by Jesse Kraai
But Lisa didn’t understand what Igor wanted her to do in this dark time that he called Winter Solstice. The chessless told long stories that somehow always said: These are the things you have to do—right now! Like the way Jan demanded that Lisa return to school, even though Lisa would now have to repeat the ninth grade whether she went back after break or not. But for everything Jan said, she still didn’t tell Lisa the truth about her father. That was the naked duplicity of the chessless.
The rains returned to the windows. And Lisa tried to think about all the failing grades Jan had posted to the refrigerator door. But her narrow cot didn’t give her any room to flop about. She tried to imagine sitting through Mr. Reese’s class. But she could never pass the ninth grade. Again and again she failed, and the kids got younger. For days, Lisa stuffed this emptiness with the white bread, packaged meats and frosted cakes that Jan brought home from Trader Joe’s. Then Lisa got marked—only not with a tattoo, but with a picture.
Lisa sat in a high wicker chair. Someone must have returned it to Jan’s new store, along with the two great vases filled with flowers that flanked it. The chair filled the place on the carpet where Jan had talked to her, the place that Ted had left empty. Jan was bringing in the outside world to freshen up the shame of her small apartment. A photographer from the Oakland Tribune was coming to take Lisa’s picture. And Jan made her ready.
Slip into this red sundress, Lisa. Feel the simple straps on your bare shoulders. Look at how these cheap glass earrings sparkle like diamonds. Rub your lips together, and smack the red lipstick. Hold your eyes open while I bring this little mascara brush terrifyingly close to your eyeballs. Let me scrub your doughy cheeks with rouge. Jan’s stiff movements said what Lisa already knew: There was nothing inside her that had value, nothing that she could offer the world. So, like Grandma Lena and Jan before her, Lisa also had to learn to use makeup.
The black and white photo that came out in the Tribune piece, under the headline Local Girl Masters Game of Kings, seemed pretty harmless, even a little flattering. And Lisa kinda liked reading her own answers to the dumb questions that the chessless ask. “What’s your favorite piece?” “The queen, obviously.” “When will we have a woman world champion?” “Any day now.” Maybe Mr. Reese would finally understand that she was a genius, and do something to help her pass ninth grade.
Then a color version of the photograph surfaced on USchess.org as part of their coverage of Chalkidiki. The girl Lisa saw on Jan’s computer screen was scared. She looked away a little, as if she were afraid of something and didn’t want to look at it. Jan had taken the girl’s overlarge glasses away from her. They had been her last line of defense, stopping the chessless from ever seeing how moist and blind her eyes really were. In the photo, Jan’s makeup met the camera with a laughing smile; the girl did not.
The photographer had wanted the white queen in the shot. Lisa hadn’t thought much about it at the time; she had just grabbed the plastic piece from her travel set. Cupped in her hands just beneath her chin, the queen looked like a gift she was offering. Was she, Lisa, the white bitch? The rest of the scene was photoshopped into a blur, Jan’s wicker chair and vases paintbrush dabs of blue, yellow and brown.
Lisa began finding the photo all over the place, on Chessbase.com, Chesscafe, Chessdom, Echecs, superajedrez, and 64.ru. All her friends from the tournament were there too. But why? Why were there so many pictures of them? Lisa did a Google image search and found Chessbabes.com. Her photo had four out of five stars. In the comments section below the picture, poisonpawn27 said:
“I’ll give this hottie a WIM.”
Poganinaissohot answered: “You can tell, right? She wants the WPhD real bad.”
Luvsglasses3 said: “I’ll give it to her, if she’s ready to fuck her way to the top.”
Allaboutjudit added: “That bitch would fuck Bobby Fischer’s corpse.”
Lisa closed the window and Jan’s computer as fast as she could, before she could read the rest. Warm, the computer continued to hum on her thighs, the bluish tint of the screen still in her eyes. Lisa sat behind grandma Lena’s metallic green desk. The men came up behind her, from the back offices, where the machines were. Their hot red peckers were already out, poking at her. Everyone said this was going to happen. Her leg, her stomach, even her eyeball—they had to find a way in. Lisa had wanted them to do it too, that’s why she had put on the makeup.
