The Chrome Suite

by Sandra Birdsell

  Several quiet moments passed. I waited, hoping he’d say more. “What do you think of Carona?”

  Dave turned to me. “Cut the cute crap. You know why we’re here.” Then he lunged at me, obliterating the world outside the car window. In one second I was pinned flat under his body, feeling his weight and then his belt buckle cutting into my thigh. He began grinding his hips and I felt his hard penis pressing against my leg. This isn’t the prick of a giant, this is about the size of a pencil, I thought, as Dave snorted and chewed at my hair, and then his fist balled around my breast. He scrunched it and I yelped in pain. He squeezed harder and again I cried out. “You like that,” he said into the top of my head and I realized that he wanted me to cry out. His breathing became raspy and he began to yank at his jeans and then at me, at my shirt, the zipper of my jeans, all the while whacking and thumping away at my leg with his pencil-thin penis.

  Later I described it to Shirley as being about the size of my finger and she said that was Gord, too, and although Cam was a much smaller person, his was the size of a Polish sausage. “Thick, like that,” she said, making a circle with her thumb and index finger. And then she said, as though reciting a rule of grammar, “It’s not the thick of the prick, but the throb of the knob that does the job.” She asked was I absolutely certain he hadn’t gone off inside me. “Certain,” I said.

  My jeans and underpants were down around my knees, pinning my legs together, but Dave kept jabbing at the crack between my legs with his pencil until I thought it might snap. We were half on the car seat, half on the floor. “Wait, wait, wait,” I said over and over through his frantic probing to get inside. I felt his body become rigid as he began to hear me and to realize that I was stroking the small of his back. His thick dark hair had fallen across his forehead, almost obscuring his eyes. Greasy, I thought, and my stomach heaved. “Dave, I can’t.” I forced myself to touch his mouth. “I’m wearing a tampon.”

  He reared back with laughter. “Shit,” he said. “Tell me something new, why don’t you?” But his hand snaked down between my legs just the same, and he began fishing about, searching for a string.

  I crossed my legs, trapping his hand. “It’s my first day. It’ll be one bloody mess on your car seat. We can do it on Friday,” I said. “I’ll be finished on Friday.”

  His head came up over mine and he opened his enormous mouth and covered my nose and mouth with it, his fat, slippery tongue licking, thrusting down the back of my throat. I had to swallow his saliva to keep from choking, and then he slathered my entire face, my eyes, licking my ears, his tongue going up inside my nostrils, and at that point I became more frightened of being suffocated than penetrated. My face was sopping wet with his saliva as I fought to breathe through his tongue, now pressed flat against my nose. I began thrashing my head back and forth. He groaned, and I felt the gush of hot wetness between my thighs as he came. He swore and collapsed against me.

  I listened to the sound of rain washing against the car’s roof. Our breath had misted the windows and we were encased in a moist, musky-smelling cocoon. Not a single car had passed by in the short time we’d parked there. His breathing grew quiet then, and he slowly untangled his limbs from mine, slid back behind the steering wheel, and began tucking himself in. He plucked a tissue from the box on the dash and threw it at me. Nausea rose in my throat as I dabbed his sticky semen from the insides of my legs. He checked his reflection in the mirror and smoothed his hair into place. “How old are you?” he asked, looking in the mirror; checking for scratches, probably, Shirley said afterwards. I told him.

  He grinned, resembling a combination of Rock Hudson and Robert Taylor, but I saw the maniac lurking behind his smile. “I guess that makes you old enough to know better.”

  My hands shook as I pulled my jeans up around my hips and my breath was still quick and high in my chest. Okay, I said to myself, you made a stupid mistake. Don’t waste time slitting your throat over it. But no bloody way will I ever get inside a car with this man again.

  We didn’t speak during the drive home. When we arrived at my house, he pulled over and reached across me to open the door, but I had already opened it and had one foot on the ground.

  “What’s the rush?” He brought his arm up against my chest, pinning me against the seat.

  “It’s late.”

  “We have a date. Friday, remember?”

