The Queen's Gambit Read Free Page A

irritably.
    She was still smarting from the loss. She had beaten him two games last week.
    “When White moves pawn to queen four, Black does this.” He reached down and moved the white pawn two squares up the board, his almost invariable first move. Then he picked up the pawn in front of the black queen’s bishop and set it down two squares up toward the middle. It was the first time he had ever shown her anything like this.
    “Then what?” she said.
    He picked up the king’s knight and set it below and to the right of the pawn. “Knight to KB 3.”
    “What’s KB 3?”
    “King’s bishop 3. Where I just put the knight.”
    “The squares have names?”
    He nodded impassively. She sensed that he was unwilling to give up even this much information. “If you play well, they have names.”
    She leaned forward. “Show me.”
    He looked down at her. “No. Not now.”
    This infuriated her. She understood well enough that a person likes to keep his secrets. She kept hers. Nevertheless, she wanted to lean across the board and slap his face and make him tell her. She sucked in her breath. “Is that the Sicilian Defense?”
    He seemed relieved that she had dropped the subject of the names of the squares. “There’s more,” he said. He went on with it, showing her the basic moves and some variations. But he did not use the names of the squares. He showed her the Levenfish Variation and the Najdorf Variation and told her to go over them. She did, without a single mistake.
    But when they played a real game afterward, he pushed his queen’s pawn forward, and she could see immediately that what he had just taught her was useless in this situation. She glared at him across the board, feeling that if she had had a knife, she could have stabbed him with it. Then she looked back to the board and moved her own queen’s pawn forward, determined to beat him.
    He moved the pawn next to his queen’s pawn, the one in front of the bishop. He often did this. “Is that one of those things? Like the Sicilian Defense?” she asked.
    “Openings.” He did not look at her; he was watching the board.
    “Is it?”
    He shrugged. “The Queen’s Gambit.”
    She felt better. She had learned something more from him. She decided not to take the offered pawn, to leave the tension on the board. She liked it like that. She liked the power of the pieces, exerted along files and diagonals. In the middle of the game, when pieces were everywhere, the forces crisscrossing the board thrilled her. She brought out her king’s knight, feeling its power spread.
    In twenty moves she had won both his rooks, and he resigned.
    She rolled over in bed, put a pillow over her head to block out the light from under the corridor door and began to think how you could use a bishop and a rook together to make a sudden check on the king. If you moved the bishop, the king would be in check, and the bishop would be free to do whatever it wanted to on the next move—even take the queen. She lay there for quite a while, thinking excitedly of this powerful attack. Then she took the pillow off and rolled over on her back and made the chessboard on the ceiling and played over all her games with Mr. Shaibel, one at a time. She saw two places where she might have created the rook-bishop situation she had just invented. In one of them she could have forced it by a double threat, and in the other she could probably have sneaked it in. She replayed those two games in her mind with the new moves, and won them both. She smiled happily to herself and fell asleep.
    ***
    The Arithmetic teacher gave the eraser cleaning to another student, saying that Beth needed a rest. It wasn’t fair, because Beth still had perfect grades in Arithmetic, but there was nothing she could do about it. She sat in class when the little red-haired boy went out of the room each day with the erasers, doing her meaningless additions and subtractions with a trembling hand. She wanted to play chess more