The Chrome Suite

by Sandra Birdsell

  “Why?” she persisted. “If you’re still so fond of me, why leave?” She winced inwardly at the word “fond.”

  “It’s too difficult to explain,” he said. “Even I’m not sure I understand.”

  “Try,” she said, her voice taut with anger.

  “All right,” he said. “It’s because I think that perhaps I no longer love you.”

  Contrary to Piotr’s prediction they’re not among the first to board the ferry. The line of cars farthest away is loaded first and then the attendant signals for them to move forward. They drop in behind the traffic streaming on towards the gaping mouth of the vessel. Tires meet the metal ramp at the entrance with a steady rhythmic clank. They’ll be on the upper level, Amy realizes. Piotr guides the car up the steep grade, but just as they are about to reach the top of it, the car in front of them stops and they’re left hanging at almost a ninety-degree angle. Piotr turns to her in panic. She yanks on the emergency brake. The attendant below is preoccupied with directing the car behind them onto the bottom level. “Hey, you, come on!” Piotr yells from the window and the attendant turns quickly, sees their predicament, grabs a lever, and they feel the car rise and level off. Their ears pop as car doors slam shut and people begin moving towards the stairs. “Hey, it’s okay now,” Amy says and rubs his knee. He takes these happenstances personally. He is constantly suspicious that the country is one big trap-line set to snare its immigrants and keep them in their place. Amy believes he’s right. She takes on his anger directed at the attendant. She had come to believe that she was an immigrant, too, cut off from her country at an early age. It’s this ability to identify, she will later come to realize, her ability to take on his skin, to see through his eyes, that caught her.

  They find the lounge and a quiet corner and share a beer. Piotr unzips his leather folder and spreads pages across the table. Amy watches a group of teenagers mill about on the deck outside the window. They look out of place, California, in their muted pastel colours. They begin throwing pieces of hot dog to the wind and are rewarded by seagulls treading air, sometimes flying backwards in order to snatch a scrap of bun. A man stands off to one side, watching. He leans against the railing, a sharp visual contrast to the younger people and their exuberant playing at feeding the gulls. A Charles Manson look-alike, Amy thinks. He laughs as a seagull swoops down from nowhere and plucks a piece of bun off a young man’s head. He’s thin, a bony man, probably undernourished as a child. He digs about in his shirt pocket and then stuffs wads of something in each ear. Licks of dark hair flip in the wind. Most likely doesn’t have any money and is reluctant to come in where he can smell the food, she thinks. A rousing cheer rises over a near in-flight collision of several birds snatching at the last bit of food. Then the pastel-coloured young people drift away and the unkempt-looking man watches them.

  The squeak of Piotr’s fine-tip felt marker sets Amy on edge. He’s crossing out line after line of dialogue of a stage play, the work of a Polish playwright, which he hopes to co-produce with his new partner, Elizabeth. Angst-ridden hyperbole. Amy wonders what Eastern European writers will have to write about now. Piotr dislikes what he has read of Canadian literature. Too much kitchen sink, he says. People falling in and out of love with themselves or writers playing around with style and form because they have nothing to say. Huh, Amy thinks, as she searches through her bag for the novel she’s been reading at his request. Talk about self-indulgent, getting off on the smell-of-your-own-armpit kind of love. She thumps the book down onto the table. “Huh!” she says aloud. Piotr doesn’t look up. The book is Tristan. A translation of a novel by Maria Kuncewiczowa. She picks up the book, rests her feet on the chair beside her, and begins to read.

  “Look,” Piotr interrupts minutes later and points to the window. Amy looks up. The Charles Manson look-alike stands sideways at the railing facing the hull. He shoulders a small rifle. He squints down the sights and they see his mouth go “pow, pow, pow” as he pops off imaginary rounds at the gulls.

  “Isn’t that illegal?” she says to Piotr. She scans the room for other people’s reactions, but they appear not to have noticed. “Shouldn’t we tell someone?”

  Piotr shrugs. “Tell who?”

