The Chrome Suite

by Sandra Birdsell

  He emerges minutes later from an alley halfway down the street. His white shirt shifts from side to side as he passes beneath the streetlights. Cocky, Mel thinks as Garth flips something in the air and catches it with one hand. Pickled herring, Jill realizes. Saliva swells in her mouth.

  “Waller’s working overtime,” Garth says. He grins. “Had a hell of a time getting past him to get these.” He sets a carton of eggs down on the steps beside the jar of herring and Jill plucks up the glass jar and twists open its lid. “Oh, I love you, love you, I love you.”

  Big deal, Mel thinks and glances up at Josh’s window again. There are two shapes in front of the window now. Two women; he can tell by the outline of breasts.

  Jill reaches through sliced onions at the top of the jar and the smell of fish and brine rises. Blue skin slides up through the opaque slivers of onion. She opens her mouth, bites, and feels immediate gratification. Yes, this is it, her tastebuds say.

  Garth and Mel watch in silence as Jill sucks brine from her fingers and then eats another large chunk of fish. Her mouth glistens as it moves up and down, sideways, grinding flesh between sharp teeth, gulping back the salty liquid. She is oblivious to all as she eats and eats. When she has devoured half the jar of herring they can no longer bear to watch the brine dribbling down her chin and her tongue darting forward to clear it away. Garth opens the carton of eggs and gathers up a few. Several people leave Ken’s Chinese Food and so he waits for the noise of their car engine to cover the sound of eggs breaking against Josh’s sign. He drops back into the shadows. He glances at Mel who is still standing there, hands in pockets, looking up at Josh’s window. The two women have moved together in an embrace. Their heads come together. Dancing, or kissing, Mel thinks.

  Garth laughs, a brittle fox bark. “Didn’t think old Josh could still get it up.” The two figures part and it becomes clear to him then in the silhouettes of their bodies that it is two women. Garth’s jaw drops and then his lips curl in a half smile. “Dykes. Bloody dykes, I’ll bet.” He laughs and throws an egg and Mel sees it break against Josh’s sign. “Here, your turn.” He offers Mel an egg.

  “No way. Forget it.”

  The egg arcs through the air and they hear the soft crack of it as it hits a window. White eggshell slides down the glass pane. The curtains part suddenly and a face appears and hands cup eyes against the light in the room. “You’re a little chicken shit,” Garth says with a touch of bitterness.

  Mel is stung by the inference that he’s a coward. He wonders if Garth can see the imprint of a foot on his shirt. “Elsa fucks like a mink,” he hears himself say and instantly wishes he could take it back.

  Garth, who is about to throw another egg, stops, arm still held above his head. He brings it down slowly as the news sinks in. It’s seldom that he is not the first to know something. “You’re kidding. Interesting …”

  The light in the room blinks out and Mel can see the sharp features of Adele as she peers out at them. “We’d better get going.” Mel looks down at Jill who is hunched low between her knees. Her body convulses as she begins to retch, and then she vomits and half-chewed herring splashes down onto the sidewalk.

  Jill and Mel cut through the alley behind the hardware store, walking towards home in silence along a tree-lined street that runs parallel to Main Street. They pass by the Hardys’ small cottage where in the living room a handful of people kneel in front of couches, chairs, the piano bench, unmindful of creaking joints or sore knees as they pray for individual people in the town of Carona, including Margaret and Timothy Barber. They pray that the breath of the spirit will quicken the steps of the unredeemed towards their Redeemer. As Jill and Mel walk down the street, the sky above Carona begins to grow lighter. Slowly the eerie light rises, imperceptibly at first so that they aren’t aware that the faces of the houses have become brighter. Mel notices as the light beams stronger and he thinks that there must be a fire outside of town. But there’s no smoke, no smell of anything unusual, and the light doesn’t flicker or jump, rather it grows brighter, as though someone’s in control, turning a knob and bringing the colour up stronger and stronger until the television antennas pushing up among the trees shine with light, taking it on full strength so that their arms appear to be neon tubes, vibrating hot-pink. Mel and Jill walk past the Alliance Gospel Church, the United Church, the row of houses on either side of them bathed in pink light, and then they see flower-beds emerge from front lawns, a tricycle sitting on a sidewalk. People inside the houses abandon the images shifting erratically across television screens, turn off their sets, and come to the window or step outside to look heavenward, at first mildly puzzled, and then, as the sky turns red, they reach for their telephone or books of prayer.

