The Chrome Suite

by Sandra Birdsell

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Don’t give me that. I can see and I have told you and told you, play with the television and you’ll get a smack.” She will not be guilty of inconsistency. When she tells Richard he’ll get a smack, he gets one. She raises her hand and he doesn’t flinch. He fixes his eyes on the wall in front of him and seems to transport himself somewhere else. How did he learn to do that? she asks herself. Her palm smarts as she strikes his hand but he doesn’t appear to have felt the blow. What now, Amy wonders? Nothing seems to work any more. This is the part she doesn’t understand: is she supposed to smack him again, hard enough to make him cry? Is that the idea? Or does hitting him just cancel the debt and leave him free to start over again? She turns to leave the room and senses movement behind her. When she looks back she sees Richard with his fingers stuck in his ears and his tongue out, expressing, with this universal child sign, his contempt for her.

  “Jesus!” Amy hears herself say. She grabs a fistful of his thick hair.

  “Ow, ow, ow!” Richard cries. Amy has him now. She feels the satisfaction of getting a response from him. He whimpers as she pulls him by the hair across the hall to his bedroom. She has caught him in the act this time. No worming his way out of this one: I didn’t do it. I never had it. I don’t know. She nudges him with the tip of her foot and he falls forward onto his knees and then gets up, moving fast, faster than he likes to move for anyone. But he’s frightened. He will learn, Amy tells herself, that when he does these things and makes me angry, he will pay for it.

  “Get onto the bed and stay there!” she shouts. Her breathing has become hard and quick and her pulse pounds in the top of her skull. She has taught herself to parcel out her anger bit by bit, only small amounts of it at a time, because if she doesn’t she will become sick with pain. Careful, Amy cautions herself. Control your breathing. Count. This is not worth two days of pain. She closes the door and crosses the hall into her own room. “Pig,” Richards yells and kicks at the wall. “You’re a dumb pig.”

  Forty-three, forty-four, forty-five, forty-six, Amy counts. Yes, that’s what I am, she thinks, ignorant, a pig. She begins to cry, softly, seeing him then, her child on his knees, frantic to escape the brunt of her anger. She gets up from the bed and goes to him.

  His eyes are large and sad. “I’m sorry,” Amy says.

  He seems relieved. “Can I come out now?”

  “Yes, sure, you can come out now.”

  He crawls across the length of his bed, climbs up over the metal railing, and drops down onto the floor. Richard seldom does anything the easy way, Amy thinks, as he pushes past her through the hall and outdoors.

  “You have to have a bath,” she calls. “Get nice and clean to meet the kindergarten teacher.”

  “I’m not going, I’m not going, I’m not going to kinder garting,” Richard sings. The window panes rattle as the door slams shut.

  15

  he next day began not with the sun rising behind the window shade in her bedroom but behind eyes closed in half-sleep, the memory of the events of the previous day blessedly unreal, still locked away until her eyelashes began fluttering and dream phantoms shrank in the light of consciousness.

  This was the day following the one when a child’s jacket had been ironed dry and he was reluctantly coaxed from play to be taken by the hand and walked the three blocks to register for kindergarten at a school named after an Arctic explorer. They had walked holding hands and she’d sung a song about raindrops. But when she remembers that walk home now – as it was golden, bright with warm June sun and the newly minted leaves swaying in the lilac-scented air – she thinks of another song. She hears music that is swollen with longing, desire, and she feels like the two Marys in Pergolesi’s “Stabat Mater.” She mourns, as much as she knows how to, her own loss, the pouty mouth, the nimble, tanned fingers, her child, her childhood.

  When I woke up Saturday morning I was aware that during the night something cataclysmic had occurred. Deep beneath the strata, in the geology of Hank’s and my relationship, something had shifted. If Hank and I were two stone plates floating side by side along a fault line, then during the night one had reared up against the other, gouging and scouring its way to the surface. I felt the tension of the impending rupture as I cooked breakfast that morning, cleaned up, and waited for Hank to get into the shower before I picked up the telephone, dialled the number Selena had given me, and made an appointment for Monday to see her boss about a job.

