The intermediate Mah-jongg group met each Friday afternoon at three, in the sweet spot between lunch and dinner. Snacks were encouraged. Potato chips. Iced tea. Cake. I’d brought a pound of babka from Two Fat Cookies in Del Ray Beach. I had told Estelle, the president of the group, that I wanted to get a sense of how the game was played before tackling the beginner session, which if I was truly interested in learning to play Mah-jongg, was where I belonged.
The group — 16 women and two men — gathered in the Common Room on the ground floor of my mother’s apartment building on Atlantic Avenue. It was a dingy space in need of a good dusting that tried hard to be posh and failed abysmally. Powder pink walls. Cut rate chandelier. Even the potted palms looked wilted. High hats in the ceiling gave the room an artificial brightness, bathing everyone in a sickly yellow glow. Four bridge tables had been set up, with four chairs at each table, and people were filtering in, chatting, taking their usual seats.
“This is Leah. Gail Lindner’s daughter,” Estelle announced, when they finally settled down to business.
The group turned to stare, like bird watchers encountering a rare, crested ibis in the Florida everglades. I was 45 years old; my presence lowered the demographic significantly.
“How is Mom?” said one woman, whose neck sagged and whose white hair was arranged in a style that can best be described as a coif.
“She . . . isn’t here,” I stammered, suddenly uncomfortable. They were looking at me expectantly. “I mean, um, she died.”
Sympathetic murmurs all around.
“She was a good Mah-jongg player,” one woman offered.
“Punctual as a clock. She used to bring very tasty mandel bread,” said another. Several heads bobbed in unison, remembering the bread. My mother hadn’t attended in months. From their muted reaction, I knew none of the participants were bothered by her absence.
As promised, there were two men present. One was a retired human resources executive whose wife still worked. He’d joined three weeks ago and had never met my mother. The other guy was Mel Blake, a widower with a full head of hair and a warm smile. I spotted an extra chair and dragged it over to his table, seating myself next to him. He was building his wall of tiles.
“Did you know my Mom?” The word tasted strange on my tongue. I had called my mother Gail for as long as I could remember.
“Yes. I used to tell her she had a photographic memory, because she always knew which tiles had been played.”
A good memory? Gail? It was the last thing I expected to hear. We could never seem to agree on how my childhood had played out. She insisted I was fat each time I gained an extra five pounds. She claimed I always wanted to be a doctor when the sight of blood made me woozy. On numerous occasions, she recounted conversations between us that had never taken place, twisting facts to suit her own purposes. Her ability to fabricate and embellish irritated me to no end.
As Mel Blake arranged his tiles into suits, carefully assessing his hand, I wondered about their relationship. A widow and a widower become acquainted at Mah-jongg. See each other once a week. Exchange innocuous observations about the weather. It probably happened every day in South Florida. Could it have led to something more? How well did this man know Gail?
***
My mother kept her desktop computer atop a stack of cookbooks at one end of the kitchen table. The week after she died, I sat across from where she used to drink instant coffee in a blue mug that says Suck it Up, Buttercup, and tried to figure out the password to her AOL account. I tried her birthday, my birthday, my late father’s birthday. Nicknames. Addresses. Restaurants she liked. Athletes she admired. I even took the computer to the Geek Squad at Best Buy, where she’d bought the darn thing, and then to a place called Beacon Repair, hoping they could figure out the code like modern day safecrackers. No luck. I was locked out.
Oh, I had photo albums. My parents looking black-and-white glamorous on their honeymoon in the Catskills, two lovebirds in evening attire with movie star hair. Her and me at the beach when I was six, dipping our toes in the Atlantic. All of us at my high school graduation, posed for some odd reason in front of the football bleachers. But these were old memories, static, fixed in time. I longed for more recent images that would tell me something about my mother I didn’t already know. My thoughts ran wild here: a secret sibling who’d been institutionalized, a hidden aunt or uncle she’d stopped talking to years ago, a fortune she’d accumulated without telling me. (If there was a will, I couldn’t find it). Maybe there were papers indicating I was adopted, the fantasy of many wayward daughters. The options fanned out in my mind like a deck of cards.
Beyond the sensational, I was looking for clues to her life. I wanted to feel connected to her. And I wanted reassurance that I wouldn’t turn into her. It’s a cliché, I know. But most clichés contain a dollop of truth. She was alone. I think she was lonely. Would that be my fate too?
I did have partial access to her online self. When I clicked on the Downloads icon, documents appeared. A letter addressed to Verizon, requesting a partial refund on her phone bill when South Florida lost power for five days. Ads for quack products sold on late night TV. A Slumber Mitt, Big Vision Glasses, Miracle Copper Socks, a Pedi Callus Remover, Slobstopper Stain Remover. She had a penchant for stuff that promised to fix your life fast.
