The Chrome Suite

by Sandra Birdsell

  She became determined from that point on to be creative. She required that Richard stamp in rain puddles, for instance, and showed him how. They made mud cakes and, later, kites, climbed the tree in the front yard. Instead of scolding him she’d laughed when once he crawled among the racks of lingerie in Eaton’s, emerging wearing a black brassiere. She wrote these things down and at the end of the day would sometimes read them to Hank.

  But there were times when she had nothing to write. Or chose not to write, because she knew she wouldn’t be able to bear going back some day and reading what she had written.

  FRIDAY, JUNE 18, 1976. MOTHER ARRESTED FOR SHOPLIFTING. Amy pictures the headline as she stands among the shelves of food in Pete’s store. Shoplifting: the shortest distance between two points. Which in this case are: twenty-five dollars every Saturday and the presence of food in the refrigerator seven days later. Thank you, Shirley Cutting. She checks the mirror hanging on the wall behind the meat counter. Pete has his back turned to the room as he bends over a box of toilet paper and so Amy drops the jar of peanut butter, crunchy, Richard’s favourite, into her jacket pocket. And peaches, too, she thinks, to garnish the leftover bread pudding. Peaches and peanut butter. As she moves down the aisle she imagines the column.

  Mrs. Amy Blank, wife of Hank the Blank and mother of Richard, was carried kicking and screaming from Pete’s Grocery and Meats on McPhillips Street. Customers in the store at the time of the theft quote the woman as saying, “This is just cheatstealie. You can’t arrest me for making the ends meet.”

  The brass bell above the door jangles suddenly, startling Amy, and the can of peaches drops to her feet, rolls across the floor, and comes to rest against the cash counter. Selena enters the store wearing a hot-pink jumpsuit and matching platform heels. She pushes a pair of yellow sunglasses up on top of her head. Like a hollyhock, Amy thinks of Selena’s new look. They let you buy sunglasses when you’re on welfare? she says to herself.

  “Hello, doll,” Pete calls.

  “Hello nothing,” Selena says. “We’ve got to stop meeting like this, it’s costing me a fortune.”

  Pete hurries over to the counter. A roll of pricing stickers dangles from his pocket. “Well, what can I say?” he laughs.

  Amy grins as she picks up the can of peaches and sets it back on the shelf. Hilarious. Pete the grocer trying to be cool. She wonders if his dark and brooding mother is crouched somewhere in the dim hallway, listening, and does she approve? “Oranges,” Amy says and plunks the bag she’d been carrying onto the counter for him to weigh.

  “Is that everything?”

  “That’s all for now anyway. Sure as shooting I’ll remember something I’ve forgot the minute I leave here though.” She winces inwardly, feeling the bite of frost as she hugs a tray of frozen meat patties against her side underneath her jacket. She will have to return for the peaches later. She likes Pete and his store but since she got her driver’s licence she’s begun to shop down the street at Safeway where the prices are lower, as Hank had wasted no time in pointing out, but where their surveillance system keeps a beady eye open and they don’t let you buy groceries on the cuff. Selena jerks a grocery cart loose and rattles off down an aisle, reaching for items at random and throwing them into her cart. “Say, think it would be okay if I charged this?” Amy asks. She holds her breath.

  “Sure.” Pete fans the air above the shoebox where he keeps the records of his customers’ accounts while his eyes follow Selena’s buttocks jiggling in the much too snug jumpsuit. From the centre of the box he pulls a receipt pad with Amy’s name on it.

  “Neat trick,” Amy says. She is using her sparkling personality this morning.

  “You haven’t been in for a while,” he says. “You should try and come in and whittle this bill down some before it gets away on you.”

  Amy feels Selena listening and her face burns with embarrassment. Hank doesn’t even know the price of milk or bread. Twenty-five dollars is all he’s got and so it’s enough. Any more and the system is ripping him off. “Hank gets paid today,” Amy says. “I’ll come in tomorrow and put something down.”

  Selena wheels her cart over to the counter and waits. “I’d like something from the meat counter when you’re finished,” she says.

