Effie held the stopwatch, and Clara drew the first slip of paper from the sun hat. She signaled that it was a person, and held her arms out to indicate a big belly, doing a little bounce. “Santa Claus,” Max said. “Jackie Gleason,” and Clara laughed and shook her head. Then she said, “Ah!” and looked above her in terror, holding her fingers to her cheeks. She dashed across the den, pointed at the radio, then up to the ceiling, and with twenty seconds to go Max cried, “Orson Welles,” and she shrieked and jumped and clapped her hands.

“That’s a lot of racket for one point,” Effie said, standing and handing the stopwatch to Max. She was all business when it came to games. She drew a slip of paper, frowned a moment, indicated that it was another person—and transformed herself: swaying her hips, batting her eyelashes at Henry, biting the tip of her finger in a perfect impersonation of Marilyn Monroe, which had been one of his contributions to the hat. When he guessed it she said, “Very good,” sat down, and recorded their point.

Max made the sign for book. And then stood still for several long seconds. Clara laughed. “Darling, do something.” So he halfheartedly mimed rifle fire, then seemed to run away from it, then repeated the sequence. “Do something else, Maxie, I’m not getting it.” But he was stuck on the move. For someone so sure and confident—someone who could execute a perfect backflip off the diving board—he seemed strangely self-conscious now. The poor lost soul. He was beginning to grow on Henry.

“Time,” Effie declared. The book had been The Red Badge of Courage.

“Oh, but that’s a hard one, darling,” Clara said.

“No, it’s not,” Effie said. “Point at something red—your trunks—make like you’re flipping a badge or something, I don’t know. Act courageous.”

Everyone laughed—especially Max. “You’re merciless, Katie Scarlett,” he said.

When Henry stood up for his turn, he pulled The Birth of a Nation, in a barely legible scratch that wasn’t Effie’s. Clara was sitting across Max’s lap in the armchair, which distracted him for a moment. He knew that it was a movie and had something to do with the KKK, but that was all. He made the sign for movie, and then, like Max, did nothing.

“How many words,” Effie said.