The Chrome Suite

by Sandra Birdsell

  We didn’t gain any friends from the neighbourhood we lived in, the neighbourhood Shirley Cutting had once taken me to. U-hauls loaded down with furniture, as people moved in and out, and traffic were among the few constant things. The traffic and Mrs. Pozinski, our immediate neighbour, who had a well-tended yard, and who had lived there twenty years, she told me over the fence; the young woman across the street, Selena, for ten, Mrs. Pozinski informed me. A single mother on welfare with three kids, she said, in such a way that I knew she didn’t approve. Our house was second from a busy corner. The occasional accident there and the ensuing scream of an ambulance’s siren were but brief respite from the steady flow of traffic. But then, in the early years of our marriage, my real neighbourhood was just Hank, Pete the grocer, Stanley Knowles, and, later, my son, Richard.

  The first year Hank showed me many wonderful and magical things such as how to make a cat’s cradle with butcher string and the way his testicles revolved all on their own, two floating worlds turning slowly inside their wrinkled sacks. He wanted to see all of me, too, and persuaded me to climb up onto the kitchen table and park my behind over the edge of it while he took a peek inside me, hoping to see the tip of my uterus and being disappointed when he was unable to. Was it true, he wondered, the saying he’d heard, that it would stretch a mile before it would tear an inch? It, meaning the opening to my vagina and a baby’s head passing through. I will allow now for the fact that he was curious. I said I didn’t know and didn’t want to find out. Then he unzipped his pants and entered me and picked me up and carried me from room to room until he came. Often we slept connected like that, or, rather, Hank slept. I would wait for him to grow limp and then move away in order to sleep. On cool nights he slept with his hairy leg draped over mine and I would feel his testicles turning, those two watery worlds, two prickly wild cucumbers turning, the motion a ticklish crawl against my leg, which I liked.

  We lived then on unemployment insurance while Hank attended M.I.T. to learn how to repair major household appliances. What should have been a six-month course turned into a full year because he needed to upgrade his reading and math skills. He didn’t want me to take a job, and I felt at loose ends, a pebble ricocheting off water or an echo among the concrete buildings of the city. When I passed the day in my front yard or in the neighbourhood park, a tiny green space beside a main traffic artery, sitting on a bench reading or watching children building up and smashing down castles in the sandbox, I felt myself come up hard against these things: the constant sound of the city, the smell of dust on pavement, the potato chip wrappers caught along the bottom of my fence, the flow of strangers driving by my yard as I sat on the steps watching the going-home rush-hour traffic. What had started as a way of passing the time became a compulsion, to see Hank’s car turning at the corner. I was glad and then not glad to see him. When he was away at work I felt parts of me were missing. When he came home I was dissatisfied and wondered why I had missed him. I felt I had no direction or substance at all until his car pulled into the driveway at the end of the day, and I suppose I resented him for that.

  Sometimes we visited Jerry in Transcona, and after his kids were put to bed and we’d drunk a few beers, we’d go down into his sound studio in the basement. Jerry played the steel guitar and Estelle, his wife, sang. One night after several beers my throat opened up and I began to harmonize with Estelle. Jerry was impressed and recorded us, and Hank, even though he didn’t say so, was irritated, as I could tell by the nervous flutter of his eyelids. Our trips to Transcona grew fewer and farther between after that. For a while Hank also took me downtown on Saturdays to the Country and Western Jamboree. On one occasion the Elvis Presley impersonator, whom I had seen along with Stu Farmer Junior and Hank years ago, was playing. He performed as himself now although he still sounded like Elvis. We went backstage and I waited in a corner while Hank caught up on the news of Stu, who had changed his name, gone to New York, and was about to cut a record down there. Jazz, blues, the singer said. “Oh yah?” Hank kept saying. “Oh yah?” as though he was working hard to be interested. He called me over and introduced us and the entertainer winked at me and gave me an autographed photo of himself. He was still pimply-faced, I noticed, even through the heavy make-up.

  In our first year, Hank told me about himself and all that he had learned about life. He told me in a matter-of-fact tone about nursing his dying mother and in the same manner presented me with her casket of costume jewellery, which we set in the centre of our bureau, on a doily. If when I moved it to dust I hadn’t put it back where it had been, the exact centre, the next time I’d look, as if by magic, it was back in its place.

