We Named Them All by Michelle Brafman

Author:Michelle Brafman [Brafman, Michelle]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: She Writes Press
Published: 2014-07-30T00:00:00+00:00

You’d think with all your knowledge you could find a way to break out of your mother’s uterus and tell your parents to relax. You want to congratulate your father for finally mustering himself to take a break from trying to cheer your mother up. You wish you could tell Hannah not to follow that huckster-psychic’s instructions to scour her heritage for signs of barrenness or that she doesn’t have to change her name to escape the fate of Hannah, from the Book of Samuel, who endured years of bitterness and disappointment over her childlessness. Biblical Hannah eventually bore 6 children, count them, 6, and besides, Hannah Solonsky was named after her great-grandmother, survivor of pogroms and grandmother of 15. She also doesn’t need to obsess that she’s going to end up like her infertile dead Aunt Sylvia, who, contrary to family lore, wasn’t infertile at all. She would have had children if her husband hadn’t insisted that they give up after a couple of miscarriages. Did you hear that, Hannah? She quit. She would have succeeded on the next try. Hang on.

Danny drives down M Street. Sunshine splashes the faces of college kids looping their elbows through the handles of Abercrombie & Fitch bags, sporting expensive eyewear, and laughing into the wind. “Enjoy it while it lasts,” he mutters to them as he turns onto Wisconsin Avenue, cranking the volume on a Phish CD; Hannah detests jam bands, “the sophomoric lyrics and interminable guitar solos.” She has a point; you have to be in the right mood, which he is.

Three lone cars occupy the Bethesda Bowl parking lot. It takes Danny’s eyes a minute to adjust from the bright daylight to the dark bowling alley, whose familiar smell of stale beer and feet comforts him. The sporadic clunk of a solitary bowling ball hitting wood replaces the usual hum of laughter and cheering. He rents a pair of size 11s and picks out a 13-pound ball; he hasn’t bowled without his own ball in years, and he’s never had practically the whole alley to himself.

He keys his name into the electronic scoreboard and then on impulse types in Hannah’s name, too. He grabs a nine-pound ball and designates it as hers. When it’s Hannah’s turn, he bowls like her, lugging the ball to the starting stripe, swinging his arm back spastically, heaving the ball down the alley and into the gutter. When it’s his turn, he bowls like the Lansing, Michigan, champ that he was, back when Wednesday afternoons meant getting off at the Port Road bus stop with Russ Newman to bowl for a few hours after school. Afterward, they would split a roast beef sub, the mayo and peppered vinegar drenching their swollen fingers, and dream up schemes to audition for Bowling for Dollars. By the time they figured out they’d been watching reruns, they’d gone on to different high schools.

The next game, he picks up Hannah’s ball but releases it, feeling its weight curl down his palm to his fingertips and into the ball return rack.

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