The Chrome Suite

by Sandra Birdsell

  “Hi, Short Stuff,” Mel, Amy’s brother, calls as she enters the front hallway. “The brat’s home,” Mel reports to Margaret, who is in the kitchen, sewing. Oh yes, Amy thinks, and forgets about the severed worm as she remembers what she really had planned to get a picture of today. A surprise for Timothy when he returns from being on the road. She doesn’t go into the living room, pass through it to the dining room, and on into the kitchen to say hello to Margaret. Instead, she climbs the stairs to the second floor, to Timothy and Margaret’s bedroom, to see if she can find where he has hidden his movie camera.

  Margaret leans across the table in the kitchen cutting out a pattern. She’d gotten up with the sun, drawn all the window shades, and tacked a blanket over the window in the back porch to keep down the heat. Shoe polish in tins lining the window sill in the back porch begins to soften, and on the kitchen counter a tall glass pitcher of cherry drink sweats a puddle of moisture. Memory of the recent polio epidemic lingers in everyone’s minds. Keep cool. Don’t run, you hear? Sit quietly in the shade now. Good advice at any time. Margaret’s hair has a life of its own as it switches in the breeze created by the oscillating fan sitting on the countertop. Every morning she jams metal combs into her hair on either side, but by the end of the day the combs spring loose and bounce across the floor or drop down into the dishwater in the sink. Unlike her younger sister, Rita, who is fine-boned and petite, Margaret is lean and sinewy. At certain times of the month her eyes glitter with a look that says, “Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies.”

  Margaret hears a noise overhead. She looks up, takes a deep breath as though she might yell, but gulps back the impulse. Margaret is not a yelling type of person. She knows it’s Amy up there, snooping about her bedroom again. The brat is home, she thinks. The voices of Elsa Miller and Jill see-saw back and forth in the dining room, their voices indistinguishable one from the other over the sound of the bent fan blade, which clips rhythmically against the wire cage. Mel’s there too. Often Margaret thinks back to Timothy’s objection to her wanting another child. Often she thinks that she should have left well enough alone and been content with the two she had. Mel is the oldest. He is fifteen. His full name is Melville, named after Timothy’s birthplace in Saskatchewan. And Mel does resemble prairie in a way. He’s solid without being fat. A blond, squared-off brush cut. Stubble cut. A fringe of white eyelashes, respectable in length, not too lavish and feminine. His eyes are sometimes blue, sometimes grey. Mel appears to have just the right amount of everything in him, which can be deceiving.

  The year when summer arrived so suddenly and early, then lingered long past the time for it, will be recorded as a year of intense sunspot activity, licks of flame spurting from the sun’s skin, and remembered for the undulating veils of aurora borealis and frequent thunderstorms. Those storms, and the heavy snowfalls of the previous two winters, ensured the continuing prosperity of the Midwest.

  That prosperity is reflected in Timothy’s furniture sales. He sells hundreds of three-room groupings through catalogues and sample books to independent stores in the network of towns and small cities in the southern end of the prairie provinces. People line up, he says, to buy the kitchen suite, the five-piece living-room ensemble, and the bookcase bed, bureau, and matching bedside tables, with lamps thrown in. The factory can’t ship them fast enough, he complains. The growing abundance of the Midwest is reflected in the Barber house, too, in Margaret’s new kitchen, the green-and-white rubber-tile floor polished to a high shine, the Arborite countertop, and in the absence of the cumbersome kitchen table that Timothy had brought to their marriage. “This is an antique,” Timothy had explained to Margaret when she objected to inheriting a piece of junk. He told her how the table had crossed the ocean in the cargo hold of a ship. How it had been dismantled and carried off from a thatch-roof house in Northern Ireland to be assembled in a bleak sod hut on the prairie. “Antique” was not then a much appreciated word. Timothy’s only fault: being ahead of his time. The table has been banished to the basement behind the furnace and in its place is the new chrome suite, one of Timothy’s lines. It consists of a table with bowed chrome legs, grey mottled Arborite top, and matching chairs with plastic-covered seats, which wheeze when you sit on them. Farting chairs, Amy calls them. Margaret’s brother, Reginald, runs the family hardware store and so Margaret has been fortunate. She’s been among the first in town to own a steam iron, the Mixmaster, the not so very portable sewing machine, the television console. Bill North from Bill’s Electrical Service has recently rewired the Barber house and connected Margaret’s new stove and the clothes dryer sitting out in the back porch. The next thing on Margaret’s list is a floor polisher.