  Hank nursed me, too, the one time I can remember being sick with a cold and fever. He rubbed my chest and back with camphor, made a tent with blankets and chairs, and set the electric kettle on the floor inside it. I crouched under the blanket tent, shivering with fever in the hot steam while Hank played his guitar and sang the song his mother had taught him. He sang in a sentimental drippy way, then put the guitar down, stripped naked, and crawled beneath the tent, and, because I was too weak and sick, I didn’t have the energy to protest that he wasn’t wearing a condom. Later I became angry. Cold steam when there’s a fever present, not hot, I had read, and you don’t fuck someone’s brains out when they’re sick either.

  Early on I gave up my notion of leading Hank the country and western musician from adventure to adventure, and instead I learned how to bake whole-wheat bread. To reward me Hank brought home two hamsters, a male and a female, who would, he hoped, copulate and multiply. I named them Simon and Garfunkel. Several months later he brought home a skinny, half-frozen ginger cat, which he’d found parked on the hood of his car at work. I was careful, but what happened was inevitable. I had thought the cat was outside when I took Simon and Garfunkel out of their cage so that I could clean it. But the cat wasn’t outside and, in the blink of an eye, it leapt from the couch in the living room, bounced across the hallway and into the kitchen, up onto the counter, and, with two quick slashes of its paw, it opened up the tiny bellies of the hamsters. The cat could not be blamed, Hank said, and didn’t say that he blamed me.

  Shortly after that the cat went into heat and kept backing into the toe of Hank’s boot and he’d rub her and laugh when she yowled and tipped her bum into the air in front of him. When he was away she kept backing into my foot, too, and yowling for me to let her outside and out of her misery and so I did. She didn’t return, and neither Hank nor I spoke about Judy the cat again.

  On the weekends we often drove out to Carona so that Hank could take care of Margaret’s odd jobs. In the first year he had replaced the dead or partially working elements in her stove, adjusted the oven door hinge so that she no longer had to prop a chair against it. Over the years he continued to be her weekend handyman, repairing, painting, rewiring the lamps with loose connections that had plagued her for years, she said, looking pathetically grateful and forcing him to take five-dollar bills. She never inquired how I was doing. That is, until I became pregnant. Then, both of them wanted to know night and day how I was doing. Margaret grew solicitous, almost tender, even went so far as to place her hand against my ripe belly. How’re you feeling? they both asked continuously as they fussed over me, brought a stool to put my feet up on, a pillow to support the small of my back. But that concern for my well-being vanished, of course, the day Richard was born.

  On the weekends when Hank wasn’t compelled to drive out to Carona to help Margaret, he took me camping. Once we took a week-long vacation, rented a canoe, and paddled through the chain of lakes in the Whiteshell. As my heart and lungs opened wide to the picture-book red sunsets reflected in still water, the smell of pine, and the rushing sound of poplar leaves filling the tent at night, I felt centred and grateful to him. I would return to that little house near a busy intersection and resolve to try harder. And I did.

  When, in our second year, Hank brought home a portable sewing machine from a scratch-and-de
nt sale, I said thank you, went to the library for the appropriate books, and taught myself how to sew. Simple things at first, tablecloths and curtains, but by the end of the year I had sewn him a polo shirt that looked as though it had come from the store. It was that good, Hank said, but his praise meant nothing to me; it hadn’t been difficult to make a polo shirt. He wore it to work the following day and returned with orders for six more, twenty dollars apiece, matching polo shirts for the winter bowling-league team he belonged to. I said I would be too nervous to sew for anyone else and I put the machine away into a closet. He hid his disappointment but did make a point of bringing home odd things the other wives had made, Christmas-tree decorations and crocheted peter-heaters.

  The last thing Hank brought home was a dozen eggs. This was in our third year. We’d been out to Carona, and on the way back Hank stopped at the town’s dump. He did this often and I’d wait for him in the car while he put on a pair of coveralls and rubber boots and went rummaging through the garbage. He looked for cast-off stoves and would unscrew the still-good fuses in them, their knobs, elements. He stripped washing machines for their clutches, belts, and pulleys, which he lined up on shelves in the garage and catalogued for the time when he was ready to break away from Eaton’s and start his own repair shop.

