The Chrome Suite

by Sandra Birdsell

  The smell of cigarette smoke spirals up from the living room where Margaret sits in the dark, smoking and waiting for the storm. “Stop fighting,” Margaret had said earlier in the day, “or you’re going to make it storm.” When their moods changed suddenly and they became irritable, or their play turned into punches and slaps, Margaret didn’t think to attribute it to a coming change in the weather; rather, it was their behaviour itself which would bring on the storm.

  In the bed below Amy, Jill’s quiet and steady breathing says that she’s already sleeping. Across the hall in Mel’s room a beam of light swings against the wall as he plays with his flashlight. Mel has $120 in his savings account. Amy saw the figures melting away, streams of blue ink trailing across the water in the toilet where she’d dropped his passbook. She admitted this finally and apologized because she wants to go with them to the Lutheran Sunday School picnic tomorrow. She wants to find out why Mel has packed a mickey of whisky in his school bag.

  Margaret stiffens at another crackle of static in the radio. The wind rises and begins to sweep down into the streets of Carona. The red brick face of the school flickers with the first round of lightning. Amy hears her mother’s swift stride up the stairs. She turns away from it and faces the wall. She can hear the shade tree swaying, its branches scraping against the side of the house. The television antenna begins to hum and then emits a high-pitched whine. Amy hears the squeak of Mel’s bed springs as he gets up and waits for Margaret outside his doorway. His flashlight casts a circular pool of yellow light against the wall. Once Amy awakened to see Mel standing in the doorway of their bedroom with the flashlight stuck down the front of his pyjama bottoms. “Chicken,” Jill said and so Mel dropped them, shone the light onto his rubbery-looking penis, and then turned around, bent over, and showed her his brown anus and wrinkled testicles. “You have hair there,” Jill whispered. “That’s disgusting.” Amy couldn’t see any hair at all.

  Margaret enters the hallway now and pushes past Mel and on into their room. Amy keeps her breathing flat and even. The bed shakes as Margaret jostles Jill awake. “Your pillow. Bring your pillow,” Jill moans in protest. Amy feels Margaret’s hands against her ribs. “Wake up.” The antenna continues to whine, steady and high, and the roof begins to vibrate with the sound. Thunder cracks and Margaret gasps. “Amy, wake up.” Her touch is more insistent. “It’s only thunder,” Jill mutters, but she pulls on a tee shirt and clutches her pillow against her chest and joins Mel out in the hallway. The sky opens suddenly and rain falls in a great gush against the roof.

  Amy curls up tightly, facing the wall. She opens her eyes. The wall leaps with white light and she sees once again the air splitting open in a zig-zag pattern in front of her face. No beginning to it, no end, it is that fast. Branches tear free and tumble across the slope of the roof. Amy uncurls suddenly, her legs shooting straight out then swinging up and over the side of the bed to dangle in front of Margaret’s astonished face. “I’m not going downstairs.”

  “It’s going to be a bad one.” Margaret’s face leaps forward in a flash of lightning, flat, white, eyes wide with fear.

  “I’m staying up here,” Amy says. But after the next crack of thunder and another long sheet of light that follows, illuminating the room, the crayon drawings on the walls, Jill’s doll collection on the shelf, Amy sees that Margaret has already fled, leaving her there. She flops back onto the bed, surprised but satisfied that Margaret has given up so easily. She listens to the whisper of their feet scurrying down the hallway, against the stairs, drowned out then by a clap of thunder and the rising wind. “Be good or you’ll make it storm,” Margaret has pleaded often. But Amy doesn’t think about this now, the idea of possessing the power to unleash a storm. She thinks only about what happened in the cemetery. That she had been inoculated by a streak of lightning and become immune to gravity and to the violence of any kind of storm. Immune to what normally struck other people down.

  Margaret’s inference that their behaviour can somehow influence the weather doesn’t occur to Mel or Jill either as they lie beside their mother on the floor in the living room, damp with heat and the weight of her arms, heavy protective wings stretched across their sweating bodies. But, as they listen to the growing force of the storm beating against the walls of the house, they become infused with her fear and vow silently to try and be better children.

  “Requests?” Mel asks, and wonders if he’ll find enough spit to play the mouth organ he’s brought with him.

