Weekend Frivolity: Flash Fiction

 

At the beginning of the pandemic, my wife took up with a younger man. As is often the case, she met him through her sister who, innocently, I suppose, thought my wife would enjoy the New York Times’ Spelling Bee puzzle. So it was that my wife transferred her affections to Sam Ezersky.

 

“Oooh,” she exclaimed one morning, while taking a break from solving Sam Ezersky’s puzzle to read an article about Sam Ezersky, “he’s only 24!” I pretended not to know who she was talking about. “And I think he’s Jewish,” she continued, twisting the knife.

 

“What’s his name?” I lied. She told me. “Could be Polish,” I speculated. She was too engrossed in her article about Sam Ezersky to engage.

 

Months passed. We settled into our shelter-in-place routine. My wife’s routine was to spend some time every morning in her favorite chair, attended to by one or more cats, and to gather up the precious baubles that Sam had left for her. Making it to “genius” was her daily goal, but her sister had progressed and now aspired to the occasional Queen Bee. Thus my wife came to spend more and more time each day with Sam in the hopes of finding the last morsel of booty that he had hidden behind some unpropitious consonants or in the plain sight of an ungainly compound consisting of two familiar words.

 

I decided to join her, and she, at first reluctantly, accepted my assistance in exploring the depths of her new beloved. I would study the puzzle for hours before she woke up and then, when she was stumped on the pangram, I would glance over her shoulder and offer “would ‘uncommonly’ work”? She would wriggle with glee, embrace me and say encouragingly, “I never would have found that!”

 

And so we settled into jointly probing Sam’s consciousness. We work independently on the puzzle and then, when we are both exhausted from the effort, we combine words. We have become familiar with Sam’s quirks. He seems to like Mexican and Indian foods, and we have learned his preferred spellings of Yiddish words. He takes “boho” and “loco” but insists that “yoyo” is hyphenated and therefore out of bounds. He can be latitudinous about spelling, taking both “yech” and “yecch,” but sometimes his selection criteria completely baffle us. We forgive him when the last puzzle piece clicks into place. We share an appreciative smile and shrug, “Dunno.” Some days, it is enough if Sam’s puzzle considers us a “genius;” other days, we conclude that we are within reach of Queen Bee and redouble our efforts.

 

After a few months, I noticed that my wife sometimes gets angry at Sam. “I hate it when he puts an “i” in the middle,” she remarked one morning, quite bitterly. I clucked my tongue and agreed. More recently, it seems Sam can do nothing right by her. She hates it when there are too few words, when there are too many vowels, when there is a “k” without a “c” or a “g” without an “h.” One night as we were falling asleep, after a white-knuckled struggle to make it to “genius,” my wife practically hissed, “Would it kill him to give us an ‘s’?”

 

These days, I’m feeling pretty good about having Sam in our lives. Working on Spelling Bee is one or our common projects. We both have independent careers, and hers involves a lot of confidential information. Much of her work consists of interactions and experiences that she cannot tell me about, and my life as a professor is fulfilling for me but not exactly action-packed during COVID, since I don’t interact with my colleagues very often. Neither professional ethics nor rectitude would stop me from blabbing, but these days, I just don’t have any gossip to share with her.

 

On good days, Sam is a pal. We have the satisfaction of completing a project. We feel good about ourselves when we make it to genius and great about ourselves when we hit Queen Bee. Along the way, we can share a chuckle over our pal’s foibles. “Ratatat” again! On bad days, my wife despairs. “I think I’m going to take a break from this puzzle for a while,” she threatens.

 

Don’t worry, Sam. I’ve got your back.