Bowling Night. A Short Story

The sweet scent of banana oil and deodorant spray waft and commingle in a unique way as Henry lifts a pair of bowling shoes, size 10, off the counter in exchange for his down-in-the-heals tassel loafers.

Wang grabs the score sheet and they shimmy off in their comical shoes, stopping momentarily to inspect the racks of balls along the way to their lane: number six over by the far end, lighted and waiting. Dull thuds and tumbles echo off the walls and fill the air around them in a nearly palpable, shimmering fog of noise.

Henry picks up a plain black ball, worn dull over the decades, but the holes fit his fingers. Good enough. It’s ladies night at home and that’s why he’s here with Wang rather than listening to his girlfriend, and her girlfriends, bemoan, with baffling glee, their tedious, dead-end jobs or dying relationships, whichever is in a later stage of decomposition this week. “And so, the clamor of tumbling pins trumps the cackle of grumbling hens”, he thinks, and smiles at his cleverness, for he fancies himself a wit, of sorts, or at least of a literary mind, constantly molding phrases and situations in his head when bored, or to assuage an innate anxiety. If I were in sharper company, he thinks, I might share some of these, but conversation with Wang hovers on a lower plane. Wang’s a good guy, as friends go, but they’ve always failed to connect on a deeper level. Wang is not, as one might assume, of Chinese ancestry. He’s middle class Irish/Italian from Long Island but he got this nickname after a wild party they crashed at a frat house up at Brown, where topless freshman girls were dancing on tables to that Wang Chung song. Everybody have fun tonight. Everybody Wang Chung tonight. Wang chunged that night and the name stuck.

Wang has chosen a marbled blue and purple number and he steps carefully up to the line, arms up, cradling the garish thing in both hands like a chalice, as if offering it up for the blessing of the gods. He seems to take bowling quite seriously, which prompts Henry to suspect he’s read books on technique, the way he did with fly fishing and sex. Henry slumps back in the slippery fiberglass chair molded into the scoring table unit, one arm draped over the backrest, a cigarette dangling. An upbeat Farfisa organ is playing over the tinny PA, and although only the organ and drums manage to penetrate the ambient noise, he recognizes the tune instantly: This Year’s Girl, a song he hasn’t heard since college, nearly a decade ago, when he and his friends would dance to it in the Tap Room—bouncing up and down with their arms at their sides in the New Wave Style—yet it still sounds fresh to him. His finger involuntarily taps out the beat, making a sinuous ribbon of the rising smoke.

Wang takes one, two steps, and slides, swinging the ball in a wide arc behind him like a soap on a rope, then whips it forward with a twist of the wrist, right leg crossing over and out to the left. He holds this stance as the ball drifts toward the right gutter, spinning and hanging out there on the very edge until suddenly, the spin overtakes forward motion and the path breaks, curving ineluctably to the center. It strikes with a CRACK and a battery of flying pins as Wang drops his pose with a surprisingly understated fist pump.

Henry takes a drag on his cigarette, scratches an X in the little box and exhales smoke up over his head in a long sigh, finishing with a pop of the jaw. A smoke ring hovers just beyond his face, shivering as it dissipates.

“Tchew play any baseball?” he asks Wang.

“Little League.

“Yeah, me too. Any good?

“Eh.” Wang pauses, “Alright.” It’s not modesty, Henry is sure, but the fact that Wang really does hold athletic ability to a higher standard than most and probably believes he did not achieve that standard in Little League baseball.

The racking mechanism goes through its routine, sweeping away the scattered pins, squeezing a fresh rack into place. Wang’s ball pops up out of the tunnel, swings around the curve and bumps to a stop against Henry’s.

“I was a catcher,” Henry says, “but I wanted to play second. What I really wanted to play was third but we had this kid with an arm, you know? They let me play it too, sometimes, but I wasn’t that good at second. I was a pretty good catcher, though and I guess I should have been happy enough in that position, heart of the team and all, but I hated putting the equipment on and off all the time, every inning. I always felt rushed and, you know, like I forgot something. It made me nervous. I just wanted to pick up my glove and trot out onto the field. Free, no constraints. But I had to stop, put on the shin guards, put on the chest protector, look around for where I dropped the face mask...all this stuff to deal with. “

“Shoulda just gone out for Pop Warner,” Wang interjects absentmindedly, “you wanna wear equipment.”