  In the time it took for Amy to ask the question, the man lowered the rifle. He walks over to the window, bends, and then, several moments later, rises with a knapsack which he hoists onto his back. He’s rolled the rifle into his sleeping bag. They see the tip of its barrel protruding out one side of it as he walks away. Piotr returns to his work without commenting. Putting the incident from his mind instantly, she knows. He needs a draft of the script to put into the computer the moment they arrive home. Needs it to take with him when he goes to meet the new person, Elizabeth, his old friend. Amy tries to erase the incident, too, as she returns to Tristan. She reads for several minutes and then closes the book. Must be a bad translation, she rationalizes, because she fails to see any of the passion or beauty Piotr speaks of with shining eyes whenever he refers to this work. It fails to engage her. She sets it aside and studies him. His single-mindedness is a discipline he learned during his years as a student. Today it both awes and irritates her. His earlier question, “What would you write?” hurts. It implies that she might not have anything to say. She hasn’t, for instance, been caught in the maelstrom of a war. “In Canada, there would never be a war,” she remembers a Czech immigrant saying. “It’s too cold in Canada for a war,” he’d said and laughed. “Canadians wouldn’t want to go out and fight. They wouldn’t want their toes to get cold.”

  She hasn’t experienced an exotic childhood either, like the one Piotr claims to have had, toddling about in the safety of a beautiful walled garden, playing games on the Planty in the shadow of a castle, beneath his child’s feet the remains of ancient moats and fortifications. Cowboy and Indian games in the Old Market in Kraków under a renaissance parapet in a square filled with hundreds of pigeons that were not really pigeons but knights, he said. The knights of dukes, cursed and turned into birds. Unlike his, her dreams have not been thwarted by the invasion of an enemy.

  Yes, well, she thinks, even if I did have extraordinary stories to tell, I wouldn’t have the patience to put them down. She can remember, though, whatever she wants to. She has a mind for minute detail, shades of a colour, a raised eyebrow. She could, if she wanted to, remember way back to age nine. In a place she will call … something unusual, she thinks, exotic. The name jumps forward from the bottle of beer placed between them. Corona. Carrion, Charon. No, something plastic and meaningless. Carona.

  If she wanted to she could recall that long, strange summer when she spent almost the entire time outside, on a rope swing.

  Sometimes I’d lie on my stomach and wind the swing up and let it fly and then afterwards I’d reel about the backyard, loving that off-spinning feeling of things not being what they were. I’d swing standing up, sitting down, upside down with the rope wound through my legs and chafing the skin behind my knees raw. Once I vomited into my shoes from motion sickness, and near the end of that long, strange summer, I got a sliver in my buttock from the wooden swing seat. Two small sutures closed the wound. I still have the scar. And the doctor’s his, too, I imagine, on the wrist where I bit him when he tried to pin me to the table. He joked about it later, saying he’d had to give little Amy Barber as much anaesthetic as he would to put down a horse.

  To the left and across the street from my yard stood the red brick face of the school, elm trees, and the jangled shimmer of television antennas. When I think of that horizon of antennas in the Fifties, I think of the word “jangled” because of its connotation of sound, the sound I thought their aluminum arms made as they embraced the invisible signal. It was also the sound of bangles jangling at a wrist: Aunt Rita as she approached the house one morning. I saw her coming. She was up early. Taking her role-playing at nurse seriously. Rita had taken a leave of absence from her job at the Film Exchange where she was in charge of distribution of short subjects a
nd news-reels for Paramount. She had come to relieve Margaret, my mother, in the sickroom. I have no idea what, if anything, she may have been doing for my father at that time, but she certainly did something later. As Rita stepped through the gate, I waved and she nodded, concentrating to keep from spilling whatever it was she carried on the covered tray. Food, I suppose. An attempt to seduce Jill’s tastebuds and bring some colour back to her waxy, pale cheeks. Rita eased the gate open with her hip and passed by the veranda and down the side of the house along the pathway obstructed by overgrown weedy flower-beds.

  The door closed behind her, and her white shoulders disappeared into the gloom of the back porch. She called hello in the kitchen, her heart-shaped face turned up to the ceiling as she passed her greeting through it into the sick room, my parents’ room, where they had moved Jill, my sister. Where Jill had spent the past month. I continued to swing, and each time my feet shot forward the swing’s metal rings squealed in the wooden crossbar above my head, groaned when I receded into the low branches of the shade tree. Squeal and groan. Squeal and groan. Like someone learning to play the violin. This was the sound of that particular long and strange summer. I remember the look of it, too, almost tropical, pools of water collecting in hub caps beside the road and rusty-looking sprinkles of mosquito larvae floating on top. Maroon and white peonies, blooming fools, the size of dinner plates. And tomatoes. Water-logged and swollen, thin-skinned fruit cracking open and leaking their juices in my Grandmother Johnson’s garden.

