The Chrome Suite

by Sandra Birdsell

  “I want you to back up the car!” he shouts. “Try and get in as close as you can.”

  The engine sputters once and then catches hold and Margaret shifts into reverse. Grass sweeps against the underside of the car as Margaret backs it carefully in his direction. She hears a clunk and then a grinding sound. A rock, she thinks, and so she decides not to venture any closer. She watches in the mirror as Timothy hurdles the log and sprints towards her with an agility she hadn’t thought possible. She rolls down the window as he approaches.

  “Good stuff.” He presses his chilled mouth against her cheek.

  “What’s up?”

  “Come and have a look.”

  Margaret walks through the bush behind him, twigs scraping against her body. She dislikes the mouldy smell of rotting bark and dry leaves underfoot. Finally he stops, pushes aside a large branch, and gestures for her to step in front of him into a fairly large clearing. She enters it and immediately sees the car, an old one, similar to the one he’s been working on for years.

  “Some luck, eh? It was covered with branches and I almost missed it. It’s got just about everything I need to finish mine.”

  “Whose car is it?” She sees a stack of branches lying off to one side of it.

  He shrugs and turns away from her. “I heard about it from one of my customers.” His voice has become less animated, disappointed, she knows, by her lack of enthusiasm. He walks around the car, reexamining it. “It’s even got the name plate.”

  “But, Tim, it must belong to someone.”

  Hinges squeal as Timothy pries open a door. The interior is littered with broken beer bottles, dried leaves, and rain-soaked newspapers. “It shouldn’t be too hard to tow it out of here. We’ll just have to move that log first.”

  Oh God, no. This is what was behind his unusual request for her to accompany him, she realizes. She leans into a tree and crosses her arms over her chest. She knows what’s going to happen. He’ll tow it home and push it into place at the back of the yard, where it will collect snow and leaves as it rusts away, and neighbourhood dogs will come and squat and strain beside it, squirrels will prance across its hood to store acorns behind the seats.

  Timothy lights a cigarette and sits down on the running board. He exhales, and Margaret’s tongue quivers. Unlike others in the church she hasn’t been freed of her craving. “The car’s been here for ages,” he says quietly, head lowered, rubbing a finger against a sore knuckle.

  “Come on, Tim. Someone went to the trouble to try and hide it. The car belongs to someone.”

  The slouch of his shoulders becomes more pronounced. “It’s really only good for parts. It’s worthless as it is.”

  “I don’t want a stolen car in my yard, Tim.”

  He sighs, pushes himself up off the car’s running board, and flicks his half-smoked cigarette into the bush. He sweeps aside the branch at the entrance to the clearing and as Margaret falls in behind him it springs back and whacks her hard against her thigh. She winces and cries out but Timothy, who is far ahead of her, has begun to whistle and doesn’t hear. She catches up to him at the car. The tow chain falls to the ground between them in a heap. “I’ll tell you what to do.” Her protest dies as he continues to whistle.

  Sick at heart and feeling sluggish, Margaret reluctantly starts the engine. Pray, she instructs herself, as Timothy winds the chain through the rear bumper. She sees him in the mirror as he walks back to the log and winds the chain around it. Then he returns. “Okay,” he says through the window, “now as soon as you feel the chain pulling, you give it the gas. But take it easy. We’ll have to move that log out slowly. Okay?” he says, cheerfully.

  She watches as he runs back to the log and yanks at the chain, testing it. Then he whistles, the signal that all is ready. Margaret presses down on the accelerator and feels the car move forward inch by inch as the chain unwinds slowly through the grass. Her foot begins to shake. Jesus, please get me out of this one, Margaret prays. As she reaches the end of the chain’s slack the car jerks slightly and holds steady.

  “Okay. Remember what I said, slow is the ticket!” Timothy shouts. “Slow and easy!” He bends over the log, ready to swing it off to one side once it begins moving. Slowly, she instructs her shaking foot. A steady, even pressure. She feels the back tires grab and begin to hunker down into the soft earth. The muscles in her calf tighten in a sudden spasm and her foot hits the accelerator sharply. The car leaps forward and then stops dead as though she’s run into a cement wall. Her body flies forward with the impact. She feels a stab of pain in her chin as it hits the steering wheel, and then behind her, dully, as though it’s happening far away, she hears the sound of glass shattering as the severed chain whiplashes through the back window.

