The Chrome Suite (6 page)

“There’s nothing to do,” Amy says as she enters the kitchen.

Margaret starts, her concentration broken. She spits out a row of pins into a china dish beside the sewing machine and peers at Amy through heavy locks of auburn curls. “It’s too darn hot to do anything anyway. And tell me, what were you doing up in my bedroom?”

Just then the spring on the screen door twangs as the door opens. Bunny North enters the porch, calling “Howdy,” and Amy is spared the necessity of inventing a reason or denying having been in Margaret’s room again.

“Hi ya, Short Stuff, what’re you up to today?” Bill’s wife, Bonny North, or Bunny, as she has been called since she and Margaret attended grade school, puckers her pink little mouth and kisses Amy on the end of the nose in passing. Bunny’s top lip has not grown since she was ten years old. A bicycle accident, Margaret had explained to them as a warning. A fall, and Bunny lost three permanent teeth. The original bridge with its porcelain buck-teeth was never replaced, and as she grew into adulthood her top lip shrank to compensate for the child-size teeth. Bunny is short and on the chubby side and seems to bounce rather than walk as she crosses the kitchen. She carries a paper bag, which crackles noisily as she sets it down on the floor. “We definitely haven’t been living right,” she says, flapping the top of her blouse to fan her chest. She pulls out a chair, sits down.
Woosh
, it says. “Bet you could cook an egg on the sidewalk.” A newspaper reporter had done just that the day before and the kids in Carona are stealing eggs now from their mothers’ refrigerators and scrambling them on the hoods of cars parked downtown. As Bunny leans forward Amy sees that freckled hump at the base of her neck. A dowager’s hump,
Margaret calls it, a warning against incorrect posture. The fleshy hump, the atrophied top lip, the ever-present dark shadows beneath her eyes make Bunny appear perpetually wounded.

Margaret’s eyes flicker across Bunny’s body. She wonders if she and Bill had made love the previous night. “Heading up to the lake this weekend?” she asks.

“Will Tim ever finish work on the jalopy?” Bunny snaps back. They laugh. “Lucky to go before summer’s over.” Bunny has recently inherited a cottage at the lake but they seldom go there because Bill’s electrical business has become a thriving enterprise. He works long hours, weekends, installing new appliances, pushing and pulling wires through walls of wooden slats, plaster, and horsehair insulation, crawling across roofs to adjust television antennas towards the signal, electrifying the barns outside of town for milking machines and automatic feeders. Bill’s reluctance to take time off work is a source of irritation for Bunny; the amount of time Timothy spends working on his Whisky Six ‘29 Studebaker when he’s not on the road is Margaret’s sore spot.

Amy likes to study the contrasts between these two women. Bunny North wears her sleeveless blouse hanging free over her red pedal-pushers, safety pin at the side closing, and a bra strap slides halfway down her arm. Her voice is like her mouth, child-size. Sometimes whiny or sing-song, inflected with exaggerated emotions. Any sternness she has is fake and gives way in moments to a soft recanting of whatever empty threats she’s uttered. Her children are scamps, Margaret says, unruly scamps.

Margaret is more complicated. She’s like her bedroom upstairs. Its papered walls, dull-green with delicate apple blossoms unfolding from floor to ceiling, the white wicker furniture say to the observer “cool,” “calm.” But there’s an edginess in the careful arrangement of the room, in the studied placement of her engraved silver vanity set,
its brush and comb and jars reflected in the three-sided mirror of her bureau. Amy can’t look at the wide bed without thinking of a line she read in Margaret’s “Blue Book.” “My bed is winter,” Margaret had written.

Amy listens as the women’s talk leaps from the progress of Bunny’s garden, which she complains is too wet to weed and growing fast, and the bed-wetting problem of Mindy, Bunny’s thumb-sucking oldest child, to Margaret’s complaints about mosquitoes and the price of blade roast at the butcher shop. Throughout this their voices mix with John Diefenbaker’s monotonous intonation of promise for social justice. Amy has seen this man on television amid all the remedies advertised for the relief of indigestion, bloating, irregular bowels. She’s seen him in the newspaper. In posters in windows his eyes follow her wherever she goes in Carona. He wags his finger at her and his hound-dog jowls quiver as he winds up to make a speech.