The most intriguing file in the Downloads consisted of nothing more than a fragment of writing. Here’s what it said:
Bird resting on bamboo
Dragons three
My hopes for us
Scattered by the east wind
Plum blossom fades before long
Where is our moon?
– Claire Wan
A Google search revealed Claire Wan to be a Chinese-American poet who writes something called modern tankas combined with recipes. I took the cookbook out of the library. Sure enough, there was the poem. My mother must have copied it. Why? My father died a decade before she bought the computer. They’d had a decent enough marriage, though I couldn’t imagine her writing a poem about him. As far as I know, after she became a widow, she never went on a single date. I urged her to sign up for one of those dating websites for seniors because I thought she could use the companionship, but I don’t think she ever did.
Returning to the Downloads, I studied each item carefully. The only vaguely personal thing that jumped out at me was a PDF for a Mah-jongg Club, held in the Common Room of her apartment building. Two groups were forming: one for people who knew how to play, the other for beginners. There was a phone number at the bottom.
I called it.
***
Some similarities between my mother and myself:
1. We were no longer married.
2. We both worked in education and didn’t like our jobs. She’d been a greeter in an elementary school. I was an adjunct lecturer at a community college, supplementing my income with freelance writing gigs.
3. We were impatient.
4. Unlucky.
5. Extravagant.
6. Quick to anger, slow to forgive.
7. Prickly.
8. Daydreamers.
9. Avid readers.
10. Resentful.
11. Bad mothers, according to our daughters.
12. We found most people, with their penchant for self-involvement, irritating.
13. We burned easily in the sun.
14. We liked a good hamburger, medium rare, with crispy fries.
15. We didn’t express our emotions easily.
16. We were aloof.
17. Persistent.
18. Regretful.
19. Rarely satisfied.
I made this list when Gail was in a nursing home, during the long hours I would sit by her bed, wishing she would recognize me.
I hate this list. It leaves out all the subtlety, the many shades of difference between us. If you look at a Benjamin Moore color wheel, there are 182 greens, each with a pleasing name. Kiwi looks identical to Buckingham Gardens. When you buy sample cans of each, brushing the colors on the wall, it’s hard to decide between them. Hard, but not impossible. Although this story isn’t about paint.
***
In Mah-jongg, each player brings a card with dozens of suit possibilities on it, and you have to choose one without other people knowing what you’d picked. Then you had to remember what all the tiles stood for. Bams. Cracks. Winds. The ladies put them down so quickly, like croupiers in Vegas, I barely caught a glimpse. Clack. Clack. Click. They played for quarters. My grandmother did the same every week with women in the neighborhood. That’s how Gail learned to play. Though I didn’t understand how things worked, I admired the beautiful drawings on the tiles: dragons, a bird of paradise, flowers. Just like the poem. Each flower was named for a different Confucian plant — chrysanthemum, bamboo, orchid, wild plum blossom.
Where is our moon? Whose moon? Gail’s and Mel Blake’s?
I always dragged an extra chair over and seated myself next to Mel. This made the other three ladies at the card table — Mel’s girls, they joked — uneasy. Estelle, Paula, and Sue. The three not so merry widows. They thought I was after him.
“Do you have a boyfriend, dear?” Paula asked me every week, even though I kept telling her no, I wasn’t seeing anyone. After the divorce, I went on the apps briefly, but I soon tired of men who lied about everything — their age, their interests, their employment status, the fact that they happened to be married. It was easier to stay home.
Paula was the youngest of the three, a spry 72-year-old sporting a curly blonde wig and long flowing dresses that looked like caftans.
“You should try to meet a man,” Paula urged me. The veins in her hands meandered across her skin, green as rivers. “Online. That’s how it’s done these days.”
“Yes,” Estelle said. “My grandson met his wife on something called Coffee Meets Bagel.”
“Cute,” Sue chimed in. “They have all these sites nowadays where women can meet men their own age.”
What she meant was keep away from Mel Blake, who was old enough to be my father. It was hard finding time to talk to him, hard to broach The Question about Gail. I had to get there early while people were setting up their tiles or linger late, sidling next to him on the short walk to the elevator. While the game was going on, he preferred not to chitchat. It broke his concentration.
I decided to try Paula instead. She was the one least interested in winning.
“Did you know my mother well?” I said, keeping my tone casual.
“Not really. One time, I asked her to go to Filene’s with me. They were having a sale. I thought it might be fun.” Mel Blake shot us a warning look. They had arranged the tiles on their racks and were just about to Charleston, a fancy way of passing tiles to one another.
“Was it fun?”
“She said she was busy, and we’d go another time. But we never did.” That sounded like Gail.
