Mating Season
In 1964, at 20 years of age, Bobby Fischer became the first US Chess Champion with 11 wins in 11 games, the only perfect score in the history of the tournament. I was eight years old then and my dad was teaching me how to play chess.
Most nights after dinner and homework, we would move to the living room where we would set up the little plastic black and white pieces on the checkered cardboard game board. The living room was fancy. It had sapphire blue wall-to-wall carpeting that accented gold and white French provincial end tables and a blue and ivory brocade sofa that sat below a beveled mirror on the wall above it. My dad would sit on the sofa and I would sit on the floor across from him with the polished walnut coffee table between us. The living room, and my time with my dad over the chess board, was special. He would concentrate not just on the game, but on me.
He paid close attention to my every move. “Are you sure you want to do that Andrea?” he would ask in a knowing way, his tone of voice teaching me that I needed to think a little more. “Imagine what move I would make if you put your knight there,” he would warn me. And so, I began to anticipate opportunities and threats. I would scan the board. What dangers lurked ahead of me, behind me, from right or left or, worse, from the diagonal? Could I lose my knight on the next move? And then I would see it. I’d retreat. Mulligans are only allowed while you’re learning. That’s how I trained myself to play out a few moves beyond the moment and attempt to see all the “what ifs” that make the game of chess so strategic and challenging.
As America falls in love with the Netflix series The Queen’s Gambit, I’m reminded of those years from 1964 to 1972 when our whole country was rooting for the American star, Bobby Fischer, to beat the Russian, Boris Spassky and when I would spend precious hours alone with my dad. Chess was all the rage. I hear it’s one of the top selling board games for this holiday season.
My dad was one of those fathers who couldn’t wait for his kids to grow out of their toddler and early childhood years. Mostly, he wanted to be able to have conversations with us which meant we were old enough to understand what he was saying and respond back with curiosity and imagination. Every Sunday he and my mom would drive to synagogue to pick up me and my brother and take us on “field trips”. Sometimes we’d go to a potato chip factory, or a working farm, other times to the Boston Children’s Museum or the DeCordova Art Museum. He’d get us tickets to youth concerts at Symphony Hall where we learned the parts of the orchestra and the origins of the piano.
My dad, and my mom, believed that education was the ticket to a future with options. These excursions were just one of the many ways they instilled a curiosity about the world around us. For example, dinnertime had its own rituals. Our turquoise applianced kitchen with the giant furnace in the corner was a regular meeting place for discussions of current events. Dad was an avid reader of Time Magazine and would regularly ask us what we knew about the latest Apollo space mission or tell us about an archeological discovery. But inevitably, there’d be a moment when my brother and I would argue over something. And that’s when dad would send us into the family room to grab the thesaurus off the bookshelf. “First one to get all the synonyms for stupid wins,” he’d shout. So, we’d jump up from the round gold and black speckled Formica table in the corner of our kitchen and run to the den where we would find the combination bookshelf-desk. One of us would have to reach up over the pull-down desktop to grab the book. We’d pour over the pages to find the silliest names we could call each other. Our arguments would devolve into laughter and rolling on the linoleum floor. And that’s how I learned how to use a thesaurus when I was just ten years old.
Dad sold ball bearings and fan belts to manufacturers. He got his college degree from Indiana University on the GI Bill following WWII. My mom was a holocaust survivor who fled Germany with her family when she was just twelve years old. They met in Bridgeport, Connecticut and were married in January, 1956. I came along that December. In 1960, When my dad landed a new sales position in Brighton, Massachusetts, we moved to Framingham, into a middle class, newly constructed suburban neighborhood of single story 6o’s ranch houses.
The street was filled with families like ours. Dozens of kids played in yards after school and on weekends. My dad put up a bell in our screened porch to call us home when it was time for dinner. Life was good.
By 1969, my mom fell ill with breast cancer. By early 1970, she was gone. Those special moments playing chess with dad in the living room after dinner gave way to helping get dinner ready. Dad would call from work to tell me to put a couple of potatoes in the oven for dinner. “Pierce them with a fork,” he’d say. Still teaching me.
Recently, I’ve begun to savor the times I played chess with my dad. That one hour of his concentrated attention was priceless. It took me away from the hard times and sad days. My mind fully concentrated on the board in front of me and my dad’s voice telling me how to see the bigger picture while preparing for the small moves. Like holding a camera up to your eye and seeing beyond the focus of your lens to what else might be in the view.
