I never thought I was a chess person. Then Covid came, and I've found the game cathartic
Back in April, months before Netflix’s series The Queen’s Gambit caused a sensation and a run on chess sets, I started playing chess with an app on my phone. This was a strange thing for me to do, since I had never thought of myself as someone who would ever be good at chess. Every time I’d ever played anyone, I’d lost almost immediately, coming away feeling frustrated and dumb. I guess I liked to think it was because I’m more of an intuitive, right-brained person, not a plotter or a planner. And so I avoided chess for most of my life. But something about April, with Covid-19 raging and New York City on lockdown, sent me into the battlefield.
I’d never really realized before that it is a battlefield. Playing chess is like being thrust into an episode of Game of Thrones. As I lay in bed at night, unable to sleep, anxious and fearful about the plague that was whipping through the city, taking the lives of thousands and then tens of thousands, I was advancing across the field like a wildling wielding its spear. Sometimes, in my imagination, I was Boudicca, the legendary, first-century redheaded Celtic queen who waged war against the Roman invaders. I loved hearing the thunk of the app when my piece would land, taking out an adversary. Chess is combat. And it’s exhilarating.
Playing chess has made me think a lot about my brother Danny, who died of an epileptic seizure in 2005, at age 46. I feel like I’ve come to know Danny better in the last few months than I ever did when he was with us. Danny was a high school chess champion. From the ages of about 14 to 18, he was obsessed with chess. Every day he would come home from school and sit down in his room with his friends Eric or Hugh and play intense games of chess with an accompanying chess clock. I would hear them banging the clock and screaming at each other – sometimes argumentatively, sometimes joyously. I just thought they were weird. They were weird. They were brilliant boys, nerdy, intellectual. At Danny’s funeral, which was held in Florida (where we were born and raised, though he spent most of his adult life living in LA, where he worked in the film industry), many people talked about how Danny was the smartest guy they’d ever known.
But it isn’t always easy being that smart. Danny had a rather hard life, and I can see now that high school was
probably especially hard for him. He was different. He was skinny. He had a terrible case of acne. He was constantly battling with our father, who was maddeningly critical of him, often for no good reason. (In many ways, they were much alike.) Chess, I see now, was Danny’s escape. In chess, he no longer had to be the difficult boy he was – he was a knight, a king. He was winning. He was powerful. And he became so through using his wonderful brain.
After I’d been playing chess for a few months – first against the app, and then against the anonymous players you can connect with online – I felt like I was ready to play an actual person in real life. I’d started to win! (Well, some of the time.) So I asked my daughter, who is 20 and lives with me, to sit down for a game. She beat me in four moves. I was astonished! How did I still suck so bad? But I also felt a little twinge of pride, and thought about how funny my brother Danny would have found the whole thing. He’s the one who first taught me how to play chess, though he soon grew impatient with my hopelessness. Now, we often play together, my daughter and I, and sometimes I tell her about my brother Danny, remembering all the things he taught me. It’s a nice way to spend quarantine.
Nancy Jo Sales is a writer for Vanity Fair and the author of American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers