TANTE SILVIA'S FLINCH CARDS
“We sipped pineapple juice and nibbled at shortbread cookies while we played.”
My Armenian great-aunt Sirvart Haigazn—Tante Silvia—survived the Armenian genocide and came to America in 1928. After two years of college she became a hospital dietician in New York City. She never married or had children. Eventually she settled in Los Angeles to be near her married sister, my grandmother. Two or three times a year, my mother and I would make the hour-long drive to visit her at her stucco duplex, where she'd greet me with kind words and an enveloping hug. She was thin, slight—I felt her bones in that hug—yet she was not fragile but a solid presence in my arms and in my life. I loved my tante. And she loved me.
Silvia was retired when I knew her, though as she had done in Turkey to help support her widowed mother and three siblings, she taught English, now to her Latino neighbors. She also studied astrology, which she believed revealed our shortcomings and talents. She was also a devout Christian and a student of metaphysics, filling three-ring notebooks with inspirational quotes, scripture and health advice: notes about cell salts based on the signs of the zodiac…jotted next to a discourse on the meaning of crucifixion and the mystery of Christ…written next to Rub in peanut oil for arthritis.
On every visit, Tante Silvia would serve lunch. In her small kitchen, she’d peel the skin off a tomato, telling me the skin protects the tomato but is hard for people to digest. She’d chop the tomato into bite-sized pieces for a salad, spoon brewer’s yeast (full of B vitamins) onto cut-up fruit in the blender for smoothies, and sprinkle parsley (good for the blood) over warm lentils.
She didn’t speak of her past struggles and challenges. I don’t know how she survived the genocide, how she bore living in that place afterwards, or even much about her early life in the United States. She smiled and hugged, peeled tomatoes and studied the stars.
And she taught me to play Flinch, a game consisting of 150 cards numbered one to fifteen. The cards were thick unwaxed paper, light gray, printed only on one side. We used the cards in our hands and in our individual stockpiles to build communal stacks in the middle of the table, from one to fifteen. Unlike double solitaire, we didn’t play all at once but took turns. Whoever used all the cards in their stockpile first, won. But our games weren’t a race, and they weren’t about winning.
We sipped pineapple juice and nibbled at shortbread cookies while we played. Tante asked about school. I told her about singing in the chorus or helping a first grader learn the alphabet or my latest favorite book. Listening, she might pick up the top card from her stockpile and find a place for it on one of the stacks awaiting fulfillment. Then she might flip over the next card in her stockpile, scan the stacks and the cards in her hand and, if she didn’t have a move, say, “Done.” She’d smile at me. “Your turn.”
Forty-five years later the cards rest, in three stacks, in their shallow rectangular red box with its lid covered in silver paper embossed with poinsettias and Flinch scrawled in pen. I seldom open the box. I am protective of the cards smudged with the oils from my tante’s fingers, and maybe a trace of the stardust she was made of even while she was with me here on earth.
—Laura Rink
Laura Rink lives in Bellingham, WA. A short excerpt (“Geraniums”) from her Armenian family memoir-in-progress appears in Complete Sentence.