The Tuesday Night Bingo Ban That Backfired
“Bingo,” said Darla, very softly.
“Louder,” said Alma, from her blankets.
“Bingo!”
The pavilion came apart. Rudy beat on the tailgate with a coffee can. Tommy put two fingers in his mouth and whistled. Bev climbed onto a lawn chair, which I do not recommend at her age, and shouted, “Check her card!”
And I heard myself say, in the loudest voice I own, “Yes! Somebody check it! I’d like to see whether she marked early!”
The place came down.
Rudy checked the card with great ceremony. “B-seven. I-twenty. Free space, which has a star on it, which is irregular.” The pavilion groaned. “G-fifty-one. O-seventy-one. Ladies and gentlemen, it’s a good bingo.”
The prize was ten dollars. Joanne counted it out of the coffee can in ones. Darla took it as if it were a medal.
We played all twelve games, and six canvases went home unfinished. At the break I found Darla sitting on the edge of the concrete, away from the heaters, with a paper cup in both hands and her ten dollars folded small in her fist.
“I thought you’d be gloating,” she said.
“I thought about it. Briefly. It wasn’t as good as I expected.”
She laughed, a short, damp laugh. “I’ve eaten dinner alone every night since August, Maxine. The first week I walked down to the Legion on a Tuesday and saw this room full of people laughing, and I stood outside the window and thought, I’ll never be asked to sit there. So I’ll run it. If I run it, then it’s mine and I’m in it.”
I said nothing. Out in the dark, a combine was still going.
“It was a nice sign.”
“It was a terrible sign.”
“The corners were lovely.”
She laughed again, and this time it hurt her, and I put my arm around her shoulders. She smelled like acrylic paint and cold coffee.
“Darla,” I said. “I owe you something, too. When they clapped that first night, I could have stopped it. I could have said, now, now, let the girl finish. I let it run. And I liked it. I’m sorry.”
She turned and looked at me, and her face crumpled for a second, and then she nodded. We stayed like that a good while, two women on a cold concrete floor, with the cage rumbling behind us.
“Nobody’s going to invite you,” I said finally. “That’s what you have to understand about this town. Nobody asks you to sit. You just walk over and sit down. I should have told you that in August. I forgot I ever had to learn it.”
“Is that all it is?”
“That’s all. You sit. They move down. And someday some poor woman is going to do the same for you.”
The house committee met on the fourth Thursday and voted six to nothing, with one abstention, which was Darla’s, to rescind the suspension. Gene Marsh, flat on a heating pad in Fort Wayne, dictated a letter that Rudy read aloud in the hall the following Tuesday. It used the word “ashamed” and the word “grateful” and the word “gallbladder,” and it brought down the house.