The Chrome Suite

by Sandra Birdsell

  “I could make him love me,” Margaret had written beneath a newspaper clipping of the author Ernest Hemingway. What did you do the three years Timothy was away? I once asked her. She seemed surprised by my question. “We waited,” she said. “And wrote letters to each other.”

  I had almost passed Carona’s Family Park when I saw Garth Johnson. I saw the flap of his wide drape pants as he approached Mel beneath the trees by the swings. Mel straddled his bike, stopping to talk. Garth slapped Mel on the back as they parted. Garth continued on, walking in my direction for several moments, and then he noticed me and stood still. He looked off into the trees as though something had happened in the branches that had caught his attention. I turned away from him and kept on walking and when I looked behind me moments later I saw him, where I had seen Mel emerge, stoop down and disappear under the grandstand beside the racetrack.

  The town of Carona seemed to end at Alf’s place. Or else it opened up to something else and Alf’s place was the door through to it. At that time I had never been further from town than his tiny two-acre farm. There were spaces between the boards of the rickety fence that enclosed the yard and I could see bales of straw, some broken open and strewn about the barnyard, washed by the rain and bright yellow. The barn door was open and I could hear the buzz of bluebottles inside it. If the horses had been out in the yard I wouldn’t have entered. While I liked the smell of the animals, I didn’t like them. I didn’t like the way they seemed to look at me sideways, snorting suddenly and stomping their hairy hooves against the ground. Their twitching, rippling muscles said you couldn’t trust them. But I knew where the horses were that day and so I unwound the strand of wire on the gate and went inside. I passed by the house. My interest was in the shed behind the house. It was a strange-looking building; it seemed to wear a hat. Alf had built a platform on the roof for his mentally retarded son, Harry, with a solid, waist-high wooden fence to enclose it. A ladder resting against the shed led up to the entrance to the platform. It was not a playhouse, but a kind of look-out for Harry. I didn’t see Harry at first, just his telescope. I’d been up there once, had bribed Harry with Mel’s alarm clock to let me come up. Harry could see almost the whole town from his perch and with the telescope he had a close-up view of people approaching in the distance. The telescope rotated in a half circle and rested on me. I waved and it dipped down. Harry’s soft pumpkin face rose up from behind the fence. He rested his chin against it and stared down at me, his little pink eyes unblinking. He grinned and saliva dribbled down his chin.

  “I’ve got something for you.” I put my hand in my pocket. He made a gurgling sound in the back of his throat and bobbed his head; his way of laughing. “Come down and I’ll give it to you.” I spoke louder than I cared to. I didn’t want the woman inside the house to come scurrying out in her bedroom slippers to see if bad children had come to play a joke on her poor old Harry, or to teach him swear words or naughty tricks.

  “Yup, yup,” Harry said, but remained there, his head a round jack-o’-lantern set down on top of a fence.

  I went inside the shed. It had an earth floor and smelled musty. I ducked through harnesses hanging from the rafters. All about the room on old doors set up on trestles was an assortment of objects, old clocks, radios, dishpans stilling with nuts and bolts. Harry moved across the platform and dust rained down from the rafters. As my eyes grew more accustomed to the dark interior, I looked among the objects for the camera and saw several items that I recognized: a battered metal dump truck, which had once belonged to Mel, a wooden duck on wheels that may have once been mine. I heard a monotone humming sound behind me, and I turned and saw Harry, a silhouette crouching in the doorway. He pointed the movie camera at me and hummed, thinking, I supposed, that that was the noise the camera made when it was operating. He lowered it and stared at me, his pale freckled face expressionless. He was almost as tall as Mel and certainly towered over his diminutive elderly mother who would take him by the hand on Hallowe’en night and try desperately to keep up with him as he galloped through the streets wearing a bandanna and hooting like an owl, believing he was repeating our echoing cries of “Hallowe’en apples, trick or treat!”

  I took out of my pocket the stone that I’d found in a tobacco can in Mel’s room, a piece of purple quartz crystal, and held it out to Harry. “You want this?”

