The Chrome Suite

by Sandra Birdsell

  “No.”

  “No.”

  “Well, all right. Didn’t hurt to ask. Try and get to sleep now.”

  Amy sees the stick smack against Harry’s chest, watches him walk down into the ditch and travel far across the field. Harry has wandered away before. They always find him. They hear the creak of springs as Margaret drops down onto her bed. She writes in the Blue Book, “Going to the lake tomorrow.” The lake, like the city, needs no name. It’s huge, an ocean set down in the centre of the prairie, not one of the smaller lakes in the chain of lakes in the Whiteshell where Margaret once sent Jill to CGIT camp. Perhaps Margaret is writing “Bloated,” or, “Sore breasts,” or, “I can’t stand this constant shifting of emotions up and down.” The bed sways as Jill gets up. She stands in the dark, the top of her head just level with Amy’s bed. Her head moves away as her feet pad softly against the floor. Then she stops.

  “Hey, Peewee. You didn’t touch the dolls today,” she whispers. “What’s the matter, are you sick?”

  “Sick of you.”

  “Thanks.”

  Mel hears Jill enter his room. He feels her presence beside his bed and smells the faint coconut scent of her limbs. “Move over.” She slides into his warm spot. “I can’t get to sleep.” She draws the covers up beneath her chin. “Talk to me.”

  “What about?” Mel cradles his head in his arms and looks up at the ceiling.

  “Anything. You’re a naturally boring person. Anything will do to put me to sleep.”

  “Speak for yourself.”

  “Elsa.”

  “What about her?”

  “How’s Elsa?”

  “How would I know?”

  Jill feels a squirmy little shift in his body. “Liar.” She nudges his ticklish spot and he twists away from her, gasping to contain his laughter. “Get out of my bed.” He kicks at her leg. “Right now.”

  Then they lie still, side by side, lost in their own thoughts. Mel slides an arm under her neck. She watches the curtain on his window swell with a light breeze and then recede, sucked flat against the screen. Out and in. Each puff of wind brings the smell of rain. The mirror on his bureau at the side of the bed, which had reflected faint light passing through the breathing curtain, dims now as clouds sift across the face of the moon and the room darkens. Mel feels her growing heat and thinks of how they used to sleep in the same room, he in the top bunk and Jill in the lower. About reading comic books together on Saturday morning and eating food smuggled from the kitchen. Sometimes a bad dream or a cold room or a shared secret brought them together to curl around one another’s bodies in the night while Amy slept in this room, in a crib and then in the bed that became his when Amy took his place in the room across the hall with Jill. Mel flexes his bicep, making Jill’s head jump up and down. “So, what’s up?”

  “Nothing. Just talk to me.”

  He pulls his arm away and reaches under his pillow. His hand cups the end of a small flashlight in order to focus on a cartoon drawing. He has done almost every position with Elsa now, except for the chair one, of course. There are no chairs under the bleachers at the agricultural grounds. “You wanted to know how Elsa was. Look.” It’s been so easy. He simply tells Elsa what he wants to do and she does it with the same strange detachment as the first time. Jill’s hand closes around the cartoon, crumples it. “I don’t want to see that thing.” She throws it across the room and they hear it hit the wall.

  Mel is stung. He turns away. “I want to sleep.” But Jill doesn’t leave. She lies there and listens to the soft swish of the curtain as it swells and subsides. She hears Amy moving about in the room across the hall, rearranging the dolls to make her angry in the morning when she’ll discover number-one doll at the wrong end of the shelf and the last doll she’s been given in the centre. Thirteen years of dolls out of their chronological order in the morning. I don’t care, Jill thinks, and is surprised to realize that she really means it.

  Mel feels Jill’s touch at his back as she begins to walk her fingers down his spine. “Hey, you mad?” When he doesn’t answer she begins to draw. “I’m tracing a snake upon your back. Guess which finger did it.” She plays their child game, which was at first just a game, but then their drawing snakes began to move further afield from their backs, exploring almost all creases and folds of skin, except for one. Jill won’t let Mel feel her between the legs. Mel pulls away. “Come on, Mel, please. I didn’t want to look at the picture because I want to show you something else.”

