We stood there a moment, and I felt my father’s impatience coursing from his fingers into mine. He tapped the fingers of his free hand on the counter, turned his head left and right.
“You got anything to put your hair back with?” he asked me. I dug in my jeans pockets, turned up nothing. Behind us, the pins clattered every few seconds, and I cringed at the noise. Just as he stepped back from the counter, ready to leave—I hoped—a dark-haired, big-chested man came through the doorway. He had a pair of shoes in one hand and a can of aerosol spray in the other. He gave my father a nod like he’d just seen him yesterday, put the can down, and reached out his hand.
They shook. “Leo,” my father said, just as he’d said in the car on the way over. Maybe he had been practicing.
Leo put the shoes on the counter, at just about eye-level in front of me. “Saw you coming,” he said. “These should fit you.” He winked at me and I stared back. I wondered why he hadn’t gotten out a pair of the red-and-white shoes for my father, too. But later, I understood that this would’ve been an insult between pros—or former ones, at least—and of course my father still had his own shoes, custom-made Linds, shined as freshly as the bag he’d pulled them from.
The pair Leo got out for me fit just right, and it was hard to figure how he’d managed that at a glance, when at Zleigman’s, where my mother took me to buy school shoes, you had to step on those cold metal measuring trays every time. But that was Leo, I learned soon enough. He’d seen us coming. There were, as it turned out, only a few things in his life he hadn’t seen coming.
My father reached for his wallet, but Leo shook him off. He pushed through the small swinging door, saying something about the royal treatment, and led us to Lane 3, which I learned that day was my father’s lucky lane, and which also became our lane. There was nobody to our left, and several lanes to the right were empty, too.
Leo wanted to know if there was anything else he could do for us. My father set his bag on a bench and straightened up. “We’re fine, thanks,” he said.
Leo shoved his big hands in his pockets. He cleared his throat, nodded. He seemed to want to talk more, but my father leaned back to his bag, unzipping it and rummaging until Leo turned and headed back to the counter.
“Let’s get you a ball,” my father said then. He led me over to the racks of balls, all of them black, looking like bombs straight out of Looney Tunes cartoons. He made me lift ball after ball, the kid sizes, until he thought the finger holes were spaced right and the weight was something I could work with. They were all too heavy as far as I was concerned. “This one,” he said finally, and then he led me over to the Lustre King polishing machine and let me put a dime in the slot and told me to push the button, which I was happy to do because I loved lighted buttons as much as any other kid. The machine swallowed the ball and kicked on, and the ball rolled out of the slot again a minute or so later looking like it had never before been touched. He held it up, inspected it. It seemed as light as a balloon in his hand. He pursed his lips, looked down at me, narrowed his eyes. After a moment he said okay, and then told me to follow him.
“Watch what I’m doing,” he said when we got back to Lane 3. He squatted at the top of the lane, kept his balance with his fingertips as he leaned even farther forward, chin jutted, squinting. No one else was doing this, I noted as I looked to my right at all the other bowlers. They were just rolling the ball, their arms swinging forward as smooth as pendulums.
Finally he got to his feet. “Not one change in the lay of the land there,” he said. I had no idea what he meant, and he didn’t explain. He retrieved his ball from his bag and held it up like an exhibit. It was a deep red with a low sparkle in the finish that reminded me of the tall red plastic cups I drank sodas from at Harry’s when we went for sandwiches on Saturday afternoons. “Now. I roll a Amflite Magic Circle because it’s springier on these lanes,” my father said. “Leo, he probably still rolls a bleeder.” He must’ve read my confused expression because then he shrugged. “They soak up the oil, you have to wipe them off all the time.” He gestured toward the front counter. “His dad rolled with the Sandusky Icebreakers, you know, which—well, they were a name for a while.” My father stopped, looked at me. He seemed to have so many things to say and show me that it was a physical struggle to figure out where to begin. The effort to decide played out on his face—the fast blinking, the pressed lips. Even then, I understood. Sometimes my head hummed with things I wanted to say, and I couldn’t choose and so I said nothing. My mother seemed to think we were both keeping our respective secrets, and that may have been true of my father, but for me, much of what was going on in my mind was a mystery to me. I could look at him and see myself.
My father set his ball in the return next to mine. “Let’s walk to the line.” He showed me how to back up four-and-a-half steps. “That’s your point of origin. Not just where you start, but where your roll starts.”
Then he said we should practice our approach. “We’re going to teach you everything just the way it should be done,” he said. “Watch me.” He backed up and then slide-stepped to the line, his feet barely lifting, stopping with the tip of his left shoe even with the line, his right hand reaching, as if he might be trying to catch something falling through the air. “It’s like dancing,” he said. “Try it.”
It wasn’t like any kind of dancing I’d seen. I looked around. I felt foolish, pantomiming, but no one seemed to notice what we were doing, busy as they were actually bowling. Every few seconds the pins crashed in the boxes at the ends of the lanes and were swept away. I backed up and glided forward, or tried to. As I backed up, I felt my father’s fingers on my wrists. “You don’t keep your hands at your sides. You use your free arm to propel you, and your body to propel your rolling arm,” he said. I had the feeling he’d be willing to practice this particular move with me all day, until I had it right. The prospect wasn’t exactly appealing.
“Back up, let’s try again,” my father said, and I said okay, and we stood at our points of origin again, mine slightly forward because my stride was smaller, preparing for my next phantom roll.
“Why don’t you just let her give it a try?”
We both turned to find Leo leaning on the return a few feet behind us, one hand resting on it, a cigarette burning in his other hand.
“Well, now, that’s a thought, coach,” my father said, his eyebrows raised but no smile on his face. I didn’t think he liked Leo, so why come here? There were other bowling places around.
“That’s all it is,” Leo said. He took a drag off his cigarette and looked across the lanes as if he had other things to keep an eye on. But he didn’t seem to be in a hurry to leave us, either.
“Any other words of wisdom?” There was a pained tone in my father’s voice, which I’d heard before, sometimes late at night if I happened to wake up and hear my parents talking. I couldn’t catch the words, even through our thin walls, but it always seemed my mother wanted something, and my father wanted to understand what it was.
“If you’re wondering where I went, it was nowhere good,” Leo said. He tapped his cigarette on the tray attached to the console, took another drag. “Hey kid,” he said. “You see your father over there? You know he went pro, right?” Leo pointed to the wall next to the counter, where there were rows and rows of black-and-white photos, some head shots, some team shots. I took a few steps closer. And there was my father with his slicked-back hair and pointy-collared shirt, a big goofy smile. He didn’t look much older than the sixth-grade safety patrol kids in my school.
“You know he had the record for the most perfect games in one season in his age group,” Leo said. He really was trying. I looked back at my father, who was studying his glossed shoes as if he wondered how they’d gotten on his feet. Leo looked like he had about given up on any kind conversation. Behind me, pins crashed two lanes over, and I shivered at the noise. Leo saw this and grinned—I’d given him something else to talk about.
“That’s nothing, kid. I used to be a pin boy down at the State. There was an alley down there, in