The Chrome Suite (48 page)

Amy hears the tinny rattling of Richard’s wagon in the distance as she rounds the corner at the intersection, the street empty now in the middle of the night and seeming to be a dark tunnel which opens at the other end to the lights of the city centre. And then she sees Richard, the flash of his teddy-bear pyjamas, as he passes beneath a streetlight several blocks away.

“I’m going to visit Grandma,” he says, scowling over his shoulder at her. She cannot pry his hands from the handlebars or make him turn his tricycle around. “I’m going,” he says.

“Yes,” Amy says. The city’s lights smudge together in a blur of colours. “Yes, yes. Tomorrow. Tomorrow you can go to Grandma’s.”

And he agrees to return home then and watches while she packs his clothing and toys into boxes and piles them beside the front door so that he will know that it is true and go to sleep.

The following morning she finds a seat for him beside a matronly white-haired woman who says she’d be delighted to keep her eye on the “little man,” and, as the bus turns the corner onto Portage Avenue, Amy goes back inside the depot and calls Margaret to tell her that Richard is on his way.

Two months later I stood outside the wire fence surrounding the school and watched children lining up before the bell rang. A little girl called Richard’s name for what had to be the hundredth time, wanting him to come and take his place in the line. He frowned his annoyance. The kindergarten teacher came out and stood on the top step looking down at them. The wind tugged at her long blonde hair. “All right, children, patience, patience, it’s almost time now,” she said and immediately they fell silent. Dry curled leaves swished across the schoolyard over to the fence where I stood watching in the chilly October air.

I knew that I couldn’t continue to haunt the school yard for a glimpse of my son, wondering was he warm enough, and, if I didn’t see him, worrying that he was ill. I became jealous at the sight of his new winter parka, which someone else had chosen for him. I knew that it was time to stop riding the bus from the apartment I had rented on Stradbrook, into the north end and past the house, hungry for details of his life, continuing to reassure myself with the presence of Hank’s maroon Chrysler parked beside the garage at the end of the day. Once I had seen Elaine at the front door, shaking dust
from the mop, and I wanted to get off the bus, march into what had been my yard, and shout, “Don’t blame me!” That it was her fault, too, for having essentially told Hank that I had not been a virgin. Everything had changed following that. But sadness, resignation, overcame the urge. I saw Marlene as well. Twice. She had been out on the clothesline stoop bringing in the wash and, another time, on the bus, wearing a Victorian Order of Nurses’ uniform. When she got on, our eyes met and I saw the flicker of recognition in her face, but she walked past without acknowledging me and sat several seats away. Later, when she stood up to get off, green-apple cologne emanated from the skirt of her uniform as she swished by, her blue cape swinging smartly. And in a low voice, almost a whisper, she uttered a single word at my shoulder: “Bitch.” Hank, the single parent of a child abandoned by his mother, rescued, by women inflamed with pity.

Richard went to the back of the line of children waiting for the school bell to ring and began jostling the boy in front of him. Then, as though he had received a signal of some sort, he broke rank and his broad knees pumped as he ran. He reached the stone steps, climbed the iron hand-railing, and straddled it. “Charge!” he commanded, an imaginary sword held high. The three straight rows of children became scraggly, sparrows bobbing and tittering.

Richard, don’t, I wanted to say. Fit in. Don’t try to be different. You get back into that line with the others, I almost called. But this was no longer my territory. I was surprised at how much that hurt. It belonged to the fairy-queen kindergarten teacher, who had told me that Richard was smart. He will do well. Did you know that my son has an above-average vocabulary? I gave it to him. These are words I would repeat to soften the realization that even though other people would now have all the say in my son’s life, I had left something of me behind. Resilient, I thought, as I looked at Richard’s triumphant grin, his ruddy wind-burned cheeks. Happy.

The teacher let him show off for a moment longer and then she reached for him and put her arms around him, peeling him loose from his iron horse. He laughed and wound his legs around her, clinging to her with his soft hands. He pressed his nose into her cheek.

It would be a kindness, I thought, not to appear in his life again. And I was to keep that resolution. The teacher untangled herself from Richard and set him back into place at the end of the line. The October wind carried grit, which stung my eyes. As I walked away from the school, the wind lifted and carried with it all the debris of summer.

When she went to parties sometimes she would drink too much, loosening the tongue of her youth, and she would drop the “f” word in the middle of a sentence and watch how people eyed her with curiosity or nervousness, wondering back and forth with their eyes who this was they’d allowed in their midst. She used the word for effect, but it expressed what she thought they were doing to one another. They talked and talked, doing talking to one another and never speaking the truth with their hearts
.

For instance: the dinner party conversations with other single women where they discussed their splintered, fractured, and worn-out relationships, their histories. They said, more or less, “I left my husband because he kept change for the parking meter in a pie-shaped Tupperware container.” Or, “I could no longer tolerate the way he rolled up his jeans and so I ditched him.” These women, you understand, did not see themselves as being sad-looking, nondescript or pathetic, scrawny or poorly dressed, or as women who evoked pity as they spoke about rape, revealed their bruises – on the streets, on radio talk shows – or traded healing tips with one another amidst the shelves of books in women’s bookstores. No, these women were women who described themselves as “feeling powerful,” “having power.” These were independent, successful women like she believed she had become, television journalists, producers, writers, politicians, doctors, professors. Of
course, they must lie: “I grew out of him,” which, translated, meant, “I was more intelligent than he was,” a sexy thing to say
.