  When I didn’t answer he tweaked my nipple and then he pinched it hard. I grabbed at his hand and curled forward, gasping with the pain, but I couldn’t pry his hand loose. He released me when he was ready to release me. I got out of the car and stood waiting for him to get my bike. When he didn’t make a move, I said, “Hey, my bike.”

  He winked. “On Friday.” He tooted the horn lightly, and then the car’s muffler coughed and rumbled as he sped away. I looked up at the house, hugging myself to keep from shaking. My nipple throbbed. Great, I thought, as I saw a light go on upstairs. Wonderful.

  Margaret stood at the top of the stairs. “Oh, thank God, you’re home. I couldn’t sleep. I’ve been awake half the night thinking about you.”

  I walked towards my mother who waited for me, clutching her pink flannel nightgown closed at her throat. Her hair, tousled from sleep, puffed out around her head in an unruly, wild-looking auburn mass. I wanted to push my face against the soft swelling of her belly and climb back inside.

  “What is it?” she asked. I saw fear rise in her eyes and her body grow stiff as I approached.

  “Nothing. Just waited out the rain before heading home.”

  “But I heard a car.”

  “Chuck and Brenda.”

  “Oh. You’re sure? Nothing’s the matter?” she asked as I climbed to the top of the stairs and walked past her.

  “Just tired.”

  “Well, I’ll say a prayer for you anyway.”

  Anger would always replace my desire for a caress from Margaret.

  I went up to the bathroom to wash the smell of this man from my body and then to search for bruises.

  I lay awake most of the night repeating over and over in my mind his words, my own, inventing new scenes for what had actually happened, things that I had not said and done but wished I had. By morning I had almost convinced myself that my reconstruction was the truth. I rehearsed what I would say and then called Shirley. “You’ll never guess what happened last night,” I said softly, hearing Margaret puttering about in the kitchen.

  “Why don’t you come over. His royal highness, the pain in the butt, had to make a trip into the city today, so the coast is clear.”

  Shirley was upstairs in the bathroom when I arrived, and her mother, a small sinewy woman, sat at the table in the kitchen rolling her day’s supply of cigarettes amidst the cluttered remains of breakfast. She worked with quick, furious motions, as though she was frightened that her husband might walk in at any moment. “You can go up,” she said, barely glancing at me.

  I heard Cheryl squealing, and when I walked into the bathroom Shirley was kneeling beside the tub squeezing water from a sponge, letting it trickle down Cheryl’s stomach. “Hi!” she said. “Cute, eh?” Cheryl’s eyes were always red and her nose dripped. Allergies, Shirley explained. I didn’t think she was cute at all. I sat on the toilet and watched while Shirley bathed her stepsister, her hands moving across the child’s pale body. Shirley’s flaming red hair, freed from its usual ponytail, fell forward as she bent over the child, and Cheryl reached up, her baby hands pushing through that red curtain of hair, and pulled Shirley towards her until their foreheads touched. I watched as they giggled and rubbed noses, Shirley completely oblivious to my presence, cooing in a small voice, “You little monkey, you little monkey.”

  I felt tough and strong as I told her about Dave while she chased Cheryl across the bed and wrestled her into her clothing. “The guy’s a sex maniac,” I said. “All hands and mouth. A fucking-machine. Sweat city.” Shirley gave up on chasing Cheryl and I had her full attention. “Watch out for that one,”
I said, and didn’t notice how her eyes narrowed as she listened. She began chewing at the cuticle on her thumb, deep in thought. I didn’t tell her that I was certain the only reason why he’d let me go was because I’d made a date with him for Friday. Or about the bruises on my breasts. Instead, I told her the story as a kind of boastful joke about the funny thing that happened to me while on the way home the other night. But she grew tense as she listened and her features hardened with her silent calculations.

  “That’s it,” she said and immediately took charge of my life, insisting that she meet me at the end of my shift at Sullie’s and walk back to town with me.

  Which she did, beginning that night, and arriving almost an hour before closing. She would keep out of the way, she said, as she hiked herself up onto the counter, swinging her legs, the heels of her flats making black marks against the cupboard door. “Here comes a great pair of falsies,” she’d say, or, “Check out lard arse, there,” offering a running commentary on the customers who had left their vehicles and were lined up outside at the order window. But she never stole so much as a nickel and I was thankful for that.