***
When I wasn’t at my mother’s apartment, boxing up her things, I was home. It wasn’t really home, of course. Home was the house we’d lived in before the divorce. A roomy five- bedroom Colonial in Huntington, Long Island, with a pool and a three-car garage. The Huntington house held our memories tight: holidays and birthday parties, a revolving parade of seasonal activities, all the things we’d loved and taken for granted. Our new one could never compete. But after my ex and I broke up, Long Island became too expensive. We hadn’t paid the mortgage off; taxes were prohibitive. The kids had to leave their old schools and their friends and start over. I had to get a job, create a new life for myself out of wishes and alimony checks.
Gail lived in Florida. She could help look after Ryan and Olivia. But then she had the stroke, one more loss in a string of them.
On my non-Mah-jongg days, I wandered about the new house, picking objects up, putting them down, the way you would in a museum that encouraged touching. I’d painted the walls the wrong shade of green. They looked putrid, unhealthy. We’d lived there a year, but it still felt like we were transients. There was a sadness to the house. It reminded me of a roadside motel with an early checkout.
***
The Question had two parts. A basic one: Did you ever date my mother? And a more complex one: What was she really like?
Other questions occurred to me as I folded her blouses, wrapped her plates in newspaper and stacked them carefully in cartons for Goodwill. Why had my mother never told me she loved me? Why hadn’t I had the grace to tell her? Why couldn’t we get along? What was the use of all this stuff in the end, all the things we leave behind? How did one build a meaningful life, anyway? It seemed way too existential for Mah-jongg.
***
“Ladies, I have an announcement,” Mel said solemnly.
Estelle and Paula exchanged a look. Sue let out an audible sigh. The ladies offered guesses as to what it could be.
“You’re driving at night again?”
“Switching to egg whites?”
“Auditioning for the talent show?”
He beat an elaborate drumroll against the card table.
“You are looking at the new docent in the rock garden at The Morikami Museum. Ask me anything about tea ceremonies. Go on.”
“What happened to volunteering at the hospital?” Sue asked.
“Didn’t work out. I felt like an oversized candy striper. And everyone there was sick!”
“Oh, Mel,” the three proclaimed in unison.
***
One week, I arrived late, after a student failed to show up for a scheduled conference. It was windy, pouring rain. The newscasters couldn’t decide if this “weather event,” as they called it, qualified as a tropical storm or a Category One storm, which I had learned since moving to Florida was not as bad as it sounded. Still, running from my car to the building I got sopping wet.
I ran into Estelle in the lobby. She was getting her mail, a handful of catalogs and supermarket flyers.
“The power’s out,” she said. “Delay of game. Sue’s searching for candles.”
“Oh.”
Estelle was the prettiest woman at our table, with eyes the color of hazelnuts and high cheekbones that had possibly been surgically altered. Her neck was swan-like, her posture impeccable, giving her a regal appearance.
“Do you want to borrow some dry clothes?” she asked. I followed her gaze to where I was dripping profusely onto the fake marble floor.
“Yes. Thanks.”
“I’m in 2B. Luckily, we can take the stairs.”
Seeing her outside Mah-jongg was strange. When I pictured the group, they were always in the Common Room together, the same way, when I was younger, I couldn’t visualize my teachers ever leaving the classroom.
Although Estelle’s apartment was in the same two-bedroom line as Gail’s, it was way nicer. Even in the half-dark, I could tell Estelle had a flair for interior design. She favored crisp linen upholstery, blonde wood, bamboo accents. Everything in its place. Unlike Gail’s apartment, which always looked like it had just been ransacked by a burglar who couldn’t find anything worth stealing.
After I had changed into a Florida Atlantic University T-shirt and a pair of gray running shorts, we sat on the couch.
“Has my mother ever been here?” I asked Estelle.
“No. I invited her to a party once, but she wasn’t able to make it.”
Why not? I wondered. Why not get to know someone like Estelle and have a friend to go to dinner and the movies with?
Outside, it was raining even harder. I had a sudden urge to kick my shoes off and take a nap.
“Do you socialize with the other ladies outside the game?”
“Paula and I walk together every morning. We asked your mother to join us, but she said she hated to exercise.”
“Did she ever talk about my Dad?”
“Not that I remember. I got the sense she was a private person. Didn’t go in for small talk.”
Then why join at all, I wondered? If she wasn’t interested in making friends, what was the point? I was getting nowhere. Mah-Jongg turned out to be another dead end. What I knew about my mother was all there was to know.
***
The following week I decided to approach Mel Blake when the group was taking a brief snack break between sets. We ate at the card table, with napkins balanced on our laps. Sometimes I thought I saw the same crumbs from the previous Friday still scattered on the floor.
“Can I ask you something?” I said. It was a simple question, really. I was the one weighing it down with expectations. “Did you and my mother ever go out?”
The widows leaned in closer, waiting for an answer. His eyes widened.
“On a date?”
“Or for coffee. A walk. That kind of thing.” He laughed heartily.
