The Chrome Suite (42 page)

“Cheap junk, nothing. You’ve been fooling around with the controls again.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Don’t give me that. I can see and I have told you and told you, play with the television and you’ll get a smack.” She will not be guilty of inconsistency. When she tells Richard he’ll get a smack, he gets one. She raises her hand and he doesn’t flinch. He fixes his eyes on the wall in front of him and seems to transport himself somewhere else. How did he learn to do that? she asks herself. Her palm smarts as she strikes his hand but he doesn’t appear to have felt the blow. What now, Amy wonders? Nothing seems to work any more. This is the part she doesn’t understand: is she supposed to smack
him again, hard enough to make him cry? Is that the idea? Or does hitting him just cancel the debt and leave him free to start over again? She turns to leave the room and senses movement behind her. When she looks back she sees Richard with his fingers stuck in his ears and his tongue out, expressing, with this universal child sign, his contempt for her.

“Jesus!” Amy hears herself say. She grabs a fistful of his thick hair.

“Ow, ow, ow!” Richard cries. Amy has him now. She feels the satisfaction of getting a response from him. He whimpers as she pulls him by the hair across the hall to his bedroom. She has caught him in the act this time. No worming his way out of this one: I didn’t do it. I never had it. I don’t know. She nudges him with the tip of her foot and he falls forward onto his knees and then gets up, moving fast, faster than he likes to move for anyone. But he’s frightened. He will learn, Amy tells herself, that when he does these things and makes me angry, he will pay for it.

“Get onto the bed and stay there!” she shouts. Her breathing has become hard and quick and her pulse pounds in the top of her skull. She has taught herself to parcel out her anger bit by bit, only small amounts of it at a time, because if she doesn’t she will become sick with pain. Careful, Amy cautions herself. Control your breathing. Count. This is not worth two days of pain. She closes the door and crosses the hall into her own room. “Pig,” Richards yells and kicks at the wall. “You’re a dumb pig.”

Forty-three, forty-four, forty-five, forty-six, Amy counts. Yes, that’s what I am, she thinks, ignorant, a pig. She begins to cry, softly, seeing him then, her child on his knees, frantic to escape the brunt of her anger. She gets up from the bed and goes to him.

His eyes are large and sad. “I’m sorry,” Amy says.

He seems relieved. “Can I come out now?”

“Yes, sure, you can come out now.”

He crawls across the length of his bed, climbs up over the metal railing, and drops down onto the floor. Richard seldom does anything the easy way, Amy thinks, as he pushes past her through the hall and outdoors.

“You have to have a bath,” she calls. “Get nice and clean to meet the kindergarten teacher.”

“I’m not going, I’m not going, I’m not going to kinder garting,” Richard sings. The window panes rattle as the door slams shut.

he next day began not with the sun rising behind the window shade in her bedroom but behind eyes closed in half-sleep, the memory of the events of the previous day blessedly unreal, still locked away until her eyelashes began fluttering and dream phantoms shrank in the light of consciousness
.

This was the day following the one when a child’s jacket had been ironed dry and he was reluctantly coaxed from play to be taken by the hand and walked the three blocks to register for kindergarten at a school named after an Arctic explorer. They had walked holding hands and she’d sung a song about raindrops. But when she remembers that walk home now – as it was golden, bright with warm June sun and the newly minted leaves swaying in the lilac-scented air – she thinks of another song. She hears music that is swollen with longing, desire, and she feels like the two Marys in Pergolesi’s “Stabat Mater.” She mourns, as much as she knows how to, her own loss, the pouty mouth, the nimble, tanned fingers, her child, her childhood
.

When I woke up Saturday morning I was aware that during the night something cataclysmic had occurred. Deep beneath the strata,
in the geology of Hank’s and my relationship, something had shifted. If Hank and I were two stone plates floating side by side along a fault line, then during the night one had reared up against the other, gouging and scouring its way to the surface. I felt the tension of the impending rupture as I cooked breakfast that morning, cleaned up, and waited for Hank to get into the shower before I picked up the telephone, dialled the number Selena had given me, and made an appointment for Monday to see her boss about a job.

I’d been reading different books lately. Novels. I liked the Matt Cohen novel I’d read for the book club. Especially the part about Kitty Malone having restless eyes: “eyes that couldn’t stay still were her whole restless story, refusing anything except whatever she could see in the centre of herself.” Yes, that’s me, I’d thought when I read those lines, and felt a twinge of panic. Well, if that was me, then what was I doing here, a mother for life? I’d read many other novels Rhoda had recommended. Stories of men who more or less made love to their wives, waited until they fell asleep, and then got into their cars and drove away forever. The way Timothy had done. I had read about women sneaking out of their marriages suitcase by suitcase until one morning a month or year later the husband would suddenly realize that his wife no longer sat across the table from him. More or less. I had decided that the long way of leaving might not be as painful. I would leapfrog out on the back of a job, security, a goal.

But it didn’t turn out that way. Circumstances decided for me, and by the end of that summer I would be gone.

Later in the morning Hank came into the kitchen carrying the alarm clock, which was in pieces, back and front removed. Richard had taken it apart earlier, amusing himself when what he was supposed to be doing was playing quietly with books or puzzles as the doctor at the Children’s Centre had instructed. “Make certain he takes it easy for a day or two.” Hank slid in behind the table, his back
to the window, and light shone through his tightly curled and now-grey hair: an Afro. Hank was finally in style.

“I registered Richard for kindergarten yesterday,” I said.

Hank asked how it had gone but seemed distracted. Although his stubby fingers could cope with the insides of major household appliances, the minute inner workings of an alarm clock frazzled him and demanded his concentration.

I told him it had gone pretty well, that the tests had shown Richard had above-average intelligence.

