Bingo (5 page)

INSIDE PICTURE FRAME

REGULAR X

CHAMPAGNE GLASS
Straight up or reverse

RAILROAD TRACKS
Any two parallel columns

ANY VERTICAL OR HORIZONTAL

BLOCK OF 9
Can be anywhere on the board, but there must be nine touching squares in the block

“Railroad tracks. Next game is railroad tracks. You remember now, you’ve got to get two parallel columns. Ready.” He paused for effect. “Steady. Go.” A ball popped up. “Number two.” Mutzi sang. “Tea for two and two for tea.”

Mother appeared nonchalant. She carried a little notebook with her on which she had drawn the new kinds of bingo games. Louise kept cribbing from Julia’s notes.

“Keep your nose over your own card, Wheezie, or you’ll get a blister on it.”

“Who died and made you God?” Louise shot back.

“Darlings, we are in a house of worship.” Mr. Pierre was sitting across from the Hunsenmeirs.

Louise would have come back with something but Mutzi called out, “Forty. Number forty and I tell you I didn’t have sense to come in from the rain until I was forty.”

A ripple of laughter rolled over the crowd. The gang was predominantly female with the men sitting along the side of the room at a bar. Truthfully, liquor should not have been sold in the church but Saint Rose’s needed money. Millard Huffstetler, the church’s business manager, did whatever was necessary to raise revenue. We didn’t know if he informed Father Christopolous. Generating cash for the church was one’s Christian duty. Louise took this to heart. She sewed raffia baskets every summer for Saint Anthony’s bazaar. Louise had converted to Catholicism at age eight. Mother remained Lutheran and this proved a fruitful source of contention.

The numbers rolled on until Ricky Bonneville, one of the “BonBons,” screeched “Bingo.” Kirk “Peepbean” Huffstetler, Millard’s nephew, wearing a bib like an old-time paperboy, sauntered over and checked the card. “Got ’em. Railroad tracks straight as the C and O.” He was a sign painter and still wore his spattered overalls.

“Fifteen dollars to Ricky B.” Mutzi smiled. He rang a cowbell, his idea of celebrating winners.

“Verna, you have an unfair advantage,” Mother shouted over. “Ten kids. You’re bound to win.”

“I have to pay admission for everyone. Two bucks a head, Julia. Think of that.” Verna was reaching into her cavernous bag for chocolate-covered doughnuts with which to feed her brood. Even the smallest BonBon, Decca, now a first-grader, manned a card. No wonder these kids won every math award from elementary school right up through South Runnymede High.

“Julia doesn’t know anything about children. You have to be a natural mother to know. Comes with the blood.” Louise, maliciously content in her wounding, cooed.

“Bullshit.”

Mutzi observed the tone between the sisters. He pulled out his .38 and brandished it. “Hunsenmeir girls, take heed. I keep this gun because I never know when you all will renew hostilities.” He also kept the gun because the cash was beside the Ping-Pong ball machine.

“I’m not renewing hostilities,” Mother called back. “I am replying to my senile sister. She just had her eighty-sixth birthday, you know.”

“Eightieth!” Louise was now on the verge of a towering rage.

“You’ll never see eighty-six again. Now why don’t you act your age and eat oatmeal!” Mother tossed her dab-a-dot in the air and caught it. Dab-a-dots are like Magic Markers except you press them down and they leave a perfect round colored dot over your number on the bingo card. Beans went out with the Edsel. Mother always used red and Louise blue.

“You know why your husband died, Julia? To get away from you!”

Mother smashed her dab-a-dot on Louise’s forehead. Goodyear growled and Lolly stood up in front of me. Pewter stopped stealing from Verna BonBon’s sandwich to watch.

The sisters attacked each other until both were covered with dots.

Mutzi blasted into the microphone: “Stop it! Girls, you stop it right this minute or I’ll throw you out. I mean it.”

“The hell you will,” Mother bellowed. “She started it. Throw her out.”

“You’re lying. You know how I can tell you’re lying? Because your mouth is moving.”

There was another flurry of attack by dab-a-dot.

Despairingly, Mutzi called to me: “Can you control your mother?”

“She’s not my mother. I’m adopted, remember?” I laughed but I couldn’t resist this small revenge for Mother’s crack yesterday. It was a mistake, because now Mother turned on me with her damned dab-a-dot. Lolly, who wouldn’t stand for anyone messing with me, bit Mother on the leg.

