Game of Kings by Michael Weinreb

Author:Michael Weinreb [Weinreb, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781592403387
Publisher: Penguin Group
Published: 2007-12-27T08:00:00+00:00

Her best students have been the progeny of cabdrivers and hardware-store employees and laundry workers. Most of their parents remain distant and removed from Elizabeth’s tutelage; they sign permission slips and they show up for car pools, and this is the extent of it, and it is nothing like what goes on at the private schools, where the mothers and fathers have been known to dictate the tenor of their children’s activities. Often, as with Oscar’s mother and father, they don’t quite understand this sudden fixation with something they’ve always regarded as a game, a glorified version of checkers. Suddenly, they’re bringing home permission slips to travel to Florida and Tennessee, and asking their parents, many of whom have never boarded a plane themselves, to sign for them.

It means something different to all of them. They can treat the game with grave urgency, as Shawn did, or they can consider it a social outlet. One of Elizabeth’s current students, an eighth-grader who lives in the Lindsay Park Houses, says that his mother is so obsessed with him passing the test to get into Stuyvesant that she hardly lets him leave the house. So chess club is his one place for making friends. He doesn’t much care about winning or losing, but his rating has jumped six hundred points in the past year. “I just want to be popular,” he says. “I’ve never been popular before.”

Marta, on the other hand, doesn’t have this problem. Marta is both popular and remarkably mature for a seventh-grader; before she started playing chess, her average in math was a 94. Now it’s gone up to a 99, and this never ceases to amaze her, how those two things seem to correlate, how she can go from her chess class to her math class and everything seems to make so much more sense, because chess class doesn’t feel anything like math class.

Marta, whose parents are from Poland (and whose father still frets over all the traveling she does for chess), who lives in Greenpoint and commutes half an hour every morning just to get to 318, is already something of an aberration among her classmates. This is because she is a female in a culture subsumed by testosterone. And this is a reality that doesn’t seem likely to change anytime soon.

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