Chessbabes found Dorsa’s naïve smile behind her dark blue headscarf. Zarra was rated a five. Lisa wanted her friends to tell her: “Listen, Lisa, they aren’t real chessplayers. Luvsglasses3 for example, his real name is Joe Schleimowitz, he sits behind a computer all day spooning dog food out of a metal cylinder, wondering why he’s only rated 1132. He’s not one of us, Lisa. He’s on the other side.”
But Lisa knew what they would say. They would talk to her about God. That was always their final answer to every difficult question. And there would never be any way to reach Joe Schleimowitz, to fuck him up. He was anonymous.
Lisa turned to the one book that both Dorsa and Zarra said was true. Lisa davened over Genesis. In her study, Lisa sometimes yelled up to her ceiling, “Oh Jesus Christ! Help me, show me a way!” But no one in the book had mentioned that guy yet. Little made sense to Lisa, but she knew how to sit inside a murky position until the pieces begin to speak. Like a black-square bishop, Lisa groped at the half of the board she couldn’t see. For there had to be an answer; she hadn’t made such a bad mistake for her position to be so completely unplayable.
During that Winter Solstice, Lisa discovered that God only made men in his image. Only men were given the power to name things. Woman was so insufficient she had to be created twice. The second time she was derived from a man’s rib, like the way scientists made human ears and fingers grow out of rats.
Lisa called out to her friends, even if they were trapped inside Jan’s computer. They were good, and they would show her how the Word of God didn’t mean what she had read. Lisa wrote to them on her Facebook wall: “Genesis I:27; II:23, WTF? #Dorsa Karimi #Zarra Mikhalevski.”
Zarra was the first to respond. “I called my rabbi and he quoted his rabbi: ‘At first He created her for him and he saw her full of discharge and blood, thereupon He removed her from him and recreated her a second time. Hence he said: This time she is bone of my bone.’ And that is the line right after the one you quote. Maybe that’s why my Rabbi won’t shake my hand :-(”
Dorsa added: “The Holy Qu’ran reveals that the beginnings were not so complicated. But this is not ours to publicly discuss. 4:34: ‘So good women are the obedient, guarding in secret that which Allah hath guarded.’ Eva’s true name is Hawa, which comes from the word ‘life’ (haiy). Allah is All-Embracing, All-Knowing.”
It was obvious that this discussion was actually about Chessbabes. But no one had the guts to say it. Lisa didn’t either. It hurt too much to write it out on Jan’s keyboard.
A chessplayer named Tim, from England, continued the thread with “Let a woman learn in silence with full submission. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. Timothy 2:8–15; :-)” Lisa had never even met Tim. Her Facebook friend count had jumped from 356 to 703 in the weeks after the tournament in Chalkidiki. If someone had at least ten friends in common with her she would accept their friend request. Because these were real people, chessplayers.
Then Alexander, from the Ukraine: “Genesis, 3:6 ‘And the woman saw that the tree was good for eating and that it was lust to the eyes and the tree was lovely to look at, and she took the fruit and ate, and she also gave to her man, and he ate.’ Yo Lisa, why you trying to seduce us? :-)”
This was the way it was then, from the very beginning. She wasn’t supposed to talk back. She couldn’t name herself. She was the hot bitch in the red sundress. She seethed with sex, the whole damn thing was her fault. How did
the men at Chessbabes know she wore cotton panties?
Laynee continued Lisa’s Facebook thread with, “Ummm, is this why there is a separate tournament for girls?”
Lisa had met so many men at her summer tournaments. Were they the men who wrote stuff underneath the pictures of her friends at Chessbabes? The same men who gave her rides and free advice?
*
Lisa met Igor in front of Berkeley Public on the second Saturday of January. That’s how long she had to wait for the end of Igor’s solstice. The Morrison was still closed for winter break, and Arun hadn’t told them how to break that code. It was unseasonably warm, one of the seventy-degree days in January that cruelly command trees and flowers to bloom. Lisa and Igor arrived in shorts, like pagans.