  Amy listens to the music as she drifts into sleep, the song Jill’s request, she realizes vaguely by the wavering Hallowe’en tune about witches and goblins. The eerie melody doesn’t keep her awake to worry about who or what might creep up on her just as she is about to fall asleep. She sleeps and dreams of rising up from the bed, up through the roof of the house, floating in the clear night sky, while below her lies the town of Carona, still, dark, asleep.

  Hours later when she awakens, the storm has passed, but she can still hear something outside in the yard. The swing. She recognizes the squealing and groaning sound. Someone must be out there, she thinks. She climbs down from the bunk bed and crosses the hallway into her parents’ empty bedroom. The clouds have thinned and the moon casts its light into the room. Through the wet glass Amy watches the stirring of the shade tree’s branches, uncertain arms flinging about this way and that. An erratic dance, an attempt to ward off the wind and the sound of the rope swing as it moves back and forth with its invisible rider.

  3

  he following day Margaret stands in front of her brother Reginald’s hardware store and watches as her children prepare to leave for the Lutheran Sunday School picnic in the city. Her children, Elsa Miller, and the oldest Miller woman, Esther, cluster about waiting for old Josh to finish packing the trunk of his car. Josh Miller agreed to drive them the forty-five miles to the city and then to return later on in the day to pick them up. He gestures to Mel to hand him the school bag but Mel declines, indicating that he wants to keep the bag with him. A sign above their heads reads MILLER’S TELEVISION AND RADIO. The sign is hand-painted with blue and white letters and streaming across it is a trail of egg yolk, hardened now to a glossy shine.

  Josh had inspected the vandalized sign earlier and then shrugged in resignation. “Will have to chisel the darn stuff off,” Josh told the older woman. He’s related to the two women and Elsa. A cousin or second cousin, it was rumoured, and that he was responsible for their immigration to Canada. Recently he’d purchased the property across from the hardware store. An investment, he said, for the future of his new family. Carona was a better place to raise a family than most, he said, and so he bought the boarded-up wood-frame building which had once been a cafe. The remains of the previous business can still be seen in the counter and stools, which Josh prefers to leave intact because he says he wants people to take their time when they shop at his place, take a load off, and have a cup of something and a chat before they shop. He opened up the front of the building, installed two display windows, and lined up in front of them are television consoles, picture-tubes flickering night and day. The children of Carona whose parents are less fortunate, whose rooftops don’t sprout the required spire, park their bicycles in front of Miller’s Television and Radio and watch. Taped to Josh’s window is a faded newspaper article alerting the public to an advancement in the technology of television. A British invention. A television set that emits odours to match the image.

  The shop door opens and Adele Miller, hair bound up in a green scarf, skips down the stairs and walks over to the car. She sees egg splattered across the sign and shakes her fist at it. A gypsy, Margaret thinks of the woman with her green turban and large hoop earrings. Adele shoos the children towards the car and climbs into the front seat beside Mel, and the older woman goes back up the stairs. Margaret feels betrayed. Mel neglected to tell her that Adele would be going with them. She feels a surge of irritation and is about to cut her farewell short when Bill North’s half-ton pu
lls into the curb beside her. The door slams shut and he walks towards her. “Reg in?” She nods. His presence, in the worn jeans and the wide leather belt which clanks with his tools as he walks by, passes through her.

  Sunlight flashes in the car windows as Josh Miller’s green Oldsmobile backs away from the curb. Margaret waves goodbye. Jill raises her hand, fingers fluttering, and then points at her head. See this, her exaggerated gesture says, I am wearing my hat. Just as you told me. As the car sweeps by Jill smiles at Margaret and it isn’t the same toothy bright smile Margaret is accustomed to seeing, but something else. A trick of light, or one of those rare occasions when the idea is a breath of panic inside Margaret’s chest: Do I really know these people, my children?

  She hears Bill talking to Reginald inside the store. His voice, which is strangely flat and neutral-sounding, neither friendly nor brusque, has become coded with messages, she believes. Messages meant for her. She ponders at length the messages she hears in a single line of greeting. Margaret knows exactly when it was that Bill, who had always been Bunny’s boyfriend and was now her husband, suddenly became Bill. It was last winter when they’d come over to play cards that she’d noticed Bill, the man. He’d complained about having a stiff shoulder and Margaret led him upstairs to the bathroom as though he were one of the children. The lamp beside her bed had been left burning. Bill paused in the doorway of Margaret’s bedroom and looked inside it. “Just as I pictured,” he said.

