No, that’s not right.

UD has known for years about online Scrabble.

She has shunned it as one shuns heroin, sensing its life-sucking flow…

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UD is an extremely good, intensely competitive Scrabble player who almost always scores well over three hundred points.

At Scrabble clubs and tournaments, experts average between 330-450 points per game… A better measure of skill is determining the “average points per turn” score. If [you] average 30 or more points per turn, not counting tile exchanges, then [you] may very well be a Scrabble expert. The very top Scrabble players average 35 or more points per turn, not counting exchanges.

UD plays very quickly, rarely waiting more than a minute to put a word down, and routinely putting a word down right away. Her impatience with opponents who actually take time to make a move, and with opponents who shuffle their tiles around on their tile holder (UD sees her words, whatever the configuration of the tiles) is notorious. In short, though UD would never win anything at a truly serious Scrabble tournament, she’s an expert.

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So far UD‘s meaningful Scrabble life has consisted of regular matches with her similarly ferocious older sister; but Barbara lives in upstate NY and they don’t see each other too often. UD‘s last game was a few weeks ago, in ‘thesda, with Rita Kosofsky (Eve and David’s mother). Rita and UD sat side by side on Rita’s couch and played on her iPad.

Maybe it was Rita’s iPad that began the insidious process of UD‘s undoing… UD had tried to build a break-water of order and elegance against the sordid tide of Scrabble and to dam up, by rules of conduct and active interest and new filial relations, the powerful recurrence of its tides within her.

But now… Two words: MANUMITS. SPEEDING. Triple word score. Last night.

The game allows players to chat. After she made speeding, at the very end of a game in which UD had been down by a few points, her opponent wrote

I LOVE IT WHEN THAT HAPPENS

and UD realized that in virtual opponent land (this one was from Vancouver) many serious players prefer exciting competition to simply winning (UD‘s all about winning).

That chatting is another thing. It makes UD a little nervous. How friendly should you get? These are total strangers, etc. Yet how strange can they be when they are exactly like you Scrabblewise?

WE’RE EERILY WELL-MATCHED

wrote UD toward the end of this game, during which our scores tracked one another extremely closely… Could this be my long-lost soulmate? Perhaps my life with Mr UD has been a horrible mischancing (he sucks at Scrabble) and I’m meant to be with the Vancouver person…

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Yes, it all has to end. It must be nipped in the bud and I will try to do that.