“Rabies! Rabies!”

Louise doubled over with laughter. “Ha, Lolly will catch rabies from you.”

Mr. Pierre, finding his courage at last, put his arm around Louise. “Darling, you need a drink.”

“I don’t need a drink. I need a new sister.”

“Blood! Blood! I need a transfusion,” Mother yelled. She rubbed her leg. There wasn’t a drop of blood on it. Lolly growled. Goodyear was too confused to do anything but lick Mother’s face. “You have that goddamned dog because you haven’t the guts to bite me yourself,” she snarled at me.

Peepbean Huffstetler helped Mother back to her seat. He brushed by me as though I were a sea slug. Peepbean had it in for me since the second grade because one time we were at the Capitol Theater watching
The Kentuckian
with Burt Lancaster and I gave him a fireball and told him it was a jawbreaker. That he could nurse a grudge that long said something about the excitement level of his life.

Louise was making her stately advance to the bar for a medicinal shot of liquor, wailing as she went. “She ruined my cards and I bought three cards.”

“It’s not cancer research. It’s just bingo,” Mr. Pierre soothed.

“You don’t know anything about cancer research, Pierre,” Louise chided him.

I was cleaning up the few dab-a-dots on my face. Mother wouldn’t help me and I wouldn’t help her and she looked like a pointillist painting. Mutzi was nervously announcing that the next game was going to be “champagne glass” and it was really hard, but this tornado of chat came to an abrupt silence as Thacker Bonneville walked in the door accompanied by a man handsome enough to be Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. Every female head in the room snapped around to look. Mother fished her compact out of her purse and aimed a blow at her cheek with the blusher. Didn’t help the spots.

Verna, savoring the moment, waved to her husband. “Thackie, sugar, Ricky won the fifteen-dollar pot.”

“Another one of those, Rick, and the old man retires.” He cheerily waved to his boy.

“Who is that?” Mother demanded.

Airily, Verna tossed off her answer. “My mother’s brother, Edgar Tutweiler Walters. From Birmingham. We call him Ed.”

“I call him gorgeous,” I said. Ed may have been seventy but he looked around fifty-five. He wore a silk handkerchief tied around his neck sort of like a cowboy except the scarf was shorter than a cowboy scarf. His hair glistened bright silver, catching what light there was in the smoke-filled room. He wore charcoal-gray trousers with a crease, no cuff, and his shirt was a pale-peach.

“Is he married?” Mother saw no reason to waste time.

“Widowed. Last year. Poor darling, he worshipped her. My mother always says that women can live without men but men can’t live without women.”

“Your mother is right, but then, just because we can do something doesn’t mean we have to.” Mother stood up and thrust her bust forward. “Verna, introduce me.”

“Julia, we’re about to play the champagne glass game.” In this bingo variation, the lines started at the two top corners, ran to the free space, and merged in one line to the bottom of the card, just like a champagne glass.

“Your children can play. Come on.” She yanked Verna out of her chair—no easy task, since Verna tipped two hundred pounds. Verna’s salvation, if not a strict diet, was navy-blue.

However, Mother was fast enough because Louise, with steel in her backbone, had propelled Mr. Pierre right over to Ed Tutweiler Walters. If Ed found Mr. Pierre’s lilac hair unusual he didn’t let on and he spoke with rapt interest to Louise. Then he did something that froze Julia to the floor. He picked up a green dab-a-dot off one of the tables and dabbed a green dot right on the tip of Louise’s nose.

“Color contrast.” He laughed.

Louise laughed, too, and then went on luridly to tell him about her unstable older (yes, she said older) sister who lost her temper over something as trifling as a bingo game. Worse, she pointed out Mother and remarked that she looked as though she had leprosy with all those blue dots covering her. At least Louise, with the red dots, only looked as though she had measles.

Ed appeared charmed. Fuming, Mother returned to her seat and played out the evening with grim resolve. Louise never left the bar. Mr. Pierre came back to sit across from Mom.

“She’s telling him that Mutzi has the thirty-eight to stop burglars like you.”

“I’d like to serve her pork tartar.” Mother could barely concentrate on her card. Maybe Louise was at first base but she wasn’t going to cross home plate. You could see the wheels spinning in Mother’s head as she schemed how to get even with her sister but, even more important, how to meet Ed Tutweiler Walters.