  What has he pictured? she’d wondered as she searched through the medicine cabinet for the liniment. Her mind sorted through the casual disorder of Bunny’s rooms and she thought that his comment had to be a favourable comparison. Later, she would take what he’d said a step further. At a certain moment, Margaret thought, perhaps as he crawled across a rooftop or drove past the house, or lay beside Bunny in bed, a damp Mindy wedged between them, Bill had imagined not just her bedroom but her inside the room. He sat on the toilet seat, with his back to her, and dropped his shirt off his shoulders. “It’s the witch’s kiss,” he said, and indicated the aching spot in his shoulder. Margaret turned from the medicine cabinet to face him and her heart lurched. She stood paralyzed, bottle of liniment in hand, thinking, So much hair, broad back. Not a boy but a strong-looking muscular man whose physical presence filled the entire room. He grew wary, waiting for her to smooth liniment across his shoulder. Waiting for her touch, she thought. She felt his careful attentiveness and her skin prickled with desire. She concentrated on her outstretched hands, the slight tremble as they moved down against his skin, and she tried not to think of the texture of it or the roughness of his hair against her warm palms.

  “I think Jill is having a bad dream,” she said when she rejoined Bunny and Timothy downstairs around the new chrome suite. She could still feel the warm imprint of Bill’s hand on her breast. She was flushed with excitement over having dared to step over the line. The lie, she hoped, covered the change in her. They would read the bright spots in her cheeks, her unusual silence when Bill came into the kitchen and they continued the card game, as concern for Jill.

  “Strange crew, those.” Reginald turns away from the window as Margaret steps inside the store.

  “Eggs, Josh’s sign?” Margaret asks.

  Reginald shrugs his lack of concern. “You heard from that man of yours?”

  “Due home tomorrow, why?”

  They’re interrupted by Garth, Reg’s middle son, as he bounds up from the basement, singing. Margaret smiles as she notices his shoes. “They’re blue all right, but not suede,” she says, “so they don’t count.” She tilts her cheek up for him to kiss.

  “My favourite aunt.”

  “Where in hell does that guy get his money, that’s what I’d like to know,” Reginald says, asking the question he has asked constantly since the opening of Josh’s shop across the street. Reg has stopped stocking televisions and radios because he can’t compete. Loyalty to a three-generation family business wears thin in the face of a bargain. He’s at the window constantly, shaking his head in disgust when he sees one of his old customers enter Josh’s store.

  “Have you heard the latest about the ‘strange crew’?” Margaret says casually and notes Reginald’s quick attention. Garth squats in front of a carton and begins unpacking it, listening, she knows. “The latest is that Adele is really Elsa’s mother. Not the older woman.”

  Reginald snorts. “You just figured that one out?” He goes behind the counter to a shelf and takes down a box of account books. He begins to lay out the individual books, each lettered with a customer’s name. “Think Tim will come in when he’s home and put something down?” Margaret is stung with embarrassment. “You want the real latest on that bunch?”

  “Sure.” She’s thankful for the distraction.

  “Adele goes into the city at least three times a week.”

  Garth abandons his pretence of work and adds, “She gets on the bus at night and comes back the next morning.”

  “So?” Margaret asks.

  “Dolled up, fit to kill,” Garth says.

  “So maybe that babe is bringing home a bit of bacon,” Reginald says. He winks at his son. “Plying the trade in the city.”

  “What trade?” Margaret asks.

  Reg laughs. “Guess.”

  Margaret’s stomach tightens with a picture of Mel in the front seat and the woman’s thigh rubbing against his leg. She senses Reg’s and Garth’s keen attention as they wait for her reaction. She reaches for the wall switch and flicks it on. The fan above their heads whirrs, stirring the air. “You’re full of prunes,” she says. “When it comes to gossip you’re an old woman, Reggie.”

