Margaret snickered and leaned toward Gordon, who sat beside her and sometimes held her hand. “That’s the brain!” she whispered in a soft, girlish voice radiant with contempt. Gordon laughed. Beth looked out the window at the autumn leaves.
“I do not know where the money goes!” Mrs. Wheatley said. “I have bought little more than trifles this month, and yet my hoard has been decimated. Decimated.” She plopped into the chintz-covered armchair and stared at the ceiling for a moment, wide-eyed, as if expecting a guillotine to fall. “I have paid electric bills and telephone bills and have bought simple, uncomplicated groceries. I have denied myself cream for my morning coffee, have bought nothing whatever for my person, have attended neither the cinema nor the rummage sales at First Methodist, and yet I have seven dollars left where I should have at least twenty.” She laid the crumpled one-dollar bills on the table beside her, having fished them from her purse a few moments before. “We have this for ourselves until the end of October. It will scarcely buy chicken necks and porridge.”
“Doesn’t Methuen send you a check?” Beth said.
Mrs. Wheatley brought her eyes down from the ceiling and stared at her. “For the first year,” she said evenly. “As if the expenses of keeping you didn’t exhaust it.”
Beth knew that wasn’t true. The check was seventy dollars, and Mrs. Wheatley didn’t spend that much on her.
“It requires twenty dollars for us to live passably until the first of the month,” Mrs. Wheatley said. “I am thirteen dollars short of that.” She turned her gaze briefly ceilingward and then back to Beth again. “I shall have to keep better records.”
“Maybe it’s inflation,” Beth said, with some truth. She had taken only six, for the membership.
“Maybe it is,” Mrs. Wheatley said, mollified.
The problem was the five dollars for the entry fee. In home room, the day after Mrs. Wheatley’s oration about money, Beth took a sheet from her composition book and wrote a letter to Mr. Shaibel, Custodian, Methuen Home, Mount Sterling, Kentucky. It read:
Dear Mr. Shaibeclass="underline"
There is a chess tournament here with a first prize of one hundred dollars and a second prize of fifty dollars. There are other prizes, too. It costs five dollars to enter it, and I don’t have that.
If you will send me the money I will pay you back ten dollars if I win any prize at all.
Very truly yours,
Elizabeth Harmon
The next morning she took an envelope and a stamp from the cluttered desk in the living room while Mrs. Wheatley was still in bed. She put the letter in the mailbox on her way to school.
In November she took another dollar from Mrs. Wheatley’s purse. It had been a week since she wrote Mr. Shaibel, and there had been no answer. This time, with part of the money, she bought the new issue of Chess Review. She found several games that she could improve upon—one by a young grandmaster named Benny Watts. Benny Watts was the United States Champion.
Mrs. Wheatley seemed to have a good many colds. “I have a proclivity for viruses,” she would say. “Or they for me.” She handed Beth a prescription to take to Bradley’s and a dime to buy herself a Coke.
Mr. Bradley gave her an odd look when she came in, but he said nothing. She gave him the prescription and he went to the back of the store. Beth carefully avoided standing near the magazines. When she took the Chess Review a month before, it had been the only copy. He might have noticed it right away.
Mr. Bradley brought back a plastic container with a typed label on it. He put it down on the counter while he got a white paper bag. Beth stared at the container. The pills in it were oblong and bright-green.
“This will be my tranquility medicine,” Mrs. Wheatley said. “McAndrews has decided I need tranquility.”
“Who’s McAndrews?” Beth said.
“Dr. McAndrews,” Mrs. Wheatley said, unscrewing the lid. “My physician.” She took out two of the pills. “Would you get me a glass of water, dear?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Beth said. As she was going into the bathroom for the water, Mrs. Wheatley sighed and said, “Why do they only fill these bottles half full?”
In the November issue there were twenty-two games from an invitational tournament in Moscow. The players had names like Botvinnik and Petrosian and Laev; they sounded like people in a fairy tale. There was a photograph showing two of them hunched over a board, dark-haired and grim-lipped. They wore black suits. Out of focus, behind them, sat a huge audience.
In a game between Petrosian and someone named Benkowitz, in the semifinals, Beth saw a bad decision of Petrosian’s. He started an attack with pawns but shouldn’t have. There was a commentary on the game by an American grandmaster, who thought the pawn moves were good, but Beth saw deeper than that. How could Petrosian have misjudged it? Why hadn’t the American seen the weakness? They must have spent a long time studying it, since the magazine said the game took five hours.
Margaret only slipped the shaft into her gym lock and didn’t twist the dial afterward. They were in shower stalls side by side now, and Beth could see Margaret’s sizable breasts, like solid cones. Beth’s chest was still like a boy’s and her pubic hair had just started coming in. Margaret ignored Beth and hummed while she soaped herself. Beth stepped out and wrapped herself in a towel. Still wet, she went back into the locker room. There was no one there.
Beth dried her hands quickly and very quietly slipped the shaft out of Margaret’s lock, muffling it in her towel. Her hair dripped on her hands, but that didn’t matter; there was water all over from the boys’ gym. Beth slipped off the lock and opened the locker door, slowly so it wouldn’t squeak. Her heart was thumping like some kind of little animal in her chest.
It was a fine brown purse of real leather. Beth dried her hands again and lifted it down from the shelf, listening carefully. There were giggles and shouts from the girls in the shower, but nothing else. She had made a point of being the first in, to get the stall nearest the door, and she had left quickly. No one else would be through yet. She opened the purse.
There were colored postcards and a new-looking lipstick and a tortoise-shell comb and an elegant linen handkerchief. Beth pushed through these with her right hand. At the bottom, in a little silver money clip, were bills. She pulled them out. Two fives. She hesitated for a moment and then took them both, together with the clip. She put the purse back and replaced the lock.
She had left her own door shut but unlocked. She opened it now and slid the clipped fives into her Algebra book. Then she locked her door, went back to the shower and stayed there washing herself until all the other girls had left.
When everyone else was gone, Beth was still getting dressed. Margaret had not opened her purse. Beth sighed deeply, like Mrs. Wheatley. Her heart was still pounding. She got the money clip out of her algebra book and pushed it under the locker Margaret had used. It might have just fallen there from Margaret’s purse, and anybody could have taken the money. She folded the bills and put them in her shoe. Then she took her own blue plastic purse from the shelf, opened it and reached into the little pocket that held the mirror. She took out two green pills, put them in her mouth, went to the washstand and swallowed them down with a paper cup of water.
Supper that night was spaghetti and meatballs from a can, with Jell-O for dessert. While Beth was doing the dishes and Mrs. Wheatley was in the living room turning the volume up on the TV, Mrs. Wheatley suddenly said, “Oh, I forgot.”