  When Margaret finishes cutting out the blouse pattern, she sits for a moment behind the sewing machine, head bowed as she studies the sewing instructions. “The breast darts,” she reads and feels her nipples tighten pleasantly, pulling taut the string of desire between her legs. Margaret has “artsy tits.” The expression coined by Timothy. It describes the breasts of the fashion models in Vogue, the magazine her sister, Rita, buys at a drugstore near the Film Exchange where she works. What Margaret is thinking about as she reads the instructions is how she is going to look tomorrow when she wears the new blouse to work, her one day a week at Reginald’s store. She imagines Bill North entering the store. Sees his eyes veer to one side. Not shifty, just a swift blink of recognition of Margaret’s “artsy tits” moving beneath the soft ecru fabric. She sees Bill all at once, solid and hard, the thick mat of chest hair creeping up to the base of his throat. Even though the humidity weighs heavily in Margaret’s limbs, she’s acutely aware of her desire to make love with Bill.

  Jill’s voice pushes through the clicking of the bent fan blade from the other room. “Ring, rang, rung,” Jill says, instructing Elsa Miller.

  “As in ding, dang, dong,” Margaret hears Mel intone in a church-bell voice, and his attempt at humour surprises her. Mel has joined Elsa and Jill at the dining-room table because, for the very same reason Margaret is suspicious of Elsa Miller, Mel is attracted to her. He’s drawn by the exotic sound of her German tongue. George, Mel’s cat, lies curled in his lap as Mel stacks coins into piles so that he can roll them and deposit them into his savings account. Through the fringe of his lowered white eyelashes he studies the curve of Elsa Miller’s mouth as she reads aloud from a grammar book, Jill looking on. Will she or won’t she? Mel wonders. He’s thinking about the dance at the end of the month. Elsa senses his scrutiny and picks up the book and tips it on its end. She raises it then, obscuring all but her and Jill’s eyes and foreheads. Silently the girls agree to gaze out over the top of the book at Mel. Elsa’s eyes are pale blue, Jill’s green with flecks of brown like chips of varnish floating in them. They’re sticking their tongues out at him behind the book. He watches his too-large squarish hands stack the coins. The hands of a banker, Timothy once said, thinking to please Mel but making him squirm. The remark hit too close to home. Mel had always wanted to have the hands of a piano player or a card shark, nimble fingers, the casual flair of dismissal over a fortune lost. A disguise to cover his desire to one day be rich. But the desire could be thought of as piggish, he would have said, greedy. Well-off would be okay. Carona was filled with well-off people. Several were on their way to making their first million. The farm-implement dealer, for instance, and a man who was experimenting with raising germ-free hogs. The word “rich” was a crude one for Carona. It carried the connotation of ill-gotten gains, indolence, a bloated mind. There were, after all, seven churches in the town of Carona. There still are.

  Elsa and Jill turn and face one another behind the book. Jill’s child features are becoming sharp, giving way to the high noon of adolescence. Two profiles, a soft and a sharp one. Mel’s fingers freeze as the crack of light between their foreheads closes and their mouths meet in a soft, quiet kiss. He skirts around these displays of affection. It unsettles him when Jill and Elsa dance together, their breasts tou
ching. Elsa’s are small swellings flattened by tight undergarments. Jill’s, two proud chocolate rosebuds. Mel has seen them when she’s come from the bath, those two hard buds nudging against her pyjamas.

  Amy hears the three of them talking as she comes down from upstairs, carrying Timothy’s camera rolled inside a towel. She hears Jill say, “Elsa really likes you,” as she stands in the dim hallway where their sweaters and jackets hang on either side of the front door. She waits to hear more. “Ha, ha, ha, very funny.” Phoney, Amy thinks. Doesn’t Mel realize how his voice changes when Elsa is around? They begin to whisper and chair legs scrape against the hardwood floor. Scheming, Amy realizes.

  She steps onto the veranda and into the immediate contrast in temperature. The heat is a sudden blast beating through the window screens. She steps outside into the bright sunlight and her eyes tear. She hears the sound of the sewing machine in the kitchen and then a beeping on the radio that signals the two o’clock news. At two o’clock Amy’s grandparents will arise from their afternoon nap, irritated and quibbling over who has been awakened how many times by the other. Her grandmother will freshen up, dab hard at her temples with astringent to swab the prickle of whatever accusations are left unaccounted for in the bedroom. Then she will put on her garden hat and go out to straighten things up and Amy will be there with Timothy’s movie camera.

