The Chrome Suite (5 page)

It is now mid-June. Amy was among the students who had polished their penny loafers or saddle oxfords and marched down from the school to the Town Hall where they’d lined up for their injections of polio vaccine, and then, because of the unusual heat and their tender arms, they were sent home early. She’s walking home now, alone, as she almost always is. She doesn’t realize how ridiculous she looks, comical the way she walks, leading with her chin, her wispy, nondescript-coloured hair held flat against her head with a
row of bobby pins on either side. And even though she’s nine years old, she still has what looks to be a milk stomach, a doughy protrusion which the waistbands of her shorts, pants, skirts, work down below so that often her stomach sticks out from beneath her shirt-tail. Her mother, Margaret, has sewn countless tunic-type shifts for Amy, who she worries aloud will turn out fat. But Amy despises those shapeless dresses and paints her fingernails with red polish and pins her hair flat on either side of her head. She dabs Margaret’s cologne behind her ears even though it makes her eyes water and mucus run from her nose in two thick rivulets, which she clears from time to time, a reflex action, on the back of her arm. Her knees are bony knobs and often peppered with scabs where the skin has been scraped away. Her feet are large for her body and as she walks home along the sidewalk they flap against the concrete like duck feet.

Her feet stop flapping as she squats and tumbles a large rock away from the base of a tree. Holy, she thinks, as she sees the variety of insects. Holy cow, holy poop. She sees flat grey slugs, rust-coloured centipedes, a pink earthworm already drilling its way back into the dark, damp earth. She sets her pencil box down and picks at the worm, amazed at how it clings tightly to the earth. She yanks and it lets loose and she has it, a ropy pinkish thick worm which curls and lashes about in the air in front of her nose. Musty-smelling. She feels its strong muscles working. Why does it loop and twitch like that? Is it afraid of her? she wonders. She sets it down against the warm pavement. What’s inside it? Earth? She knows very well what’s inside it. She takes her metal-edged wooden ruler from her pencil box. She hesitates for a moment and then decides. She brings down the ruler swiftly onto the worm and saws it in half. Holy yuck, she thinks, disgusted by the blob of white juice bubbling out. And it’s all over her ruler too. Worm juice. Nothing has changed. It’s still white worm juice inside. She watches as one half of the earthworm tries to get away. She’ll go into the house, upstairs, get Timothy’s movie camera,
and take a picture of the severed worm. White blood, she chants to herself as she pushes open the front gate. White blood, white blood. White blood is poisonous.

“Hi, Short Stuff,” Mel, Amy’s brother, calls as she enters the front hallway. “The brat’s home,” Mel reports to Margaret, who is in the kitchen, sewing. Oh yes, Amy thinks, and forgets about the severed worm as she remembers what she really had planned to get a picture of today. A surprise for Timothy when he returns from being on the road. She doesn’t go into the living room, pass through it to the dining room, and on into the kitchen to say hello to Margaret. Instead, she climbs the stairs to the second floor, to Timothy and Margaret’s bedroom, to see if she can find where he has hidden his movie camera.

Margaret leans across the table in the kitchen cutting out a pattern. She’d gotten up with the sun, drawn all the window shades, and tacked a blanket over the window in the back porch to keep down the heat. Shoe polish in tins lining the window sill in the back porch begins to soften, and on the kitchen counter a tall glass pitcher of cherry drink sweats a puddle of moisture. Memory of the recent polio epidemic lingers in everyone’s minds. Keep cool. Don’t run, you hear? Sit quietly in the shade now. Good advice at any time. Margaret’s hair has a life of its own as it switches in the breeze created by the oscillating fan sitting on the countertop. Every morning she jams metal combs into her hair on either side, but by the end of the day the combs spring loose and bounce across the floor or drop down into the dishwater in the sink. Unlike her younger sister, Rita, who is fine-boned and petite, Margaret is lean and sinewy. At certain times of the month her eyes glitter with a look that says, “Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies.”