  The brick face of the school radiates as though lit from within with burning embers, while its tracery windows above the entrance appear to be solid, a sheet of glowing metal. Margaret watches for Jill and Mel from the veranda and beckons for them to hurry.

  “Come inside,” she urges. “This is just too strange.”

  “I think it’s aurora borealis,” Mel says as he closes the gate behind them.

  “All right, yes.” But Margaret doesn’t like them having been touched by it.

  It is not yet daylight when Margaret opens her eyes and hears the rhythmic squeal and groan of the swing. She feels Timothy’s presence in the room and there’s the clink of coins and keys on the bureau as he empties his pockets. When Timothy returns from his travels they seem almost reluctant to cross the space that has opened up between them while he was away. They find that they walk around one another for a time before they can slip back into each other. They have discovered the giving up of that space is accomplished quicker and more gracefully in bed. Margaret listens to the sound of his clothing dropping to the floor. The mattress dips beneath his weight.

  “Tim?”

  “Amy,” he half whispers. “The little beggar was sitting on the stairs when I came up. Waiting. Now she’s out there in her nightgown.”

  “Oh great! She’ll wake the entire neighbourhood.”

  Timothy slides in beside her and moves up against her and his cool limbs draw her from her state of half-sleep. She shivers as he curls about her and cups her breast. “Drove all night,” he whispers and then sighs with weariness. Gradually his body grows limp and his breathing slower and Margaret wants to try to sleep again, to drift inside his encircling arms. His limbs begin to warm from the heat of her body. His fingers twitch in muscle spasms against her breast. She closes her eyes and falls into the rhythm of his breathing pattern so as not to disturb his drift into sleep, but her heart thuds too loudly against the mattress and she grows tense with the sound of it. She opens her eyes and sees the arrangement of wicker furniture, a vague grey outline in the first light of sun, and she thinks: Fool. Cosy, she’d thought when she’d put the furniture there. The chair backs face one another across the low table, an almost grim arrangement, she thinks now. Her heartbeat quickens and she winces against an image of Bill North that keeps rising unbidden behind her eyes. Fool! She wants to pound the word flat against the bed. Timothy’s hand clutches at her breast.

  “You want to sleep?” he murmurs.

  “Yes.” That is her wish, to stay curled into him while he sleeps for several hours. But he begins tracing her nipple and then his hand drops from her breast down across her hip and he begins to draw her nightgown up over her legs, her hips. “All right. Sleep then.” She feels his palm in the small of her back urging her to curl forward so that he can enter her from behind and watch himself make love to her, whispering that she should continue to sleep until their love-making becomes so unbearably pleasurable that she cannot lie still any longer but will moan, or thrust up against him hard, wanting him to go deeper, or turn and straddle him, her lean body becoming a hard straight plane set against his, moving on him until he comes. She believes that Timothy, caught up in his own desire, never suspects that she feels little. She is certain of this; otherwis
e she would have to think that he didn’t care.

  “No. I can’t. I’m not fixed.” Margaret draws away from his probing.

  “Well, go and get fixed,” he whispers into her neck.

  “No.” She turns to face him, weeping softly.

  “What is it?” he asks, mildly alarmed. He touches her cheek. “Tell me.” Their eyes meet. What does he see when he looks at her without his glasses, she wonders. A featureless blob of jelly wobbling on a pillow?

  “I missed you,” she says, though she knows that because of the house renovations, the new appliances, the third child, she doesn’t have the right to say this.

  He sighs. They agreed not to speak about their loneliness when they were apart. “When you say that,” Timothy explained once, “it makes me feel guilty. It’s not my fault that I have to be away.” There wasn’t enough business in the hardware store any longer to support two families.

  “Hey.” His mouth is warm against hers. “I’m here now.”

