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Morphy and the Golden Age of Chess; Winning Chess Traps; How to
Improve Your Chess; Improved Chess Strategy. She took down one called
Attack and Counterattack in Chess and began reading the games, picturing
them in her mind without reading the diagrams. She stood there for a long
time while a few customers went in and out of the store. No one bothered
her. She read through game after game and was surprised in some of them
by dazzling moves—queen sacrifices and smothered males. There were
sixty games, and each had a title at the top of the page, like “V. Smyslov—I.
Rudakavsky: Moscow 1945” or “A. Rubinstein—O. Duras: Vienna 1908.”
In that one, White queened a pawn on the thirty-sixth move by threatening a
discovered check.
Beth looked at the cover of the book. It was smaller than Modem Chess
Openings and there was a sticker on it that said $2.95. She began going
through it systematically. The clock on the bookstore wall read ten-thirty.
She would have to leave in an hour to get to school for the History exam.
Up front the clerk was paying no attention to her, absorbed in his own
reading. She began concentrating, and by eleven-thirty she had twelve of
the games memorized.
On the bus back to school she began playing them over in her head.
Behind some of the moves—not the glamorous ones like the queen
sacrifices but sometimes only in the one-square advance of a pawn—she
could see subtleties that made the small hairs on the back of her neck tingle.
She was five minutes late for the test, but no one seemed to care and she
finished before everyone else anyway. In the twenty minutes until the end
of the period she played “P. Keres—A. Tarnowski: Helsinki 1952.” It was
the Ruy Lopez Opening where White brought the bishop out in a way that
Beth could see meant an indirect attack on Black’s king pawn. On the
thirty-fifth move White brought his rook down to the knight seven square in
a shocking way that made Beth almost cry out in her seat.
***
Fairfield Junior High had social clubs that met for an hour after school and
sometimes during home-room period on Fridays. There was the Apple Pi
Club and the Sub Debs and Girls Around Town. They were like sororities at
a college, and you had to be pledged. The girls in Apple Pi were eighth and
ninth graders; most of them wore bright cashmere sweaters and fashionably
scuffed saddle oxfords with argyle socks. Some of them lived in the country
and owned horses. Thoroughbreds. Girls like that never looked at you in the
hallways; they were always smiling at someone else. Their sweaters were
bright yellow and deep blue and pastel green. Their socks came up to just
below the knees and were made of 100 percent virgin wool from England.
Sometimes when Beth saw herself in the mirror of the girls’ room
between classes, with her straight brown hair and narrow shoulders and
round face with dull brown eyes and freckles across the bridge of her nose,
she would taste the old taste of vinegar in her mouth. The girls who
belonged to the clubs wore lipstick and eye shadow; Beth wore no make-up
and her hair still fell over her forehead in bangs. It did not occur to her that
she would be pledged to a club, nor did it to anyone else.
***
“This week,” Mrs. MacArthur said, “we will begin to study the binomial
theorem. Does anyone know what a binomial is?”
From the back row Beth put up her hand. It was the first time she had
done this.
“Yes?” Mrs. MacArthur said.
Beth stood, feeling suddenly awkward. “A binomial is a mathematical
expression containing two terms.” They had studied this last year at
Methuen. “X plus Y is a binomial.”
“Very good,” Mrs. MacArthur said.
The girl in front of Beth was named Margaret; she had glowing blond
hair and wore a cashmere sweater of a pale, expensive lavender. As Beth sat
down, the blond head turned slightly back toward her. “ Brain!” Margaret
hissed. “ Goddamn brain!”
***
Beth was always alone in the halls; it hardly occurred to her that there was
any other way to be. Most girls walked in pairs or in threes, but she walked
with no one.
One afternoon when she was coming out of the library she was startled
by the sound of distant laughter and looked down the hall to see, haloed by
afternoon sunlight, the back of a tall black girl. Two shorter girls were
standing near her, by the water fountain, looking up at her face as she
laughed. None of their features was distinct, and the light from behind them
made Beth squint. The taller girl turned slightly, and Beth’s heart almost
stopped at the familiar tilt of her head. Beth took a quick dozen steps down
the hallway toward them.
But it wasn’t Jolene. Beth stopped suddenly and turned away. The three
girls left the fountain and pushed noisily out the front door of the building.
Beth stood staring after them for a long time.
***
“Could you go to Bradley’s and get me some cigs?” Mrs. Wheatley said. “I
think I have a cold.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Beth said. It was Saturday afternoon and Beth was
holding a novel in her lap, but she wasn’t reading it. She was playing over a
game between P. Morphy and someone called simply “grandmaster.” There
was something peculiar about Morphy’s eighteenth move, of knight to
bishop five. It was a good attack, but Beth felt Morphy could have been
more destructive with his queen’s rook.
“I’ll give you a note, since you’re a bit youthful for smoking yourself.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Beth said.
“Three packs of Chesterfields.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She had been in Bradley’s only once before, with Mrs. Wheatley. Mrs.
Wheatley gave her a penciled note and a dollar and twenty cents. Beth
handed the note to Mr. Bradley at the counter. There was a long rack of
magazines behind her. When she got the cigarettes, she turned and began
looking. Senator Kennedy’s picture was on the cover of Time and
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