The Chrome Suite

by Sandra Birdsell

“And?”

  “And that’s about it. Here.” She takes the peeler from Amy and demonstrates how to use it. “She said, ‘Please say hello and tell her’ “ – Elaine coughs and clears her throat – “ ‘tell her that I’m praying for her.’ Is your mother religious?”

  Amy watches the wrinkled skin give way to white flesh as she scrapes at the potato. Marlene drops the hoe and walks through the garden towards them.

  “You could stay with us,” Elaine says quickly. “We’d find something for you to do.” Her voice becomes businesslike. “Marlene’s always harped about not having a sister. You’d be good for her.”

  Yeah, sure, fine, Amy thinks. I am a stray dog to be fed, fattened, my coat brushed until it shines, and in return, of course, I will wag my tail and look up adoringly at every pat, and all for the sake of your darling daughter. What if it isn’t good for me, eh? And anyway, this is probably a pretty dull and boring place. She sees Marlene’s feet stop in front of her own. “I think Hank’s got a crush on you,” Marlene says. Amy doesn’t notice Elaine’s sharp sideways glance, or how her hands have stopped moving for a moment.

  Twit, Amy thinks. “How come there aren’t any churches in Spectrail?” A diversionary question.

  “We’ve got enough trouble without asking for more,” Elaine replies curtly. “There’s a Denver sandwich in the oven. You’re probably starving.”

  She is starving. She feels weak with hunger, and her legs are rubbery as she climbs the stairs and goes back inside. She hears the children’s low chattering in the ping-pong room as she stands behind the counter, hands trembling as she devours the sandwich, and then sucks bits of egg and butter from her fingers. She senses that she’s being watched and turns and sees a girl sitting on a stool. She sees only her head, dark braids trailing down either side of it, brown eyes fixed steadily on Amy’s face. Jill, Amy thinks, and wonders what she would look like now. If she had not died, would I be here in this place or still back in Carona?

  “What’s you name?” the girl lisps.

  Amy wants to turn away from that steady gaze and ignore the question. It seems that each time she tells someone her name, a piece of her is given away.

  “What’s you name?” the child insists.

  “Alice,” Hank says from the doorway, “come on now. You’re not finished yet.” Alice slides from the stool and walks over to him. “Her won’t tell me her name,” she complains. Hank laughs. “Amy. Her’s Amy,” he whispers loudly, taking the child by the hand as they leave the room. Amy hears him whistling a tune between his teeth. And her’s getting out of this creepy place, Amy thinks.

  Hank was still whistling when he worked at the ping-pong table with the children for the rest of that morning. But even if Amy had been listening, she wouldn’t have recognized the song.

  It was a song he’d absentmindedly sing while driving down the road on a Saturday night on his way to play with a pick-up band at an anniversary or wedding social, or when Jerry called and he’d take the bus into the city, or, years later, in bed, Hank would whistle between his teeth, or sing softly under his breath “The Girl That I Marry” – the song a brand or a legacy from his mother.

  12

  ain Street isn’t where I thought it would be, Amy writes in her notebook. And it goes nowhere. Ends suddenly at a war memorial. No hotel. And no churches either. Elaine and Marlene have hitched a ride with friends Steve and Laura and have driven to Brandon, a major centre which is known as the wheat city of the west. Steve is a jovial, pot-bellied butcher, who agreed to give Amy a few hours’ work on Fridays and Saturdays. And although he winced her first day when he discovered that she’d fed a whole tray of sirloin steaks into the meat grinder for hamburger, he made jokes about it later, saying that his customers kept coming in after that and demanding the grade “A” grind; “A” for Amy. Laura, his stringbean Duchess of Windsor look-alike wife, putters constantly in the four-stool coffee bar set up in one corner of the shop, which is a tilting wood frame building, painted bright green on the outside and coral inside. She makes pathetic-looking gingersnaps and chocolate chip cookies that people refer to as “Laura’s hockey pucks” but nonetheless feel obligated to buy. Elaine travels to Brandon with the couple three times a year. In spring for her gardening needs, before Christmas, and now, at the beginning of September, to shop for back-to-school supplies and clothes for Marlene. Amy is at home, babysitting the old bugger.