  Mel allows himself to be drawn to face her. Their noses almost touch on the pillow as they breathe in each other’s breath. “Give me your hand.” Her hand is cool and firm as she guides his beneath the elastic waistband of her pyjamas. His hand passes across her flat belly. The skin is moist and clammy. Mel tries to still his breathing which has grown uneven. She holds his hand still against her abdomen and Mel thinks that maybe she’s changed her mind now and has decided not to let him touch her. “Feel this.” She shifts his hand to the side. “There. Just run your hand up and down. There.” Mel presses lightly and feels the large swelling beneath her skin. “What’s that?” He pulls his hand away quickly, but she catches it and makes him feel the swelling once again. It’s egg-shaped and hard. “It’s where that guy kicked me. You know.”

  Oh shit, Mel thinks. “But what is it?”

  “I don’t know. It keeps getting bigger. I can hardly walk straight.” Her stomach jerks with the attempt to hold back tears. He feels the movement and is stricken. “You should show it to Margaret.”

  “No. She’ll take me to the doctor.”

  “You don’t have to tell her how it happened.”

  “It’s not that.” She moves into his side and rests her head on his shoulder. He winds his arm around her, holding her against him. “It’s just that I think … that if I don’t tell anyone, it’ll go away.” She begins to cry.

  It’s all my fault, he thinks. “I’ll tell Margaret, if you won’t.”

  “I shouldn’t have told you.” She cries silently for several minutes and then grows quiet. As children they had always been sick together, measles, mumps, and even later on they seemed to catch one another’s colds and flu. A sadness settles in Mel’s chest. The presence of the lump in her body is like when he first noticed the swelling of her breasts. It is something he cannot share, and he knows she has stepped further away.

  “I’ll wake up one morning and it will be gone. I know it,” she whispers. “So there’s no need to tell anyone.” He feels her hard chocolate rosebud nipple nudge his arm as she reaches across him for his hand. “Do you want to draw a snake?” She takes his hand and guides it down between her legs.

  When Jill left the room, Amy got out of bed, and she lies on the floor now beside the bed, the navy-blue cape Timothy bought for her spread out around her. She lies with her arms straight out, toes pointed, and nose flat against the floor. The muscles in her neck and back have begun to ache from her intense concentration. She closes her eyes and sees herself rising up above the road outside the house. She is wafted gently upwards until she’s level with the telephone poles, and the ground begins to glide swiftly beneath her outstretched body. She imagines herself flying for seconds, minutes, an hour, she can’t tell how long, but is jarred suddenly by the sound of breaking glass. It has come from the kitchen. And then she hears Jill wailing. Lights flick on in both Mel’s and Margaret’s rooms almost at the same time. Amy leaps up and follows Margaret and Mel down the stairs.

  They enter the kitchen to the sight of Jill sprawled on the floor in a pool of brine and broken glass. “Oh, leave me alone,” Jill cries. “Just leave me alone. All I wanted was a damn pickle, for God’s sake!”

  6

  argaret Barber lies between Jill and Amy in a mouldy-smelling bed, which is not even a full-size bed and which, once their bodies heat the mattress, exudes the odour of urine. Her head pulsates with what has been a two-day headache caused by the heat, the glare of sun on water, the airless hours spent playi
ng lifeguard to Bunny’s children, watching them sculpt the shapes of turtles, Popeye, and an airplane in the sand while Bunny stayed back at the cabin reading from a stack of magazines. All day Margaret listened to the children’s cries and their heat-induced whining, their skirmishes over ownership of territories and sand toys.

  Jill moans and turns suddenly, her arm thrashing Margaret in the chest. How can I sleep through this, Margaret wonders, through this damned headache, the awful-smelling room? Jill curls against her, hands tucked between her knees, and sleeps a dreamless sleep. Margaret must lie flat on her back because if she tries to sleep on her side she smells the perspiration of another person in the pillow. Bill? she wonders, and her stomach twists. Jill murmurs in sleep. Moody and silent by day, Jill only begrudgingly agreed to play with the younger children. But she wouldn’t go swimming; she had resisted Margaret’s pleas to put on her bathing suit. Margaret sighs when she thinks of this now, and attributes it to shyness over her developing breasts. Jill had been content to wade, as deep as her shorts would allow, through the sunlit water, beads of it spraying up around her body like multi-faceted crystals, diamonds, white fire.