“He smelled like Lifebuoy soap.”

But when she attended one of those dinners and they began to “f” one another with their wine-induced chatter, she was careful never to drink too much and drop a stinky bomb onto the white tablecloth. I left because I was afraid I might kill my son, Richard
.

wish, Amy thinks, as she watches Piotr study the map spread across the hood of the car. She wishes that she hadn’t taken the time to bathe this morning. She would have liked, as in the past when they had to be apart, to keep the evidence of their lovemaking, the odour and moist stickiness of it inside her thighs for the remainder of the day.

She leans against the car, warming the backs of her legs. Beyond, the Trans-Canada Highway curves sharply, disappearing into the trees, and in the far distance she sees the glimmer of Lake Superior and a band of grey mist above it, rimming the almost clear sky of Northern Ontario.

Because it may be his last trip through this area, Piotr is determining whether they can afford to spend an hour or two in Lake Superior Provincial Park with a side trip to Agawa Rock and the pictographs, which they have in the past neglected to visit. Afterwards they would drive straight through to Thunder Bay Home by Wednesday.

Amy notices the bone-white limbs of a single birch splayed against the deep green backdrop of spruce and pine, the spattering
of camomile and blue aster beside the road. Where does he leave off and I begin? she wonders, as she hears the sharp crack of a rifle shot in the distance and then its faint echo. “I thought guns weren’t allowed in a provincial park,” she says.

The Savage single shot .22 rifle cracked once again and its echo reverberated among the trees beside the highway. It was a clean, distinctive sound, but for the hitchhiker it was muffled by the cotton wads in his ears. He lowered the barrel and watched as blue-black wings clutched at the air and a raven climbed awkwardly up and away into the forest. The rifle’s sights were just slightly off, high. A branch swayed under the bird’s weight. Winged it, he thought, and headed down into the ditch to investigate
.

“A native person probably,” Piotr says.

“Why native?” Amy asks, and thinks how not too long ago they both would have said Indian and not native.

“They have the right, don’t they, to hunt and fish wherever they want?” he says.

She leans over him as he looks at the map and he feels her heat and the hope she so stubbornly clings to. They had bathed together that morning, she straddling him and rising to her knees to sponge her neck, raising one arm then the other, the sponge following the hollow of her armpit, the contour of a full breast, giving him an image to keep and perhaps use later in a scene, he realized, as he lay back in the sudsy water and studied her.

She twisted the sponge and soap trickled down her belly and into her thick mound of pubic hair. “I’m leaving you,” Piotr had said. She closed her eyes and saw them old. Older, perhaps already grey. They carried ice-cream pails and walked among the scrub of the inter-lake in search of blueberries. On the way home they would discuss at length whether the berries would be best put into a pie or eaten with cream and sugar. She hummed and
sponged her body for him and saw them old. “My flight’s on Friday. Friday morning,” Piotr said. “Yes, I know,” she answered, still watching her hands pluck blueberries
.

He slips the binoculars from his neck and hands them to her. The highway leaps towards her, its surface shimmering with heat waves. She scans the forest on either side of it but there’s nothing, no one. The rifle cracks once again, to the north, farther away this time. As she loops the binoculars back around his neck she drinks in the sight of him, his youthful unlined face, small hands spreading the map flat against the car. She believes that he has told her everything there is about himself, while she has told him virtually nothing. He doesn’t know, for instance, that she has a son, Richard, who is twenty years old now and lives in Fort Saskatchewan, Alberta, with his father in a house trailer outside of town. That Hank drives a school bus and is the icemaker at the skating and curling rink. He’d wanted flexible hours so that he could care for Richard. He explained this to Margaret when he and Richard used to make infrequent trips back to Manitoba to see her. They did not come to see Amy. Too painful for the boy, Hank told Margaret. Painful for which boy? Amy asked her mother. Not remarried yet, Margaret reported from time to time, and just as good-looking as ever. But many years have passed since their last visit. Margaret has written several times and was rewarded recently with a photograph of a cocky-looking Richard, hair too long and kneecaps shining through threadbare jeans, a bottle of beer raised towards the camera.

When Amy and Piotr return to Winnipeg, she’ll go up to the closet that holds the trunk. She will say, See? This is me at age three and four. She will read to him from her journals. But she will not show him the baby pictures she has of Richard. She knows that he would never understand. He would never understand how she could have left him.

“So what do you think?” Piotr asks, the sun glinting off his glasses as he looks up from the map. “Do you think it would be worth to go and see the pictographs?”

The pictographs didn’t really interest her. This was the reason why they hadn’t gone to see them before. But she said yes because she wanted to be with him for a longer time and it’s possible she will forever in her mind see the question in his eyes, his uncertainty, his hesitance, his desire to please her, and not knowing which would please, to go or not to go. Do you think it would be worth to go? It would have been better if she’d said no, she didn’t particularly want to go. But she didn’t. She said yes
.