  She cups her chin and rocks back and forth. She drops her hand to look at it and is relieved by the absence of blood. She runs her fingers across the tender spot. A bruise, nothing more. She turns, and through the spikes of glass hanging in the back window she sees Timothy down on one knee beside the log. He rises slowly, then walks towards the car, stopping at the shattered rear window, and stoops and peers in at her.

  “Maggie? Are you okay?”

  “My chin. But I think it’s just a bruise.”

  “What happened? I said to go slow.”

  Though his face is a blur through the throb of pain in her chin she notices that he’s not wearing his glasses. “I’m sorry,” she says, “but I thought the car was going to get bogged down.” Then it becomes clear to her what has happened. God has answered her prayer.

  “The chain snapped.” His voice sounds as though he has a full-blown cold.

  “I know.” The approaching darkness is punctuated by many fires now, flickering in the distant field. “Tim,” she says. “Do you think that it’s God’s way of showing us that we’re not supposed to take that car?” Thank you, Jesus, Margaret breathes. She feels the tickle of her new language on the tip of her tongue. Alla, alla, lingal, mia, mia, alla, alla. In the name of the Lord I command you to stop hurting, she prays, and the pain in her chin subsides. Then Timothy’s face comes into focus. Blood. A trail of blood runs from his nose. She notes, too, that the skin beneath his eyes has turned purple and swollen, and then she sees the strange new angle of his nose. Alla, alla, mungle, teckle, mia, mia, her tongue desires to speak. The wind sweeps down the shallow ditch, its movement swimming in the top of the yellow grass. We’ll have to put cardboard in the window until we get it fixed, she thinks.

  Timothy bangs his fists against the roof of the car. “You stupid bitch!” Timothy shouts. “Margaret, you’re an ignorant, sanctimonious bitch!”

  That is how Margaret came to be a divorcée. Though not the cause, this was the event that propelled Timothy out of the marriage and into the city and the scandal of Rita’s apartment. Then the two of them drove west until they could go no further, to where they still live, on a small hobby farm just outside of Victoria in a stone house filled with washstands, robin’s-eye oak bureaus, and bookshelves, which they bought at flea markets and refinished, mantel clocks that chime the hours of their lives, and glass cases, which are mounted on walls, displaying Timothy’s pocket watches and Rita’s plate and rhinestone jewellery collection. Years later, Timothy mourned the loss of the farm kitchen table, which, when Margaret moved to the Grandview Apartments, fell to Amy and Mel to lug out from behind the furnace in the basement.

  Amy sold the table to one of the many “collectibles” stores in her neighbourhood and was amazed to find that the chrome suite, which Mel took, had also become a sought-after item. When she and Mel had flipped the chrome table over to unscrew the legs, she’d seen the wads of dried chewing gum where she used to sit, at her place between Timothy and Margaret. Timothy at one end of the table, Mel at the other, Jill across from Amy, and Margaret beside Amy and close to the stove and counter so that she could jump up quickly to bring more hot food or wipe a spill from the table. “Whatever you think you can make use of just take,” Margaret had
said to Amy and Mel, because she didn’t know how she would fit everything into her scaled-down life. Amy prowled through the house and searched through closets, which still held remnants of Jill in a single bouquet of dried flowers, a chocolate box filled with Get Well and Sympathy cards, one remaining doll. But she was unable to find anything of herself, not even a scrap of paper with her large uneven scrawl, for her to puzzle over and ask, Is this me? She had been there, though, it was apparent in the greyish hard spots of chewing gum stuck beneath the chrome table and in the films Timothy had made with his camera. “Just these,” she’d said. “I want these.” She’d left the broken projector behind on a shelf and filed its box with the reels of eight-millimetre films. She took the box of films home and put it in a trunk in an upstairs closet along with all her journals.