  He nodded. He set the camera down on the table and then snatched the quartz from my palm and popped it into his mouth. He rolled it about on his tongue, tasting it, feeling its texture. Then he spat the stone into his hand and ran with his strange gallop out of the shed and into the daylight where he stood, shoulders hunched, and examined the chunk of crystal. I picked up the camera. The side of it had been pried off and the inner workings exposed. The film was gone and in its place was a narrow strip of paper fed through the cogs. I set the camera down and just then caught sight of the reel of film. It rested on a shelf above the table, bound tightly with an elastic band. As I put it into the canister that was inside the box I carried in my pocket, I heard the stone bounce off the side of the shed and Harry began to wail his disappointment. Must have thought it was candy, I supposed.

  Harry spidered in sideways through the door and lunged for the camera on the table. He followed me outside and down along the house, all the while humming as he filmed the back of my head. When I stepped outside the gate he was right behind me. Because Harry wasn’t allowed to wander unattended, I knew I should go and get his mother, but she would interrogate me about my trespassing, and so I didn’t. Harry followed me for several minutes, a long-legged scarecrow with a pumpkin for a head. As I grew closer to town I worried about being seen with this weird, humming person, and so I yelled, “Go home!” as though he were a dog. And like a dog, he retreated, but only several feet, and when I turned away he continued to tail me. I was reluctant to walk all the way back to his house and so when I saw a stick lying by the side of the road, I picked it up and threw it at him. He didn’t react. His reflexes were not quick enough to shield himself or make him step out of its way. He watched the stick coming, and when it smacked against his chest he appeared not to feel the blow. He stopped humming and lowered the camera, hugging it to his chest. Then he veered off the road, away from me, wading through the tall grass in the ditch. I walked quickly in the event that he might try to follow again, but when I looked back, he was travelling far out across a field.

  The drizzle of rain had almost stopped and now and then the sun seeped through the thinning clouds, warm against my arms. I looked up as I approached the agricultural grounds and this time I saw Elsa. She was hurrying away beneath the trees on the road leading through the park.

  Later when I reached the post office where I would mail off the film, Mel walked towards me wheeling his bicycle along the sidewalk, its basket loaded with an order of groceries for delivery. “Hey, Short Stuff,” he said. “So where’s the darn fire, eh?”

  I sprinted up the post office steps and yanked at the heavy door. Like Jill, I could have replied, It’s my snot and I can eat it if I want to. Or like Margaret, Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies. They were connected in some way, the three of them, Garth, Elsa, and Mel, but I didn’t know how and so I said, “Why don’t you ask Elsa,” to try and find out.

  “It’s just like the rain we got in B.C.,” Bunny North is saying to Margaret in the kitchen. Out of the blue, Bill had suggested they take off for two weeks and so they’d packed up the kids and car and driven through Banff and Jasper and then onto the ferry boat to Vancouver Island. “It rained, the entire time, almost every single day, just like today. Not enough to keep you indoors, but enough that you felt damp all the time.”

  “It’s nice. Good for the old complexion,” Margaret replies. “And it’s turning everything so green.”

  “I don’t know,” Bunny says, “the holiday was nice, you know. But hectic? Maybe we just tried to see too much in two weeks. I’d just as soon have spent the whole time up at the lake relaxing.”
The table in front of her is littered with snapshots. Earlier, Bunny went through the pictures with Amy and Jill, describing their trip. Look how Takakkaw Falls seems to tumble right out of the sky! See those goats leaping across the face of a mountain! Bunny picks up a photograph. She goes over to the counter where Margaret ladles stewed tomatoes into jars. The timbers beneath the floor creak with her movement and Margaret wonders with a lurching stomach how to arrange her face. Bunny leans against the counter, resting her elbows against it. Margaret feels heat radiate from her body and smells the sweet scent of baby powder that always irritates her. “Have a look at this one.” Bunny slides a photograph across the counter. “This is where we stayed the night Mindy thought she heard a moose outside snorting.” A tiny smirk forms in her baby Cupid’s bow. Bill and their four children stand posed in front of a log cabin. A pair of deer antlers mounted beside the door appears to grow out of Bill’s head. “It’s pretty hard to manage sex when you’re surrounded by four kids for two weeks,” she says. “Bill got pretty desperate. The moose Mindy heard was actually Bill.”

