…How to Bowl Likes Your Life Depends on It

I’m not the kind of guy that scares easy.

Sure, there’s the occasional jumpscare that’ll getcha, but that’s just human nature. It’s an unfair game, like when someone yawns at you and you yawn back on instinct. Instinct. That’s what it is, just plain old instinct. The same kind that tells you when to start walking faster at night when you feel like you’re being watched, as well as the one that lets you know when you’re about to say something stupid in front of your friends. It’s common sense, really.

But nothing about the present moment makes sense, common or otherwise. Between the gauche decor that still reeks of the bell-bottoms and grass of my father’s birth-year and the fact that it all just jumped to life with the glazed-over grace of a murderous puppet in a horror movie, you couldn’t blame me for feeling a bit like I missed the memo. Especially when one of the two maniacs that dragged me here is doing bowling-ball calisthenics and the other is pitching the most furious strikes this side of a communist labor union.

“That’s another 10 on frame 6,” Anne Marie shouts, thrusting her fist in the air, “Mark it down, mark it down!”

There’s an innocence about her—despite the bloodthirst in her eyes—that is strangely compelling. I tally the score by punching sticky red buttons into the retro-digital display, like the kind you see in a cartoonishly evil plan. No surprise, but I’m losing by a factor of three.

“Just so you know,” Anne-Marie said, plopping into the cruddy plastic chair across from me. “I skipped breakfast, so I hope you brought enough cash.”

“You’re a real demon, you know that,” I remark, as I rise to take my turn at the lane.

She stretches out across her row of seats and says, “It takes two to make a deal.”

I groan, but not loud enough to give her the satisfaction.

The air fills with the unholy cries of the rusted bowling mechanism coming out of retirement, and a furiously shaking metal rack lowers to reset the pins on the other end of the chamber. My ball was supposed to be a 12-pounder, but as I roll it around in my hands I can feel a strange sloshing inside that makes it feel a whole lot heavier. Worse yet, my fingertips feel the slightest hint of moisture as they slide into the grooves. I whisper a prayer to whichever homeless man that relieved himself in my ball and chuck it down the lane.

I knock six pins in the middle, leaving myself a horrible hanging conversion for the second shot.

“You throw like a girl,” Anne-Marie says with a snicker.

“And you throw like a- Brian,” I reply, punctuating my sick burn with the grunt of my remaining attempt.

Somehow, the ball veers straight into the pin second from the right, sending it flying straight into the pin second from the left, which leaves the furthest pins miraculously untouched.

“Tough split,” she says.

I know I’m out of my element here, but she really is enjoying this just a bit too much.
I clear my throat. “Is a one-sided beating really that entertaining?”

“It depends,” she says, standing to shoot, “On how much you squirm.”

I grin like an alligator. “Modern feminism in action.”

She seizes up as if she’d been run through with a sword, and her ball goes straight into the gutter.

“Oh god, are you one of those guys?” she asks, turning to me in horror.

I shrug, and wait until she gets bored enough to start another throw. Then, I spring my next trap:

“Idunno, I think Joe Rogan makes some really reasonable points about abortion.”

The ball slips from her fingers too early, and meanders along the alley until it gutters again.

Anne-Marie rolls her eyes as she takes her seat. “Oh. You’re just screwing with me.”

“You think so-” I start, before my shoes let out a loud squeak and give out beneath me. My tailbone meets wood, cushioned only by my hips that are unusually wide for a guy.

I try to play it cool, glancing over to her with the most nonchalant pokerface I could muster to mask a week-long bruise. Instead of the satisfied smirk I’d expected from the benches, she’s standing over me with blue eyes wide in concern and one hand out.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah, Thanks,” My voice comes out shaky from the pain as I take her hand, “Shame I left my bowling shoes at home.”

We linger for a second after she helps me up. Sort of just staring at our overlapping hands as if they don’t belong to us. I grab for my ball and rush to take my turn as if it didn’t happen, landing an unexpected strike in the process. She says nothing, and neither do I.

I hadn’t really stopped to think about it, but it’s just been the two of us going at it for the last- half an hour. Has it really been that long since Brian got bored and went off to bench-press that broken setting rack?

“Fun fact,” Anne-Marie says, readying her next throw, “Sixty percent of throws result in a strike.”

“I must be an anomaly then, cuz sixty percent of my throws are a disappointment.”

She scores a flawless strike for her eighth frame, a perfect recovery from my little sabotage attempt.

