by Jesse Kraai
LISA
a chess novel
JESSE KRAAI
ZUGZWANG PRESS
Copyright © 2013 Jesse Kraai
All rights reserved. This books or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Printed in the United States of America
First Printing, 2013
Zugzwang Press
Jessekraai.com
THE JOURNAL
A ceremony once marked the completion of Lisa’s journals. Her mother would take the finished work into her hands and hold it for a time with her eyes closed, as if she were giving thanks. But she would never look inside, for the journal was private. Then, together, Lisa and her mother would begin to craft Lisa’s next book. They ran linen thread through wax. They bound the pages to one another with a Coptic stitch. Finally, her mother would bring forth a colorful postcard—once it was Renoir’s Banks of the Seine at Asnieres, another time it was a bunch of colored tiles by a guy named Mondrian. Lisa and her mother glued a postcard on the cover of every new journal. And Lisa would often return to those decorations, wondering what her mother hoped her to find in the blank pages beneath them.
In those early days, Lisa’s mother sometimes recited a small section of the Schmied family’s Tagebuchlied or Song of the Journal that had been passed down through the generations:
Know the earth your roots meet,
Pushing down, with many feet
Name the stones that you grip,
Hold tight, and do not slip
Upward stalk in the wind,
Pass doch auf kleines Kind!
But her mother—whom everyone else called Jan—didn’t know what the last line meant, nor could she remember the rest of the song that her mother—Lisa’s grandmother, Lena—had sung to her.
Jan had always been too busy running her kitchen and home store, Domestique, to write in her own journal. And ever since she had expanded the business to four stores, she hadn’t had time to sew the pages together. Lisa’s new journals were from her mother’s flagship store in Orinda. They were heavy, with hard covers and a clasping lock. A splatter of noble wood fragments gave each thick page a unique texture. And they all read “My Diary” in big curvy letters.
As Lisa grew older, Jan began to disapprove of the large amount of time she spent with her journal, as if it were a security blanket that her daughter needed to let go of. But she never admitted it. Jan would only repeat, over and over, that Lisa, now thirteen, needed to learn to face the world. And she let Lisa’s stepfather, Ted, tease her about her journal. “Oh, go hide in your book!” he would say—or, “Must be some expensive thoughts you’re writing on those woody pages.”
But Lisa would not betray her journal, the one friend who offered her insight and loyalty. On January 30th she wrote, “The rainy season has come back. Like a forgotten memory, the wet darkness holds me. Thick clouds won’t let me see. And I am left to myself, withering and whitening. The kids at school don’t want to feel the rain. They hide their ignorance underneath facts: how long it’s been raining, rain clothes, condensation, forecasts. And I’m rolled up like a burrito in their assembly lines all day long.”
Lisa began to casually leave her journal around the house—on the long granite countertops of her mother’s spacious kitchen, on the colorful tiles next to the sink of the downstairs bathroom, stenciled with native Californian plants Lisa had never seen—always with her entry from January 30th facing outward. But nothing changed. Jan continued to talk about Lisa’s middling grades. She complained that Lisa didn’t have any friends. And she sometimes even made odd remarks that seemed to refer to how fat Lisa was.
Lisa was supposed to be like the other girls at her small college-prep school, Mens Conscia Recti. They were so engaged with life! Together, they knew what they were supposed to do. And Lisa did try to join them, when she first arrived at the school a year before, in seventh grade.
Lisa thought her wit would have to come fast, before she lost her chance. Someone would interrupt her if she allowed any breath between her words. But her hurried sentences floated down like shredded paper in front of the other girls. And she soon found herself on the outside, staring at their lithe backs, their earrings and their perfect hair.
Lisa began to look down on their inane conversations about boys, makeup and clothes. She hated the way they always did what they were supposed to. Life was so easy for them, so thoughtless. Everything they did was about getting into Berkeley, or Stanford. That unoriginal goal—which wasn’t really even theirs—was the only meaning their lives had. They are like cows, Lisa thought, trusting the rancher’s prods to guide them down his corridors of barred steel to his cornmeal. They think he acts in their best interest.