  “For you, darling, just ask.”

  “That’s going to cost a bundle,” Amy says, eyeing the pile of groceries in Selena’s cart.

  “Doesn’t it always?” Selena yawns. “I started work so I gotta stock up for the weekend.”

  “Really?”

  “I’ve been thinking about going back. I used to work there before the kids. Now that my oldest can babysit nights, I figured why the hell not?”

  “Doing what?” Amy is still in her sparkling mode. Learning how to be interested in other people. The jar of peanut batter lies heavy in her jacket pocket.

  “Cocktail waitressing. At the Club Malibu,” Selena says, naming one of the city’s nightclubs.

  Well, that figures, Amy thinks. But when Selena tells her how much she makes in tips on a good night, she does some fast calculating. It’s almost as much as Hank allows her for one week’s groceries. “You should think about it,” Selena says. “I’m in with the boss and I know they’re looking for a part-time person.”

  “Hank would have a fit,” Amy says. “And, anyway, Richard’s going to start kindergarten in September. I’m taking him down to register this afternoon.”

  “What?” Selena says. “The little twerp can’t be five already!”

  It doesn’t feel like the time has passed by as quickly as that already, Amy thinks. It feels longer than five years. She’s twenty-six years old, heavier now, with a bit of a pot belly, which she hates. The road-map of the world is in stretch marks on her breasts and stomach and she has lost all her teeth. After Richard was born her teeth began to crumble. She would bite into a piece of toast and the top of a molar would come away with it. Eating utensils touching her teeth made her head shiver with shocks. Hank had left Eaton’s repair department shortly after Richard was born and was on his own now, building up an appliance repair shop in an eight-by-ten-foot space he’d rented, part of a warehouse in the east end of the city that used to be an airplane hangar. There wasn’t any money for a sizeable dentist bill. Today Amy sometimes wants to take a gun and shoot herself – or someone – over that. But then she was convinced that there was no other way and she’d allowed herself to be led by the hand to the chair and put to sleep. When she awakened the dentist’s nurse stood before her holding up a mirror so she could admire a mouthful of plastic teeth.

  “Well, he is,” Amy tells Selena, “and since he’ll be going off to school in September, I’ve been thinking I might take a course.”

  “What kind of course?” Selena asks, feigning interest.

  “At the university.” The words feel strange on her tongue.

  “No kidding.”

  “Yeah. Maybe a literature course, or something.” “You like reading books,” Rhoda, Amy’s new friend, had said. “So why not take an intro literature course?” “I haven’t really decided yet,” Amy says to Selena.

  “Sounds exciting,” Selena says and raises her eyebrows at Pete. “Here.” She hands Amy a card. “If you want some real excitement, that is. And a paycheque. I could get you on, easy.”

  Amy hears Pete and Selena laughing over a shared joke as she leaves the store. Fart. Face reality, Amy thinks, and wishes she hadn’t bragged about taking a course at the university. Wishes that she hadn’t telephoned Mel. “Well, far out,” Mel had said. “But why literature, for God’s sake? A general arts degree is totally useless. Go down to the registrar and get a calendar,” Mel advised. She couldn’t bring herself to ask what a calendar was.

  The jar of peanut butter jostles against her thigh as she walks down the street. She stands still, debating whether to chance the traffic or to walk to the intersection and the lights. Face the reality of Hank, she reminds herself. Tucked away in the tea-towel drawer in the ki
tchen are her test results, the grade she’s been awarded for her High School Equivalency. Rhoda had told her about the General Education Development Tests and loaned her the examination fee. After Amy had received her marks she’d also got a letter from the University of Winnipeg advising her of its Mature Students Program.

