The Chrome Suite

by Sandra Birdsell

  I’d seen Harry later on in the day, after the mourners had left our house and the United Church women’s auxiliary had cleared away the mess in the kitchen, wiped it down, and restored its counters and floor to Margaret’s usual high shine. Timothy sat at the end of the living room in the easy chair, smoking. The ashtray in the smoking-stand beside him was filled with cigarette butts. Margaret sat on the couch, legs crossed primly, the same pose she’d maintained during the time visitors streamed steadily into the house. Earlier, Bunny had sat beside Margaret, almost ignored, until Margaret turned to say that she would be fine, she didn’t want Bunny to stay the night, continuing to punish her friend for being the one to discover the swollen lymph node in Jill’s groin. Aunt Rita posed on the edge of the piano bench, elegant in a narrow black sheath dress, her white face framed by a careless-looking but careful arrangement of hennaed curls. The silent trio barely moved as I passed through the room, into the hallway, and out the front door.

  What did I hear as I stepped out from the veranda that evening? The chirp of crickets, perhaps the sawing of cicadas, whose sound has been recorded in almost every new novel and story I have read recently. Cicadas in Mexico, for instance, Brazil, Greece, Minneapolis, the insect leaps off the page before I can squash it, its purpose meaningless; only to be there? What’s with the plague of cicadas in contemporary literature, I asked Piotr once, and vowed that I would never put the sound of a single cicada in any of my scripts.

  That evening after the funeral I wanted to go and ride the swing as high as I could, but as I walked towards it I felt the boil on my buttock rubbing against my underwear. It had been painful to sit up straight on the hard pew during the service. I stood in the centre of the yard looking up at the gold filigree, the paper-clip shapes of the television antennas set against the purple rim of the twilit sky. A cat crooned in a neighbouring yard and then another cat joined in and then both of them began to scream. I couldn’t move without feeling the bulge of the boil and the sharp prick of the sliver swimming in its centre, so I lay down on the grass and spread the cape over my shoulders. I smelled the damp earth and the spores of toadstools exploding beneath it. I spread my arms out beneath the cape and closed my eyes.

  It’s now or never, I thought. I had practised long enough. I said the word, “Fly.” And, as in all my dreams and imaginings, it was just that easy. I felt myself rise and the wind blowing against my face and scalp. I opened my eyes and saw the fence pass beneath me. As I had suspected, flying was similar to swinging, both will and action, I noticed, as I brought my arms forward and swept them back again and felt myself climb higher. When I tilted my right arm, I moved in that direction and down the street I flew, passing directly over the red roof of Bunny’s house, across the wrought-iron steeple of the Presbyterian church, the silver shell of the grandstand at the agricultural grounds. I had risen so high that the houses were like pieces in a Monopoly game. Too high, I thought, and clapped my arms against my sides and felt myself plummet. Quickly, I spread my arms and felt the air cushion my body. Below me lay the clutter of Alf’s yard. I wanted to see Harry. I wanted to say that I was glad he was alive and that I was sorry for having chased him away that day. Light flashed in my eyes, the setting sun reflected in glass. I realized that it had come from Harry’s look-out tower on top of the shed. I circled for several moments, knowing that he was watching. “Sorry,” I called down to Harry. “You hear that, you little pumpkin head? I’m sorry.”

