Last Night at the Telegraph Club(33)

“Square your hips,” Kath told her.

Lily turned toward her. “Sorry, what way?”

“The other way,” Kath said, looking amused.

And before Lily turned on her own, Kath reached out and touched her hip, gently nudging her to face the lane. She touched her for only a second, but Lily felt Kath’s hand through the fabric of her skirt like a spark on her skin.

“Now, put the fingers of your right hand in the holes,” Kath said. “You’re right-handed, aren’t you?”

Lily blinked and tried to shift her attention to the ball. “Yes. It’s so heavy.”

“Hold the weight of the ball with your left. Right, like that. Now bend your knees and lean forward—but not too much! You’re going to lead off with your right foot. Just walk toward the lane—keep your eyes straight ahead. Swing your right arm back—you see how they’re doing it down there? Right, swing your arm and just let go—no, you don’t need to throw it!”

Lily had tossed the ball heavily at the front of the lane. It smacked the polished wood with a wince-inducing crack, and then spun into the gutter.

“I told you I’m not good at sports,” Lily said ruefully. “Maybe I should have just stayed with Miss Weiland’s group.”

Over to their left, Miss Weiland was teaching several beginners, but Kath had convinced her she could teach Lily on her own. The rest of the G.A.A. girls were split up among half a dozen lanes throughout the Loop Bowl. The group of mixed couples and a party of four men beside them were the only non-G.A.A. patrons that afternoon.

“I should have showed you first,” Kath said. “Watch me this time. It’s all about timing. That’s what Miss Weiland says. You have to swing your arm in time with the way you walk. See?”

Lily watched Kath pick up a ball and hold it in front of her stomach. Then she started walking toward the lane, leading with her right leg as she swung the ball back with her right arm. She took four steps and slid her left foot along the polished wooden floor, extending her right leg behind her as if she were curtsying to the bowling alley, and let go of the ball. It rolled down the oiled wood and struck down half of the pins.

“That’s great!” Lily exclaimed.

“It would’ve been better if I got them all. But I’ll go again. Maybe I can get a spare.”

Lily took a seat at the back of their lane to watch Kath try again. There was a pleasing rhythm to the way Kath moved, a smoothness to the arc her arm followed before she released the ball. When she slid on the fourth step, dropping low to the ground, her skirt rose up and exposed the hollows behind her knees. The sight was unexpectedly intimate, and Lily averted her eyes. The men who were bowling nearby seemed to smoke and talk more than they actually bowled, and Lily saw a couple of them eye the G.A.A. girls and grin at each other.

There was a crashing sound as Kath’s ball struck the last of the pins, and she let out a triumphant whoop before returning to Lily. “You see, it’s about momentum,” Kath said. “You don’t have to throw it down the lane. The momentum will carry it. You want to go again?”

Lily was acutely aware of the men in the next lane, and she drew Kath down on the bench beside her and whispered, “I think they’re watching.”

“Who?”

Lily turned her back on the men and said quietly, “Those men behind me. When you bowl, your skirt goes up.”

Kath looked startled. She glanced over at their classmates, watching as they slid toward the lane and extended their legs back. Each time a girl bowled, her skirt rose up, exposing a flash of knee or thigh, and with those men watching, the ordinary motion of their bodies somehow became indecent—as if the girls were showing off their limbs to onlookers.

Kath looked down at her hands, her cheeks turning a faint pink. “Don’t pay any attention to them,” she said, but she didn’t suggest picking up their bowling game again.

The girls from the G.A.A. down at the far end hadn’t noticed they had an audience. They were still getting their lesson from Miss Weiland, who was instructing them on the proper way to walk toward the lane. “The footwork is unhurried—you don’t need to run at the lane,” Lily heard her say. Her voice carried clearly in a break between the echoing, musical sounds of bowling balls crashing into pins. She watched Miss Weiland take her stance and begin her approach to the lane, her arm swinging back and releasing the ball, her right leg extending backward in that bowling lane curtsy. Miss Weiland was wearing trim-fitting khaki pants rather than a skirt, and Lily wondered if Miss Weiland had done that on purpose.

“Now, you see, you swing the ball back like a pendulum and simply let it go,” Miss Weiland was saying.

Miss Weiland’s bowling ball spun down the right side of the lane and then hooked toward the center, rolling right into the space between the center pin and the one to its right. The crack of collision echoed as the pins tumbled over. Lily could imagine it illustrated in a cartoon with the jagged-edged star of an explosion, and she immediately thought of rockets. “It’s all physics,” she said suddenly.

“What?” Kath said, puzzled.

“The bowling ball hitting the pins—it’s Newton’s third law. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. It’s how rockets work.”

“I think you’ve lost me.”