The Bridge Game

Whenever I write about my distant and far-off childhood, I always feel uncannily like Laura Ingalls Wilder must have, sitting down to a rough-hewn old school desk with a scratchy fountain pen in hand, to nostalgically describe frontier life in the Old West. I always halfway expect, in my narratives, for Pa to come strolling in from the Dakota Territory bearing a rucksack stuffed with meat from a freshly-killed b’ar.

In the far-off antique lands of my youth, Saturday nights were game nights in my family. Well, most nights were game nights around my household, anyway, for some of us. During my middle and high school years in the nineteen-seventies and early nineteen-eighties, our household didn’t have cable and we didn’t have a hundred electronic devices to whittle away our time. When the sun set, our entertainments were books, the four channels we could receive on our primitive TV sets, telephone calls made on a rotary phone, or board or card games.

My mother and I both loved games and preferred to spend our free evenings matching wits at the kitchen table. My favorites were those with a detective theme that employed logic and deduction to arrive at a conclusion, like Clue, or the jewel-themed Sleuth, or the Eurogame Scotland Yard, or a primitive bleeping console called Electronic Detective. My mother’s favorites were spelling games like Scrabble or Word Rummy or Upwords, or card games from traditional canasta to the exotic, mahjong-based Mhing.

Once a week on Saturday nights, however, with a lot of wheedling and cajoling from his children and heavily-coached reminders that we, his next of kin, would soon be grown up and out of the house and eventually have the powers of attorney to put him in a particularly disreputable home of our choice for the aged and decrepit, my father could be persuaded to join the family around the kitchen table for an hour or two of jolly competitive fun. We would sometimes play a few super-vicious rounds of Pit or the much calmer Probe, another Parker Brothers word game.

But mostly we played contract bridge.

I was eleven or twelve when my parents decided they’d teach bridge to my sister and me. At seven or eight, my sister was able enough to count the value of face cards and add them up to thirteen—the magical number at which it’s permissible to start bidding. I was old enough to grasp a little of the deeper strategy. And besides, my parents assured us, knowing contract bridge was an absolute must for college. All the right people played bridge. If I had the knowledge to pull off a grand slam, doubled and redoubled, well, my mother said. That kind of derring-do would prove the key into any social circle I chose.

She sold me. Already I was apprehending that my likely social circles in college, if they resembled anything like those I’d enjoyed during my pimply adolescence, were likely to be fairly limited. Limited to the cootie-infested, the unpopular, and the new kids who hadn’t yet learned to shun me as a social leper, in other words. Inspired by my parent’s Eisenhower-era reminiscences of hot coffee, crustless sandwiches, and vigorous rubbers with the coed smart set, I threw myself into learning the game.

Never once did it occur to me to question my parents’ faith in bridge as the primary undergraduate social lubricant; enough of their own generation still played the game that at the time it was still an everyday commonplace. The Times-Dispatch carried bridge columns both by Goren and by Omar Sharif. The local library had a whole shelf of books on the game that saw enough circulation so that they weren’t yanked and replaced by something more current.

We were all fairly competent at playing out the hands. Slapping down cards, selecting the proper club or diamond from the dummy, and collecting tricks occasionally requires a little finesse, but for the most part it’s a pretty mechanical process. The problem with our Saturday night bridge games was that we were all wildly different in our approaches to bidding. Omar Sharif, listening to our bridge-table banter on a typical Saturday, would have walked away scratching his handsome Egyptian head and permanently swearing off the game.

My father, for example, was a small-potatoes player who aimed at plucking fruit from the lowest-hanging branches—and plenty of it. He was happy to stop bidding at one spade or two diamonds, tops, so that he could play out the hands quickly, hit his low contract, and insist everyone toss in the rest of their cards so he could reshuffle and move on. It might take him more hands to get a win, but when you’re only playing out half the deck, they surely didn’t take long. Very practical, my father.

My sister was usually his partner; her approach to bidding, given that she was four years my junior and playing contract bridge at an age most kids were still mastering Candyland, was pretty much to state exactly what was in her hand. If my father would open with a conservative bid of one diamond, my sister, with all the subtlety of Norma Desmond auditioning for Salome, would crazily bat her big eyelashes over her cards and intone, “SIX HEARTS. I mean, FOUR SPADES. I mean, two DIAMONDS.” Which all of us quite correctly interpreted to mean that she had a hand containing six heart cards, four spades, and only two diamonds, leaving my father to pick whichever suit he thought he could best handle. The American Contract Bridge League would’ve hounded her out of any tea room, but as she was only in second grade, we were a little more forgiving.