  I’d been reading different books lately. Novels. I liked the Matt Cohen novel I’d read for the book club. Especially the part about Kitty Malone having restless eyes: “eyes that couldn’t stay still were her whole restless story, refusing anything except whatever she could see in the centre of herself.” Yes, that’s me, I’d thought when I read those lines, and felt a twinge of panic. Well, if that was me, then what was I doing here, a mother for life? I’d read many other novels Rhoda had recommended. Stories of men who more or less made love to their wives, waited until they fell asleep, and then got into their cars and drove away forever. The way Timothy had done. I had read about women sneaking out of their marriages suitcase by suitcase until one morning a month or year later the husband would suddenly realize that his wife no longer sat across the table from him. More or less. I had decided that the long way of leaving might not be as painful. I would leapfrog out on the back of a job, security, a goal.

  But it didn’t turn out that way. Circumstances decided for me, and by the end of that summer I would be gone.

  Later in the morning Hank came into the kitchen carrying the alarm clock, which was in pieces, back and front removed. Richard had taken it apart earlier, amusing himself when what he was supposed to be doing was playing quietly with books or puzzles as the doctor at the Children’s Centre had instructed. “Make certain he takes it easy for a day or two.” Hank slid in behind the table, his back to the window, and light shone through his tightly curled and now-grey hair: an Afro. Hank was finally in style.

  “I registered Richard for kindergarten yesterday,” I said.

  Hank asked how it had gone but seemed distracted. Although his stubby fingers could cope with the insides of major household appliances, the minute inner workings of an alarm clock frazzled him and demanded his concentration.

  I told him it had gone pretty well, that the tests had shown Richard had above-average intelligence.

  “Well, if Richard is so darn smart, then how come he can’t put this thing back together again, eh?” I heard pride in his voice.

  I saw Richard through the front screen door from where I stood at the kitchen counter. He had climbed halfway up the chainlink fence and hung there by his fingers and toes like a monkey. He had a good full-sized head. Egg-shaped. Thick, dark hair, which he hated for me to wash or comb. Because of the constant battles we had over washing his hair, I often let it go longer than I should, and consequently most of the time he exuded the odour of a squirmy pup, hot and dusty-smelling. I wouldn’t attempt to wash his hair for a while now because of the shaved spot at the back of his head and the two sutures that laced up the cut. He had examined those sutures with a curious kind of satisfaction, almost pride. They would make him king of the neighbourhood. An accident. He fell, I told the doctor. He fell off his tricycle.

  I had thought of that puppy smell on the way to the Children’s Centre the day before as he curled in my lap in the back seat of the cab, clutching up to his face what remained of his comfort blanket, a frayed square of flannel cloth, while I pressed a sanitary napkin against the cut. His sides heaved with energy and life and I remembered the first time I had held him. I had been amazed by the weight of him in the crook of my arms, at how solid that little floating being had become. He had settled into my arms instantly, a slanted-eyed stranger, and claimed the right to my embrace. Sometimes I would coax Richard with the promise of a treat or an adventure, to have a rest with me. We would cuddle, the two of us, beneath a blanket in the middle of an afternoon. Ri
chard, shrimp-like, curled up in front of me, and me lying there, feeling despair, feeling that a burglar had crept into the house to steal my energy, had sat on my heart so that my blood became sluggish. Sometimes I would lie with him for an entire afternoon, listening for the telephone to ring, for the sound of mail thumping into the box. The warmth of him leaning into me as we rode in the cab spread up to my throat. Richard, Richard, I thought, as I held him against me tightly, watching the grey city glide past the cab window. “I fell, didn’t I?” he said. “On my bicycle. I fell.”

  I stood in the centre of the kitchen, hands on my hips to make myself appear larger, as Hank would often do. “Hank,” I said, “I want to talk to you.”

  “Yah?” he said, still concentrating intently on the inner workings of the alarm clock. “Shoot.”

  The telephone rang, startling both of us. Hank looked up at me and then his eyes shifted away to the hall and front door where Richard peered in at the both of us, his invisible antennae quivering. I reached the telephone before Hank. My friend, Rhoda, had a way of sounding breathless whenever she called, as though the house was burning down around her and she was pouring water on it and making last-minute calls before the firemen arrived. “Hey,” I think she may have said, “I’m just checking with you. I can’t talk. Would you believe it? Tom’s chosen this very moment to come traipsing in the door with six of his friends. Six, Amy. Six fucking boys. I’ve got to go and barricade the fridge. Just checking about the book club. You still coming?”