  Then I tilted my left arm and veered off across the top of the grain elevator, away from Carona where farmhouses lined a gravel road every mile or so, and then I saw the top of Uncle Reginald’s Ranch Wagon parked beside the road. Both front doors were wide open and the radio was turned on full volume. Garth sat on the car’s hood, tapping out the beat of the song with a pair of chopsticks. Mel was inside the car in the driver’s seat, crying. I am not a coward, Mel cried. I am not a chicken shit. Am I? Am I? he asked, still blaming himself and not cancer for the lump in Jill’s groin. The melancholy sound of a train’s whistle rose and Mel lifted his head. A beam of light shone steadily on down the track. The passenger door slammed shut and then the driver’s door too. Mel reached for the keys in the ignition and turned on the engine. A startled Garth leapt from the hood as the tires spat gravel and Mel drove away. I watched yellow dust roiling up behind the car as Mel made a bee-line for the rail crossing. He would meet the train at a ninety-degree angle. The train’s whistle shrieked several times and I wanted to close my eyes to the explosion of metal and glass. I blinked and Mel was gone and the train streaked across the road, its cars swaying wildly. Then I saw the glow of the station wagon’s tail-lights appear intermittently in the space between the swaying boxcars. Garth saw it too. “You idiot!” Garth screamed and then ripped off a rebel yell and flung the chopsticks into the air. As the train’s caboose clattered across the road, Garth ran towards the car. Mel got out from it slowly and walked towards him, wearing an uncertain grin. “How was that for a chicken shit, eh?” “Not bad,” Garth said, “except that you’ve gone and pissed yourself.” He pointed to the stain in the leg of Mel’s new suit pants, and it was true, Mel had.

  The day following the funeral I had expected that Margaret would have somehow tidied up the world while I had slept and that the house would be back to normal once again. I stood on the veranda feeling slightly nauseated by the sight of the feeding wasps. I heard the soft voice of Mrs. Hardy upstairs in Margaret’s bedroom. Steady, monotonously solicitous, and holy. At some point during Jill’s illness Margaret had moved the wicker furniture back down to the veranda and if it hadn’t been for the wasps I would have sat down. I opened the door to the house thinking that I would go back inside and wait for Timothy and Aunt Rita to return. I opened it as wide as its spring would allow, changed my mind and let go and the door slammed shut. I liked the sound of its spring being stretched to the limit and so I opened it again and once again let go. The door slammed. I liked this sound too. So I opened the door again and let it fly. Then I did it again. Open and slam. Open and slam. I continued to do this until I heard feet pounding on the stairs, and then I saw Mel, his face a mask of fury as he ran down the stairs towards me. He’d wound his belt around his fist and he grabbed me and swung the belt, hitting me on the backs of my legs, my buttocks, hitting the boil there, and it burst wide open.

  “Now, now, dearie.” Mrs. Hardy came down the stairs and clasped me to her bony chest. I strained against her because I had only yelled once and wasn’t crying and didn’t need her ministrations. “You kiddies have had a difficult time,” she said. She took my face in her hands and peered into my eyes and said slowly and distinctly, “You must realize this: Jill is safe in the arms of Jesus now.” I laughed because I saw Jesus cradling a frozen turkey against his chest. Then Margaret entered the hallway still wearing her funeral dress. She’d slept in it and she looked old, used, defeated; a crumpled paper sack. I try to remember Margaret this way. It is the last picture I have of her where she looked natural.

  I untangled myself from the woman’s embrace, needing, longing for Margaret’s touch at last. I wanted to confess that it was my fault. I wanted to tell her that I had been struck by lightning. That I felt I had enough power in me to light up a city the size of New York and that perhaps, at one time, I might have secretly wished Jill dead. As I walked towards my mother, my arms coming forward to embrace her, she noticed my limp and her eyes filled with horror. She shrank from my touch and backed away, her fingers gouging deep into her eye sockets. “Oh God, not another one,” she moaned and then her voice rose in a high, keening sound. “Please, God, oh no, God, you can’t do this to me.”

  Mrs. Hardy stopped Margaret as she attempted to flee. “My poor, poor child,” she said, and Margaret lurched into her arms. “Jesus, God,” Margaret howled, “I don’t deserve this.”

  “But, my dear,” Mrs. Hardy said, “won’t you see that the Lord is calling out to you? He has taken Jilly to be with Him for a reason. Can’t you see?”
She stepped back and raised her face and hands and began to chant a prayer. At least I believe it was a prayer but I couldn’t be certain because the words, though they sounded like words, didn’t make any sense at all. When I left the house, Margaret’s voice joined with hers and I heard my mother say, “Thank you, Jesus, for taking Jill away from me.”

  When I woke up in the hospital, the sliver removed and my buttock throbbing with the pain of sutures, I became aware of a figure in black at the end of my bed. It was Grandfather Johnson, come to visit, standing there just as he had when he visited Jill, holding a geranium plant, a red wound against his black suit. “Now guess what I saw on my way over here?” he said. I heard myself yelling at him to go away, to get out of my room.

