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had been left in the house and I’d read. I specifically liked it that all the chess men looked different, slightly mysterious and had complicated responsibilities that required them to move only in predetermined ways for specific strategic missions, which my book described as representing how real war went on at the time when chess was invented in India.
    My mother didn’t play. She preferred pinochle, which she said was a Jewish game—although she had no one to play it with. My father didn’t like chess because, he said, Lenin had been a chess player. He preferred checkers, which he claimed was a more natural game that required subtle, deceptive skills. This made my mother sneer and say it was only subtle if you were from Alabama and couldn’t think straight. When I got my set, I laid it out and showed her how the men moved. She tried to execute some of these, but grew uninterested and finally said her father had ruined it for her by being too demanding. I found out from my book that players all played chess against themselves for practice and would spend hours studying how to beat themselves so that when they played against a real opponent in a tournament, the game became just something you played in your head—which appealed to me, though I couldn’t figure out how to do it and made rash, uninformed moves the club members would’ve hooted at. Several times I tried to convince Berner to sit on the opposite side of the board, on my bed, and let me perform moves that I read straight out of the Chess Fundamentals book, and which I would then instruct her how to answer. She did this twice, then also got bored and quit before the game had barely begun. When she was disgusted with me, she would stare hard at me and not speak, then breathe through her nose in a way that was meant for me to hear. “If you ever were any good at this, what difference would it make?” She said this as she was leaving. I, of course, thought this wasn’t the point. Everything didn’t have to have a practical outcome. Some things you only did because you liked doing them—which was not her way of thinking about life by then.
    BERNER WAS , of course, my only real friend. We never endured the rivalries and bitter disagreements and belligerence brothers and sisters can suffer. This was because we were twins and seemed often to know what the other was thinking and cared about, and could easily agree. We also knew the life with our parents was very different from other children’s lives—the children we went to school with, who we fantasized as being regular people with friends, and parents who acted normal together. (This, of course, was wrong.) We also agreed that our life was “a situation,” and waiting was the hard part. At some point it would all become something else, and it was easier if we simply were patient and made the most of things together.
    As I’ve said, Berner had lately come to advertise a more severe temperament and didn’t talk to anyone much and was often sarcastic even to me. I could see my mother’s grave features living in her flat, freckled face—her rounded nose, large, pupil-less eyes with thick eyebrows, large pores in her pimply skin and dark, wiry, heavy hair that started near her forehead. She didn’t smile any more than my mother did, and I once heard my mother say to her, “You don’t want to grow up to be a tall gangly girl with a dissatisfied look on her face.” But I don’t think Berner cared who she would grow up to be. She seemed to live entirely in the present moment, and thoughts about what would happen to her later didn’t displace the feeling that she didn’t like how things were now. She was physically stronger than I was and would sometimes take hold of my wrist with her large hands and rub my skin in opposite directions and make the “Chinese burn,” while she told me that because she was older than I was, I had to do what she said—which I did almost all the time anyway. I was very