“Don’t I know. She better watch where she shakes that,” Sherry said, face tight and sallow under the fluorescent light. She looked like a sickly yellow bird, a pinched lemon.
“You got ideas.”
“Sure I got ideas. And I’m no rabbit. Maybe she needs to hear that.”
“I’ll see she does.”
Sherry nodded. Those flat eyes were jumping. That slack lip now drawn tight. Her face all moving, all jigsawing around. She looked different, more interesting. Not pretty. It was all too much for pretty. But you couldn’t take your eyes off it.
I wasn’t supposed to be back there at all. Once, years before, some kid, not even fifteen years old, was working at the Lanes. He got stuck in the pinsetter machine and died. There were a million different stories of how it happened, and ever since, no one under twenty one was supposed to be back there. But I never got near the clanging machine. I stayed in the alcove where they kept the cleaning equipment.
From there, I could see them and they never saw me. They never even looked around.
Sometimes, Eddie would be whispering to Carol, but I couldn’t hear.
They were just pressed together, and when the machine wasn’t going, when no one was bowling, you could hear the rustle of their uniforms brushing against each other.
The more he moved, the more she did, and I could hear her breathing faster and faster. He covered her and I couldn’t see her except her long hair and her long legs wound round. I was too far to see her eyes. I wanted to see her eyes. It was like he was shaking her into life.
“Things are getting interesting,” Mrs. Schwartz said to my mother, who was resting against the counter, slapping a rag around tiredly. You can lean, you can clean, Jimmy always said.
“Don’t count on it,” my mother replied.
“Sherry might try harder, wants to keep a man like that,” Mrs. Schwartz said. She was the head of one of the women’s leagues. She was always there early to gossip with Diane. I think she knew Diane from the Stratton, where Mrs. Schwartz met her second husband. They liked to talk about everybody they knew and the terrible things they were doing. “Looks like a singer or something,” she added, twisting in her capris. “A television personality. Even his teeth. He’s got fine teeth.”
“I never noticed his teeth,” my mother said.
“Take note.” Mrs. Schwartz nodded gravely.
Diane walked up, clipping her name tag on her uniform. No one said anything for a minute. They were watching Sherry walk into the ladies’ room, cigarette pack in hand.
“She can’t even be bothered to put on lipstick,” Mrs. Schwartz said, shaking her head. “Comb her hair more than twice a day.”
“Her skin smells like grill,” Diane commented under her breath. The two women laughed without making any noise, hands passing in front of their faces.
Mrs. Schwartz left to meet her teammates surging into the place with their shocks of bright hair and matching shirts the color of creamsicles.
Diane was watching Sherry come out of the bathroom. “Trash,” she said to my mother. Then, in a lower voice, “They used to live upstate. Her father’s doing a hitch in Auburn. Got in a fight at a stoplight, beat a man with a tire iron. Man lost an eye.”
“How do you know?” my mother asked.
“Jimmy told me. He gave her hell for making a call to State Corrections on his dime.” Diane shook her head again. “Mark my words, she’s trouble. Trash from trash.”
I looked over at Sherry, leaning against a ball return to tie her apron. She had her eyes on them, on all of us. She couldn’t hear, but it was like she did.
“Mark my words,” Diane said. “Blood will tell.”
That whole summer, I’d lie in bed at night waiting for my mother to come home from her shift waiting tables at the tavern. I’d lie in bed and think about Eddie and Carol. It was like how I used to think about Alice Crimmins, the Kew Gardens lady who killed her kids so she could be with her boyfriend. I couldn’t get her face from the newspaper out of my head. Two, three times a night, I’d run around testing all the window latches, the window gates.
Now, though, it was all about Eddie and Carol. I’d stay under my sheets — cool from sitting in the refrigerator for hours while I watched television and ate Chef Boyardee — and think about how they looked, all flushed and pulsing, how you could feel it coming off them. You could feel it burning in them. It made my throat go dry. It made something ripple in me, like the time I rode the rollercoaster at Fairyland and thought I just might die.
Then I’d start thinking of Sherry standing behind that counter all day. When she’d first started she cracked gum and looked bored, went in the bathroom twice a day to wash hot dog sweat off her hands and spit out her gum in the sink.
But lately she didn’t look bored. And nights, she’d get into my head. Standing there like that, her head dropping, eyes lowered, watching. I wondered when she was going to make her move. Was she waiting to see it for herself? Hadn’t she figured out yet when and where it was happening, right behind the wall of pin trestles that she — we all — stared at every day all day?
Each day it seemed closer and closer. Each day you could feel it in the place, even as the clean and fresh-faced Forest Hills kids pounded their bright white tennis shoes down the alleys; even as the shiny-haired teenagers hunched over the pinball machines, shoving their hips, twisting their bodies, like they wanted to squirm out of their skin; even as the customers at the bar, steeled behind smoked glass by lane 30, cocooned from the pitch of the squealing kids and mooning double dates, cool in their adult hideaway of tonic and beer, crushed ice and lemon rinds and low jazz and soft-toned waitresses with long, snapping sheets of hair and warm smiles, and a bartender who understood them and would know just what to do to make them happy... even with all that going on at the Lanes, it was going to happen.
“I don’t like the way they talk about her,” Diane was whispering to my mother, leaning over my mother’s counter, tangerine nails tapping anxiously. “Sherry and Myrna and Myrna’s friends from the Tuesday league.”
“Talk’s just talk,” my mother answered, loosening her apron.
“Listen,” Diane said, leaning closer. Looking over at me, trying to get me not to listen. “Listen, she deserves something. Carol does.” Her voice even lower, husky and suddenly soft. “Her mom’s at Creedmore. She’s been there awhile. Took a hot iron to Carol when she was a kid. She was sound asleep when it happened. Still a scar the shape of a shield on her stomach.”
Diane was looking at my mother, looking at her like she was asking her something. Asking her to understand something.
My mother nodded, eyes flickering as the fluorescent light made a pop. “You got a customer, Diane,” she said, pointing toward the bar.
I was thinking they might stop. Might take a few days off, let things cool off. But they didn’t. They only changed it up a little. From what I could tell, Carol came in the back way for her shift and met Eddie first. Met him back there before anyone even saw her. But they didn’t stop. And one day Eddie came out with a streak of Carol’s lilac lipstick on his bleach-white collar, just like in a story in a women’s magazine.
I watched him walk across the place, lane by lane, with the stain on him. I glanced over at Sherry, who was leaning against the pinball machine and watching him. I thought: This is it. She’s too far to see it, I thought to myself. But if he moves closer. If she moves closer.
Yet neither of them did.