by Jesse Kraai
The conversation became unpleasant, especially after Lisa realized she had a winning mantra. Again and again, Lisa repeated her shouting logic: “So, you put me in chess class, and now I can’t play in a tournament? Do you want to take away my journal too? You’re always complaining about it, saying I obsess. That I should exercise, and focus on my grades.” Jan could only counter with complaints, saying that she didn’t have time. Then Lisa threatened to take the train there herself.
*
Lisa prepared for the tournament by playing against herself. She set up five boards throughout the large house—in the garage, the dining room, the blue guest room, the red guest room and on the verandah. Lisa marched a steady circuit through her positions and sought to cultivate her most elevating experiences, the embodied intimacy of the rain and the interconnection she had felt in her game with the rude boy. Before she had only seen what everybody does, that each piece only knows a geometric movement. Now she saw that each piece really only acquires meaning as part of an evolving conversation, that the individualism of each piece is clothed within larger, moving patterns.
Lisa knew only one stratagem: if she took all her opponent’s pieces it wasn’t that hard to figure out how to mate the lone king. This made her pieces greedy. They wanted to hold each in a thick embrace, as if their love were eternal. Lisa practiced feeling that interconnection, striving for a snug mutual defense. Then she would smell for weakness, awkward movements among the herd of opposing pieces. Like a wolf pack, Lisa’s pieces sought to cut the sick and tired from those who might defend them.
Lisa strove to beat the boys in the few competitive games she was allowed to play at the Berkeley Chess School. But the boys’ thoughts were crude. Their pieces had no sense of the herd. And their thoughts didn’t have time to see the whole board. That’s why they rushed their prettiest piece forward, prancing about without any help. Lisa would surround the errant young bull and stab him until he fell. Sadly, these violent eviscerations went largely unnoticed. The glory of Lisa’s triumphs was masked underneath the playful atmosphere of the school, which seemed to insist that chess was just a game.
*
The plastic chess sets in the tournament hall looked like test booklets to Lisa. Garishly shining in the fluorescent light, they marched in long rows upon the fold-down cafeteria tables. Lisa wanted to run away. But she found herself trapped, like a soldier in a forward-moving box of men, advancing to the front. Some of her peers might also want to run, but they would never be able to escape all by themselves. Fear moved everybody onwards.
Lisa was alienated by the hunger to prove themselves that she saw in the girls around her. It surprised her to see that they were not like her. They didn’t come from the same place. It seemed like one bus full of girls had arrived straight from India, and another from China. Lisa was imagining chess among women to be like a sacred ceremony, not a test. And she was ashamed to admit that she had been hoping to meet a white girl, someone like her.
But Lisa would have a whole hour to play her moves. No boy would shout at her. And she didn’t have to play against herself—it would be a real conversation. Lisa found her seat in the anonymous hall. She prepared her scoresheet, carefully writing down her name and that of her opponent, Shreya Datta. Finally, her puddle would have rain and a chance to deepen itself.
But Lisa’s first-round opponent moved too fast, like an anxious boy. Nor did she feel the bonds between her pieces, and Lisa began collecting them.
The scoretable to which Lisa and her opponent reported their result was the only place in the wide hall that seemed inviting and friendly. A light paisley cloth covered a circular wooden table of dark oak. And a bouquet of irises stood behind a sign that read “Wim Ruth Charing, Chief Arbiter.” What strange names people have here, Lisa thought. The unsaturated colors of the older woman’s clothes drew Lisa in. Heathered, they gracefully acquiesced to the darkness of the rainy season.
Lisa came up to this woman and said, “Hi Wim, my name is Lisa. Me and Shreya are here to record our result.”
Ruth laughed and said, “Nice to meet you, Lisa. My name is Ruth. WIM stands for Women’s International Master.”
After each of her games, Lisa would come to sit down on the cold linoleum, underneath the paisley skirts of Ruth’s table. She liked to be hidden, and listen to Ruth talk about chess with the players and adults who reported to her. Sometimes, when Ruth had a free moment from the administration of the tournament, she would tell Lisa stories from her life in the game. Jan was far away, using her cell phone to place orders for her store on the other side of the large cafeteria hall.