  “Do you want an orange, kid?” Jill had asked me. This was in July when it was still thought that her illness might be rheumatic fever. The middle of July. Possibly only three or four weeks after our trip to City Park on the day of the Lutheran Sunday School picnic. Jill had been kneeling on the bottom bunk bed, the humidity of the day evident in the rim of perspiration popping across her forehead. She cradled a fruit basket that someone had brought to the house. She swung her arm, and fruit bounced off the wall behind me. What I caught I could have, she said, and so, my appetite being what it was, I caught all of it and wolfed it down instantly and hid the fruit rind and seeds inside the doll house. Throughout most of that July, and all of August, gifts arrived at the house. Paint-by-number sets. Embroidery kits. Sparkle art. Eventually Jill grew weary of these attempts to amuse her and gave the gifts to me.

  I hadn’t spent almost an entire summer swinging out of resentment over what extra attention Jill may have received. Not at all. I welcomed it because then there wasn’t time for their eyes to pinch pieces off of me, to puzzle over, sort through, measure and compare. My parents, Timothy and Margaret Barber, my grandparents the Johnsons, Aunt Rita and my brother, Mel, all the people who entered and left the house that summer more or less ignored me. Occasionally someone would squat and say hello. Or touch my face with a tentative, quick touch, as though afraid I might bite them. They believed that I was being considerate; soft-shoeing my way through Jill’s illness.

  But I remember something quite different. I was relieved to be left alone because I was teaching myself how to fly.

  The house loomed and receded. Moments after Aunt Rita arrived I saw Grandfather Johnson coming down the street. He walked erect that day, shoulders squared, not tight then – or with a snootful, drunk, blasted, the term depending upon whoever witnessed the prematurely retired gentleman walk by on any given day. Grandfather Johnson’s pride was as great as his thirst and so he didn’t drink in public. My wily and vocal grandmother had lately uncovered his stash of port, and so that day his face possessed a quiet dignity and wasn’t flushed or uncertain. He carried a plant. A geranium. A red wound against his black suit. He would set the plant on the bureau at the foot of Timothy and Margaret’s wide bed where Jill lay. If she was asleep, he’d stand there, fold his hands as if in prayer, and rest them against the footboard, careful not to press his weight against the bed’s frame or jostle the mattress in any way. If Jill was awake, he’d say, “Now, sweetheart. Guess what it was I saw on the way over here?” He believed it was important that Jill never lose sight of the world outside the room.

  He walked slower that day, as though being sober made him tired. The rope swing jerked; I felt weightless for a second, then dropped hard to the end of the slack. A wailing sound rose up in the house, high, thin, climbing above the noise of the squealing swing. A dog, I thought at first, but realized that it had come from the bathroom upstairs. Margaret. Margaret had locked herself in, opened the water taps, and was howling. My grandfather turned and looked at me, his eyes jumping with fear. Then Rita appeared at the back door, her white face angry as she looked out across the space between us. “Must you make so much noise? Must you? You’re driving your poor mother crazy.”

  “Here, now,” my grandfather said in alarm, “she’s just a child amusing herself.” He set the geranium down and knelt in front of me. I looked down at his pink scalp shining through thin strands of silver hair. I regretted for an instant my collusion in the past with Grandmother Johnson in ferreting out his latest supply of port. His crooked fingers trembled as he fastened the buckle on my sandal. I was to go down to the locker plant, he said, to ask for more ice. It was the only thing that would satisfy Jill’s strange food cravings now. Shards of ice wrapped in a handkerchief which she would suck on. I had listened to the sound of it in the night, my sister’s greedy slurping at the cold nipple.

