Between Wax Paper

There was a boardgame stored in the shanty on our fishpens; it was a knock-off of the game “Monopoly,” and it had been prepared for being kept on the sea. All the little colored moneys had been oiled to translucent and the board had been pressed between wax paper to preserve it, but it made it difficult to read in parts. Mother wasn’t much for boardgames, she’d say, and I never could get a starfish to deal with pieces, die, cards, and money at once.
The instruction booklet was in a folded envelope of wax paper that I gingerly unwrapped and read again and again. For a period, I read it at bedtime every night and kept it under my pillow, in the wax paper envelope. The last thing I did before turning down the lamp was tuck it back in the envelope.
In lieu of play with real opponents, I read the rules and extrapolated how the gameplay would go.
Then, I set up the board and played with multiple opponents. The hard part was forgetting what my intentions were as another player, which I did to make it fair. Other times it seemed I couldn’t recall, once it was the next player’s turn, every bit of the thinking for that particular player, what attitude they took toward risk and why, what her GO/NO GO setpoints were and by what formula they had been derived, the whys and why nots that each one might choose, ways of going about things, methods of counting. There was always a real me, and so there was the matter of if another opponent had a particularly favorable advantage, not letting the real me know, but really wanting to. But fair play was tantamount to understanding how these things were going to work.