“And I had to wear a cup. Nobody else had to wear a cup” Henry lays the filter of his cigarette into one of the grooves in the metal ashtray built into the scoring desk, gets up, stretching a little, and holds his palms over the forced air vent. “Used to be they’d ask ‘You wearin’ your cup?’ and you could just say ‘Yeah’ even if you weren’t, but then some kid, a catcher on another team caught one in the nuts and so the coach started tapping you there with the end of a bat to make sure. So you had to wear it. Had to.”

“What’s wrong with wearing a cup?” Wang asks.

“Made me feel self conscious, like everyone was looking at my crotch.”

“So?”

“So, I was ten. I didn’t want people staring at my crotch.”

“Hope you’re wearin’ it tonight, maybe get some action.”

Henry smirks, shaking his head. He picks up his ball, walks up to the line and without much ado fires a shot straight down the middle, no body english, no frills. Three pins remain, one of them wobbling, but it decides to stand. Two on the left, one on the right side. “Split!”, Wang says, as if that were good news. Even though he can visualize, more or less what what he’d need to do to make the spare, Henry knows that the means will evade him. He stands beside the ball return, his hands in his pockets.

“We had this kid on our team,” he says, waiting. “Had a girl’s name. They stuck him out in right field, you know?

“Yeah?”

Henry’s ball comes rolling up the ramp and around to where he’s standing. “Kim. His name was Kim.”

“Korean?”

“Not even. WASP. His father was some big money corporate guy. His mother ran the flower group.”

“The garden club?”

“Yeah, that. They had a big house by the river, with a perfect lawn and these giant sycamore trees out front. Curving driveway,” he gestures a sweeping curve with his arms out, remembering it. “Named their son Kimberly.”

Henry scoops up his ball and drives a hard diagonal towards the two pins on the left, but it slams into the gutter about a foot short of the target. Wang makes a loud hockey buzzer noise and Henry slides down onto the banquette.

“This kid got enough grief from us, for his name, but then he tries out for Little League, and man, did he suck! I mean his heart wasn’t even in it. His Dad pushed him to play, I’ll betcha anything.”

“Mmm Hmm. That figures.”

“Oh, man...This kid...He’s got a girl’s name, throws like a girl, can’t swing a bat, no coordination, you know? Motor skills?”

“A spaz.”

“Total spaz. But, everybody gets a chance, right? So he gets picked up by our team.”

Wang goes through his motions again like some sort of clockwork toy, same practiced groove, same catenary trajectory as if the ball were gliding down an invisible steel cable loosely strung between two points determined by the palm of his right hand and a spot equidistant between the first and third pins, and, naturally, he bowls another strike. Henry rolls his eyes and stubs out his cigarette.

“This one time, end of the game, they put him in for a couple innings, he’s out there in right field, OK?”

“Yeah?”

“And the other team? They’ve got this kid at bat, another loser, he’s oh and two, so limp-wristed he can’t get the bat around but on the third pitch he actually makes contact...”

“Lemme guess. Pops it up to right field.”

“Egg-zactly! And you know he’s as surprised as everyone else, so he just stands there for a second, dazed, staring slack-jawed at this thing he’s done, and the whole team is up off the bench yelling at him. RUN! So he finally bolts for first while the ball is still hanging up there in the sky and Kim comes out of his daydream, and he’s shuffling around, trying to get under the ball, with his glove straight out, at arm’s length in front of him...”

“You wanna beer? I’m gonna go get a beer.”

“Yeah, OK.”

Wang heads off to the bar and Henry glances around at the other bowlers. There’s a young couple two lanes down, looks like they could be out on maybe a second or third date, having fun, but Henry can tell they’re still not entirely comfortable together, like they still care what the other thinks of them. Henry knows that won’t last, nope, after a few more dates they’ll let that slide. Soon enough they’ll be having their first argument and won’t talk for days. Eventually, they’ll cool down and make up, shaking their heads over whatever the fuss was in the first place, but that initial crack will remain, forgotten until the next fight which will widen it, then the next one and the one after that, and it all starts to fall apart.

Henry sighs.

It’s so fresh in the beginning, when it's pure, sweet potential. You hide the churlishness, your dark secrets are safe, and you’re not ashamed; no one’s thinking of failure yet. The girl reminds him somehow of a girl he knew from high school, but he can’t recall her name. She was in the musical, senior year, one of the chorus girls in Guys & Dolls, and they made out at the cast party. Her mouth was bigger than his, way too big really, almost freakishly large, and kissing her over in the corner where the coats were piled, she sitting on his lap, he didn’t know how to approach it, no reasonable fit seemed forthcoming. She opened wide and fastened on to the general area around his lips like a warm, moist remora. All he could do was nibble on her lips, a little bit here, a little there, but it was no small job. Too bad, she was kind of sweet. A charming and unassuming girl really, and so grateful for the attention he’d shown her. What was her name, already? It wasn’t Kim, he was sure of that.