  She glances out the window and sees the old man below in the garden where he likes to sit, and which, except for the cornstalks stripped bare of their cobs and several root vegetables grown too large and pithy to be eaten, is now bare. Earlier in the week Amy had helped Marlene dig the potatoes and carry them basket by basket to the bin beneath the cellar stairs. Elaine also has a root room for storing turnips, parsnips, and carrots. Amy had collected poppy seeds for her, emptying the little brown seed shakers into a jar so Elaine could use them when she baked poppyseed bread during the winter. They were like animals, Amy thought, in a frenzy to store food for the winter. When Elaine proudly pointed out that there wouldn’t be the need to buy a single can of anything, Amy felt some of her pride too.

  They’re poor, she realizes. The old man always wears the same shirt, and his jacket has been mended at the cuffs and elbows many times. He receives a pension from the First War which is not enough for them to live on. Marlene is vague when it comes to answering questions about her father but Amy has learned enough to understand that the old bugger fought for the other side. For a full hour now he has been working over his stamp album. A strand of his hair lifts and flutters. There’s a breeze. Perhaps she should go and bring him inside. She closes her notebook and her eyes turn to the page of the dictionary lying open to one side. Love. The word she’d been searching for earlier. “Love is a zero score in tennis.” She likes that line. Unlike her mother’s journal, Amy’s is forceful, witty, and creative. The day it begins to sound snivelly, I will burn it, she thinks. Love. Love could also be a table. The table Elaine rescued from the dump, scrubbed, painted, and set down in front of the window so that Amy can look out from time to time while she reads or writes. She has read almost two full shelves of books from the strange little library in town, and, although she sometimes hears footsteps on the other side of the door and smells pipe smoke, she hasn’t seen the long-nosed librarian again.

  A movement in the garden draws her attention. The top of a cornstalk dips and sways wildly and then she sees Hank attempting to wrench it loose from the earth and failing. “It’s okay,” Elaine had said when Hank offered to come over and clean up the corn. “Wait until the first hard frost. It’s easier then.” But Hank would not be deterred. The cornstalks had to be pulled out. Today. He steps back from it, puts his hands in his pockets, and studies it. His legs are short, most of his length in his trunk, she sees, as she studies him and imagines for a moment that he might make a good back-up musician for her life. Her mind jumps with possibilities; hanging out with Hank the way she’d hung out with Cam and Gord. Leading the way to adventure, and Hank following behind carrying the suitcases, the required male presence to get her through doors and backstage. She does not realize that churning beneath his genial and rather placid expression is the excruciating desire to mate with her and merge.

  Hank circles the cornstalk and lunges at it again. He yanks and falls backwards as it comes loose. He turns and looks at the old man, who has spoken. The sound of the man’s voice is like a rusty gate in need of oil, Amy thinks. Hank gets up and heads off out of sight and returns moments later carrying the garden fork. Use the proper tool for the job, Amy thinks, remembering how Timothy once took away the rock she was using to pound a nail into a board and replaced it with a hammer.

  “Love,” she reads in the dictionary, “is an attraction based on physical desire.” In the weeks that she’s been in Spectrail she’s become rounder, though not by much, and her hair is a little longer and two-toned. She can’t imagine anyone desiring her. She watches as a cornstalk flies t
hrough the air, landing beside the garden. She doesn’t see anything particularly sexy about Hank’s solid, utilitarian body. But he is unusually kind and thoughtful, and she wonders why she doesn’t find that attractive. Oh well, she thinks, he likes to be useful.

  At first, her writing and reading had been a covert activity, snatched on the run. Sometimes she would simply disappear for hours into the country outside of town with a book and offer no explanation for her absence. But all that changed in one day. She had been sitting on the edge of the bed too engrossed in what she was reading to hear Elaine come up the stairs. When she looked up for a moment she saw that Elaine was standing, and for God only knew how long, in the doorway with her hands on her wide hips. Oh fart, Amy thought, I guess I should be down there doing something. Elaine strode towards her and in a single movement lifted both of Amy’s legs, swung them onto the bed, and heaped pillows behind her head. “You really should be comfortable when you read,” she said. It was after this that she’d gone and scrounged the table and a larger bureau, too, and added them to the furnishings of the sparse room. The two bottom drawers are Amy’s and are surprisingly full given what she had the day she arrived. In one corner of the bottom drawer is a tobacco tin where she keeps her savings. She feels a bit guilty over the fact that she isn’t proving to be the sister Marlene has always wanted. She declined joining the teen bowling league and going down to the Craft Collective with Marlene in the evenings to learn how to make papier mâché bowls.

