When I judged Mary Ann Payne’s essay submitted for Writing It Real’s first 2006 personal essay contest as our runner up, I wrote to her with comments about her ending and ideas for strengthening it.   Here is the essay she submitted followed by those comments and Mary Anne’s revision:

The House of Seven Gambles
By Mary Ann Payne

The Gamble House was my favorite destination as a child. Not the famous Greene and Greene craftsman house in Pasadena, but a remodeled frame house at the comer of Medary and Seventh Street in Brookings, South Dakota. My friend Cheris was the middle child of a rollicking family whose exploits were recorded in a weekly newspaper column by their mother and encouraged by their father. Mr. Gamble was chairman of the mechanical engineering department at the local college and filled the house with time and money saving devices that were the marvel of anyone under ten. Donna was the oldest. She was studying to be a nurse and showed us how to dissect frogs and cats and tiny dogs. Brice was second and had inherited his father’s mechanical abilities. While in high school, he used spare bicycle parts to create tandem bikes he rented to college students and unicycles for the family to ride. Cheris was my friend and part of the Girl Scout Troop formed when we were in second grade, a group that continues via email to this day. Glee was shy and disappeared into her bedroom where constellations glowed in the dark on the ceiling, and William was the first baby I remember being born.

Each week when I stopped for Cheris on my way to our weekly Girl Scout meeting, I always managed to arrive early in hopes of catching an adventure in process. A mural of a seaside village could drop from the wall to become a dining room table large enough for the whole Gamble family and half a dozen guests. The wall over the couch was covered with pictures of family and friends hung on wide grosgrain ribbon that changed with the season and the occasion. During the last week of April, the ribbon was always purple and my picture joined those of other Scouts and the family to celebrate Cheris’ birthday. Birthday parties were always special at the Gambles. We pulled taffy and made our initials to take home as favors. We caught soap bubbles in the skirts of our party dresses, played charades, and learned to do the Charleston. One time we turned the fluffy Angora cat lavender by swooshing her gently in a washtub tinted with food coloring.

An elaborate sound system connected all the rooms with an even more elaborate control panel mounted above each light switch to regulate the direction, volume and tone of music or conversations between family members. Cheris could flip a switch from her bedroom (or anyone of the three bathrooms) to say hello when I had arrived. It seemed like magic until I discovered the tiny camera and microphone that worked like the bell in the drugstore to let the family know someone was in the front hall. If I was expected, I didn’t need to knock or ring the bell. I could simply come in and sit on the carpeted stairs or a sofa and read.

I preferred the stairs where books were stacked on each step. Our house had magazines, drafts of masters’ thesis, and carefully chosen read-aloud books from the library. The Gamble House had books in every room and on every surface – picture books for little kids and coffee table books with pictures of Rome and Egypt and the Amazon River, poetry and short stories, engineering books with diagrams of windmills and radios, medical books with detailed pictures of all the human systems, fiction, non-fiction, poetry–and encyclopedias. There were several sets of encyclopedias, each with at least one volume missing because whole sections had been tom out for a school project or the set was incomplete when Mrs. Gamble bought it at a farm sale or thrift shop. It was like the library, only better, because all the books could be read by anyone of any age. In fact, if you wanted a particular book and the upstairs librarian at the Andrew Carnegie Library judged it unsuitable for children, Mrs. Gamble would check it out on her card. Since she went to the library at least once week, you never had to wait long, and you could choose to read the selected book at her house or take it home, depending upon your parents’ prejudices and level of scrutiny. She would renew a book twice, but if you were late returning it, you paid the fine.

