My mother, my father and I stood in a pool of champagne light in a curio shop on Brighton Beach Avenue. We’d spent the day at our beach club, had dinner at our regular diner on the avenue, then strolled on the commercial strip. Now, we lingered. Outside, chattering crowds passed in the darkness after sunset. The streetlights shone into the store, where their glare melted into the softer yellow cast of table lamps. We’d recently moved away from these old shadowy streets in Brooklyn, across the Verrazano Narrows, to the newness of Staten Island. But the evening fixed us in this store like flies suspended in amber.

“Look, Ran,” my mother said. “Aren’t they gorgeous?” She held the wooden case open like a book before me. Inside, nestled in individual beds of black velvet, were thirty-two plastic chess pieces, each a Sleeping Beauty. The blush on each pale cheek made me imagine them breathing, and if I touched their hearts I was sure I’d feel them beat. While the rest of the store’s merchandise was wood and metal, some items even dated as antiques, somehow these plastic sculptures felt to me the most like genuine artifacts. Two courts, from king to lowly pawn, slumbered, mirroring one another, one court clothed in red and the other in white. My mother lifted the red queen to show me.

Though the queen was only a couple of inches high, I knew, if she existed in real life, she would be tall like my mother, would have a commanding voice just like the one my mother used to direct the fourth graders in her classroom. Then I pictured their identities reversed. I imagined my mother in medieval dress, a cone tilting on her head like the queen’s, silk draping from the cone’s tip all the way to the ground, where it would puddle against the hem of her ermine robe.

“She’s beautiful,” I whispered. Can I hold her? I wanted to say, but didn’t. It was 1971, and I was nine. My mother laid the queen back inside her velvet crevice. I stood on tiptoe, as my mother cradled the open case with both hands. I wanted more time to see each detail: the cross in the bishop’s hand, the way each knight reared on his horse. People in tiny

“Bern?” my mother said, looking now at my father.

My father, Bernie, with his hands in the pockets of his ancient brown canvas jacket, hovered over a display case of calligraphed maps. The lights of the store, seemingly brighter because of the darkness outside, reflected in crescents off the lenses of my father's horn-rimmed glasses. He wore his battered black canvas handball sneakers, patched and mended multiple times. My father was a fix-it-with-adhesive-tape sort of guy. He had learned this technique as a medic in the Korean War, and now he applied adhesive tape to every item, it seemed: sneakers, the torn covers of math textbooks, ripped outdoor cushions. He scoffed at throwing things away.

“Bern?” my mother said again. “It’s a chess set.”

Chess. It was my father’s other game, besides handball. Maybe my father would like the chess set in the new house. Maybe it would go with all the other items my mother had chosen in recent weeks, all vetted by her decorator, all from Huffman-Koos.

Huffman-Koos was a Manhattan furniture emporium that advertised regularly with full page ads in The New York Times. Up until a few months before, I’d never heard of Huffman-Koos. I had lived the first nine years of my life in Brooklyn. Our Brooklyn house, with its front stoop and screen door, a single tooth in a row of identical, side-by-side houses, had seemed fine to me. But each night, my mother knelt on the kitchen floor with a safety match to ignite the pilot light within the decades-old white enameled oven. She struggled with a rubber hose that attached a wheeling, clanky dishwasher to the sink faucet. Sometimes, the hose fell off the faucet. Water would spray and leave her drenched and mopping the graying linoleum floor. Her Brooklyn kitchen looked nothing like the shining abodes in her issues of Better Homes and Gardens. Somehow her dream of having a new stove had ballooned into a newly constructed house in a different borough of New York City: Staten Island. Now I heard the words every day: “Huffman-Koos,” “our decorator.” In our Staten Island house, we had not only a Harvest Gold oven—one with a pilot light that lit when my mom turned a knob—and a matching refrigerator and dishwasher, but a living room and a recreation room.

“We could put it in the rec room,” my mother said. “On the chess table.” We didn't have the chess table yet, but my mother had picked it out.

I’d practiced chess for two Thursdays in my fourth-grade after-school club before getting bored and going home early so I could get into bed with my Andrew Lang collection of fairy tales. But now I tried to picture playing a game with my father, with the intricate plastic figurines. He’d wax on about famous openings: the Ruy Lopez, the Giuoco Piano. He’d shake his head at me, impatient, when I moved my knight and left the king vulnerable. I wouldn’t want to consider defense, why pawn to king’s four made more sense. I’d want to set the pawns in a dance around the maypole, turn the opposing queens into best friends choosing gowns for the banquet together.

My father shrugged, leaned over and glanced at the plastic pieces arranged in velvet, and flattened his lips together in a half-smirk. “You want it?” he said.

My mother was too tall and broad for girlish moves, but her nod contained a hopeful leap, a skip. “I love it,” she said.

My father shrugged again, pulled out his wallet. My mother reached her hand to his, and leaned in.

“Okay, babe,” he said, kissing her on the lips and smiling now. “Enjoy it,” he said, even though I had never known my mother to play a game of chess.

Our new Staten Island neighborhood felt fresh, clean, and confusing. White poured concrete lay everywhere, the sidewalks unblemished and empty, baking under a harsh, constant sun. To walk outside, I pushed open the vinyl screen door of our new house and raised a hand to shield my eyes.