  “Yes.” She smiles. The wee cry is over. The sound of the rope swing beats against the house, a squealing, groaning metronome, steady, monotonous. “I caught that kid up on the garage roof last night. My heart was in my mouth.” She sees the soft pouches of flesh beneath his eyes that come from squinting against the sun and at the flash of white lines passing through the beam of the car’s headlights.

  “Hello.” She laughs lightly and he releases her. She’s grateful for his poor eyesight, that he can’t see her features clearly. He moves away from her, rolls over onto his side of the bed, and falls asleep instantly.

  Margaret looks up at a dust mote dangling in a corner and wonders how she will arrange her face while he is home. What will she think about to keep the image of Bill North firmly beneath the surface? The light in the room has grown stronger and the pale apple blossoms on the wallpaper begin to bloom their dusty pink colour. She hears footsteps in the hall. Jill, she realizes as the bathroom door closes softly. She lies still, barely breathing, forcing herself to stay at Timothy’s side while he sleeps but wanting desperately to be downstairs, her mind engaged with familiar chores. She hears the scrape of the bedroom door against the carpet. George. Amy must have let the cat into the house. She listens to the soft pad of its paws against the carpet and then George springs up onto the bed and creeps across the foot of it, settling on top of Margaret’s feet. She looks down at the animal as it crouches and blinks at her with amber eyes. It’s only an animal, Margaret tells herself. It knows nothing.

  Several hours later, Jill, Mel, and Amy cluster around Timothy at the kitchen table. Amy sits on his lap and listens to his voice push through the top of her head and feels his breath stir in her hair. She hears the strange, almost water-like sound of air moving in his chest as he inhales smoke. She has shown him the mark on her foot and he has slathered it with ointment and put on a Band-Aid. “How did you manage that?” he’d asked. “That’s a nifty little surface burn you’ve got there.” She said she didn’t know; she had just wanted him to see it and to dress it because it seems to her that Timothy’s hands possess something Margaret’s don’t and that the burn will heal better and faster if Timothy cares for it. Jill stands behind his chair leaning into it, arms wound about his neck. She rests her pointed chin into his shoulder and begs him to make smoke rings for her finger. Mel sits across from Timothy listening intently as he describes the display of northern lights he saw outside of Regina last night, like the underside of an umbrella, he says, red, green, violet, the colours absolutely streaming down from the centre of the sky. They are drawn to him, all of them, like metal filings to a magnet.

  Margaret prepares breakfast and listens to their voices. She moves between the stove and counter, stirring scrambled eggs, buttering toast, catching glimpses of herself in the mirror. She is not satisfied with the look of the green grosgrain ribbon against her auburn hair, and does not recognize the expression on her own face, the eyes are too wide, there is a strange half-smile. She stacks toast onto a plate and is about to put it into the oven to keep warm when she looks out of the window and sees Bunny and Bill’s Fairlane pull into their driveway behind Bill’s truck. Home from church, she thinks bitterly, and notices that Bill is wearing his new dress slacks. “I’m going to be out. The pants will be on the dryer in the back porch,” Margaret had said to Bunny on the telephone and had lain still on her bed hardly breathing as she heard the door open and then close. The telephone rings in the hallway, startling her so that she almost drops the plate of toast.

  “I’ll get it,” Mel and Jill both say at once.

  “No, I’ll get it.” Margaret wipes her hands on her apron and goes into the hallway and picks up the receiver. She hears the bright voice of her sister, Rita. “Say, kiddo, okay if Louie and I drive out for supper tonight?” Margaret holds the sound of her sister’s voice tightly against her ear to stop her hand from trembling.

  “Amy?” Rita says when she doesn’t answer. “Go and get your mother for me. Tout de suite. This is long distance, you know.”

  Margaret laughs. “It’s me. Sure, come out for supper. I have to talk to you.”

  “Oh.” Rita is quiet for a moment. “I guess you don’t want me to bring Louie, then?”