The girl in the other lane comes up to the line and turns backward to face her date, half bent over, knock-kneed with the ball hanging down near her shins. A pose that Henry finds strangely alluring in its awkwardness. She’s laughing a silly little laugh, and suddenly she spins around on her heels, checks her mirth for a second as she half-drops-half-rolls the ball away then flips her hair back and bursts out laughing again. The ball drifts weakly into the gutter and the guy jumps up out of the chair to show her the ropes. He presses himself in carefully from behind, lightly touching her thigh to get her to bend the knees, holding her right hand and stretching her arm back, his head up alongside hers. Henry watches the sequence play out with a chuckle. The girl is playing dumb, doing the moves wrong, forcing him in closer still, and they make the swinging motion in tandem, spooning, like a prelude to another intimacy, as one more restraining wall between them falls to the sound of toppling pins on polished hardwood and her silly little big-mouthed laugh. Clever girl.

Wang poses two Narragansett’s in the cup holders. “You’re up,” he says.

Henry bowls four pins and almost gets the spare, but steps down with a 9. “So,” Wang says, “Your old buddy Kimberly?”

“Yeah, so the ball is just hanging in the air, and Kim gets underneath it--easiest out in the world--and down it comes SMACK!, right in his mitt.”

Henry takes a big sip and fishes a cigarette out of a flattened pack of Merits in his shirt pocket. “But see, here’s the thing.” He taps the cigarette filter on his thumbnail. “I think he never actually caught a ball before, so he didn’t squeeze the glove--probably didn’t even know that’s what you do. The ball just slaps down and bounces out. And the other guy, well he’s never been on base before, you can tell, so he’s practically hugging the bag, with the first base coach yelling “Go, go, go!” and it finally sinks in, so he’s off to second.”

“You guys had base coaches?”

“Sure.” Henry lights his cigarette and takes a drag. “After that it’s just a comedy of errors.”

Wang bowls his turn, which looks like it will be another strike, but a cluster of pins stand in defiance. He turns to face Henry, “And?”

“Yeah, well, the ball pops out. Kim lunges for it and doing that, he kicks it about ten feet away. So he goes running off and grabs it, but he fumbles it. He reaches for it and—get this, he kicks it again.”

“Get out!”

“I kid you not.”

“So, the other guy’s what, rounding second? Third?”

“The other guy’s not even looking. He’s standing, both feet on second and now the third base coach is motioning for him to keep coming.” Henry pinwheels his arm, drawing big circles in the air in a ‘get-a-move-on’ gesture.

“I can’t believe we never had base coaches.”

Wang picks up the spare and settles down across from Henry, elbows on his knees, beer in hand.

“I’m standing behind the plate watching all this in slow motion, Henry says, scribbling down the score. “Kim finally gets the ball and he goes to throw it but with no wind up, see? Just squared off to the infield. He takes a step forward and he’s gonna try to throw it, all arm, right?”

“Jeez”

“But he sees how far it is, and he’s never gonna carry the infield, so he puts some extra umpf into his shoulder and the ball rolls up out of his hand and—honest-to-God—over his back, and falls behind him as he shoves his empty hand out in front with a look of blank terror on his face.”

“God”

“Unreal. So, I’m behind home plate, practically doing jumping jacks, waving my arms over my head as the other kid rounds third, and he can’t believe his luck.”

“So does Kim finally make the throw?”

Henry takes a drag and lets it out slowly, looking up at the ceiling, which he notices is comprised of a series of parallel beam-like laminated wood structures, apparently some sort of acoustical design, which makes sense, but he’s never noticed before that it hides a whole universe of cables and air ducts and such, and he can even make out a catwalk that spans the length of the lanes. “No,” he says, “The center fielder had already run over and swept in behind Kim, scooped up the ball and drilled it, one-bounce off the mound right to my glove.”

“Nice”

“Yeah, it was a good throw but a couple of steps too late. The other team was already out of the dugout, patting the guy on the back, jumping up and down and everything. First time the kid ever gets a hit and it’s a home run.”

“And Kim?”

“I’ll tell you, man, if it was me, I wouldn’t have left the house for a month. For a year. I would have run away from home. I’d ‘ve been mortified.”

“I’m embarrassed just hearing it.”

