For 22 years, my wife told me she spent every Wednesday night at her sister’s knitting club. Last Wednesday, her sister called our house looking for her. “Knitting club? Corny, I don’t knit.” My stomach dropped. I’m 74. I put on my good jacket and followed my wife’s Buick across town like a fool in a movie. She parked behind a building with no windows and slipped in through a side door . I waited ten minutes. Then I went in after her. It was dark. It was loud. People were shouting her name. Her name. And then I saw her, under a spotlight, wearing.
a satin bowling shirt the color of a fire truck, with the words “MAD MAXINE” stitched across the back in rhinestones.
My wife. Maxine Babbitt. Sixty-nine years old, retired school librarian, deaconess at First Methodist. A woman who apologizes to furniture when she bumps into it.
She was standing at the end of lane seven at Starlite Bowl, crouched like a cat, holding a sixteen-pound ball like it owed her money.
The crowd went silent. She took four smooth steps and let it go.
Strike.
The whole place exploded. A man in a trucker hat screamed, “MAXINE! MAXINE!” A woman with purple hair blew an air horn. Somebody turned on a disco ball. My wife spun around, did a little shimmy with her shoulders, and pointed at the scoreboard like a professional wrestler.
Then she saw me.
I’ll never forget her face. It went from victory to horror to something like a child caught with a hand in the cookie jar, all in about one second.
“Cornelius,” she said. “What are you doing here?”
“I could ask you the same thing, Mad Maxine,” I said.
The man in the trucker hat came over and shook my hand so hard my shoulder clicked. “You’re the husband? Corny? We’ve heard so much about you! You’re the guy who fixes everybody’s lawnmowers!”
“That’s me,” I said slowly. “I’ve heard nothing about any of you.”
Maxine grabbed my arm and pulled me over to a plastic bench by the shoe rental counter. She sat down, took a deep breath, and told me everything.
Twenty-two years earlier, our daughter had just left for college. The house was quiet. Maxine felt, as she put it, “like a lamp nobody turned on.” One Wednesday she drove past Starlite Bowl, went in on a whim, and bowled a 92.
“It was terrible,” she said. “I loved it.”
She came back the next week. And the next. A league team called the Gutter Queens needed a fifth player. By the end of the year, she was bowling 160. By year five, she was the team captain. By year ten, she held the alley record for a woman over sixty.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked.
She looked down at her hands. “Because you always said bowling was for people who couldn’t play golf.”
I opened my mouth to argue. Then I closed it. I had said that. Probably more than once. Probably at dinner parties, thinking I was very clever.
“And then,” she said, “the longer I didn’t tell you, the harder it got. After five years, how do you say, ‘By the way, dear, I’m secretly very good at a sport’? It sounded like I was having an affair.”
“Maxine,” I said, “I followed you here because I thought you were having an affair.”
She stared at me. Then she burst out laughing so hard she had to hold onto the bench. The purple-haired woman came over to see what was wrong, and Maxine gasped, “He thought — he thought I had a boyfriend!”
The purple-haired woman, whose name turned out to be Dolores, patted my shoulder kindly. “Honey, the only thing she’s been cheating on you with is a ten-pin.”
There was one more surprise.
Dolores led me to a glass case by the front door. Inside were trophies — big, gaudy, golden trophies with little bowling figures on top. Nearly half of them had Maxine’s name on them. And on the top shelf there was an oversized novelty check, the kind they give on television, made out to Maxine Babbitt for $5,000.