Margaret hears a noise overhead. She looks up, takes a deep breath as though she might yell, but gulps back the impulse. Margaret is not a yelling type of person. She knows it’s Amy up there, snooping
about her bedroom again. The brat is home, she thinks. The voices of Elsa Miller and Jill see-saw back and forth in the dining room, their voices indistinguishable one from the other over the sound of the bent fan blade, which clips rhythmically against the wire cage. Mel’s there too. Often Margaret thinks back to Timothy’s objection to her wanting another child. Often she thinks that she should have left well enough alone and been content with the two she had. Mel is the oldest. He is fifteen. His full name is Melville, named after Timothy’s birthplace in Saskatchewan. And Mel does resemble prairie in a way. He’s solid without being fat. A blond, squared-off brush cut. Stubble cut. A fringe of white eyelashes, respectable in length, not too lavish and feminine. His eyes are sometimes blue, sometimes grey. Mel appears to have just the right amount of everything in him, which can be deceiving.

The year when summer arrived so suddenly and early, then lingered long past the time for it, will be recorded as a year of intense sunspot activity, licks of flame spurting from the sun’s skin, and remembered for the undulating veils of aurora borealis and frequent thunderstorms. Those storms, and the heavy snowfalls of the previous two winters, ensured the continuing prosperity of the Midwest.

That prosperity is reflected in Timothy’s furniture sales. He sells hundreds of three-room groupings through catalogues and sample books to independent stores in the network of towns and small cities in the southern end of the prairie provinces. People line up, he says, to buy the kitchen suite, the five-piece living-room ensemble, and the bookcase bed, bureau, and matching bedside tables, with lamps thrown in. The factory can’t ship them fast enough, he complains. The growing abundance of the Midwest is reflected in the Barber house, too, in Margaret’s new kitchen, the green-and-white rubber-tile floor polished to a high shine, the Arborite countertop, and in the absence of the cumbersome kitchen table that Timothy had brought
to their marriage. “This is an antique,” Timothy had explained to Margaret when she objected to inheriting a piece of junk. He told her how the table had crossed the ocean in the cargo hold of a ship. How it had been dismantled and carried off from a thatch-roof house in Northern Ireland to be assembled in a bleak sod hut on the prairie. “Antique” was not then a much appreciated word. Timothy’s only fault: being ahead of his time. The table has been banished to the basement behind the furnace and in its place is the new chrome suite, one of Timothy’s lines. It consists of a table with bowed chrome legs, grey mottled Arborite top, and matching chairs with plastic-covered seats, which wheeze when you sit on them. Farting chairs, Amy calls them. Margaret’s brother, Reginald, runs the family hardware store and so Margaret has been fortunate. She’s been among the first in town to own a steam iron, the Mixmaster, the not so very portable sewing machine, the television console. Bill North from Bill’s Electrical Service has recently rewired the Barber house and connected Margaret’s new stove and the clothes dryer sitting out in the back porch. The next thing on Margaret’s list is a floor polisher.

When Margaret finishes cutting out the blouse pattern, she sits for a moment behind the sewing machine, head bowed as she studies the sewing instructions. “The breast darts,” she reads and feels her nipples tighten pleasantly, pulling taut the string of desire between her legs. Margaret has “artsy tits.” The expression coined by Timothy. It describes the breasts of the fashion models in
Vogue
, the magazine her sister, Rita, buys at a drugstore near the Film Exchange where she works. What Margaret is thinking about as she reads the instructions is how she is going to look tomorrow when she wears the new blouse to work, her one day a week at Reginald’s store. She imagines Bill North entering the store. Sees his eyes veer to one side. Not shifty, just a swift blink of recognition of Margaret’s “artsy tits”
moving beneath the soft ecru fabric. She sees Bill all at once, solid and hard, the thick mat of chest hair creeping up to the base of his throat. Even though the humidity weighs heavily in Margaret’s limbs, she’s acutely aware of her desire to make love with Bill.

Jill’s voice pushes through the clicking of the bent fan blade from the other room. “Ring, rang, rung,” Jill says, instructing Elsa Miller.

