The Chrome Suite

by Sandra Birdsell

  “Amy! Oh gosh, what a day. Isn’t it just awful about Shirley?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is it true?” she said. “Were you really supposed to go out with the guy and she went instead?”

  I felt a sudden weariness, making me slack-jawed and sluggish, making me want to curl up and close my eyes and fall into a deep sleep. “Brenda, I have to call Victoria.”

  “B.C.?”

  “Yeah, my father.”

  She groaned. “Amy, don’t ask me. I can’t. I’ll get into trouble with my supervisor.”

  “Please, just this once. I have to talk to him.”

  Again she groaned. “Don’t do this to me, I can’t.”

  “Put it on my mother’s phone bill.”

  “But what if she questions it? If she does, I’m dead.”

  “Please.”

  I heard static on the long-distance line. “Thanks, Brenda.”

  “Yeah, sure,” she whispered. “But only this one time.”

  “Hello?” A woman’s voice, high, cheerful.

  The static sounded like water, waves in the Strait of Juan de Fuca, I thought, rolling up onto a beach outside their front door.

  “Hello?” Her voice dropped, its tone now wary. My tongue refused to move as I heard a muffled sound, her hand, perhaps, placed over the receiver, and then the line became clear again. “Well, if you’ve got nothing to say, kiddo, neither do I,” Aunt Rita said sharply and hung up.

  I didn’t know where I was going to go, but I knew that I was leaving Carona for good. All I had were my white bucks, ankle socks, jeans, underwear, tee shirt, and black denim jacket. What I was wearing. Then I felt the bulge in the breast pocket of my jacket. I patted it and it crackled. I also had most of two weeks’ pay from Sullie’s Drive In. Thank you, Sullivan.

  11

  he walked for almost four weeks. The balmy weather held for her, high skies during the day, and warm enveloping nights, which carried the essence and softness of the night she swam in the gravel pits, the night she had recognized as being one of the few when she did not yearn to be moving towards another place. Her predilection for the melancholy is evident in how often she recalls the external landscape. A romantic Amy, remembering with her body and not her mind.

  She walked well into each night, frightened, imagining what demons look like. Grinning tiny imps with monkey tails, or bloated gargoyles with steaming, fetid breath? She would startle at every small sound by the way, and look with yearning at lights in windows of distant farmhouses. Then, as those dots of lights winked out one by one and only yard lights remained lit and churning with a frenzy of moths, this was where you could find her. In the darkness. Not during the day, but at night, when there was no one but herself.

  Even though she would like you to think so, there is nothing at all romantic about being alone on the road in the dead of night. It wasn’t so much the absence of people but the presence of absence; not a single loving person at her centre. And, frankly, who, if they dared to approach, would find much that was lovable there – a heart as flat and as polished as her white face.

  That first night I walked until past three in the morning, and then trampled down some grain, making a nest for myself in a field, and spread my jacket as a pillow and slept. In the morning I awoke feeling damp and stiff but strangely exhilarated as I stretched and listened to a dog barking in the far distance and heard, too, the whistling, cawing, the hiss and croak of the landscape, and thought: I did it. Then the barking was drowned out by the sound of a machine’s engine sputtering to life and I knew it was time to move on.

  During the days I ignored the curious appraisals of the truckers, farmers, and waitresses I encountered in roadside gas stations, and I didn’t speak more than was necessary to order what I wanted to eat and to ask directions to the washroom. After the first day, when I saw myself in one of those washroom mirrors, I noticed that the skin beneath my eyes looked bruised from smudged mascara and so I dampened a paper towel and wiped my face clean of cosmetics. By the end of the first week my skin took on a rosy glow from the sun and my arms became deeply tanned. As I travelled I tried not to think of distances, set no goals, just walked, cutting away from the main highway after the first day to travel along secondary roads and then roads that were not really roads but rutted paths crossing open fields, until I saw on the horizon the crawl of headlights or rows of telephone poles, meaning that I had come back to the main highway. I would follow it again, perplexed sometimes to find myself passing by a hamlet or town I had come across several days earlier.

