“So there was a board on each side called a side kick that was supposed to keep the pins contained. You’d sit up there—” he stood in a crouch, feet spread, knees bent, looking almost like a jockey on a horse, “and when a box was done, you’d jump into the pit, put the ball on the return and roll it to the bowler, and scoop the pins. There was a pedal back there, too. You’d step on it to raise these rods so you could place the pins. Then you’d drop the pedal and hop back up on the bench and pray the pins wouldn’t fly up and hit you when some guy cranked it back down the lane. And you’re doing this on two sides, mind you.”
Leo acted all this out, and my father watched. I couldn’t read his expression. “Anyway,” Leo said, straightening up, “if you were good, you could set without the rods. But most people wanted you to use them, so you couldn’t crowd the pins and do someone a favor for a cut.”
He winked as he said this last part. He was what my mother called a flirt, the way he made it seem all of this was just between us. I liked him, I decided, even though I understood that whatever was between him and my father had nothing to do with joking around.
“Because there was always betting. Wasn’t there, Leo?” my father said. He rested a hand on my shoulder. “You should tell her about that. Tell her all you know about that.”
Leo looked down at the ball return, patted it like a dog’s head. “Sure thing,” he said. He stubbed out his cigarette, gazed out over the lanes again. “I’ll leave you to it.”
My father watched Leo walk away until he was almost to the bar. He turned back to Lane 3, surveyed it again as if considering a great distance. He got his ball from the return and carried it to the top of the lane, cradled it against his chest as if he were praying. Then he said he might roll a few just to get warmed up.
Of course, I didn’t know how it must’ve felt for him, stepping back from the foul line after so long. I didn’t know then that the last time he’d done that, more people than lived in the entire state of Ohio had watched him bomb on national television. He probably felt he was being watched again by everyone there, and he was probably right.
He glided forward. And he did look like a man dancing, or skating on glass as he approached the line, his arm swinging in front of him smooth as a trapeze artist, reaching through the air, his chin uptilted in a way that looked both confident and fearful. He expected nothing, that’s what I think now. He had given up, and come back humble. But he’d chosen to take me with him. That’s what I felt—as if I’d been let in on a secret, one I wasn’t even sure I could express to Chelsea, to whom I told everything—and that this place, the Galaxy Lanes, was a room in our house which had been kept locked until that day. My father, who always seemed rushed and nervous, now looked to be swimming, his movement graceful and measured, though the ball appeared to shoot from his fingers, slowing only to curve into the pins. I thought of school films about the astronauts landing on the moon and the lower gravity there—imagine moving through water, our teacher had told us—and I could imagine it, watching him.
My father rolled nine strikes before he missed a pin. When he made the ninth, he turned around and said to me, “And here’s your wish for next year, sweetheart.”
Then he rolled again and dropped them all but the ten pin, but that was okay. My pulse felt big in my throat. I had seen something of him that I hadn’t known before, and it seemed to me for the first time that there was a world of things I didn’t know.
“I want to try,” I said—actually, I didn’t realize that I’d said anything, but my father had heard me. He put down his ball, retrieved mine, and ushered me to the top of the line. He tapped my thigh to remind me of the four-and-a-half steps back. He showed me how to position the ball at my chest, and he pulled my shoulders back so that the weight of the ball wouldn’t throw me off balance. At some point, I knew it was time to move, and so I tried to glide forward as he had. But while he’d seemed to be floating, I felt only weight—in my arm, in my legs, and the soles of my feet. The ball dragged me forward, left my fingers too late. It slammed into the floor rather than sailed; it meandered to the pins. A few tipped lazily as if agreeing to lie down just to humor me for trying. I was dumbfounded—my father had made it look so natural.
The pins rolled and stilled, and I turned back to my father, expecting him to be disappointed. Instead, he had the same look as game show contestants when they’d won the grand prize. There was a sudden gleam at the edges of him, as if he’d found something that no one else in the world knew existed.
I walked back to him and he turned me around, gave me some more direction about the optimal bend in the legs, about letting the ball go a heartbeat earlier. I tried again with more power though not more accuracy. I rolled a few in the gutter, but my father was only happier with each roll, his words clipped when he leaned in to explain this or that adjustment.
Eventually, I got a strike. I whirled back to face him, threw my hands over my head, jumped up and down, expecting him to do the same. Instead he looked no different than before—just smiling at me and nodding to himself at some calculation he’d tried and confirmed. “Fine, good,” he said, same as he’d said when I’d rolled a gutter ball a moment before.
I turned back to look at the lane. The evidence of my first triumph was already being swept away, the next frame set. I had the sense that those pins in particular, not to mention the place itself, had been waiting for me. There was a pressure in my chest, almost the same feeling as when I was about to cry, which I hated to do. But this was more powerful. I felt as if I’d expanded somehow, filled myself more fully. I couldn’t have explained this to anyone, not even Chelsea, maybe especially not Chelsea. But I did know I wanted to roll again.
I walked back to where my father stood waiting for me. He looked at me with concern, as if he could see what was happening to me. “How’s your arm?”
“Fine,” I said. I wanted to get on with it, and he could see this, too.
“How’s your wrist?”
I said fine again, and shook both hands to demonstrate. “You should watch your wrists,” he said. “Your mother has weak wrists.”
This was not a detail I remembered either of my parents mentioning. My mother, overall, was not known for weak points. She had moments when nothing could satisfy her, when she found doom in every misplaced spoon, and during those times, if my father was not at work, we went on one of our various expeditions, or just for ice cream downtown, or to the marina to watch the boats—which was only steps away from where we stood now, eyeing each other. My father, I knew, was sizing me up, and I was trying to decipher what he thought he was seeing.
“Did you see that—what I did?” I said, since I didn’t yet know the word for strike.
“Yes, I did,” he said. “And it was great. But let’s not overdo it.”
“I want to go again.”
My father tilted his head to one side, and the smile in the wrinkles around his eyes told me he loved me—that part of his expression I recognized. But there was something else, a watchfulness, as if he was seeing me in some new way. And he was; he told me later. He understood what I wanted, even though, as was typical for me then, I couldn’t put a word to it. Mastery—that was the desire pushing against my ribs.
By the time we left—hours later, it turned out—my father tipping an imaginary hat to Leo at the counter as if he’d beaten him fair and square at something, I had fallen in love with bowling the way you love a food and can’t remember what life was like before you tasted it. I loved it for the way the ball curved—hooked, my father explained—magically