The Chrome Suite (40 page)

The following day she decides to leave the house, keep distracted, and so she rides the city transit bus to the end of the line on north Main. She walks across a field towards a thicket of bushes and discovers a narrow path leading through scrub brush and nettles. She follows it and steps out onto the bank of the Red River and faces the slippery-looking grey water, the wild tumble of growth on the opposite bank. The air is heavy here, rank with the odours of rotting fish and raw sewer. As she turns to head back she almost stumbles across the body of a person asleep on the river bank, half-hidden by overhanging willows. He is curled up like a child, head resting on a tattered parka. He doesn’t stir as she steps around him, smelling
then the sickly sweet odour of cheap wine. Nettles bite at her bare legs as she scrambles back up the path quickly. This is a part of the city she would rather not see.

When the next bus arrives she gets on and rides it as far as Eaton’s downtown. She wanders about looking at towels and fake gold soap dishes. One, a mermaid, holds a shell-shaped dish on her head. Not my style, Amy thinks, and neither are the heavy cut-glass decanter and wine glasses or the china dinner sets. There seems to be nothing at all in the store that draws her eye, that says Buy me, she thinks.

Then she crosses over into the annex of the store where she bumps into one of the men Hank works with in the repair department. He asks how Hank is feeling and so Amy knows he isn’t there and hasn’t called them. She has listened on the radio for news of accidents. Waited to answer the door to the sight of two policemen bearing bad news. But she knows instinctively that he’s safe, waiting, punishing her with his absence.

On the ride home the bus is jammed, full of weary-looking people who stare blankly into the air in front of them, clutching parcels in their laps. Several have their eyes closed, catnapping. Four or five stops along, a pregnant woman gets on carrying a small child on her hip. She searches down the aisle for a vacant seat. A muscle twitches beside her eye and her face is drawn with fatigue. Amy offers her seat and the woman’s face lights up with a grateful smile. She looks Spanish, Amy thinks, like someone in a Goya drawing. Amy admires the woman’s long, kinky blue-black hair and her quick dark eyes. The child senses Amy studying them and raises her equally dark eyes, smiles shyly, and Amy, against her will, is drawn into a game of peekaboo with the beautiful child. She laughs each time the girl hides her face against her mother’s large belly. Believing herself to be invisible, Amy knows. Nice, she thinks, and begins to feel better than she has since Hank left. Yes, I wouldn’t mind, she thinks. I wouldn’t mind
having a little girl. I would love her and protect her. A little girl like that one. She would care for the little baby girl tenderly, delight in the sight of its tiny, female body. She would tell her stories.

A drizzling rain sprinkles against her arms as she walks home from the bus stop, her step lighter, feeling energized by the little Goya child. The overcast sky threatens to hold down the diesel fumes and the rancid grease odours from the nearby potato chip factory which permeate the houses and even the clothing hanging in the closets. Not the best place to raise a child, she thinks. But a child can grow if there’s love. Mrs. Pozinski comes puffing across the yard to the fence, carrying a paper bag.

“Yoo hoo, missus.” She holds the bag high as she plods through her garden in her bedroom slippers. “I do it my baking this morning,” she says almost furtively. She hasn’t bothered to put in her dentures and her wrinkled cheeks cave in on either side of her mouth. The bag is dark near the bottom, almost transparent with grease. “Take, take.” She pushes the bag towards Amy. Amy is surprised by this sudden overture and notices how the woman rises onto her tiptoes and cranes her neck to look over Amy’s shoulder. Amy follows her gaze to the dandelion patch. The yellow heads have gathered themselves into tight brown nubs tucked in close to the earth. The dandelion patch is dying. The leaves look like cooked spinach. Before she knows it, she is clutching the bag of food, and the round woman, after smiling a toothless, satisfied smile, waddles back through her garden and enters her house.