“Well, if Richard is so darn smart, then how come he can’t put this thing back together again, eh?” I heard pride in his voice.

I saw Richard through the front screen door from where I stood at the kitchen counter. He had climbed halfway up the chainlink fence and hung there by his fingers and toes like a monkey. He had a good full-sized head. Egg-shaped. Thick, dark hair, which he hated for me to wash or comb. Because of the constant battles we had over washing his hair, I often let it go longer than I should, and consequently most of the time he exuded the odour of a squirmy pup, hot and dusty-smelling. I wouldn’t attempt to wash his hair for a while now because of the shaved spot at the back of his head and the two sutures that laced up the cut. He had examined those sutures with a curious kind of satisfaction, almost pride. They would make him king of the neighbourhood. An accident. He fell, I told the doctor. He fell off his tricycle.

I had thought of that puppy smell on the way to the Children’s Centre the day before as he curled in my lap in the back seat of the cab, clutching up to his face what remained of his comfort blanket, a frayed square of flannel cloth, while I pressed a sanitary napkin against the cut. His sides heaved with energy and life and I remembered the first time I had held him. I had been amazed by the weight of him in the crook of my arms, at how solid that little floating being had become. He had settled into my arms instantly, a slanted-eyed
stranger, and claimed the right to my embrace. Sometimes I would coax Richard with the promise of a treat or an adventure, to have a rest with me. We would cuddle, the two of us, beneath a blanket in the middle of an afternoon. Richard, shrimp-like, curled up in front of me, and me lying there, feeling despair, feeling that a burglar had crept into the house to steal my energy, had sat on my heart so that my blood became sluggish. Sometimes I would lie with him for an entire afternoon, listening for the telephone to ring, for the sound of mail thumping into the box. The warmth of him leaning into me as we rode in the cab spread up to my throat. Richard, Richard, I thought, as I held him against me tightly, watching the grey city glide past the cab window. “I fell, didn’t I?” he said. “On my bicycle. I fell.”

I stood in the centre of the kitchen, hands on my hips to make myself appear larger, as Hank would often do. “Hank,” I said, “I want to talk to you.”

“Yah?” he said, still concentrating intently on the inner workings of the alarm clock. “Shoot.”

The telephone rang, startling both of us. Hank looked up at me and then his eyes shifted away to the hall and front door where Richard peered in at the both of us, his invisible antennae quivering. I reached the telephone before Hank. My friend, Rhoda, had a way of sounding breathless whenever she called, as though the house was burning down around her and she was pouring water on it and making last-minute calls before the firemen arrived. “Hey,” I think she may have said, “I’m just checking with you. I can’t talk. Would you believe it? Tom’s chosen this very moment to come traipsing in the door with six of his friends. Six, Amy. Six fucking boys. I’ve got to go and barricade the fridge. Just checking about the book club. You still coming?”

“Of course I’m coming to the book club on Monday,” I said, loud enough to remind Hank. Because he worked Saturday afternoons he
took off a half-day on Mondays and he’d promised to keep Richard for an hour and let me use the car.

“Well, you never know,” Rhoda said, and implied with her tone the possibility of mysterious and exotic happenings in my life. Intrigue, gossip, the things Rhoda fed on. When she talked, words spilled like water into the kitchen sink, a bubbling torrent of sentences, seemingly without direction, but then funnelling into prying questions and sucking me in.

Hank cleared his throat to indicate impatience. Whenever the telephone rang and it was for me, Hank suddenly had to use it. To make contacts, appointments to pick up appliances in need of repair. I told Rhoda that I had finished reading the book we were supposed to discuss on Monday but that I didn’t understand it. I had found it rather strange.

“Of course it’s strange, dummy,” Rhoda said. “It isn’t a Harlequin, after all.” Rhoda insulted all the women in the book club equally. Once she said to me, “You are an anomaly.” And another time, “You are an obsequious person.” I went out and bought my own dictionary, and more and more since I’d met Rhoda I’d felt compelled to reach for it. I needed a clear definition for the word “victim.” We were reading Margaret Atwood’s novel
Surfacing
. I enjoyed reading it, I told Rhoda, but I didn’t understand the ending, the point that was being made. I didn’t tell Rhoda about my dream, though. Of me standing in the bow of a ship and Margaret Atwood standing beside me. Her hair twitched in the wind. She pointed across the watery horizon, off at something in the distance. “I’m trying,” I said. “But I can’t see what you see.” “Open your eyes. Look, it’s over there, plain as day,” she said, her voice sounding like Rhoda’s. Then she disappeared.

“What’s to understand?” Rhoda asked. “The woman in the novel begins to take responsibility. She begins to reject the idea of being a victim. Simple. There, it’s yours. I give it to you. Use it in the discussion and I’ll let everyone think it was your idea. Thomas!” she
shouted. “Jesus! Boys! They’re so insufferably smug at this age. They make me want to puke. Oh, why couldn’t I have had just one girl?”

The alarm buzzed harshly, Hank proving that he’d fixed the clock. I told Rhoda I had to go.

“Oh, I get it. Old whatziz is home.”

“Rhoda,” I said as I hung up.

“The spinny one,” Hank said, and reached around me for the telephone. I held my breath as I waited for him to finish his call. I could hear the telephone ringing at the other end, four, five times. He hung up.

“Hank.” I stood there, hands on my hips. “Hank. I registered Richard for kindergarten yesterday.”

“Yah, I know, you already told me.”

I could not hold it in any longer. “Well, it seems that our financial state of affairs is worse than I thought. So I think it might be a smart move for me to get a job.”

“You have a job,” Hank said. “But if you’re bored” – he shifted, as though embarrassed, his mouth curling in a half-smile, his eyes evading mine – “well, then maybe it’s time we got started on another one.”