“As in ding, dang, dong,” Margaret hears Mel intone in a church-bell voice, and his attempt at humour surprises her. Mel has joined Elsa and Jill at the dining-room table because, for the very same reason Margaret is suspicious of Elsa Miller, Mel is attracted to her. He’s drawn by the exotic sound of her German tongue. George, Mel’s cat, lies curled in his lap as Mel stacks coins into piles so that he can roll them and deposit them into his savings account. Through the fringe of his lowered white eyelashes he studies the curve of Elsa Miller’s mouth as she reads aloud from a grammar book, Jill looking on. Will she or won’t she? Mel wonders. He’s thinking about the dance at the end of the month. Elsa senses his scrutiny and picks up the book and tips it on its end. She raises it then, obscuring all but her and Jill’s eyes and foreheads. Silently the girls agree to gaze out over the top of the book at Mel. Elsa’s eyes are pale blue, Jill’s green with flecks of brown like chips of varnish floating in them. They’re sticking their tongues out at him behind the book. He watches his too-large squarish hands stack the coins. The hands of a banker, Timothy once said, thinking to please Mel but making him squirm. The remark hit too close to home. Mel had always wanted to have the hands of a piano player or a card shark, nimble fingers, the casual flair of dismissal over a fortune lost. A disguise to cover his desire to one day be rich. But the desire could be thought of as piggish, he would have said, greedy. Well-off would be okay. Carona was filled with well-off people. Several were on their way to making their first million. The farm-implement dealer, for instance, and a
man who was experimenting with raising germ-free hogs. The word “rich” was a crude one for Carona. It carried the connotation of ill-gotten gains, indolence, a bloated mind. There were, after all, seven churches in the town of Carona. There still are.

Elsa and Jill turn and face one another behind the book. Jill’s child features are becoming sharp, giving way to the high noon of adolescence. Two profiles, a soft and a sharp one. Mel’s fingers freeze as the crack of light between their foreheads closes and their mouths meet in a soft, quiet kiss. He skirts around these displays of affection. It unsettles him when Jill and Elsa dance together, their breasts touching. Elsa’s are small swellings flattened by tight undergarments. Jill’s, two proud chocolate rosebuds. Mel has seen them when she’s come from the bath, those two hard buds nudging against her pyjamas.

Amy hears the three of them talking as she comes down from upstairs, carrying Timothy’s camera rolled inside a towel. She hears Jill say, “Elsa really likes you,” as she stands in the dim hallway where their sweaters and jackets hang on either side of the front door. She waits to hear more. “Ha, ha, ha, very funny.” Phoney, Amy thinks. Doesn’t Mel realize how his voice changes when Elsa is around? They begin to whisper and chair legs scrape against the hardwood floor. Scheming, Amy realizes.

She steps onto the veranda and into the immediate contrast in temperature. The heat is a sudden blast beating through the window screens. She steps outside into the bright sunlight and her eyes tear. She hears the sound of the sewing machine in the kitchen and then a beeping on the radio that signals the two o’clock news. At two o’clock Amy’s grandparents will arise from their afternoon nap, irritated and quibbling over who has been awakened how many times by the other. Her grandmother will freshen up, dab hard at her temples with astringent to swab the prickle of whatever accusations
are left unaccounted for in the bedroom. Then she will put on her garden hat and go out to straighten things up and Amy will be there with Timothy’s movie camera.

Heat ripples above the baseball diamond in the school yard across the street. Amy feels the pressure of the sun, a white hot thumb pressing its mark into the top of her head. She sees the flash of a curled tail in the air above the smouldering road. She raises the camera and frames the circus performer in the viewfinder: the squirrel which now dashes across the high wire of electricity leading into the school. It’s Amy, she thinks. She chooses to believe that every squirrel she sees is the one she once found lying stunned on the ground beside the school. She’d brought it home in Mel’s paper-route bag. Timothy had named the squirrel Amy because of its impulse to be on the move. Incessantly it climbed the rungs of the bird cage, its temporary home, or up their legs to their heads. Up the walls to the rafters of the garage. Amy felt the urgency in its oversized feet and understood its need to move was serious and so she agreed with Timothy that they would take it back to the school. She’d stood beside him and crossed her fingers and watched as the animal climbed up the sheer brick face of the building, up three floors to the hole just beneath the eaves troughing.

The muscles in Amy’s arms ache with the weight of the camera as she follows the movement of the squirrel. She’s disappointed with what she sees. It would be a fine waste of Timothy’s film, she thinks, and so she lowers the camera. She can picture Timothy stroking his long chin when the image of the squirrel flickers on the dining-room wall, wondering where in hell it came from. A fine waste of film, he’d say. She hears the now steady
chugga chug
of the sewing machine and the grumble of a man’s voice on the radio. It’s too hot, she realizes. Fear of polio or sunstroke will keep her grandmother inside until later. She hides Timothy’s camera among the chunks of
broken concrete beneath the veranda and follows the grumbly voice, Diefenbaker’s voice, to the back of the house. She steps into the porch and is enveloped instantly by the sharp chemical odour of melting shoe polish.