Dad had his own strategies. “Get your pieces out of the back row as soon as you can.” “Castle early,” (swapping positions with your king and rook simultaneously, the only time that affords the player the chance to move two pieces at once.) I joined the chess club in Junior High school. I was the only girl. But unlike so many other games and sports, gender truly didn’t matter. I won as much as I lost and so did everyone else. I just liked to play.
I don’t remember when my dad gave me his carved ivory chess set. But I still have it. The king is a Samurai warrior in full armor, the queen is an empress. The knights are elephants with elaborate seats and blankets over their bodies and they carry tall flags. The pieces are small, perhaps two inches high at the peak. And instead of black and white, they are ivory and red. He bought them on his travels through Europe in the fifties, after WWII. He appreciated the game, and these pieces raised it to an art. We never played with them however. They weren’t weighted on the bottom and so they were very fragile and would tip over at the slightest movement of the board. So, they sit in their original case, waiting for the day that I find a special artisan who can drill into the little platform bottoms of each piece and insert a ball bearing or some other shard of metal to hold them permanently upright.
In 1972, Bobby Fischer won the World Chess Championship, defeating Boris Spassky in a match held in Reykjavik, Iceland. That match garnered more interest than any World Chess Championship before or since. It was billed as a cold war confrontation. My dad and I followed the daily moves in the newspaper where each play was reported like a tense football match.
“In (Game 6) Robert Fischer lead off the Game with 1. c4 — and went into the Queen’s Gambit Declined: Tartakower Defense. Exchange Variation. BUT 41. Qf4 -!!!, would be another brilliant Game-Winning Move for Fischer! In this position Boris Spassky would either get Checkmated or lose his Queen. Fischer now took the lead over Spassky by 1 point.”
We took the winning game’s notations and played it ourselves to glean just an ounce of understanding from the two masters. Dad taught me to appreciate genius, not to be jealous of it or try to emulate it. Just to learn from it. Those years trained me to think strategically, to try and step back from the board in front of me and see the whole — the goal, the players and their roles, the possibilities. There is no question, these early suggestions about how to think became the heart of how I approach many challenges in life.
Years later, I was living in western Massachusetts, working my first job out of college. I would play chess at a local coffeehouse where you could enjoy a hot cider while playing a game at your table. I worked with a tutor who would teach me how to improve my end games. We’d clear the board of all the pieces except perhaps his king and my knight and bishop. And I would try several maneuvers, over and over to corner and checkmate him. I was getting better.
I started dating a guy in New York City who I’d met through a friend. I began traveling to see him twice a month. He loved chess too. We would take the subway from 102nd Street down to the chess halls in Greenwich Village. The spaces were like coffee shops with long tables similar to the cafeteria tables we had in elementary school. The tables were set parallel to each other affording players a seat on either side of the expanse. Each place was marked by the presence of a chess board and clock timer. The paneled wood walls and linoleum floors echoed from an era long past. On the back wall was a large cloth chess board with the iconic pieces set in their places to record tournament games as they were being played.
My boyfriend and I would play each other for a little while until one day, I ventured to play a total stranger. Most of the regulars were men who did nothing but play chess all day against anyone who might stop by and was willing to wait long enough to play the winner. I’d never played with a clock timer until that day. As intimidating as it may have been, it was apparent I was still a newbie and my opponent was a willing teacher. Like my father, he would give me a look now and then. “Sure you want to do that?”, I would read into his eyes. And I would hold off until I was ready. I’m sure I lost the game. But it was fun to try.
My boyfriend and I would often walk to Riverside Park with a bag of chess pieces in hand to find an open table along the riverfront. Dozens of Puerto Rican locals would be playing the game with friends and fans looking on. One time a small group came over to watch our game. One asked if he could play the winner and we gladly obliged. I won. He smiled widely and sat down to play. I opened with the Queen’s gambit. As luck would have it, he accepted. A crowd formed around us. I could hear my dad’s voice in my head. “Get your pieces out, take control of the center squares early.” I concentrated, not lifting my eyes from the board. We were exchanging pieces. My points were rising. The end game was near. When I won, my opponent stood and shook my hand. “Never saw a girl play before,” he said. “Good game.” Having played with my dad for so many years, it really hadn’t occurred to me that I was a novelty. I was confident and liked to play. As I began to realize how unique it was for a girl, woman, to play the game, it only made me want to play more.
Chess fell out of favor after a while. And my life moved along. The boyfriend ended. Graduate school and marriage to another followed. Then children, career and so on. During my time traveling to New York for love and chess, I purchased my own inlaid wooden board and matching wooden pieces. Now divorced and moving to my own home, I will set the chessboard in my window and relish the time when someone new comes along willing to teach, willing to learn, and willing to play.