  Once Piotr asked Amy if she would like to go and visit Jill’s grave. They were leaving the Grandview Apartments following a visit with Margaret. She linked her fingers through his, knowing that Margaret watched from the window. “Heavens no,” Amy said, it wasn’t All Saints’ Day, after all, and she didn’t have a candle. The girl who had sat in her sickbed throwing fruit at Amy no longer existed. Visiting Jill’s grave would be like visiting the scene of an accident. In dying, Jill had taken both Margaret and Timothy away.

  Amy made a point that day of driving past the family house, without telling Piotr she had grown up there. She took him to see Carona’s “historical point of interest,” Sullie’s Drive In and Take Out. Over forty years old, known throughout the land for its hot dogs, she told him. And then she drove down Main Street for no reason at all except that the dissolution of it, the boarded-up store-fronts, the spent greyness of Carona were reminders of the danger of false expectations. Do this and you’re sure to get that. The promise of the faith of the Fifties, the structure of fictions past: conflict and resolution, when constant change was what was real.

  She took him to see all the seven churches of Carona and he was puzzled. Six of them were Protestant but so different that each required a separate place of worship? The Prince of the Polish devils would have his work cut out for him here, she told him. In all his twenty-plus years living in Poland he’d never once met a Protestant. They stood side by side in front of the United Church. She didn’t mention that her wedding had occurred there. A cold wind stung her face. She reached for Piotr’s hand, the one he’d set into the hand of Boruta, wanting to wind her fingers through his and warm them. But he drew his hand away to point out something he wanted her to see. She should have noticed how often it was that he would do that.

  8

  my and Piotr have left the ferry, The Chi-Cheemaun, and are travelling across Manitoulin Island heading towards the town of Little Current. He drives and she’s relieved that he doesn’t appear to be in a hurry but seems to have sunk into a reflective mood, content to wander along in the stream of slow-moving traffic. Pensive, Amy thinks. Perhaps doubting his decision to leave her? “I wouldn’t mind living here,” she says, and envisions at once blue gingham at a window, a plant on a sill, a pottery bowl cupping wild rice and sweetgrass drying in a sun porch. Being still and not moving. The two of them, in a village on one of the outermost points of the shore, just the sky and water. They would build something. Yes, she thinks, stay and build.

  “I don’t think it would be a good place for a person living alone. You’d go crazy here in the winter. It’s pretty isolated, I think. Little Current, six kilometres.” He reads the sign at the side of the road.

  Alone. “Will we stop?” She reminds them of their ritual of stopping at a particular store to pass the time browsing while they wait for the traffic from the ferry to move through the bottleneck of the single lane on the narrow bridge just outside the town.

  “Sure.” His hand drops away from the gear shift and crosses the space between them. She feels its warmth against her thigh and the gentle reassuring pat. She covers it with her own. He brought very few things with him when he entered her life. A single suitcase of clothes and several canisters, the films he’d made in Poland – no excess baggage from a previous marriage or even a short time lived with another woman. He came almost penniless, with only a halting grasp of the language. But his eagerness to learn, his child-like inquisitiveness she found seductive and took on, her world-weariness fading as she acquired his capacity to celebrate simple things such as a dish of blueberries, a cloud formation. Look! he exclaimed constantly, pointing, and she was seeing a sunset as though for the first time. But although he came to her with very little, when he leaves, the rooms of her life will have a hollow echo, she knows.

  “Look,” he says now, and draws his hand from beneath hers to point out a man crouching beside the road. The man from the ferry, Amy realizes. He’s wearing a jacket, now, red plaid, but nevertheless she recognizes the backpack and green sleeping bag rolled up on top of it.

  “Should we?” Piotr touches the brakes and the car slows down. The man rises in anticipation.

  “No. It’s him, the guy we saw on the ferry.”

  “That’s not the same person,” he says, but jabs at the accelerator and they shoot away. He watches in the rear-view mirror. “The other man was much smaller.”