“Oh, how we mocked him. We did. You remember how it was when we were ten, twelve years old? You didn’t have to be a great ballplayer to fit in, but you had to not suck or you were nobody, a loser. Until puberty, at least, then other stuff ‘s more important not to suck at.” Henry gets a far off look, squinting at the dim and secret world beyond the acoustic ceiling. He senses movement up there on the catwalk but he can’t make it out clearly in the glare of the lights. “We never let up. He acted like he didn’t care. But he cared.”

Henry takes his turn and figures if he tosses the damn thing hard enough he can throw a strike, and as it turns out, this time he does. Instinctively, he glances over at the girl two lanes down but she has her back to him and she’s watching her date, her head tilted almost to her shoulder.

“You know? This guy turned out to be a major head in high school, but still not popular like some of the stoners, the cool ones. More like he discovered that pot took him outside of himself… and he liked himself so much better when he wasn’t home that he moved out permanently.”

Wang chuckles at this. “So, he’s what now, school janitor? Or, no, wait! His daddy bought him a seat on the stock exchange. Yeah, karma, man. And now he’s making more in an hour than you do in a month.” Wang is still chuckling as he bowls his last frame but Henry is sitting mute, his jaw clenched.

“The sad thing is,” he finally says, “his father was indicted for fraud and went to prison. They lost the house and Kim lived with his mother in one of those apartments downtown, over the shops, during senior year. He was always in trouble with the cops, too. They’d come and grab him out of class and we wouldn’t see him for weeks. I’d guess he’s probably in jail himself by now, or will be soon”

“You still feel guilty, don’t you? Like you think you hastened his decline by riding him ‘til he broke, am I right?”

“Well,” Henry hesitates, “You’re not wrong...”

“Damn right I’m not wrong. You were a total prick, weren’t you? Admit it.”

“Shut up.”

“Come on, let’s hear it, Henry. Why’d you tell me this story anyway? Because you still feel guilty after all these years, that’s why”

“Shut up.”

“Did you know that Idi Amin used to tie down prisoners then put some rats in a metal bucket and strap it to their stomach? Then he would heat it up reeaal slow…only one way out. That’s what you deserve, Henry.”

“Hey, it wasn’t Lord of the Flies, man. Everybody gets mocked for something.”

“You gonna whine all night or you gonna bowl?”

“I’m not—”

“Hey, when I was at the bar there was a guy, a guy from the league, asked me if we wanted to bowl with them. You wanna bowl on a team?”

“I..no. Maybe. I dunno…look, I—”

“That’s them,” Wang says, and gestures toward a group of guys in purple and gold bowling shirts a few lanes down. Henry looks up, past the couple in lane four but shifts his gaze back to the girl who is looking his way with a bright mischievous smile. Rattled, he looks away, and yet intrigued and a little flattered, he immediately looks back. He sends her a big leering grin of his own, with a cocky tilt of the head before he notices her eyes pull a rack focus back to him from ten yards past his left shoulder. Their eyes lock for a brief instant and Henry’s heart skips a beat. She drops her smile and her eyes simultaneously and turns to her boyfriend, who snaps a quick, sharp glance at Henry, still standing there with his frozen smile. Henry looks back over his shoulder and notices for the first time the object of her attention: A group of young women in the last lane who look like they’ve just got out of work and are yakking it up, doing hip-swaying dance moves they’ve seen on MTV. Chubbies, all of them, no wonder he hadn’t noticed.

“Let’s go talk to them,” Wang says brightly.

Henry swivels an incredulous glance at Wang, “Why?”

“Well, to get to know them. To see if they’re cool. See if we fit in, you know.” Slowly, as if drugged, Henry realizes that Wang is talking about the bowling team, not the Chubbies. “Yeah, right. OK…No, you go if you want, I don’t think I want to bowl in a league.”

“C’mon, it’ll be fun.” But Henry defers. “You go, I’ll be over in a minute,” he says to Wang’s back. Henry slumps in his chair and as he lights his next-to-last cigarette he notices the couple packing up to leave. The guy swings his pack up over his shoulder but the girl is rooting around in her bag and motions for him to go on ahead, nodding in the direction of the Ladies Room. The guy spins his car keys around his index finger and pointing to the exit, turns to leave. She fiddles in her bag, pulls out a slip of paper and pen, and holding the paper to her thigh, she writes something. Henry reaches out and takes a sip of his beer. As he lowers the bottle, he sees the girl from lane four coming his way.

§§§

“Where’s your car?” Henry’s girlfriend is shuffling around the apartment wearing one of his blue oxford shirts over pink leggings which make her look chubby—”square butt” he’s taken to call her in his mind, but not yet aloud. She’s picking up plates and glasses off the coffee table. “You know what?” she asks, not waiting for Henry to answer the first question. “Lynn got a mobile phone. I’m thinking maybe I should get one.”