  The old man’s eyes follow Amy as she crosses the yard now carrying a TV tray and checker game box. The breeze that dips and sways in the tree’s branches in the centre of the garden is full and moist. She stops and turns her face up to the sun. Here I am, she thinks. This is me. She absorbs its light and heat. “I think I was meant to live outdoors,” she says to no one. Another cornstalk arcs through the air and shushes down on top of what is now a large heap. Hank leans against the fork watching Amy. “Why don’t we go camping one of these weekends?” he asks. “You, me, and Marlene. Before it gets too cold. I’ve got a tent.”

  His voice startled her and she feels silly to be caught, mouth open, gaping at the sky. She sets the game down on the ground and struggles to set up the TV tray. Hank is at her side instantly. He takes the tray from her and wrestles it into place. “I’ll go and get a chair,” he says and rushes off into the house. The old man looks at her. She sees the knot of puzzlement in his forehead give way to a single word, What? And then a whole sentence unravels. What is this?

  A reasonable question, she knows. She has never spoken to him and sees him only at the evening meal when he sits hunched and silent, his chin almost resting against the tabletop, looking down at the food on his plate or at his hand grasping the fork. They talk around him as though he’s invisible and it seems to Amy that no sooner is he done eating than he’s whisked away out of sight.

  “I thought you could teach me how to play checkers,” she says, though she knows he can’t hear her. “It might be useful information. For my future.”

  His hand tightens around the stamp album in his lap as she reaches for it. Get lost, his expression says.

  Hank returns with a chair and positions it on the other side of the TV tray. He’s surprised when Amy sits down. “Oh, okay.” He backs away. “You know how to play?”

  “I’m sure it’s no big deal. He can teach me.” She knows from having watched the two of them play how to position the checker pieces. The old man frowns and swivels sideways in his chair, cups his chin, and fixes his rheumy eyes on a distant point. It’s only his legs and ears that don’t work, Marlene has explained. He can talk when he wants to. Amy is aware of his legs beneath the wool pants. Dry twigs. She waits. His face says, If you don’t go away I’ll just ignore you. She hears Hank grunt as he yanks at a cornstalk. Well, to hell with this, Amy thinks, and watches as a monarch butterfly floats down through the air between them. Then it dips and wavers, coming to rest against the edge of the checkerboard. “Hey, Shorty, you know what happens when a caterpillar spins its cocoon?” Amy remembers her grandfather saying this one summer when she was on the swing. “Yes, it goes to sleep inside the cocoon.” “And then what?” he had prompted. “Jill is not a caterpillar,” she said.

  As she watches the butterfly fan its wings, Amy remembers how she would put cocoons in jars. She’d either take the jar inside the house where she’d store it until the cocoon dried up, or else she’d be too impatient to wait for the metamorphosis to occur and would break open the cocoon and be disappointed in what was revealed: a tangle of strings and ashes, paper-thin unformed wings crumbled beneath her probing. She holds her breath as the sun glazes the mosaic of gold and black panels outlined on its wings; iridescent powder-covered scaled, she knows, from having captured them and seen the silvery powder on her fingers. “Pretty.” It lifts off suddenly and she watches as it flutters across the yard and away.

  The old man turns to the table at his side and places his hand on top of a stack of magazines. He slides a magazine out and hands it to her. On the cover is a photograph of monarch butterflies. She flips through it to the feature article. It’s a story about the migration of monarch butterflies with photographs of eucalyptus trees bending beneath the weight of thousands of clustering butterflies. Then the old man straightens in his chair. You can read that later, he indicates, as he nudges a black checker piece forward a square.