  “Of course I’m coming to the book club on Monday,” I said, loud enough to remind Hank. Because he worked Saturday afternoons he took off a half-day on Mondays and he’d promised to keep Richard for an hour and let me use the car.

  “Well, you never know,” Rhoda said, and implied with her tone the possibility of mysterious and exotic happenings in my life. Intrigue, gossip, the things Rhoda fed on. When she talked, words spilled like water into the kitchen sink, a bubbling torrent of sentences, seemingly without direction, but then funnelling into prying questions and sucking me in.

  Hank cleared his throat to indicate impatience. Whenever the telephone rang and it was for me, Hank suddenly had to use it. To make contacts, appointments to pick up appliances in need of repair. I told Rhoda that I had finished reading the book we were supposed to discuss on Monday but that I didn’t understand it. I had found it rather strange.

  “Of course it’s strange, dummy,” Rhoda said. “It isn’t a Harlequin, after all.” Rhoda insulted all the women in the book club equally. Once she said to me, “You are an anomaly.” And another time, “You are an obsequious person.” I went out and bought my own dictionary, and more and more since I’d met Rhoda I’d felt compelled to reach for it. I needed a clear definition for the word “victim.” We were reading Margaret Atwood’s novel Surfacing. I enjoyed reading it, I told Rhoda, but I didn’t understand the ending, the point that was being made. I didn’t tell Rhoda about my dream, though. Of me standing in the bow of a ship and Margaret Atwood standing beside me. Her hair twitched in the wind. She pointed across the watery horizon, off at something in the distance. “I’m trying,” I said. “But I can’t see what you see.” “Open your eyes. Look, it’s over there, plain as day,” she said, her voice sounding like Rhoda’s. Then she disappeared.

  “What’s to understand?” Rhoda asked. “The woman in the novel begins to take responsibility. She begins to reject the idea of being a victim. Simple. There, it’s yours. I give it to you. Use it in the discussion and I’ll let everyone think it was your idea. Thomas!” she shouted. “Jesus! Boys! They’re so insufferably smug at this age. They make me want to puke. Oh, why couldn’t I have had just one girl?”

  The alarm buzzed harshly, Hank proving that he’d fixed the clock. I told Rhoda I had to go.

  “Oh, I get it. Old whatziz is home.”

  “Rhoda,” I said as I hung up.

  “The spinny one,” Hank said, and reached around me for the telephone. I held my breath as I waited for him to finish his call. I could hear the telephone ringing at the other end, four, five times. He hung up.

  “Hank.” I stood there, hands on my hips. “Hank. I registered Richard for kindergarten yesterday.”

  “Yah, I know, you already told me.”

  I could not hold it in any longer. “Well, it seems that our financial state of affairs is worse than I thought. So I think it might be a smart move for me to get a job.”

  “You have a job,” Hank said. “But if you’re bored” – he shifted, as though embarrassed, his mouth curling in a half-smile, his eyes evading mine – “well, then maybe it’s time we got started on another one.”

  It’s still early afternoon on Friday when Amy and Richard return from registering him for kindergarten and so Amy takes him to the playground. She sits on a warm bench, basking in the glow of the June sun and the kindergarten teacher’s comments about Richard’s evaluation tests. Above-average vocabulary; intelligent.

  Middle-aged, fat, the woman had bottle-blonde hair and wore a kind of fairy-queen costume. For the children, she explained, and waved her magic wand. It made them feel more at ease when they were brought in. As Amy watched her float around the room in bouffant netting, she thought, Who do you think you’re kidding? She came to learn later that the woman was a trained musician. An opera diva who had sung all over Europe but suffered a mental collapse and became a teacher late in life. “Richard is an intelligent and well-adjusted child,” she’d said, and Amy thought, Thank God for small mercies. In spite of me, Richard is well-adjusted. She’s impatient to tell Hank that Richard has an above-average vocabulary, which includes a few words she wishes he didn’t have, the ones he’s picked up at the playground where they have spent entire summers, Amy reading, Richard learning how to defend himself. Children’s play, Amy discovered, could be awfully bloody and Richard managed to do his fair share of bashing. Does it hurt? Where does it hurt? she’d ask. Show me. But she didn’t offer to kiss it better the way other mothers did. She didn’t want to use tricks.

