The Chrome Suite (39 page)

Around midnight she walks through the rooms of their one-storey house. Lit up like a Christmas tree, she thinks, as she turns off lights and sees that all around her in the neighbourhood the houses are solid blocks of darkness. One last light burns in the house, in the bathroom, and she stands with her back to it, looking into the bedroom. The double bed almost fills the room. At its foot is a maple bureau. This is the furniture Hank inherited and brought to their marriage. Did his mother die there, in that bed? Amy thinks, and wonders why she never thought to ask Hank. The mattress, now spotted with the stains of their lovemaking and Amy’s menstruation, had been spotless, absolutely free of the dead woman’s presence. Amy goes into the bathroom to wash up. Hanging on the wall above the toilet are a pair of pink swan plaques. It’s what everyone hangs in their bathrooms, she thinks, as she brushes her teeth. This is in style. In Woolworth’s. But she wonders if she actually likes the swan plaques. She winces as the sweet, cool toothpaste meets cavities and crumbling fillings.

She leaves the bathroom light on, the door partly opened. Except for the weeks wandering in the countryside, and the nights in her rented room on Ruby Street spent lying awake and listening to the sounds of other people around her, since she has left Carona she has not spent a night alone. Margaret, she thinks. By herself. In that large house. She marches into the bedroom, sweeps the blankets
aside, but fear clutches at her stomach. Where is he? she wonders, as she crawls under the covers. Where is Hank sleeping? Curled up in the back seat of his huge car, pulled off beside a country road? Asleep on the ground in a trampled down grainfield or wide awake and frozen with fear of the invisible manifesting itself suddenly, a dark presence, a demon with a huge mouth, bulging eyes and genitals? The last bit of water rises in the toilet tank, the sound a faint hiss. The sound a demon might make.

She gets up and tries to read her new book on becoming a fascinating woman. Then she turns on the lights in all the rooms, goes into the kitchen, and makes a graham-cracker lemon square. She feels better with the lights on. She wraps a blanket around her and huddles into the couch and writes in her journal, not about the dark things that lie under cover at the bottom of night, but about day things.

She continues to write until she grows aware of the press of grey light dawning in the windows and realizes that the night has passed. She feels safe now and, as she reads what she’s written in her journal, strangely satisfied. Rain begins falling against the roof, a soft enclosing sound, and she is able to go to bed. She feels the house come in around her.

She sleeps for several hours and then goes outside and sits on the front steps and sips at cold coffee and waits for him. The pain in her stomach grows sharp and radiates through her torso. The sun has not yet climbed above the peak of Mrs. Pozinski’s house and she sits in the shadows shivering and hugging herself against the pain and the dampness. A pleasant cooking odour rises up from inside Mrs. Pozinski’s house. Chicken soup, Amy thinks. Often the tiny round woman cools things on newspapers inside her immaculately clean back porch. Bits of doughy things that have been deep fried until they look like dried shoe leather and then rolled in icing sugar. She sees in her mind the graham-cracker lemon square congealing in the fridge, the crackers sodden, the lemon filling rubbery. The smell of
cooking, the profusion of colour in the sweetpea vines climbing up Mrs. Pozinski’s fence and beyond it, the thick rows of vegetation in the garden which she planted both in the front and back yards, make Amy nervous. Hank planted a small square of a garden out in their backyard but the front is a tumble of hollyhocks growing out of control, quack grass, and a dense patch of yellow heads, the dandelions that Mrs. Pozinski spoke to Hank about in hushed, dismayed tones. Amy had said to Hank, “To hell with what she wants. I like the dandelions. A little wildness in a lawn adds interest to life. It’s our
right
to be able to grow dandelions,” she told Hank and he agreed.

The traffic leaps forward once again as the light changes at the corner. She sits through thirty-eight light changes. Useless exercise, she thinks, and spills the remainder of her coffee over the stair railing and gets up. Fear batters at the edge of the day and when she goes around into the backyard, the absence of Hank’s car hits her and her stomach tightens around the cold coffee as she thinks of the possibility of another night alone.

Try harder, she thinks, as she goes into the garage in search of the hoe to weed the vegetable garden. If she does this, if she tries harder, she reasons, he’ll somehow sense her spirit of good intentions. She can will him to return. She cuts through the hairy thick stems of weeds, which spurt their juices, and soon the hoe’s blade is wet and glistening. She likes the sound and feel of the blade severing weeds from their stems. I shouldn’t have bitten him, she thinks. I disturbed the natural order of things. The devil made me do it. But Amy knows she has cast the devil that Margaret said she possesses into the basement of her psychic night, where it sits in a corner listening to the footsteps above, waiting for the silence that says she’s alone.

In minutes she finishes weeding the garden and the paths between the rows of vegetables are strewn with weeds already wilting beneath the sun. The garden appears to be diminished, scraggly, the
tomatoes no more than stunted green baby fists. She only likes the garden when it first comes up. She enjoys sitting out on the clothesline stoop each spring, looking at the different colours of green, the wavy lines of new growth set against the black earth, the pattern like that on a babushka Mrs. Pozinski might tie onto her head as she goes off to mass early Sunday morning. Above, a clumsy shaped airplane with a fat belly hangs for a moment as though skewered by the grain-elevator shape of a nearby brewery and its smokestack. The plane hovers for a moment, then it climbs, veers west, and is gone.