  “It was him,” Amy says. He knows well enough not to argue against her memory.

  They drive in silence for the next several minutes and Amy remembers the last time they picked up a hitchhiker. They had been on another island. The Sanibel Island in Florida and heading up towards a reef of smaller islands. The man had appeared so suddenly, emerging from a dark screen of mangrove, that they stopped more for fear of hitting him. They couldn’t have known that the round, soft-faced middle-aged man was mentally handicapped. Once they did realize, they had travelled too far to take him back. His shirt was neatly ironed, his cotton pants had a sharp crease, and his shoes shone. He has a mother, Amy remembers thinking, reminded of Harry in the town of Carona and his tiny, caring mother. As she travels across Manitoulin Island sitting beside Piotr in the car while outside a saw-toothed, pine-tree landscape divides land from sky, she thinks of a pink and turquoise horizon, of the round man they picked up in Florida, and wonders how long it took his mother to track him down. BEWARE OF CROCODILES CROSSING, the road signs had said. She imagines that he might still be out there, heading across those shell-strewn beaches, on and on he goes, right into the Gulf of Mexico. Then she sees herself cradling a huge conch shell against her chest. Piotr stands so close to her that his wet bathing suit touches the side of her leg. They are waiting for the orange ball of sun to drop into the ocean. They long to see the phenomenon of the green flash occurring just as the sun sets.

  “We should go back to Florida, it was so beautiful there,” she says. He doesn’t answer.

  Yes, it was beautiful, but it was rotten too. After they spent the entire day shelling they sat out in someone’s backyard looking out over the Gulf. It was dark and lanterns bobbed on skiffs, nodding across the violet water. From a patio behind her, there was music, a jumpy Ry Cooder song, “Get Rhythm,” and voices; the voices of people reclining beneath pastel umbrellas, the soft murmur threading through the music. She and Piotr sat side by side on the beach that night but rather far apart for a couple in love, she sifting white sand through her fingers and Piotr wondering aloud for the third or fourth time what it was that these people did that allowed them the waterfront property, the cars, the boats. She didn’t sense the growing frustration that lay behind his question, his disappointment over what he perceived to be a lack of opportunity for himself the small gains he had made. She didn’t think of the Russian proverb he often quoted: “Not married by thirty, not rich by forty, always an idiot.” Rather she thought that he wanted to be far away from her, out on one of those lamp-lit boats, scuba-diving or snorkelling and not beside her, a comparatively mature woman who must constantly diet and exercise and suck in her stomach and try to ignore the quizzical glances they received from strangers on the beach, in restaurants. The odd couple.

  When they did go snorkelling she encountered a manta ray that had lain hidden in
the sand. It rose up in front of her suddenly and she’d darted to the surface, terrified. Piotr left her side to pursue it and, abandoned, she felt claustrophobic in the underwater world and swam back to the boat alone. She watched the yellow tip of his snorkel move further and further away. That was when Piotr began to leave her, but she chose not to notice.

  They enter the store in Little Current and Amy enjoys all at once the smell of deer hide and the dry, pleasant odour of sweetgrass. She follows the scent to a display rack and takes down a braid of grass. She will buy it and hang it in the car. Good luck and all that; a blessing of some kind. She searches for a clerk. A radio plays in a room behind the counter but there’s no sign of anyone. They wander for several moments among the shelves of moccasins and hand-knit bulky sweaters, both of them feeling as though they’re being watched. Piotr grows impatient. He fills his cheeks with air and expels it slowly. “Come on,” he urges the invisible clerk. Moments later a woman appears from the room behind the counter. She’s heavy-set, a plump native woman with clear, silky-looking skin. Amy sets the sweetgrass down onto the counter. “You people just off the ferry?” the woman asks.

  “Yes.”

  “Aren’t you the lucky ones,” she says with a slight smile. “The ferry’s going to be shut down for a while now.”

  “What’s up?”

  The woman explains that she’s just heard it on the radio, a barricade has gone across the highway just south of Tobermory, blocking off traffic. A slender teenage boy enters the store. He wears his baseball cap low on his forehead and leans into the counter, studying them.