  Amy already knew her son was intelligent. She’d known it early on from the books she brought home from the library on child development. She realized he was ahead of his age in the way he stacked blocks or arranged them in patterns. She watched him in the kindergarten room as he explored, going back and forth between the Activity Centre and the Learning Centre, fingers lifting, examining, deftly fitting pieces of puzzles together; fingers never, never still.

  She watches now, his thin legs scissoring through the sun as he dashes between the water fountain and the sandbox carrying a soup can. On the bench beside her, unopened, is the latest book she has borrowed from the library: Your Gifted Child. Richard waits patiently for the narrow stream of water to fill the tin can and then he races back to the sandbox and empties the water in one corner, his spot. His tongue follows the direction of the road he’s constructing.

  “Can I? Can I?” Richard stands in front of her now, his sand-encrusted fingers drumming against her knee.

  “Sure.” She watches him dart off to the refuse barrel to rummage through it for a larger container.

  Later, Amy feels the tug of his hand in hers as he drags his feet, tired from the excitement of the visit to the school and an afternoon in the bright sun. She feels the flush of it in her own cheeks too. Amy sings a song about raindrops, and he joins in now and then with his ragged voice, a bit off-key. He wants to go to school again, tomorrow, he says, and Amy will take him to the calendar when they get home and try to explain how many days, weeks, months before this will happen. “When the leaves on the trees are gold and start to fall off,” she explains and he seems satisfied by this and turns his face up to the trees as they walk away from the park, heading down towards Pete’s Grocery to pick up the can of peaches she didn’t manage to get that morning. “Not gold yet,” Amy says. He nods solemnly. Her heart twists.

  “Hi, hi, hi,” Richard says as he scrambles up the stairs in front of her. “Stanley Knowles,” he says,
and points to the poster.

  “What? You here again?” Pete says as she enters the store and then he kicks an empty box down a narrow aisle and disappears behind a shelf. She hears a knife slicing open a carton.

  “Milk,” she says. “I told you I was bound to forget something. Any specials?” she asks, more to hear the sound of his voice, so that she can determine where he is at all times.

  “There’s a special on canned ham,” Pete says. “I got a good buy.”

  Richard kneels in front of the bins of potatoes and begins sorting through them, dumping red potatoes in with the white and white in with the red. Amy moves down the aisle. MOTHER AND CHILD ARRESTED FOR SHOPLIFTING. I beg your pardon, ma’am, would you spread your legs, put your hands above your head. Don’t move. Careful, she’s got a can of peaches in her jacket pocket. Look, I only take what I need. This is just a temporary solution.

  “Been a busy day today?” she asks.

  “Not any more than usual,” Pete says.

  Her hand jumps. He’s moved. His voice comes from – she looks in the mirror. Where in hell is he? Suddenly, he’s standing beside her, leaning against the shelf. He crosses his pointed-toed shoes. “You want to buy tickets for a social?”

  She picks up a can of devilled ham and pretends to read its label. “I haven’t been to a dance for ages. I don’t think I’d know how,” she says.

  “Go ‘way. You and Hank go to socials, don’t you?”

  “Oh, we used to. But he can’t stand the smoke,” Amy says. “It’s terrible in those halls. It makes his eyes swell.”

  Pete laughs. “He’s pulling your leg. I’ve seen that man of yours in the Lincoln Motor Inn often enough. The smoke’s so thick in that place you could cut it with a knife. I’ll bet he doesn’t take you because he’s afraid he’d never get a chance to dance with you.”

  No weather talk, this, Amy thinks. She feels the heat of blood rising in her face, feels flustered, confused. “I’ll have half a pound of bacon,” she says so that they will fall back into their familiar roles. She doesn’t need bacon but is relieved as Pete becomes businesslike again. He hurries away behind the meat counter. She’s irritated and set off balance by this information. When Hank is away she always assumes it’s work, an estimate or a pick-up or delivery. She’s never doubted that his absence was due to work.