Spectrail is an odd name for a town, Amy thinks. Main Street isn’t where she expected it to be, isn’t broad, either, or strung with those prerequisite coloured lights, which in winter are depressing in their feeble attempt at gaiety and which stay up all year round. The town itself isn’t where Amy thought it would be, but hidden behind a screen of trees, she discovers, as she hangs onto the seat of Marlene’s bicycle and not Marlene’s waist as she had instructed her to do. Marlene rides standing up and her bare shoulders dip from side to side as she pedals. The string ties of her halter top shift against her back. Marlene smells like green apples, Amy thinks, like summer.
The bicycle’s wheels jar against the wooden planks of a bridge and Amy sucks in her breath, feeling the jiggling motion in her abdomen and the sudden sharp rise of a cramp. Below the bridge she sees an almost dry creek bed, a trickle of water washing bright the smooth river stones. As they cross the bridge and pass through an arch of trees Amy sees Main Street, how it opens up the town, a strip of shiny black asphalt about four blocks long. It ends in a U-turn just as abruptly as it began and Marlene makes that U-turn at the war memorial which has a colourful spattering of flowers planted around the base of it. The town is clean, the stores and houses neat and bright as though freshly painted. It owes its name to the word “spectacular,” Elaine explains later, and Amy doesn’t question this, given the view, which stretches beyond the end of Main Street where the landscape drops away to miles and miles of tilled soil and fields of flax and sunflowers.
Spectral. Amy changes the name of the town when she later tries to write about it because of the way it appeared so suddenly behind the trees, because the substance of the events in her life while she lived there will remain foggy, illusive, and come to mind when she least expects it.
Marlene is quick to understand Amy’s problem and goes with her to the store, then waits outside the washroom at the playground in the town’s centre while inside Amy hunches over, gasping through the pain of what have become strong, intermittent contractions. When one subsides she’s left shaking and bathed in a cold sweat. Amy grits her teeth as another contraction begins to crawl through her muscles. She can no longer, hold back. “Oooooohhhh,” she hears herself moan. The door opens and then Marlene hovers over her, wide-eyed with worry. “Gee. I’ve got some Midol at home if you want.”
When Amy opens her eyes she realizes that she’s slept for a long time. The light has changed and the air in the room has become suffocatingly heavy with heat. An attic room. She vaguely remembers entering Marlene and Elaine’s yard and seeing a patch of red poppies, petals flipping in the air, a tree, and, in the shadow of its branches, the slight figure of a man slouched in a wheelchair. She remembers Marlene calling, “Have you had enough of being outside, you old bugger?” and cheerfully hopping through the swaying poppies towards him, and that the thin elderly man’s head wobbled as she moved his wheelchair along the uneven garden path to where Amy sat on the back step, shivering and holding back nausea. “I’ll just take the old bugger inside and I’ll be back in a jiffy.”
“Why do you call him that?” she’d asked.
“Because he is.” Marlene laughed. She leaned towards his ear and yelled, “You can’t hear a darn thing, can you, you old bugger? Stone deaf.” The old man didn’t flinch or his bright eyes flicker with any indication that he’d heard.
The room she’s in is large and contains the bed she lies in, a washstand, what looks like a kitchen chair in one corner, and a low chest beneath a small window. The walls are unfinished, rough unpainted boards, and hung randomly at waist level are glossy magazine photographs of movie stars. Marlene’s room, she supposes. Strange, Amy thinks, that the pictures aren’t hung at eye level. The room is surprisingly bare given the colourful and well-kept appearance of Marlene and her mother. She hears whispering behind the door. Marlene’s and Elaine’s voices. Amy braces herself, believing that she’ll be asked to leave. The door opens and Elaine steps inside. Time to get up, Amy thinks.
“Good grief, it’s hot in here.” The floor creaks as Elaine strides over to the window and pries it open. Then she stands at the foot of the bed, crosses her arms against her chest, and looks down at Amy. “Well. So what is it? Have you run away from home?”
“No.” The sanitary napkins between her legs feel sodden and spongy.
“Kicked out, then?”
“No. I left.”
