The Chrome Suite

“The human landscape and the complexities of relationships ring true. Birdsell’s ability to enter the hearts of her characters keeps us hooked.”

–
Calgary Herald

“A fluid quality to Birdsell’s prose bids you move ever onward, even into dark and menacing corners where unseen forces bind families, make them crackle with tension, make them unravel. She is that rarity, a consistently
interesting
writer with an original voice. … As Margaret Atwood captured the tensions that divide young girls in
Cat’s Eye
, so Birdsell explores the tensions – sexual, emotional, territorial – that fill Amy Barber’s house. … 
The Chrome Suite
seems to have been written from some deep, dark well of inspiration.”

–
Books in Canada

“The writing is always a joy, the kind that slows the reader down to savour every vivid moment.”

–
Quill & Quire

“A passionate exploration of loss, betrayal, death, and the heartless whimsy of fate. … The writing is masterful. There is an uncompromising ferocity and harsh power to this author’s work.”

–
Canadian Book Review Annual

NOVELS
The Missing Child
(1989)
The Chrome Suite
(1992)
The Russländer
(2001)

SHORT FICTION
Night Travellers
(1982) and
Ladies of the House
(1984),
reissued in one volume entitled
Agassiz Stories
(1987)
The Two-Headed Calf
(1997)

Copyright © 1992 by Sandra Birdsell

Trade paperback with flaps published 1992
First Emblem Editions publication 2002

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data

Birdsell, Sandra, 1942-
The chrome suite

eISBN: 978-1-55199-685-1
I. Title.

PS
8553.176
C
4 2002      
C
813′.54      
C
2001-903820-8
PR
9199.3.
B
4385
C
48 2002

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

This is a work of fiction. The characters described are fictitious, as are the events of the story. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

An excerpt from this novel was published in slightly different form in the summer 1991 fiction issue of
Quarry
magazine.

“Keeping Things Whole” by Mark Strand is reproduced by permission of the author. The quotation from
The Sweet Second Summer of Kitty Malone
by Matt Cohen is reproduced by permission of the author.

The words from Rilke are taken from
Duino Elegies
, translated by David Young (W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. New York, 1978).

SERIES EDITOR
:
ELLEN SELIGMAN

EMBLEM EDITIONS
McClelland & Stewart Ltd.
The Canadian Publishers
481 University Avenue
Toronto, Ontario
M
5
G
2
E
9
www.mcclelland.com/emblem

v3.1

For my children
Roger, Angela, and Darcie Birdsell

Cover

Other Books by This Author

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Acknowledgments

About the Author

–
Mark Strand

can feel it,” I tell the doctor, “right there.” I press the spot just to the left of my breastbone where something swollen lies. Sometimes I imagine it to be thick and flat and the texture of liver, this thing that slides around inside my body, its presence felt in an almost imperceptible movement, a nudge against my bottom rib bone, my skeleton. At other times I envision the swollen thing to have the uncertain shape of an overripe tomato; hold it too tightly and your fingers will penetrate the thin membrane of taut skin and it will spill, a shapeless pulp, into the palm of your hand.

“Here?” The doctor’s breath smells of mint tea. His fingers probe the area beneath my rib cage. Tanned hands, face. A recent vacation, I speculate, spent some place where the sun is stronger. Florida? Arizona? Perhaps Greece or the Caribbean. Perhaps one of the places Piotr and I had promised ourselves we would visit.

“There.” I guide his cool hand. His fingers press down and the swelling shifts sideways, eluding his touch.

“Well,” he says. “You see, it could be almost anything, and then it could be nothing at all.”

“I see.”

He turns away from the table and sits down at his desk and slips my chart from its folder. “So how is your professional life these days?” he asks. “Still tramping off here and there?”

“Fine.” I gather the paper gown closed and sit up.
Living With Hypertension, The Facts of High Blood Pressure
. I read the titles of the books jammed into a small bookcase beneath the window.

He squints at the chart. “You were here back in October before last,” he says to himself. He glances up and smiles. Good teeth, I think. “I just happened to turn on the television the other night and caught part of that National Film Board series, the second episode, the one you wrote? Well, it was quite good, yes, quite, quite good, I think,” he says.

“That’s ancient. I can’t believe they’re still running it.”

“Now then, you’ll just have to get busy and write some new stuff, won’t you?” His tanned forehead crinkles and he squints at the chart again as though the question he will ask next has only just come to mind. “And your domestic life? How’s that going?” He sets the chart on his lap and riffles through it. “Weren’t you –?” he asks. “Wasn’t there someone in your life fairly steady for a while there?” He peers at the chart and says, “Ah, yes,” as though he has come across Piotr’s name. He leans back in the chair, his posture open, and even though I hear voices in the almost full waiting room, the impatient shuffle and cough of the person in the adjacent examination room, his demeanour invites me to take all day to say whatever it is I must tell him. He knows about Piotr, I think. He knows what happened. It was written up in both the local newspapers and in
The Globe and Mail, Saturday Night, Maclean’s
.

