The Chrome Suite

by Sandra Birdsell

  Mel appears in the doorway and leans into its frame. George, a ginger tabby, winds around and through his legs and then settles down in its favourite spot directly in front of the refrigerator door. “Anyone seen my bank passbook?” Mel asks.

  Jill sloshes cherry drink into two tall glasses. “Amy had it, yesterday.”

  Until then they had all ignored Amy, but as they turn and stare at her, their eyes accusing as usual, she feels cornered. She feels the ridiculous sadness in Mel’s eyes. His meek disappointment. “I haven’t seen your shitty little passbook,” she says.

  “I won’t stand for that!” Margaret’s voice is cutting.

  “She’s lying,” Jill says.

  Amy lunges for her and Jill laughs as she gracefully twirls away swinging the glass of cherry drink, not spilling a drop.

  “Stop it, you two.” Margaret grabs a fist of her own hair and twists it as if she wants to yank their voices from her head. Amy lunges again and Jill darts behind Elsa.

  “If you don’t stop fighting this minute, you’ll make it storm,” Margaret warns.

  Amy wants to pinch Jill’s arm but Jill raises them above her head. The movement causes her halter top to ride up, exposing a slash of tanned midriff. Amy pinches her there instead. Hard. Jill shrieks and glass shatters against the floor. Cherry drink spatters on their legs and spreads out in a crimson pool around their feet.

  Bunny leaps up and rushes to the sink for the dishrag. Elsa stoops and begins to gather bits of broken glass. “It’s the heat,” Bunny says. “It’s getting to all of us.”

  “Oh, I know. You’re right.” Margaret’s arm drops to her side. “But it’s no excuse for bad behaviour. You need a paddling.” She shakes her finger at Amy. Mel snorts. As if Margaret has ever paddled any of them.

  As Amy retreats through the back porch she hears Mel speaking to Margaret. “What do you think?” he says. “Elsa has invited Jill and me to go to the Lutheran Sunday School picnic tomorrow. In the city. Think it would be okay?”

  Amy stops in the doorway to listen. “I don’t know,” Margaret says after a slight pause. “I suppose so. Well, all right, but only if you take Amy too.” Amy smiles, sensing their immediate disappointment. She opens the screen door as wide as the spring will allow and lets it fly.

  “Amy!” Margaret howls. “When will you learn how to close a door!”

  I remember that I ran across the school yard, carrying my father’s camera against my chest. The day seemed to be bleached by the sun, the colours faded. The baseball diamond, the school building radiated heat. I cut through the RCMP compound and its squat two-storey red brick building. Behind it, and seemingly ironed flat against the sky, was the silver bullet-shaped water tower, CARONA painted in shiny black enamel. Once I was out of view of the veranda, I slowed to a walk. I cut through the front and back yards of houses, heading towards the cemetery at the edge of the town and, beside it, my grandparents’ house. I walked head down, watching my feet. I imagined that I floated across a body of water. I became the girl on the inside cover of The Book of Knowledge, floating on top of a book towards a strange new horizon. I passed by a Chinese junk with red and gold sails, going on towards a city where a rocket thrust up through a yellow and turquoise sky I floated towards faces carved in the side of a mountain, cannons aimed at belts of snow hanging above valleys, a fountain spewing, water arching over menacing-looking totem poles. There was just one thing about the picture on the book that puzzled me, though. It was the presence of tiny yellow moths fluttering alongside the book the girl and boy stood on as they held hands and floated towards their future. Why moths? I wondered, as I turned and entered the broad alley-way behind the town’s oldest hotel.

