The Chrome Suite (9 page)

She thinks of Bill as being a young Ernest Hemingway and of herself as Catherine and that she will make him love her. He senses her watching now and raises his head. She has known since that night last winter that something would eventually happen between them, that the lines would one day converge: Timothy’s absence, her being mid-cycle, when her desire for sex was at its peak, the children away. Her throat clicks with dryness. Be quiet, she thinks. Stop this. But she’s certain that when she rises up to meet him, skin against skin, she will meet the substance of her intemperate dreams.

Bill North feels compelled to look up from the spool of electrical wire he’s been unwinding and looping around his elbow. He sees Margaret’s face and the self-satisfied look of her mouth. He’s become impatient with her game, the signals she telegraphs with her eyes and then takes back moments later retreating behind a mask of pleasantries. She needles Bill into remembering the act. The night she’d picked up his hand and pressed it against her breast and then walked away as though nothing had happened. He feels uncertain and off balance in the presence of that self-knowing look. She’s too
old to play at cock-teasing. “Howdy,” he says. “Bun says after work. Still okay by you?”

“Yes, sure.” Her voice is brisk and businesslike. “Around four.”

I watched through the back window of Josh’s car as Margaret receded from view that morning. Goodbye forever, I thought, without knowing why I had thought of the word “forever,” except that seeing her standing there in the street, wearing the new blouse with its crooked collar, growing smaller and smaller, made me think of the song “Clementine.” “You are lost and gone forever, oh my darling Clementine.” I prefer to remember Margaret looking like that, uncertain, vulnerable. Elsa and Jill had rolled the windows halfway down and I leaned into the upholstery enjoying the pressure of the windstream against my face. I took short gasps of breath through it and felt beads of cold water form inside my nostrils, and I thought, Maybe I can breathe under water now.

Josh patted the dashboard. “Rocket ‘88,” he said to Mel. “Hydra Matic. But it won’t get you to the moon. Maybe those old Americans can make better cars but they’d better get the lead out if they want the moon.” He turned on the radio. “It’s a push button,” he explained. “Go on, have a go at it.” Bits of music and voices popped from the speakers as Mel began pushing buttons at random.

“Hey, that’s not a toy, boy,” Josh warned. I laughed inside, thinking that Mel was just that. Not real. A toy.

The seat bounced as Jill fidgeted, moving her knees in and out as though she needed the bathroom and signalling her impatience with the long ride to the city. It seemed to take longer to get there than to return. We called it “the city” because Winnipeg was and still is the only real city in the province of Manitoba, a sprawling island with half the population of the province living on it. We had all been to the city
before, of course. Timothy made a point of taking us in for the Santa Claus Parade each year. Occasionally we accompanied Margaret when she took the bus in for her appointment with the doctor. Mel, Jill, and I had the distinction of having been born in the city because Margaret wouldn’t go to the clinic in Carona where the receptionist snooped and your health became everyone’s business. Or else we would go with her for a short day’s shopping excursion which always ended on the mezzanine floor at the Hudson’s Bay store. She would collapse into an overstuffed sofa, bags strewn about the carpet at her feet, while we waited for Rita to get off work at the Film Exchange and join us for a Denver sandwich and ice-cream floats. “She puts all her money on her back,” Margaret said often about Rita, and when she appeared, causing all heads to turn, my mother’s expression was clearly envious, sometimes genuinely admiring. But the trips in to the city were few and far between and our travels were always confined to an area of three city blocks, which encompassed Rita’s office, the Winnipeg clinic, and several department stores in the vicinity of the bus depot. Now we would see new sights, new streets, the park.

We passed through Carona and gained speed. We approached the golf course and then sped past the cemetery and its wrought-iron gates. Behind them, dark spruce, white birch, and the slender willow trees screened from view the place where the dead people were lined up, waiting. I wondered about the camera. If it was still there, whether Alf had found it. Alf was always riding the mower. He wore coveralls that were too large and which sagged beneath his armpits and his behind. Alf had a freckle-faced mentally retarded son, Harry, who was Mel’s age but really only about three years old.

