The Chrome Suite

by Sandra Birdsell

  She goes into the house and sits down in the kitchen nook and stares at the telephone on the wall; white, to go with the pale decoration of the room. The kitchen is small, its space allowing for only the breakfast nook, fridge, and stove, and, later, Richard’s high chair. But Hank had upgraded it, recovered the breakfast nook in a blue vinyl and installed a countertop stove. They’d papered the walls in a pale blue-and-white vertical stripe, which is supposed to give a feeling of height and space, Amy had read. She begins to cry, the sound going nowhere in the confines of the kitchen. Then she thinks about Margaret sniffling her heart out upstairs on a bed and remembers how this always filled her with scorn. Useless, she thinks, and then is startled into silence by the sound of the telephone ringing. Hank. She waits, answering on the third ring, her voice full, she knows, but controlled, cheerful-sounding, as though he had just gone around the corner to the store and is calling to ask what else she needs. But it’s Hank’s supervisor, wondering with a little laugh whether Hank has got tangled up in his wife’s pyjamas today. “He’s in bed with the flu,” Amy says. “I was just about to call.”

  Keep busy, she thinks, and opens her new cookbook, Foods of the Nations. She riffles through it and decides that she will make an African stew when Hank returns home. She bathes and dresses to go to Pete’s for the ingredients. She looks like Sandra Dee with her medium-length permed hair. She has dabbed lemon juice on it and sat out in the sun and the tips of her light brown hair glint gold. She rubs Vaseline into the ends to make them sparkle. She has a bright face now, pink mouth, blue mascara. Bright. Ordinary. Her jeans hold her stomach flat and she knows that she could be taken for any one of the sleepy-eyed girls who pass by her fence on the way to Sisler High School.

  The sun is high in the sky and the sound of traffic vibrates in the windows of the stores as she walks down McPhillips Street towards Pete’s. She mounts the steps and the eyes of Stanley Knowles greet her from the election poster in Pete’s window. Mr. Knowles has a long, gentle face and she anticipates seeing him whenever she goes into the store. He’s like a grandfather the way he smiles at her with affection. He loves the people, she’s told Hank, just look at his eyes if you don’t believe me. He cares about the rights of individual people, the worker, she’d tried. He’s a socialist, Hank said. Vote for him and soon you won’t have any rights at all.

  Pete is busy grinding meat when she steps inside. The smell of too-ripe produce hangs in the air. Selena is shopping. Must be welfare payday, Amy thinks, since Selena’s cart contains more groceries than usual. The status symbol of that neighbourhood: a full cart of groceries and lots of instant foods and treats. Clearly Selena’s not wearing a bra beneath her sweatshirt, Amy sees in the way her pendulous breasts sway when she moves.

  “And what can I do for you beautiful ladies this morning?” Pete sings over the hum of the meat grinder.

  “Use your imagination,” Selena says.

  Pete hides his reaction behind his meat-stained hand. He’s a tall, square-shouldered man, about forty years old, blond and single. Pete the grocer lives behind the store with his arthritically crippled mother. Amy looks at his feet. His shoes are coated with animal fat and covered in sawdust. He wears pointed-toe shoes with cardboard heels. The laces are frayed. Feet turn her off.

  Amy tells Pete she will have a pound of lean stew meat when he’s ready for her and he becomes all business then. She notices the line of his underwear pressing into his flesh as he bends over the sink behind the meat counter to wash his hands. Hank insists on wearing boxer shorts so that his balls can hang free. Very nice behind, she thinks, and catches herself. But she needn’t worry about lusting after Pete, he has eyes for Selena only. A mark, Shirley Cutting had said of him, and Amy wonders how much Selena has taken him for.

  “By the way,” Pete says as he slides the parcel of meat across to her. “My Weed-Ex came in yesterday if you want some.”

  Amy says her budget doesn’t include money for weed-killer, any more than it did last spring or the one before that. He laughs and says he’d promised Mrs. Pozinski he’d take a stab at it. Selena snorts. “Why don’t you just tell the old babe to take a hike?” Amy laughs but she’s uneasy around Selena, whose mercurial personality is unsettling. One minute she’s beating her kids with broom handles, the next she is roaring across the street to shake her fists at other kids in the neighbourhood who may have slighted them. As unpredictable as a mother bear.