  On one side of the alley, the white stucco wall of the hotel’s back side reflected the sun. On the other stood the sagging livery stable, doors removed, dark insides gaping open like an old man’s mouth and emanating the odour of another era. It was a thick, comforting odour and I became Amy the squirrel, age two and heading out for the first time, way the hell and gone down the street before Margaret snagged me by the hem of my dress and reeled me in. Where was I going? “She was going to buy an ice cream,” Timothy had said, and would repeat the story at my every birthday and at the same time plunk down a brick of ice cream for me to eat. Spoonful by spoonful, the whole quart of Neapolitan ice cream disappeared inside my round little body. But Timothy had been curious. “Don’t chase her,” he instructed. “Let’s just see what happens.” They sent Mel to follow me and I took him places he’d never been. Somehow, through a wandering, circuitous route, we wound up on the back steps of Andy’s Cafe behind which, beyond a row of rusting oil barrels, flowed the swollen Lucy May Creek. Afterwards Timothy built the fence and screwed a hook closure on the outside of the gate. He watched with a mixture of pride and despair when, later, I wheeled the baby stroller over to the gate, climbed into it, and then went up and over the fence.

  As I passed by the hotel I heard the rumble of voices inside it. Then the back door opened and a grey-looking man reeled unsteadily into the bright sunlight. “Holy cow,” he muttered. He couldn’t see me. He turned his back, bent to fumble with his pants. I heard the splash of his stream hitting the wall. I wanted to raise Timothy’s camera and record this but decided not to. Margaret had warned me often to steer clear of the men who went in and out of the old hotel, those who would wave me over and call me “lass” or “darling” or “princess.” “Go on, help yourself,” they’d say, urging me not to be shy but to come on over and take a coin from among the change held out in their soil-stained hands. I would be invited to choose a nickel and buy a treat. An ice cream. I had been warned often about the promises of ice cream. But there was nothing sinister about these men, so often I did pluck a nickel from their palms, or a quarter. They didn’t seem to care or know the difference. The grey-looking man was lean and stoop-shouldered. He turned and saw me as I passed by. “Hey now, get on out of here. No place for a girl,” he said.

  I crossed the road that bordered the cemetery; beyond it was the golf course and clubhouse. I set the camera down on top of the stone wall enclosing the cemetery and searched for Alf, the grounds-keeper, but the grass appeared to be freshly clipped so I knew Alf had already been and gone. I hiked up the wall and dropped down inside the cemetery and the air felt immediately cooler. I walked among the hard stones and smooth columns of marble and granite headstones. In the golf course beyond a red kite climbed unsteadily into the cloudless sky. Two boys. Cam and Gord, I recognized, a year older than I was. Their backs were brown, impervious to the sun. They looked up at the kite, pulling on its string as they walked backwards, coaxing it to fly higher. Behind me at the front gate of the cemetery stretched the highway and I heard the sound of vehicles gearing down as they approached the town’s speed limit. There was a lot of traffic around Carona then. Transport trucks moving in and out of town, bringing dry goods, groceries, television sets, washers and dryers. The merchandise was transported from the city to the town where it would be uncrated in the stores, the shelves stocked, banners painted to proclaim coming sales. The merchants were anticipating another record harvest, the mounds of silver coins in the callused palms of the men who stepped from the beer parlour – while inside it was the click of billiard balls amid the raucous roar of male voices, all saying the same thing in different ways, congratulating themselves and sometimes God for the absence of hail among the pillars of clouds at night, for the heavy rainfall at the right time, grain prices, the record-breaking yields per acre, and all of them loving to love the prime minister, “Dief the Chief.”

  The hinges on my grandparents’ fence squealed. I stood still for a moment, watching for movement behind the curtain at the window. Grandfather Johnson would be sitting at the table spooning sugar into strong coffee. I dropped down behind a row of dogwood shrubs, unrolled the camera from the towel, and waited. All at once the back door opened and the elderly woman stepped outside. Her loosely woven garden hat, tilted at an angle, c
ast a latticework of shadows against her face and I worried that her features would be hidden. She stopped at the bottom of the stairs to pull on a pair of gardening gloves, jerking each finger down into place with the same determination that shaped all the movements of her life. I picked up the camera, held my breath, and waited. She slid rather than bent to her knees in front of the flower-bed. I framed her in the viewfinder. She wobbled forward and her straw hat became a flat beige circle as she leaned over the flowers. Then what I waited for happened all at once. She started, and leapt to her feet out of view, darting towards the house, holding up a green bottle. She held it away from herself as though it stank, not stopping to realize that it didn’t make sense for my grandfather to hide it where she was bound to find it, or that the fluid inside the bottle was not port but clear water.