  Oh, Margaret thinks as she stares up at the ceiling through the throbbing of her headache, she’d been such an idiot to agree to come. “I think that’s a terrific idea,” Timothy had said when he returned her call. “There’s no reason at all why you shouldn’t go. Mel will manage perfectly fine on his own.”

  And Mel is managing perfectly fine, too. At that moment in Carona, Mel is upstairs in his room about to have a go at the last position depicted in the cartoon. Garth lies naked on Jill’s bed across the hall, waiting his turn.

  So, although a little drunk, Mel is managing fine. Do this, he says, and is delighted when Elsa flips up her skirt and turns her little white bum up to greet him. But then suddenly Elsa does something quite different. She stiffens and both legs shoot straight out. She’s as rigid as a board as she topples sideways from the chair onto the floor and lands on her back. Garth hears a thud, and then a steady thumping sound, and comes to investigate. Mel stands over Elsa, his eyes wide with shock. Her heels bump against the floor, up and down in a steady rhythm, like a wound-up toy soldier knocked onto its back, and her head thrashes back and forth in time to it. “Christ,” Garth says as foam begins to bubble at the corners of her mouth and her eyes roll up inside her head. He gathers up his clothing, dresses swiftly, and leaves a terrified Mel to manage alone.

  Margaret and Timothy will be proud of Mel in the end, of how he had been man enough to go downstairs to the telephone, to pick it up and call Josh Miller.

  Josh doesn’t talk much as he mounts the stairs to the bedroom. “Epilepsy, a seizure,” he says, and, “blanket.” He kneels beside Elsa and wipes her mouth with his handkerchief while Mel strips the blanket from his bed. Josh rolls Elsa into it and cradles her in his arms as though she were a baby, or a limp doll, Mel thinks, as Josh pushes past him and out of the room. Mel sees Elsa’s round white face, the flutter of her eyelashes closed in deep sleep, and the soft pout of her mouth; the corners turned down in a look of extreme disappointment. His heart constricts. She has consented to bare her breasts for him, and still he has refused to kiss her. He would like to now. He doesn’t understand this desire or the feeling of guilt that he interprets as pity or sorrow.

  The car door slams shut and Josh drives away leaving Mel with an incredible regret: to not be able to erase the past few weeks and unlearn what he knows. He imagines that Elsa loved him and that he betrayed that love. He wanders about the empty house and stops to turn on the radio. He listens to Buddy Knox singing that all he wants is a party doll, which only increases his sense of remorse, and so he goes out to face the still and dark town.

  He takes the back way, choosing the street that runs parallel to Main Street. He walks through the shadows cast by the United Church, past houses, then the Alliance Gospel Church. A soft light burns in the window of the Hardys’ cottage. Behind the curtain people kneel in a circle. They’re praying for a spiritual revival to occur in the town of Carona. They continue to pray for individuals who have been brought to their minds in dreams or while they were out weeding the garden, for those whose names they’ve heard in soft but distinct whispers across their shoulders. They continue to pray for Margaret and Timothy Barber.

  Mel steps out from the alley beside Johnson’s Hardware and into the street. Garth is nowhere to be seen. Hiding under a bed, Mel thinks, and suddenly feels self-righteous as he looks up at the window above Josh’s shop. He wants to gaze up at that lit window and wallow in his regret, but a figure darts across the street towards him, and before Mel realizes that it’s the woman Adele, she leaps on him, striking his face with the palm of her hand, and then her fingers become claws raking the skin beneath his eyes. Mel ducks, backing away from her, arms raised to ward off the blows. He gasps as she punches him in the stomach. “You swine! You dirty little coward! You have to use little girls!” she shouts. Her fists pound against his shoulders. Mel wants to say, Wait a minute. Not once had Elsa indicated that she didn’t want to do it. She was the one who offered it to him in the first place. Mel doesn’t know that Elsa’s behaviour is, sadly, a learned one. Adele brings her knee up between Mel’s legs, going for his balls, and so he swings, blindly but hard, connecting with the woman’s head, and is astonished and sick suddenly to see her hair go flying away into the street. Adele crouches, glaring, her orange mouth contorted in anger, and her bald head, with a scar running in a crooked line from one side of it to the other, shines silver in the light of the street lamp. Mel has never seen such rage, or a bald-headed woman. Such ugliness. “Jesus!” he says, turns, and flees from it. As he runs, he hears the sound of the hardware store’s windows shattering, one and then the other.