My favorite times were when Mrs. Gamble would call from the kitchen. “Mary Ann, can you help me a bit? I need to figure out why someone would want to use Camay soap instead of Ivory in 25 words or less.” I’d scurry through the living room, past the pictures on the wall and the table hiding behind the seaside village to find her sitting at the kitchen table. A jumble of papers and pencils, paper clips and scissors, rubber cement and library paste spread over the Lazy Susan built into the center of the table. She’d give it a spin so I could see the starts and stops she had already made and we’d get to work. Until Cheris came flying done the backstairs, the two of us would play with words and make long lists of adjectives: gentle, delicate, easy, soft, mild, tender, placid, peaceful, quiet, serene, calm or strong, muscular, tough, sturdy, durable, hard-wearing, indestructible or clean, spotless, polished, immaculate, fresh, uncontaminated, sanitary, sterile.

Weeks later, she’d meet me at the door. “Come quickly and let’s see what we’ve won.” A brown box secured with tape and twine would be sitting on the Lazy Susan. Together we’d read the return address and try to remember what we’d said for which contest. Mrs. Gamble always mailed in the final copy of each entry and threw away all the drafts. “It’s much more fun to be surprised than to worry about whether or not the judges liked our words, isn’t it?” I agreed, and she won often enough that frequent packages provided plenty of motivation to continue writing. Sometimes she won first prize, but more often a second prize or an honorable mention award was in the box. Honorable mentions were usually rewarded with coupons or pamphlets filled with helpful homemaking tips, which she would share if she had duplicates. Laundry products and cookbooks were standard second prizes and first prizes were money or a blender. Once she gave me a blender as a thank-you for helping her think of 25 words to describe why margarine was as tasty as butter. That was a challenge, and I thought I deserved it, but my mother wouldn’t let me keep it.

Any mention of the Gamble House or its occupants other than Cheris was verboten in our house. When I forgot and gushed about the neat contraption Mr. Gamble had built so Mrs. Gamble didn’t have to carry wet clothes up the basement stairs, Daddy would turn red and start to fume. Mom would firmly interrupt with, “‘Not at the dinner table! Why don’t you tell Daddy about the tray favors you made at Scouts today?” I knew the rules: no discussion of sex, religion, or politics at the table and talking about the Gambles crossed the line of campus politics. Mr. Gamble, with an M.S. from the School of Mines in Rapid City, was a tinkerer who spent his time fixing up old houses instead of running his department like he should at the college. Daddy was an agricultural scientist with a Ph.D. from Purdue who had expanded the agronomy department from four to 54 staff members in ten years. Mr. Gamble wanted the engineering division to offer advanced degrees like the agriculture and liberal arts divisions had started to do, and my principled father continually counted votes on the Graduate School Governing Committee to make sure that didn’t happen until the ratio of engineers with advanced degrees to students equaled that of the other divisions. I followed the rules and kept my discoveries at the Gamble House hidden with other information that was seen and heard and never discussed.

When I married my engineer husband, the Gambles sent me a blender.

****

After a delightful romp with Mary Ann through her memory of visits with the Gambles and being allowed to re-experience the way kids gravitate to what interests and excites them despite adult disapproval, I felt suddenly cut off at the end.  What did this blender mean to the speaker then or now. Did she ever show it to her parents? What was their reaction? How did or does she use the blender? Does she do anything now that reminds her of the Gambles–writing, listing adjectives? Even one more sentence will make a big difference in having the essay come full circle.

I wrote to Mary Ann that if she wanted to continue working on the essay, she might consider the questions that I had had as a reader and continuing writing a bit longer at the essay’s end.

Mary Ann wrote back with a new ending that hit the mark:

When I married my engineer husband, the Gambles sent me a blender. I never told my parents about their gift, but each time I puree potato-cheddar soup or blend bananas and strawberries in a smoothie, I think of 25 words or less in appreciation of the towers of books, pink cats and flights of imagination I learned at the house of seven Gambles.