  Amy leaves the store and instead of going down to the intersection and the lights she dashes across McPhillips Street and cuts through a yard, passing between two houses. Moisture drips from the eaves down onto a carpet of lily-of-the-valley growing in the shade. The sprinkling of those white blossoms against dark leaves snatches her breath away. They look so new, so innocent in their tiny bell skirts, Amy thinks; lights in an otherwise bleak neighbourhood. She stops to gather a fistful, a centrepiece for the kitchen table. She hurries down the back lane, anxious, wondering what may have transpired during the brief time she’s been away. But her heart drops as she rounds the corner and sees that Hank’s car is still not there, parked at its usual angle in the gravel driveway.

  As she sits on the couch reading late that night, she smells the sweet scent of the flowers. Comforting, she thinks, and goes to get them, placing them on the Coca Cola crate beside the couch. They seem to glow; waxy, tiny lamps. She’s been reading about Joan of Arc and as she returns to the book she wonders what the Maiden of Orleans would do in her position. Pray, likely. She puts the book away. She wouldn’t want to hear voices giving her answers, whether they be from God or not. Life is this Coca Cola crate, she thinks; a squashed gopher. Then she takes the jar of flowers with her to the bedroom and sets it beside the casket jewellery box. She lies awake, turning this way and that, smelling Lifebuoy soap in Hank’s pillow, fear in her own acrid perspiration odour. The clock says one, then two. She gets up and goes out into the kitchen to the tea-towel drawer, which also contains an assortment of nuts and bolts, fuses, small hand-tools, a calorie counter, and her current Hilroy notebook. She slides in behind the table and spends the remainder of the night writing scenes such as these:

  Scene #1

  Music and laughter. Dimly lit bar. People burp or slap one another on backs. Women’s voices, shrill or coy. Depends on the age. Guys play shuffleboard and pool and cigarettes hang out the corners of their mouths. They squint and scratch. Hank sits at a table with a girl on his knee. She laughs and feeds him a huge piece of garlic sausage and grease trickles down his chin. She laughs again. Hank thinks he’s cool. From out of nowhere. Kapow! Amy’s fist, dead centre in the babe’s chest. Then she grabs the woman’s hair and tears loose her wig and throws it across the room. She dumps a glass of draught in Hank’s crotch to cool him off, grabs him by the ear, and hauls him home.

  Scene #2

  There’s blood and glass and crumpled metal. Bystanders say, “Oh God, holy shit, serves him right, drunken bum.” A man’s voice calls out from the wreckage. “Amy, help me,” the man says. Amy appears, a tiger fighting and clawing her way through the bystanders. They hold her back to prevent her from reaching her true love. A loud explosion. Flames. The outline of Hank’s head growing black and then blacker as it dips like a spent candle and rests on the steering wheel. Hank melts away before Amy’s tortured eyes.

  Amy stops writing to think. Does Hank have any life insurance?

  Scene #3

  A lovely place in the country. Green. Streams and cows. Two children play in a sandbox under a tree. Margaret, a grandmother type with hair pulled back into a bun, sits on a lawn chair watching the children play. “Isn’t it wonderful that the nice man had life insurance,” Margaret says to Amy, who is in the swimming pool doing the backstroke. Watching is a handsome man with long hair and a beard, who, whenever Amy presses a remote control button, disappears.

  The following day she decides to leave the house, keep distracted, and so she rides the city transit bus to the end of the line on north Main. Sh
e walks across a field towards a thicket of bushes and discovers a narrow path leading through scrub brush and nettles. She follows it and steps out onto the bank of the Red River and faces the slippery-looking grey water, the wild tumble of growth on the opposite bank. The air is heavy here, rank with the odours of rotting fish and raw sewer. As she turns to head back she almost stumbles across the body of a person asleep on the river bank, half-hidden by overhanging willows. He is curled up like a child, head resting on a tattered parka. He doesn’t stir as she steps around him, smelling then the sickly sweet odour of cheap wine. Nettles bite at her bare legs as she scrambles back up the path quickly. This is a part of the city she would rather not see.

