Summary: "I wanted to be you. I still do. I want to be free, to know love, to finally get rid of the past, but...it's so hard." A chess board of green and white represents an apt metaphor for Scarlett's life.
The board was green and white, marble, polished to a shine, with figures of green and white stone, polished to the same finish, silent and opposing, two rows or eight on each side. Green and white, silent and screaming at each other, seperated only by a few rows in the middle. Cold, white civilized indifference battling green passion, barbaric fire.
It was the ones in the center that fascinated her most--a queen and king, silent and commanding over their armies. The green queen was wild, heathen, her hair loose, flowers her crown, and a low, slim-skirted dress, holding a long rod in her hand, and Scarlett picked her up, admiring her features. The tiny figure looked so lifelike, her dress folds perfect, flowers carved to minute precision, and the face so real, a regal, calm, amused, commanding expression on her face. The king beside her was heathen as well; a crown of twisted wire or vines, a dangerous benign smile on his face, eyes narrowed and glinting with the joy of battle.
These pawns were wild and reveling in it; bare chested, clutching spears with oddly calm expressions on their faces. Behind them, witches guarded the king and queen on either side, witches with impossibly curling hair, tattered, majestic robes, holding human skulls covered in flower blossoms. Beside them were horses, wild stallions, with green manes tossed, pawing the ground, eyes alight in the joy of battle. Tall, crumbling towers stood at either end, flames atop each one a beacon of battle for the troops.
How different from the white ones. The white queen had her hair drawn back, her crown rigid and unornamented, her face stern, regal in its white marble coldness, hands folded on billowing skirts and lacy sleeves. The king's crown was heavy, and his face was worn, tired from carrying the burden, commanding and responsible and stern. Priests lay on either side of them, hands clasped and crosses on their plain robes, and beside them knights sat rigid atop horses. Two tall, conical spires were the ends, straight and severe, and the pawns were soldiers, swords drawn at an angle and shields raised.
But it was the queens that interested Scarlett. She picked them up, setting one in each palm carefully, staring them in the face. Rhett had called her a queen, once, and she hadn't known what he had meant. Now, it seemed simple, knowing this game as she had come to, respecting it as she had come to. The Queen was the most agile piece, moving in any direction, strong but just as vunerable as the other players, able to be cut down by a pawn and could be replaced by a pawn as well. Her eyes weighed the two queens she held, both haughty and commanding, but one joyous and wild, one strict and civilized. She had known both.
The queens could have been the person. They were the same height, same build, their features the same, but their souls were of two different personalities. The green queen had accepted who she was and embraced it, become wild, joyous, alive. The white queen had grown into a stereotype, stern, commanding, doing her duty but not loving it, confined and captive in her white castle.
How foolish she would look if anyone had come in now--sitting at a table holding two chess pieces in her hand. "Well, I don't care," she told the green queen defiantly. She had realized that no opinion mattered to her but Rhett's, and he would always love her and always had. She smiled secretely at the queen.
"Things have changed," she said, adressing the white queen. "I used to be just like you, so worried about everything. Do you even know the way things really are in the world?" Scarlett paused, her smile fading, staring at the white queen. "Things are always different," she said to herself, and she wasn't talking to the white queen anymore. "I don't know who I am. I don't know if I ever really did. I didn't know anything but I thought I knew everything--now I realize I don't know anything and I still don't know what to do." Scarlett paused, staring at the queen's lined, worn face. "All I wanted was beaux. I wanted Ashley. No, that's not really right. I wanted the person I thought Ashley was. But it didn't matter..."
She trailed off under the white queen's stern gaze and smiled at her. "I guess you're right," she confessed to it. "I manged to ruin all the chances at happiness I had pretty thoroughly, didn't I?" She let her smile fade and she stared past the queen. "But could I have been happy? Not with Charles, not with Frank, not with Ashley. I could have been happy with Rhett but Ashley was standing in the way--no, it wasn't Ashley standing in the way, it was me, my own feelings."
She focused her brilliant green eyes on the green queen, so much darker than her eyes. "I wanted to be you. I still do. I want to be free, to know love, to finally get rid of the past, but...it's so hard. I could never be you," she looked at the white queen sadly, "and I almost killed myself trying to." Scarlett was silent, and unbidden, images came back: seeing herself in that mirror, her hair lank and stringy, her eyes shadowed and dangerously bright, face pale, too thin and too bony, with a glass of whiskey in her hand--her drug, her suicide, her savior, her addiction.
"I'm not like them," she murmured to the green queen. "Neither are you. We're different. We're not ladies, we can never be--we can't stand their rules and their games, their secrets and their little role-plays. We're too real for them; we can feel life, feel it the way it should be. But the white queens could never understand our lives--the lusts, the addictions, the battles and joys we have every day. It's so hard to stop caring about what people think, so hard to have faith that it will make you happy."
The room grew silent as Scarlett stared thoughtfully at the two queens, her thoughts swirling and spiraling through ideas and possibilities she had thought a thousand times before. So many regrets, so many stupid mistakes. You think it'd be easy, Scarlett thought wryly, learning to let these things go. But it's not--it never is and it never was.
It was a battle, an internal battle, a journey and a battle from and to white and green and back again, from the O'Hara to the Robilliard and from the Ellen to the Gerald and from Atlanta and Charleston to Ireland and London, and from the slow death of boredom and the thrill of challenge to the loneliness of herself and the answer of Rhett. He pushed her into battles, fought her in the midst of them, pulled her through them, and held her safely. She had run after him, to Charleston, to their restraining societies and quiet malice, into the slow death of boredom. Some people could be happy that way, but Scarlett O'Hara Butler was not one of them.
She had thought that Ireland could be her green queen, offering her happiness and home, that the O'Hara life could satisfy her and make her content. But it hadn't, and it couldn't. She needed challenge, and without it she was only half alive. She had poured her heart and soul into it, but it couldn't satisfy her. She wanted love, needed it, for love was freedom, and Rhett was freedom.
How complex. He caged her, tortured her, angered her, but he was the one who freed her, who crushed her and brought her to life. It wasn't fair or right, not when he had seemed so free to go without her. But he wasn't and hadn't been. A small smile played on Scarlett's lips at that thought, and it gave her a warmth inside. She was intelligent where he was emotional and he was intelligent where she was emotional; two pieces that fit in a jigsaw puzzle, always next to each other. They needed each other--two halves of a whole, two sides of the same coin, he heads and her hearts, soul mates, if she had believed in such things. A king and a queen.
Scarlett's smile widened and her eyes danced as she watched the two queens on her palms. They could be the same woman. Her face reflected in both and she knew it true.
Slowly, she set the white queen down, keeping the green queen but a moment longer before setting it down. She stood, and unconsciously adapted the same position as the green queen, smiling joyfully, flirtatiously, her face serene and regal, eyes amused and serious, body straight and proud, and as she walked, her feet were loose and wild and free.
She wanted to dance.