She had also taken the time to read her essay to Cheris, who helped her remember some things more exactly.
About this process, Mary Ann wrote:

I shared my “House of the Seven Gambles” with my friend Cheris since I had taken a few creative liberties and wanted her permission to go ahead with revising it.  She recognized my stretches of imagination, approved of them, and thanked me for reminding her of things like the birthday parties and “Rogue’s Gallery” above the sofa she hadn’t thought about in years. The essay also prompted a discussion about our fathers’ involvement in campus and local politics that I’m sure will be continued when we get together in September for our 50th high school reunion since we both have such lop-sided pictures of what was going on and who were the good guys and who were the bad guys.

Cheris also provided two factual corrections…The first is that her father had a master’s degree from the University of Wisconsin rather than the School of Mines – and second, he was the head of the electrical engineering department.  I’ve also added a bit of a disclaimer to that sentence since Cheris shared some additional information about her dad. (He owned some apartment buildings in town but was very careful not to work on them himself so that he couldn’t be accused of having two jobs at once. Mrs. Gamble evidently did all the repairs and decorating and property management. He also served on local and state utility commissions with the blessing of the college administration, which I can see must have added fuel to my father’s envy and competitive spirit.)

****

Here’s Mary Ann’s fully revised essay, after considering Cheris’ information and some more tinkering (as writers do we ever believe we are finished?):

The House of Seven Gambles
By Mary Ann Payne 

The Gamble House was my favorite destination as a child. Not the famous Greene and Greene craftsman house in Pasadena, but a remodeled frame house at the corner of Medary and Seventh Street in Brookings, South Dakota. My friend Cheris was the middle child of a rollicking family whose exploits were recorded in a weekly newspaper column by their mother and encouraged by their father. Mr. Gamble was Chairman of the Mechanical Engineering Department at the local college and filled the house with time and money saving devices that were the marvel of anyone under ten. Donna was the oldest. She was studying to be a nurse and showed us how to dissect frogs and cats and tiny dogs. Brice was second and had inherited his father’s mechanical abilities. While in high school, he used spare bicycle parts to create tandem bikes he rented to college students and unicycles for the family to ride. Cheris was my friend and part of the Girl Scout Troop formed when we were in second grade, a group that continues via email to this day. Glee was shy and disappeared into her bedroom where constellations glowed in the dark on the ceiling, and William was the youngest and the first baby I remember being born.

 When I stopped for Cheris on my way to our weekly Girl Scout meeting, I always managed to arrive early in hopes of catching an adventure in process. A mural of a seaside village could drop from the wall to become a dining room table large enough for the whole Gamble family and half a dozen guests. The wall over the couch was covered with pictures of family and friends hung on wide grosgrain ribbon that changed with the season and the occasion. Birthday parties were particularly special at the Gambles. We pulled taffy and made our initials to take home as favors. We caught soap bubbles in the skirts of our party dresses, played charades, and learned to do the Charleston. One time we turned the fluffy Angora cat pink by swooshing her gently in a washtub tinted with food coloring.

An elaborate sound system connected all the rooms with an even more elaborate control panel mounted above each light switch to regulate the direction, volume and tone of music or conversations between family members. Cheris could flip a switch from her bedroom (or any one of the three bathrooms) to say hello when I arrived. It seemed like magic until I discovered the tiny camera and microphone that worked like the bell in the drugstore to let the family know someone was in the front hall. If I was expected, I didn’t need to knock or ring the bell. I could simply come in and sit on the carpeted stairs or a sofa and read.

I preferred the stairs where towers of books were stacked on each step. Our house had practical reading material like Better Homes and Gardens, drafts of masters’ thesis, and a few carefully chosen read-aloud books from the library. The Gamble House had books simply to enjoy in every room and on every surface – picture books for little kids and coffee table books with pictures of Rome and Egypt and the Amazon River, poetry and short stories, engineering books with diagrams of windmills and radios, medical books with detailed pictures of all the human systems, fiction, non-fiction, poetry – and encyclopedias. There were several sets of encyclopedias, each with at least one volume missing because whole sections had been torn out for a school project or the set was incomplete when Mrs. Gamble bought it at a farm sale or thrift shop. It was like the library, only better, because all the books could be read by anyone of any age. In fact, if you wanted a particular book and the upstairs librarian at the Andrew Carnegie Library judged in unsuitable for children, Mrs. Gamble would check it out on her card. Since she went to the library at least once week, you never had to wait long – and you could choose to read the selected book at her house or take it home depending upon your parents’ prejudices and level of scrutiny. She would renew a book twice, but if you were late returning it, you paid the fine.

