Уолтер Тевис - The Queen's Gambit

“God knows,” Mrs. Wheatley was saying, “God knows they have to be meticulous about whom they turn their charges over to. You can’t have scoundrels taking the responsibility for a growing child.”

Beth set her fork down carefully. “May I go to the bathroom, please?”

“Why, certainly.” She pointed to the living room with her fork. Mrs. Wheatley had been holding the fork all during lunch, even though she had eaten nothing. “The white door to the left of the sofa.”

Beth got up, squeezed past the piano that practically filled the small dining room and went into the living room and through its clutter of coffee table and lamp tables and huge rosewood TV, now showing an afternoon drama. She walked carefully across the Orion shag carpet and into the bathroom. The bathroom was tiny and completely done in robin’s-egg blue—the same shade as Mrs. Wheatley’s cardigan. It had a blue carpet and little blue guest towels and a blue toilet seat. Even the toilet paper was blue. Beth lifted the toilet seat, vomited the tunafish into the bowl and flushed it.

When they got to the top of the stairs Mrs. Wheatley rested for a moment, leaning her hip against the banister and breathing heavily. Then she took a few steps along the carpeted hallway and dramatically pushed a door open. “This,” she said, “will be your room.” Since it was a small house, Beth had visualized something tiny for herself, but when she walked in she caught her breath. It looked enormous to her. The floor was bare and painted gray, with a pink oval rug at the side of the double bed. She had never had a room of her own before. She stood, holding her valise, and looked around her. There was a dresser, and a desk whose orange-looking wood matched it, with a pink glass lamp on it, and a pink chenille bedspread on the enormous bed. “You have no idea how difficult it is to find good maple furniture,” Mrs. Wheatley was saying, “but I think I did very well, if I do say so myself.” Beth hardly heard her. This room was hers . She looked at the heavily painted white door; there was a key in it, under the knob. She could lock the door and no one could come in.

Mrs. Wheatley showed her where the bathroom was down the hall and then left her alone to unpack, closing the door behind her. Beth set down her bag and walked around, stopping only briefly to look out each of the windows at the tree-lined street below. There was a closet, bigger than Mother’s had been, and a nightstand by the bed, with a little reading lamp. It was a beautiful room. If only Jolene could see it. For a moment she felt like crying for Jolene, she wanted Jolene to be there, going around the room with her while they looked at all the furniture and then hung Beth’s clothes in the closet.

In the car Mrs. Wheatley had said how glad they were to have an older child. Then why not adopt Jolene? Beth had thought. But she said nothing. She looked at Mr. Wheatley with his grim-set jaw and his two pale hands on the steering wheel and then at Mrs. Wheatley and she knew they would never have adopted Jolene.

Beth sat on the bed and shook off the memory. It was a wonderfully soft bed, and it smelled clean and fresh. She bent over and pulled off her shoes and lay back, stretching out on its great, comforting expanse, turning her head happily to look over at the tightly closed door that gave her this room entirely to herself.

She lay awake for several hours that night, not wanting to go to sleep right away. There was a streetlight outside her windows, but they had good, heavy shades that she could pull down to block it out. Before saying goodnight, Mrs. Wheatley had shown Beth her own room. It was on the other side of the hall and exactly the same size as Beth’s, but it had a television set in it and chairs with slipcovers and a blue coverlet on the bed. “It’s really a remodeled attic,” Mrs. Wheatley said.

Lying in bed, Beth could hear the distant sound of Mrs. Wheatley coughing and later she heard her bare feet padding down the hallway to the bathroom. But she didn’t mind. Her own door was closed and locked. No one could push it open and let the light fall on her face. Mrs. Wheatley was alone in her own room, and there would be no sounds of talking or quarreling—only music and low synthetic voices from the television set. It would be wonderful to have Jolene there, but then she wouldn’t have the room to herself, wouldn’t be able to lie alone in this huge bed, stretched out in the middle of it, having the cool sheets and now the silence to herself.

On Monday she went to school. Mrs. Wheatley took her in a taxi, even though it was less than a mile. Beth went into seventh grade. It was a lot like the public high school in that other town where she had done the chess exhibition, and she knew her clothes weren’t right, but no one paid much attention to her. A few of the other students stared for a minute when the teacher introduced her to the class, but that was it. She was given books and assigned to a home room. From the books and what the teachers said in class she knew it would be easy. She recoiled a bit at the loud noises in the hallways between classes, and felt self-conscious a few times when other students looked at her, but it was not difficult. She felt she could deal with anything that might come up in this sunny, noisy public school.

At lunchtime she tried to sit alone in the cafeteria with her ham sandwich and carton of milk, but another girl came and sat across from her. Neither of them spoke for a while. The other girl was plain, like Beth.

When she had finished half her sandwich Beth looked across the table at her. “Is there a school chess club?” she asked.

The other girl looked up, startled. “What?”

“Do they have a chess club? I want to join.”

“Oh,” the girl said. “I don’t think they have anything like that. You can try out for junior cheerleader.”

Beth finished her sandwich.

“You certainly spend a lot of time at your studies,” Mrs. Wheatley said. “Don’t you have any hobbies?” Actually, Beth was not studying; she was reading a novel from the school library. She was sitting in the armchair in her room, by the window. Mrs. Wheatley had knocked and then come in, wearing a pink chenille bathrobe and pink satin slippers. She walked over and sat on the edge of Beth’s bed, smiling at her distractedly, as though she were thinking about something else. Beth had lived with her a week now and she noticed that Mrs. Wheatley was often that way.

“I used to play chess,” Beth said.

Mrs. Wheatley blinked. “Chess?”

“I like it a lot.”

Mrs. Wheatley shook her head as though shaking something out of her hair. “Oh, chess !” she said. “The royal game. How nice.”

“Do you play?” Beth said.

“Oh, Lord, no!” Mrs. Wheatley said with a self-deprecating laugh. “I haven’t the mind for it. But my father used to play. My father was a surgeon and quite refined in his ways; I believe he was a superior chess player in his time.”

“Could I play chess with him?”

“Hardly,” Mrs. Wheatley said. “My father passed on years ago.”

“Is there anyone I could play with?”

“Play chess? I have no idea.” Mrs. Wheatley peered at her for a moment. “Isn’t it primarily a game for boys?”

“Girls play,” she said.

“How nice!” But Mrs. Wheatley was clearly miles away.

Mrs. Wheatley spent two days getting the house cleaned for Miss Farley, and she sent Beth to brush her hair three times on the morning of the visit.

When Miss Farley came in the door she was followed by a tall man wearing a football jacket. Beth was shocked to see it was Fergussen. He looked mildly embarrassed. “Hi there, Harmon,” he said. “I invited myself along.” He walked into Mrs. Wheatley’s living room and stood there with his hands in his pockets.