  In the days leading up to Friday I began to feel cornered by Shirley’s concern and regretted having told her anything about Dave. She watched for his purple Ford and made me duck into alleyways or zip into the post office when it approached in the street. On Thursday night, as I lay in bed exhausted and gratefully moving towards sleep, the throaty purr of a car’s muffler startled me fully awake. Dave, passing by the house. Twice. My scalp tingled as I lay there drenched in a cold sweat, making plans to cover myself for Friday night. On Friday, Patsy would close up and Chuck, Brenda’s boyfriend, could be persuaded to take all of us to the town down the road to catch the current movie.

  But Shirley didn’t show up at Ken’s on Friday night as we had agreed. Cam, Gord, and I waited an extra half hour, and then Cam phoned her and her mother said Shirley had left well over an hour ago. Gord had arrived at the cafe still angry from an argument he’d had with his parents before leaving the house. They’d begun to nag him to do something useful with his life, threatening to make him enlist in the army. Gord swore over Shirley being late, refusing to wait any longer. We left Ken’s and headed off to meet Brenda and Chuck. I didn’t know it then, but this was to be my last night in Carona. The night before I left the town for good.

  As I walked down the street between Cam and Gord, I suppose I looked as though I could have been their kid sister tagging along. Still short, at four feet eleven inches, I nevertheless felt I was their equal in height and superior in all other ways, although I was careful not to show this. When we reached the intersection we didn’t bother to wait for the traffic light to change. This was one of several lights installed recently These lights, and the cavernous hall of the beer parlour, transformed now into a lounge with recessed lighting, and “mixed” drinking, and the beginning construction of a new school to accommodate the influx of students who were being bused in from outlying areas, were just a few of the many changes in Carona, but they didn’t affect me. Nor did the displays in store windows that were designed to catch our eye – the new consumers. I had watched the events of the Cuban Missile Crisis on television, Martin Luther King telling a crowd of thousands they were “free at last,” the killing of President Kennedy, the young man who attended classes wearing a black bag to test the conformity of the university students around him, and none of this touched or affected me, except to confirm what I already knew about impermanence and change.

  As we walked down the street the warm night was soft and the texture and colour of navy suede. Underlying that softness, however, was the hard edge of tension. I could feel anger in Gord’s body as I walked beside him, impatience in Cam’s. From time to time a car passed by and I would call out and ask if any one had seen Shirl. No one had.

  Brenda and Chuck, whose face flamed with fresh eruptions of acne, waited for us outside the telephone company building where Brenda worked. Gord said he wasn’t interested in going to a movie to see “the fag” Elvis, and when Chuck protested, Gord surprised us by grabbing him around the neck and threatening to kill him. “Easy,” Cam cautioned, pulling Gord off an astonished Chuck. Cam explained the fight Gord had had with his parents and suggested that we cool off, pick up some beer, and drive out to the pits for a swim. The suggestion didn’t please Brenda, but Chuck agreed to drive the eleven miles to the gravel pits if we paid for the gas. Cam and Gord looked at me, and I said okay, and so we stopped off at Sullie’s and I paid myself for the last two weeks’ work. Patsy said that Dave had been around, asking for me.

  The further we drove from Carona, the better I began to feel. I was giddy with relief, that I had escaped Dave, and as we scrambled down the face of a gravel cliff towards the turquoise pools of clear water, ankle-deep in an avalanche of crushed rock and sand, it seemed to me the night itself was like the water in the pits, deep and soothing. I laughed as a naked Gord, a white fish shining in the light of the moon, posed on a ridge of gravel, showing off, calling out to us, “From deep in the heart of Africa comes the cry of the Fug Owee tribe. Where the fuck are we?” Then he yodelled a Tarzan cry and leapt feet-first into the water.