  Margaret hears a mewing sound coming from the adjoining room in the cabin. One of Bunny’s children, wanting to be led through the bushes to the back of the property and the privy. Well, she will ignore it tonight, in the same way Bunny and Bill seem able to ignore all their children’s requests during the night. A terrific idea, Timothy had said. Bill’s idea, Bunny had confessed. So far Bill had only joined them for the evening meal, eating quickly and almost silently, speaking only to bring order to the children’s unruly behaviour or to ask Bunny to pass him something. Bunny’s basset-hound eyes appeared hurt and uneasy the whole time. Bill would already be gone in the morning when they gathered in the large room that served as both kitchen and living room to feed the brood, as Bunny put it. Feed the sharks, you mean, Margaret had thought as she worked at preparing sandwiches and filling jars with lemonade for their day beside the water. At night they all went to bed at the same time, Margaret with her two girls in the evil-smelling and cobweb-draped room, Bunny’s four children crammed into an equally small room, and Bill and Bunny out on the veranda on a fold-down couch. Then the cabin grew still and silent as everyone but Margaret, with her grinding headache, fell asleep. Absolutely useless, Margaret thinks. She gets up, dressing quickly, and goes out through the back door so she won’t have to pass by Bill and Bunny.

  Whenever Bunny had spoken about the cabin she’d inherited at the lake, Margaret imagined something more than the little wooden unpainted box with its tilting veranda and the cluster of equally decrepit, festering cabins around it, dark and empty. She had imagined the sound of water breaking in waves against the shore just outside the door and the light of the moon dropping down against the lake, illuminating the room, and Bill standing there in the doorway, pausing in that light before moving towards her. Not his absence, not the almost fifteen-minute walk to reach the water.

  The road is a dark corridor but at the end of it she sees light moving against the face of the lake. She steps out onto the beach, hears the soft wash of waves against the sand, and her headache begins to diminish. She walks by the children’s toppled sculptures, by shovels and pails strewn here and there. On she goes, beyond the dock and away from the main beach to a rising in the land and a sa
nd bank that forms a gentle cove. She burrows down into the sand, its warmth an embrace, the cool breeze off the water a caress against her hot skin. She tries not to think of Timothy asleep in his motel room somewhere in Saskatchewan and focuses instead on a white shape that appears to hover above the surface of the black water. A sail. A sailboat. She watches it for several moments and it doesn’t seem to move. A pelican? she wonders, and finds its silent white presence comforting. Margaret thinks of Timothy returning home and reaching for her beneath the blankets. And how she once confessed to Rita that she was frightened about turning thirty-five and facing the possibility of never having sex with a man other than Timothy. “Why on earth would you want to?” Rita asked and Margaret was surprised to see the blush rising beneath the heavy beige pancake make-up Rita wore. “Just to know what it would be like,” Margaret said. “Let me tell you then,” Rita stated rather strongly, “once you’ve had one, you’ve had them all.”

  But Margaret doesn’t think so. Margaret knows there’s something she’s missing. She knows this from her strange and sometimes bizarre early-morning dreams of making love with strangers, or with Timothy, her children, Bunny, Bill. Margaret has even had several dreams of being made love to by a large black dog. Dreams of wet and slippery sex that bring excruciating pleasure and leave her aching for more. Then Margaret lies awake and listens to the sounds of the house to determine if the children are still asleep and will not hear the squeak of bedsprings as she replays the dream beneath her eyelids and seeks relief. Margaret has even dressed up and gone to see a doctor in the city and sat out in the waiting room with all the other patients, those whose broken parts – in their wrappings of bandages or plaster, in their fevers manifested by blotchy rashes – were more evident. And after the doctor had poked about her insides, Margaret had got dressed again and sat across from him on a Naugahyde chair and said, “What am I supposed to feel when I have intercourse?”