I watched Ash glance at the numbers board, down into his machine, across to American flag man. Then he was pulling his own lever, nodding. There were now five players: two stick-thin older women in matching bright red poodle-skirts, twin sets, and bobby socks, who might have been sisters; a kid in skater shorts with some kind of heavy metal music erupting from the sides of his headphones, as though everything inside his head were kicking and screaming to get out of there; American flag man; and Ash.
“What planet is this?” I murmured, and a bell dinged, and the rollerskate girl circled the room once more while Ash rocked back and laughed and dropped another quarter on his machine-top for the girl to collect.
Closing her eyes, Rebecca surprised me by taking my hand. Then she leaned in and kissed my cheek. “This is where he came. Before he walked out. It’s been just like this for . . . God.” She shuddered. “He’d put us on the merry-go-round, and he’d come in here, and he’d spend his hours. One quarter at a time. Most days, he wouldn’t even take us home. My mom had to come get us.”
Another ding, and the kid in the skater shorts flipped his hands in the air and moonwalked a few steps to his right, then back to his machine to pop a quarter in place just as the rollergirl passed and dropped a red chip at his feet. One of the women in the poodle skirts laughed. The laugh sounded gentler than I expected, somehow. The board flashed, and a new round began.
“Ever played?” I said, holding my wife’s hand, but not too tight. Whatever tension there had been before between the three of us tonight, it was fading, I thought. Around us, the canvas outer draping undulated in slow motion as the sea breeze pushed against and through it. There was another winner, another burst of quiet laughter from somewhere as some lucky soul got liter, another new number flashing. One more sad-magic night with Ash and Rebecca, so long after the last one that I’d forgotten how it felt.
A good while after I’d asked, Rebecca sighed and leaned her head against me. “I miss our daughter,” she said.
“Me, too.”
“Should we call?”
“She’s alright.”
“Look at him,” Rebecca said, and we did, together.
He was bent almost as far over his machine as the red-headed man, now, and when he played, the lights inside it and the red neon from the LITE YOURS sign reflected off his skull, and his vest beat and twitched with the rhythm of his movements, as though we were looking straight through his skin at the mechanisms that ran him.
“Poor Ash,” I murmured, though I wasn’t sure why I felt that way, and suspected he’d be furious if he heard me say it.
“I’ll bet you a bag of Patriot Popcorn I can win before he does,” said Rebecca, and she straightened and let go of my hand.
I thought of the fisherman on the empty pier behind us with the ray dying in his lap, the gaggle of beggars, and beyond them, the too-bright streets of downtown Long Beach. “And where will we find Patriot Popcorn, wife of mine, now that the Gap has come?”
“I think I know a place.”
“I bet you do,” I said, and let her go. On every side of us, at all times, at least one person was laughing.
“Change?” said the rollergirl, gliding past, but she executed a perfect stop even before Rebecca got her hand to her pocket. She took my wife’s dollar, nodded. Her turtleneck clung tight to her, and there were tiny beads of sweat along the mouth of it like a string of transparent pearls. The tingle that sizzled through me then was more charged than any I’d felt since adolescence but sadder and therefore sexier still, and I had to bend over until it passed. Whether it was for my wife, the rollergirl, or just the evening, I had no idea.
When I next looked up, Rebecca and Ash were side by side, both bent over their individual metal machines, fingers pushing and pumping while the lights on the metal board flashed and the rollergirl rolled and the ocean breathed, in and out. Not wanting to distract them – and also, for some reason, not wanting to play – I stepped just close enough to see how the game worked.
Inside each machine was a ball chute and a simple, inclined wooden playing board, with metallic mushrooms sprouting out of the center and impeding or – if you were skilled enough – directing the path of the ball. Across the top of the playing board were ball-sized holes numbered one to ten in plain black lettering. The object was to sink one ball in each of the holes corresponding with the flashing numbers on the big board. When you dropped a ball in the correct hole, your machine dinged and the number lit up. First person to light up every required number got a visit from the rollergirl and a red chip dropped at his or her feet as the quarter antes were collected for the next round. Then, with no pause, no stretch-break, no breath, the big board flashed again and the game resumed.
I settled into my spot between Rebecca and Ash, close enough to touch both but a step back. I was watching my wife’s frame rattle as she bounced up and down in her big black shoes, leaned left and then right, and I thought of the new, permanently puffy space on her stomach where her scar was, and where, she said, she could no longer feel anything, which for some reason always made me want to put my hand there. To feel the dead space, where the life inside her had been. I watched her watch Ash between games, heard her gleeful-competitive murmurs.
“Feel that, Ash? That would be my breath on your neck. That’s me passing you by. Again.”
Ash kept shaking his head, staring into his machine and seeming to drag it closer to him with those outsized, outstretched arms. “Not this time,” he kept saying. “Not tonight.”
And I found that I knew – that I’d always known – that Rebecca was in love with him, too. That I was merely the post she and Ash circled, eyeing one another from either side of me but never getting closer than they already were. The knowledge felt strange, heavy in my chest, horrible but also old. As though I hadn’t discovered but remembered it. Also, I knew she loved me, in the permanent way she’d loved her mother, who she’d stayed with, after all. Not that she’d had a choice.
In the back, the man in the flag shirt lit his line, closed his eyes, and slapped the sides of his machine with the heels of his palms. Then the kid in the headphones won again, did his dance. Occasionally, one of the poodle-skirt women won, but mostly they didn’t, and their laughs punctuated each round, regardless. Rebecca bobbed, swore, taunted Ash. Ash leaned over further, grim-faced, muttering, the machine bumping and dinging against him, almost attached to him now like an iron lung. Between and amongst them, the rollergirl skated, collecting quarters, strewing victory chips. At one point, tears developed in my eyes, and I wiped them away fast and thought of the perpetual sprinkles of dried milk that dotted the corners of my daughter’s lips like fairy dust. The stuff that brought her to life.
It was the poker chips, I think, that finally alerted me to how long we’d been standing there. My eyes kept following the rollergirl on her sweeps, tracing her long fingers on their circumscribed, perfectly circular path from machine-top to black change-purse at her waist, white tips of her hair barely caressing the slope of her shoulders. And at last my gaze followed one of those chips as it fell to the floor amidst maybe a thousand others strewn around the ankles of the flag-shirt man like rose petals after a rainstorm.
My head jerked as though I’d been slapped.
“Change?” the rollergirl said as she breezed past me on her path through the players. Had she said that to me every time? Had I answered? And where was the music coming from? I could hear it, faintly. I was moving to it, a little. So was Ash. A gently bouncing fairground whirl, from an organ somewhere not too near. Under the dock? On shore?
Inside me? Because I appeared to be singing it. Sort of. Breathing it, so it was barely audible. We all were, I thought. It was everywhere, floating in the air of this makeshift room like a sea breeze trapped when the curtains dropped. Dazed, I watched Rebecca fish ten dollars out of her jeans pocket without looking up. The rollergirl took it and stood a bankroll of quarters, wrapped tight in red paper like a stick of dynamite, on the rim of Rebecca’s machine. Both of them humming.