Sylvia. They traded stories about Mom learning to cook on the old iron stove when she first married Dad, until the women of the family had united in demanding something made in the current century. Joey told them about learning on the outdoor brick stove at his family’s country home in China.
“You grew up in China?” Sylvia asked. “Your English is perfect.”
“I was born in Oregon,” Joey said. “But I was sent overseas to my grandmother’s side of the family when young, and I spent a number of years there before traveling, then eventually ending up in California. I go back often.”
Granny Z appeared at the door. “I was about to take a nap when I heard voices,” she said, beaming at them all. “Guests!”
Doris introduced Joey, and Granny Z smiled up at him. “I already met that one young man in the other room. Are you Chinese, too?”
“On my mother’s side,” Joey said.
Doris remembered what she’d seen at Joey’s house, and turned to her grandmother. “Did you know that mahjong is actually from China? I always thought it was brought over from Europe.”
Granny Z laughed. “You California kids never were inside the house long enough to learn much about it. Long games are more popular in places with months of snow. My mother told me mahjong crossed the Pacific with Chinese people, but it got popular here after it was introduced at the World’s Fair. My grandmother was a girl then, and she remembered how fast it became a fad in Chicago, where she lived.”
Granny Z turned to Joey and said, “You must know something about it, nu?”
Joey spread his hands. “Only a little. I know how to play, and that it is a very old game in China, with numerous variations.”
Granny Z nodded. “The game I learned on was very beautiful. Each piece hand carved and painted. That might have been some of the appeal, because we didn’t have many nice things. But mahjong was a game that women could, as my mother said, play and ploysh.” She smiled Joey’s way. “Ploysh is Yiddish for chatter. But one thing I never learned, what all the terms meant in Chinese. When I was ten, I thought they were Yiddish!”
Everyone laughed at that, and Joey said, “Mahjong is the American pronunciation of ma jiang. I can’t say for sure where the name came from, but the explanation I like best is that it meant sparrow. The name came from the sound the tiles made, like the clacking of sparrows.”
“Sparrows!” Granny exclaimed. “I do like that! But I think a bunch of women chatting sounds more like sparrows than the tiles. How about . . .”
She eagerly began to throw various terms at him, demanding the correct pronunciation and the meaning. Mom looked from one to the other as if watching a tennis match. Doris smothered a grin, certain that she would later strut this new information before the other women at the synagogue.
Doris stood beside Joey, so close their shoulders nearly touched, and let herself enjoy his proximity as she relished how he’d managed to defuse the Titans.
Was it weird to find the soft sound of a man’s breathing attractive? Probably. But nobody was ever going to find out how the shape of his shoulders under his shirt, the unruly lock of blond hair on his forehead, the light grace of his hands all made her heat up in that place below her bellybutton that, until she met Joey, she’d never really believed existed.
She could enjoy not only his proximity, but how easily he made friends, bringing everybody into the conversation. She was safe, surrounded by her family. Nobody would ever know about this adolescent crush blooming in spite of her intention to be practical—nearly fifty years after everybody else fumbled through such things.
Everyone except her.
ELEVEN
JOEY
Joey drank more coffee than he liked, but he’d had less than four hours of sleep in two and a half days. Had he been asked, he would not have chosen to meet Doris’s family under such circumstances.
But no one had asked. Joey worked hard to find common ground with such a fascinating variety of people. When he won a smile from Elva, Doris’s mother, his reward was seeing Doris’s shoulders drop another notch.
Finally Elva shooed them out of the kitchen and into the den to continue their language lessons, while she and Sylvia planned a meal. The teens still sat over by the fire, the older people at the other end of the den. Jacob, Doris’s father, bent over a game of chess with Xi Yong.
Granny Z plopped down into the second wing chair near the chess game. She watched the chess game as she quizzed Joey about random vocabulary, once she’d exhausted mahjong terms, (“And what’s the word for . . . fish?”) until the phone rang from the other room.
“Not again,” Marrit drawled in a put-upon voice. Her cynical front hid what Joey sensed was a curiously fragile interior.
“Let me, let me,” Granny Z declared, rocking herself out of her chair to step into the little alcove off the den, where a rotary-dial phone lived by itself.
“It’s just going to be some phone scam or telemarketer,” Marrit protested, rolling her eyes in a long-suffering manner. “Nobody else would call this number except one of us, and we’re all here!”
“I love playing with those phone snake-oil persons,” Granny Z declared. “So far today I’ve been promised a new mortgage, and assured that my student loans would be dealt with if I called a number. Once a fellow told me that there was a complaint against me at the FBI, and he just needed to verify my personal information to insure my security. That was quite exciting!”
She picked up the phone and said in a quavering voice, “Hello?” Then her face brightened. “Oh, yes! I remember you, indeed I do. Didn’t you call yesterday? What’s that . . . well, I like you, too, young man. Such pleasant manners. Well, thank you, that is very caring of you, very caring indeed. I agree, I would hate fraud to be committed against my social security number. Or is it supposed to be with it, not against it? You tell me.”
“Does she do this a lot?” Joey murmured to Marrit.