“Nope. We were alike that way. Already had the big one once. No need to try and duplicate it.”
I felt my hopes crumble like the lemon square Paula was chewing. This man didn’t know my mother any better than I did.
“But you got along?” Maybe she wanted more from him. An unrequited love.
“Sure.” He smiled and the ladies smiled too, showing artificially white teeth.
***
I kept coming, mostly because I didn’t have anything better to do. It was lonely in the new house. Especially when the kids weren’t around. I’d try to read or watch the news, but I couldn’t seem to focus my thoughts, which were slippery as fish. The sunshine was starting to bother me. It was aggressive, relentless. I was almost done cleaning out my mother’s apartment.
At the beginning, I’d hoped to come across a journal she’d kept, a diary recording her innermost thoughts. But there was nothing.
In the Common Room, Paula presented me with a Mah-jongg bracelet she’d found at a yard sale. Its plastic links mimicked those on the board. There was the South Wind, seven bam, bird of paradise.
“To help you remember the tiles,” she said.
“Thank you.” I slipped it onto my wrist, suddenly close to tears.
I couldn’t remember the last time anyone had given me a gift. On my birthday, in Florida, the kids wrote down chores — washing the kitchen floor, cleaning their rooms — as IOUs.
“You look like your mother,” said Estelle. “Has anyone ever told you that?”
“We have the same nose.”
The game was about to start. I got up and went to grab a Diet Coke out of the cooler. Mel Blake was getting a Dr. Brown’s black cherry soda. It was a humid day. The air smelled stale.
“What did you do before you retired?” I asked him, making conversation.
“I was a pediatric dentist for forty-one years.”
“Did you like it?”
“Would you like getting bitten by little kids?” There was an awkward silence.
“Just kidding. You’re a professor, right?” Mel Blake said.
“Yes. Broward Community College.” I hated telling people where I worked. Community College was a far cry from four-year colleges.
“Your mother was awfully proud of you. Talked my ear off about how you’d always been the smart one in the family. Always reading. Victorian novels, I think she said.”
“Really?” I tried to remember when my mother had ever complimented me and came up empty.
“She talked about you all the time. How pretty you are. How talented.”
His words gut-punched me. I repeated them to myself, trying to picture Gail saying them aloud.
When the game began, I watched listlessly as the foursome moved their tiles around, calling out commands, slapping the porcelain pieces down. Gail had sat at this very table with these people. She’d baked bread for them, won a few dollars, been part of their world, however briefly, a much shorter time than she’d been part of mine.
I had read Mah-jongg imagery into the poem she saved. I was good at close reading, a staple of every English lit class I taught. How to analyze, how to pull words apart to uncover a deeper meaning. Figure out what lies beneath the surface, I tell my students. That’s the key.
Now I wondered if the poem was about us. Our missed opportunities. Our inability to connect. Maybe it had bothered my mother, too. Maybe we shared the same unfulfilled longing. The game went on.
“Five crack.”
“Two bam.”
“Green dragon.”
“Kong.”
Too late, the tiles clicked out. Too late to change a thing.
All around me I heard people talking and laughing, a constant refrain. I had been coming to Mah-jongg for two months. Sitting with the same people, yet not part of the group. Observing them from afar, hoping they would feed me scraps of information. What did I know about any of them? Estelle was an artist. Paula liked to shop. Mel Blake hadn’t enjoyed being a dentist. I knew next to nothing about Sue. To me, they were a means to an end. I’d been privy to the barest bones of their lives and hadn’t asked for more. An outsider. An onlooker. Just like Gail. What did they know about me? I could walk out the door and never come back. None of them would miss me.
“You know what?” I said to Paula, as we headed out. “I think next time I’d like to play.”
Her smile appeared genuine. “That will be more fun.”
“I might not be any good. I might slow things down for the rest of you.”
“That’s all right, dear. It takes a while to learn.”
***
I never did access my mother’s AOL account. It remains trapped inside her hard drive, tantalizingly close, yet just out of reach. Sometimes I think about all the data inside her old computer. The stuff you can see — scans, downloads, ads. And the stuff you can’t. Coding built from complicated tech equations I will never understand. I picture them as squiggles in a painting by Miro. Tantalizing. Darkly mysterious. Their jagged edges completing a complicated puzzle as intricate as the pictures on the Mah-jongg tiles. Written in another language. Darkly beautiful. Silent. Waiting to be revealed.
Beth Sherman’s writing has been published in more than 100 literary magazines, including Portland Review, Tiny Molecules, 100 Word Story, Fictive Dream, and Bending Genres. Her work is featured in Best Microfiction 2024. She’s also a multiple Pushcart, Best Small Fictions, and Best of the Net nominee. She can be reached on X, Bluesky or Instagram @bsherm36.
ELEVENTH HOUR LITERARY 