  He was only gone several minutes when he came running back to the car, upset and wanting a box. I followed him down into the smouldering, foul-smelling pit. Bouncing about among the stew of decaying garbage were fluffy yellow balls: chicks, peeping noisily. The egg hatchery in Carona had dumped a load of eggs and the heat of the fire had begun to hatch them. “Oh,” I said. “Oh, Hank.” Then I saw the darting movement of a rat, its long tail trailing across a mound of garbage as it headed down towards the chicks. Hank saw it, too, and swore and threw a stone at it. We quickly realized the futility of the act, however, as rats began moving en masse, a grey cloud floating across the rubble towards the chicks. They attacked swiftly, silencing the chicks one by one and dragging their yellow bodies away through the stench and the smoke.

  Hank pushed the speed limit getting back to the city. He carefully set the dozen eggs he’d rescued from the edge of the fire into muffin tins and into my warm oven. Then we sat in front of the stove, holding hands, waiting. We cheered when the first egg began to wobble and crack apart. An hour later half the eggs had hatched and there were six chicks peeping and running around the bottom of the cardboard box, already drying and their feathers beginning to fluff out. “Now what?” I asked Hank. “What do we do now?” “We’ll raise them,” he said. I told him that I didn’t think I could raise six chickens in my oven. Only at first, he explained, until they were older, and then he’d make a patch for them outside in the corner of the garden and enclose it with chicken-wire. I said I didn’t think we were allowed to raise chickens in the city, any more than we were allowed to light fires in backyards or park the car on the boulevard, no matter now convenient it might be. Hank kept putting the box in my arms and I kept shoving it back at him. I had had enough of Hank bringing home little projects for me and so when he shoved the box under my nose once again, I grabbed his arm and bit it. Hard. The top of my head went tight with tension. He didn’t jerk away or cry out, just stood still while I bit him. When I opened my eyes and saw the crescent-shaped imprint of my teeth and the bruise already spreading at the edges of it, I felt foolish. It was a rash, stupid thing to do. “If I wanted to raise chickens I would have married a farmer.”

  “You couldn’t raise anything to save your life,” Hank said, anger pulling the cords in his neck taut.

  He drove to Carona alone with the box of chicks and found a farmer Margaret knew of who kept chickens. In fall the farmer brought Margaret two gutted chickens, one for her and one for us. I stuffed and roasted the chicken for Thanksgiving, and as I watched Hank wolf it down I wondered if it would occur to him that the chicken could have been one of ours.

  When Hank takes the chicks to Carona he doesn’t return for three days. Amy stands in front of the window for an hour past the time it should have taken him to return and then she telephones Jerry, who says he hasn’t seen Hank. She wants to call Margaret and ask, “Did Hank mention anything about where he might be going?” But she doesn’t want Margaret to think there are things she might not know about her husband. Amy sits up late at the window, waiting, counting the number of times in an hour the traffic light changes from green to red. Her stomach grows tense and begins to ache.

  Around midnight she walks through the rooms of their one-storey house. Lit up like a Christmas tree, she thinks, as she turns off lights and sees that all around her in the neighbourhood the houses are solid blocks of darkness. One last light burns in the house, in the bathroom, and she stands with her back to it, looking into the bedroom. The double bed almost fills the room. At its foot is a maple bureau. This is the furniture Hank inherited and brought to their marriage. Did his mother die there, in that bed? Amy thinks, and wonders why she never thought to ask Hank. The mattress, now spotted with the stains of their lovemaking and Amy’s menstruation, had been spotless, absolutely free of the dead woman’s presence. Amy goes into the bathroom to wash up. Hanging on the wall above the toilet are a pair of pink swan plaques. It’s what everyone hangs in their bathrooms, she thinks, as she brushes her teeth. This is in style. In Woolworth’s. But she wonders if she actually likes the swan plaques. She winces as the sweet, cool toothpaste meets cavities and crumbling fillings.