“Left where? From where? You do have a name, don’t you?”
Because she’s lying in Marlene’s bed in this woman’s house, she thinks it’s only fair. She tells Elaine her name; the place: Carona.
The bed dips as Elaine sits down. Amy notices her ears, large, like bread and butter plates lying flat against the sides of her head, and wonders if they are receivers for the news of the world; whether Elaine might be the town snoop and blabbermouth.
“And you do have parents?”
“No.”
“Come on! Left in a basket then, on a doorstep?” She slouches, her work-rough hands resting against her thighs. Amy notices that the lines beside her mouth and eyes curve up naturally. Perhaps Elaine is asking questions, Amy thinks, because she is interested and not gathering information to be used later as ammunition. “I have a mother,” Amy says. “Kind of.”
“Kind of? Well, did your ‘kind of’ mother know that you were pregnant?”
Amy’s heart kicks and she feels the push of anger in her throat. “I am not.” Pregnant. She sits up and swings her legs over the bed. She will get the hell out of this place and gain herself back. But when she stands up the room sways and she must grab the bedpost to keep from falling.
Elaine pats the bed. “Come on. Don’t be a silly ass. You can’t go anywhere today.”
Amy feels the room move inside her head. She sits down. She sees her tiny pointy feet and the dirt encrusted in the cracks between her toes.
“You know, of course, what has to happen between a man and a woman for the woman to become pregnant,” Elaine speaks quietly.
“Of course.” And I’m not pregnant, she thinks. This is a heavy period, that’s all.
Elaine’s hand slides across the blanket and Amy feels its warm pat against her leg. “You’re right. You’re not pregnant. Not any more. It’s in the toilet downstairs.” She sighs as she gets up off the bed. “So it’s all over now and you don’t have anything to worry about.” She stops at the door, pulls the red bandanna free from her hair. “You’re welcome to stay with us until you feel better, but I’ll have to call your mother and let her know where you are.”
“No.”
“Listen. I have a daughter and so I know how your mother must be frantic.”
“I’m leaving here anyway.”
“It’s okay,” Elaine says and smiles as she opens the door. “I’m not going to tell your mother about this. What’s the point?”
The door closes behind her. There’s nothing to tell, Amy thinks.
She falls asleep almost instantly, sleeping through the grainy darkness of nightfall, through the smell of their supper cooking. On she sleeps into the night, no groaning anxious mother-earth sounds to disturb her, no worry in her ear. She doesn’t hear when Marlene enters the room and undresses in the light of a flashlight set down on the chair in the corner. “Here we are,” Marlene says as she slides in under the sheets. “We’re a couple of honeymooners.” Amy doesn’t hear the bump of feet on the stairs and Hank’s voice as he half carries, half drags the invalid man up to his room next door to theirs and separated only by the thin board wall. Hank does it for Elaine; he comes as often as he can.
Amy sleeps through the rasp of a saw-whet owl perched on a telephone pole at the end of the street and through the sound of Hank’s feet against the road as he heads home to the room behind the Craft Collective where he lives alone and has since the age of fourteen when his mother died of breast cancer. Hank whistles as he walks, and thinks of the casket-shaped jewel box under his bed which holds his mother’s black Alaskan diamond
ring, strings of beads, pins and earrings. He whistles the Hank Snow song about being left behind with a brand on his heart and at the same time thinks of his mother’s jewellery and imagines that some day he’ll give it to the girl he just met at the Community Centre.
