Cheating at Scrabble

Cheating at Scrabble

                                                                      

My family used to accuse me of cheating at Scrabble. My family being my mother who hated losing, my father who rarely took my word on a subject without double-checking its truth, and my brother who inherited our mother’s hatred of losing. A typical scene went like this: I would lay down a combination of letters that conceivably formed a word, I was pretty sure, and leave it to them to challenge its existence in the dictionary.

              “That’s not a word,” one of the sore losers or the skeptic would argue.

              “Yes, it is,” I’d counter, adding—the expression my family will someday have inscribed on a park bench in my memory—“I use it all the time.”

              It didn’t matter what the would-be word was, if they weren’t familiar with it they couldn’t resist the temptation to challenge it. Or rather, challenge me, as I felt I was the one on trial, with my family members serving as judge, jury, and prosecuting attorney. So if my word was questionable, the three of them would first confer as to who among them was to bring charges against me. That is, which of them could afford to challenge me. If I was losing, it was a toss-up and they might even let me off with a warning. But if I was ahead in the game, it boiled down to who wanted to risk losing their turn.

              My mother and my brother were both point-driven, while my father didn’t have a competitive bone in his body. A Presbyterian minister who was the son of Presbyterian minister who was the grandson of a minister, Dad enjoyed winning, but he never gloated. As a boy he wasn’t allowed to play on Sundays and card games were forbidden anytime, except for Rook which used a different deck of cards. Whether it was the way he was raised or how he was hard-wired, Dad had an irrational form of altruism that made him a terrible card player. He thought the best of everyone and thus couldn’t read people much less put on a poker face. Words, on the other hand, proved a person’s mettle, and Dad couldn’t stand biblical literalists and religious fundamentalists for whom he employed the f-word: fundie. Thus Scrabble was his only game.

              In hindsight, if most of my words had turned out to be fabricated I would’ve gone down in the family history as a mediocre Scrabble player. I would’ve lost turns, reducing my scores, and ended up winning my family’s sympathy, even pity. Inviting me to play Scrabble to make a threesome or a full house would’ve altered the dynamics of a particular game, but it would not have turned into a group therapy session.

              “I’m ahead, dammit, and I don’t want to lose my turn,” my mother, who is now but wasn’t then an ordained elder in the Presbyterian Church although being an elder doesn’t stop her from uttering four-letter words especially in an election season, would declare. She was raised in Kentucky, not exactly a teetotaling state, and while her parents were of predominately German heritage—because any amount of German blood tends to predominate—my mother admits she takes after her Irish grandmother who, if you didn’t let her win, wouldn’t play any more. Fortunately the German in my mother does want to play again after losing but makes it very clear she’s not happy about it. She plays for blood.

              “I challenged the last time,” my father might state. He was adept at stating facts and remembering certain details and left the task of negotiating to my mother.

              “Yes, and she lost last time, too,” the woman who birthed me would point out in my presence. “Someone needs to challenge her.” She might as well have been calling for a therapeutic intervention to my addiction to cheating.

              My brother, the youngest member of the tribe, would pipe up, “Mom, you could lose your turn and still win.” He and Mom were both younger siblings and always sided with one other. Dad and I were older siblings and used to standing up for ourselves but not necessarily for each other.

              “Okay, I’ll challenge.” I can still hear the defeatism in my mother’s tone. “Hand me the dictionary,” she’d order, just like she used to demand that my brother or I go get the hairbrush which sat on her dresser to be used to paddle him or me whenever we were caught doing something we knew very well we weren’t supposed to do. Like flushing the neighbors' pet fish down their toilet. “What’d she play?”

              “I played ‘fipple,’” I’d assert, defending both my word and my right to be at the table.

              I’d watch my mother glance at the word as though she hadn’t heard me. Then she’d plop down the dictionary and open it up with exasperation. “F, F-I, I, sure are a lot of words, F-I-N, ‘firing squad,’ okay, here we are: ‘finish,’ ‘finite,’ ‘fink,’ ‘finnan haddie’—remember, honey, we used to have that when we lived in Edinburgh.” This referred to the first year my parents were married, that is, before they had a daughter who grew up to cheat at board games. “F-I-N-N, ‘finny,’ ‘fiord,’ ‘fioritura,’ shit!”

              My mother, who was once given an award by the United Way of Middle Tennessee for her many years of service in providing quality day care, sounded like she had just found her name in the Book of Doom. “Fipple’s a word,” she would exhale. “It’s a type of flute.” And then, without further ado, much less an apology, she’d begin adding up my points.

              “I can’t believe it,” my doubting father would remark. “She’s done it again.”

              “She always cheats,” my brother would testify, harkening back to our early school days when I would cheat at the Ten Commandments board game which was just like Monopoly only based on works-righteousness. For every commandment you memorized, you earned a plastic white shekel with which you could buy bushels of wheat, and the first person to memorize all the commandments in order won.

              “I play by the rules,” I offered in my defense.

              “You cheat,” my brother, who saw right through me but also knew I saw right through him, repeated for good measure. He was baptized a Presbyterian and taught never to fight, only he and I used to argue and fight a lot until he outgrew me, about the time I went off to college. As an adult he was re-baptized a Mennonite pacifist, or a pacifist Mennonite. He studied art and works as a professional carpenter; once when he was playing Scrabble with a university professor friend, my brother got a big kick out of how surprised his academic opponent was when my brother won the game.

              “Stop it, you two! Whose turn is it?” our mother would interject as though she were the only grown-up in the room.

              And that’s why, for a good long time now, my family plays Scrabble with an open dictionary. No more guesses, no more challenges, no more cheating. When it’s your turn you can take as much time as the other players give you to look up words. But you have to play a real word; you can’t fake it. Very rarely a misspelled word gets played by mistake, and the game is either forfeited if the winner made the mistake, or the mistake is forgiven if the winner, who didn’t make the mistake, so decides. Those who hate to lose still hate to lose. And my father ended up playing blind, with the rest of us looking up words in the dictionary for him.

              “Is there a word B-O-R-C-K?”

              “No.”

              “What about “C-R-O-B? Or K-R-O-B?”

              “Nope, sorry.”

              “How about corb-with-a-C or korb-with-a-K?”

              “Neither.”

              “Is ‘brock,’ B-R-O-C-K, a word?”

              “Yep, it’s a badger.”

              Then we would count up Dad’s points and add them to his score.  More often than not he won the game.