  My feet seemed to move independently of my will, so that even though the rest of my body ached with tiredness, my brain screamed for sleep, still I could walk.

  In the days and nights that followed I did not think about Shirley’s crushed chest or ruptured heart; but I suppose now that Cam and Gord did. They were among the pall-bearers at Shirley’s funeral and they must have thought about her broken body as they filed past the open casket and saw her too-high, pointy, and obviously fake breasts thrusting out against the dress her mother delivered to the undertaker, one of her own, probably, because Shirley didn’t own a dress.

  I did not imagine myself as Amy the squirrel, or standing on a book and floating towards a harbour, heading towards Truth and Knowledge. I thought instead about Margaret. If there was one thing I could have changed, I wouldn’t have struck her. I reasoned that my mother had told me I was possessed by a demon for revenge. I began to dread the silent telephone calls in my own future.

  But gradually thoughts of Margaret vanished in the open air, and during the days I walked I became aware of how large everything was, how tall and wide the sky, how broad the plains of the Midwest, which seemed to breathe and become twitchy with nervous energy during the night. At night I heard the earth’s nervousness in the ground as I lay on it, how it quivered with sound.

  Once, I squatted beside a water-filled ditch, dropped pebbles into its scummy surface, one by one, and watched the ripples circle outwards, a water insect riding the ridge of energy I had set in motion to the outer limits of its cosmos. In the days as I continued to walk, I believed that the air rippled with sound waves which circled outwards and upwards, and that my breath pushed the noise of the chirping and sawing insects out further and up through the stratosphere and beyond the stars to the place where angels and God abide.

  I began to duck out of sight into deep grass beside the road at the sound of an approaching vehicle, desiring to be alone, unseen, and becoming stealthy. I had no one. You would think that I would have felt sad about that, a bereft child, cut off and cut loose. But as I bent over the squashed remains of a gopher lying to the side of the road and studied its insides which heaved with rice-shaped plump maggots, I believed instead that I had been freed.

  I felt myself begin to blend in with the landscape, become as much a part of it as the insects, the frogs gliding through still ponds, the Franklin’s gulls hovering over freshly tilled fields, the whippoorwills calling out their own names at nightfall, and the need and desire to see Timothy ebbed. I wanted to spend the rest of the summer outdoors but, towards the end of July, when I squatted in a field to empty my bladder, I realized by the spatters of blood on the ground that my body had played its trick and I would need to go into a town.

  Spectrail, the town Amy enters the following morning, appears to be similar to the others she has passed, in that the highway skirts around it, and to enter it she must take the service road which passes through the inevitable ugly clutch of buildings on the town’s perimeter, corrugated steel sheds, gas stations, farm-implement lots, and car dealers. She worries that she won’t find the main street and the hotel or cafe washroom before she leaks through her jeans. Then she sees a half-moon-shaped building which has a sign above the door. COMMUNITY CENTRE, she reads, which probably means a bingo hall and curling rink and likely not open yet. But just as she thinks this the door does open and a young woman wearing a peach-coloured halter top and white shorts steps ou
tside. As the door swings closed behind her, Amy smells the aroma of food cooking and her stomach turns with hunger. The young woman walks over to a bicycle rack where several bikes are parked. She sees Amy and shields her eyes against the sun and stares. This is Marlene. When Amy thinks about Marlene years later, she sees the heavy sausage-shaped ringlets hanging across her forehead, a clear-eyed person with a broad smile revealing almost perfectly shaped teeth, and a friendly, even disposition. She will also remember Marlene referring to her elderly father as “the old bugger.”

  She asks the girl if there’s a washroom inside the building and is startled by the sound of her own voice, at how thin and strained it has become.

  “Yes.” The girl’s long curly dark hair sweeps across her shoulders as she pulls her bike free. She walks it over to the door as though she’s waiting for Amy. She isn’t wearing shoes and her painted toenails shine as though still wet. “The washrooms are just inside the door. Men’s to the left.” She takes a white cap from the wicker basket on the handlebars and jams it onto the back of her head. She glances up as Amy passes by and her eyes go wide with surprise. “Oh sorry! I thought you were a boy.” Snorts of laughter shoot from her nostrils. “Great hair, I really like it,” she says.

