The Chrome Suite (38 page)

In our first year Hank bought a used Chrysler 450, maroon, a gas guzzler, nine miles long and nine miles to the gallon; for protection, he said. Hank took personally any traffic infraction against him, and while he wasn’t one to threaten to dim anyone’s lights, he did fume about the incident for days afterwards. He grew quieter, defensive, his fluttering eyelashes often the only betrayal of his frustration or anger. I discovered that Hank had a streak of stinginess in him and that he mistrusted information to be found in newspapers and books; he mistrusted anything he himself had not experienced. I discovered, too, that Hank could barely read.

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-dent 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.