  I thought of how Timothy complained that it was strange the way you couldn’t get people to stand still for an ordinary camera but with a movie camera you couldn’t get them to move. My grandmother’s voice inside the house was sharp and accusing, my grandfather’s injured-sounding. I felt discouraged and disappointed. I had anticipated Timothy’s laughter at the sight of the usually staid and prim woman running across our dining-room wall waving a port bottle.

  I left their yard and cut back through the cemetery, feeling the mystery of the place in Alf’s carefully tended graves, rectangles of bright flowers or crushed stone marking out where people lay, waiting. Their silence brushed against my legs as I skittered along narrow pathways between headstones. On the golf course, Cam and Gord were still staring heavenward at the red kite. Its ribbon snapped as it found a stream of air and began climbing higher. I stood behind a tall column of marble, leaned into it to steady myself, and raised the camera. I felt the vibration of the film unwinding against my cheek as the cogs began to feed it across the camera’s eye. When I couldn’t see the kite, just the boys walking backwards with their arms stretched to the heavens, it looked as though they were engaged in some kind of ecstatic worship. And then I remember clearly how the air in front of me suddenly quivered. It was as though the air in front of my face became water, two thin streams rippling, their currents going opposite ways. I felt a sudden harsh sting in my nostrils and gasped, rearing away from it. In the moment it takes to blink, in the instant I staggered back from the odour, the water parted and a thin white line zig-zagged down in front of me. Light swirled, became a ball turning, and then a concussion of air whomped me hard, dead centre in my chest. I felt myself fall backwards, and in the final dim split-second of consciousness, I remember hearing voices.

  I opened my eyes. Overhead, a green canopy of branches swayed, and beyond it I caught glimpses of the sky, high and clear, and of the red kite, a tiny triangle now, gliding gracefully across the face of it. Sunlight exploded in brilliant pockets of light among the trees, and I realized that the air moved now. I could see, in the swaying branches of birch, that the air had begun to move.

  I became aware of the ground beneath me, as though it had just materialized, damp from the previous night’s rainfall. There was a bitter metallic taste in my mouth. I pushed up onto my elbows and felt an ache in my breastbone. As I sat up the movement rocked inside my head, making the world tilt and then gradually steady. My knees shook when I stood and so I reached for the headstone for support. I touched it, and felt its cool surface beneath my hand. I knew I wasn’t dead, then. The stone was real. The boys’ voices from the golf course were real too. I looked down at my feet where the camera lay. Its metal casing was completely ruined, battered, a deep dent in its side as though it had been smashed with a hammer. Then I saw my feet. The buckle on one of my sandals was black and bent, like it had been crimped with a pair of pliers.

  The boys’ voices, the cool dampness in my tee shirt, the sound of the wind swaying in the branches above me, were confirmation that the world was still there. But I felt that I stood somewhere outside of it, looking in. I left the camera and towel lying in the grass and walked towards the front gate and the wrought-iron angels flying across it, the trumpets at their mouths heralding my passing. I still tasted metal on my tongue, and felt that my limbs were somehow lighter. I began to walk towards Main Street where there would be people and traffic. The sky seemed to be much higher and brighter and the store-fronts vivid, sharp outlines against the day. My feet barely touched the ground as I ran across the school grounds towards home. I remember how I pushed off and sailed, my stride yards long and high, the pull of gravity much less than it had been before. I thought it might be possible to challenge gravity, to stretch my arms and will myself to leap and rise above the houses and follow the path of the telephone wires, thread my way through the forest of television antennas, become a ghost in the screens of all the television sets in the living rooms of Carona. I had been struck by lightning and survived.