“So, how’s your daddy’s old jalopy coming along?” Josh inquired. Mel squirmed and muttered his reply, but I knew Mel was petrified that Timothy might finish restoring it one day and actually drive it down the street or worse still, insist that Mel join him. The tires thumped rhythmically over the cracks in the concrete, the highway
cutting straight and clean through the prairie where the sky reached down to touch the rim of green fields. The stream of air had grown stronger and I gasped to breathe through it, feeling that my skin might pull away from my bones and slide off and then Josh turned and told Jill and Elsa that it was time to roll the windows up. The sound of the car’s radio leapt forward in the silence. “It is with deep personal satisfaction, my fellow Canadians, that I am able. … The clouds are beginning to disappear … that we are on the verge of a turn in the tide of gloom and fear which was the legacy we inherited. …” The voice of John Diefenbaker droned on and on, following me into the city.

“What is ‘legacy’?” Adele Miller asked Josh and listened carefully to his explanation. “What does he mean, legacy of fear and gloom?” she said with scorn and laughed sharply. “This must be a joke.” Then she swivelled her green-turbaned head towards Elsa and spoke rapidly in German. Elsa tensed as though she’d just swallowed an ice cube. Adele turned back and fumbled in her beaded drawstring bag and came up with a cigarette. The match flared and I smelled the same acrid odour that had stung my nostrils in the cemetery. Jill leaned across me and whispered to Elsa. “What did she say?”

“Nothing.” Elsa’s mouth went crooked as she spoke from one side of it. “The usual thing. Stay in the shade. It’s easy for me to sunburn.”

I studied the translucent flecks of dried skin where Elsa’s gold hoop pierced her lobe. Did it hurt to have a hole in your ear? Elsa must have sensed my scrutiny because she turned to me then. Her pouty mouth stretched in a wide smile across wet teeth. She was cute in the soft, puffy way often preferred by adolescent boys. Even though she was a full year older than Jill, she’d chosen my sister for her closest friend, and Jill took on the responsibility of guiding her through her first year in a strange country with some pride. “You will have a good time at the picnic, yes?” Elsa said to me, her voice
going several pitches higher than normal. For a moment I thought she might tweak my nose or chuck me beneath the chin.

“Adele is really your mother, isn’t she? And not your sister?” I said, and felt Jill’s elbow jab into my side. The corner of Elsa’s eye crinkled into a white line and I saw the sudden squirt of moisture there. She turned her moon face to the window and didn’t speak for the remainder of the drive to the city.

Mel’s school bag thumped heavily against his leg as he walked on ahead of us in the park. Jill, solicitous of the withdrawn and weepy-eyed Elsa, stayed close to her side, as she had ever since we’d arrived at the picnic grounds, and held her hand now as we struggled to keep pace with Mel’s single-minded march. Josh had dropped Adele off downtown at a hairdressing shop and us at the park with instructions as to where and when we should meet him later. It was easy to slip away in the confusion of activity: the bustle of families gathering at the picnic site, the setting of tables, and fires spitting to life in the brick pits in the cookhouse. We hadn’t been noticed as one by one we bundled our sweaters and hats into our picnic blanket and stashed it among the bushes beside an overgrown path that led through trees and then out into a clearing and the remainder of the park.

We followed Mel as he passed by a sun-dappled pond where self-possessed swans ignored the offerings of bread in people’s hands. Then we dutifully walked through the zoo, pausing only once to look at the cages where raw-bottomed baboons shrieked their discontent. “From the family of Cercopithecidae,” Mel read from a plaque. “So you can tell Margaret what you learned today. But don’t tell her that,” he said when the animal squatted in front of us and pulled its penis, stretching it like a rubber band until it looked like it might tear loose.

In deference to Elsa’s pale skin, we waited in the deep shade of a vine arbour while Mel went inside the pavilion to the concession and bought a bottle of cola. The haunting melody of piano music floated out from the top floor of the recital hall in the pavilion, seducing us into silence and turning our thoughts inward. Elsa’s eyes grew redder and the tears that had threatened to erupt during the ride into the city spilled over and ran down her cheeks. “What?” Mel’s face dropped in dismay as he walked towards us. I saw the wet stain in his school bag where he’d jammed the bottle of cola down inside. I heard the hard clink of glass against glass.

“Amy’s got a big mouth, as usual,” Jill said.

“What now?”

