When I was a kid, I was sent to the store at the top of the street for everything imaginable, milk, bread, the newspaper, batteries when we were desperate. Once my mother needed some pantyhose so off I went. When I was half way up the road my father stuck his head out the door and yelled,
"Queen size!"
I gave him the thumbs up. I knew the color as well. It was something easy like "brown." I readily found the item then skipped home proud of my success. When I arrived my mother was not speaking to my father. The tension was a little more palatable than the Joint Security Area in the Korean Demilitarized Zone. My father was sitting at the kitchen table in his chair with the newspaper open to the word jumble. My mother, manning the kitchen sink, was slamming dishes and cups signifying her disdain for something unbeknownst to me that went down not to her liking.
"I got the queen size," I said raising the bag aloft.
My mother threw a wet dish rag across the kitchen which landed squarely on my father's newspaper. I stood their motionless, holding the bag like one of those jockey lawn ornaments, the slightest move and Swartz was going to get his. My father carefully folded the rag then placed it on the table. He stood up then discarded his newspaper into the wastepaper basket with a thud. He stoically walked to the front door to peer out the small pie shaped windows. I put the bag on the counter and got the hell out of there since from experience I knew when a blowout of this magnitude erupted anyone of us kids usually ended up caught in the crossfire. Unfortunately I was the omega in my family so when tensions ran high the corporal usually paid me a visit.
"Now everyone knows," my mother muttered as she scrubbed a bowl.
I wasn't sure what she was talking about. The best I could come up with was she was referring to the size of her pantyhose, but I didn't get why she was mad about that. The girth of her rear end was common knowledge. I mean, it was no secret my mother had a big ass. It's not like you couldn't readily ascertain such a boldface fact just by looking at her. My mother graduated from the Harvard School of Cold Shoulder earning a PhD with honors. When it came to ignoring someone in the same room, she was master class. She didn't speak to my father or me for three days. One morning she ripped into me for not putting my clothes in the hamper. She unfurled her well rehearsed rant to satisfy her blood thirst for controversy,
"Is that your sock on the floor by the hamper?" she launched.
"I think so," I answered.
"You should be more appreciative of everything you have," she recited.
"I am."
"You kids don't appreciate anything your father and I do."
"I do," I said even thought I knew where this was going.
"You always had a roof over your head, food on the table and clothes on your back."
"It must have fell when I stuffed my clothes in the hamper," I explained.
"You left it there on purpose."
Even though arguing never led to a more agreeable outcome I did it anyway. They say when you have children you realize the sacrifices your parents made for you. I realized that you don't get credit as a parent for food, shelter and clothing. If you don't do those things, social services comes and relieves you of your children. Eventually everything went back to normal. My parents were talking to each other albeit in short incoherent grunts. In the afternoon, they resumed their epic Scrabble campaign.
My mother and father loved Scrabble. They tallied who won every game they ever played. After nearly a thousand matches, the winner was up only by one, and that changed weekly. My parents, if nothing else, were each other's Scrabble equals. They knew all the two letter Scrabble words like "xi," a Greek letter and "xu," a Vietnamese penny. Whenever my father went out playing an eight point "x" on the two letter Vietnamese penny, sometimes dropping it on a double letter, he would say,
"Thank you dong!"
"Dong" is the Vietnamese dollar. So a xu is one hundredth of a dong. They knew all the "q" words that didn't require the "u," as in "qi," "qat," "qaid," "qadi," "qintar," "qanat" and several others. Most of these words had their origins in the Middle East, and my parents hadn't a clue what any of them meant, but they used the various length words to drop the ten point "q" on a choice square. My father never said,
"Honey, when you finish your qat, the local qaid said we should check the qanat."
"Qat" is a leaf chewed in Yemen, "qaid" is a Muslim chief and a "qanat" is an ancient Persian irrigation system so it was unlikely that these words would be spoken in casual conversation in Rhode Island in 1975 or any time soon for that matter. At the time my father was one game down on my mother. Whoever was winning had bragging rights as well as feudal decree. No matter what the argument was over the reigning Scrabble champ had hand over the loser. They conceded right from wrong based on the Scrabble tally. The winner would say,
"Alright for you. We'll see who wins the next game."