Alone with her journal, Lisa became skilled at finding the tender wounds of the people around her. She stabbed at Ted’s emotional ignorance, her teachers’ slavishness and Jan’s hypocrisy. With her fine blade of sarcasm and irony she cut through all of their intestinal muck until she felt the hard grimace of the backbone. Then she would pull violently to the head, and all of their squishy bits would pop out and ooze.
Like the Hercules beetle, whose gruesome black pincers grossly outsize its body, all Lisa could ever see was her own weaponry. And she had to drag that heavy load around with her wherever she went.
Through the journal, Lisa expected to know and manipulate the textures and patterns around her. Filling its pages, she expected to gain foresight, and carefully choose the friends and enemies who would define her. But she didn’t feel in control. And there were many things she wanted to know, but could not discover—especially about herself.
Lisa needed to find Grandma Lena’s journals. They would show her how to write in her own. But the house was huge, and there were any number of places where Jan might have hidden them. The rooms were cluttered with neglected stuff that Jan couldn’t sell at her store, because of a chip or a scratch. The redwood dresser was full of clothes that needed to be donated. The fifteen hundred thread-count bedspreads in the guest rooms had suntan lines. And the stalks of once wildly exotic plants drooped over great clay pots like strings exhausted by a cat. “It’s not a house. It’s a home.” That was Domestique’s slogan. But Jan’s own home looked more like a warehouse.
*
Lisa thought it wouldn’t be so hard to find herself. After all, her own words didn’t have to put on clothes or give themselves airs when they went about and talked with one another. But Lisa didn’t know where to start. It seemed natural that she begin with her most elevating experiences, moments like the wet of January 30th, when her intimate connection to the world felt like a call to something higher.
It was such an exhausting task that Lisa had to fast from school. She did what her teachers asked, but with dull eyes and limp limbs. She just needed to get through it, then she could be alone in her large room on the quiet side of the house. Everything outside that room became drowsy. And her classes, once overgrown with thorny bushes of failure and displacement, now thinned into featureless tundra.
Every night, Lisa expected the rain’s chanting patter to allow her past the barriers that made the daylight so insensitive and cruel. And she did drop, as if into a well, briefly caressing leathery patches, sandy ridges and sections of lace as she fell. But she wasn’t able to return from these pilgrimages of her soul with anything tangible that she could be proud of. She only found dinky trinkets, false souvenirs of herself. Like the kind of thing she saw on bumper stickers, or tattooed on the unfortunate arm of a young girl. They could hold a sentiment, but never her. And they certainly never encompassed her with the shrouding intimacy of the
cold and dark rain.
School was not ending. It moved with the groping motions of a garden slug, slowly tearing windows in the thick greens for the coming sun. And as the rainy season extended, Lisa’s nocturnal discoveries became more ghastly. She found herself naked in the middle of the girls from school. They laughed at her and wouldn’t give her any of their clothes. Lisa broke all of the expensive wine glasses at Jan’s store and made the customers walk over the shards with bare feet. And she killed Ted, with poison, knives and kitchen gadgets.
These images created a biting pressure, like one of the ballooning pimples on her face. And they had to be uncaged. It was a release to cut her arm with a razor, to watch the animal within her pulse its blood. And Lisa did feel free when she called her mother “Jan,” like everybody else did. These violent acts were a revenge upon the darkness that wouldn’t let her see herself.
*
One very early morning, a faint light glooming through the thickly painted glass of the clouds, Lisa thought she was outside. Lying in wet, neither asleep nor awake, Lisa waited for the rain to deepen. Slowly, she began to fall and feel the puddle rise around her. Unseen men lowered her with thick ropes. As her descent accelerated, a woven script unfurled away from her, and stuck to the sides of her casket-sized plunge. Lisa felt called to awake and read the patterns on her fabrics, to see herself. But she could not. An alarm clock rang, and another day sulked through its sameness and small thoughts, for the reward of another evening to herself.