  She goes down into the basement to the coffee room to set water to boil. As she passes through the dimly lit interior she immediately senses the presence of Bill. Then she sees him through a row of shelving as he stands against the far wall. She sees just his head, framed in a rectangle of fluorescent light. He looks down, absorbed in a task. She has watched him secretly as he rewired their house, up on a ladder, arms and face caked with plaster powder, whistling softly as he worked. She invented reasons to enter rooms where she knew he was and realized by the stiffening of his spine that his tension matched hers. She painted the veranda’s wicker chairs white and carried them upstairs and set them on either side of a table in front of the bedroom window. From there she can see the light in his bedroom at night or his truck backing down the driveway in the morning. She began to drape her nightgown over the back of a chair instead of folding it and setting it back into her nightie drawer. She arranged perfume bottles on the table and set in its centre a tin of Chantilly dusting powder, the lid opened, the powder puff flecked with scented beige granules, as soft as skin. Just as I pictured. She’d thought that on closer inspection Bill would have seen more than he had first imagined.

  She thinks of Bill as being a young Ernest Hemingway and of herself as Catherine and that she will make him love her. He senses her watching now and raises his head. She has known since that night last winter that something would eventually happen between them, that the lines would one day converge: Timothy’s absence, her being mid-cycle, when her desire for sex was at its peak, the children away. Her throat clicks with dryness. Be quiet, she thinks. Stop this. But she’s certain that when she rises up to meet him, skin against skin, she will meet the substance of her intemperate dreams.

  Bill North feels compelled to look up from the spool of electrical wire he’s been unwinding and looping around his elbow. He sees Margaret’s face and the self-satisfied look of her mouth. He’s become impatient with her game, the signals she telegraphs with her eyes and then takes back moments later retreating behind a mask of pleasantries. She needles Bill into remembering the act. The night she’d picked up his hand and pressed it against her breast and then walked away as though nothing had happened. He feels uncertain and off balance in the presence of that self-knowing look. She’s too old to play at cock-teasing. “Howdy,” he says. “Bun says after work. St
ill okay by you?”

  “Yes, sure.” Her voice is brisk and businesslike. “Around four.”

  I watched through the back window of Josh’s car as Margaret receded from view that morning. Goodbye forever, I thought, without knowing why I had thought of the word “forever,” except that seeing her standing there in the street, wearing the new blouse with its crooked collar, growing smaller and smaller, made me think of the song “Clementine.” “You are lost and gone forever, oh my darling Clementine.” I prefer to remember Margaret looking like that, uncertain, vulnerable. Elsa and Jill had rolled the windows halfway down and I leaned into the upholstery enjoying the pressure of the windstream against my face. I took short gasps of breath through it and felt beads of cold water form inside my nostrils, and I thought, Maybe I can breathe under water now.

  Josh patted the dashboard. “Rocket ‘88,” he said to Mel. “Hydra Matic. But it won’t get you to the moon. Maybe those old Americans can make better cars but they’d better get the lead out if they want the moon.” He turned on the radio. “It’s a push button,” he explained. “Go on, have a go at it.” Bits of music and voices popped from the speakers as Mel began pushing buttons at random.

  “Hey, that’s not a toy, boy,” Josh warned. I laughed inside, thinking that Mel was just that. Not real. A toy.

  The seat bounced as Jill fidgeted, moving her knees in and out as though she needed the bathroom and signalling her impatience with the long ride to the city. It seemed to take longer to get there than to return. We called it “the city” because Winnipeg was and still is the only real city in the province of Manitoba, a sprawling island with half the population of the province living on it. We had all been to the city before, of course. Timothy made a point of taking us in for the Santa Claus Parade each year. Occasionally we accompanied Margaret when she took the bus in for her appointment with the doctor. Mel, Jill, and I had the distinction of having been born in the city because Margaret wouldn’t go to the clinic in Carona where the receptionist snooped and your health became everyone’s business. Or else we would go with her for a short day’s shopping excursion which always ended on the mezzanine floor at the Hudson’s Bay store. She would collapse into an overstuffed sofa, bags strewn about the carpet at her feet, while we waited for Rita to get off work at the Film Exchange and join us for a Denver sandwich and ice-cream floats. “She puts all her money on her back,” Margaret said often about Rita, and when she appeared, causing all heads to turn, my mother’s expression was clearly envious, sometimes genuinely admiring. But the trips in to the city were few and far between and our travels were always confined to an area of three city blocks, which encompassed Rita’s office, the Winnipeg clinic, and several department stores in the vicinity of the bus depot. Now we would see new sights, new streets, the park.