“Fairly steady, six years or so.” My feet are mottled, have turned blue with the chill of the room. Old feet, I think. “What do you think this thing could be?”

“What do you think it is?” he asks. “What would be your worst fears?”

“I’m not at all worried about tumours. Cancer. Not at all.”

“Well, good. We’ll do the necessary blood work anyway, if only to reassure you. You’re what now?” Again he flips through the chart on his lap. “Ah yes, you’re forty-two. Well, you know the body is not perfect. I get people in here who expect that their bodies should be a hundred per cent all the time. Something goes wrong, they expect that I will tinker with it and send them home in perfect shape,” he says. “I’m not a mechanic.”

The door closes behind him. I dress hurriedly in the cramped cubicle, bending to slip into my shoes, and feel the swollen thing slide back into place beneath my bottom rib and rest there, a slight pressure against the bone. What do I think it is? It’s absence, I think. And not the absence of Piotr, either. But the absence of me, Amy Barber.
Oh who can we turn to in this need?
I think of the line from one of Rilke’s Elegies. I have turned to the physician. I would like him to operate, carve around it, deftly lift it from my chest.

I had arranged to meet a friend, Daria, at The Forks following my appointment with the doctor, and we rush across the parking lot towards one another, two bright and cheerful birds chirping our greetings; but then, as so often seems to happen, we grow closed and as still as the surface of the river, which reflects back to us the bright June sky and trees on the opposite shore. We spread our sweaters on blocks of tyndall stone still cold from the past winter, the chill a fist curled in the stone’s core. We sit side by side for almost an hour,
hardly speaking, and except for the dogged drone of a motorboat in the distance, we enjoy the silence.

It’s early in the afternoon, mid-week, and the lunch crowd has petered out and drifted back into the office buildings behind us. Although I know it is not possible, still I searched, and had not seen Piotr among them. There is little chance that my eye will find something of him today. Daria has come straight from work and she still wears the heavy make-up she must put on to help her look younger, seamless and smooth for the camera’s eye, but in the light of day her face appears soft, swollen. An overripe tomato. I imagine that if I placed a thumb beneath each of her eyes, the slightest pressure … I avoid looking at her and stare out across the river, at the great shell face of Saint Boniface Cathedral. The drone of the motorboat grows louder and then becomes a high-pitched whine as a small craft rounds the bend in the Red River and enters the mouth of the Assiniboine; in it, a man and a young boy. The man cuts the power to enter the marina and we watch as the boat glides towards shore. They moor their boat, the man giving instructions, the young boy scrambling about, gathering up life jackets, a pink pail, which he swings up onto the dock. The man glances our way, and then I do see Piotr. I see him in the shape of this man’s stocky body, the slope of his shoulders. I lean forward and press my palm hard against my rib to push the swollen thing back into place. I hold it there.

“I wish people wouldn’t do that,” my friend says and turns her face away.

The young boy has a pair of binoculars around his neck and has raised them in our direction. The man speaks sharply and the binoculars drop to his chest. Daria begins to tell me, then, the reason for wanting to see me. She has broken off with the man she met recently. Not a long-term relationship this time, but still it hurts.

“Well, you know the saying,” I tell Daria. “If you love someone, let him go.”

“Yes, I know the saying.”

“And if he doesn’t come back, hunt him down and kill him.”

She laughs and then blushes, slightly embarrassed at having laughed. “I must say, I haven’t heard that version before.” Her on-air voice is carefully modulated and serious.

“I came across it on a tee shirt. It’s crude, but to the point. I think I may be that kind of person.”

“Maybe you have too much time to think,” she says.

I choose not to interpret her comment as concern for my mental well-being, but rather as hidden animosity over the fact that she must deny herself the luxury of self-examination; time will not allow it. She has a job she must go to every morning. She rummages about in the oversize bag on the stone beside her and pulls out a Koala Spring. “I’ve only got one. But we can share.”

“It’s okay, I’m not thirsty.” I don’t want the intimacy a shared bottle of drink implies; my mouth where hers has been.

“On the way over to meet you, I realized,” Daria says after a while, softly. “It’s June. You must be thinking about Piotr.”

It is not as silent as I had thought. Not silent at all as I begin to hear the traffic of the city of Winnipeg behind me, a constant, steady hum. I listen to the wail of a siren, the low growl of another motor-boat making its way round a bend in the river, its sound becoming a roaring echo as it passes beneath the Main Street Bridge, a train as it glides across a trestle bridge beyond, a child calling. I begin to hear a hundred different sounds where I once thought there was silence.