The Queen's Gambit (2 page)

Mr. Shaibel was silent for a while. Then he pointed at the one with what looked like a slashed lemon on top. “And this one?”

Her heart leapt. “On the diagonals.”

***

You could save up pills by taking only one at night and keeping the other. Beth put the extras in her toothbrush holder, where nobody would ever look. She just had to make sure to dry the toothbrush as much as she could with a paper towel after she used it, or else not use it at all and rub her teeth clean with a finger.

That night for the first time she took three pills, one after the other. Little prickles went across the hairs on the back of her neck; she had discovered something important. She let the glow spread all over her, lying on her cot in her faded blue pajamas in the worst place in the Girls’ Ward, near the door to the corridor and across from the bathroom. Something in her life was solved: she knew about the chess pieces and how they moved and captured, and she knew how to make herself feel good in the stomach and in the tense joints of her arms and legs, with the pills the orphanage gave her.

***

“Okay, child,” Mr. Shaibel said. “We can play chess now. I play White.”

She had the erasers. It was after Arithmetic, and Geography was in ten minutes. “I don’t have much time,” she said. She had learned all the moves last Sunday, during the hour that chapel allowed her to be in the basement. No one ever missed her at chapel, as long as she checked in, because of the group of girls that came from Children’s, across town. But Geography was different. She was terrified of Mr. Schell, even though she was at the top of the class.

The janitor’s voice was flat. “Now or never,” he said.

“I have Geography…”

“Now or never.”

She thought only a second before deciding. She had seen an old milk crate behind the furnace. She dragged it to the other end of the board, seated herself and said, “Move.”

He beat her with what she was to learn later was called the Scholar’s Mate, after four moves. It was quick, but not quick enough to keep her from being fifteen minutes late for Geography. She said she’d been in the bathroom.

Mr. Schell stood at the desk with his hands on his hips. He surveyed the class. “Have any of you young ladies seen this young lady in the ladies’?”

There were subdued giggles. No hands were raised, not even Jolene’s, although Beth had lied for her twice.

“And how many of you ladies were in the ladies’ before class?”

There were more giggles and three hands.

“And did any of you see Beth there? Washing her pretty little hands, perhaps?”

There was no response. Mr. Schell turned back to the board, where he had been listing the exports of Argentina, and added the word “silver.” For a moment Beth thought it was done with. But then he spoke, with his back to the class. “Five demerits,” he said.

With ten demerits you were whipped on the behind with a leather strap. Beth had felt that strap only in her imagination, but her imagination expanded for a moment with a vision of pain like fire on the soft parts of herself. She put a hand to her heart, feeling in the bottom of the breast pocket of her blouse for that morning’s pill. The fear reduced itself perceptibly. She visualized her toothbrush holder, the long rectangular plastic container; it had four more pills in it now, there in the drawer of the little metal stand by her cot.

That night she lay on her back in bed. She had not yet taken the pill in her hand. She listened to the night noises and noticed how they seemed to get louder as her eyes grew accustomed to the darkness. Down the hallway Mr. Byrne began talking to Mrs. Holland, at the desk. Beth’s body grew taut at the sound. She blinked and looked at the dark ceiling overhead and forced herself to see the chessboard with its green and white squares. Then she put the pieces on their home squares: rook, knight, bishop, queen, king, and the row of pawns in front of them. Then she moved White’s king pawn up to the fourth row. She pushed Black’s up. She could do this! It was simple. She went on, beginning to replay the game she had lost.

She brought Mr. Shaibel’s knight up to the third row. It stood there clearly in her mind on the green-and-white board on the ceiling of the ward.

The noises had already faded into a white, harmonious background. Beth lay happily in bed, playing chess.

***

The next Sunday she blocked the Scholar’s Mate with her king’s knight. She had gone over the game in her mind a hundred times, until the anger and humiliation were purged from it, leaving the pieces and the board clear in her nighttime vision. When she came to play Mr. Shaibel on Sunday, it was all worked out, and she moved the knight as if in a dream. She loved the feel of the piece, the miniature horse’s head in her hand. When she set down the knight on the square, the janitor scowled at it. He took his queen by the head and checked Beth’s king with it. But Beth was ready for that too; she had seen it in bed the night before.

