“I’m an actor,” Arch said peaceably. It was only occasional these days. “Maybe I never was that good a bowler, I just acted as though I was one and the pins believed me.”
“What on earth are you talking about?”
Arch felt as though he understood his own life for the first time, not spelled out in words, not something he could translate to another human being, but shining all around him as the car moved through it. He should have taken that talent elsewhere. He could have been an actor. He could have been nearly anything. He still could change his life.
“I saw a UFO,” said Arch. “That’s what took me so long.”
“You saw a cop’s flashlight.”
“I heard music.”
“Must have been a boardwalk on the other side of the bay. Sound carries across water.”
“I know sound carries across water.”
They drove a long time in silence, and Roy said, “I believe you.”
“Believe me what?” asked Arch.
“What you said. About the spaceship.”
“The UFO,” said Arch, thinking it sounded more scientific. But the ship, the object, wasn’t the point: it was the creature who’d spoken to him thought to thought. He couldn’t work out how to put it.
“Yes,” said Roy. “I believe you.”
Arch studied Roy, resolutely piloting the old Renault. A perversity to drive that car in the States. Nobody knew how to fix it, and they weren’t inclined to try. Roy’s face, as always, was that of a captain who’d vowed to go down with his ship, but not quietly. “You don’t believe in UFOs,” said Arch.
“I believe you,” said Roy.
“You don’t believe in ghosts.”
“Whatever you tell me, Arch,” said Roy, and he looked away from the road for a moment, and his eyes were filled with tears, “I believe. I owe you that.”
Arch sat back. For a moment he was irritated at Roy—these tears! this pity! when Arch himself felt entirely happy and at peace—and then he accepted the belief (but not the pity), the brotherly affection, as he had accepted plenty of things from Roy over the years. Roy was a monk; Roy renounced things not for God but for his brother.
As for Roy himself—it had come upon him then that if any living human could talk to the dead, to the galactically misplaced, to babies dreaming in their prams, it was his brother, as innocent a sinner as ever lived.
Home. Before Roy got out he said, “I think we should open a bowling alley.”
Arch nodded. He said, “You hate bowling.”
“I don’t,” said Roy. “In another life I might have loved it. We’ll do everything differently.”
“Tenpin.”
“Sure, why not,” said Roy. “Half and half. Stay at home. Run the pro shop.”
“All right,” said Arch. “I will.”
Roy got out and looked at the back of the Renault. The bumper was half off, and there was a crack in the rear window.
“Vandals,” he said.
Arch laughed.
“Vandals,” said Roy threateningly.
“OK,” said Arch. After all, he was changed; he believed, too. He knew things now that Roy didn’t and he looked toward the blue morning sky to confirm them. There was a finial atop the nearby church steeple that Arch had never noticed before. A message from another world. It fattened and diminished, fattened and diminished. It flew away. It was a pigeon.
He always looked for it afterward, and he always missed it.
God and Bowling and Children
Cracker did enter into marriage again, she already had. She was married to that parody bride, her mother-in-law. They went about planning a life together. Leagues, birthday parties, more pinball machines, move out the pool tables. Cracker hired more help, an evening manager named Walter, a weekend manager named Ida Jane. She bought a hot dog roller, a little oven, expanded the candy selection, got a new vending machine that dispensed not Eskimo Pies but Fudgsicles and Dreamsicles and Popsicles. She sold factory-made cookies that came stacked three to a round pack, wrapped in crackling cellophane, salty, awful, addictive. A bowling alley was a place for children now; children had trash taste. The balls were always sticky. The little hand dryers at the end of every lane blew up billows of powdered sugar and cheese popcorn dust.
“You’ll look after me?” Margaret asked Cracker, like the abandoned child she was.
“Of course.”
“Even if your own mother gets sick? Even if your own mother needs you?”
Cracker laughed. “My own mother will never need me.”
Her own mother—Arlene Levine Graham Buchsbaum—was still hale and cheerful in Boynton Beach. Mostly she required that her granddaughters be shipped down for summer visits; they came back brown limbed and green haired, with souvenirs from obscure and troubling tourist traps: Zarkland, Murray’s House of Snakes, Little Batavia. Occasionally Arlene came north for a visit. She was always amused by Cracker’s love for Margaret.
“When you were little,” she would say, smoking in the garden, “you had dolls of all nations. Now you have a little Catholic whose hair you comb.”
“I don’t comb her hair,” Cracker lied.
“You always were the motherly sort.” Then Arlene gave Cracker a folder with instructions: when her two-story house was too much, she planned to move to a nearby retirement village, and here was the pamphlet; when she needed more help, to the Jewish Home the next town over, pamphlet; when she died, to this cemetery here, where Mr. Buchsbaum, her second husband, was already interred. Pamphlet. Her first husband, Cracker’s father, was buried—like Bertha Truitt—in the pamphletless Salford Cemetery, but who would visit Arlene there? Shady Palms was the popular spot, among her set.
How could Cracker explain it to her mother? Margaret loved her. Margaret, who had been (according to her sons) an exhausting, shrieking mother; who’d been a grandmother concerned mostly with what might kill her grandchildren (chills, their own misbehavior, maternal neglect). Her relatives were doomed stocks in which she had better not invest, but she had come into love like a late inheritance. “You’re so wonderful to me,” she would tell Cracker, and she would stroke Cracker’s shoulder, or seize her hand and kiss it—shades of toddler Brenda! “I really love you, honey. You know that?” She had given up knitting for crossword puzzles and consulted Cracker. “You’re so smart, you’ll know this.” Her eyes were clear and blue. She called Cracker Honey honey and darling girl. A junk shop had opened up in the block over from Truitt’s, and Margaret liked to pick up presents for Cracker there—little bisque figurines of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, old windup monkeys who played the drums. “I thought this would appeal to your sense of humor,” she’d say, with something like admiration, as though the monkey, goggle-eyed and toothy, were a book in German she herself could never hope to understand. She started to clean more, she flew at the windows like a songbird, with Windex and a rag. She made lemonade with saccharine and biscuits that never rose. She set the table, all spoons.
Only later would Cracker recognize the love at the first glimmering evidence. She should have noticed when she shampooed Margaret in the kitchen sink with the slow-moving emerald Prell. Her mother-in-law had stopped dyeing her hair the childish brown she favored (the kind of brown nobody else would choose, that generally darkened after childhood into something more interesting). Here were her gray roots, like a kind of sadness radiating from her skull. Beneath the wet hair, Cracker could feel the seams of Margaret’s skull as it had come together in utero, infancy, and childhood, in the nineteenth century. She felt dents, too, and one ovoid lump. They would tell a story, if only you knew how to read them.