  Why is it that you always take it for granted that I want to talk to you about you? Margaret thinks. She has already said everything there is to say to her sister about the folly of being in love with a married man. She and Bunny have talked to Rita until blue in the face. Let her learn the hard way, I guess, Bunny had said. It was the way Rita had learned almost everything, which was why discussion in their family always centred around her. “No, that’s fine. Tim plans on working on the jalopy today. Louie can keep him company.”

  “Well, that should be fun for Louie.”

  As Margaret goes back into the kitchen she hears the porch screen door open. They all turn at once and see Alf, the grounds-keeper, step into the doorway. He wears his coveralls and stands blinking for several moments, looking embarrassed and out of place. He clears his throat and then abruptly thrusts an object in Timothy’s direction. The camera, Amy realizes. “My boy came across it yesterday when he was helping me with the mowing,” Alf says. “I knew it was yours.”

  “Holy Toledo,” Mel says and whistles at the sight of the ruined camera.

  Amy is jammed between her father’s legs and can’t escape. She watches as Timothy examines the camera. She stands deathly still as everyone’s eyes swoop down on top of her head.

  “Ain’t none of my business how she got there. My boy just come across her. A shame.”

  As Amy tries to squeeze out from between Timothy’s knees, he holds her fast by the neck of her tee shirt. “Look.” She’s forced to confront the shattered camera which is already pitted with rust. Ashes to ashes, she thinks.

  “Thanks for coming by.” Margaret hopes to dismiss Alf, disliking the smell of manure that emanates from his straw-encrusted boots.

  Alf nods. “You been talking to Reginald this morning?”

  “No, why?”

  “He was putting cardboard over the store window when I came by. Seems someone chucked a good-size piece of cinder block through her. Smashed pretty good and then some.”

  “Seems like it got broke,” Mel says with a slight scoffing tone in his voice.

  “You betcha.” Alf nods, oblivious to the mockery.

  “Was anything stolen?” Margaret is thinking about the display she’d arranged in the window the day before, remembering what tools, toys, and kitchenware.

  “Reg didn’t seem to think so. So it don’t make a heck of a lot of sense to me.” He turns, about to leave.

  “Wait up.” Timothy hands him the camera. “Think your boy would like to tinker with this?”

  “Think so.” Alf’s smile reveals teeth stained from chewing-tobacco.

  “Perhaps he can fix it,” Mel says. He seldom uses the word “perhaps” and Amy thinks he sounds mealy-mouthed.

  “Well, if he does manage to fix it, then bra
vo,” Timothy says. “I don’t want it back.”

  “What on earth is happening to this town?” Margaret wonders aloud as the door closes behind Alf. Mel and Jill exchange a glance and slip from the room. Amy moves to follow them but Timothy holds her fast. He slides a chair out from the table and indicates that she’s to sit down and face the music.

  Margaret does not say a word. Although she doesn’t agree with Timothy that they should overlook Amy’s covert behaviour, she goes along with him because she knows the girl too well. The moment Margaret makes an effort to pick up on something Amy’s interested in, Amy discards that interest. Film is cheap, Timothy had once said to Margaret. “She just likes to think she’s pulling one over on us but in the meantime she’s learning something, don’t you see?”

  Amy slouches down into the chair, head lowered, and Margaret sees the veins in her stem-like neck which make her appear small, vulnerable. Amy, the shadow between them; the child whose presence while in her belly Timothy ignored, refusing, too, any physical contact throughout the entire pregnancy. The child he never wanted became a delight instantly, the moment he saw her elf-like face. Margaret’s secret joy, her relief, gave way to puzzlement in the following months. “She sure is the apple of her daddy’s eye,” Bunny once remarked. “I told you he’d come around in the end.” “Yes,” Margaret said, “I’m glad.” But she felt that she was being punished. Amy’s pug nose, the constant trail of mucus beneath it, the fingernails embedded with dirt, her perpetual determined frown, do not say vulnerable. “Sit up straight, you’ll get a dowager’s hump sitting like that,” Margaret says. But even though Amy listens and pulls herself into the proper sitting position Margaret can still see the veins behind the strands of the child’s wispy hair, and she feels anger. Perhaps, Margaret thinks, it is Timothy’s unreasonable patience with the girl that is the cause of her anger.