculous.
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.”