Amy dreams of standing beside the war memorial at the end of Main Street, reading the names of the war dead etched into its surface. Private Howard P. Scott, Lieutenant B. Randolph, Timothy Barber, she reads. Then she is standing in a cobblestone street and the damp air smells of fish. She looks up at a tall narrow house where, behind a diamond-shaped leaded-glass window on the top floor, she sees Timothy sitting at a desk. When he swivels in his chair and looks down at her, Amy sees terrible grief in his eyes. “Why didn’t you tell me you were dead?” Her voice echoes in the empty street. “Why didn’t you tell me that’s why you never came to see me?” Timothy walks over to the window and places his palms against it. He’s crying. “I’m coming up there.” She begins yanking at the wrought-iron gate in front of the door. In the distance a bell rings, its sound echoing through the thick fog. “No. You can’t,” Timothy says. “Go away.” Amy heats footsteps, high-heel shoes clicking against stone. She turns and sees Margaret step through a swirl of fog. She’s dressed smartly in a tailored emerald-green suit and a hat whose veil covers her eyes. She gestures frantically and her bright red mouth turns down at the corners with worry. “Hurry,” she pleads, “we’ll miss the ship.” The bell clangs and a ship’s whistle blats, the noise of it vibrating harshly. The sounds envelop Amy like the fog, drift inside her ears. “Go away. Go away,” Timothy says. He presses his mouth against the glass and it looks like a fish mouth gaping open, sucking for air. “Hurry, hurry. The Lord is going to leave without us,” Margaret pleads. Their voices become a hollow-sounding echo inside Amy’s head. “He doesn’t want me to come and live with him because he’s dead,” she hears herself say. Then Amy is standing beside the war memorial again and before her is the spectacular view, the fields which spread for miles, curving over the side of the earth at the horizon.
When Amy awakens the following morning Marlene is already gone. She hears paper rustling and then the soft sound of rubber tires gliding across the floor in the room on the other side of the wall. Resting on the foot of the bed is a mound of clothing and a note. She finds it difficult to read Marlene’s back-slanted loopy script. She has gone to the Community Centre with Elaine. Amy can wear whatever she wants. Amy can have a bath, too, and when she comes down to the Centre Elaine will make her something to eat, she reads.
Amy carries the clothing downstairs to the bathroom and runs water into the tub. A bottle of bubble bath rests on the side of it and beneath it is another note in the same strange scrawl. “Be my guest.” Amy picks up the bottle. Now they will both smell like green apples, she thinks, as she watches the lime-coloured foam bubble up beneath the rushing water. She sinks down into it, up to her neck, and then slides beneath the surface, entirely submerged, and holds her breath for several seconds. She feels the grit of the road lift and float to the surface and lets her limbs float and her body roll to one side. She’s relieved that the bleeding diminished during the night and that the cramps are gone and she can now get back on the road again.
Later, when she looks at herself in the full-length mirror on the bathroom door, she likes what she sees. She likes the way Marlene’s tan cotton twill pants fit her, baggy, concealing the fact that she has almost no shape at all. She rolls up the legs and then tucks the shirt down into place. Yes, okay, she thinks and begins to make a list of what she might go looking for. Food in the refrigerator. A heavier jacket for cooler nights ahead. She sees a brush resting on the toilet tank. Yes, a hairbrush too. Her hair is going to grow in eventually. She wonders what colour it will turn out to be. Then she sees the bottle of cherry-red nail polish beside the brush and so she sits down on the toilet seat and paints her toenails, carefully fanning them to make them dry quickly while she listens to the sound of the wheelchair overhead as it rolls across the room, pivots, and rolls back again. When she goes into the kitchen in search of food and a closet where she might find a warmer jacket, she hears a steady dripping sound and then sees her jeans, the black denim jacket, her tee shirt, washed and draped across the backs of chairs, puddles forming on the floor. She realizes she’ll have to stay in Spectrail a bit longer. Long enough for her clothes to dry.
Instead of going straight to the Community Centre, she decides to see what the rest of Spectrail has to offer. The houses are more like cottages that have had rooms added to the backs or sides of them. No sign of a new bungalow or split level as there is in Carona. The residential streets are short, sometimes with only three or four houses on either side of them, houses with bright floral plastic curtains in the windows, and some with lawn ornaments, others with plastic roses stuck in the flower-beds. The Craft Collective is something different too. She reads the announcements taped to its windows. It appears that people meet in the building several times a week and make things. There are announcements of play rehearsals coming up and Glee Club practice, which Amy reasons must be music given the treble clef and notes drawn on the poster. The presence of the Community Centre with its summer program of activities for the town’s children, the bowling alley she had seen on Main Street when she’d ridden on Marlene’s bicycle, are different too. And there is no hotel, Marlene had explained yesterday, which means there isn’t a parlour or a lounge so those who want to wet their whistles must drive to another town to do it. The oddest thing of all, though, is the absence of churches. There isn’t a single building with a cross or a spire. Amy notes that the streets are as empty as a Sunday afternoon in Carona. Marlene will explain later that this is because most of the people work in other towns.