  The remainder of the afternoon passes swiftly. Amy loses every game of checkers they play. But even though she loses, the games begin to last longer and she learns the necessity of thinking several moves ahead. When Hank finishes clearing away the cornstalks he brings them a plate of sandwiches Elaine had prepared that morning. She feels Hank watching as she begins to nibble at a sandwich and her throat closes when she tries to swallow. She excuses herself and goes up to her room.

  Amy sits in front of the attic room window, feet propped up on the small chest beneath the table, paging through the magazine the old bugger has given her. She becomes aware that the light in the room is fading as the sun drops behind the trees at the end of the street. She switches on the lamp in the centre of the table, and the colours of the monarch butterflies, a patchwork quilt covering the branches of a tree, leap to life from the glossy page. She has heard Hank when he’s dragged the old man up the stairs to his room on the other side of the wall, and she hears him now, outside, sitting on the steps, she supposes, humming and strumming softly at the strings of his guitar. She sets the magazine aside and listens as he seems to find what he’s been looking for and begins singing. It’s a whiny sound, and she wonders why country and western singers think they sound great singing through their noses. She recognizes the song. It’s about a man pining for a pillow his sweetheart has slept on, wanting to put it beneath his head so that he can dream her dreams. Elaine and Marlene should have returned by now. The breeze flowing through the screened window feels cool against her hot skin and she shivers. She doesn’t want to think about Elaine and Marlene being late.

  She goes over to the bureau to get a sweater from her bottom drawer. As she leans forward her eyes look directly into the face of James Dean. Strange, she thinks, as she notices a small eruption on his face. The picture has been torn or poked with something, she discovers, as she examines it more closely. Marlene will flip out, she knows. She loosens the strings of Marlene’s peach-coloured halter top and lets it drop around her waist. Her breasts are stark white against the deep tan at her throat and shoulders. Perky. She cups a breast. She strokes the nipple until it draws up into a tight bud. She wonders if Marlene ever masturbates. From the way she keeps herself covered most of the time, dressing in a corner with her back turned to the room or undressing in darkness, Amy doubts it. She’s tempted to slip her hand down there and press the button which is already swollen. Hank’s song becomes a moan. Corny, Amy thinks, and resists the temptation. She pulls the sweater on over her head. He sounds sick. Lovesick, lovelorn. She goes downstairs, following the sound of his singing. Wh
en she steps outside and sits down beside him, he grins at her because she’s humming the tune, harmonizing under her breath.

  When he breaks off singing to tune the guitar strings Amy watches how his tongue flickers at the corner of his mouth as he concentrates and she feels a tightening in that hard nub at her centre. She pushes off the steps and walks down to the gate. When she sees headlights of a car moving through the trees and turning the corner onto the street she’s relieved, realizing that it’s Elaine and Marlene. The car sways to a halt in front of the house and all four doors open simultaneously. Marlene leaps from the car first, laden down with packages. “Hi! How have you two lovebirds been making out?”

  “We have not been making out,” Amy replies darkly but a great worry has been lifted from her chest at the sight of them.

  “Oh! So you are lovebirds,” she sings. “Huh, huh, huh.” Her shoulders jerk with laughter. Hank has followed and steps up behind Amy. He takes packages from Marlene’s arms. Amy wonders suddenly, Why not Marlene? Why not Hank and Marlene? She hears Elaine’s voice mixed with the sound of big band music blaring from the car radio. “Well, I don’t know, Steven,” Laura says, her voice uncommonly loud. “It seems to me that if we’re going to stop in for a pee, we could stay for a short snort too.”

  “They’re looped,” Marlene whispers as they walk towards the house. “We stopped at a hotel for supper and they must of drank a gallon of beer. Each.”

  “Honey?” Elaine calls.

  They both turn. “Yah?” they say in unison. Elaine hates the word “Yah.” They tease her with it. Amy has never seen Elaine wearing a dress before. It’s a sleeveless white cotton dress with red polka dots, cinched at the waist with a wide red belt which makes Elaine’s hips jut out like two shelves. The V-neckline reveals the deep crease between her breasts. Amy thinks that Elaine looks nice wearing a dress. Real. She sees through that full-blown woman to the girl Elaine may have been, daring, impudent, and probably a flirt.