  When the next bus arrives she gets on and rides it as far as Eaton’s downtown. She wanders about looking at towels and fake gold soap dishes. One, a mermaid, holds a shell-shaped dish on her head. Not my style, Amy thinks, and neither are the heavy cut-glass decanter and wine glasses or the china dinner sets. There seems to be nothing at all in the store that draws her eye, that says Buy me, she thinks.

  Then she crosses over into the annex of the store where she bumps into one of the men Hank works with in the repair department. He asks how Hank is feeling and so Amy knows he isn’t there and hasn’t called them. She has listened on the radio for news of accidents. Waited to answer the door to the sight of two policemen bearing bad news. But she knows instinctively that he’s safe, waiting, punishing her with his absence.

  On the ride home the bus is jammed, full of weary-looking people who stare blankly into the air in front of them, clutching parcels in their laps. Several have their eyes closed, catnapping. Four or five stops along, a pregnant woman gets on carrying a small child on her hip. She searches down the aisle for a vacant seat. A muscle twitches beside her eye and her face is drawn with fatigue. Amy offers her seat and the woman’s face lights up with a grateful smile. She looks Spanish, Amy thinks, like someone in a Goya drawing. Amy admires the woman’s long, kinky blue-black hair and her quick dark eyes. The child senses Amy studying them and raises her equally dark eyes, smiles shyly, and Amy, against her will, is drawn into a game of peekaboo with the beautiful child. She laughs each time the girl hides her face against her mother’s large belly. Believing herself to be invisible, Amy knows. Nice, she thinks, and begins to feel better than she has since Hank left. Yes, I wouldn’t mind, she thinks. I wouldn’t mind having a little girl. I would love her and protect her. A little girl like that one. She would care for the little baby girl tenderly, delight in the sight of its tiny, female body. She would tell her stories.

  A drizzling rain sprinkles against her arms as she walks home from the bus stop, her step lighter, feeling energized by the little Goya child. The overcast sky threatens to hold down the diesel fumes and the rancid grease odours from the nearby potato chip factory which permeate the houses and even the clothing hanging in the closets. Not the best place to raise a child, she thinks. But a child can grow if there’s love. Mrs. Pozinski comes puffing across the yard to the fence, carrying a paper bag.

  “Yoo hoo, missus.” She holds the bag high as she plods through her garden in her bedroom slippers. “I do it my baking this morning,” she says almost furtively. She hasn’t bothered to put in her dentures and her wrinkled cheeks cave in on either side of her mouth. The bag is dark near the bottom, almost transparent with grease. “Take, take.” She pushes the bag towards Amy. Amy is surprised by this sudden overture and notices how the woman rises onto her tiptoes and cranes her neck to look over Amy’s shoulder. Amy follows her gaze to the dandelion patch. The yellow heads have gathered themselves into tight brown nubs tucked in close to the earth. The dandelion patch is dying. The leaves look like cooked spinach. Before she knows it, she is clutching the bag of food, and the round woman, after smiling a toothless, satisfied smile, waddles back through her garden and enters her house.

  Amy bends over the decimated dandelion patch. Mrs. Pozinski has obviously poisoned it. She wonders if there isn’t a law against entering other people’s yards and sprinkling weed-killer on their lawns. She marches with purpose into the house to change her clothes and then comes back out again. She works for the remainder of the day in the front yard, cutting the tall grass with a grass whip and raking it to the back of the yard. She stakes and ties up the sagging hollyhocks, and is rewarded with a bee sting for her efforts. When she’s finished, she walks about the yard with a cardboard box and gathers up the cigarette- and gum-wrappers and empty potato chip bags.

  Later, Amy walks over to Mrs. Pozinski’s fence with a pocketful of dandelion heads. She tears open several and watches as the seeds float beneath their parachutes and across Mrs. Pozinski’s obscenely productive garden.