  “Well, it’s possible. I might find the time to do it tomorrow after work,” Margaret says to Bunny. She stands in the centre of the kitchen with her fingers against her throat as though she’s tracking her pulse. She has pushed her hair back from her forehead with one of the silver combs and it stands straight up now, a curly auburn tiara.

  Bunny and Margaret watched in mock horror as Jill made two mustard sandwiches, which she said she must eat instantly or die. A stage, Margaret said, and shivered as she watched Jill suck the remaining smears of mustard from her fingers. Mel roamed about the house in search of his bank passbook and the women resumed their visit. Bunny slid a pair of men’s dress slacks from the paper bag she’d brought with her. The woman who usually does alterations for Bunny is away and Bill needs the pants for Sunday, she explains. It’s his turn to usher at church, Bunny says, otherwise they wouldn’t bother going.

  “All right.” Margaret feels the heat of her answer rise in a blush beneath her fingers at her throat. She sees Bill North, hard and hairy, lean, and feels her body pushing up against his. “Tell Bill he can come over tomorrow, then. After work.” If she’d known the purpose behind Bunny’s visit, she wouldn’t have said yes, the children could go to the city to the picnic tomorrow.

  “Around four would be good,” Amy hears Margaret say as the screen door closes behind her. The muted light of the sun permeating the pink blanket on the window and the women’s voices are like an arm around her shoulder as she passes through the porch. They turn and look at her as she comes into the kitchen and it occurs to Amy that she might be marked in some way. Like the story she’d heard. Cain, going around with a big X on his forehead. But Margaret is frazzled and preoccupied and looks straight through her.

  Bunny puckers her tiny pink mouth and blows a kiss off the palm of her hand. “The coast is clear,” she says and winks, meaning that she’s run interference again, smoothed Margaret’s ruffled feathers. A faint crackle of static cuts through the music playing on the radio. Margaret’s eyes dart nervously towards it. Damn, damn, damn, Amy sees in her mother’s eyes. She’s worrying, Amy realizes, that the static signals the possibility of a storm. She knows then that there isn’t anything noticeably different about her appearance. For a second she thinks she might tell them: I have been struck by lightning. But she decides not to, believing that she would lose the experience if she told them. Woosh, the chair farts as she sits down at the table behind the sewing machine. She notices the crooked lines of Margaret’s sewing. How she’s repeated herself in a seam, over and over. The skin next to the ruined buckle has begun to sting. She swings her foot up and down, wanting them to notice the strange look of her buckle, but they don’t.

  Later that night Amy lies naked beneath cotton sheets, body still cool from the tepid bath Margaret had run for them before bed, a dash of Mr. Bubbles for good measure, and they’d soaked up to their necks for a full fifteen minutes each. Then, sensing a storm brewing, Margaret swished through the rooms banging windows down into place. It’s necessary to close the windows because lightning could follow the flow of air into the house and become a current of electricity that could very well turn them all into glo
wing lamps for Jesus if they stepped down into it, Mel has joked to frighten Amy – which, over the years, has been Mel’s and Jill’s main occupation. They have jumped from closets in dark rooms, hidden around corners and leapt out at her. Sometimes they have dropped down from a tree like ugly spiders, swinging upside down in front of her face. They make pig faces at her. Mel plays at Wolf Man, and his face changes, fangs sprout to suck her blood dry when she’s asleep. She has looked in the mirror in the morning and seen red dots, the puncture marks drawn on her neck with a pen. They have put a field mouse, frogs, in her bed. Two against one is never fair, Margaret chastises until blue in the face, but Margaret can’t be everywhere. Lately, though, Jill and Mel seem to have lost their interest in teasing Amy. More often their heads are together as they whisper, and it’s become difficult to uncover their secrets.