  Yeah, sure, Amy thinks, believing the tone of voice is derision. She steps inside the dim interior to the sound of voices and the smell of perspiration mixed with cooking odours. She hears the snap of a ping-pong ball meeting a paddle and strange shuffling and grunting sounds coming from another room. The washrooms are just inside the doorway and beyond them are the raw plywood walls of a hallway and doors which open up on either side of it. She enters the washroom and is relieved to discover that she’s alone. The muscles in her abdomen have become rigid and ache with cramps. She sees in her mind the girl outside, the perky white tilt of her sailor’s cap, the painted toenails, and she feels dirty. Her jeans are dirt-encrusted and grass-stained, the white socks now grey. She pulls her shoes off and removes her socks, turns them inside out, and puts them back on. Then she winds toilet paper into several pads and stuffs them into her pockets.

  She studies her reflection in the mirror above the sink as she washes her hands and sees how tightly the skin stretches across her cheekbones, making her eyes look hollow. The door opens behind her and two small girls enter and stop dead to stare at her. They sidle around her and then dash into the cubicle and she hears them whispering and stifling giggles. Well, to hell with this tight-ass town, Amy thinks, and her throat constricts without warning. She hears Shirley’s words in her own mouth and for one terrible moment she has to grab hold of the sink to keep from pitching forward. She sees her face twist to one side, her mouth crinkling. A stranger looks out from behind her eyes, admonishing her. She instructs herself not to think about Shirley but to think instead about the maggots in the gopher and not to give in to self-pity. The toilet flushes. She sees the little girls’ shoes, a pair of red and a pair of navy sneakers, their mosquito-bitten, stem-like ankles, and how their feet seem to waltz as they tug their clothing back into place. She takes several deep breaths. No one must see anything unusual in her face. She checks her reflection in the mirror and, although her eyes are still suspect, the rest of her face has settled back into place. Now she will walk into the town and buy what she needs and move on.

  As she enters the hallway, the smell of food once again pulls at her empty stomach. She hesitates, but then is drawn by it down the hall, past a door and a room where several children play ping-pong. They’re engrossed and don’t look up as she goes by, following her nose to the end of the hallway and the other door.

  When Amy walks into the room, she sees a tall man wearing a Stetson standing in the centre of a raised platform: a boxing ring. The two young men standing on either side of him wear leather helmets and boxing gloves. “Okay, you guys, now remember what I said. You fight fair now.” Amy recognizes the voice, the slow, thick tongue, and the frizzy hair above his ears. It’s the man called Hank, she realizes, the bass guitar player she met in the park years ago with the country and western performer Stu Farmer Junior.

  Just then a bell clangs and Hank steps back and the boys begin to weave and bob. Hank looks up and sees her, stares for a second, and then several young boys who have been shouting encouragement to the boxers turn and stare at her as well. As she walks towards the concession stand at the end of the room she feels their eyes on her. A woman works behind the counter at a stove. This is Elaine, Marlene’s mother. Amy is aware of the woman’s backward glance in her direction, a question forming in her face, but she ignores it as she reads the menu written on a blackboard and thinks about Stu Farmer Junior. She remembers him sitting on a picnic bench in the city, hugging his acoustic guitar, the day Mel almost fell into the river, and it feels like it happened in another world and to another person. She remembers his music and then Hank approaching as she lay stretched out on the grass about to take off and fly. “So who’s the dopey kid?” Hank had asked.

  She senses that Hank is still looking at her, that he leans against the ropes and peers out over the heads of the dancing boxers, checking her out. She calculates what she can afford to eat and for the first time it occurs to her that she might have to stop moving and get a job. The band of muscles in her abdomen tightens sharply. What if I get sick? I don’t get sick, she tells herself. She realizes that the strange shuffling sound she’d heard when she first came in had been the sound of the boxers’ feet, the grunting their breathing, and although she has studied flies feeding on blood on a car seat, she has no desire to turn and watch fists pounding bodies. Another clang of the bell ends the round. She hears Hank talking to the boys, his diction slow, a slight lisp, and then Marlene is at her side. Wet teeth, Amy thinks as the girl smiles at her, she should really swallow her spit. Her eyes shine with friendliness. Vacuous.