“Sixty percent of anything is a disappointment.” Anne-Marie turns to me with a remarkably earnest look in her eyes. “I mean think about it. The average person can focus for an average of twenty minutes at a time. But our attention spans are so shot I bet it’s half that, and it takes like another 20 minutes to refocus. So what are you doing for that sixty percent of the time that you’re not sleeping, eating, traveling, or using the bathroom?”

“No clue. Just vibing, I guess.”

“Exactly. And how does that accomplish anything?”

I pause with the ball in my hands, sloshing it around like ripe melon. “Not sure if vibing needs to accomplish something. Unless, maybe you have a better answer?”

“I don’t,” Anne-Marie replies, nodding towards the lane. “Not really, at least.”

I knock a good seven pins, leaving a neat cluster of three on the left end.

“Clean shot,” she says.

“I thought we put aside the irony.”

“It’s not irony. If you stepped more with your left foot on that high backswing, your loft would have delivered a strike.”

My mouth hangs open a little. “You sure know a lot about bowling for a soccer player.”

“Tends to happen with coping mechanisms, doesn’t it?”

I sink the last three pins handily, and look over at her. “I thought the soccer was the coping mechanism. And the mathletes. And-”

“It’s not like that,” she says, her eyes sinking to the chipped floorboards. “I guess you can’t relate, but sometimes there’s a lot of things you have to do without wanting to.”

I think about all the late nights promised away to multiplayer marathons and vapid voice calls that go nowhere. All the hours wasted listening to the guys jousting each other by the inch in arguments that’d be resolved by a two-minute wikipedia search. Or those prime weekends I’d have to sit in with my dad in the cramped garage, playing my switch with one hand and handing him tools with the other as he chips away at client projects. Sure, it’s nothing like actually having to get off my ass and do stuff. But it’s nothing like having full freedom to do what I want. All I can say in return is:

“Speak for yourself, Ms. Perfect.”

Something about the way I said it must have come off wrong. Or maybe it was the wrong time for a joke. If that even was one.

In the nasty, harsh fluorescents, her eyes glint like she’s on the verge of tears.

“Sorry,” I say, “That might have been too far.”

She doesn’t respond, shivering in place as if she’s simultaneously keeping one thing in and another thing out.

“Why,” her voice recenters with every word, “Would you think I’m Ms. Perfect?”

My teeth clench automatically as a chilly hedgehog takes up refuge in my chest. I feel that same invisible arena descend around us as the day we met. But, it’s just the two of us stuck in this grody, hellish throwback, and there’s something about the way she looks when she’s holding back tears that steels my resolve. After all we talked about that day… No, I’m not going to let that happen again.

“Because I’m an idiot,” I admit. “And I don’t know what I was saying.”

She looks up at me, with what I’d guess is the same tender surprise as the kind I felt when she helped me up. I might be a useless nerd, but even I can tell what’s running through her head right now.

“I solemnly swear,” I say, “That you’re just a person. Nothing more, nothing less.”

Her lips part. She turns around to wipe her face with a sleeve.

“Now that’s more like it,” she says, with a sniffle.

“Do you need to talk about it?”

“I think I’m good right now. Just going through it, is all. You know how it is.”

I nod.

Her composure returns to her by the breath as she mumbles. “I guess it is what it is.”

“Does it have to be?”

She sighs, as if disappointed by my question. “The problem with going through it is that you don’t get to feel better until you’re out of it. And by that point, your only options are either to learn your lesson or feel nostalgic.”

“That’s…fair.” I say, knowing that it’s not really fair. “I guess all we can really do is finish our set, then.”

She nods. “I’d like that.”

We play about one more frame before the power in the alley cuts out. By then, though, we’re chuckling like madmen over something stupid while Brian is itching to get back home for his one-o’-clock bulk. He offers to drive me home, but I tell him that the run-down jewelry shop around the corner from where we first met is fine. As I’m stepping down from the two-story car, I look back at Anne-Marie.

She looks a lot more relaxed than when we first talked a couple hours ago. Simply content to chill with me in the backseat of this massive black hole of a vehicle, standing in the dust in front of that worn, half-baked jeweler’s shop. The one I don’t have the courage to admit is also a plumber’s, stitch-seamer’s, and shoemaker’s.

And I’m not sure if its’ the right thing, as my hand cranks the door handle. Or if it’s weird or not, as I step down from the second-story cab. But, as my feet hit the ground, I grow increasingly certain that I wouldn’t feel satisfied with just a, “seeya” or a “talk to you later”. So I clear my throat, give up on a winning smile, and ask:

“Until next time, then?”

She laughs at how stilted I look, but she nods anyways.