by Penelope Cray
“This game, Marble Solitaire, that I was drawn to play—that I looked forward to playing all year in that final month I somehow imagined as having all these extra, empty days in it, all this extra time—defined winning as the elimination of all others from the sphere of play and measured my success as a player by how well I ended up alone.”
Every year, and more often in December, when the circular board joins other festive wooden objects on my coffee table, I try to solve the marble solitaire. December arrives with different rules. I listen only to seasonal music and dress the home in ornaments I ignore the rest of the year, wrap in paper and store darkly under the stairs. I anticipate a stretch of days without work, and I savor it, set the time aside for play.
In this month of feeling together, the game of marble solitaire requires that I end alone, with one marble in the center well. That's me—the solitary glass orb who has leapt artfully over all others to land in the center of her life, disposed to survey each once-occupied and now empty well. So says the game.
The wooden board contains thirty-seven wells. I start with thirty-three marbles—none in the center well, where I hope to end up, and none in four peripheral wells, creating room for jumping the others and arranging the original marbles in the shape of a fat cross. Festive. From the start, every marble in play is hung on it.
The marble solitaire was a gift to my son from his paternal grandparents several Decembers ago. The game was selected by me for them to give to him. Mostly, it has been a gift from me to me. The game came with all red marbles, but I have raided my son's collection to play with colors and patterns—cat’s eyes, cloudy swirls, speckled eggs, pearls—with a few original reds thrown in. I don't get attached to which marble I aim to land alone in the center. So far, in my life, I have landed alone nowhere. The fewest marbles I've landed with in marble solitaire are four. I think: me, my husband, my son, my daughter. None of us at the end of this un-won game are close enough to one another to be leapt over and thereby stripped from the board.
For years, I’ve played this game and not solved it, by which I mean I have not ended up alone. It is not like solitaire with a deck, where in the end every card is neatly stacked in ascending order in its own suit. I’ve won that game loads of times, putting same with same. I’m drawn to games with the word “solitaire” in their titles—the “debonair” of wallflowers and late bloomers. But I’ve never lost enough marbles to win this game.
I could, of course, at any moment of any day of the year, look up the solution online and step-by-step make just the right moves to end up all alone in the center. Every inconsequential puzzle of my life has a solution online. Many solutions are not good, but their positioning as solutions still recommends them to me.
Year after year, I proceed unwittingly. As often as I am left with four marbles, I am left with five or six or seven. Who are they, I wonder, left behind with me and my family in this foiled game, each also at a distance that does permit me to jump them and thereby eliminate their influence? What are these last stubborn numbers that are so difficult to be rid of?
When I eliminate an insufficient number of marbles from the game, I reset the board to play again, every marble miraculously restored to me, as in playing with a full deck. At the end of these non-winning games, I remain a collection of differently colored marbles, each fixed by a wooden well, not one marble rolling off, as marbles do. Should someone bump the board, the game catches them in the long circumferential well where all those eliminated gather together for their next turn at play, when one among them might finally be defined by the absence of all others, which is called winning.
Some games have rules that require me to lose even when I win—the kind of game my father played through insults and self-ostracization and won by making his very last move with his own hands. Why try to win a game that aims to land me all alone?
I play as slowly or as quickly as I like. I play instinctively, then strategically. The outcome is always the same: loss, no fewer than four remaining, over and over, the game ever available to be played again, to lose as often as I like. The moves are there, waiting to be taken, to lead me to the same mode of impasse. I must get all the peripheral marbles to the center, I counsel myself, so that there, I can pick them off one by one and claim the center well for myself, fill it with my last marble.
This, according to the rules, is the only way to win. If I eliminate, via jumping, every other marble but land finally in a peripheral well and not in the center, then I will not have won, remaining, in this scenario, still at a remove from the main action of being entirely solo and under no one’s influence but my own. This would not be gaining the center but simply losing all my marbles, all but one. And yet I have not managed to get even this far.
I torture myself: I’ll never win this, and, If I win this, I’ll never remember how I did it, and, If I look up the solution online and win that way, even if I forget the solution, if I win again, I’ll never be able to experience it as a real win, as mine, and, If I look up the solution and memorize it, I’ll never again have any pleasure in the game.
This is, after all, a game of pleasure, of being in play with oneself.
I have yet to win this game. And each time I begin, there is no single marble I call myself and avoid skipping over and removing from play. I remain, for another season, potentially every marble on the board.
Games are great sources of speculation because their rules provide something to push off from, as from the edge of a seawall into open water. This game, Marble Solitaire, that I was drawn to play—that I looked forward to playing all year in that final month I somehow imagined as having all these extra, empty days in it, all this extra time—defined winning as the elimination of all others from the sphere of play and measured my success as a player by how well I ended up alone. What is this impulse, I began to speculate about myself, to play by the rules of Marble Solitaire at precisely the time of year most associate with gathering and drawing closer to loved ones and family, to be with rather than to be alone. In the end, writing this essay—another solitary endeavor—was the winningest bet.
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Penelope Cray is the author of the short prose collection Miracles Come on Mondays (Pleiades 2020), selected by Kazim Ali. Cray's poems and short fiction have appeared in such journals as Harvard Review, New England Review, Ocean State Review, Green Mountains Review, Bartleby Snopes, Pleiades, and American Letters & Commentary and in the anthologies Please Do Not Remove (2014) and Roads Taken (forthcoming). She lives with her family in northern Vermont, where she operates an editorial business from home.