Lisa, A Chess Novel

by Jesse Kraai

  Lisa laid herself out on the short-haired Berber carpet of Jan’s living room in Emeryville. From Jan’s computer, Lisa’s friends from Chalkidiki called her to places she couldn’t yet go. Her third-round opponent, Hrund, wrote on her Facebook wall: “Lisa, come stay with my family in Iceland! It be crazy good time!” The spectacular TV was gone, along with the glass coffee table and the leather couch. A friend’s garage had saved these treasures during the bankruptcy. And their deep imprints were still visible in the carpet. But they were now gone, along with Ted.

  The memo next to her report card on the refrigerator read: “Dec. 22, 8:00 P.M., we talk.” Lisa tried to imagine repeating ninth grade. But something would always go wrong; and she could never get through it. In some years, she would step over the maximum absence limit. In others, she opened her trap and spent all of her time stuck in Project Darkness. The kids kept getting younger and younger.

  Jan was late; she had to work overtime with everybody else. Late December was the season for retail, especially for a home store. When she finally got home, Jan tied her hair into a bun and came to sit next to Lisa on the carpet. They leaned their backs against the wall and stretched their socked feet out into the barren room. Lisa had known that this conversation was going to be her reckoning. But she hadn’t expected Jan to speak to her as if she were an adult. From Jan’s very first words, it felt like she was letting her go.

  “I have also failed, Lisa. The business is gone; Ted is gone. And I have no means to help you. I don’t have money for the antidepression drugs. I don’t have money for Dr. Frohlich. And I certainly don’t have money for Mens Conscia Recti; I won’t be able to send you to college. I don’t even have the time to look after you. I have to work, to support us.”

  Lisa’s old school had cost $35,000 a year. That was one reason they were so poor now.

  “When I was your age I had to go to my mom’s office after school and wait until she closed everything down. There was a little loveseat hidden behind her desk where I was supposed to do my homework. It wasn’t a good spot for math problems. So I read the books my mom gave me and I journaled.

  “Your grandmother, Lena, sat behind a high metallic green semicircle. When you got off the elevator it looked like she was in charge of some kind of space ship, as if she had all kinds of hidden levers and buttons. The pixelated IBM logo and Lena’s pretty smile welcomed people into the future. But from where I sat I could see that her desk was completely hollow. All she had was a phone and a notepad.

  “Mom thought the world was kind. And she would try to write about that goodwill in her journal. She drew plants the same way. She wasn’t interested in likenesses, to show other people and say, ‘Hey look, this is a California Poppy, and this is a Magnolia.’ She would laugh at men and all their phony objectivity, looking for unseen mechanisms that turn the color of a leaf and unfold a flower. Mom wanted to behold beauty. She would see it and draw it. It seemed obvious to her that the power of everything was flowing out from the beauty she saw and wrote about.”

  Lisa had long wished that Jan would tell her more about her grandmother. It was like Jan was stingy with Lena, keeping her all to herself. Jan had given Lisa the journal, but not her grandmother’s words, not the instruction manual that went with it.

  “Beauty is a special kind of magic, Lisa, especially for those of us without power or money. We can make believe that it’s all around us, and that no one owns it. But Mom was naïve. Men had made her life easy. A man she was dating got her the job at the office. They gave her things. And she accepted them as if the benevolent world were simply providing. She saw herself picking tasty nuts off a tree that nobody owned. And she would draw that tree. She would meditate on its goodwill in her journal. And she would see her own natural beauty reflected in it. So she didn’t get a skill, Lisa. And she didn’t fight for a place in the world.

  “I watched her fade behind that desk. At first she was proud of her few white hairs. She said it was natural, and she called herself a Grayhair. That was a thing then, back in the seventies and early eighties. Lines began to show up on her face in the morning. They looked like tide lines on the beach, where the ocean has pushed its debris in the middle of the night. Men stopped looking at her. That’s hard for every woman, Lisa, when you start becoming more and more invisible to men and the world. Imagine what it’s like when they pass you by and flirt with your underage daughter.