Amy bends over the decimated dandelion patch. Mrs. Pozinski has obviously poisoned it. She wonders if there isn’t a law against entering other people’s yards and sprinkling weed-killer on their lawns. She marches with purpose into the house to change her clothes and then comes back out again. She works for the remainder of the day in the front yard, cutting the tall grass with a grass whip and raking it to the back of the yard. She stakes and ties up the
sagging hollyhocks, and is rewarded with a bee sting for her efforts. When she’s finished, she walks about the yard with a cardboard box and gathers up the cigarette- and gum-wrappers and empty potato chip bags.

Later, Amy walks over to Mrs. Pozinski’s fence with a pocketful of dandelion heads. She tears open several and watches as the seeds float beneath their parachutes and across Mrs. Pozinski’s obscenely productive garden.

That evening Amy sits on the couch, the lightness gone and in its place the dread of facing another night alone. The couch is a makeshift affair, a box spring and mattress set up on cinder blocks. Above the door hangs a varnished plaque with the words “God Bless This Wee House and All Who Enter.” A gift from Grandmother Johnson. The table lamp on top of the Coca Cola crate is a gift from Mel. The room is bits and pieces of other people. Not her. What do I have to give a child? she wonders.

But even while she asked herself what do I have to give a child? she knew that she must soon give in and have one. She told herself she would love it, wash its tiny body tenderly, and enjoy the feel of its small hand inside hers as they walked down to story time at the library. She told herself these things because she wasn’t wise enough to question her real motive for capitulation. Is it right, do you think, to have a child because you’re afraid to be alone at night?

Amy is in bed reading when she hears the sound of Hank’s car swinging into the driveway and then the engine dying. The waiting, the worry, is over, she thinks, and her heart grows instantly calm. His footsteps put the world back together again. He enters the bedroom, looking none the worse for wear, and flops down beside her, fully clothed and grimly silent. She smells nothing suspicious.
No cigarette smoke, no stale beer odours. He wears a Band-Aid, a badge marking the spot where she bit him. She continues reading as though nothing has happened. She knows instinctively that she must never reveal her fear of being alone at night.

“So who was the guy?” Hank asks, staring up at the ceiling. He wants her to tell him whose baby she lost when she stayed with Elaine in Spectrail. Amy, stunned by what she perceives to be betrayal, reluctantly tells him about Dave the rapist. He listens without interrupting, and when she finishes he gets up to find something to eat. She hears him rummaging about in the kitchen. Elaine’s place. That’s where he’s been. So there were strings attached to Elaine’s generosity, she thinks, sensing collusion. When he returns he stands in the doorway chewing on a sandwich. “There’s no such thing as rape,” he says.

“Oh really? And how do you figure that?”

“Because a girl can run faster with her skirt up than a guy can with his pants down.”

“I was wearing jeans,” Amy says, thinking, Stupid. Asshole. In what lavatory did he hear that one?

He frowns and says that he doesn’t want to talk about it any more. Later, her anger softened by relief at having him home, Amy curls around his warm body. Sleep claims her almost instantly and the notion she’d had of having a baby fades in the light of morning.

But something changes after Hank returns. He’d sat on the edge of the bed the following morning, back hunched, arms dangling, listless and reluctant to go to his work. Once, he complained that sex was overrated. A lot of sweating and a big to-do with nothing to show for it later.

They no longer reach for one another beneath the blankets every single night. Their infrequent lovemaking becomes quick, mechanical, and she imagines him in the bathroom, discarding the condom
and checking himself for damage. He hits Amy in the chest with the implication that it is not life, his job, his inadequacies, but her, Amy. It is she who takes too much from him.

One morning Amy is lying in bed watching Hank stumble about half asleep, dressing for work. “Honey,” she says, “I’ve been thinking. You know. That if. …” She takes a deep breath. “I wouldn’t mind trying for a baby. I think I’m ready.”

He has one leg in and the other out of his trousers. She can tell by his expression that he’s startled by what she’s said.