Lisa won rounds two and three in much the same way she had won round one. Two remaining games would be played the following day. Lisa didn’t think too much about her wins, but she was surprised that her eager opponents could not see the threats their pieces stood under. As the room was being tidied, and Lisa and Jan were leaving, Ruth came up to Lisa and said, “I watched some of your third round. You’re really good, especially for someone who has never played in a tournament before. And now you’re tied for first place. I think you might have a chance! Especially since Emily Zuo isn’t here.”
Everyone, especially Ruth, had been talking about Emily at the score table. She was rated 1672, and was taught by some famous guy named Khmelnitsky. But Emily had to take the SATs that weekend. Lisa didn’t know anything about ratings. It seemed like the kind of thing a boy would get excited about. They said that Emily had represented Northern California at the Polgar Girls Tournament the year before—that was where the winner of the Northern California Girls Championship got to go.
“Come on, Lisa, we have to go. I have to go to the store to clean up a mess,” Jan demanded. Lisa felt she had always been tugged away by Jan. And she wanted to shout at her, like an insistent horn in a traffic jam: “Jan, can you wait a second?” But she calmed herself. Ruth, after all, was standing right there.
“Ruth,” Lisa asked, “why does it matter if you win or lose?”
Ruth fell into thought, as Lisa felt Jan’s impatience tightening into silence. “I’m not sure anyone has ever asked me that before, Lisa,” Ruth said. “I guess it’s because we can measure ourselves in the game. In real life, our thoughts flow out of us like water. We don’t know if they will be understood, or where they will go. At some point they evaporate, like my voice in this room.”
Jan pulled Lisa away. “Thank you very much, Ruth,” she said. “I’ll have Lisa here for round four tomorrow morning.”
Lisa thought about what Ruth said about measuring yourself all night. In chess, you could see all the pieces and you knew how they moved. That’s what made it honest. It wasn’t like life. But what was the measure? Ruth talked about ratings all the time, as if a person’s rating was somehow a reflection of the quality of their meditation. To Lisa, ratings seemed like birdcages suspended in an elaborate pulley system: however much someone went up, someone else went down. Those cages seemed like places for boys to hide, so that they wouldn’t have to know the experience of the rain, or ever truly look at their pieces. But Lisa was flattered that Ruth had watched over her thoughts, and praised her meditation. She did want to please Ruth.
*
The next day, after she had won her fourth round game, Lisa overheard the anxious complaints of a mother from her hidden linoleum cave. Lisa could only see the woman’s legs from her place beneath Ruth’s table. They were thin and muscular, so unlike the blue veins and thick ankles she was used to seeing in kids’ moms. And her toenails weren’t painted. “My daughter not pay tension,” the mother shouted. “She not Con-cen-trate. I try tell her. I always tell her. But she not listen. I not know what wrong with her. You chess lady. You talk.” In Ruth’s most lofty vision of herself she was a volunteer for women’s chess, but now Lisa could feel her squirming as a passive listener to all the girl’s failings, repeated by her mother. “Tell chess lady why you not Con-cen-trate.” Ruth was trapped behind the oak table that she had brought from
home, not knowing what answer to give.
Did Claire Ho’s mom want her daughter to know about the measure Ruth told her about yesterday? Lisa wondered. Were Ruth’s measure and Claire’s mom’s the same? Why doesn’t Jan care about chess? Alone, hidden, the pieces know what they want, but the people who move them don’t seem to know at all.
Ruth gently pulled Claire to her. She stroked her shiny black hair and consoled her loss. Claire looked down at the floor, and repeated in the most plain American English, “I tried. I really tried.” Lisa thought Claire must know that she was right beneath the table, behind the paisley cloth. Her downward eyes must see her. Lisa was about to jump up, out of her hidden place, and tell Claire about the ants, the spider, the interconnection and the text. Chess wasn’t school! It wasn’t some dumb obstacle course you had to run through to get a grade. Lisa didn’t know how she was going to say it. It would all just spill out. But then Claire’s mother furiously said, “No comfort, not deserve. Tell her Con-cen-trate!”