  Margaret laughs. She has become a straight line inside now and she wants to stay that way. She doesn’t want to think about that day. The moment she’d seen Rita step from Louie’s car on her last visit, wearing that white linen suit, carrying the box-shaped red leather bag, and sporting new red shoes, Margaret knew she wasn’t going to say anything to her sister about Bill. She’d cooked for them and tolerated the smell of Louie’s cigar and Rita’s lively chatter, how she seemed able to talk to all of them at the same time, the hint of the flirt she had become evident in the way she answered Tim’s question about what she had been doing for fun lately, the following quick wink she cast in Louie’s direction to appease him. Rita told them about being among the first in the city to see The Naked and the Dead at a private showing at the Film Exchange for the bosses in from Minneapolis. Even the children seemed mesmerized by their Aunt Rita and loved it when she clipped her earrings onto Mel’s lobes or imitated Louis Satchmo Armstrong’s deep, scratchy laughter. Margaret was relieved that she hadn’t talked to Rita about the day Bill came over to have his dress pants hemmed up. She had simply grown to believe that nothing significant had happened to her. She had made a fool of herself, but it was over now. The inner wincing, the cringing, was gone. She watches tomatoes drop into the jar with a soft plop, their yellow seeds trailing down its sides. “What do you think lesbians do with each other?”

  Bunny blinks with the shock of Margaret’s unexpected question. Then she nods. “Oh yes. I heard. Do you think it’s true?” Then they’re silent as they ponder over the Miller women whose lives have suddenly taken on a whole new dimension. Margaret no longer thinks about their jewellery and her speculation that it has been gained at the expense of unfortunate, desperate people. Jews, perhaps.

  “They say the women share the same bed.”

  “I couldn’t tell you what they might do,” Bunny says. “Even thinking about it gives me the willies.”

  Kiss, lick, hold, what? Margaret finds that she’s slightly aroused by the notion of it.

  Bunny plays with a silver chain at her neck, sliding it back and forth across her bottom lip. She sighs. “I haven’t been able to bring myself to face it. Mindy failed her grade.”

  “Oh, Bun, I’m so sorry.” Margaret sets the ladle down and hugs the woman. Deceit, she thinks as she embraces her friend, isn’t at all like a home permanent that has gone too curly. It won’t eventually straighten itself out. The feeling of having been deceitful always rises to the surface in Bunny’s presence. She pats Bunny on the back for several moments and then holds her at arm’s length.

  “I was afraid this was going to happen. You wouldn’t believe what the teacher let that girl get away with during the year.”

  Margaret nods in sympathy. She knows she’s supposed to agree and quote a statistic she’s read about poor reading skills and give Bunny something to alarm the other parents with at the next Home and School meeting. But she can’t. Something has shifted inside Margaret. With the straight line comes a flatness too, the inability to feel anything strongly.

  “Cam and Gord are real snot buckets,” Jill says as she enters the kitchen and slams the Bible school lesson-book onto the table. “I caught them throwing stones at George.”

  “Now, now,” Margaret says, indicating her displeasure with Jill’s choice of language.

  “Well, they are. They’re retards,” Jill says as she leaves the kitchen.

  Holding her side again, Margaret thinks. She’s noticed how the girl seems to favour one side. What side is the appendix on, she is about to ask when Bunny stops her with a question.

  “Would you like to come up to the lake with us for a couple of days? Bill says it’s okay by him,” Bunny says and blushes. “Well, actually it was his idea. He says he plans on spending the time working on the outboard. You’d be company for me.” Bill’s suggestion puzzles Bunny though. She knows of his dislike for her friend. She’s so tight her ass squeaks when she walks is Bill’s observation of Margaret, or, She’s stuck on herself. Often Bunny is compelled to try and explain or defend Margaret.

  Margaret searches for the message lying behind Bunny’s statement that it was Bill’s idea. “I’ll see,” she says, compelled and repulsed at the same time by the idea of going to the lake with them. “When?”

