A Summer In Europe

by Marilyn Brant

  “Next, we each need to build a wall,” Simone instructed us, walking us through the stacking of the now-shuffled tiles into a big square, each of us responsible for building one side of it. With our open racks facing us, we placed the tiles behind them and into two rows of eighteen—one row of tiles atop the other—for a total of thirty-six tiles per player.

  With all the tiles now gone from the middle of the table and stacked nicely into four distinct walls, everything looked so organized, well-structured, tidy. I felt a twinge of confidence. That wasn’t so hard. We did well. Yay, us!

  “So, what do we do now?” Erika asked eagerly.

  “The next step is the rouching,” Simone said. “It’s the trading of the tiles.”

  “Rouching?” I asked. “I’ve never heard that word. How do you spell it?”

  Simone shrugged. “No idea. I don’t know if everyone who plays calls it that, but I always have.”

  “Might be able to find it with an online dictionary,” Erika said, reaching for her smart phone.

  “Who taught you?” Karen asked Simone, an edge of suspicion in her voice. “Are those the real rules?”

  “Hey, do you guys want to learn this game or not?” Simone said, exasperated. “My grandmother taught my mother to play, my mother taught me and I taught my daughter, who’s a lot younger than all of you and she can handle it. These are the rules my family plays by, so just stop worrying about all the words and pay attention.”

  I didn’t actually stop worrying about all the unusual vocabulary, but I did stop asking about it. Unfortunately, a spelling lesson wouldn’t have helped with the next step anyway.

  “So, the next thing we do is exchange the tiles, but it’s done in a very systematic way,” Simone said. “Everyone gives three tiles to the player on her right, and gets three tiles from the player on her left. Then you trade three tiles with the player across from you. Then you give three tiles to the left and get three from the right. Then you repeat that last step, because you’re reversing directions, so you give to the left and get from the right again. And then you go back to exchanging with the player across from you and, finally, you go back to the right. But there’s also one last chance to trade with whoever is across from you—as a ‘courtesy’—if you both want to. It has to be a mutual decision, but you can exchange either one, two or three tiles then.” Simone smiled at us and nodded. “Okay?”

  All four of us stared at her in stunned silence.

  “What, um, are we supposed to do again?” Erika managed to ask.

  “Maybe one more time with that,” Pamala suggested.

  The waitress suddenly appeared. “Anything else I can get you, ladies?”

  I rubbed my forehead. “Do you serve margaritas at the Steak-n-Shake? Jumbo strawberry margaritas, maybe?”

  The waitress narrowed her eyes at me.

  “I think that’s a no, Marilyn,” Karen murmured.

  I nodded. Then, to the waitress, I said, “Nothing for me, then. Thanks.”

  No one else seemed to need anything else either, save for a step-by-step handbook for completing the rouching ... or, you know, whatever it was called.

  Simone sighed and started taking us through it, and, somehow, we managed to muddle through the trading of the tiles. Pamala and I worked together, but even so, I was incredibly confused. If there was a pattern for doing it, I couldn’t catch it, so I amused myself during this latest stage of the setup—we hadn’t even begun playing yet!—by coming up with synonyms for how I felt: befuddled, perplexed, confounded, puzzled, mystified, bewildered.

  Then, finally, the actual game began. The object, it turned out, was to take turns trading more tiles and attempt to make one of the hands listed on the mah-jongg cards she’d passed out to us, which Simone told us were new every year.

  There were a million possible combinations on the cards. I squinted at them. One of the winning hands listed in the “Winds-Dragons” category was N EE WNW SSSS DDDD (all in black ink) and another winner, in some other category, was listed as 111 (in red ink) 555 (in green) 999 (in blue) NNN DD (in black).

  “So, you’re saying any one of these hands will win the game?” Karen asked, pointing to a particularly tricky, multicolored combination.

  “Yes,” Simone answered, looking triumphant, as if she were actually convinced that we understood now.

  “Still think this is like dominoes?” I whispered to Pamala.

  She shook her head. “More like really complicated math.”

  Erika was getting into it, though. “This seems sort of like something I’ve played before.”

  Karen, too, was reminded of old card games. It seemed to have struck some kind of poker nerve for her. “The winning hands have ranks, and there are different ways you can win.”

  Since I didn’t play any card games besides “Go Fish,” this comparison was lost on me.

  “You know,” Pamala said, “when we had our chapter’s writing conference in the spring, I saw a group of women playing this at the hotel. I didn’t know what it was at first, not until I asked one of the hotel people. I just kept hearing this really fast clicking sound. Like stiletto heels on a tile floor. They were picking up and discarding the tiles that quickly. It was like combat mah-jongg.”

  I tried to imagine that. “They must have really known what they were doing.”

  “Maybe if you grow up with it as a child and have had the exposure to it really early, the randomness and complication of it would seem logical and reasonable,” Pamala said.

  I stared at the row of tiles we had on our rack and, alternately, the little card filled with possible winning-hand combinations. “Hmm. Maybe.”

