Word Games

 

“It’s just one word!” Lisette hissed, her eyebrows scrunched together, her cheeks flushed. She was angry, I knew, but not at me.  At life and at her growing inability to put a name to a simple object.

Words had always been so important to us. Our friendship was built on words, and, later, our lives and livelihoods.

Within weeks of meeting, we became each other’s thesauri. We spent a lot of time and energy in those pre-Google days determining the proper plural of thesaurus. Once we concluded that either would suffice, we chose to stick with the one we liked best, deciding also that the plural of phallus was phalli and doofus, doofi. 

By the second year of college, we were roommates, and a Saturday morning ritual began. A steaming pot of coffee. A fresh pack of cigarettes and empty ashtray each. A Scrabble board laid out on the kitchen table with our hefty stack of dictionaries and thesauri. One of us would declare, “I’m going to whoop your ass!” and the game would begin. More often games. Six was our record. It was hard to read or function that day, with every word I encountered swimming across my brain with ‘K’s, ‘J’s and ‘X’s screaming: “Five points! Eight points!”

“Who knew there were so many words starting with ‘A’ that mean the same thing,” Lisette mused one morning while flipping through the Merriam Webster, an extra-long du Maurier menthol, balanced betwixt graceful fingers. “Amiss, amok, awry, askew, akimbo!”

“Who knew there were so many ‘be’ words,” I countered. “Bemused, bewildered, befuddled. That’s 17 points on that last one.” 

“You bedazzle me with your word math!” She laughed. 

Years, careers, boyfriends, husbands, and children went by. Our first jobs were in cities far away from college and each other, but our bond was strong. We talked weekly by phone or fax in addition to long, literate letters. It was not a romantic kind of love, yet she was my soulmate. When, decades later, she wrote her fourth best selling novel, she chose to move back to the city where we met and where I was now a weekly columnist for a national newspaper. The Saturday morning Scrabble ritual was back on, although we’d dropped the cigarettes. And the husbands.

“I’m going to whoop your ass.”

“Amiss, amok, awry – go ahead and try!”

One day, Lisette declared, “I have the perfect Scrabble word!”

“Let’s see it.” 

“Well, I don’t’ have the letters for it right now but imagine if there were a ‘T’ or an ‘I’ left hanging right here,” she said, pointing at the spaces on the top row just to the left of the middle triple word square. “If you had the right letters, you could make ‘quixotic’!  The ‘X’ would fall on the double letter square so it’s worth 16, with the ‘Q’ and ‘C’, that’s a total of 34 points, tripled twice is 306 – plus an additional 50 for using all your letters. Isn’t that a great word?”

I had to hand it to her, it was a fabulous word or would be if the conditions were ever right and one had the seven necessary letters.

“You know, Scrabble’s a metaphor for life,” I said. “We are randomly dealt obstacles, we sort through them, we make the best words we can, connecting with what’s out there on the board, hoping, quixotically, that everything fits perfectly in place, and preferably on a triple word square.”

“Fuck that’s deep,” she said. “I’m trying to sort out life with five ‘I’’s. Most people only have two.” 

With that wit and wordplay between us, it was difficult to watch as my dear friend struggled to play the game or put names to simple items, such as curtains. I gently suggested that Lisette should talk to her doctor.   

“It’s just one word!” she hissed. “I am not losing my mind just because you draw all the high scoring letters, or because I can’t remember what you call… what you call those things… those things that hang over the holes with glass in them!”

 

That was a year ago. Lisette’s doctor recommended a specialist and that’s how we spend our Saturday mornings now, waiting on plastic chairs, surrounded by out-of-date magazines and the lingering scent of latex, industrial cleaner, and despair.  

“I’m going to get better,” she suddenly declares. “And when I do, I’m going to whoop your ass.”

I smile. Lisette’s magnificent mind has become a curtain – cruelly fluttering open for her to peak through before closing again, blocking out the light. I miss her. There was really no question who would care for her once it became apparent that she could not longer live on her own. Her children lived in far away cities with their young families. I gladly moved in and we’re roomies again. I spend nearly every moment of the day with Lisette, and yet, I miss my friend. 

“That’s a bit quixotic, don’t you think?” I ask. “Tilting at windmills?”

“Quixotic. Great word. Worth more than 300 points.”

My heart pounds against my ribcage. I squeeze her hand and agree, “I think it’s best word ever, and you are so brilliant for coming up with it.”

Lisette looks at my hand and smiles. “What a nice thing to say. Whoever you are.”