*
For years, Jan had driven Lisa to activities. They were designed to turn Lisa outward, and integrate her into the world. Some were supposed to make her smarter. Others tried to make her more social. And even though Jan never said it, Lisa knew that many were designed to make her lose weight. Lisa suffered most of these patiently: horseback riding, swim lessons, story time, therapy with Dr. Frohlich. Lisa was usually happy to be alone. She could wait for friends. They would be older, and show Lisa something more than the small world she was forced to inhabit.
But the animal shrieking of young boys at chess class always made Lisa feel bitterly lonesome. Jan took her there every Tuesday and Thursday. Alone in a boil of unspanked violence, with no other girls in the room to pillow the boys’ barking, Lisa was in the way. And she would discover herself looking and feeling paranoid, especially when she had to hold her hands up as if they were earmuffs, to protect her head and her glasses from the projectile weapons chess pieces can become.
Each chess lesson had a preamble. To Lisa, it always sounded like, “Get ready to smear our peanut butter all over this AMAZING obstacle course. It’s gonna be great!” It was easy for Lisa to sit back and not care. Like at school, some boy would always be too eager to regurgitate the gluey cud when her turn came around.
The lesson never lasted very long. The slouchy man at the head of the class couldn’t tame the boys. He would gently ask them to be quiet, to pay attention. But they would not. They talked back, and said things like, “But I got the ADD!” So they were allowed to play variants of the game. They played Bullet chess, where each side has one minute for the whole game. They played Atomic chess, where the most recently played piece explodes everything in its vicinity. And they played Suicide, where the boys raced to get rid of all of their pieces. These were all very loud.
On a Tuesday in April, Lisa awoke from her tired stupor. A boy was shouting at her: “GO! . . . I’M VERSING YOU . . . HEY! . . . MOVE!” A man came by to hush the boy, but Lisa could see the next scream filling the monster’s eyes like a water balloon. The violent splash would come. The wave would recede, and Lisa would lie broken on the floor, as she always feared her glasses would be. It was unfair. What, after all, did the boy’s pushiness have to do with her?
Lisa remembered the ropes pulling on her. The rooty mess of her puddle scratched her. The slime of seaweed slithered around her like snakes as she broke her fingernails on the stones she wasn’t strong enough to dislodge from the sand. Why couldn’t she clean it out? Where was the sublime between she had felt inside her drown of rain? It had been so simple and whole. Why was it so hard to find again? Lisa needed the closeness to save herself, a promise of a deeper world to hold against the cruel thoughtlessness of her waking day.
Several moves had already been played. Had she made those moves? The chaotic clump of the matte plastic pieces was like a small patch of ground that her face had been shoved up against. She felt that she was supposed to get up from that humiliated view. It was animal to be so close to the ground. But she saw no reason to get up. She knew the phony exhaustion of the world up there too well.
Lisa looked. An ant appeared. Soon, some friends followed its path. They had discovered a flower, and were harvesting something from its yellow calyx. A small spider was nearby, but she didn’t seem to be interested in the ants, as if she were in a different world, concerned with something else. Glistening trails of some creature pointed their way to a different flower.
Softly, the pieces began to reveal their discussion. Unlike the braille around her, Lisa could see the friendship of her pieces. Rains would come, the geography would shift, and the group would have to foresee new ways to hold hands across the mounds, rivulets and pits. Lisa could feel her pieces warming each other, with the familial coziness of mammals, but without the mammalian need to turn on each other. They were consonant.
Lisa’s immobile meditation punished the boy. The slap and bang of his pieces drifted off into the silence. And the waterslide of his quick decisions, rushing down to a splashy pool, was taken from him like a toy. He wasn’t going to land in fun. His command was at first angry, “MOOOhoove, moWOOVVE!” But then it became a plaintive, bovine despair.
