the gamemaster and

The Gamemaster and the Reluctant Daughter

By Luanne Castle

Once my father knew he was dying, he began holding court at the nursing home, delighting in

the attention. As if each of his last days were his birthday, he begged, cajoled, or demanded each

guest play a game with him.

But the challenges were new. Because we played on the adjustable bed table, when Dad got

excited over an exceptional hand, he moved so abruptly that the plastic oxygen tube unclamped from

his nose. I gestured for him to push in the clip, but had to direct it for him.

When I slammed my cards down in frustration, the table rolled toward my father who startled.

I’d been avoiding Dad’s pale, drawn face. His head appeared to have grown smaller with illness, and

perhaps by contrast, his ears—one of them with a raggedy edge—now stuck straight out like flags in

a veteran’s cemetery.

I couldn’t remember a time that games weren’t part of life with my father. When I was little,

Dad took me along to his best friend’s house. They holed up in the study, slouched over the chess

board, while I played The Barbie Game with the friend’s daughter. She was an arrogant two years

older, and for some reason I always ended up dating red-haired Poindexter, while she went steady

with Ken.

As the men emerged from the study, I could tell by the expression on Dad’s face that he had

lost, but he wasn’t about to give up on the only game he didn’t regularly win. We always went back

the following week.

I wasn’t going to give up either. By seven I was playing the box game Password with my

parents. By eight I was a Monopoly regular.

It was over the Monopoly board in the living room that I asked my father if he and our

neighbor knew each other in the war. The only war I knew about was the Korean War, Dad’s war.

“No, we weren’t even in the same branch. I was Army; he was Navy,” Dad said. He grabbed a

handful of candy corn from the bowl Mom put out.

“Were you a hero?” I said, examining Dad’s expression as he peered down his aquiline nose

at the real estate cards spread out in front of him. He pushed his graying pompadour back and looked

up at me.

“I don’t know any heroes,” he said.

“Oh. Did you know any spies? Any Communists?”

“None of those, either.”

Dad saw I was disappointed. “But one night, when I was conked out in my sleeping bag—and

it was so cold that my nose—

“Froze into a Popsicle,” I said.

“Yes, froze into a Popsicle and a Korean soldier snuck up on me,” Dad continued his story for

the first time. “He creeped right up beside me while I was asleep. I didn’t know he was there. And he

bit”—Dad peeled his lips back from his gums and snapped his teeth—“off my ear.”

“What! Really?” I peered at Dad’s ear.

“No, it’s the other one,” he said. I hadn’t noticed anything unusual, but when I drew right up

to the ear itself I saw that the outside fold of his ear was uneven. “Too bad it can’t grow back like a

starfish leg.”

Suddenly my mother was standing in the doorway, the laundry basket resting against her hip.

“Really, Rudy. “

“Really, Mom!”

Mom shook her head. “Really,” she said as she walked down the hallway to the bedrooms.

As I turned back to the board, I noticed Dad had just placed a hotel on Park Place. Accusation blared

from my eyes. He had the audacity to wink.

My father bought his first commercial property on a land contract and a smile, no money

down. Then he bought another and another. It seemed natural that he would always win at the board

game of Monopoly when it reflected what he did with actual real property.

As soon as Dad began to pull ahead in a game, I scowled. “You’re a big fat cheater!” At every

game, sooner or later, I accused him of cheating. His shit-eating grin never divulged if he had cheated

or if he thought the accusation was funny.

Words troubled my father. Maybe it was a learning disability, maybe it was emotional. He

confused surnames and remembered events wrong. If he had been chained in a dungeon until he came

up with the correct spelling, Dad couldn’t have answered. Nonetheless, he always won at Scrabble.

He memorized all the legal two letter words. For longer ones, he psyched out his opponents so that he

would know if the word was spelled right or not without having to lose a turn.