It took him fourteen moves to trap her queen. She tried to play on, queenless, to ignore the mortal loss, but he reached out and stopped her hand from touching the pawn she was about to move. “You resign now,” he said. His voice was rough.

“Resign?”

“That’s right, child. When you lose the queen that way, you resign.”

She stared at him, not comprehending. He let go of her hand, picked up her black king, and set it on its side on the board. It rolled back and forth for a moment and then lay still.

“
No
,” she said.

“Yes. You have resigned the game.”

She wanted to hit him with something. “You didn’t tell me that in the rules.”

“It’s not a rule. It’s sportsmanship.”

She knew now what he meant, but she did not like it. “I want to finish,” she said. She picked up the king and set it back on its square.

“No.”

“You’ve got to finish,” she said.

He raised his eyebrows and got up. She had never seen him stand in the basement—only out in the halls when he was sweeping or in the classrooms when he washed the blackboards. He had to stoop a bit now to keep his head from hitting the rafters on the low ceiling. “No,” he said. “You lost.”

It wasn’t fair. She had no interest in sportsmanship. She wanted to play and to win. She wanted to win more than she had ever wanted anything. She said a word she had not said since her mother died: “Please.”

“Game’s over,” he said.

She stared at him in fury. “You greedy…”

He let his arms drop straight at his sides and said slowly, “No more chess. Get out.”

If only she were bigger. But she wasn’t. She got up from the board and walked to the stairs while the janitor watched her in silence.

***

On Tuesday when she went down the hall to the basement door carrying the erasers, she found that the door was locked. She pushed against it twice with her hip, but it wouldn’t budge. She knocked, softly at first and then loudly, but there was no sound from the other side. It was horrible. She knew he was in there sitting at the board, that he was just being angry at her from the last time, but there was nothing she could do about it. When she brought back the erasers, Miss Graham didn’t even notice they hadn’t been cleaned or that Beth was back sooner than usual.

On Thursday she was certain it would be the same, but it wasn’t. The door was open, and when she went down the stairs, Mr. Shaibel acted as though nothing had happened. The pieces were set up. She cleaned the erasers hurriedly and seated herself at the board. Mr. Shaibel had moved his king’s pawn by the time she got there. She played her king’s pawn, moving it two squares forward. She would not make any mistakes this time.

He responded to her move quickly, and she immediately replied. They said nothing to each other, but kept moving. Beth could feel the tension, and she liked it.

On the twentieth move Mr. Shaibel advanced a knight when he shouldn’t have and Beth was able to get a pawn to the sixth rank. He brought the knight back. It was a wasted move and she felt a thrill when she saw him do it. She traded her bishop for the knight. Then, on the next move, she pushed the pawn again. It would become a queen on the next move.

He looked at it sitting there and then reached out angrily and toppled his king. Neither of them said anything. It was her first win. All of the tension was gone, and what Beth felt inside herself was as wonderful as anything she had ever felt in her life.

***

She found she could miss lunch on Sundays, and no one paid any attention. That gave her three hours with Mr. Shaibel, until he left for home at two-thirty. They did not talk, either of them. He always played the white pieces, moving first, and she the black. She had thought about questioning this but decided not to.

One Sunday, after a game he had barely managed to win, he said to her, “You should learn the Sicilian Defense.”

“What’s that?” she asked irritably.

She was still smarting from the loss. She had beaten him two games last week.

“When White moves pawn to queen four, Black does this.” He reached down and moved the white pawn two squares up the board, his almost invariable first move. Then he picked up the pawn in front of the black queen’s bishop and set it down two squares up toward the middle. It was the first time he had ever shown her anything like this.

“Then what?” she said.

He picked up the king’s knight and set it below and to the right of the pawn. “Knight to KB 3.”

“What’s KB 3?”

“King’s bishop 3. Where I just put the knight.”

“The squares have names?”

He nodded impassively. She sensed that he was unwilling to give up even this much information. “If you play well, they have names.”