  When I returned from the errand, my grandfather waited for me beside the swing. During the walk home I’d hugged the ice-filled enamel bowl against my body and a cold spot radiated from my breastbone as I walked towards him. He held the oil can and pointed up to the metal rings screwed into the crossbar of the swing. He smiled, nudged the swing’s wooden seat with his foot, and it swung back and forth, silent now, its only sound a soft whisper of rope rubbing against slippery metal. He set the oil can down on the seat and the swing moved between us, a lazy, hypnotic motion. I remember how he would clear his throat before he spoke. “Here now, Shorty.” He had something to tell me, he said, and I wondered how he would say it.

  Yes, she can remember. But can she be trusted? Can one trust a person who seizes every occurrence that passes by in the street and changes it instantly the second her eye rests on it? She’s the kind of person who believes that when she enters a room, action begins, and that when she leaves it, people freeze in their positions. She thinks, for instance, that Margaret Barber, her mother, is at this moment sitting in her bachelor apartment in Carona, motionless, not at all alive until Amy walks in for one of her monthly hour-long visits. She is a mother, too, of a twenty-year-old son living somewhere in Alberta. She wonders if he, too, is in a state of waiting. She sees him as being five years old, with dark, curly hair, sitting outside on a clothesline stoop, his tongue working across his bottom lip as he concentrates on his task of stripping leaves from a twig. She allows for his father, Hank, to have some kind of life, but she can’t imagine what. This is Pergolesi’s “Stabat Mater.” Amy. Two voices. The learned counterpoint and the new, what she hears floating through the rooms of her mind.

  I don’t know if you should trust her.

  2

  he summer Amy Barber remembers is the summer of 1959. The hot season had arrived in May, overnight, with unusually high temperatures that held steady throughout the early weeks of June. The people of Carona could hardly believe their good fortune. And then they worried. “Looks like we’re in for a doozer,” they warned one another as they ascended the marble stairs of the Bank of Commerce and passed through its Corinthian columns and on into the cool interior. “We’ve either been living right or awfully wrong, time will tell,” is what they said as they waited their turn to see the manager about their seeding loans.

  It is now mid-June. Amy was among the students who had polished their penny loafers or saddle oxfords and marched down from the school to the Town Hall where they’d lined up for their injections of polio vaccine, and then, because of the unusual heat and their tender arms, they were sent home early. She’s walk
ing home now, alone, as she almost always is. She doesn’t realize how ridiculous she looks, comical the way she walks, leading with her chin, her wispy, nondescript-coloured hair held flat against her head with a row of bobby pins on either side. And even though she’s nine years old, she still has what looks to be a milk stomach, a doughy protrusion which the waistbands of her shorts, pants, skirts, work down below so that often her stomach sticks out from beneath her shirt-tail. Her mother, Margaret, has sewn countless tunic-type shifts for Amy, who she worries aloud will turn out fat. But Amy despises those shapeless dresses and paints her fingernails with red polish and pins her hair flat on either side of her head. She dabs Margaret’s cologne behind her ears even though it makes her eyes water and mucus run from her nose in two thick rivulets, which she clears from time to time, a reflex action, on the back of her arm. Her knees are bony knobs and often peppered with scabs where the skin has been scraped away. Her feet are large for her body and as she walks home along the sidewalk they flap against the concrete like duck feet.

  Her feet stop flapping as she squats and tumbles a large rock away from the base of a tree. Holy, she thinks, as she sees the variety of insects. Holy cow, holy poop. She sees flat grey slugs, rust-coloured centipedes, a pink earthworm already drilling its way back into the dark, damp earth. She sets her pencil box down and picks at the worm, amazed at how it clings tightly to the earth. She yanks and it lets loose and she has it, a ropy pinkish thick worm which curls and lashes about in the air in front of her nose. Musty-smelling. She feels its strong muscles working. Why does it loop and twitch like that? Is it afraid of her? she wonders. She sets it down against the warm pavement. What’s inside it? Earth? She knows very well what’s inside it. She takes her metal-edged wooden ruler from her pencil box. She hesitates for a moment and then decides. She brings down the ruler swiftly onto the worm and saws it in half. Holy yuck, she thinks, disgusted by the blob of white juice bubbling out. And it’s all over her ruler too. Worm juice. Nothing has changed. It’s still white worm juice inside. She watches as one half of the earthworm tries to get away. She’ll go into the house, upstairs, get Timothy’s movie camera, and take a picture of the severed worm. White blood, she chants to herself as she pushes open the front gate. White blood, white blood. White blood is poisonous.