Ever since I learned that bridge was my certain in among the undergraduate beau monde, I applied myself to a study of the game with infinitely more vigor than I displayed for any actual school homework I ever did. I checked all the books out of the library multiple times, read the daily columns and did the puzzles, subscribed to the American Contract Bridge League newsletter, took notes, and memorized every trick and convention that I could cram into my noggin.

Playing with me was likely excruciating. If I had a partner bid one no-trump, I would agonize for long minutes over whether to respond with a Jacoby transfer or a weak two, or whether I should bank on my partner understanding what I was tell them when I resorted to the little-used Chittleton defense. Post-hand autopsies with me were a form of torture on par with anything Guantanamo Bay inmates might have known, as I’d splay out the tricks and lecture everyone on what they ought to have played, according the Hoyle. I might have known my stuff, then, but I surely didn’t know my audience . . . though they were more aware than I how irksome I was.

My mother was usually my partner. We were singularly ill-suited for each other. I was mathematical, precise, and by-the-book; she relied heavily on the psychic bid. I could feel my blood pressure slowly rising right from the evening’s first hand. I would make a calculated and reasoned opening bid of one spade, based on the count of my face cards, the length of my suits, and the probability of our being able to make book plus the requisite number of tricks to win a rubber. My mother, on the other hand, would gaze at the bottom of her coffee cup as if contained tea leaves she might read, then close her lids and attune herself with the great spirits of the universe and consult some internal Ouija board, and finally, with veiled eyes and a dark, eerie, hollow, oracular intonation, respond, “FIVE SPADES.”

Of course my father and sister would instantly pass. When my mother would lay out her hand for the dummy, I’d discover that she’d have no spades at all to support me, perhaps one or two jacks at most among the face cards, and a multitude of low diamonds that were of zero use. Then, smoking heavily throughout my squawkings, she’d ignore my outraged postmortem and my appeals to Omar Sharif and say mysteriously, “I thought you were sending me five spaces telepathically.”

“Telepathy has no part in bridge!” I’d yell. "Bridge is a science!"

“Hush now,” she would whisper, curling the new hand that my father had dealt. “I’m trying to be in tune with my cards.”

“You should try to COUNT your CARDS!” I’d shriek. “There is no way that five spades—“

“One club,” my father would say.

“Pass. There is no way that anyone could bid five spades when her partner—“

“SIX DIAMONDS,” my sister would say. “I mean, ONE DIAMOND.”

That would get my attention. “Are you really going to let her—“ I’d try to protest.

My mother, in the meantime, would have studied her hand deeply, gazed through the bathroom plumbing and the second floor ceiling and the house’s roof to the constellations above, decided that Mercury was in the seventh house and that her internal I Ching had fallen onto the thirty-second hexagram, and announce, out of the blue, “Four no-trump.”

It’s something of a wonder I emerged from that particular cauldron with a working knowledge of bridge at all.

The sad punchline to devoting my adolescence to contract bridge is that when I arrived at college in nineteen eighty-one, none of my peers played the game. Not at all. Whatsoever. My vision of a spirited repartee and crustless sandwiches among the college smart set was quickly erased by the mundane reality of being on a beer-swilling freshman dorm hallway full of drunken frat pledges throwing keggers in the lounge across the hall, new Asia LP blaring at rib-rattling volumes, while I sat solitary, holed up in my room trying to brush up on my overcalls and Blackwood convention.

A couple of times I attempted to place ads to see if anyone else on campus might be interested in forming a bridge club. The only responses I got were from kids pastier and pimplier and even more fantastically less popular than I—the sort of kid who would look at me and think that I was the smart set they’d been promised to meet by their bridge-playing parents and grandfolks.

If someone was desperate enough to think I was the beau monde, they clearly were not the kind of person with whom I cared to associate. I bit my tongue, put away my Goren, and licked my wounds. I took up gin rummy instead. It was a simpleton’s game, but hey. When in Rome.