The Chrome Suite

by Sandra Birdsell

  Mrs. Pozinski is waiting for them at the fence as they enter the yard. “Yoo hoo, missus,” she calls. “I don’t like it to bother you, but I find glass on my sidewalk. Your boy, he throw drink bottle into my yard yesterday.”

  “Uh uh, no I didn’t,” Richard says and backs away from the woman’s accusing finger.

  “I’ll come over and clean it up,” Amy says wearily. No peaches for dessert, a half a pound of bacon she doesn’t really need, and an irate neighbour. What next?

  “Good, good,” Mrs. Pozinski says. “Boy oh boy, broken glass, big trouble.”

  “I’m sure he didn’t do it on purpose,” Amy says. “I’ll speak to him.” She sends Richard into the house with the bacon and then follows the woman down the walk to the broken pop bottle. As she bends and gingerly picks at the thin slivers of glass, she winces with pain. A bubble of blood rises on her finger.

  They keep the Band-Aids on the top shelf in the bedroom closet and out of reach or else they’d find them plastered on Richard’s toys or on cracks in the walls, his attempts to “fix” things. She jumps and makes a grab for the box on the shelf and a clear plastic bag falls to the floor at her feet. Inside it are dozens of plastic monkeys, amber, green, red, the kind used to decorate fancy cocktails. But something else captures her attention. A bank passbook. She opens it and the figures jump from the page. Two thousand and eight hundred dollars. She sits down on the bed. Each entry, the precise accounting of deposits, interest payments, each figure a hammer blow. Bitterness fills her mouth. Here I am, she thinks, a juggler, trying to keep all the balls in the air and he’s hoarding money in a savings account. The unfairness of this settles heavily in her chest. Her hands shake as she slips the passbook back into its plastic sleeve.

  Richard lies on his stomach under the kitchen table shielding something with his arm. “I’m making a surprise,” he says. “You’re going to like it.”

  “I sure hope it’s not the kind of surprise you gave Mrs. Pozinski,” Amy says drily. Damn him, Amy thinks, the cheap bastard.

  “I didn’t do it.”

  “I’m going outside for a while. I’ll be out in the backyard if you need me, okay?”

  “I’ll call you when my surprise is finished.” He bends over his work, scribbling furiously.

  Amy lies back in the chaise lounge facing the garden. She looks up at the latticework of wires crisscrossing the sky above her yard, at the chokecherry bush growing wild beside the battered garbage cans, thinking: Almost three thousand dollars. Thinking of his meagre gifts in the past, a roasting pot for Christmas, a second-hand synthetic Persian lamb jacket, the cheap Woolworth’s nightgowns. Thinking: Here I am, twenty-six years old, with a mouthful of plastic teeth. It isn’t fair. But it’s his secretiveness that unnerves her. What else, she wonders, has he concealed? She sees Selena across the street, closing her gate and teetering off on very high heels to the corner and the bus. To work, Amy thinks, and realizes that she envies Selena. Amy isn’t at all certain what courses she would take even if she did go to university. Three thousand dollars is a lot of courses. But she doesn’t want Hank’s money. She wants to be like Selena, to have the freedom a job allows, to weigh possibilities and make decisions. Maybe she should take a course in psychology. She would like to try and learn how to understand herself better. Or perhaps she could become a teacher; or a medical lab technician who tracks down the insufficiencies of human fluids or the presence of abnormal cells, records the hot and cold of the body’s climate zones. She would like to be in a position of saving people. Whatever, she would not study what Mel had and become a snob who gets her kicks being recognized by waiters. I want to do something, she thinks, and feels the pressing urge just to do. Then she hears a scream inside the house. It yanks her to her feet. Richard meets her at the door, his face gone pale, his mouth open, and his words jumble together. “Mommy, Mommy, oh, oh, oh.”

  “What is it?”

  “Fire.” He points towards the kitchen.