Even though they had seemingly moved beyond the pantyhose incident my mother was plotting against my father over the next Scrabble match. Much later in life she admitted to making his coffee extra weak in hopes that he would fall asleep. My mother was the Scrabble bluff champion. The way bluffing in Scrabble works you can play any word you want. If another player calls your bluff, you go to the official Scrabble dictionary to look up the word. If it's not in the book, the person playing the bluff takes their letters back and loses their turn. If the word is legit, the challenger loses their turn. My parents used to put the Scrabble board on a revolving platform called a "lazy susan" so each player in turn could face the game. The board spun around all afternoon as they battled it out, my father trying to tie the score, my mother secretly trying to levy a brutal punishment for my father's town crier role in the pantyhose affair. As the game wore down and the last letters found their way onto the board, my mother went out with,
"Zick."
She smiled with delight as she began adding up the letters.
"Hold on there!" my father protested.
My mother kept on counting.
"What is 'zick'?" my father asked.
"It's a technique of decorating objects with printed media," my mother responded authoritatively.
My mother was an accomplished artist. Although she was describing decoupage, my father wouldn't have known this. He was a silversmith. He was about to challenge when I walked by. My father turned to me and said,
"You know what 'zick' is?"
Now I heard my mother's definition as I approached, and I wanted to sound like I was smart so I said,
"It's an art form using pictures from magazines or something."
My father sank back in defeat as my mother continued to tally the score. She smiled condescendingly while periodically letting out an irritating chuckle as she added up the totals. In Scrabble when you go out first, you get the points for the letters that everyone else got stuck with. My father was left with the ten point "q." When my mother finished, she announced,
"I win!"
My father slapped on his glasses then snatched the score sheet from my mother. He looked over the columns of numbers incredulously then scanned the board attempting to locate the words that matched the numbers on the sheet. Eventually he relinquished the scorecard for the Scrabble dictionary. He dove for the back of the book.
'What the hell!" my father exclaimed.
"What?" I asked.
"'Zick' is not a word!"
He looked to my mother.
"You bluffed!"
My mother had a smirk on her face that even a middle school jerk like me thought was mean. My father then turned to me and said,
"And you lied too!"
"I... I... thought that's what it was," I exclaimed defensively.
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Front Door on Our House
with Semicircular
Window |
My father got up from the kitchen table, turned and walked to the front door, then peered out the small pie shaped windows. He always did that when he was angry. Our house sat at the junction of a tee and faced down Jacques Street. The view out the semicircular window of the front door was that of a middle class neighborhood, filled with tightly packed houses. There was no ocean, no mountains. We were lucky to have a few trees. That's what middle class suburbia offered in the 70's. I don't know what he was thinking as he stared at length out those windows. My father never smacked us kids like my mother. She was short and couldn't look out the front door unless she stood on a stool. Growing up I thought that the view out the window was the difference between catching a beating or not, but in truth, it wasn't that simple.
My mother was two games up on my father, something that never happened in all the years of their gameplay. My father was crushed, a beaten man. He wanted a rematch, but my mother refused. She wanted time to rub Scrabble debris into my father's open wounds. It was a painful week for my father, waiting for the next game. He overheard my mother talking on the phone with one of her friends, saying,
"Oh yes, we still play Scrabble. I'm up by two games."
My father's pencil would break as he stabbed in the words of his crossword puzzle. He wasn't speaking to me either. As far as he was concerned I was a traitor. On the following weekend my mother and father reconvened for another match. My father brought his A-game. He had played many of the money letters including the "j," the "x," the "q," and the "z." He had won with an unusually large margin. My mother refused to play a second game. Still in the lead she wanted another week to gloat.
The following weekend the Scrabble game was uncommonly quiet. My mother typically talked non stop, but today she sat silently looking over her letters while occasionally surveying everything my father did. I passed by a few times only because you had to go through the kitchen to get to my room. On one pass my mother had played the "z" with the word "size." My father spun the board around and to my horror immediately predicated her word with "queen." My mother turned red as she stared at the letters my father arranged on the Scrabble board. He had played five letters with the "q" and "z" and picked up a double word to boot.