Amy passes by the playground and sees a woman standing watch over a child riding a swing. As she turns a corner to head back towards Main Street she sees a two-storey house. LIBRARY, she reads on the sign beside the front door. She inches up the walk in order to read the smaller letters beneath. Enter Quietly. Why not? she thinks, and mounts the stairs.
The library is no more than the front hallway of the large house. But she has never been inside one before and it feels strange to be surrounded by books on all sides. She turns, scanning the shelves. She feels as though she’s entered a church by mistake. Several rows of books near the top appear to be bound in leather. Pilgrim’s Progress, Gulliver’s Travels, Don Quixote. She reads the names of Dickens, whom she read at school and liked, Chekhov, Tolstoy, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Shakespeare, of course. Then she becomes aware of the smell of pipe smoke and hears footsteps. The door at the end of the hall opens a crack and she sees a long thin nose and a white bushy eyebrow.
“If you see something you’d like to read, just put your name and the title of the book in the ledger.” The long nose disappears and the door closes.
“Thanks,” Amy says to the closed door. Then she sees the ledger lying open on top of an old school desk. There are only a few names written on the open page and it seems that the last person to borrow a book did so several years ago. She slides a volume from the shelf and blows dust from its cover. The White Company, a book Mel read in his final year of high school. No thanks, she thinks, as she puts the book back on the shelf and walks out the door. Books are too heavy to carry.
She hears voices as she enters the Community Centre. “Hello, Amy,” Hank calls as she passes by the ping-pong room. She’s startled by the shape her name takes in his mouth. It’s as though she’s hearing it for the first time. It doesn’t sound like Shorty, or Short Stuff, she thinks. It’s a softer rounder sound. Amy doesn’t know that he’s practised saying it. That when he got home last night he’d stood in front of the mirror and put his mouth around her name. Amy. He’d said it over and over, in the same way he was teaching himself to play his latest favourite, the Hank Snow song, “I’m Movin’ On.”
The ping-pong table is covered with newspaper and sitting around it with him are several children. “I
told Marlene I’d keep my eyes open for you. They’re out back,” he says and Amy sees colour rise in his neck.
“Look.” A little girl sitting beside Hank demands Amy’s attention. She holds up a white object for Amy to see. Her sun-browned fingers are tinged with white dust. “I’m making a turtle.”
“And I’m making a gopher,” the girl across the table from her says loudly. They’re the same two girls she’d seen in the washroom the day before. They look up at her and their eyes are inquisitive, their faces shine with intelligence.
“Not bad,” Amy says against her will.
“Soap carving. We went out first to scout an animal we might carve,” Hank explains.
“I didn’t, I didn’t,” the girl interrupts Hank. “I didn’t actually see a turtle. It was a rock that looked like a turtle.”
Cute, Amy thinks.
“Mostly we’re making a mess. I’m no good at this.” Hank laughs, a nervous little cough.
She’s surprised to discover that there’s a large vegetable garden behind the Community Centre building. Elaine sits on the back steps with a bucket of peeled potatoes at her side and a basket of unpeeled ones between her legs. Beyond, Marlene stands among the vegetables, hoeing. “Howdy,” she calls when she sees Amy. “Man, oh man, were you ever sawing logs when I got up this morning.”
“You have two gardens?” Amy asks.
“No,” Elaine says. “This is the community garden. We take turns looking after it. Some of the old folks don’t have it in them any more.” She squints up at Amy, searching her face. “How you feeling? Better, I’ll bet.”
“Yes.”
Elaine moves over on the step, indicating that Amy should sit down. She hands her a peeler and a potato. “We’ve got fries on the menu every single day.” Her voice drops. “Your mother says hello. Talked to her this morning.” Amy’s hand stiffens around the potato and her stomach tightens.
The Chrome Suite Page 25