Sometimes Mrs. Gamble would call from the kitchen. “Mary Ann, can you help me a bit? I need to figure out why someone would want to use Camay instead of Ivory in 25 words or less.”  I’d scurry through the living room past the pictures on the wall and the table hiding behind the seaside village to find her sitting at the kitchen table. A jumble of papers and pencils, paper clips and scissors, rubber cement and library paste spread over the Lazy Susan built into the center of the table. She’d give it a spin so I could see the starts and stops she had already made and we’d get to work. Until Cheris came flying done the back stairs to go to Scouts, the two of us would play with words and make long lists of adjectives: gentle, delicate, easy, soft, mild, tender, placid, peaceful, quiet, serene, calm or strong, muscular, tough, sturdy, durable, hard-wearing, indestructible or clean, spotless, polished, immaculate, fresh, uncontaminated, sanitary, sterile. Over several months, we crafted words to capture the unique properties of products we had never tried.

About once a month, Mrs. Gamble would meet me at the door. “Come quickly and let’s see what we’ve won.”  A brown box secured with tape and twine would be sitting on the Lazy Susan. Together we’d read the return address and try to remember what we’d said for which contest. Mrs. Gamble always mailed in the final copy of each entry and threw away all the drafts. “It’s much more fun to be surprised than to worry about whether or not the judges liked our words, isn’t it?”  I agreed, and she won often enough that frequent packages provided plenty of motivation to continue writing. Sometimes she won first prize, but more often a second prize or an honorable mention award was in the box. Honorable mentions were usually rewarded with coupons or pamphlets filled with helpful homemaking tips, which she would share if she had duplicates. Laundry products and cookbooks were standard second prizes and first prizes were money or a blender. Once she gave me a blender as a thank-you for helping her think of 25 words to describe why margarine was as tasty as butter. That was a challenge and I thought I deserved the blender, but my mother wouldn’t let me keep it.

Any mention of the Gamble House or its occupants other than Cheris was verboten in our house. When I forgot and gushed about the neat contraption Mr. Gamble had built so Mrs. Gamble didn’t have to carry wet clothes up the basement stairs, Daddy turned red and started to fume. Mom firmly interrupted with “Not at the dinner table! Why don’t you tell Daddy about the tray favors you made at Scouts today?”  I knew the rules: no discussion of sex, religion, or politics at the table and talking about the Gambles crossed the line into campus politics. According to my father, Mr. Gamble, with an M.S. from the University of Wisconsin, was a tinkerer who spent his time fixing up old houses instead of running the electrical engineering department he headed like he should. Daddy, an agricultural scientist with a Ph.D. from Purdue, took great pride in expanding the agronomy department from four to 54 staff members in ten years. Mr. Gamble wanted the engineering division to offer advanced degrees like the agriculture and liberal arts divisions had started to do. My principled father continually lobbied to make sure that didn’t happen until the number of engineers with advanced degrees equaled that of the other divisions.

I followed the rules and kept my discoveries at the Gamble House to myself. When I married my engineer husband, the Gambles sent me a blender. I never told my parents about their gift, but each time I puree potato-cheddar soup or blend bananas and strawberries in a smoothie, I think of 25 words or less in appreciation of the towers of books, pink cats and flights of imagination I learned at the house of seven Gambles.

****

Mary Ann had had a hunch that her original ending wasn’t quite right, but the deadline day had come and she entered the essay.  I am very glad she did and I am also very glad we used the opportunity to tune up her entry and create a satisfying read.