  “The red lipstick came first, as if she needed just a dash of color. Then her loose, earth-toned clothes began to peel away, and tight fabrics began to grip her body. It was like she was naked in public, like she was trying to point to her body, away from the age on her face. She went to jazzercise, Lisa, every day. It was so demeaning, and, you know, I thought about jazzercise every time Ted tried to get me to sweat, that hypocritical fucker. Then the jewelry and heavy makeup came. She bleached her hair blond. Her place behind the desk was no longer an easy job that slipped in and out of her benevolent contemplation. The world was no longer nice. And she had to fight.

  “I wasn’t there to see her get fired, Lisa. I had just gone off to UC Davis. I hadn’t really thought about why I went to college. I guess it was because I saw my Mom at her most beautiful when she was alone, thinking. And because I was supposed to. But Mom never told me to study.

  “Mom accepted her unemployment. She gave her power suits, her makeup and her jewelry to Goodwill. She told me it was OK to be poor, Lisa; there were a lot of poor single women then. Together they made yogurt, sauerkraut and even mead. They knew how to garden, and grow the best vegetables. They would steal from the orchards that used to be all over the South Bay—apples, lemons, pears, oranges, pomegranates, figs and grapefruit.

  “Mom was crafty. She would invent things in her journal while she was dreaming of the small kindnesses she could do for others. When her neighbor and friend Judy said that her garden slug problem was so bad that it seemed like phalluses were crawling all over her backyard, destroying everything beautiful, Mom cut a hole in a plastic yogurt container, put some beer in it, and yelled, “Free Beer, Boys!” and nearly two hundred slugs drowned themselves that first night. She figured out how to make sauerkraut in big Mason jars. And she was one of the first to use hydroponics to grow pot in her closet. She was very good, and that went on for a couple years. But she didn’t want to know anything about money. And she couldn’t afford health insurance.”

  Lisa had never seen Jan cry before. She had always been so stoic and strong that Lisa never really questioned why she had the shop, why she traded false smiles with fake friends, why she had married Ted. Jan continued, “That’s when your grandmother got breast cancer, Lisa. She must have felt the lumps, but hoped they were benign. Because she couldn’t afford cancer. I think she knew something was wrong for a long time. It was only after she was shitting and coughing blood that she walked through the Emergency Room door. That’s the only hospital door a poor person can walk through.

  “So I quit school and came home. We had a routine where I would take her in for chemotherapy once a week. Then I would sit with her at home. I applied cream to the areas of her skin where the chemo had burned her. I watched her lose all her hair, all her strength. I helped her eat with a tube; cans and cans of liquefied baby food. I felt so helpless, Lisa. I knew there were better treatments, but we didn’t qualify for them. Everything was so routine at the hospital, like they were just waiting for her to die.

  “On one of those days, I went back to her old office. I wanted those men to apply the cream to her dying skin. They should connect the tube to my mother’s stomach. They should put her clothes on. But when I got there everything was so clean, and I was so dirty. Only there could I smell the sickness on me, all of the little creatures that come to eat the dying covered my body and clothes. And the new pretty woman behind the same metallic green semicircle wouldn’t let me pass.

  “She already had the makeup, the dyed hair and some fitness routine. I could see part of the armrest of my old loveseat
behind her. She made me wait in one of the lobby chairs. The fancy African art was still on the wall, great warriors with shields and oversized penises. Finally I saw Pete, Peter Schulte was the name on his door. He came in with his big tennis bag, jangling the keys to his Porsche. ‘Pete!’ I said. But he acted like he didn’t remember me or my name. He was so flush and tan with health. ‘I’m Lena Schmied’s daughter,’ I said. He nodded at me as if I were a bothersome groupie, a fan of his band. And he just walked on by, past my mom’s old desk.

  “I jumped up and grabbed his hand. I didn’t know what I was going to say. I didn’t have a plan. I just knew that he owed me something. ‘Please,’ I said. ‘Lena needs help. She’s very sick and needs better treatment.’ Mom’s replacement started yelling at me, ‘MISS! MISS!’ Pete tried to wrest his hand away. But I held on, Lisa, with everything I had. I wasn’t going to let him get away. Then the new girl pulled my pointer finger all the way back, really hard. The new girl, Mom’s replacement, she was fighting for Pete.