I thought of our sidewalks back in Brooklyn, shaded by old maples and oaks, the cracked pavements, the way the roots of the wizened trees pushed up through the ground, forming hills and valleys, whole imaginary worlds where I sat some days, making up stories, cupped in the safe dips in the earth around the street trees, alone but not lonely. The complexity of Brooklyn streets had comforted me, the privet hedges protected me. Men and women passed by, heading home from the subway stops on the avenues. They smiled down at me, benevolent, unsurprised to see a thin girl seated cross-legged beneath a street tree, whispering to herself.

Where could I hide here? Klondike Avenue stretched out before me, as barren and unforgiving as the Canadian terrain the street was named for. The treeless sidewalks ended at the top of a hill, where they devolved into plowed red mud and woods not yet cleared for new tract housing like ours.

Gradually, the empty house filled with furnishings, so that we could move beyond the Harvest Gold kitchen and outward. My mother presided over the unloading of the trucks from Huffman-Koos.

The sunken living room turned something called “country French,” curlicued and baroque and completely off-limits to all three of us kids. “I always wanted a living room that I can sit in without toys in it,” my mother said. As it turned out, she never sat in it either. The chairs and tables, with their curved, spindly legs, and their white finishes like meringue, seemed too fragile for my tall, clomping mother. They looked more like tea seatings for the royal chess pieces. But my mom seemed to love the living room anyway. She loved the idea of it.

One day, in a moment that seemed like fairy-tale magic but I knew was Huffman-Koos, the rec room appointments appeared: a shag rug with a paint-splatter pattern like a Jackson Pollock painting, a couch upholstered with pale-gray fake fur and trimmed with stainless steel, glass coffee and side tables, a lamp with a smoked-glass base shaped like an eye from an ancient Egyptian scroll. The most understated piece in the room was the chess table, a simple wooden side table with a chess board printed on its surface, flanked by two director’s chairs. I knew my mother had planned out the rec room with my father’s comfort in mind. A wall unit had open shelves for my father’s stereo system and his hundreds of classical music albums. The plush, comfy chair that faced the TV set, and was also right next to the lamp so reading would be easy, was instantly labeled “Daddy's chair,” and any of us would clear off of it the second he entered the room.

My father seemed half-pleased, half-dubious when he stood with my mom before the finished room.

He wrapped his arm around her. She beamed. He rubbed her back.

"You like it?" he asked her.

"Of course I like it. It's amazing. Don't you think so?"

"It's... wild," he said. I stood next to them, picturing our Brooklyn house, all neutral tones and nondescript, where my father, in his faded brown trousers and his threadbare, ripped white t-shirts, seemed to fit in. This place, admittedly, seemed right for my mom on a night out, when she'd wear her gold hoop earrings and her palazzo pants—bell bottoms so wide they flowed like a queen's gown with a psychedelic paisley print.

"You don't like it?" My mother seemed poised to crumble. She searched his eyes.

"I like it, I like it," my father said, pulling my mother closer to him. "It's great, babe."

In Staten Island, I did appreciate the fact that the houses next door to ours were each twenty feet away, which felt like a mile compared to the attached houses in Brooklyn, where "next door" meant on the other side of a wall.

One afternoon, my brother and sister were both out. I sat in the rec room, reading, when I heard my father's voice rise from the kitchen. Soon he stomped into the rec room, my mother following him. He paced back toward the dining room, and pulled drawers open, one after the other. What was he looking for? "Bern, no," my mother said, as he flipped open the wooden case, and dug his fingers into the velvet.

As I braced myself on the couch, the chess pieces began flying against the dining room wall. Curses punctuated each of his pitches: Mother fucking cocksucker. Jesus fucking Christ. Fucking bastard. I had no idea why he was so angry in the first place. He threw the pieces one at a time, aiming clear and crisp, the way he did when he slammed a handball.

"I'm going for a walk," he said. And then I heard the front door slam shut. I knew he'd return calmer. I knew he'd enclose my mom in a hug and stroke her hair and tell her how sorry he was. And I knew, as I always knew, that she would forgive him, and expect me to forgive him, too.

But this knowing didn't come first. First, I knelt on the dining room carpet next to my mother and picked up the plastic shards. The white bishop's cross, on a disembodied arm. The broken turrets of the red rook. Feet on round disks: the bases of so many pawns. I grasped the red queen, her headdress gone, only half her face intact. I looked up at my mother. She seemed exhausted, but whole, focused on her task: tucking the pieces back into the case, sweeping fragments of royalty into a dustpan.

I didn't see her put the wooden box into the trash. But I never saw a trace of that chess set again.

Years later, when I was an adult, I asked my mother about my father's temper. They grew old together. In their seventies and eighties, when they went anywhere, they held hands. He had calmed some, and where he once would have shouted, he now just sneered. "Your father had a chemical thing," she said. "That anger. He couldn't help it. I just ignored it. It always passed."

If he'd been more open-minded, or if he'd been born in a later generation, maybe my father would have gotten therapy, or medication, or both. Maybe he would have learned to talk about what angered him, instead of letting his rage build and then explode. Their marriage lasted sixty-five years, until they both died, within three months of each other. Was it weakness that welded her to him? Or was there something stronger in my mother, more regal, that let her tolerate, or perhaps separate herself from, my father's combustion? I can't pretend to understand.

July 5, 2023

About the writer

Randi Glatzer's essays have been published in Lilith Magazine, Pen 2 Paper, and New Millennium Writings. Her journalism has been published in local and national magazines, including Self, Philadelphia Magazine, New York Magazine, and Glamour. She holds a bachelor's degree from the State University of New York at Binghamton, and an MFA in creative nonfiction from The New School in New York City. She teaches and writes in Philadelphia.