She leaned forward. “Show me.”

He looked down at her. “No. Not now.”

This infuriated her. She understood well enough that a person likes to keep his secrets. She kept hers. Nevertheless, she wanted to lean across the board and slap his face and make him tell her. She sucked in her breath. “Is that the Sicilian Defense?”

He seemed relieved that she had dropped the subject of the names of the squares. “There’s more,” he said. He went on with it, showing her the basic moves and some variations. But he did not use the names of the squares. He showed her the Levenfish Variation and the Najdorf Variation and told her to go over them. She did, without a single mistake.

But when they played a real game afterward, he pushed his queen’s pawn forward, and she could see immediately that what he had just taught her was useless in this situation. She glared at him across the board, feeling that if she had had a knife, she could have stabbed him with it. Then she looked back to the board and moved her own queen’s pawn forward, determined to beat him.

He moved the pawn next to his queen’s pawn, the one in front of the bishop. He often did this. “Is that one of those things? Like the Sicilian Defense?” she asked.

“Openings.” He did not look at her; he was watching the board.

“Is it?”

He shrugged. “The Queen’s Gambit.”

She felt better. She had learned something more from him. She decided not to take the offered pawn, to leave the tension on the board. She liked it like that. She liked the power of the pieces, exerted along files and diagonals. In the middle of the game, when pieces were everywhere, the forces crisscrossing the board thrilled her. She brought out her king’s knight, feeling its power spread.

In twenty moves she had won both his rooks, and he resigned.

She rolled over in bed, put a pillow over her head to block out the light from under the corridor door and began to think how you could use a bishop and a rook together to make a sudden check on the king. If you moved the bishop, the king would be in check, and the bishop would be free to do whatever it wanted to on the next move—even take the queen. She lay there for quite a while, thinking excitedly of this powerful attack. Then she took the pillow off and rolled over on her back and made the chessboard on the ceiling and played over all her games with Mr. Shaibel, one at a time. She saw two places where she might have created the rook-bishop situation she had just invented. In one of them she could have forced it by a double threat, and in the other she could probably have sneaked it in. She replayed those two games in her mind with the new moves, and won them both. She smiled happily to herself and fell asleep.

***

The Arithmetic teacher gave the eraser cleaning to another student, saying that Beth needed a rest. It wasn’t fair, because Beth still had perfect grades in Arithmetic, but there was nothing she could do about it. She sat in class when the little red-haired boy went out of the room each day with the erasers, doing her meaningless additions and subtractions with a trembling hand. She wanted to play chess more desperately every day.

On Tuesday and Wednesday she took only one pill and saved the other. On Thursday she was able to go to sleep after playing chess in her mind for an hour or so, and she saved the day’s two pills. She did the same thing on Friday. All day Saturday, doing her work in the cafeteria kitchen and in the afternoon during the Christian movie in the library and the Personal Improvement Talk before dinner, she could feel a little glow whenever she wanted to, knowing that she had six pills in her toothbrush holder.

That night, after lights out, she took them all, one by one, and waited. The feeling, when it came, was delicious—a kind of easy sweetness in her belly and a loosening in the tight parts of her body. She kept herself awake as long as she could to enjoy the warmth inside her, the deep chemical happiness.

On Sunday when Mr. Shaibel asked where she had been, she was surprised that he cared. “They wouldn’t let me out of class,” she said.

He nodded. The chessboard was set up, and she saw to her surprise that the white pieces were facing her side and that the milk crate was already in place. “Do I move first?” she said, incredulous.

“Yes. From now on we take turns. It’s the way the game should be played.”

She seated herself and moved the king’s pawn. Mr. Shaibel wordlessly moved his queen bishop’s pawn. She hadn’t forgotten the moves. She never forgot chess moves. He played the Levenfish Variation; she kept her eyes on his bishop’s command of the long diagonal, the way it was waiting to pounce. And she found a way to neutralize it on the seventeenth move. She was able to trade her own, weaker bishop for it. Then she moved in with her knight, brought a rook out, and had him mated in ten more moves.