The Chrome Suite (17 page)

Except for Decoration Day fifteen years after the war when we, the children of ex-service men, lined up on Main Street to march to the cenotaph and lay a wreath in memory of the dead, the war was a reality only in the minds of the fathers who had returned and refused to speak of it. The memory faded quickly and, in 1959, it wasn’t bomber planes people craned their necks to watch passing far above, but rather jet airplanes, which had begun to ply the highways of the sky. On clear nights I had watched for that dot of light, Sputnik, to sweep across the dark hemisphere. For us, the war was Audie Murphy crawling across no man’s land on a big screen, and when we’d return from the movie and go to bed we’d pray for God to send us portable radios and dream of becoming stewardesses and airline pilots.

“I could make him love me,” Margaret had written beneath a newspaper clipping of the author Ernest Hemingway. What did you do the three years Timothy was away? I once asked her. She seemed surprised by my question. “We waited,” she said. “And wrote letters to each other.”

I had almost passed Carona’s Family Park when I saw Garth Johnson. I saw the flap of his wide drape pants as he approached Mel beneath the trees by the swings. Mel straddled his bike, stopping to talk. Garth slapped Mel on the back as they parted. Garth continued on, walking in my direction for several moments, and then he noticed me and stood still. He looked off into the trees as though something had happened in the branches that had caught his attention. I turned away from him and kept on walking and when I looked behind me moments later I saw him, where I had seen Mel emerge, stoop down and disappear under the grandstand beside the racetrack.

The town of Carona seemed to end at Alf’s place. Or else it opened up to something else and Alf’s place was the door through to it. At that time I had never been further from town than his tiny two-acre farm. There were spaces between the boards of the rickety fence that enclosed the yard and I could see bales of straw, some broken open and strewn about the barnyard, washed by the rain and bright yellow. The barn door was open and I could hear the buzz of bluebottles inside it. If the horses had been out in the yard I wouldn’t have entered. While I liked the smell of the animals, I didn’t like them. I didn’t like the way they seemed to look at me sideways, snorting suddenly and stomping their hairy hooves against the ground. Their twitching, rippling muscles said you couldn’t trust them. But I knew where the horses were that day and so I unwound the strand of wire on the gate and went inside. I passed by the house. My interest was in the shed behind the house. It was a strange-looking building; it seemed to wear a hat. Alf had built a platform on the roof for his mentally retarded son, Harry, with a solid, waist-high wooden fence to enclose it. A ladder resting against the shed led up to the entrance to the platform. It was not a playhouse, but a kind of look-out for Harry. I didn’t see Harry at first, just his telescope. I’d been up there once, had bribed Harry with Mel’s alarm clock to let me come up. Harry could see almost the whole town
from his perch and with the telescope he had a close-up view of people approaching in the distance. The telescope rotated in a half circle and rested on me. I waved and it dipped down. Harry’s soft pumpkin face rose up from behind the fence. He rested his chin against it and stared down at me, his little pink eyes unblinking. He grinned and saliva dribbled down his chin.

“I’ve got something for you.” I put my hand in my pocket. He made a gurgling sound in the back of his throat and bobbed his head; his way of laughing. “Come down and I’ll give it to you.” I spoke louder than I cared to. I didn’t want the woman inside the house to come scurrying out in her bedroom slippers to see if bad children had come to play a joke on her poor old Harry, or to teach him swear words or naughty tricks.

“Yup, yup,” Harry said, but remained there, his head a round jack-o’-lantern set down on top of a fence.