  She’d taken a bus downtown determined to barge into the registrar’s office and demand a calendar as though she knew what it was, as though she’d been coming in for years. She’d stood in front of the university, which was an odd combination of old and new buildings, reading the directional map, her mouth dry, heart thudding, and palms too moist. Students rushed back and forth, tense-looking, with self-importance or affected boredom in their faces. Hordes of students, she discovered, as she rode the escalator up and then back down again; students sitting on floors with books spread around them, rummaging through lockers. She felt their energy, their planed-down sense of purpose. Directed, she thought. Driven? Narrow, she concluded, as she left the campus without picking up a calendar. She had felt that all eyes had been turned on her, and she knows now that if she returns she must wear blue jeans and maybe a corduroy jacket and a minimal amount of make-up. She must also look distracted, bored, pale-faced with fatigue. All she needs is the money and the courage. “Blue-collar workers make a bundle,” Rhoda had said. “Old whatziz can spring for a course or two.”

  Amy had met Rhoda in the checkout line in Safeway just after Christmas. Rhoda had been complaining, to anyone around her who would listen, about the cold snap and how she hated shopping. When she spotted a paperback book among Amy’s groceries she picked it up. “Junk,” she proclaimed, holding it by one corner as though it was something dead.

  Amy told her that it put her to sleep.

  “Oh, do you have trouble sleeping?” Rhoda peered at Amy through rimless glasses. “Does this happen often? Because, you know, it could be a sign of depression.”

  Only when Hank works late into the night, Amy couldn’t explain, and so she just smiled and wondered what Rhoda would make of the pain she’d begun to experience more frequently since Richard was born. How, without warning, pain would clutch her body from beneath her breastbone to her lower abdomen, and that in spite of the doctor’s probing, and the subsequent tests which revealed no reason for it, the pain was very real. When it hit there wasn’t much she could do other than bundle herself in a blanket, much the way Hank used to bundle Richard when he had colic, and wait for it to pass.

  “This is junk too,” Rhoda said and held up a bag of salt-and-vinegar chips. “But what can I do? Bloody TV makes consumers of kids at age two.”

  Amy told her that she would not be terrorized into buying junk food for her kid, but the truth was she couldn’t afford it and Richard had learned to stop asking.

  “Really?” she said and Amy felt Rhoda examining her anew, evaluating. Her narrow blonde eyebrows arched above the tops of her glasses. Her face was free of cosmetics and she didn’t wear jewellery but there was something distinctly feminine in her tiny hands, white birds fluttering in the air between them as she spoke, and in the soft pastel colours she was wearing. “Well, that’s quite smart of you,” she said. “Say, would you like to come to my book club? We meet once a month. Of course you would, silly question.” She adjusted her glasses with an index finger and looked at Amy hard. “Just what are you, nationality-wise, I mean? No, wait.” She held up a palm as if Amy was in danger of speaking. “Let me guess. You’re short, but with your colouring and shape you could be Scandinavian. Anyway, looks can be deceiving. You could, for instance, be Serbian. Have you ever read fortunes? You could be psychic, you know.”

  Amy told her that she was part Irish and part English and Rhoda said, “Yecht! I spit on that.” And then Rhoda said, “Trust me. The depression bit? I took bloody drugs for two years before I realized that I was only doing it for my father. By the way, I’m Rhoda,” she said, extending a hand.

  “Amy.”

  “God what kind of name is that to saddle a kid with? Some parents should be shot,” Rhoda said.

  Doing what for her father? Amy wanted to know and so she said yes, she’d come to the book club, which wasn’t in her neighbourhood at all but further out in a suburb where the streets had the names of flowers and trees. They were going to read The Sweet Second Summer of Kitty Malone, a novel by a Canadian writer, Matt Cohen. Rhoda wrote the author’s name on the back of Amy’s grocery receipt.

  Amy had felt light-headed and euphoric after meeting Rhoda that day. On the way home from Safeway she stopped at the library and looked up “Serb. Serbian.” “Serbo-Croatian,” she read from the dictionary: “The Slavic language of the Serbs and Croats consisting of Serbian written in the Cyrillic alphabet and Croatian written in the Roman alphabet.”

  Amy thought that perhaps she hadn’t heard Rhoda correctly and it was not “Serbian” she’d said but rather “acerbic.” And so she looked up the word “acerbic” too, and before she realized it an hour had passed and the lettuce and tomatoes sitting in the trunk of the car had frozen. They went without salad that week and she was back to shopping exclusively at Pete’s.