  Mel and Amy became “products of a broken home,” which, though growing more common in the 1960s, was still an anomaly in a town as small as Carona. They were objects of pity and scorn as though, like Alf’s son, Harry, they were defective and deserved bad luck. Mel excelled at capitalizing on the pity end of the spectrum, and because the size of Timothy’s monthly cheque to Margaret did not take into account Mel’s ambition for further education, Mr. Waller, the grocer, was moved to take “the lad” under his wing. He offered Mel steady employment in his final year of school and later through his four years of university, lending him money to buy a car so that he could drive back and forth to the University of Manitoba, from which he would graduate with a degree in economics. Mel was a well-liked student, though he was not ever at the centre of things. He had to rush back to Carona at the end of each day, to put in two hours at Waller’s and then four more at his desk studying. Mel proved to be even, predictable. He would achieve notoriety in his final year with the surprise win of the silver medal and by his equally surprising boast, made once when he was inebriated, that he was an expert on female genitalia and could determine the ethnic origin of a woman by the shape and colour of her labia.

  Amy drew the short straw when it came to being pitied, because after Timothy left, she took to cussing in earnest. “That little Barber kid went and caught a bug of some sort,” people remarked. “What a shame. She’s come down with diarrhoea of the mouth.” And she became bossy, too, to the point of being belligerent in the playground, feverishly writing down playscripts and handing them out at recess to make her classmates say and do exactly what she wanted them to say and do. And if they tried to be original and change their lines (as Mindy North once did, and instead of being the queen decreeing, as the script indicated, that the prisoner standing before her be sent to the dungeon to be tortured, decreed instead, “Off with his head!”), they were excluded from the next play, and found their bicycle tires flattened. She didn’t want to hear their taunts of her “old man” having “buggered off,” “flown the coop,” gossip the children had overheard around their dinner tables. “My dad’s on a buying trip,” Amy had told them to explain his absence. “He’s taking on a new line,” she’d said without recognizing the irony in the explanation. She threatened her schoolmates into silence with her swearing and directed them through her playscripts away from the topic. “Manipulative,” the teacher complained to Margaret on Parents’ Day. Margaret was worried, and so she began to take the problem of Amy to her weekly prayer cell.

  For some reason Mel was exempt from Margaret’s attempts at proselytizing; all her efforts were focused on Amy. But Amy realized fairly quickly that even if she were to take on Margaret’s faith, become born again and baptized in the spirit, even if she prayed with the tongues of angels, possessed the miraculous gifts of healing, prophesied and dreamed visions, it would not be enough. She would still be found wanting in some way. She was flawed simply because she was alive.

  When Amy was thirteen she put a black rinse in her hair and twisted strands of it into spit curls and pasted them into place with Dippety-do gel on her forehead and either side of her face because she thought it made her look Spanish. At night she lay in the top bunk bed aware of the silence in the bed beneath her, sometimes imagining she could feel the nudge of a foot against the mattress. The unchanging porcelain and plastic faces of Jill’s dolls on the shelf across the room seemed deliberately cool and impassive as they watched with sightless glass eyes Amy propping a notebook against her knees and writing long letters to Timothy, telling him that she felt anxious, as though the heart in her chest had grown faster than her body and she had too much power. She told him that Margaret was still a “holy roller” – his expression for the people at the “Alliance Gospel Circus.”

  Margaret still thanked Jesus for taking Jill away from her and was willing to embrace any catastrophe that might serve to bring the rest of her family into the Kingdom of God. Margaret wrote in her Blue Book that she would give up anything, even her own life, for that to happen. Amy might have been frightened when she read those words, wondering what terrible lesson Margaret or Timothy had yet to learn that might tempt God to reach down and pluck her up next to become a gem in his kingly crown. But she wasn’t. Amy reasoned that because she’d been struck by lightning and survived, she was immune to killer diseases, accidents, the force of gravity. She suspected that she might be immortal.

  Timothy had been gone for over two years and still she wrote to him, letters that she sometimes mailed, but usually not. She had grown disappointed in his replies. She had looked in them for the father who had bought her the cape, but his letters were too carefully written, as though writing her was an assignment that he strove to do well. “You must come and visit us sometime,” he once wrote. She hadn’t the courage to ask, Sure, when? Then his unsatisfying letters dwindled to greeting cards sent on the occasion of holidays and special days such as Valentine’s or St. Patrick’s, and which, Amy suspected, had been chosen by Aunt Rita.