I went inside the shed. It had an earth floor and smelled musty. I ducked through harnesses hanging from the rafters. All about the room on old doors set up on trestles was an assortment of objects, old clocks, radios, dishpans stilling with nuts and bolts. Harry moved across the platform and dust rained down from the rafters. As my eyes grew more accustomed to the dark interior, I looked among the objects for the camera and saw several items that I recognized: a battered metal dump truck, which had once belonged to Mel, a wooden duck on wheels that may have once been mine. I heard a monotone humming sound behind me, and I turned and saw Harry, a silhouette crouching in the doorway. He pointed the movie camera at me and hummed, thinking, I supposed, that that was the noise the camera made when it was operating. He lowered it and stared at me, his pale freckled face expressionless. He was almost as tall as Mel and certainly towered over his diminutive elderly mother who would take him by the hand on Hallowe’en night and try desperately to keep up with him as he galloped through the streets wearing a
bandanna and hooting like an owl, believing he was repeating our echoing cries of “Hallowe’en apples, trick or treat!”

I took out of my pocket the stone that I’d found in a tobacco can in Mel’s room, a piece of purple quartz crystal, and held it out to Harry. “You want this?”

He nodded. He set the camera down on the table and then snatched the quartz from my palm and popped it into his mouth. He rolled it about on his tongue, tasting it, feeling its texture. Then he spat the stone into his hand and ran with his strange gallop out of the shed and into the daylight where he stood, shoulders hunched, and examined the chunk of crystal. I picked up the camera. The side of it had been pried off and the inner workings exposed. The film was gone and in its place was a narrow strip of paper fed through the cogs. I set the camera down and just then caught sight of the reel of film. It rested on a shelf above the table, bound tightly with an elastic band. As I put it into the canister that was inside the box I carried in my pocket, I heard the stone bounce off the side of the shed and Harry began to wail his disappointment. Must have thought it was candy, I supposed.

Harry spidered in sideways through the door and lunged for the camera on the table. He followed me outside and down along the house, all the while humming as he filmed the back of my head. When I stepped outside the gate he was right behind me. Because Harry wasn’t allowed to wander unattended, I knew I should go and get his mother, but she would interrogate me about my trespassing, and so I didn’t. Harry followed me for several minutes, a long-legged scarecrow with a pumpkin for a head. As I grew closer to town I worried about being seen with this weird, humming person, and so I yelled, “Go home!” as though he were a dog. And like a dog, he retreated, but only several feet, and when I turned away he continued to tail me. I was reluctant to walk all the way back to his house and so when I saw a stick lying by the side of the road, I picked it
up and threw it at him. He didn’t react. His reflexes were not quick enough to shield himself or make him step out of its way. He watched the stick coming, and when it smacked against his chest he appeared not to feel the blow. He stopped humming and lowered the camera, hugging it to his chest. Then he veered off the road, away from me, wading through the tall grass in the ditch. I walked quickly in the event that he might try to follow again, but when I looked back, he was travelling far out across a field.

The drizzle of rain had almost stopped and now and then the sun seeped through the thinning clouds, warm against my arms. I looked up as I approached the agricultural grounds and this time I saw Elsa. She was hurrying away beneath the trees on the road leading through the park.

Later when I reached the post office where I would mail off the film, Mel walked towards me wheeling his bicycle along the sidewalk, its basket loaded with an order of groceries for delivery. “Hey, Short Stuff,” he said. “So where’s the darn fire, eh?”

I sprinted up the post office steps and yanked at the heavy door. Like Jill, I could have replied, It’s my snot and I can eat it if I want to. Or like Margaret, Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies. They were connected in some way, the three of them, Garth, Elsa, and Mel, but I didn’t know how and so I said, “Why don’t you ask Elsa,” to try and find out.

“It’s just like the rain we got in B.C.,” Bunny North is saying to Margaret in the kitchen. Out of the blue, Bill had suggested they take off for two weeks and so they’d packed up the kids and car and driven through Banff and Jasper and then onto the ferry boat to Vancouver Island. “It rained, the entire time, almost every single
day, just like today. Not enough to keep you indoors, but enough that you felt damp all the time.”

“It’s nice. Good for the old complexion,” Margaret replies. “And it’s turning everything so green.”