  Elaine comes over to the counter and leans into it. A red bandanna holds her hair off her forehead. She swipes at perspiration on her face with a corner of her apron. Hot flashes, the change, Elaine explains several days later to Amy as they sit out on the back step peeling potatoes for a batch of french fries. She’d made a fake stab at Amy with the potato peeler. “I can’t be held responsible for my actions,” she said. “I’m in the change and women have been known to go batty.” She reminds Amy of Bunny North, Margaret’s friend.

  “I thought you were on your way home,” Elaine says to Marlene.

  “I was, but I came back.”

  “He’ll be cooked by now.”

  Marlene points to Amy’s head. “I want my hair like that.”

  Elaine wipes a spot of grease from the counter. “Sure you do. Now get out of my sight.”

  “I’m serious, Mom, I want that hair.”

  The woman sighs dramatically and rolls her eyes. “What you really want is the back of my hand,” she says with mock sternness. “Kissy, kissy,” she says, and makes kissing sounds with her red mouth. “I happen to think you’re beautiful just the way you are.”

  Corny, Amy thinks, and wonders if this is a show staged for her benefit. Elaine leans across the counter and winks at Amy. “She takes after me.” Despite herself Amy wants to laugh. They couldn’t be more opposite, she thinks. Elaine has a meat-and-potatoes face, ordinary, with large pores and a doughy little nose, while Marlene’s sharp and clearly defined features are doll-like, perfect, and dance with a certain mischievousness. Several young boys rush past Amy and straddle the stools at the counter. Elaine sends them off to wash their hands.

  “You finished?” Marlene says to someone who has just stepped up behind Amy. Amy can smell him. It’s the smell of Hank. It’s the smell of Lifebuoy soap.

  “Yah,” Hank says, “that’s it till after lunch anyways.” He saunters past Amy over to the stools, appearing disinterested in her, but she senses that he’s sprung tightly inside, as tight as his bristly curls, and is acutely aware of her. As the woman sets a cup of coffee down in front of him, Amy turns away, reading the blackboard menu once again.
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  “Well, if you’re finished,” Marlene says to Hank, “then maybe you’d like to go down to the house and move the old bugger into the shade.” Her voice is high and child-like.

  “From where?”

  “Outside. In the garden. Since nine,” Elaine says. “If you don’t mind, Hank, he’s had enough of the sun. He’ll be cooked by now. Just wheel him into the shade of the tree.”

  “Will do,” Hank says.

  Steam billows up around Elaine’s face as she lifts the lid of a pot on the stove and Amy smells vegetable soup. Yes, she thinks, something hot, but she can’t find it on the menu. A hand taps her on the shoulder.

  “Where you from?” Marlene asks. Amy turns, about to reply that it’s none of their business and walk away, when Marlene disarms her with formal introductions. “Sorry,” she says, “here we are talking all around you. I’m Marlene, that’s my mom, Elaine, and the funny-looking person over there is Hank, Spectrail’s celebrity and most eligible bachelor. Huh, huh, huh.” Her breasts jiggle behind the peach halter top as she laughs.

  “You can be replaced,” Hank says.

  They all wait for Amy to tell them who she is.

  “You want to order something to eat, dear?” Elaine says quickly, filling the gap.

  “No.”

  “Fine!” Elaine smacks the soup ladle against the counter. “Don’t eat then. But skinny is not beautiful, honey, not in my books.” She pats her ample thigh. “Check this out. This is beautiful.” She smiles at them, pleased with herself. “Now sit!” she commands, and goes over to the stove and ladles soup into a large bowl.

  As Amy sits at the counter eating the soup, which is thick with barley and vegetables, Hank’s sleepy eyes tell her that he thinks it is she who is beautiful, right now, skinny and all. Amy feels that he’s stealing parts of her face with his eyes. She vows not to tell him that she’s the dopey kid he met in the park that day. She doesn’t want them to have any history at all.