A Weekend With Family

We always play cards at my grandparents’ house: either pinochle, canasta, or hand-and-foot. Pinochle is everyone’s favorite, so ever since my sister and I were old enough to understand the game, pinochle has been the game of choice.

As with most card games, everyone has their own variation on the rules. My grandparents grew up playing the high-scoring, card-passing version of pinochle referred to as “airplane.” This version relies a bit more on luck-of-the-draw and melding (getting certain card combinations worth points before the hand is played) than on counting cards and playing one’s hand strategically. Consequently, my dad—a notorious card-counter, who is bored by any game that relies on luck—hates this version of the game. However, because my grandparents refuse to learn to play any other way, he grudgingly acquiesces every time we sit down to play in Allentown.

“Can we play at least one game of cards tonight?”

That would be my sister. We—comprised of Amy, my mother and father, my grandmother and grandfather (my mom’s parents), my aunt, and me—are all sitting at a little round table in my grandparents’ cozy kitchen, finishing dessert. A small round fan buzzes on the floor, and spoons clink against ceramic mugs as we scoop out the last of our Oreo ice cream. It has been a long day of disassembling antique sewing machines, dismantling headboards from bedframes, and maneuvering furniture down narrow stairways. The house is in organized disarray, everything ready to be loaded onto the auctioneer’s truck tomorrow.

“Of course,” my grandmother replies. “Just after we clean up these dishes.” We will most likely be me and my sister. They don’t have a dishwasher, so I immediately look for the dishrag. This will be my fourth set of dirty dishes, today.

“Nana,” my aunt begins in her I’ve-been-patient-all-day-but-you’re-wearing-me-thin voice, “I think we need to finish going through things in the basement tonight, first.”

“Why?” my mom chimes in. “The auctioneer isn’t taking that stuff.”

“Yes, but we’re moving it out in two weeks,” my aunt argues. It needs to be packed. Two weeks isn’t a very long time.”

They argued, my aunt won out, and while my sister and I washed and dried dishes, my grandmother was trooped down to the basement to sort through phone books, cookie cutters, old photographs, canning jars, and who knows what other odds-and-ends. Before the things were packed away into empty liquor boxes, my sister and I were each given a pie plate. (My grandmother had seven of them.)

Finally, at ten o’clock, we returned to the kitchen table to play cards (minus my aunt, who decided to take a shower, instead). Dad dealt, and once everyone had organized their cards, my grandfather spoke up.

“What’s trump?”

“Popop, nobody bid yet.” The winner of the bid (which is basically betting on a minimum amount of points your team will score) decides which suit is trump. I’m still determining how many point’s worth of meld I have. “Trump wasn’t called.”

“I’ll say seventy-five.” My mother starts the bidding. My grandmother wins and calls spades trump. She, my mother, and my sister all pass to one another (they’re on the same team). Now, we can lay down our meld.

“What’s trump?” My grandfather is carefully laying down his marriage in diamonds.

“Spades.” My dad’s in a bad mood because he thinks making double marriages worth thirty points is cheating. In “regular” pinochle, they’re only worth four. “Those are the rules, though,” my grandmother claims as she puts her double marriage back into her hand. This is why my dad doesn’t like airplane.

Since my grandmother won the bid, she plays the first card. According to airplane rules, the first card played must be an ace of trump. She leads the next two tricks with two more aces of spades.

“Is that trump?” My grandfather fishes a king of spades out of his hand to follow suit. (In pinochle, if you have the suit that is “asked” by the first card of the trick, you must play it.) I can feel my dad roll his eyes without even looking at him.

“Yes, Popop.”

A few tricks later, the lead is mine. I choose to play diamonds. Amy is out of diamonds, but since she doesn’t have any spades, she plays a heart.

“Is hearts trump?”

“Spades, Popop.” I collect the trick and lead with another diamond.

Finally, no one has any trump left except for my grandmother, so she collects everyone’s remaining cards. We count up the points from the hand, shuffle the cards, and start dealing again. My mom keeps score in her neat handwriting on a small gray tablet.

“Three-sixty-four to one-eighty-eight,” she announces.

“Wow, we really cleaned up, didn’t we?” My grandmother glows with pleasure.

“If I had called hearts, what would you have passed me?” my dad asks me. He always wants to discuss the could’ve/would’ve/should’ve of hands, once they are over. I tell him what hearts I had.

“Man, I should’ve kept going.” He means he should have bid higher in order to call trump. “That would’ve given me a double book” (i.e. meld worth 150 points).

Everyone seems to have their cards in order. It’s Amy’s turn to bid, and she passes.

“Something out of the ordinary,” my dad remarks. Amy starts fuming. When she was little, she never bid. We called her a coward for it, and still do today.

“Excuse me, I do bid,” she snaps back.

“Yes, Amy does bid, now,” my mom offers in support, ever the peacemaker.

“Let’s go, let’s go.” My grandmother is used to playing fast.

I open the bid. “Seventy-five.”

My grandfather looks at his cards.

“What’s trump?”