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