Game Night

Last night, six of them played a new game that Tillie, who doesn’t ordinarily join them, got at the Thrift store: “Trivia in the Twentieth Century.”

There were Tillie, Small Betty, Shelta, Nora, Sara, and Vera. None of them could remember how to play the old Trivia, the mechanics of it, going around the board after throwing the one “die” which they kept calling “dice,” but it was the questions that were ridiculous. They were so obscure that none of them, except once or twice, Sara and Nora, could come up with the answer. So the game-playing dissolved into histrionics. One of the questions had been “What is the most important piece of equipment an athlete has to wear?” None of the old gals thought of “jock strap” but that was the answer. So dangle that before six bored old ladies and what are you going to get? Titters, laughs, and funny stories.

Nora told one, and it was true.

She began: “I decided that the sound of my own snoring was waking me up, and that I snored because my mouth fell open during the night.”

In casting about for some way to keep her mouth closed, short of duct tape, she lit upon a jock-strap. Not that she had one to hand since her kids were long-gone. But she bought a small one, a bit red-facedly, from a sports emporium, and that night, put her idea to work. Who knew but that maybe she was on the cusp of a great invention that would solve a vexatious problem that had plagued mankind for centuries?

Too bad she didn’t take a self-photo, and a good thing she lived alone. Somehow, she arranged the jock-strap around her head, looping straps over her ears, so that she could moor her chin in the pivotal point of the equipment that boxers, wrestlers, high-jumpers, and football players use in quite a different way on quite a different part of their anatomies.

Of course, the old gals were laughing, and it was good to hear Small Betty practically sob. Even Sara was having a spasm of mirth. Shelta, beside Nora at the table, had to remove her glasses to wipe them. Tillie, while laughing, fixed Nora with a baleful gaze as if Nora were making it all up. Nora even said, “You know I couldn’t make this up…”

“Did it work?” they asked.

Actually, Nora couldn’t remember. How can one if one is asleep? The contraption probably slipped off during the night. She remembered only trying it once.

Their game degenerated from then on. Small Betty, the most innocent of them all since she’d never been married or had children, and had led a chaste Catholic schoolgirl life, read a pretend question from a card: “What are the many uses of a jock-strap at night?”


Coming up is the weekly pot-luck which the new resident, Frona, has taken over and made her own project. But most people are glad because someone had to. The menu is brats and sauerkraut. Hope there will be some good German mustard to go along.

Also, coming up is the TGIF night, with drinks on the house, but, imagine, at 3 p.m.; the Big Birthday Party, and a bus ride to see a Habitat for Humanity house under construction, for which Zoners are making cookies for the workers.

Oh, by the bye: remember Cass, and the Cass and Peggy duo? Well, they’re still going around together but he has become rather attentive to Nora! Directing lots of remarks toward her. Provocative ones like “I dreamt about you last night.” Peggy has a small puzzled look on her face. (But that could be her encroaching senility.) What divvils are afoot? Not that Nora would…

But here’s a late bulletin: she opened the door this morning in her wrapper to get her morning newspaper and upon it in a plastic wrap was a frosted éclair and a note from “A Secret Admirer.” Zounds!