  I stripped down to my underwear and went over to where Cam sat naked on a sandstone slab of rock, watching Gord swim laps. Gord had the tough, jerky swimming stroke that most self-taught country boys had. They’d thrash, hold their heads too high, and punch the water with their hands as though fighting their way through it. Cam appeared comfortable in his nakedness and sat with one knee raised, his flaccid penis lying against his other leg. The summer had bleached his hair to such an extent that it had turned silver, complementing his narrow face and high cheekbones. He was a good-looking person, though I never regarded Cam as being anyone other than a boy I had known since grade school, not seeing past that constant cigarette clenched between his teeth, the raw-boned look of a not yet mature body. When I did meet him again some twenty-five years later in Red Deer, Alberta, he said I’d been responsible for ninety-five per cent of his wet dreams. I liked his sharp wit and how he clearly enjoyed the company of women, and I would have given anything to have been his lover, but, having been happily married for almost twenty years, he was impervious to my flirtations. He told me I’d be the first to know if it ever turned sour.

  As I sat down on the rock beside Cam, he grinned and tugged at my bra strap. “Hi, No Tits,” he said. “Hey, Chuck, Barber here doesn’t want us to see her no tits.” Chuck, who was now treading water in the centre of the pool, laughed and dove under. I laughed, too, and slid off the warm rock down into the tepid water. I wasn’t ashamed of my small breasts. It wasn’t that. I didn’t want them to see the bruises, the thumbprints the colour of tobacco stains. Music floated down from the car window and Brenda appeared at the top of the gravel ridge carrying a blanket. She scooped out a hollow for herself and sat up there, watching while we swam.

  Then Cam built a fire and we dried ourselves beside its heat and sipped at beer for an hour while the sky swept its arm of stars over us and Gord roamed the gravel hills. I recognize that night now as having been one of those few moments in life when I didn’t want to be moving towards another place. But when Gord reappeared, and I heard the sound of a beer bottle shatter against rock, I knew that my state of contentment was bound to end soon.

  Instead of returning to Carona, we drove on further west, towards a larger community where Gord directed Chuck through the streets, making him stop behind a hardware store. Brenda, Chuck, and I waited as Cam and Gord disappeared into the shadows and returned moments later, jubilant with success, carrying a length of chain and a carpet knife. Then we drove to the outskirts of the town where there were several car dealership lots and, once again, without saying why, Gord instructed Chuck to pull over.

  Chuck groaned and began to bang his head against the steering wheel, saying that his father would kill him if he ever found out, and Brenda made frightened noises behind her hand as we watched Gord d
arting through the car lot, hooking the curved knife into tires and slashing them open. Cam stood beneath a streetlight, hands plunged deep into his jeans pockets, on guard. I sat in the back seat waiting for Gord to be finished, watching impassively while in the final venting of his anger he swung the heavy chain and shattered a windshield. They ran back to the car and slid in beside me. Gord hugged himself and shivered and his laughter was tight and barky. Idiot, I thought. I could tell by the silence in the front seat, by the rigid fix of Chuck’s and Brenda’s heads, that they agreed. Cam moved away from me, pressing up against the door, staring into the night. I knew that something had ended.

  When we got back to Carona I asked Chuck to let me out at the top of the street and I walked the remainder of the way home. There were no lights burning, which meant both Mel and Margaret were asleep. I didn’t want to risk waking her, and so I felt my way through the closet in the front hall and pulled free a blanket, and, without undressing, curled down under it on the couch in the living room and instantly fell asleep.

  When I opened my eyes the following morning the sun streamed in through the front window and I saw Margaret sitting across the room in the easy chair. She played with the asparagus fern, which trailed like dangling fingers, stroking the plant, sometimes twisting its fronds and letting them spring back. This chair and the couch I had slept on were from one of Timothy’s lines, and now the worse for wear. Silver threads had pulled loose from the fabric and were prickly against the arms and legs. On one side of the chair stood Timothy’s smoking-stand, which I could never look at without my stomach doing a strange turn. From time to time, Margaret collected bits of things when she went walking, pine cones or small pebbles, and she’d place them in the ashtray to remind herself that her lungs were now clean and taking in nature’s pure air. The way she sat there, fondling the plant, deep in thought, unsettled me and I wanted to make my escape upstairs. “What time is it, anyway?” I asked, startling her.