Elsa dabbed at her face with the back of her hand and laughed, a breathy bit of laughter that was meant to convey to us that it was over now, she was sorry for having been such a cry-baby. “Is that what you think?” she asked them. “That Adele is my mother?”

“Does it matter?” Mel frowned to cover his uneasiness with this delicate topic.

“Yes, it does.” Elsa’s temper flared suddenly. “It does!” Her shoulders dropped then and her arms fell to her side as the anger subsided as quickly as it had risen. She slung her shoulder bag around against her stomach and unzipped it. She took out a bottle of white pills. We watched as she unscrewed the top. “It matters to me because I don’t know who my mother was. I was born in a bomb shelter and left there. They never found her. I’m adopted and so is Adele, and so you see she really is my sister.” The tiny pills spilled into the palm of her hand. She ducked her head, and one of the pills disappeared into her mouth on the tip of her tongue. “Esther Miller adopted both of us.” She dropped the remaining pills into the bottle and screwed the top on tightly and put the bottle hack into her purse.

Jill wound her arm around Elsa’s waist and glared at me. “You always try and spoil things, don’t you? Jerk.”

The three of them turned then and began heading out across an open field in the park. The piano music grew softer and then ended. Scattered applause rose up in the recital hall. I watched as Mel’s blue shirt, Jill’s pink shorts and top, and Elsa’s yellow sundress became spots of colour moving across a green carpet. When they reached the centre of the broad field, I followed. Head down, I watched my feet glide swiftly across the damp grass. The crimped buckle looked like an oddly shaped black bug on the side of my foot. The rhythm of my feet pulled me forward while I floated across the harbour on top of the book, heading towards my future. I looked into a yellow and turquoise sky and saw against it a pagoda, a Gothic cathedral, a rocket. I noted something different in the future then: a volcanic mountain, its cone trailing smoke and at its base a city whose buildings were pink and pyramid-shaped. The flutter of yellow moths billowed up around my ankles.

When I looked up, searching for Mel, Jill, and Elsa, I realized that they were gone. Vanished. In their place, riding against the dark backdrop of trees, were three boys on bicycles. They rode in a circle, swerving now and then to cut across one another’s path. Their raw-sounding voices were like the screeching baboons as they exclaimed loudly over near collisions, daring them to happen. I slowed down instantly and searched beyond them for a path, one Mel and Jill and Elsa may have taken to enter the belt of trees. One of the cyclists – dark-haired and I thought him to be the oldest and the leader – looked up and saw me. Immediately he veered from the circle and headed towards me across the grass. I stood still as he wheeled about me slowly in a wide circle. I turned with him, wanting him to speak. I couldn’t guess at his intention if he didn’t speak. A thick hank of hair lay across his forehead almost obscuring his eyes. The other two followed and joined the first boy, circling around me again and again. Then, as if on signal, they stood up, straddling the crossbars of their bicycles and, legs pumping in short spurts, they tightened
the circle and began making clucking noises like chickens. I looked for an opening to dash through and escape. “Chick, chick, chick,” they called without humour, taunting. Their faces became a blur and their bodies exuded something I had not met before. Not anger or revenge, but an intense maliciousness. I became rigid inside with panic. Where was Mel? Stay together, Margaret had instructed.

“Here chick, chick, chick,” they called. “Pock, pock, pock.” I cautioned myself not to cry. They passed so close now that I could feel the heat radiating from their bodies and smell their unwashed hair. An arm flashed in the air and I felt my head snap back as one of them yanked at my hair. Another arm flashed and my rump stung with the blow. Their mouths, mean thin slits, sneered as I yelped. And then the circle loosened, widened, and I thought that they had grown tired and were deciding to leave me alone. Beyond them I saw the arch of a footbridge and beyond that cars moving steadily on a street just outside the gates of the park. I held my breath and waited for the opportunity. I leaned towards a space between their bicycles, but it was what they’d been counting on, I realized, as they whooped loudly and circled in more closely.
Mel, Mel
, I cried silently. I sensed that something was about to happen. Something dangerous. Mel, I thought, and heard myself say, “You assholes!” And then I began yelling in desperation all the swear words I knew. “You bitches!” I yelled and stamped my feet, making them thunder against the ground. “Pigs! Fart-faces!”