“Oh. Ah. OK.”
He hoped he’d be let back in. That had been his life so far, old Arch, old dog—Cracker didn’t know how many candlepin houses had barred him for drinking or gambling, and they always let him back in. How could his own family be different?
She was done cooking for him. His mother brought him meals in covered pots.
“Soup of the day,” she said.
He peered into it, horrified. “It’s casserole.”
“Casserole’s what travels.”
He’d hidden some bottles in the alley mop closet, amid the sad faded feminine mops, because like his grandmother Arch liked to throw parties in the after-hours alley from time to time. The bottles were gone, dumped out by his mother, as all the liquor was everywhere else by his wife. Good, thought Arch. Otherwise he might unhinge his jaw and consume it all: vodka, bourbon, ginger ale, the pickled onions nobody ever requested. Mix the cocktails in his gullet. Anna drank beer, he drank beer with Anna, of the elastic muscles and sharp nose, the blood that pumped all through her body: Arch had never met a woman whose hands and feet were never cold. The climate of Anna was constant, warm in every region. It had all started with holding hands. He wanted to tell Cracker that.
He didn’t want to be forgiven. That was work you had to take on for yourself. You had to find the work and do the work. (In the family he was famous for his laziness. They didn’t know how he labored inside.) How would he manage it?
He decided to quit drinking. The decision came before the quitting, but he’d never considered it before. All his life he’d loved stories of solitary men against nature, Arctic explorers, round-the-world sailors, and this was how he convinced himself. It would be an act of bravery, one that might kill him. To set off on a life in which he would traverse Temperance. Perhaps he would sail off the very edge of it. One did not set off to cross the ocean thinking you might turn back. You had to make up your mind and go. He thought of the USS Montrose, how he sat and slept and stood in shifts, each day divided in thirds. Such order might help him now: eight hours of sleep, eight hours at the table, eight hours at the window staring out. In every attitude he shivered beneath the quilt Cracker had sewn him, as though condemned to it. A week passed.
Later a doctor would tell him he could have killed himself from such a sudden abstinence—this was in context of discussing all of Arch’s favorite and possibly fatal habits—but now it was his wall of ice and he was determined to get over it. The rumbling in his head was not distant avalanches, not a scuppering wave, but always, ever, bowling.
His mother came to see him twice a day. As usual her fury manifested in frightening good cheer. He made himself sit at the kitchen table just before the alley opened, when she would appear with coffee and a cruller. She believed in the medicinal properties of the doughnut shop. “Honey! You look good, you look good!”
“Thanks, Ma.” He turned up his collar. Awful, to be assessed by your mother. She reached over and turned his collar down. He wondered about asking after his wife and kids, but neither of them said a thing. She felt he was ruining his life. She didn’t think he could stop, and she felt sorry for him, so she might as well straighten his collar as he tumbled away.
Because he’d given up drinking he had to give up drinking’s Siamese twin, smoking. Instead, he ate. He consumed pounds of pistachios, which in those days came dyed red and dyed his fingers red, bought from Sutherland’s Market down the block. Cherries, too, which were in season, and which turned his fingertips a muddier red, black around the nails. Any kind of fiddly food eaten one at a time, to occupy his hands and mouth. Olives didn’t work for some reason. Grapes could but they weren’t time-consuming enough. The floor of the apartment was scattered with nut paper, cherry stems, the arboreal remains of grapes. Oysters were tempting but impractical. The expedition began its second month. It was too late to turn back, and more dangerous. In his cabin above the bowling alley, he kept on.
He visited the girls, took them on Sundays into Boston, when everything was closed because of the blue laws. He imagined that they’d demand he explain himself—how come he lived at the alley? When was he coming back?—but their questions concerned candy, and could they stop walking, and why couldn’t they see a movie. Those he could answer.
How to explain to Cracker that he’d changed his life? Why, through television, of course. He went back on Candlepins for Dollars. He would not stray, never stray, to the women’s lanes. Drinking, he was baby faced; now he had a jawline, cheekbones, a pointed upper lip. “Laughing Arch Truitt,” the announcer still called him, but he did not laugh so much. He concentrated on the lanes. He spoke to the pins. One week he kicked the ball return and the station told him he was on probation. Drinking, he assumed that drink was what made him a bowler. It unknotted his shoulders. It made him forget grudges. But surely it kept him back, too. Sober, he thought, prayingly, Well now I’ll be champion. But it didn’t work that way. Lots of the game was luck, which was why he liked it. Every ball was a test of luck, every box, every string. He still thought that, but it was a long story. Your luck could worsen. You could keep failing, get worse, reveal yourself as a failure, a jinx. Your own jinx.
Cracker didn’t watch him. How could she? Instead she tried to think of him as merely a man who—like most of the men of the world—made their money mysteriously and elsewhere.
His fingers were dyed red from pistachios. His stomach hurt. He’d given up everything to get his family back and had forgotten that the first thing he’d given up was his family. What did she do with her days? She sat and waited for him to come home. He sat and waited to be invited.
He went back to work in the alley. Every morning he went downstairs and his mother said, “Good morning, dear!”
“Good morning!”
“How did you sleep?”
“Like a bear.”
“Brought you breakfast.”
“Coffee first.”
“Brought you coffee. Looks like a nice day. Oh, those shoes, somebody put ’em back any which way.”
People came to the alley to shake Arch’s hand. He wasn’t the best bowler on Candlepins for Dollars but he was memorable: his smile, those billboard cowboy teeth, straight and white; the way he’d been caught goosing that big Polish girl on local television. So he devoted himself to the Bowlaway. He gave lessons. He cleaned the balls and tended to the balky pinsetters. One day to his mother’s amazement he saddle-soaped every shoe in the place, including the numbers stitched on the heels: he used one of the stubby scoring pencils to work the soap through the seams.
Then he went upstairs and watched television and disassembled pistachios with his fingertips. Look at the shells! It seemed like there should be something to do with them. The thing to do, of course, was throw them away, but he couldn’t: they were evidence of the only progress he was making. He began to stack them. He would make an obelisk of pistachio shells. He said aloud, “I’ve gone mad.”
If you’ve gone mad you don’t know it. But what if you say it aloud?
He went to bed, got up, drank his mother’s coffee from the plaid thermos, ate his mother’s cruller. At noon she presented his lunch, saying, as she always did, “Soup of the day!”
This lasted until the Tuesday morning his mother said, “Good morning, dear!” and in return he burst into tears.