  As Amy bounds up the stairs two at a time she can see in the kitchen doorway the reflection of orange light dancing on the refrigerator door and as she enters, then the fire itself, shooting up the wall from the garbage can. She grabs a pot of leftover coffee from the counter and sloshes it onto the flames. The coffee sizzles and the fire draws back under cover of a sheet of smoke. Then she flings water from the dishpan, quenching the flames. The smoke rises and billows throughout the room, dark and thick, making her eyes and throat smart. Pieces of burnt paper swirl up near the ceiling and then softly float down onto the table, the countertop, her head and shoulders. Amy opens the window as wide as it will go and both the front and back doors. Her canvas running shoes are tinged black with soot and the wallpaper and ceiling around the garbage can glisten silky black.

  “Richard! What the hell happened?” He enters the kitchen rubbing his eyes against the sting of smoke. “You almost burned the house down! What were you doing?” She’s an inch from hysteria.

  “I was baking a cake,” he says. “I was baking you a cake.” He points and she sees the broiler element in the oven glowing red.

  She forces herself to lower her voice so that he will not retreat into stubborn silence. “What do you mean, baking a cake?”

  His eyes shift to a pie plate lying on the floor and a tea-towel beside it, slightly singed. Amy squats in front of him and looks into his fear-filled eyes. “It’s okay, Richard, everything’s okay. Just tell me the whole story, all right?”

  “I put the cake in the oven,” he says, blinking the way Hank does and twisting a corner of his tee shirt around one finger.

  “And then what?”

  “It started on fire and so I put it in the garbage.”

  “Put what, Richard? I don’t see anything here.”

  “It burned. It was a paper cake.”

  The evidence of this lies under the kitchen table, the crayons, scissors, and brown paper. Her surprise.

  She draws him into herself, holding him against her tightly. She feels the sticky warmth of his hands sliding about her neck in a hug and the tickle of his moist lashes against her face. “It’s okay, honey,” she hears herself say. Positive reinforcement, she has read somewhere, for telling the truth. “I’m glad you told me. Would you like to make a real cake some time?”

  He nods and leans heavily into her breasts, clinging, wanting to stay.

  She pats his back, draws his hands from her neck, and moves away. “Well, that’s what we’ll do then. Not now, but another day. Soon, okay?”

  An hour later the kitchen is back to normal except for the lingering burnt odour and a scorch mark on the wallpaper beside the garbage can. She looks at the clock and realizes that Hank is late. Her joyful anticipation of telling him that their son will do well has faded and in its place is the sour taste of his secret: the bank passbook. His withholding. She thinks she will use it as ammunition to put him on the offensive, off balance, and then she’ll tell him flat out that she’s going to get a job. “It stinks in here,” Richard says. She agrees and so they go out into the backyard where they’ll wait for Hank.

  Richard plays in a corner of the yard where Hank has set down a piece of indoor-outdoor carpeting. He moves vehicles through streets in the town he has constructed out of pieces of wood, bits of broken cement, anything he can find. The rush-hour traffic has thinned to a trickle of cars passing through the intersection on the corner. The day has lost its brightness and the sharp edges of the neighbourhood begin to soften. She watches as Richard gets up and tiptoes to the back of the garden and over to the chokecherry bush. He carries a stone, she knows, and watches as he bends and places it among the others he has laid there. A tiny pile of stones, which they were not to touch or ever disturb because they are “very, very magic,” Richard had said rather vehemently. He cups his mouth and leans forward and whispers into the tree’s branches. Then he turns his ear as though he’s listening to something. He walks towards Amy, carrying a twig that he’s pulled from the bush. “Daddy’
s coming soon,” he says and offers no explanation. Hank, you bastard, where are you? Amy thinks.

  She watches as Richard climbs up onto the clothesline stoop and begins to strip the branch of its leaves. His tongue flicks from side to side as he concentrates. Then he twists the twig until it breaks into two pieces and he sets the pieces one against the other. He lifts the crossed sticks and swings them across the sky, making the ssshh ssshh sound of a powerful jet engine as he pushes his airplane up over the roofs of the houses, over the stingy, gritty neighbourhood, high above and on to other worlds. Yes, Amy thinks. Yes, she will confront Hank about the passbook and ask, Why do I have a mouth full of plastic teeth when we have all this money? She will demand the right to get a job, to make decisions, the freedom to choose.