She goes into the house and sits down in the kitchen nook and stares at the telephone on the wall; white, to go with the pale decoration of the room. The kitchen is small, its space allowing for only the breakfast nook, fridge, and stove, and, later, Richard’s high chair. But Hank had upgraded it, recovered the breakfast nook in a blue vinyl and installed a countertop stove. They’d papered the walls in a pale blue-and-white vertical stripe, which is supposed to give a feeling of height and space, Amy had read. She begins to cry, the sound going nowhere in the confines of the kitchen. Then she thinks about Margaret sniffling her heart out upstairs on a bed and remembers how this always filled her with scorn. Useless, she thinks, and then is startled into silence by the sound of the telephone ringing. Hank. She waits, answering on the third ring, her voice full, she knows, but controlled, cheerful-sounding, as though he had just gone around the corner to the store and is calling to ask what else she needs. But it’s Hank’s supervisor, wondering with a little laugh whether Hank has got tangled up in his wife’s pyjamas today. “He’s in bed with the flu,” Amy says. “I was just about to call.”

Keep busy, she thinks, and opens her new cookbook,
Foods of the Nations
. She riffles through it and decides that she will make an
African stew when Hank returns home. She bathes and dresses to go to Pete’s for the ingredients. She looks like Sandra Dee with her medium-length permed hair. She has dabbed lemon juice on it and sat out in the sun and the tips of her light brown hair glint gold. She rubs Vaseline into the ends to make them sparkle. She has a bright face now, pink mouth, blue mascara. Bright. Ordinary. Her jeans hold her stomach flat and she knows that she could be taken for any one of the sleepy-eyed girls who pass by her fence on the way to Sisler High School.

The sun is high in the sky and the sound of traffic vibrates in the windows of the stores as she walks down McPhillips Street towards Pete’s. She mounts the steps and the eyes of Stanley Knowles greet her from the election poster in Pete’s window. Mr. Knowles has a long, gentle face and she anticipates seeing him whenever she goes into the store. He’s like a grandfather the way he smiles at her with affection. He loves the people, she’s told Hank, just look at his eyes if you don’t believe me. He cares about the rights of individual people, the worker, she’d tried. He’s a socialist, Hank said. Vote for him and soon you won’t have any rights at all.

Pete is busy grinding meat when she steps inside. The smell of too-ripe produce hangs in the air. Selena is shopping. Must be welfare payday, Amy thinks, since Selena’s cart contains more groceries than usual. The status symbol of that neighbourhood: a full cart of groceries and lots of instant foods and treats. Clearly Selena’s not wearing a bra beneath her sweatshirt, Amy sees in the way her pendulous breasts sway when she moves.

“And what can I do for you beautiful ladies this morning?” Pete sings over the hum of the meat grinder.

“Use your imagination,” Selena says.

Pete hides his reaction behind his meat-stained hand. He’s a tall, square-shouldered man, about forty years old, blond and single. Pete the grocer lives behind the store with his arthritically crippled
mother. Amy looks at his feet. His shoes are coated with animal fat and covered in sawdust. He wears pointed-toe shoes with cardboard heels. The laces are frayed. Feet turn her off.

Amy tells Pete she will have a pound of lean stew meat when he’s ready for her and he becomes all business then. She notices the line of his underwear pressing into his flesh as he bends over the sink behind the meat counter to wash his hands. Hank insists on wearing boxer shorts so that his balls can hang free. Very nice behind, she thinks, and catches herself. But she needn’t worry about lusting after Pete, he has eyes for Selena only. A mark, Shirley Cutting had said of him, and Amy wonders how much Selena has taken him for.

“By the way,” Pete says as he slides the parcel of meat across to her. “My Weed-Ex came in yesterday if you want some.”

Amy says her budget doesn’t include money for weed-killer, any more than it did last spring or the one before that. He laughs and says he’d promised Mrs. Pozinski he’d take a stab at it. Selena snorts. “Why don’t you just tell the old babe to take a hike?” Amy laughs but she’s uneasy around Selena, whose mercurial personality is unsettling. One minute she’s beating her kids with broom handles, the next she is roaring across the street to shake her fists at other kids in the neighbourhood who may have slighted them. As unpredictable as a mother bear.

Amy leaves the store and instead of going down to the intersection and the lights she dashes across McPhillips Street and cuts through a yard, passing between two houses. Moisture drips from the eaves down onto a carpet of lily-of-the-valley growing in the shade. The sprinkling of those white blossoms against dark leaves snatches her breath away. They look so new, so innocent in their tiny bell skirts, Amy thinks; lights in an otherwise bleak neighbourhood. She stops to gather a fistful, a centrepiece for the kitchen table. She hurries down the back lane, anxious, wondering what may have transpired during the brief time she’s been away. But her heart
drops as she rounds the corner and sees that Hank’s car is still not there, parked at its usual angle in the gravel driveway.

As she sits on the couch reading late that night, she smells the sweet scent of the flowers. Comforting, she thinks, and goes to get them, placing them on the Coca Cola crate beside the couch. They seem to glow; waxy, tiny lamps. She’s been reading about Joan of Arc and as she returns to the book she wonders what the Maiden of Orleans would do in her position. Pray, likely. She puts the book away. She wouldn’t want to hear voices giving her answers, whether they be from God or not. Life is this Coca Cola crate, she thinks; a squashed gopher. Then she takes the jar of flowers with her to the bedroom and sets it beside the casket jewellery box. She lies awake, turning this way and that, smelling Lifebuoy soap in Hank’s pillow, fear in her own acrid perspiration odour. The clock says one, then two. She gets up and goes out into the kitchen to the tea-towel drawer, which also contains an assortment of nuts and bolts, fuses, small hand-tools, a calorie counter, and her current Hilroy notebook. She slides in behind the table and spends the remainder of the night writing scenes such as these:

Scene #1

Scene #2

Amy stops writing to think. Does Hank have any life insurance?

Scene #3