Cracker Graham wouldn’t live in an apartment over a bowling alley, though she understood that wherever they moved, her mother-in-law would follow. Her cousins owned a red empire sofa that could never be abandoned; she herself had inherited a clawfoot buffet with a cracked tilted mirror. Previously she’d thought of the buffet as an elderly relative who needed to be taken care of—it wasn’t its fault that it couldn’t converse with the rest of the furniture—but now that she had a mother-in-law, the mother-in-law seemed like a piece of furniture. She would have to be installed somewhere.
Cracker’s mother gave them the down payment to buy the house on Somefire Hill, a durable Victorian built around the time of Supersum but habitable. Margaret complained, and moaned, and declared she would miss her kitchen—really, just a hissing stove, an old refrigerator with a round rattling monitor top—and said she wouldn’t go, and when she finally walked into her room at the house, burst into tears.
“I’m sorry,” said Cracker.
Margaret shook her head. What she couldn’t say: all she had ever wanted was a room like this for her own, she had gone to work as a baby nurse for it, had married for it, had children for it—she’d wanted it so long she’d become afraid of her longing, as many a religious heart decides to spurn what it desires. Now here it was: a double bed with a new mattress and two feather pillows, a pale purple chenille bedspread, a nightstand with a glass lamp flush and lumpy as the bedspread, a rag rug, a window with a balustrade, which looked out over the garden filled with flowers—Margaret didn’t know what sort of flowers, she had always hated people who knew the names of things: birds, flowers, the constellations. Show-offs. Flowers themselves she loved, that flat-faced purple sort and the ones that looked like fireworks and the ones that smelled of lilac—why, they were lilacs, weren’t they, even she knew that.
“I’m sorry,” said Cracker again, and Margaret took her hand and squeezed it and in a voice of love and gratitude said, “You should be.”
A pair of inventors had installed some automatic pinsetter prototypes at Whalom Park in Lunenburg, and the Arch Truitts went to see them. The machine swept the pins into the pit, brought them up on a conveyer belt, flung the balls back to the bowlers the way the pinbodies always had, with one good toss and gravity. Breathtaking, in a way, and also frightening: they did not work with humans, as the pinball machines did, but replaced them. Afterward, Cracker wanted to ride the Whalom Park roller coaster, and Arch pointed out that she was pregnant.
True enough, but she said, “So?”
“No wife of mine—”
“How many wives you got? That makes it sound like more than one.”
“Sometimes it feels like it,” he said. He set his hand on the underside of her stomach, which was bossy with child. He knew how to run his hands over a woman’s anatomy—through clothing or not—as though his palm were magnetic, as though her soul were ductile, pulled around the surface of her skin. He did this now. Cracker shuddered. It astounded her that she’d fallen in love with him through the mail. He had a particular mesmerizing smell. She couldn’t tell where it emanated from. Breath? Lungs? The interior of his nose? It seemed to come in puffs, though she could also detect it in the shallow wells of his collar bones, behind his ear: clean heat, starch ironed into a shirt, the sun on bedsheets. She thought, I could find you in the dark. Maybe it was her, too. This was the scent of the spell they cast together, what people meant when they spoke of chemistry.
“No,” he said with certainty. “It’s not safe.”
She looked at the Flyer Comet in all its paleontological beauty. “I bet you can’t fall asleep on it. Not even you.”
He got a thinking look at that, then shook his head. “I have to put my foot down.”
Later, this would be one of her biggest grievances against him, though she couldn’t say why. Motherhood ruined her for roller coasters—it rearranged her inner ear, the nausea center of her brain: now when she looked at one she felt sick, though it wasn’t like some lost pleasures, what did I ever see in that? She knew exactly what she’d lost, the plunging exhilaration of being dropped, rescued, dropped again, delivered to your beginning. She had wanted to ride the roller coaster. Arch wouldn’t let her. It’s amazing it wasn’t listed in her writ of divorce.
“So we’ll get them,” said Arch.
She nodded. He’d been right about everything so far, every machine and modernization. Still, she’d worked as a pinsetter as Arch had not, and she knew that while it was better to have a machine sweep up the pins, pour them into the apparatus, set them down, it was sadder, too. Hand-setting was backbreaking, dangerous work, appreciated by nobody, the quietest thing that happened in a candlepin alley, a collaboration between two people.
They had to smash apart the pinsetters’ shelf to make room for the machinery. The sound of the cracking wood was the most violent thing she’d ever heard, like bones, and she burst into tears. She’d loved that shelf and she had caused it to be broken.
“Why are you crying, honey?” Arch asked her.
She didn’t know. She wanted to write to Roy to tell him, to ask. He might understand but he might not care.
The sound of the Bowlaway, in the 1950s! It was like a piano tumbling down a flight of stairs, then panting in pain. Arch had a knack for fixing the various machines, so he loved them the way anyone loves something or someone who is easily humbled and easily cheered. Children screamed in the alleys because they could. Bowlers shouted conversation. Babies cried, and their parents laughed at them, said, do your worst, kid. One of these babies was Amy Truitt, Amy of the fear of falling and the depthless sorrow, hiccupping Amy, shrieking Amy, Amy who smelled like Arch did, sweet and clean. It was something that ran in the family, like eye color and the width of feet.
When had Cracker stopped bowling? She had started during the war—she was no LuEtta Mood; that is, she was mortal—but she understood physics. She could convert spares with the exactitude of a surgeon. The problem was that the game, the long game, didn’t interest her. Not the story of it. She didn’t care if she won, she didn’t care if she improved. (Later Arch would say, “That was the problem with you. You never wanted to win.”) She wished she could pinset for Arch, but a robot had taken her job.
Instead she watched, along with everyone else. When Arch rolled, it was as though he knew, strike or split, half Worcester or full. He didn’t make it happen, he foresaw it, turning away as the ball made its way down the alley. He smiled no matter what. LAUGHING ARCH TRUITT, the trade papers called him. He liked twenty-four-hour tournaments, tournaments to a thousand. The man could bowl forever. The automatic pinsetters kept up; as many people came to see them as the human bowlers. You could scarcely see the nineteenth century at the Bowlaway. Only the iron columns, the one doll high above. Elsewhere it was plastic, and ringing bells. Was Arch prescient, or simply a modern man who liked modern things? The game had changed, pins thicker, balls standard. A good bowler—Arch, for instance—could top 200 in a game, though it wasn’t easy.
The overnights he dazzled, like a character from a tall tale—some of the old-timers who came around remembered LuEtta Mood, and told stories grown Bunyanesque: she bowled six days straight and only quit to go to church. She beat every woman in the house then every man then all comers and they told her to stop. She would not stop.