The women’s conversation takes on a new tone. Their voices drop and the talk becomes coded, punctuated by a raised eyebrow and the occasional shift of a shoulder in the direction of the dining room where the voice of the girl Elsa Miller, clipped and precise in her determination to rid it of its German accent, rises above the radio and the rhythmic pinging of the fan blade.

“Why would she do such a thing?” Bunny repeats the question Margaret has asked. “Well, because she doesn’t want anyone to know that she’s used goods, I suppose. It’s convenient. She passes Elsa off as being her mother’s child and she becomes the big sister.”

Margaret appears to savour this idea as though it’s a piece of chocolate but she waves her hand to dismiss it. “Go on, Bun, that’s just gossip.”

“Wait,” Bunny says, clearly offended, but Jill enters the room then and their talk breaks off. Margaret’s eyes follow Jill as she crosses the room. She enjoys the image of Jill reaching for a glass
in the cupboard, her thick dark braids shifting against her back with the movement. The sight of Jill’s long, tanned legs and bony child-haunches beneath the pink-striped shorts pleases Margaret. When she looks at Jill she imagines herself at the same age. She doesn’t see the presence of illness in the bruises on Jill’s shin and thigh or notice her paleness, a shadow lying beneath her strong, tanned face.

Elsa enters the kitchen and Margaret’s pleasure vanishes. She tries to conceal her dislike for Elsa as the girl swoops down on the blouse pattern lying on the table, gushing over it. Yes, Margaret replies drily, she
is
making a blouse. Yes, it should be quite nice when finished. The tendons in her neck grow taut with the effort to be civil. Elsa senses Margaret’s hostility and retreats. She fiddles with her earring, turning the gold hoop around and around, and wonders why the woman doesn’t like her. She dresses old, Margaret thinks, a miniature of the two women who had accompanied her to the skating rink last winter. They’d made a noisy entrance, stamping snow from their boots and speaking to one another in German. They’d headed straight for the bench nearest the oil burner; brassy, Margaret thought. When they shrugged free from their heavy fur coats, they revealed clunky and overdone-looking amber and coral beads. Their leather gloves concealed rings, too, with large and well-cut stones.
Meine Mutter
, Elsa had said, as she introduced the older grey-haired woman to them, and the young woman, whose harsh-red hair and preference for orange lipstick made her appear sullen and hard, was her sister, she’d said. But Bunny could be right, Margaret thinks now. The woman is too old. She would have been well past child-bearing age when Elsa was born. The rumour that the younger woman, Adele, is really Elsa’s mother, makes sense. But while the illegitimacy of the girl is a delicious melt-in-the-mouth thought for Margaret, it’s their jewellery she wonders about; she has come to think that there’s something sinister about the time-worn look of it.

Mel appears in the doorway and leans into its frame. George, a ginger tabby, winds around and through his legs and then settles down in its favourite spot directly in front of the refrigerator door. “Anyone seen my bank passbook?” Mel asks.

Jill sloshes cherry drink into two tall glasses. “Amy had it, yesterday.”

Until then they had all ignored Amy, but as they turn and stare at her, their eyes accusing as usual, she feels cornered. She feels the ridiculous sadness in Mel’s eyes. His meek disappointment. “I haven’t seen your shitty little passbook,” she says.

“I won’t stand for that!” Margaret’s voice is cutting.

“She’s lying,” Jill says.

Amy lunges for her and Jill laughs as she gracefully twirls away swinging the glass of cherry drink, not spilling a drop.

“Stop it, you two.” Margaret grabs a fist of her own hair and twists it as if she wants to yank their voices from her head. Amy lunges again and Jill darts behind Elsa.

“If you don’t stop fighting this minute, you’ll make it storm,” Margaret warns.

Amy wants to pinch Jill’s arm but Jill raises them above her head. The movement causes her halter top to ride up, exposing a slash of tanned midriff. Amy pinches her there instead. Hard. Jill shrieks and glass shatters against the floor. Cherry drink spatters on their legs and spreads out in a crimson pool around their feet.

Bunny leaps up and rushes to the sink for the dishrag. Elsa stoops and begins to gather bits of broken glass. “It’s the heat,” Bunny says. “It’s getting to all of us.”