Igor said he had stashed his board behind the bookcases of the children’s room. But the carved pieces of her master did not call to her. In her mind, Lisa could already hear the sounds of people screaming at each other on the first floor, the screeching of chairs, children whining, the green flatulence and the musty dusty of homelessness. None of that had bothered Lisa before. But now she feared it, and she missed the serene quiet of Arun’s secret study.
Not so long ago, Lisa’s one wish had been to enter this library. Now she asked Igor if they could run. Igor lifted his eyes. He looked up to the mountains, and then down to the water. “Yes,” he said. “We run.” Did Igor know about Chessbabes? Lisa couldn’t bring herself to ask. He wouldn’t understand the pain and betrayal she felt. Maybe he used the site himself.
Without intent, Lisa found herself descending the gentle slope to the water, rolling downhill, like she had done on Jan’s bike before it was taken in the bankruptcy. The sweat began, and Lisa encouraged it to flow; she wanted it to wash over her like a cold Pacific Ocean wave. Mile one. Lisa was not fast. The capillaries in her bouncing roll of belly flesh demanded the same oxygen that her legs needed. But she never stopped. She had learned from Igor to hope for strength and deliverance on the other side of pain.
They passed over the freeway on the high University Avenue bridge, briefly inhaling the prehistoric animals whose carbon burned as gas below them, and soon found themselves in a dog park. Mile three. Humans whose ideal of friendship was canine had driven there so that their dogs could smell other dogs. And when they talked with other members of their cult, they did so through the medium of the dog, commenting on breed and how good they were. Paved paths, erosion barriers and grass cut so short that it poked like lesbian hair; these were the minimalistic gestures to a tamed nature that called the dog-worshippers to prayer. Lisa hated these people. So they kept running, to the kite park. Mile four. There Lisa saw people forcing the same fake smile which had made her face sore for days after the photo shoot, their kites celebrating the sleepy rewards of a forgetful life.
Igor tried to play up the place. He told her it was not real land. It was landfill, a trash heap from a faraway time that tried to extend land into water. He told her about the mice, skunk, possum and raccoons who live there. Then he talked about the coyotes and burrowing owls who come to hunt them at night. He told her about the halibut fishermen on the pier who once in a lifetime pull up that sideways fish from its foreign planet. He tried to imitate the celebratory dance they would do around the captured alien. He told her about the amazing health insurance that the leashed dogs have, and the basic help that his friend Wojo didn’t have. He told Lisa about the kite runner who would come to this very spot to artfully cut down the dreamy air buoys. But Lisa couldn’t see any of that. She only saw false smiles crowding her, as if their deceit could break the wind off the water, temper the sun and stop their own sweat. “I wanna keep running,” she said.
So they headed north, and the prettiness ended beside a strangle of low-tidal muck. The stench was like a physical barrier they had to pass through. Yellow ammonia and proteins rose from the dying microbes and awakened the slumbering creatures inside Lisa’s body. Has our time come? the larvae, fungi and bacteria inside her asked. Will we now feast upon you? Lisa briefly sensed that she was not alone.
Then they climbed a hill to a horse track; to her right, Lisa saw the horse penitentiary, narrow stalls filled with flies and shit. At the top, Lisa saw the betting men whose dollars no longer smiled when they won. Mile six.
On the northern side of the hill, Igor pointed to an obtuse peninsula beneath them. “Is trash from another time,” he said. “Forefathers make land in water. You wish for go?” Lisa thought of the mounds made by the Indians in Emeryville, that she now lived on. “Da,” she answered. “We run.”
The main trail brought them to a dirt clearing and the unplanned beginnings of at least eight paths. Many didn’t seem to lead anywhere; and everything was brown, as if the plants didn’t want to paint themselves. Like a witch, Lisa sensed the red and blue ores beneath the dwarf trees and the broken hunks of concrete that the roots of the prickly shrubs ran up against. A syrup of pink and gold chemicals slithered through it all, like the way Equinox had once made its way through her brain. This land was her heritage. This land was what her forefathers had left behind. The chessplayers kept running down, toward the water, as if it were the only sensible direction, their bare legs lightly lashed by the itchy tendrils that wanted to reclaim the anarchic trail.