  Serbo-Croatian. Mr. and Mrs. Hank Blank – only their language hadn’t melded into one. They did talk a lot, of course, but over and around one another, she doing most of the talking. She’d spring on him like a cat the second he entered the house, brimming with snippets of information to alarm or amaze him, or to further an argument that had previously gone nowhere. Her voice was a ram battering against his body. He’d withdraw to the garage and into his tinkering to escape it. He had nothing to say. He worried about this. He frowned and his eyelashes fluttered. His thick tongue could barely get around the words when he read bedtime stories to Richard. Sometimes when she talked and talked, he could stand it no longer and he’d pick her up and throw her onto the bed or chase her down into a snowbank and give her a face wash, pushing snow into her mouth until she gagged. He felt happiest when she was quietly working at something in the kitchen and not talking.

  Stub your toe on the reality of Hank, Amy thinks. The skin at her rib cage tingles from hugging the frozen patties. Hank, she knows, would not dish out money for a university course or want her to go to work as a cocktail waitress. She decides not to walk to the intersection but to gamble, and she dashes out into the street. Tires scream on pavement as a blue MG screeches to a halt seconds from hitting her. She feels the heat of its engine and smells gasoline. The white-faced driver clutches the steering wheel and stares at her in disbelief. “Jesus Christ! You stupid broad! You blind or just dumb?” the driver shouts and shakes his fist at her.

  The gate clicks behind Amy. She’s home. Safe inside the yard. Her knees tremble. This cheatstealie thing takes too much from me, she tells herself. She hears the squeal of the clothesline and then sees Richard’s jacket, which is pinned to it, move slowly across the yard. “Richard?”

  The jacket sways, empty arms flailing air and dripping water. “Richard?”

  He rounds the corner of the house, leans against its grey siding, and stares at her.

  “I thought I told you to stay in and play with your toys until I got back.”

  “I had to hang up my jacket.” His voice is rough-sounding, ripe with a summer cold. She was up most of the night steaming him in the bathtub. The top of his head looks ragged, his thick brown hair falling in ropes across his forehead in large C-shaped curls. His eyes are wide, dark, and always questioning.

  “Why is your jacket wet?” she asks with a sinking feeling. She imagines water running beneath the bathroom door because in the past he has poked a washcloth in the drain, locked the door, and turned on the taps.

  “I washed it. It was dirty.”

  “Well, that wasn’t very smart, what will you wear now when we go to register you for kindergarten this afternoon?”

  “I’m not going to kindergarten.”

  Amy sighs. “You’ll like it, you’ll see. Now in you go.” She raises her arm and the meat patties drop to the gro
und.

  “Hey, you dropped them,” he says in an accusing tone. He picks up the tray of patties and carries it into the house. He pushes a stool over to the sink and washes the dirt from the package. Amy believes that a mother’s role is not to do things for her children but to teach children how to do for themselves. When he was a baby she would not go to him the second he began to cry. And no matter how red-faced and angry he became, la-laaing and punching the air with his baby fists, she would not be intimidated and would close his door and return only when she was ready, when it was the hour of his feeding, for example, or if he needed changing, his bath, a cuddle, or a walk. On her terms, her time. She had “discussed” this at length with Hank. Hank believes that Richard should be allowed to lie on the floor and count the fly specks on the ceiling while she wrestles him into his clothing. What are mothers for anyway? Hank asks, and insinuates that she isn’t worth the amount of money he spends if she isn’t doing things for Richard.

  “Sweetheart,” Amy says, “I thought I told you to stay inside and watch television until I got back.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s broken.”

  When she investigates she discovers that every knob has been screwed right around. She has told him repeatedly not to play with the dials but he does every time her back is turned. Anything with moving parts is a target for his tampering. He stands in the doorway watching. “It’s broken. Cheap junk,” he says, using the phrase Hank uses often to dissuade Richard or Amy or himself from buying something they really don’t need.

  “Cheap junk, nothing. You’ve been fooling around with the controls again.”