“You sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure.”

“Well, let’s get started then.” He laughs, self-conscious and suddenly shy as he approaches the bed.

“You’ll be late for work.”

“Who cares?” He sheds his clothing quickly.

His breath fans through Amy’s hair as he lies on top of her and she wonders fleetingly, What have I done? She opens her legs to him. Maybe I won’t be able to get pregnant, she thinks. She bites his shoulder and he gasps and comes and she becomes pregnant instantly.

uring the years that followed, she read books on the care and feeding of a child until she knew by heart and could recite the symptoms of croup, whooping cough, mumps, and colic. Once she and Hank with Richard in arms attended a meeting in a neighbourhood church basement filled with anxious parents who had come to hear a children’s aid worker speak on how to develop a healthy parent-child relationship. She listened and grew worried and didn’t have any questions at the end of the session. Silent for once, Hank had remarked. Amy the Agitator, tongue-tied. They went home and she put Richard to bed. It isn’t enough that I have learned how to keep him alive, she thought, as she stood looking at him
.

She became determined from that point on to be creative. She required that Richard stamp in rain puddles, for instance, and showed him how. They made mud cakes and, later, kites, climbed the tree in the front yard. Instead of scolding him she’d laughed when once he crawled among the racks of lingerie in Eaton’s, emerging wearing a black brassiere. She wrote these things down and at the end of the day would sometimes read them to Hank
.

But there were times when she had nothing to write. Or chose not to write, because she knew she wouldn’t be able to bear going back some day and reading what she had written
.

FRIDAY
,
JUNE
18, 1976.
MOTHER ARRESTED FOR SHOPLIFTING
. Amy pictures the headline as she stands among the shelves of food in Pete’s store. Shoplifting: the shortest distance between two points. Which in this case are: twenty-five dollars every Saturday and the presence of food in the refrigerator seven days later. Thank you, Shirley Cutting. She checks the mirror hanging on the wall behind the meat counter. Pete has his back turned to the room as he bends over a box of toilet paper and so Amy drops the jar of peanut butter, crunchy, Richard’s favourite, into her jacket pocket. And peaches, too, she thinks, to garnish the leftover bread pudding. Peaches and peanut butter. As she moves down the aisle she imagines the column.

The brass bell above the door jangles suddenly, startling Amy, and the can of peaches drops to her feet, rolls across the floor, and comes to rest against the cash counter. Selena enters the store wearing a hot-pink jumpsuit and matching platform heels. She pushes a pair of yellow sunglasses up on top of her head. Like a hollyhock, Amy thinks of Selena’s new look. They let you buy sunglasses when you’re on welfare? she says to herself.

“Hello, doll,” Pete calls.

“Hello nothing,” Selena says. “We’ve got to stop meeting like this, it’s costing me a fortune.”

Pete hurries over to the counter. A roll of pricing stickers dangles from his pocket. “Well, what can I say?” he laughs.

Amy grins as she picks up the can of peaches and sets it back on the shelf. Hilarious. Pete the grocer trying to be cool. She wonders if his dark and brooding mother is crouched somewhere in the dim hallway, listening, and does she approve? “Oranges,” Amy says and plunks the bag she’d been carrying onto the counter for him to weigh.

“Is that everything?”

“That’s all for now anyway. Sure as shooting I’ll remember something I’ve forgot the minute I leave here though.” She winces inwardly, feeling the bite of frost as she hugs a tray of frozen meat patties against her side underneath her jacket. She will have to return for the peaches later. She likes Pete and his store but since she got her driver’s licence she’s begun to shop down the street at Safeway where the prices are lower, as Hank had wasted no time in pointing out, but where their surveillance system keeps a beady eye open and they don’t let you buy groceries on the cuff. Selena jerks a grocery cart loose and rattles off down an aisle, reaching for items at random and throwing them into her cart. “Say, think it would be okay if I charged this?” Amy asks. She holds her breath.