An assistant arbiter, distinguished by a piece of blue felt wrapped around her arm, came by the table to calm the distress. Playfully joking, she said, “Have you guys heard that Igor Ivanov talks to his pieces? They say he talks to them the same way I talk to my cat. ‘Pebbles,’ I say, ‘what do you really want out of life?’ Pebbles never says anything back. Sometimes he licks himself. But Igor says the pieces tell him all kinds of things.” This vision of chess craziness lifted all three women, and they shared the bond of a condescending smile. Chess was, after all, just a game.
Once they were alone again, Lisa asked Ruth about Igor.
“Oh, Igor was a great talent,” Ruth replied. “He came to this country years ago, but lost his way in drink. He’s still the strongest player in the area, and wins whenever he plays. Chess is everything to him. I don’t think he ever had much of a life outside it.”
“Does he really talk to his pieces?” Lisa asked.
Ruth laughed. “Well, I’ve never seen him do it, but for him the pieces are like an extension of himself. He says he is his pieces. Totally crazy, huh?”
GANDER
Walking kale crowded the narrow path to the grandmaster’s cottage. Eight feet tall, the perennial plant extended its many fronds like hands on long arms. Underneath them was a rich forest of annual kales, the frilly blackish green of dinosaur, the poisonous-looking bright colors of rainbow and the prickly stems of Siberian dwarf.
To get to the grandmaster’s door, Lisa had to squeeze her body around a wooden cart of horse shit that was harnessed to an enormous steel bike. The bike’s seat loomed behind her head like a fence post, forcing her on top of a dirty brown mat that said “Welcome.” Lisa knocked and waited. She tried to push her tank top down over her belly. But her flesh rolled away from her; the stretchy piece of cotton never stayed. Her pastel blue shirt was a ribbon around a present no one wanted.
“Grandmaster Ivanov?” Lisa could barely hear her own voice. Then she spoke with more force, directly into the door she had just knocked on: “My name is Lisa. I’m a chessplayer.” The floorboards squealed as the man came to his door. The right-hand side of his shirt had just been fisted into his pants. His belt buckle hung open, and soiled jeans slid down his lean frame.
The giant man finally looked down and found Lisa. He began to examine her. And it was then that Lisa first saw real chess eyes. They were cold and wet, like a healthy dog’s nose, impolitely sniffing at all the things she couldn’t smell herself.
Lisa’s sentences began to jump. “I found you with Google. My parents will never know I’m here. They get home late. School is just two train stops away. I want you to teach me. I won the Northern California Girls Championship. I got some study money. From the Polgar Foundation. I need to train. For the Polgar Girls Tournament. At the end of the summer. I can pay you.”
Lisa had waited for the shuttle with the other kids, just like every other day. The high wooden-shingled roofs of their private college-prep school were warm and ordered, like a summer camp. The boys jumped on each other, made the wave with their stomach muscles, and did the armpit fart. The girls stood aside, superior and mature. The rainy season was over, and school would end soon.
Lisa took the school shuttle to the train with them. She knew she could break the rules and simply walk the four blocks to the train station, through the dangerous traffic. But Lisa wanted them to know that she was going in the other direction. They would follow the customary path, and travel through the mountain to the suburbs on the other side, to Orinda, Walnut Creek and Lafayette. Lisa would go toward the water.
Lisa transferred at MacArthur Station. On the platform, a wrinkled woman yelled into the emptiness, “I’ve had enough of your candles! Purple, pink and black. I can’t take it. GET OUT of here!” Lisa looked around for the candles, but didn’t see any. After a while, it seemed like the woman wasn’t real; no one noticed her.
Then Lisa rode to Ashby Station, close to where she had found Igor’s house on Googlemaps. She saw a mangy rat precariously clutch a Starbucks cup in his big teeth and scurry off into the station’s thick vines. Black people stood on the street corners she walked by. They asked her for money. And now she stood close to Igor’s thick forearm hair. Purposeful veins travelled over a rippling network of muscles and tendons like elevated train tracks. Splotchy scars decorated his arm like tattoos.
