Your Turn

Monopoly, Parchesi, Sorry, Clue, Life, Othello, Stratego, Connect Four, Scrabble, Checkers, Chess, Backgammon, Rummy-O, Poker. Later: Pictionary, Trivial Pursuit. Still later: Whist, Charades, Dictionary, that game we played at parties where you wrote names on slips of paper and put them in a bowl and had to give your partner clues to guess the word. Games.

Games were a huge part of my childhood. I grew up in house not near any other houses. We didn't have a neighborhood gang the way my cousins did--a group of kids who hung out all day in summer and in the afternoons after school, playing whiffle ball and four square and flashlight tag, also games, now that I think of it: the active kind. My sister is just a year younger than I am, and when we were bored, or it was rainy, or on snow days, or lazy Sunday afternoons, and there weren't any other kids around, we played games. My mother was not, is not, a game person. I don't remember her playing board or outdoor games with us. My father claims to hate games, but he really doesn't--at least not the two predominant ones of our family's early years: poker and Monopoly, both of which he had enjoyed in younger days with his own sister and friends. And whiffle ball, which we played almost every evening after dinner in the front yard for a number of years, two against one with a swing player: a person could not, after all, pitch to herself.

Games, which I must confess I still enjoy, are so very useful and revealing. They occupy blank space in a day, force us to confront each other's gifts and deficiencies and strategies and senses of humor, teach us much about who we are: how we win and how we lose and how we, well, play the game. Games with two are intimate, intense. I see me and my sister in a booth on the top deck of the Martha's Vineyard ferry, hot chocolates, crackers filched from the box intended for those who'd purchased chowder, the green Othello board between us. I see Alison, slightly flushed and smiling; she is winning. She almost always, maybe always beat me at Othello, her only consistent victory in our never-ending gameathon, which is why she always chose it when it was her turn to choose. Revealingly, this is also why I never said no. There was always one more chance for me to try to win.

Games with two are a duet that can, in instant, become disonant. If my father wasn't playing--a distraction, a mitigating force--the Monopoly board could be pushed off the table in a fit of frustration, the little houses and hotels scattering like a handful of gravel on the wooden floor, the money swishing softly down, more slowly, more dignified, in pastel-colored piles. It was Alison who pushed it, her frustration matched by my ruthlessness--my irritation, tattletaling, disingenuous. I had led her to the brink and nudged her off, again; if it was I who was losing, I'm sure I found another way to prematurely end the game.

Group games are festive; hilarity ensues. The atmosphere becomes charged, voices louder, sometimes alliances form. Now I see me and Alison and my three cousins around my father's peeling poker table, a relic from his college gambling days, set up in our driveway in the blinding heat of summer in the middle of the day. Five card stud, seven card stud, Texas Hold 'Em: we had mastered them all by the time Andy and I--the oldest--were ten, and we bet with m and m's or pennies and nickels--never for real money, but we smoked candy cigarettes, ostentatiously drank from our soda cans, set neatly into the little holes designed for beer around the table, talked trash and showed our most brazen selves to each other, learned to keep a straight face, read each other's bluffs.

We shot pool, too, in my grandparents' basement. Same idea: faux, exagerated, mock tough guys, like something we'd seen out of some movie somewhere. The cues were rolled in the chalk for full minutes too long, the sounds of our parents upstairs, talking, laughing, communal: the most reassuring, constant background hum of my existence, my childhood soundtrack, until I left for school. In fact, that basement room, unfinished, dusty, peppered with lost items from my mother's, their father's, our aunt's own childhood's, could symbolize for me today the sense of safety, continuity, tribehood, that was a hallmark of my growing up. And the game itself. By the time I went to college, I was so good I could have taken on a barroom challenge, but I wasn't the best. I wonder if Andy still shoots pool. Or Alison, Jacy, Brandon. We were all good. That's what happens when you do something for hours on end, free from the pressure of trying, for the pure unadulterated pleasure of it.

I am going to resist turning this into a nostalgia piece. For all I know, kids still play games today; they must. I will say that the older ones I know play computer games, obsessively sometimes, and some of the little ones I know already seem to be headed in this direction. But I like to think that at their homes, when I'm not there to see them, on a rainy Saturday they are lying with a sibling on a floor--probably not the orange shag carpet of my parents' basement in the seventies--a board set up between them, snacks and drinks at the ready, rolling a pair of dice. I think if Lily asks me to play Candyland tomorrow, the most mind-numbing of all the games for small children, I will say yes. One must start somewhere, after all. And next year, maybe, I can teach her all about a Royal Flush.