“Wang drove me back.” Henry drops his coat on the arm of a chair and leans against it. She always has to do what The Girls are doing, which is why her hair is teased up into a pile and she wears leggings even though nether of these suit her. “They’re really expensive. Like two bucks a call and you even pay when somebody calls you. What do you need a mobile phone for? A doctor might need one, a businessman maybe, if he’s travailing…”

“Or a paralegal…people are always trying to reach me. The Camry broke down again?” She looks up to discover a pale Henry, with a matted crust of blood in his hair. “Hey, you look like crap! What happened?”

“Someone dropped a wrench from the catwalk above the lane. I was out cold for a couple minutes.”

“Oohh, lemme see”, she says cupping his head and forcing him to double over so she can inspect the wound. You’ve one hell of a bump there, that’s for sure. And a gash in your scalp. You’re going to need stitches”

“They put a butterfly bandage on it.”

“I can see that. You’re going to need stitches. And your hair smells like cigarettes.” She lets go brusquely and turns, Let’s get you some ice.” Henry doesn’t even bother to straightened up but simply drops backward into the armchair. “And a Tylenol too,” he calls out after her.

“That’s clearly negligence, Henry,” she hollers from the kitchen. “You can sue big for damages. We had a lady sued the diner in Bayside last year, remember? The door literally hit her in the ass on the way out. Knocked her down the stairs. She got $20,000. I’ll set you up with Anna, she does torts.”

“No. No lawyers. No stitches. No lawsuit. Nothing.”

“That’s what they have insurance for,” she says testily.

“Drop me off at the lanes tomorrow morning so I can pick up the car, would you?”

“Can’t,” she says “Gotta early morning meeting in Plainfield. Take the bus.”

Henry grunts and kicks off his shoes.

“If I had a mobile phone you could have called me and I would have come to pick you up,” she says without thinking.

“No, if I had a mobile phone I could’ve called the house. You were home. And I’d still have to go pick up the car.”

She returns with a baggie full of ice cubes, drops it and two tablets into Henry’s palm. He gingerly lays the ice on the throbbing welt on his scalp and dry swallows the pills. “There’s some water on the table,” she tells him on her way out of the room. Henry blankly watches her square butt recede.

She stops in the doorway. “Come to bed”, she says.

“My head’s pounding, I’ll be in in a little while.” He lies. “Hey. I’m bowling in the league now. Two nights a week.”

Henry sits like that without moving for a while, he’s not sure how long but the ice is a bag of water now and he lays it onto the coffee table. He turns out the pocket of his coat, looking for a cigarette but he’s been sitting on it and the last one is bent in two. Flakes of tobacco fall into his lap and he brushes them onto the rug, kneading them into the pile with his toe. A scrap of folded paper torn from a woman’s day planner slips down behind the cushion. Slowly, he lifts himself up and totters to the foyer, rummaging through the drawer where they keep the keys and the mail his mother sends every few months, thick envelopes full of clippings from the local paper, and a note handwritten on the little pad she keeps by the phone. Thinking of you. His heart sinks each time he finds a new one stuffed in the mail slot. He doesn’t expect to find a pack in there, but he keeps searching anyway, pushing aside the pile of envelopes, all of those clippings of “local-boy-made-good” stories that stir up a biting envy in him but that he can’t keep himself from reading, nonetheless. One in particular that gnaws at him like a bucketful of rats: A photo of Kimberly Preston (graduated Summa Cum Laude, Stanford Law School and named youngest full partner at Whittman Knowles Wright), his fiance Claire (former fashion model, now running her own talent agency), surrounded by his beaming parents Leslie (Pres.Wakefield Garden Club) and Harald (CFO, Collsen Stiles, LTD), standing in the sweeping driveway of their stately riverfront home.

Beat, bone-tired and aching, Henry gives up his fruitless search and stands swaying in the dark foyer. He doesn’t really want a cigarette, never even wanted the first one, actually, but he wants something and whatever it is, it’s hidden from him. He wants to sleep, maybe, snuggle in next to his girlfriend and let her familiar warmth soothe him, the calming bulk of her behind pressing against his stomach, but he’s afraid to dream. Not that dream, not again. Standing alone out in right field, alienated and paralyzed by fear, all eyes on him, heavy with expectation. And a baseball hanging in the sky above, about to fall.

Bowling Night
A short story by Dash Enwitt © 2014