An overgrown concrete structure greeted the chessplayers as they arrived at the water. Maybe a massive WWII gun had once swung on its turret here, prepared to meet a Japanese assault. Generations of graffiti extended back into the walls, like light from a distant star. Lisa admired the recent layers of angry artwork. She petted the flippant expressions, and felt that she was not alone. Others came here, like her, to find the truth.
They had to keep running, to keep their sweat from drying into a cold salty crust. So they headed north along a coast of lost concrete and rebar jabbing up into the air, no longer knowing its original purpose. They came to the sculpture garden. Figures of fishermen, philosophers and misfit animals were wedged together out of the found metal, driftwood and concrete that littered the place. Unfinished, they called out for an author.
Underneath a low sun, the chessplayers came to the great warrior. She was twenty feet tall, and her hair hung down low in fat chains, each link the size of Lisa’s fist. Knotted driftwood formed the many delicate bones of her powerful face. Woven chainmail armed her.
They had to keep moving, and ran up the path over which the woman looked, inland. Sad to think her adventure over, Lisa turned back to her, as if she were an oracle and could tell her something. Lisa said, “They do not name her here. She is the Guardian, the Cherubim.” Lisa decided that if there were a boy up in the sky, who had created the earth and people as some kind of science experiment, she would not pray to Him.
Lisa wasn’t ready to go home. There wasn’t anything there for her anyway. She wanted to bushwhack her way to some metal objects she saw flashing in the setting sun. So they followed the shine like magpies on a quest, and discovered a sprouting rebar fern, each metal reed crowned with found treasure: a spinning bicycle wheel, a large green glass bottle, a lion sewn together from filmy metal strips. “This is the tree of knowledge,” Lisa announced.
Next to Lisa’s tree stood a shack that had been cobbled together out of driftwood and repurposed two-by-fours. Lisa approached the humble structure, but Igor called her back. His voice even shook a little, as if he feared an armed and angry hermit. “Don’t be so scared all the time,” Lisa said as she walked in. To her, it seemed natural that she should find a library. A couch, a couple chairs and a roughly cut section of carpet covered the earthen floor. On a shelf, Lisa instantly spotted a cheap plastic chess set, the kind that’s hollow inside and doesn’t have any weight in your hands. The books were different. They weren’t filled with stuff that teachers like Mr. Reese expected you to study but had never even read themselves. These books were all gifts, each brought by someone who wanted to share their experience.
Igor was nervous. He said that if he left anything outside his hous
e—the plywood carcass of a stereo case, a slouching bookcase decorated with mold—that shit would disappear immediately. It would leave on principle, Igor said. That was the American freedom he had known.
The sun dropped and strong winds began to rattle the wooden boards of the library. Dogs started barking, some distant, some very close. They had to move. Running. Salt stung Lisa’s eyes and her legs quickly felt like rubber. The lights of the city were too distant to swallow the blackness of the water. Bouncing thoughts began and ended like the animal paths she had seen, without direction or the need of a connection. Up on racetrack hill, the last rays of sunlight caught the top of the UC Berkeley clocktower.
They came to the aquatic park. Lisa was picturing waterslides and screaming children, but it was just another cesspool of dying algae. Mile ten. At the southern end, Lisa saw men in dark clothes wait in a narrow parking lot. Flesh-colored motions flashed in the thin bushes. They ran through streets filled with wide warehouses from another time. Mile thirteen, Lisa was almost home.
“I have a special request,” Lisa said as she finished her first half marathon. “Can we do our next lesson at the library?”
*
Igor met Lisa close to Jan’s apartment the next day. Her teacher had strapped his board to his back without the protection of a black garbage bag. The soft mahogany and maple squares faced outward. As Lisa walked with Igor, she imagined the maple squares enlarging first, and cracking, unable to expand in the tight grip of the mahogany. Tiny particles of salt and sand would pockmark the board’s veneer; spores would travel through those cracks, and a fungal mycelium would burst inside the wood. Igor’s beautiful board would soon be just as ugly as the rest of the world. Lisa thought about her own uncleanliness, the tampons and her dark mess. She remembered that God had sacrificed Jesus to atone for what Eve had done. The Lord’s bloody death atoned for her contamination of Paradise.