  “Mom died a couple weeks after that. The hospital stopped doing the chemo. They said the cancer had metastasized and that there was nothing they could do.”

  Jan got up to put the kettle on. Lisa watched her as the room became silent. There was a new pot, black and earthen, and new teacups too, with raised red and green flowers glazed upon them. The set must have been from the store she worked at. Maybe it had been returned with a chip and Jan got it for nothing. Lisa watched Jan assemble everything carefully on a large silver tray with handles, as if she were adjusting her pieces to their most precise centers. Then she brought her elegant arrangement to their humble spot on the carpet to continue her story.

  “I thought I was following my own path when I was on that couch behind her. But I was writing it all down in a journal. And I was reading the books I found on her bookshelf. She had all the Jane Austen books, and I became obsessed with them. I knew all the characters by heart; I could plot their lives and genealogies. I thought I was so smart, maybe even British. And I had teachers who encouraged me. They praised my book reports, and said I should study English in college.

  “I know it will sound weird to you, but I often see my own Jane Austen phase when I look at you playing chess. Austen didn’t want to talk about the whole world. She cut away politics and the ships of the English Empire. She cut away business and the world of men. She wanted to talk about the development of a few people inside of their relationships to one another. That’s how she became precise, by making the world smaller. I never really thought of it as a mathematical thing, but in my imagination I did see scenarios playing themselves out, people unrolling with the passing of time. And I guess that’s what you’re doing in chess, only instead of a drawing room and a few people you have a board and a few pieces.”

  Jan fell silent, and a long quiet slipped its arms around Lisa and Jan. Thin drywall separated them from their neighbors and the rushing Pacific Ocean fog. The microbial world beneath them starved; Ted and his take-out food were gone. O bejeweled lake of golden curry, where we swam and baptized our children. O breadcrumbs where we harvested the green fungi. O sizzled bit of hamburger from whose bowels came the ever-so-delicious little worms. The apocalypse is upon us, and we must kill each other over the scant oils of feminine feet and the dry flakes of downy skin.

  Lisa remembered Igor’s summary of life: “Is great paternity uncertainty.” He had talked to Lisa of his fathers, the few men who had returned from the war. Women wanted these precious men. Even the drunks and chessplayers got to be kings. Jan’s story about Lisa’s biological father and the car accident was probably bullshit.

  Lisa imagined Jan again walking into grandma Lena’s old office, this time on the fifteenth anniversary of Lena’s death. A new girl sat behind the same hollow desk. Everything was the same, except the African art was gone. Now signed musical instruments hung on the wall: guitars, drumsticks and a Zildjian cymbal.

  The men needed to pay. Jan wasn’t sure how yet. But they would pay for the health insurance and stock options they didn’t give Grandma Lena. And they would have to finally give Jan access. As a girl she had sat for too many afternoons on the loveseat behind her mother’s metallic green semicircle; they had never let her any further in, back to see the machines. Now they would.

  Jan walked out of the elevator and faced the new secretary with the breezy confidence of a virago. With its stern lines down the side of her body, Jan’s power suit already knew how to gently command underpaid women.

  Jan pretended to have business with the company, and easily took control of the new girl behind the desk, Jenna. In the same way that Lisa had seen Jan have light conversation about the cruel life of retail with her employees, Jan now got pretty Jenna to tell her everything. Peter Schulte had made it to the top. He now sat on the board of IBM. Such a nice man! He donated some of his wealth to keep the local parks clean, where Jenna jogged.

  Jenna told Jan about the company’s new math whiz, Zak Zilber. Summa cum laude from Stanford, the young man had developed some equations that had sent stock soaring. And Jenna said yes, Jan could pass by the great metallic green semicircle and knock on Zak’s door.

  Peter Schulte’s keys jangled so effortlessly. Men like him waltzed through life, spawning South Bay pools and parties with iced tea. From the first moment she saw Zak, Jan beheld his power, to create the mysterious gadgets that led to the money and stock options. Jan would take it. She would put his mathematical prowess inside her body. It had to be true, Lisa thought. That was the deep power she felt when she played chess. That was where her Jewishness came from!