  “I think I’m understanding it. Sort of,” Erika said. “But I’m not sure I’ll remember any of it later.”

  “Like a one-night stand,” Karen said. “Seems to makes sense while it’s happening, but the next morning ...”

  We all laughed.

  It was clear to me that Pamala and Erika were getting it, and Karen was quickly catching on, too. I was impressed with all three of them. I could see the lightning of illumination—like the flash of a comet across the night sky—in Karen’s expression as she put the pieces together. She said that she thought if she played for long enough that evening, it would probably stick.

  For me, however, it would not stick.

  Exasperated, I finally turned to Simone and said, “On what planet is this game EASY?” I waved the mah-jongg card at her. “I like math. I play sudoku. I regularly use algebra in my daily life, and I solve lots of kinds of puzzles. You know those logic problems where there are seven people who live in seven houses with seven different kinds of cars and a bunch of other variable things, and you’re given only a handful of clues to match the right ones up?”

  Simone nodded slowly. She looked a bit feverish.

  “I love those!” I insisted. “I do those for fun. But I do NOT get this game... .”

  My friend blew her nose and calmly told me to chill out and just keep playing.

  With the help of Karen, Erika and Pamala, I continued slogging along, understanding intellectually that there was both a reason and a rhythm to the game, even if I couldn’t quite catch onto either of them myself. At one point, though, I reached over to grab a tile, and Simone—watching our play with hawk eyes—stopped me.

  “You can’t do that,” she informed me. “You’ve chosen a tile too soon. You’re picking your future.”

  Of course I was annoyed. Here was yet another example of the complicated and seemingly endless rules of this game. But then it hit me. What she’d just said was such a fascinating phrase. Picking your future? What did that mean?

  I asked Simone to explain, and she said, “Picking your future tile early means you’ve called a tile in advance of your turn. You’re skipping ahead and laying claim to something you may have to give to somebody else in trade. Since there’s a lot of exchanging of tiles in the game, if you have to adjust the hand you’re playing, you may have to give
away what you thought your future tile would be. This can make players really dissatisfied. So, everyone should just take their turn and have their future revealed to them at the right time. Don’t try to jump ahead, because things change and the best future for you might be different from what you thought.”

  Bingo!

  Whether or not I could play mah-jongg with any skill whatsoever was irrelevant. I’d finally found one of the metaphors I’d been searching for all evening. “Please, tell me more,” I urged her, having learned at last to ask the right questions about the game. “This is really cool.”

  So she told me a little more and explained how, if a group of players was going to allow picking futures, they’d have to make that decision at the start of play. Many people wouldn’t agree to it because they considered it a form of cheating.

  Interesting, I thought.

  “And what is it with these annual cards?” I asked. “Why are there so many winning hands? Why do you have to get new cards every year?”

  “It’s all because players need to learn to be flexible,” Simone said reasonably. “And not get attached to any one way of winning. If someone else has the tile you need to complete the winning hand you’ve been trying to get or, worse, if they’ve already discarded an important tile so it’s dead and can no longer be played, you need to choose a different possible winning combination. It’s like in traffic, when there’s a roadblock on the street you’re driving on, you have to change directions. Find a different route to take. You don’t know what lies ahead, so you have to be flexible enough to explore multiple options. It makes the journey more interesting.”

  “Yes ... yes, it does!” I cried in an authorial moment, akin to finally seeing the promised comet streaking across the night sky. That big connection was there after all! I could do something with these intriguing concepts and knew, at last, how I might be able to use them alongside some of the themes in the book. I grasped the annual card and brought it tight against my chest, hugging it. I loved mah-jongg!

  Simone looked relieved. “Did that help, Marilyn?”

  “Oh, a lot,” I told her. “I think I can get the game to make sense in the story now.”

  “Good,” Simone said. “That’s what friends are for.”

  “Aw, thank you.” I grinned at her, finally giving her back the annual card I’d been clinging to with both hands. “Thanks so much for teaching us.”

  “This was really fun,” Erika added.

  Pamala nodded. “Yeah, I liked it.”

  “And I hope you feel better soon,” I told Simone as we helped her pack up the game. “Maybe we can play again when you’re recovered and well rested.”

  Pamala, Karen and Erika all agreed.

  “We should!” Simone said with enthusiasm, and we clinked our water glasses and made plans to meet sometime soon for Mah-jongg, Round Two.

  As we left Steak-n-Shake for the evening, waving good-bye to our waitress and the staff, Karen shot me a sideways glance. “Why do you look so worried?” she asked. “I thought you got all the info you needed.”

  “Oh, I did,” I said. “This was great, and I feel I’ve finally made my peace with mah-jongg. But”—I exhaled—“there’s also this sciency thing that’s kind of a big part of the story... .”

  Karen nodded. “Somebody can probably help you figure it out. How sciency is it?”

  “Hmm, very.” I laughed. “Know any theoretical physicists?”

  KENSINGTON BOOKS are published by

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  Copyright © 2011 by Marilyn B. Weigel

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  ISBN: 978-0-7582-7421-2