  Heat ripples above the baseball diamond in the school yard across the street. Amy feels the pressure of the sun, a white hot thumb pressing its mark into the top of her head. She sees the flash of a curled tail in the air above the smouldering road. She raises the camera and frames the circus performer in the viewfinder: the squirrel which now dashes across the high wire of electricity leading into the school. It’s Amy, she thinks. She chooses to believe that every squirrel she sees is the one she once found lying stunned on the ground beside the school. She’d brought it home in Mel’s paper-route bag. Timothy had named the squirrel Amy because of its impulse to be on the move. Incessantly it climbed the rungs of the bird cage, its temporary home, or up their legs to their heads. Up the walls to the rafters of the garage. Amy felt the urgency in its oversized feet and understood its need to move was serious and so she agreed with Timothy that they would take it back to the school. She’d stood beside him and crossed her fingers and watched as the animal climbed up the sheer brick face of the building, up three floors to the hole just beneath the eaves troughing.

  The muscles in Amy’s arms ache with the weight of the camera as she follows the movement of the squirrel. She’s disappointed with what she sees. It would be a fine waste of Timothy’s film, she thinks, and so she lowers the camera. She can picture Timothy stroking his long chin when the image of the squirrel flickers on the dining-room wall, wondering where in hell it came from. A fine waste of film, he’d say. She hears the now steady chugga chug of the sewing machine and the grumble of a man’s voice on the radio. It’s too hot, she realizes. Fear of polio or sunstroke will keep her grandmother inside until later. She hides Timothy’s camera among the chunks of broken concrete beneath the veranda and follows the grumbly voice, Diefenbaker’s voice, to the back of the house. She steps into the porch and is enveloped instantly by the sharp chemical odour of melting shoe polish.

  “There’s nothing to do,” Amy says as she enters the kitchen.

  Margaret starts, her concentration broken. She spits out a row of pins into a china dish beside the sewing machine and peers at Amy through heavy locks of auburn curls. “It’s too darn hot to do anything anyway. And tell me, what were you doing up in my bedroom?”

  Just then the spring on the screen door twangs as the door opens. Bunny North enters the porch, calling “Howdy,” and Amy is spared the necessity of inventing a reason or denying having been in Margaret’s room again.

  “Hi ya, Short Stuff, what’re you up to today?” Bill’s wife, Bonny North, or Bunny, as she has been called since she and Margaret attended grade school, puckers her pink little mouth and kisses Amy on the end of the nose in passing. Bunny’s top lip has not grown since she was ten years old. A bicycle accident, Margaret had explained to them as a warning. A fall, and Bunny lost three permanent teeth. The original bridge with its porcelain buck-teeth was never replaced, and as she grew into adulthood her top lip shrank to compensate for the child-size teeth. Bunny is short and on the chubby side and seems to bounce rather than walk as she crosses the kitchen. She carries a paper bag, which crackles noisily as she sets it down on the floor. “We definitely haven’t been living right,” she says, flapping the top of her blouse to fan her chest. She pulls out a chair, sits down. Woosh, it says. “Bet you could cook an egg on the sidewalk.” A newspaper reporter had done just that the day before and the kids in Carona are stealing eggs now from their mothers’ refrigerators and scrambling them on the hoods of cars parked downtown. As Bunny leans forward Amy sees that freckled hump at the base of her neck. A dowager’s hump, Margaret calls it, a warning against incorrect posture. The fleshy hump, the atrophied top lip, the ever-present dark shadows beneath her eyes make Bunny appear perpetually wounded.

  Margaret’s eyes flicker across Bunny’s body. She wonders if she and Bill had made love the previous night. “Heading up to the lake this weekend?” she asks.

  “Will Tim ever finish work on the jalopy?” Bunny snaps back. They laugh. “Lucky to go before summer’s over.” Bunny has recently inherited a cottage at the lake but they seldom go there because Bill’s electrical business has become a thriving enterprise. He works long hours, weekends, installing new appliances, pushing and pulling wires through walls of wooden slats, plaster, and horsehair insulation, crawling across roofs to adjust television antennas towards the signal, electrifying the barns outside of town for milking machines and automatic feeders. Bill’s reluctance to take time off work is a source of irritation for Bunny; the amount of time Timothy spends working on his Whisky Six ‘29 Studebaker when he’s not on the road is Margaret’s sore spot.