“I don’t know,” Bunny says, “the holiday was nice, you know. But hectic? Maybe we just tried to see too much in two weeks. I’d just as soon have spent the whole time up at the lake relaxing.” The table in front of her is littered with snapshots. Earlier, Bunny went through the pictures with Amy and Jill, describing their trip. Look how Takakkaw Falls seems to tumble right out of the sky! See those goats leaping across the face of a mountain! Bunny picks up a photograph. She goes over to the counter where Margaret ladles stewed tomatoes into jars. The timbers beneath the floor creak with her movement and Margaret wonders with a lurching stomach how to arrange her face. Bunny leans against the counter, resting her elbows against it. Margaret feels heat radiate from her body and smells the sweet scent of baby powder that always irritates her. “Have a look at this one.” Bunny slides a photograph across the counter. “This is where we stayed the night Mindy thought she heard a moose outside snorting.” A tiny smirk forms in her baby Cupid’s bow. Bill and their four children stand posed in front of a log cabin. A pair of deer antlers mounted beside the door appears to grow out of Bill’s head. “It’s pretty hard to manage sex when you’re surrounded by four kids for two weeks,” she says. “Bill got pretty desperate. The moose Mindy heard was actually Bill.”

Margaret laughs. She has become a straight line inside now and she wants to stay that way. She doesn’t want to think about that day. The moment she’d seen Rita step from Louie’s car on her last visit, wearing that white linen suit, carrying the box-shaped red leather bag, and sporting new red shoes, Margaret knew she wasn’t going to say anything to her sister about Bill. She’d cooked for them and
tolerated the smell of Louie’s cigar and Rita’s lively chatter, how she seemed able to talk to all of them at the same time, the hint of the flirt she had become evident in the way she answered Tim’s question about what she had been doing for fun lately, the following quick wink she cast in Louie’s direction to appease him. Rita told them about being among the first in the city to see
The Naked and the Dead
at a private showing at the Film Exchange for the bosses in from Minneapolis. Even the children seemed mesmerized by their Aunt Rita and loved it when she clipped her earrings onto Mel’s lobes or imitated Louis Satchmo Armstrong’s deep, scratchy laughter. Margaret was relieved that she hadn’t talked to Rita about the day Bill came over to have his dress pants hemmed up. She had simply grown to believe that nothing significant had happened to her. She had made a fool of herself, but it was over now. The inner wincing, the cringing, was gone. She watches tomatoes drop into the jar with a soft plop, their yellow seeds trailing down its sides. “What do you think lesbians do with each other?”

Bunny blinks with the shock of Margaret’s unexpected question. Then she nods. “Oh yes. I heard. Do you think it’s true?” Then they’re silent as they ponder over the Miller women whose lives have suddenly taken on a whole new dimension. Margaret no longer thinks about their jewellery and her speculation that it has been gained at the expense of unfortunate, desperate people. Jews, perhaps.

“They say the women share the same bed.”

“I couldn’t tell you what they might do,” Bunny says. “Even thinking about it gives me the willies.”

Kiss, lick, hold, what? Margaret finds that she’s slightly aroused by the notion of it.

Bunny plays with a silver chain at her neck, sliding it back and forth across her bottom lip. She sighs. “I haven’t been able to bring myself to face it. Mindy failed her grade.”

“Oh, Bun, I’m so sorry.” Margaret sets the ladle down and hugs the woman. Deceit, she thinks as she embraces her friend, isn’t at all like a home permanent that has gone too curly. It won’t eventually straighten itself out. The feeling of having been deceitful always rises to the surface in Bunny’s presence. She pats Bunny on the back for several moments and then holds her at arm’s length.

“I was afraid this was going to happen. You wouldn’t believe what the teacher let that girl get away with during the year.”

Margaret nods in sympathy. She knows she’s supposed to agree and quote a statistic she’s read about poor reading skills and give Bunny something to alarm the other parents with at the next Home and School meeting. But she can’t. Something has shifted inside Margaret. With the straight line comes a flatness too, the inability to feel anything strongly.