  She leaves the bathroom light on, the door partly opened. Except for the weeks wandering in the countryside, and the nights in her rented room on Ruby Street spent lying awake and listening to the sounds of other people around her, since she has left Carona she has not spent a night alone. Margaret, she thinks. By herself. In that large house. She marches into the bedroom, sweeps the blankets aside, but fear clutches at her stomach. Where is he? she wonders, as she crawls under the covers. Where is Hank sleeping? Curled up in the back seat of his huge car, pulled off beside a country road? Asleep on the ground in a trampled down grainfield or wide awake and frozen with fear of the invisible manifesting itself suddenly, a dark presence, a demon with a huge mouth, bulging eyes and genitals? The last bit of water rises in the toilet tank, the sound a faint hiss. The sound a demon might make.

  She gets up and tries to read her new book on becoming a fascinating woman. Then she turns on the lights in all the rooms, goes into the kitchen, and makes a graham-cracker lemon square. She feels better with the lights on. She wraps a blanket around her and huddles into the couch and writes in her journal, not about the dark things that lie under cover at the bottom of night, but about day things.

  She continues to write until she grows aware of the press of grey light dawning in the windows and realizes that the night has passed. She feels safe now and, as she reads what she’s written in her journal, strangely satisfied. Rain begins falling against the roof, a soft enclosing sound, and she is able to go to bed. She feels the house come in around her.

  She sleeps for several hours and then goes outside and sits on the front steps and sips at cold coffee and waits for him. The pain in her stomach grows sharp and radiates through her torso. The sun has not yet climbed above the peak of Mrs. Pozinski’s house and she sits in the shadows shivering and hugging herself against the pain and the dampness. A pleasant cooking odour rises up from inside Mrs. Pozinski’s house. Chicken soup, Amy thinks. Often the tiny round woman cools things on newspapers inside her immaculately clean back porch. Bits of doughy things that have been deep fried until they look like dried shoe leather and then rolled in icing sugar. She sees in her mind the graham-cracker lemon square congealing in the fridge, the crackers sodden, the lemon filling rubbery. The smell of cooking, the profusion of colour in the sweetpea vines climbing up Mrs. Pozinski’s fence and beyond it, the thick rows of vegetation in the garden which she planted both in the front and back yards, make Amy nervous. Hank planted a small square of a garden out in their backyard but the front is a tumble of holly
hocks growing out of control, quack grass, and a dense patch of yellow heads, the dandelions that Mrs. Pozinski spoke to Hank about in hushed, dismayed tones. Amy had said to Hank, “To hell with what she wants. I like the dandelions. A little wildness in a lawn adds interest to life. It’s our right to be able to grow dandelions,” she told Hank and he agreed.

  The traffic leaps forward once again as the light changes at the corner. She sits through thirty-eight light changes. Useless exercise, she thinks, and spills the remainder of her coffee over the stair railing and gets up. Fear batters at the edge of the day and when she goes around into the backyard, the absence of Hank’s car hits her and her stomach tightens around the cold coffee as she thinks of the possibility of another night alone.

  Try harder, she thinks, as she goes into the garage in search of the hoe to weed the vegetable garden. If she does this, if she tries harder, she reasons, he’ll somehow sense her spirit of good intentions. She can will him to return. She cuts through the hairy thick stems of weeds, which spurt their juices, and soon the hoe’s blade is wet and glistening. She likes the sound and feel of the blade severing weeds from their stems. I shouldn’t have bitten him, she thinks. I disturbed the natural order of things. The devil made me do it. But Amy knows she has cast the devil that Margaret said she possesses into the basement of her psychic night, where it sits in a corner listening to the footsteps above, waiting for the silence that says she’s alone.

  In minutes she finishes weeding the garden and the paths between the rows of vegetables are strewn with weeds already wilting beneath the sun. The garden appears to be diminished, scraggly, the tomatoes no more than stunted green baby fists. She only likes the garden when it first comes up. She enjoys sitting out on the clothesline stoop each spring, looking at the different colours of green, the wavy lines of new growth set against the black earth, the pattern like that on a babushka Mrs. Pozinski might tie onto her head as she goes off to mass early Sunday morning. Above, a clumsy shaped airplane with a fat belly hangs for a moment as though skewered by the grain-elevator shape of a nearby brewery and its smokestack. The plane hovers for a moment, then it climbs, veers west, and is gone.