When Dad made a mistake he couldn’t blame on somebody else, he’d smirk and say, “Jack of

all trades, master of none.” But we called him The Gamemaster, knowing he either excelled or kept

trying, as he had with chess.

He didn’t have to worry about any of his childhood failures when he was playing a game. He

was no longer a lousy student, the fatherless son of a poor and uneducated woman, a screw-up, a

troublemaking kid. Instead, he could use what he was best at--trickery, intimidation, and sheer

bravado—and forge a success and a quick jolt of adrenaline.

When I entered my teen years, Dad and I were at almost constant odds. He was particularly

strict with me, the older child and only daughter, and I was resentful. All those years my father had

refused to discuss the man who had abandoned his mother and their children. The subject was 35

closed to me. Of course, for my father, the subject was anything but closed. He was suspicious and

overprotective because he wanted my life to be different from that of his mother. I didn’t realize any

of this, so I couldn’t understand why he picked on me, and I grew to despise my father.

When he asked to play games, I delighted in saying no, even if I triggered a shouting fit or

caused him to storm off and hammer nails. After school and on weekends, I stayed in my bedroom or

hung out with friends, spending as little time as possible with my father.

Even as an adult, I didn’t want to give in to him too often. How many times did he beg me to

play games? Sometimes I acquiesced, either wanting to play or wanting to keep Dad happy so he

wouldn’t pout as he floundered about, not knowing what to do with himself. Darkness enveloped the

whole family if Dad was unhappy. Even my children avoided Grandpa when the blackness inside him

grew.

Eventually, Dad began to slow a bit. The first hint was when he and my 11-year-old daughter

played a game of Monopoly that lasted for three days. I was able to film the ultimate blow to

Grandpa when he was bested by someone sixty years younger. My father insisted that I had helped

her, and that’s why she won. I wasn’t sure if he was saying she cheated or if he saw the game as two

against one.

After years of brandishing his mastery over bridge, pinochle, and board games, Dad settled on

a game called carbles, a portmanteau word combining cards and marbles. Out of a thick maple slab,

he crafted the board. With a deck of cards and solid color marbles, the players follow rules akin to

Sorry or Parcheesi. My father painted the correct colors in little divets on the board, but they

appeared splashed from a high bowl, either because of his macular degeneration or hand tremor.

He made a board for me, too, so that when he came to visit I could play with him. We only

played a few times because we lived two thousand miles from each other.

When my father became ill, I visited him and saw that he had trouble focusing on the carbles

board and the card games. He no longer had the ability to follow a thought through to the end. He

tried, but to distract him from his resulting distress, I would wheel Dad for a spin down the hall or

announce it was time to measure his oxygen level with the pulse oximeter.

My mother drove Dad and his friends in her golf cart in the woods behind the nursing home.

He had them push his wheelchair to the café for Wednesday Happy Hour. One friend, another

veteran, visited several times a week to transcribe my father’s war experiences. Dad demanded to be

buried in the Veteran’s Cemetery with military honors, rather than the family plot in our hometown.

As time went on, he talked more and more about the war. He was no longer the king of downtown

real estate, but a U.S. veteran.

Dad’s face brightened every time a new face appeared in the doorway of his room—someone

else to give him their complete attention, if only for forty-five minutes. He almost seemed happy in

those last weeks.

One afternoon, my niece and her fiancé came to visit. Dad sat in the chair next to his bed,

repeatedly pushing the plastic tubing across his cheek. He couldn’t quite catch the ear. My niece had

brought Grandpa a new game, and I could see the expectant excitement lighting her face.

As she handed him the game, a shadow passed across my father’s face. He would never play

again. All the visits and attention he was getting couldn’t give him back the satisfaction of the game.

Now that he’s gone, my carbles board, propped against the wall, draws my eyes whenever I

enter the room. The maple is raw, unfinished, and the crooked drops of red and blue from Dad’s

tremulous paintbrush unsettle me. I’ll move it where I don’t see it so often. After all, I don’t have to

play games any longer.