Now I knew that "queen size" was two words. I read it on the pantyhose packaging, but I wasn't saying anything. My mother was too angry to draw any logical conclusions. She just sat their and seethed. My father picked up over fifty points sealing the tying game in his favor. He was certainly going to win. He reached for the bag of letters, pulled out a few new ones, then he topped off his tray with another trip to the bag, and then he got greedy. My father in his glee forgot himself for just one critical moment. Through her anger my mother peered down at the word on the Scrabble board which slowly rotated in front of her. She looked to my father as he attempted a third trip to the bag.
My father was mildly good with slight of hand tricks. He used this skill, honed as a teenager, to cheat at poker. Now it came in handy to palm Scrabble letters then reach in the bag to drop them all while attempting to retrieve a new more higher scoring letter. The mistake he made was he had seven letters already on his tray when he had made a third trip to the bag. My mother saw it right off.
"Stop!" she ordered.
My father froze with his hand in the cookie jar. Midway through the kitchen I also stopped dead in my tracks.
"You had seven letters, and now you have five!" she summoned.
"I need two more," my father explained.
"You're swapping letters!"
"I am not!" my father said indignantly.
Then he extracted his hand from the bag. Panicing he returned a letter he was holding in his other hand back to his tray.
"You had a letter in your left hand!" my mother shouted.
"I did not," my father protested.
My father was busted. He had taught me how to cheat at checkers, Chutes and Ladders, Sorry, even chess. He honed his cheating skills when playing us kids so that the game moved along more quickly, and he could return to his newspaper and crossword puzzles. My sisters used to cheat every time they played a game with me. They were not as clever at concealing their tactics as my father, but I didn't care. I just wanted someone to play with me. My father tried to teach me to palm playing cards, but he gave up because my hands were too small. He never taught me anything of value like math or French or how to ride a bicycle. He grew up full of mischief with an absent father who was murdered in New York City in 1938. Once my father taught me how to make a time bomb with a cigarette and matches. My knucklehead friends and I blew up a mailbox on a four minute delay, time enough for us to get away. His palming skills came in handy when playing Scrabble. My mother might have been the Bluff Queen, but my father was the Palm King.
Now you might be thinking that I was devastated to embrace my father being caught cheating in Scrabble, but it was not so. Back in the 70's being a successful cheat was highly regarded in middle school. The movie, The Sting, staring Robert Redford and Paul Newman as con men won four academy award for best picture, screenplay, directory and costume design. Con men were cool, and that's what my dad was. The same year my father took me to see Paper Moon starring Ryan O'Neal opposite his real life daughter, Tatum. The two played partners during the Great Depression in a scam to bilk widows out of money for bibles that they claimed a recently deceased family member ordered. Tatum won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress at ten years old, becoming the youngest winner in any category.
"That's how you got all those high scoring letters in the last game!" my mother reasoned.
My dad got up from the table and walked calmly to the front door to peer out the pie shaped windows. I resumed my progress towards my bedroom.
"You!" my mother shouted.
I froze yet again.
"You see what you father did?" she exclaimed. "He cheated!"
Being accused of cheating by the Bluff Queen had a certain irony. As far as my middle school mind was concerned bluffing was lying even though it was in the rules. I resumed walking without saying a word.
As I got older and tall enough to look out the pie shaped windows of the front door I found reason to do so occasionally when I did badly on a test or a girl in my class "didn't like me back." I never knew what went though my father's mind as he often stared blankly out that window. For me the view was just the closely packed houses of our neighborhood. There was no sense of relief, no cathartic release. One time as I gazed out the window I saw a father teaching a young boy how to ride a bike on Jacques Street. Eventually the little dude found his balance and took off up the road to the great delight of his father.
We see the same things with different eyes. Eyes that are new and hopeful, sometimes wet with laughter or bruised from abuse. Many things are in the eye of the beholder, and the view out that window certainly was one of them.
Editor's Note: Originally posted on December 27, 2016.