  Amy likes to study the contrasts between these two women. Bunny North wears her sleeveless blouse hanging free over her red pedal-pushers, safety pin at the side closing, and a bra strap slides halfway down her arm. Her voice is like her mouth, child-size. Sometimes whiny or sing-song, inflected with exaggerated emotions. Any sternness she has is fake and gives way in moments to a soft recanting of whatever empty threats she’s uttered. Her children are scamps, Margaret says, unruly scamps.

  Margaret is more complicated. She’s like her bedroom upstairs. Its papered walls, dull-green with delicate apple blossoms unfolding from floor to ceiling, the white wicker furniture say to the observer “cool,” “calm.” But there’s an edginess in the careful arrangement of the room, in the studied placement of her engraved silver vanity set, its brush and comb and jars reflected in the three-sided mirror of her bureau. Amy can’t look at the wide bed without thinking of a line she read in Margaret’s “Blue Book.” “My bed is winter,” Margaret had written.

  Amy listens as the women’s talk leaps from the progress of Bunny’s garden, which she complains is too wet to weed and growing fast, and the bed-wetting problem of Mindy, Bunny’s thumb-sucking oldest child, to Margaret’s complaints about mosquitoes and the price of blade roast at the butcher shop. Throughout this their voices mix with John Diefenbaker’s monotonous intonation of promise for social justice. Amy has seen this man on television amid all the remedies advertised for the relief of indigestion, bloating, irregular bowels. She’s seen him in the newspaper. In posters in windows his eyes follow her wherever she goes in Carona. He wags his finger at her and his hound-dog jowls quiver as he winds up to make a speech.

  The women’s conversation takes on a new tone. Their voices drop and the talk becomes coded, punctuated by a raised eyebrow and the occasional shift of a shoulder in the direction of the dining room where the voice of the girl Elsa Miller, clipped and precise in her determination to rid it of its German accent, rises above the radio and the rhythmic pinging of the fan blade.

  “Why
would she do such a thing?” Bunny repeats the question Margaret has asked. “Well, because she doesn’t want anyone to know that she’s used goods, I suppose. It’s convenient. She passes Elsa off as being her mother’s child and she becomes the big sister.”

  Margaret appears to savour this idea as though it’s a piece of chocolate but she waves her hand to dismiss it. “Go on, Bun, that’s just gossip.”

  “Wait,” Bunny says, clearly offended, but Jill enters the room then and their talk breaks off. Margaret’s eyes follow Jill as she crosses the room. She enjoys the image of Jill reaching for a glass in the cupboard, her thick dark braids shifting against her back with the movement. The sight of Jill’s long, tanned legs and bony child-haunches beneath the pink-striped shorts pleases Margaret. When she looks at Jill she imagines herself at the same age. She doesn’t see the presence of illness in the bruises on Jill’s shin and thigh or notice her paleness, a shadow lying beneath her strong, tanned face.

  Elsa enters the kitchen and Margaret’s pleasure vanishes. She tries to conceal her dislike for Elsa as the girl swoops down on the blouse pattern lying on the table, gushing over it. Yes, Margaret replies drily, she is making a blouse. Yes, it should be quite nice when finished. The tendons in her neck grow taut with the effort to be civil. Elsa senses Margaret’s hostility and retreats. She fiddles with her earring, turning the gold hoop around and around, and wonders why the woman doesn’t like her. She dresses old, Margaret thinks, a miniature of the two women who had accompanied her to the skating rink last winter. They’d made a noisy entrance, stamping snow from their boots and speaking to one another in German. They’d headed straight for the bench nearest the oil burner; brassy, Margaret thought. When they shrugged free from their heavy fur coats, they revealed clunky and overdone-looking amber and coral beads. Their leather gloves concealed rings, too, with large and well-cut stones. Meine Mutter, Elsa had said, as she introduced the older grey-haired woman to them, and the young woman, whose harsh-red hair and preference for orange lipstick made her appear sullen and hard, was her sister, she’d said. But Bunny could be right, Margaret thinks now. The woman is too old. She would have been well past child-bearing age when Elsa was born. The rumour that the younger woman, Adele, is really Elsa’s mother, makes sense. But while the illegitimacy of the girl is a delicious melt-in-the-mouth thought for Margaret, it’s their jewellery she wonders about; she has come to think that there’s something sinister about the time-worn look of it.