Free The Queen's Gambit by Walter Tevis Page A

down the broad stairs to the basement, where she spent twenty minutes at a counter with what a card said were “Dinner Napkin Irregulars,” putting together six blue ones from the multicolored pile, rejecting dozens in the process. She waited while Mrs. Wheatley assembled her set in a kind of mesmerized trial and error and then decided she didn’t really need napkins. They went to another counter with “Book Bargains” on it. Mrs. Wheatley read out the titles of a great many thirty-nine-cent books, picked up several and leafed through them but didn’t buy any.
    Finally they took the escalator back to the main floor. There they stopped at a perfume counter so Mrs. Wheatley could spray one wrist with Evening in Paris and the other with Emeraude. “All right, dear,” Mrs. Wheatley said finally, “we’ll go up to four.” She smiled at Beth. “Young Ladies’ Ready-to-Wear.”
    Between the third and fourth floors Beth looked back and saw a sign on a counter that said BOOKS AND GAMES , and right near the sign, on a glass-topped counter, were three chess sets. “Chess!” she said, tugging Mrs. Wheatley’s sleeve.
    “What is it?” Mrs. Wheatley said, clearly annoyed.
    “They sell chess sets,” Beth said. “Can we go back?”
    “Not so
loud
,” Mrs. Wheatley said. “We’ll go by on the way back down.”
    But they didn’t. Mrs. Wheatley spent the rest of the morning having Beth try on coats from marked-down racks and turn around to show her the hemline and go over near the window so she could see the fabric by “natural light,” and finally buying one and insisting they go down by elevator.
    “Aren’t we going to look at the chess sets?” Beth said, but Mrs. Wheatley didn’t answer. Beth’s feet hurt, and she was perspiring. She did not like the coat she was carrying in a cardboard box. It was the same robin’s-egg blue as Mrs. Wheatley’s omnipresent sweater, and it didn’t fit. Beth did not know much about clothes, but she could tell that this store sold cheap ones.
    When the elevator stopped at the third floor, Beth started to remind her about the chess sets, but the door closed and they went down to the main floor. Mrs. Wheatley took Beth’s hand and led her across the street to the bus stop, complaining about the difficulty of finding anything these days. “But after all,” she said philosophically as the bus drew up to the corner, “we got what we came for.”
    The next week in English class some girls behind Beth were talking before the teacher came in. “Did you get those shoes at Ben Snyder’s or something?” one of them said.
    “I wouldn’t be caught dead in Ben Snyder’s,” the other girl said, laughing.
    ***
    Beth walked to school every morning, along shady streets of quiet houses with trees on their lawns. Other students went the same way, and Beth recognized some of them, but she always walked alone. She had enrolled two weeks late in the fall term, and after her fourth week, mid-term exams began. On Tuesday she had no tests in the morning and was supposed to go to her home room. Instead she took the bus downtown, carrying her notebook and the forty cents she had saved from her quarter-a-week allowance. She had her change ready when she got on the bus.
    The chess sets were still on the counter, but up close she could see that they weren’t very good. When she picked up the white queen she was surprised at how light it was. She turned it over. It was hollow inside and made of plastic. She put it back as the saleswoman came up and said, “May I help you?”
    “Do you have
Modern Chess Openings
?”
    “We have chess and checkers and backgammon,” the woman said, “and a variety of children’s games.”
    “It’s a book,” Beth said, “about chess.”
    “The book department is across the aisle.”
    Beth went to the bookshelves and began looking through them. There was nothing about chess. There was no clerk to ask, either. She went back to the woman at the counter and