  “Tomorrow, if you can get things together that fast. He’s still got Frank in looking after things at the shop until the end of the week, so we may as well take advantage of it.”

  “I’ll have to talk to Tim.” Margaret hears Jill’s footsteps in the upstairs hall. Her mind picks apart the words “it was his idea.” When Bunny leaves, she returns to her chore of filling jars with stewed tomatoes and forgets completely that she promised herself to wipe her hands, go upstairs, and find out what’s bothering Jill. It will be up to Timothy to decide, she thinks. If he thinks it would be good for them to go, then she will go. Then she does wipe her hands and goes out into the hall and asks for the long distance operator. She gives her the number of the motel where Timothy always stays in Brandon. She leaves a message for him to call her when he gets in that evening. It will be up to Tim to decide whether or not Mel is old enough to be left behind for a couple of days while she and the girls go up to the lake with Bunny and Bill. She looks down at her hands, which have begun to shake. Why am I doing this? Why can’t I stop myself?

  That night Amy lies in bed and listens to the sounds in the house. The sky outside the window flickers with light. For an hour there had been faint flashes of lightning which grew in intensity, but the thunder never amounted to more than a rumble in the far distance. And then, gradually, the lightning grew less frequent as the storm skirted the town, though the tension of its threat remains. She feels it around her, thick and humid. Downstairs Margaret stubs out her cigarette and gets up from the couch. Her waiting for the storm that never comes is over. “I think it would be great for you guys to get away,” Timothy had said. She thinks about going to the lake in the morning. About her folly.

  Amy hears the toilet flush and then Margaret brushing her teeth at full speed. An up and down furious sound of brush against her teeth, a single spurt of water rinsing the brush clean, and then a sharp ping! as the brush hits the bottom of the glass, saying, Finished! That’s done for the day. Amy feels her bed rock as Jill changes position. “Oh hurry up,” Jill says, wanting to creep out of bed, needing to talk to Mel. For the past hour she has thrashed from side to side, had been still only for moments, sometimes muttering under her breath or growling with impatience like an angry dog. Now she begins to hum softly as Amy hears the bathroom door open and close and then Margaret’s door scraping against the carpet as she shuts it. They listen as she moves about the room. “When He cometh, when He cometh,” Jill begins to sing softly, “like the stars of the morning, His bright crown adorning.” She stops and Amy feels the jab of her foot against the mattress. “Hey, you sleeping?” she whispers. “Guess what? You�
�re not really a jewel, you know that? You’re a pearl. An affliction, that’s what you are.”

  “I don’t care.” Good, Amy thinks, then God won’t want me. There’s no way I’m going to go to heaven, not now or at any time in the future. No one’s going to reach down and grab me off for His crown.

  “You better care or you might wind up in Hell and turn into a lump of coal.”

  “Shut up.”

  “You will, you know. You’ll burn and turn into coal dust.”

  “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Everyone does. When they die.”

  “Not me.”

  “Idiot. As usual.”

  Amy feels another sharp jab of Jill’s foot against her back.

  They hear Margaret opening and closing drawers, putting away, straightening up before sleeping so that her dreams may be as tidy as her room. She neatly sets out what she will take with her to the lake tomorrow. Amy watches the light of a passing car sweep across the ceiling and she thinks, Maybe I’m already dead. I was killed by lightning and everything that’s happened since then has just been a dream. Maybe I’ll wake up and find myself on the ground in the cemetery and all this will happen again in the same order.

  Jill sighs. “I sure don’t want to go to the lake tomorrow.”

  Maybe I can breathe under water, Amy thinks. Then all thoughts scatter with the sound of the telephone ringing in the hall below. Light beams across the floor as Margaret’s door opens. They listen to her feet moving against the stairs. Whenever the telephone rings unexpectedly in the night they think Timothy, and their hearts go stone-cold with fear. Margaret picks up the receiver. They hear her soft, anxious murmur. She talks for a short time and then comes back upstairs, pausing outside Mel’s door with a question. Then she stands in their doorway. “That was Bunny.” Amy feels her heart begin to beat again. “Harry has wandered away and Alf hasn’t been able to find him. Have either of you seen him today?”