  Later, Amy runs water for Richard’s bath and then goes out into the kitchen and calls Hank’s shop. The setting sun glares through the bedroom windows at the other side of the house but the kitchen is already dim. She sits at the table in the kitchen nook and listens to the ring of the telephone. Richard stands in the doorway, eyes bright, fixed on her. She hangs up. He doesn’t wait for her to ask, What is it?

  “It’s broken again,” he says. “Can you fix it? I want to watch ‘The Brady Bunch.’ “

  The world outside the house rushes inside. A shrill ambulance siren, the waspy whine of a motorbike passing by colliding against the sound of water running into the bathtub – she must constantly be on guard that it won’t overflow. The stink of the scorched wall, Hank’s absence, his duplicity, eat at her. She crosses the hall into the living room and she sees the flickering roll of the television set. “By Jesus, you little bugger!” she hears herself scream, and sees herself grab Richard by the arm, swing him around, and let go. She sees him slide and slide across the living-room floor. She hears the horrible crack of his head meeting the edge of the coffee table.

  The shift that had occurred overnight was cataclysmic, I realized, because I knew I couldn’t be deflected or driven away from my resolution to make changes. I held my ground in the kitchen with Hank. “Another baby? You must have rocks in your head. Number one,” I said, “with the miserly bit you’ve been giving me to run this house we can barely afford the one we have. No matter what you say I won’t continue trying to feed the three of us on twenty-five dollars a week. Period.” I told him that I had been forced to buy groceries on the cuff at Pete’s. “Fact number two,” I said, “it’s a job I want, not another kid. Selena, across the street, just started cocktail waitressing, and she says she makes as much in tips in one night as you give me for an entire week’s groceries.”

  “Number one,” Hank countered, “there’s something pretty screwy about the system if it takes two incomes to run a family. And, number two, it stinks if a waitress can earn as much as a skilled worker. It just plain well stinks. And that’s what happens because of socialism,” he said, jabbing at the tabletop. “That’s what comes from voting for the likes of Stanley Knowles.”

  I said I didn’t quite get the connection and he ground to a halt, throat knotting with words that refused to be born. He managed to say, “Richard needs his mother. A full-time mother, and not one with her nose in a book all day either, not watching properly. No wonder accidents happen,” he said, his voice accusing.

  I could see Richard from where I stood in the centre of the kitchen, opening the front gate to let one of Selena’s children into the yard. The cut on his head would need a fresh bandage at bedtime.

  Hank’s voice grew quieter as he turned the alarm clock around and around in his hands, and I listened once again as he recited the litany of his hard life – about being the illegitimate child of a single working mother, her early death, and his consequent vow that if he ever had children they would have their mother at home, full time. I said that I would try to get a night job, be at work while Richard slept, and he pointed out that he couldn’t be expected to babysit, not while he was sweating blood to increase his clientele and needed the freedom to be able to get up and go at a moment’s notice.

  “What, to the Lincoln Motor Inn?” I asked. “Is that where you find your customers?”

  He began to blink and his face became a mask I couldn’t read. “I work all day,” he said. “I need to go out once in a while.”

  “And I don’t?”

  “You do, almost every day,” he said, sounding genuinely surprised by my question. I wanted to hear glass shattering, feel the pain of it cutting my knuckles as I put my fist through the window beside his head. Put fear into his flat, smug expression. “And what about this?” I pulled his bank passbook from my jeans pocket. “What about all this money sitting in a bank while I’ve been short for food, worrying myself sick about how to make the money you give me stretch? What about the fact that we couldn’t afford to get my teeth fixed?”

  “You’ve been snooping through my things,” he said and then he lunged, snatched the book from me, and jammed it into his shirt pocket. His face grew scarlet.

  “So what about it?” I said, unwilling to back down.

  “A person’s entitled to save ten per cent of what they earn,” he said. “It’s a smart practice. And, anyway, if you’d known about it, do you think it would still be there?”