  Back at his expansive apartment without enough furniture to claim the emptiness, Zak sat Jan down in a lonely chair and took out his tenor recorder. Jan tried to politely refuse his concert, but he insisted. He played Sarastro’s air from Mozart’s Magic Flute, slowly walking in a circle around Jan. She felt suffocated, slobbered upon, especially when he stopped to explain the mathematical beauty in the harmony of the piece. This song was his love and lovemaking. But Jan couldn’t approach this world, and she had to wait with a fake smile.

  But Lisa had not turned out like she was supposed to. She was fat, like him, ugly like him, socially awkward like him. Like Zak, and Igor, Lisa wanted her glasses to be overlarge, as if the extra surface area would help them capture something everyone else missed. Back then they didn’t have words like “autistic” or “Asperger.” That’s why Jan hadn’t seen it in Zak. Now it would be obvious. And that was one of the reasons Lisa wouldn’t make it where her father had. Everyone could see that there was something wrong with her. She wasn’t going to make it in the world. She wasn’t even going to make it in school.

  “Jan?” Lisa asked. “Did my father really die in a car crash?”

  Jan said that he did. But she looked away when she said it, like when Ruth confessed that she had done nothing to help Bobby through his madness.

  Lisa imagined that Jan would never tell the truth. Jan feared that her daughter would demand a name. Lisa would walk up to whatever South Bay mansion he now lived in, looking for her biological identity. Then she would knock on his door, with the same intrepid stupidity with which she had knocked on Igor’s door, uninvited.

  But Zak wouldn’t open the door. Lisa would be held waiting. Zak would look at her, but only from a hidden distance, from his security camera. He wouldn’t trust himself to see his own procreation in her face. He would only trust the machine. So he would take a piece of Lisa and give it to the machine. And the machine would tell him that he was the father. He would then declare himself outraged with Jan, and his lawyers would take Lisa away from her. No. He had been Jan’s tool. And that tool might not have performed as she had hoped—but Zak Zilber would always be only a tool.

  Jan interrupted these thoughts of Lisa’s, and said, “I know I haven’t been easy on your chess, Lisa. And I know you think I hate it. But you were losing yourself in it. I didn’t want you to become shut out. I wanted you to be armed, to never b
e as defenseless as my mother was and I now am. See, we’re now like the people who didn’t make it into Jane Austen’s books. Her characters all had at least some prospect of access, of money. She understood that a life without money is bestial. That kind of life is undignified and uninteresting. Look at me: I’m alone, I don’t have health insurance, and I’m too old to ever make it again.

  “I wanted you to have money like the men in the South Bay have. They own the world. They have the say. They send their sons to chess class. That’s why I sent you. Chess trains their sons to climb up mathematical boulders. Chess trains them in the art of hostile takeovers. But it’s just practice, Lisa. You’re not supposed to get stuck there.

  “After your grandmother died, I realized that I had to face the real world. Reading and journaling only means debt. So I got a job at a kitchen store, not very different from the job I have now. I was good at it. In those early days I learned that people need distinguished forms of primitive household technologies. And I knew the primitive from my mother’s poverty. When I opened my own store I designed a metal slug trap, and had thousands made in China. I imported beautiful Polish sauerkraut crocks. And I marked those babies up.

  “I know how to help people buy the expensive cutlery and tools they will never use. Each customer is trying to buy the domestic life they never had. They think that if it’s expensive it will fill the empty space, the way people put gold frames around ancestors they didn’t care to know while they were alive. I have always understood that pain, trying to reclaim my mother.”

  *

  Igor got Lisa to pause her chess during the Holidays. The Russian needed her mind to take everything in before moving forward, like the way silt must sink to the bottom of a lake before its waters can become clear. And he wanted Lisa to somehow mark her great achievement, something personal. Of his own attainment of the grandmaster title he said, “I should have put stop to the life, put title on arch of back. For understand momient.” On the long and sleepy train ride back from the airport, Igor drew this tattoo which should have connected his shoulder blades: ГРОССМЕЙСТЕР.