’Course, they said, that was then, and she was a girl. Reckon Arch could beat her. My money’d be on Arch, for sure.
No surprise when the local television station came, wanting him to bowl in front of the cameras. Not at Truitt’s—the lanes were a funny length, dreamt up by a Victorian woman, they’d never do for a tournament—but at the new house in Boston, the Bowladrome. He bought handsome shirts it turned out he couldn’t wear on TV—he had a weakness for loud patterns, a way to look a little ridiculous on purpose instead of by accident—and got his hair cut once a week. Bowling was made for television: unlike football, baseball, basketball, you didn’t have to shrink it down to watch. It was already box shaped. It already had suspense; its quiet moments (the ball headed toward the pins) were as thrilling as its loud ones (their eventual meeting). On national television, it was all tenpin bowling, brutish and rewarding and sponsored by beer companies. New Englanders required candlepins. Candlepins for Dollars: a modest game for modest prizes, Saturday at noon. “I’m one step up from a test pattern,” Arch liked to say, but he loved it.
He loved bowling. He wished he didn’t: it felt like a family curse, one that Roy—who sent postcards from Lisbon and Belize and Tenerife, who had no dependents and no obligations—had escaped.
It is a curse to be good at something, Arch thought. He would take comfort where he could.
The Unrelenting Baby
All babies are beautiful,” said Margaret dubiously, examining hiccupping Amy Truitt, then five months old. “When’s the christening?”
“No christening,” said Cracker. The very verb! To turn a baby more Christlike.
“You were christened your own self.”
“No I wasn’t,” said Cracker. “I’m Jewish. That’s why we got married at City Hall.”
They were standing in the new kitchen then. Margaret closed the refrigerator as though it were a dirty book that had caught her unawares. “How are you Jewish?”
“Well, my mother is.”
Margaret closed her eyes and tried to remember Cracker’s mother, who lived now, already, in Florida. She reviewed the evidence—shortness, bad eyesight, a discombobulating glamour—and found it convincing.
“Well, that’s her,” she said. “My granddaughter will be christened. That’s how that works.”
The trick was, Cracker thought, keeping secrets from everybody. Margaret need never find out that because Cracker was Jewish (because her mother was), this meant Amy was, too. Her own mother need never hear of the christening itself.
Her own mother had been maternally standoffish, and Cracker had worried she would be likewise. Then she worried that she would be the opposite, she would crawl into their beds, watching them sleep, furious that she didn’t know the content of their dreams. She would demand to know every first-star, birthday-candle, wishbone-splitting, wishing-well wish. She would say, over and over, the thing she would never say to a man: Do you love me? It was all she ever wanted to know.
Cracker held still and waited. She always had. Once somebody came close, then she could love, she was a pond of love, a lake. Depthless, she believed. Maybe she was right. In high school when her friends talked of crushes and marriage, Cracker kept mum. It didn’t feel like fear, it was deeper, evolutionary, syncopal: talk of love lowered her blood pressure into the fainting zone. When Davey Cotter kissed her in the Intimate Apparel department of Grover Cronin, she had been surprised: she didn’t particularly like him, but how to send him away? She had an idea she wasn’t supposed to. She let him kiss her that day, and for months afterward.
Then Arch. Nothing cautious about Arch! Why everybody loved him: he was a spendthrift. Munificent. In his first letter: Had a dream with you. Want to hear it? You were making me toast, and laughing. You rode away on an old-fashioned bicycle, the kind with a big front wheel. You looked beautiful. I take this as a sign I should write.
If you came to her with love, she loved you. Even as a mother it was her way. That’s why you hold still. It’s a kind of camouflage, a blending into the native tree bark: I don’t care, I don’t care, love me or don’t.
You better love me.
It worked. The children, those preposterous foreigners, declared their love even before they spoke the language, came and lay upon her and kissed her, doe-eyed, serious, or laughing uproariously. “You’ll spoil them!” her mother-in-law would say. “They need a schedule.” A schedule meant not just bedtime and mealtime but love. Amazing Margaret didn’t want to check off affection next to diapers and baths.
Let them stay up all night. Let them eat when they want and what they want, wake up and pour a bowl of cereal, a glass of milk, mop up the mess.
It worked. First hiccupping Amy, who acquired a sense of humor, which she would later lose; then Brenda, the late arrival, always in that way an immigrant: determined to be accepted, do well, even when she didn’t understand the jokes. She suffered from spasms of love. She’d kiss her mother’s hand like a pantomime duke, sighing, murmuring mama [kiss], mama [kiss], mama, as though it were the only word of English she’d mastered. Cracker lay her hand on Brenda’s back and felt the buzz of her blood. She braided Amy’s maple hair and took such pleasure in the feel of it between her fingers, her daughter’s back against her shins, she wanted to weep. “Ouch!” said Amy. “Hold still, pet,” said Cracker in her gentling way.
(It worked for a while, anyhow. Once Amy and Brenda were out of the house they discovered the joys of a regular bedtime, hot breakfasts, bedroom slippers. All that stillness. They grew resentful. When they were children she had struck them as beyond reproach, entirely a mother, entirely theirs. Once they grew up and could see around the back of her the other parts, there all along, they felt duped. Her own desires! Her own ambitions! Hidden! She had been, they decided, a soundstage of a mother. They watched her friends, who adored her, who called her up and took her out to meals and fussed over her, who said Your mother is such a wonderful woman. You don’t know, Amy wanted to say. But she didn’t have any proof to the contrary, other than it had always been clear that it had been their job to love her, and they did. They still did.)
When the children were young, she was their mother. Not a full-time mother—she also worked as a wife and a daughter-in-law, did some mail-order work as a daughter to her own mother, off in Boynton Beach. She’d become a collection of other people’s secrets. “Mama, can I tell you something?” Amy would say, and Cracker, full of hope, said yes. “I don’t like Claire anymore.” Well, that wasn’t news. Who would like that pie-faced girl? She kept falling for it. Her children offered the most mundane facts prefaced by, Mama, can I tell you something? Yes, Cracker, said, every time, you can tell me anything. The children never confided anything she didn’t already know.
The grown-ups did.
For instance, her friend had an elderly aunt who died. This aunt had been renting a house on the Cape, in Dennis, and it had fallen to Cracker’s friend, Audra, to empty it, so Audra had cooked a week’s worth of food for her husband and children and had gone to clear away the years of the aunt’s retirement. Audra’s husband was a dentist. He, too, was named Dennis. Her two girls were sweet and contained, polite in a way that Cracker had found both enviable and unreal. “I was worried they would miss me too much,” said Audra. They were at the ice cream parlor. Audra angled her spoon under the dripping marshmallow. “And then I worried they wouldn’t miss me at all.”
“Did they?”
“Yes?” said Audra. Even her sundae was perfectly matched, stark marshmallow, off-white whipped cream, ivory ice cream, butterscotch. Audra’s hair was butterscotch, too, her lips maraschino cherry. “But do you know? Betty, I would only say this to you: I didn’t miss them. Not for a minute. I went for walks when I wanted. I swam in the sea. I ate whatever was left in the cupboards.”