  That evening Amy sits on the couch, the lightness gone and in its place the dread of facing another night alone. The couch is a makeshift affair, a box spring and mattress set up on cinder blocks. Above the door hangs a varnished plaque with the words “God Bless This Wee House and All Who Enter.” A gift from Grandmother Johnson. The table lamp on top of the Coca Cola crate is a gift from Mel. The room is bits and pieces of other people. Not her. What do I have to give a child? she wonders.

  But even while she asked herself what do I have to give a child? she knew that she must soon give in and have one. She told herself she would love it, wash its tiny body tenderly, and enjoy the feel of its small hand inside hers as they walked down to story time at the library. She told herself these things because she wasn’t wise enough to question her real motive for capitulation. Is it right, do you think, to have a child because you’re afraid to be alone at night?

  Amy is in bed reading when she hears the sound of Hank’s car swinging into the driveway and then the engine dying. The waiting, the worry, is over, she thinks, and her heart grows instantly calm. His footsteps put the world back together again. He enters the bedroom, looking none the worse for wear, and flops down beside her, fully clothed and grimly silent. She smells nothing suspicious. No cigarette smoke, no stale beer odours. He wears a Band-Aid, a badge marking the spot where she bit him. She continues reading as though nothing has happened. She knows instinctively that she must never reveal her fear of being alone at night.

  “So who was the guy?” Hank asks, staring up at the ceiling. He wants her to tell him whose baby she lost when she stayed with Elaine in Spectrail. Amy, stunned by what she perceives to be betrayal, reluctantly tells him about Dave the rapist. He listens without interrupting, and when she finishes he gets up to find something to eat. She hears him rummaging about in the kitchen. Elaine’s place. That’s where he’s been. So there were strings attached to Elaine’s generosity, she thinks, sensing collusion. When he returns he stands in the doorway chewing on a sandwich. “There’s no such thing as rape,” he says.

  “Oh really? And how do you figure that?”

  “Because a girl can run faster with her skirt up than a guy can with his pants down.”

  “I was wearing jeans,” Amy says, thinking, Stupid. Asshole. In what lavatory did he hear that one?

  He frowns and says that he doesn’t want to talk about it any more. Later, her anger softened by relief at having him home, Amy curls around his warm body. Sleep claims her almost instantly and the notion she’d had of having a baby fades in the light of morning.

  But something changes after Hank returns. He’d sat on the edge of the bed the following morning, back hunched, arms dangling, listless and reluctant to go to his work. Once, he complained that sex was overrated. A lot of sweating and a big to-do with nothing to show for it later.

  They no longer reach for one another beneath the blankets every single night. Their infrequent lovemaking becomes quick, mechanical, and she imagines him in the bathroom, discarding the condom and checking himself for damage. He hits Amy in the chest with the implication that it is not life, his job, his inadequacies, but her, Amy. It is she who takes too much from him.

  One morning Amy is lying in bed watching Hank stumble about half asleep, dressing fo
r work. “Honey,” she says, “I’ve been thinking. You know. That if. …” She takes a deep breath. “I wouldn’t mind trying for a baby. I think I’m ready.”

  He has one leg in and the other out of his trousers. She can tell by his expression that he’s startled by what she’s said.

  “You sure?”

  “Yes, I’m sure.”

  “Well, let’s get started then.” He laughs, self-conscious and suddenly shy as he approaches the bed.

  “You’ll be late for work.”

  “Who cares?” He sheds his clothing quickly.

  His breath fans through Amy’s hair as he lies on top of her and she wonders fleetingly, What have I done? She opens her legs to him. Maybe I won’t be able to get pregnant, she thinks. She bites his shoulder and he gasps and comes and she becomes pregnant instantly.

  14

  uring the years that followed, she read books on the care and feeding of a child until she knew by heart and could recite the symptoms of croup, whooping cough, mumps, and colic. Once she and Hank with Richard in arms attended a meeting in a neighbourhood church basement filled with anxious parents who had come to hear a children’s aid worker speak on how to develop a healthy parent-child relationship. She listened and grew worried and didn’t have any questions at the end of the session. Silent for once, Hank had remarked. Amy the Agitator, tongue-tied. They went home and she put Richard to bed. It isn’t enough that I have learned how to keep him alive, she thought, as she stood looking at him.