“Oh, I know. You’re right.” Margaret’s arm drops to her side. “But it’s no excuse for bad behaviour. You need a paddling.” She shakes her finger at Amy. Mel snorts. As if Margaret has ever paddled any of them.

As Amy retreats through the back porch she hears Mel speaking to Margaret. “What do you think?” he says. “Elsa has invited Jill and
me to go to the Lutheran Sunday School picnic tomorrow. In the city. Think it would be okay?”

Amy stops in the doorway to listen. “I don’t know,” Margaret says after a slight pause. “I suppose so. Well, all right, but only if you take Amy too.” Amy smiles, sensing their immediate disappointment. She opens the screen door as wide as the spring will allow and lets it fly.

“Amy!” Margaret howls. “When will you learn how to close a door!”

I remember that I ran across the school yard, carrying my father’s camera against my chest. The day seemed to be bleached by the sun, the colours faded. The baseball diamond, the school building radiated heat. I cut through the
RCMP
compound and its squat two-storey red brick building. Behind it, and seemingly ironed flat against the sky, was the silver bullet-shaped water tower,
CARONA
painted in shiny black enamel. Once I was out of view of the veranda, I slowed to a walk. I cut through the front and back yards of houses, heading towards the cemetery at the edge of the town and, beside it, my grandparents’ house. I walked head down, watching my feet. I imagined that I floated across a body of water. I became the girl on the inside cover of
The Book of Knowledge
, floating on top of a book towards a strange new horizon. I passed by a Chinese junk with red and gold sails, going on towards a city where a rocket thrust up through a yellow and turquoise sky I floated towards faces carved in the side of a mountain, cannons aimed at belts of snow hanging above valleys, a fountain spewing, water arching over menacing-looking totem poles. There was just one thing about the picture on the book that puzzled me, though. It was the presence of tiny yellow moths fluttering alongside the book the girl and boy stood on as
they held hands and floated towards their future. Why moths? I wondered, as I turned and entered the broad alley-way behind the town’s oldest hotel.

On one side of the alley, the white stucco wall of the hotel’s back side reflected the sun. On the other stood the sagging livery stable, doors removed, dark insides gaping open like an old man’s mouth and emanating the odour of another era. It was a thick, comforting odour and I became Amy the squirrel, age two and heading out for the first time, way the hell and gone down the street before Margaret snagged me by the hem of my dress and reeled me in. Where was I going? “She was going to buy an ice cream,” Timothy had said, and would repeat the story at my every birthday and at the same time plunk down a brick of ice cream for me to eat. Spoonful by spoonful, the whole quart of Neapolitan ice cream disappeared inside my round little body. But Timothy had been curious. “Don’t chase her,” he instructed. “Let’s just see what happens.” They sent Mel to follow me and I took him places he’d never been. Somehow, through a wandering, circuitous route, we wound up on the back steps of Andy’s Cafe behind which, beyond a row of rusting oil barrels, flowed the swollen Lucy May Creek. Afterwards Timothy built the fence and screwed a hook closure on the outside of the gate. He watched with a mixture of pride and despair when, later, I wheeled the baby stroller over to the gate, climbed into it, and then went up and over the fence.

As I passed by the hotel I heard the rumble of voices inside it. Then the back door opened and a grey-looking man reeled unsteadily into the bright sunlight. “Holy cow,” he muttered. He couldn’t see me. He turned his back, bent to fumble with his pants. I heard the splash of his stream hitting the wall. I wanted to raise Timothy’s camera and record this but decided not to. Margaret had warned me often to steer clear of the men who went in and out of the old hotel, those who would wave me over and call me “lass” or “darling” or
“princess.” “Go on, help yourself,” they’d say, urging me not to be shy but to come on over and take a coin from among the change held out in their soil-stained hands. I would be invited to choose a nickel and buy a treat. An ice cream. I had been warned often about the promises of ice cream. But there was nothing sinister about these men, so often I did pluck a nickel from their palms, or a quarter. They didn’t seem to care or know the difference. The grey-looking man was lean and stoop-shouldered. He turned and saw me as I passed by. “Hey now, get on out of here. No place for a girl,” he said.