Lisa maneuvered around the cart and backed away into the hands of the man’s kale. “Aren’t you going to say anything?” she asked. The man just stared at her.
Finally, he said, “I not teach American. No respect for game. Not since camp in Payson, Arizona. Is promise I make, to self.”
“The Polgar Foundation will pay you!” she cried. “They gave me money for a teacher!” But this did not move the man. He stood in his doorway like a tree, waiting for her to go.
As if Lisa were looking for a friend, she dove into her backpack. A princely unicorn looked out from the plastic cover of the pack that Jan had bought for her. He was pure white with a wavy black mane. Lisa had once thought him wise and powerful. Now he just seemed childish, especially as bright pink and gold flowers fell about him. Lisa arose from her backpack with a book. She straightened her back. Armed with her journal, she was suddenly poised and articulate, and she began to read aloud:
“I know I’m not that good. It’s not just that Emily Zuo wasn’t at the tournament—she would have beaten me for sure—it’s that I’ve never really studied the game. Chess was just one of those places my mom drove me to, some place where a teacher tries to lead us around, entertain us, always smiling. I don’t know what chess really is. I sometimes feel like there is more going on. I can’t see it. I only sense it. I win my games by taking stuff. I feel stuck there, even if I am good at it, like a beginning painter who only knows how to draw stick figures.”
Igor was silent, and Lisa continued reading from her book: “Ruth said that Igor talks to his pieces.” Here Lisa looked up at Igor, as if he should know who Ruth was. “She said it in a way that made him seem crazy. But I think I might understand what he means. Maybe I’m crazy. They say he won’t teach anymore, that he’s angry. The parents try to trick their children into concentrating with chess. They say, ‘Chess is fun!’ But he says that chess will hurt. I tried to friend him on Facebook. Nothing. I left a message on his phone. No response. So tomorrow I’m just going to knock on his door.”
“What is book?” Igor asked.
“It’s a journal.”
“This journal, what is?”
Lisa looked down on the stupid book that the grandmaster pronounced “djurnaal.” It was flimsy and girlish in the dappled light of his dark green garden. The cover had once been very pretty, a watery pink that seemed to expect a later bloom of luscious red. But Lisa had defaced that veneer with black roses and a thick tangle of spiky vines. She had drawn them with care and deep feeling, as if many other girls had not decorated their shields with the same bloodflowers. Inside, thick and woody pages expected the fine c
alligraphy of a curving hand. “It’s supposed to tell you what’s important,” Lisa mumbled.
Igor turned around and went inside. He abandoned Lisa, without even giving her a chance. So she sat down. She didn’t wait for his attention. No, this spot of ground was as good as any other. Like a goldfish swimming around and around in a tank, every place was equally meaningless.
Eventually Igor came out, to shovel the green-and-brown shit from the cart on his bike into his garden. The shit had swirls in it, like chocolate ice cream from a dispenser. White maggots squiggled out of the muck and tumbled down the pile. A feral cat hunted something along the side of the fence. Lisa imagined a rat, breathing heavily in the brush, afraid to move.
Then she felt a weight on her shoulder. It was the biggest book Lisa had ever seen. “Do first five hundred mate-in-two, come back tomorrow. Please give book respect, is old friend.” Lisa stood up, but then had to stoop forward as she took possession of the overlarge black tome.
*
“You did what?” Ruth gasped. Lisa needed help, somehow, and had called the volunteer for women’s chess right away, just a couple blocks away from Igor’s backyard cottage. At first it had seemed like the mate-in-twos would be easy. You move, they move, and then zap, it’s all over. But Lisa quickly saw that there was no way she could ever do five hundred by the following afternoon. And there was also no way she could get the book into her room without Jan asking questions about where she had been, and with whom.
Lisa sat down on the sidewalk to wait. About ten feet away there was a very large human turd, as if someone had wanted to make a proud public proclamation. The book held 5,334 black boxes. Each box held a position, and a demand to find a very efficient mate, a simple answer, a haiku. The pieces seemed random. Many problems had a lopsided material imbalance. Like: