The Chrome Suite (18 page)

“Cam and Gord are real snot buckets,” Jill says as she enters the kitchen and slams the Bible school lesson-book onto the table. “I caught them throwing stones at George.”

“Now, now,” Margaret says, indicating her displeasure with Jill’s choice of language.

“Well, they are. They’re retards,” Jill says as she leaves the kitchen.

Holding her side again, Margaret thinks. She’s noticed how the girl seems to favour one side. What side is the appendix on, she is about to ask when Bunny stops her with a question.

“Would you like to come up to the lake with us for a couple of days? Bill says it’s okay by him,” Bunny says and blushes. “Well, actually it was his idea. He says he plans on spending the time working on the outboard. You’d be company for me.” Bill’s suggestion puzzles Bunny though. She knows of his dislike for her friend. She’s so tight her ass squeaks when she walks is Bill’s observation of Margaret, or, She’s stuck on herself. Often Bunny is compelled to try and explain or defend Margaret.

Margaret searches for the message lying behind Bunny’s statement that it was Bill’s idea. “I’ll see,” she says, compelled and repulsed at the same time by the idea of going to the lake with them. “When?”

“Tomorrow, if you can get things together that fast. He’s still got Frank in looking after things at the shop until the end of the week, so we may as well take advantage of it.”

“I’ll have to talk to Tim.” Margaret hears Jill’s footsteps in the upstairs hall. Her mind picks apart the words “it was his idea.” When Bunny leaves, she returns to her chore of filling jars with stewed tomatoes and forgets completely that she promised herself to wipe her hands, go upstairs, and find out what’s bothering Jill. It will be up to Timothy to decide, she thinks. If he thinks it would be good for them to go, then she will go. Then she does wipe her hands and goes out into the hall and asks for the long distance operator. She gives her the number of the motel where Timothy always stays in Brandon. She leaves a message for him to call her when he gets in that evening. It will be up to Tim to decide whether or not Mel is old enough to be left behind for a couple of days while she and the girls go up to the lake with Bunny and Bill. She looks down at her hands, which have begun to shake. Why am I doing this? Why can’t I stop myself?

That night Amy lies in bed and listens to the sounds in the house. The sky outside the window flickers with light. For an hour there had been faint flashes of lightning which grew in intensity, but the thunder never amounted to more than a rumble in the far distance. And then, gradually, the lightning grew less frequent as the storm skirted the town, though the tension of its threat remains. She feels it around her, thick and humid. Downstairs Margaret stubs out her cigarette and gets up from the couch. Her waiting for the storm that never comes is over. “I think it would be great for you guys to get
away,” Timothy had said. She thinks about going to the lake in the morning. About her folly.

Amy hears the toilet flush and then Margaret brushing her teeth at full speed. An up and down furious sound of brush against her teeth, a single spurt of water rinsing the brush clean, and then a sharp
ping!
as the brush hits the bottom of the glass, saying, Finished! That’s done for the day. Amy feels her bed rock as Jill changes position. “Oh hurry up,” Jill says, wanting to creep out of bed, needing to talk to Mel. For the past hour she has thrashed from side to side, had been still only for moments, sometimes muttering under her breath or growling with impatience like an angry dog. Now she begins to hum softly as Amy hears the bathroom door open and close and then Margaret’s door scraping against the carpet as she shuts it. They listen as she moves about the room. “When He cometh, when He cometh,” Jill begins to sing softly, “like the stars of the morning, His bright crown adorning.” She stops and Amy feels the jab of her foot against the mattress. “Hey, you sleeping?” she whispers. “Guess what? You’re not really a jewel, you know that? You’re a pearl. An affliction, that’s what you are.”

“I don’t care.” Good, Amy thinks, then God won’t want me. There’s no way I’m going to go to heaven, not now or at any time in the future. No one’s going to reach down and grab me off for His crown.

“You better care or you might wind up in Hell and turn into a lump of coal.”

“Shut up.”

“You will, you know. You’ll burn and turn into coal dust.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“Everyone does. When they die.”

“Not me.”

“Idiot. As usual.”

Amy feels another sharp jab of Jill’s foot against her back.

They hear Margaret opening and closing drawers, putting away, straightening up before sleeping so that her dreams may be as tidy as her room. She neatly sets out what she will take with her to the lake tomorrow. Amy watches the light of a passing car sweep across the ceiling and she thinks, Maybe I’m already dead. I was killed by lightning and everything that’s happened since then has just been a dream. Maybe I’ll wake up and find myself on the ground in the cemetery and all this will happen again in the same order.

Jill sighs. “I sure don’t want to go to the lake tomorrow.”

Maybe I can breathe under water, Amy thinks. Then all thoughts scatter with the sound of the telephone ringing in the hall below. Light beams across the floor as Margaret’s door opens. They listen to her feet moving against the stairs. Whenever the telephone rings unexpectedly in the night they think
Timothy
, and their hearts go stone-cold with fear. Margaret picks up the receiver. They hear her soft, anxious murmur. She talks for a short time and then comes back upstairs, pausing outside Mel’s door with a question. Then she stands in their doorway. “That was Bunny.” Amy feels her heart begin to beat again. “Harry has wandered away and Alf hasn’t been able to find him. Have either of you seen him today?”

“No.”

“No.”

“Well, all right. Didn’t hurt to ask. Try and get to sleep now.”

Amy sees the stick smack against Harry’s chest, watches him walk down into the ditch and travel far across the field. Harry has wandered away before. They always find him. They hear the creak of springs as Margaret drops down onto her bed. She writes in the Blue Book, “Going to the lake tomorrow.” The lake, like the city, needs no name. It’s huge, an ocean set down in the centre of the prairie, not one of the smaller lakes in the chain of lakes in the Whiteshell where Margaret once sent Jill to
CGIT
camp. Perhaps Margaret is writing “Bloated,” or, “Sore breasts,” or, “I can’t stand this constant shifting
of emotions up and down.” The bed sways as Jill gets up. She stands in the dark, the top of her head just level with Amy’s bed. Her head moves away as her feet pad softly against the floor. Then she stops.

“Hey, Peewee. You didn’t touch the dolls today,” she whispers. “What’s the matter, are you sick?”

“Sick of you.”

“Thanks.”

Mel hears Jill enter his room. He feels her presence beside his bed and smells the faint coconut scent of her limbs. “Move over.” She slides into his warm spot. “I can’t get to sleep.” She draws the covers up beneath her chin. “Talk to me.”

“What about?” Mel cradles his head in his arms and looks up at the ceiling.

“Anything. You’re a naturally boring person. Anything will do to put me to sleep.”

“Speak for yourself.”

“Elsa.”

“What about her?”

“How’s Elsa?”

“How would I know?”

Jill feels a squirmy little shift in his body. “Liar.” She nudges his ticklish spot and he twists away from her, gasping to contain his laughter. “Get out of my bed.” He kicks at her leg. “Right now.”

Then they lie still, side by side, lost in their own thoughts. Mel slides an arm under her neck. She watches the curtain on his window swell with a light breeze and then recede, sucked flat against the screen. Out and in. Each puff of wind brings the smell of rain. The mirror on his bureau at the side of the bed, which had reflected faint light passing through the breathing curtain, dims now as clouds sift across the face of the moon and the room darkens. Mel feels her
growing heat and thinks of how they used to sleep in the same room, he in the top bunk and Jill in the lower. About reading comic books together on Saturday morning and eating food smuggled from the kitchen. Sometimes a bad dream or a cold room or a shared secret brought them together to curl around one another’s bodies in the night while Amy slept in this room, in a crib and then in the bed that became his when Amy took his place in the room across the hall with Jill. Mel flexes his bicep, making Jill’s head jump up and down. “So, what’s up?”

“Nothing. Just talk to me.”

He pulls his arm away and reaches under his pillow. His hand cups the end of a small flashlight in order to focus on a cartoon drawing. He has done almost every position with Elsa now, except for the chair one, of course. There are no chairs under the bleachers at the agricultural grounds. “You wanted to know how Elsa was. Look.” It’s been so easy. He simply tells Elsa what he wants to do and she does it with the same strange detachment as the first time. Jill’s hand closes around the cartoon, crumples it. “I don’t want to see that thing.” She throws it across the room and they hear it hit the wall.

Mel is stung. He turns away. “I want to sleep.” But Jill doesn’t leave. She lies there and listens to the soft swish of the curtain as it swells and subsides. She hears Amy moving about in the room across the hall, rearranging the dolls to make her angry in the morning when she’ll discover number-one doll at the wrong end of the shelf and the last doll she’s been given in the centre. Thirteen years of dolls out of their chronological order in the morning. I don’t care, Jill thinks, and is surprised to realize that she really means it.

Mel feels Jill’s touch at his back as she begins to walk her fingers down his spine. “Hey, you mad?” When he doesn’t answer she begins to draw. “I’m tracing a snake upon your back. Guess which finger did it.” She plays their child game, which was at first just a game, but
then their drawing snakes began to move further afield from their backs, exploring almost all creases and folds of skin, except for one. Jill won’t let Mel feel her between the legs. Mel pulls away. “Come on, Mel, please. I didn’t want to look at the picture because I want to show you something else.”

Mel allows himself to be drawn to face her. Their noses almost touch on the pillow as they breathe in each other’s breath. “Give me your hand.” Her hand is cool and firm as she guides his beneath the elastic waistband of her pyjamas. His hand passes across her flat belly. The skin is moist and clammy. Mel tries to still his breathing which has grown uneven. She holds his hand still against her abdomen and Mel thinks that maybe she’s changed her mind now and has decided not to let him touch her. “Feel this.” She shifts his hand to the side. “There. Just run your hand up and down. There.” Mel presses lightly and feels the large swelling beneath her skin. “What’s that?” He pulls his hand away quickly, but she catches it and makes him feel the swelling once again. It’s egg-shaped and hard. “It’s where that guy kicked me. You know.”

Oh shit, Mel thinks. “But what is it?”

“I don’t know. It keeps getting bigger. I can hardly walk straight.” Her stomach jerks with the attempt to hold back tears. He feels the movement and is stricken. “You should show it to Margaret.”

“No. She’ll take me to the doctor.”

“You don’t have to tell her how it happened.”

“It’s not that.” She moves into his side and rests her head on his shoulder. He winds his arm around her, holding her against him. “It’s just that I think … that if I don’t tell anyone, it’ll go away.” She begins to cry.

It’s all my fault, he thinks. “I’ll tell Margaret, if you won’t.”

“I shouldn’t have told you.” She cries silently for several minutes and then grows quiet. As children they had always been sick together, measles, mumps, and even later on they seemed to catch one another’s
colds and flu. A sadness settles in Mel’s chest. The presence of the lump in her body is like when he first noticed the swelling of her breasts. It is something he cannot share, and he knows she has stepped further away.

“I’ll wake up one morning and it will be gone. I know it,” she whispers. “So there’s no need to tell anyone.” He feels her hard chocolate rosebud nipple nudge his arm as she reaches across him for his hand. “Do you want to draw a snake?” She takes his hand and guides it down between her legs.

When Jill left the room, Amy got out of bed, and she lies on the floor now beside the bed, the navy-blue cape Timothy bought for her spread out around her. She lies with her arms straight out, toes pointed, and nose flat against the floor. The muscles in her neck and back have begun to ache from her intense concentration. She closes her eyes and sees herself rising up above the road outside the house. She is wafted gently upwards until she’s level with the telephone poles, and the ground begins to glide swiftly beneath her outstretched body. She imagines herself flying for seconds, minutes, an hour, she can’t tell how long, but is jarred suddenly by the sound of breaking glass. It has come from the kitchen. And then she hears Jill wailing. Lights flick on in both Mel’s and Margaret’s rooms almost at the same time. Amy leaps up and follows Margaret and Mel down the stairs.

They enter the kitchen to the sight of Jill sprawled on the floor in a pool of brine and broken glass. “Oh, leave me alone,” Jill cries. “Just leave me alone. All I wanted was a damn pickle, for God’s sake!”

argaret Barber lies between Jill and Amy in a mouldy-smelling bed, which is not even a full-size bed and which, once their bodies heat the mattress, exudes the odour of urine. Her head pulsates with what has been a two-day headache caused by the heat, the glare of sun on water, the airless hours spent playing lifeguard to Bunny’s children, watching them sculpt the shapes of turtles, Popeye, and an airplane in the sand while Bunny stayed back at the cabin reading from a stack of magazines. All day Margaret listened to the children’s cries and their heat-induced whining, their skirmishes over ownership of territories and sand toys.