  “Fuck your money,” I said and saw him flinch. “I’ll get my own.” I told him then I had made an appointment for a job interview on Monday and that if I got the job I would find someone to look after Richard on the nights he had to be out, “working” at the Lincoln Motor Inn.

  “Like who?” Hank asked, with a slight mocking smile, implying I didn’t have a single friend who might help me out.

  “Like Rhoda,” I said, and that’s when he attacked me.

  No way would that “bra-burning bitch” get near Richard, Hank said. What I needed was to come to my senses, to cool off, he said, as he grabbed my arm and twisted it behind my back. He brought his knee up and bumped me across the room to the sink. He turned on the water tap and pushed me under it. I gasped with the shock of cold water against my scalp as he forced my head down and down until my nose squashed flat against the bottom of the sink. “So what do you think of that?” Hank said, me rearing up, gasping and sputtering, unable to say what I thought of it because the moment I tried to open my mouth and talk, he’d push my head down again to the bottom of the sink and the rising water. “You think you’re so goddamned smart. You think you know everything about everything. You think I’m an asshole, don’t you? You think I don’t know that? You with your stupid smirk and big nose always in the air. Big nose stuck in a book all day. Well, let me tell you, life is not in books,” he said, the words spat out as he released me then plunged me under again. “Life is out there. Ten hours a day. One week off a year. How would you like being jerked around by guys at work? Locked in the washroom, ha, ha, big joke. Turds in my tool box. Hank the Tank. Big dumb Hank. Did you ever stop to think that maybe I can’t stand you? That maybe I hate the sight of your nose? I try to do something. I get my own place. Now I’m being jerked around by salesmen, the sales tax people, income tax, business tax, accountants. And what for? Because I want something better for myself and they don’t want me to have it. They see that I’m trying and they don’t want me to make it.”

  Once again he released me and I lifted my head. Water streamed down my face, the front of my shirt. “No, Hank,” I said. “I don’t think that’s the case –” and then he shoved me under again.

  “If you want to work so darn bad then why not come and work for me, eh? All that stupid paperwork. You think I wanted Richard to have to say at school, ‘My dad works as a repairman at Eaton’s’? That’s why I’m doing this! I’m a businessman! I’m trying to run a business so that I, I, I. …” He couldn’t find the words to continue. Red-faced, the cords in his neck still jumping, he turned away, freeing me, half-drowned, dripping and wheezing. I was stunned by his anger.

  Hank sat down at the table and covered his face with his hands.

  I stood at the sink twisting wate
r from my hair and then sponged my sodden shirt with a tea towel. I saw my reflection in the tiny mirror above the sink. Eyes large, looking black with fully dilated pupils. When I touched my nose it hurt. I was shocked by what he’d said about it. I wondered how it was possible to live twenty-six years and never realize that your face is off kilter, your nose too large.

  “What do you mean, big?” I asked. “I don’t have a big nose.”

  I heard the front door open and close. Richard stood in the hallway staring at us. “I’m not going to play with the TV,” he said. “I promise I won’t play with the TV and I won’t ride my bike too far. I’m not going to be bad any more.”

  “Okay, okay, true,” my friend Rhoda said to me Monday afternoon after the others had left the book club meeting. “When a person is a victim they don’t have to take the responsibility for the things that happen to them. But when you think of it, doing nothing is actually making a decision too, you know.” She curled into a quilted floral chair and her fine blonde hair became a puff ball as the sun slanted though the vertical blinds behind her. In the street beyond I saw the last of the book club women, Sara, get into her car and drive away.

  “By the way,” Rhoda said, following my gaze, “Sara is fucking someone.”

  I saw in my mind’s eye Sara. Tall, thin, with raw hands, a harried mother of four children, who still managed to donate several hours of her week to UNICEF. I said I didn’t believe it.

  Rhoda laughed. “The trouble with you,” she said, “is that you don’t look past the surface. I’d say the guy she’s fucking is about fifty-five, grey, and a little on the heavy side.” She leaned back into the chair and swirled orange juice around in her glass. “She’s fucking her father, if you get what I mean. Have you?”