  Margaret allowed Amy to make one telephone call a month and it was the same thing, the same stiffness in his voice as in his letters. There were long silences between their sentences when Amy wanted to but could not ask, “When can I come and live with you?” And so she stopped calling him as well. She began to write Timothy’s replies to her letters. “I want you to come and live with us soon,” Amy wrote Timothy saying. “You should be with your mother right now. But once you’re older, then I want you to come.” She invented his life with Aunt Rita, and an Irish setter named Pal. On Saturday afternoons they’d play bingo at the legion hall while Pal waited for them outside. But they didn’t play for money. They played for things, and Timothy had won an ironing board and a kitchen clock that was shaped like a Dutch windmill and which he was going to send to Amy because it wasn’t an antique. She looked up Victoria, British Columbia, on the map at school and took them out of the legion hall and put them instead on a sandy beach with the sound of surf crashing as they looked out over the Strait of Juan de Fuca, Aunt Rita throwing a piece of driftwood into the water and Pal bounding after it, eager to please. She had Timothy explain how, from the beginning, he really had been attracted to Rita more than to Margaret but didn’t want to hurt Margaret’s feelings.

  Amy tried to write a story about the time when Timothy had taken her to visit Santa Claus at Eaton’s and the line-up of children and parents to Santa’s throne was too long. She had grown impatient and so, rather than wait to see him, she’d pulled Timothy over to see the electric trains. She wrote about what she saw: trains winding through tunnels past gumdrop signal lights, train-station roofs encrusted with frosting and embedded with jewel-like candy, candy cane lampposts, trains crossing bridges over orange soda-pop rivers. She stopped writing when she remembered that Timothy had let go of her hand and she’d been frightened that he’d abandoned her. Dad! she’d cried out, then saw how the faces of several people around her had gone soft with pity, and so she’d swallowed her panic and set off angrily to find her father, who was only an aisle away, his back to her, engaged in conversation with a store clerk. Dad! she had yelled, and when he turned she punched him in the stomach.

 
; Dad! Amy sometimes cried silently and punched her pillow, but it wasn’t the same thing. One Saturday before Father’s Day, resentful over the absence of mail at the post office, Amy went into Black’s Dry Goods and marched to the men’s section at the back of the store. On a table was a display of gift suggestions, ties encased behind plastic in narrow boxes, plaid shirts, handkerchiefs, fishing lures. Her compulsion to pick up the items and one by one throw them across the room began to recede. A fishing lure, she thought. Yes. Perfect. She chose the largest one, a silver spoon with red glass beads for eyes. She bought it and mailed it away to Timothy in Victoria.

  At age fourteen, Amy refused to get out of bed on Sunday morning and told Margaret that she no longer wanted to go to the “Alliance Gospel Circus.” Mel didn’t have to go, she reasoned, and, besides, it had become a boring affair; they repeated the same stories over and over, did the same tricks. Margaret, who had become somewhat of a spiritual force in the congregation, perceived Amy’s rebellion to be an attack by the evil one and she rose to the challenge.

  When Amy is sixteen, and Shirley Cutting walks into her life, Margaret puts in a request to her prayer cell for “prayer warriors” to come to her aid, those who will fight on their knees daily for Amy. And Amy becomes a redhead like Shirley and Shirley becomes her best friend.

  Amy meets Shirley for the first time in Ken’s Chinese Food when Shirley walks in one day with a self-possessed air, as though she’d been coming to Ken’s all her life. Her thick red hair is pulled back into a ponytail, drawing her features taut, accentuating their sharpness. A fox, Amy thinks, when she first sees Shirley. “Foxy” is what Cam and Gord will nickname Shirley later on, the name muttered under their breath, for their ears only. Shirley sits on a stool at the counter, looking unconcerned as she puffs furiously at a rollie and blows the smoke towards the ceiling. She turns and looks at Amy, Cam, and Gord where they sit in the back booth, and her eyes become slits as she studies them coolly and with a great deal of contempt. When Amy goes over to the jukebox, Shirley speaks. “Play fifty-six.” Curious, Amy punches the number and the song turns out to be an old one, Sarah Vaughan singing in a clear, bittersweet voice, “I’ll Be Seeing You.” Shirley hums along like a slightly drunk, love-lost woman in an old black-and-white movie, sitting at a bar nursing a drink. Fade to black.