No, Lisa would not move. She sat. The moves she had already played on the board were not hers; they were sleepy decisions, unaware of themselves. Nor would she have her pieces coarsened by the boy. Her close view, pushed to the ground, able to see what everyone else walked over, was hers alone. All the other games were finished, and the boys huddled together on a nearby table to stack the pieces as high as they could. They hooked the heads of four knights onto the crown of a rook, building the base. They strategized ways to build something on top of the bishop’s pointy head. Then, when the construction fell, and chess pieces were spit out into the far corners of the room, the boys shrieked “Jenga!” Delighted, they began their task anew, with a different set. Lisa continued her meditation.
*
Thursday. Lisa watched the boys tumble into the after-school class that never started on time. One group of boys imagined themselves wizards, and cast down terrible spells upon their opponents with the fanciful cards of Magic The Gathering: “Treva is the voice of the ur-dragon, demanding cries of worship.” “I’ll rain down on you with the power of magic itself. Then we’ll see who prevails.” Some other boys were playing bughouse, a tag-team chess match, and a boy was already climbing up to the top rope of the wrestling cage he imagined himself in. He wore a red cape and a scary mask of curving black and white streaks. When he landed his knight he yelled, “Oh, OHHH, TAASTE MEEE!”
Lisa was awake now to the teacher. He had to speak quickly, and loudly, to meet the tyranny of the boys’ needs. But Lisa expected chess to speak through the man. If she listened carefully, the game’s powerful words would rise like invocations up into the cruder world she was forced to inhabit. But she could not discover any deeper meaning in his words.
*
Lisa hadn’t spent time in the living room in months. It was Ted’s space—“the man cave,” as he called it. But that night she wanted to explore the chess world on Jan’s laptop. She wasn’t allowed to have her own. They were dangerous. A big engine sound revved colorful cars around a track inside Ted’s big screen. An empty carton of yellow curry poked out of the plastic bag he had brought it home in. Gentle burps of beery satisfaction rose from his belly as he enjoyed the race. Ted worked hard all day, managing hotels or something. He had earned the right to rest his dirty socks on his gl
ass coffee table.
Lisa had eaten Ted’s take-out food. He liked his bites to contain the unexpected. He didn’t want to know the names of the spices; he wanted them to bounce through him wildly, like a maniac shooting off fireworks in the sewer. He felt the same way about his eighty-inch flat-screen TV. He wanted to be dragged out into the unknown in a violent undertow of color and sound.
Lisa sat with Ted on his leather couch as Google led her to a Bay Area chess group for women on chess.com. There was only one event listed. Lisa imagined a sea of kindred seekers at the Northern California Girls Championship, girls who shared what she had found. There would be older girls there, high school girls. In them, Lisa would be able to see women she could become. In three weeks, they would share the conversation. And she would finally pursue something Jan wanted—she would play chess.
Jan was sitting on a table behind the couch, just outside the invisible boundary of Ted’s cave, doing the numbers from her store. “Jan,” Lisa shouted over the barrier, “I’m going to play in the Northern California Girls Championship.”
Jan looked up from the concerns of an Excel spreadsheet she had printed out. “Championship? Of what?” she asked.
“Chess,” Lisa said.
“You mean there’s a separate tournament for girls?”
Lisa shrugged.
Jan put on her disappointed face and said, “I thought chess was supposed to be just a game, for fun?”
“I want to play, Jan.”
It seemed like Jan did not want her to play, but didn’t know how to forbid her. Instead, Jan asked, “Why does it have to be way off in Fremont?” “Why does it have to last all weekend?” And, “Why don’t you want to play with the boys?”
Elegant drapery hung from the tall windows of the man cave. The fabric was gauzy and thin, from Domestique. Lisa used to press her face up against the delicate texture, and look out to Jan in Ted’s world. Then Lisa would blow, as hard as her young lungs could, to encourage the draft of the open window. The drapes would swallow Ted and all his stuff. But now Lisa felt the room collapsing around her, and the light drapes roughened into curtains underneath the undulating whine of Ted’s car race.